BOB'S BITS

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THE HOLY MAID

In case hys Highnes proceded to thaccomplishment of the seid devorce and maried another, that then hys Majestie shulde not be kynge of this Realme by the space of one moneth after, And in the reputacion of God shuld not be kynge one day nor one houre. Elizabeth Barton, ca. December 1533.

This was a dangerous stuff. Henry VIII had secured an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. In November 1533 he secretly married Anne Boleyn. A public wedding was planned for late January 1534, which would (many months ex post facto) legitimate Anne and Henry’s daughter Elizabeth and strengthen the King’s hope that Anne would produce a boy baby. And then along came this illiterate nun, Elizabeth Barton, who dared to say that it was all rotten: worse, a sin. And Henry would pay for it. He should not be king for one day more. This was treason, and parliament called it so in a bill of attainder. In the usual grisly ways, she and a few of her followers were “hanged and headed” at Tyburn on April 20, 1534. Well, we know how it all turned out. Queen Anne didn’t last much longer. Her failure to produce a boy was compounded by her roving eye, and she was executed in 1536, albeit by a more aristocratic method. The Elizabeth who was Anne Boleyn’s daughter would, against the odds, ascend the throne, rule for decades, and leave us the “Elizabethan Age” and a Protestant Church of England. But what of Elizabeth Barton? During her short lifetime (she was born, probably, in 1506) she was known as the Holy Maid of Kent. She had visions, pronounced prophecies. She performed miracles. She impressed many with her saintliness. These included not only the poor penitents who flocked to her convent to seek intercession, but also priests, cathedral clergy, and several bishops including the Archbishop of Canterbury. Some of King Henry’s most trusted councilors, including More and Cromwell, interviewed her and were impressed. So was Henry himself. But absolute kings are dangerous beings, and when Henry drifted towards annulment and a separation from Rome, the Holy Maid of Kent refused to float with the tide. Whether she spoke those actual words is unknowable, but probably something like them, and under duress. Worse, she corresponded with the Pope and others powerful enough, if very lucky, to divert Henry from his chosen path. And so she was condemned. She suffered the further ignominy of a public confession of her sins and errors, as it were on her way to the gallows at Tyburn. It may be for that reason that the Catholic Church has never made her a saint. For although she did consciously model herself after medieval saint-martyrs like Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, she never attained that ultimate glory. But some modern historians recognize her not as a saint but as a female person of substance. ©

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HOSTESSING

Stay!! Let us have a party. Emily Temple, Viscountess Palmerston.

The quotation is ‘attributed.’ But it has authenticity. Viscountess Palmerston was the most successful of Victorian hostesses. She moved easily from guest to guest, making small talk interesting, and along the way testing the political waters for her husband. Indeed, Palmerston parties were often thrown on the eve of important parliamentary votes, and Lady Emily acted as her husband’s voice and ears. Cambridge House in Piccadilly (it was built by one of George III’s sons, the Duke of Cambridge) was the site of of their London gatherings, soirées with scores of guests arriving in carriages. The traffic was heavy, its flow smoothed by Cambridge House’s two gates. Some wags called it the “In and Out House.” If, on the other hand, Emily and John entertained at one of their country places it could be a whole weekend. He had Irish estates, too distant for parties and too unproductive for the lavish parties for which the couple became famous. She had the money. They were useful parties, for Lord Palmerston was successively Foreign Secretary and then Prime Minister. His Viscountess was a wonder in her own right and in her own realm: ‘society.’ A match made in heaven? More likely it was made in Almack’s, the notorious London club. Its membership rules were perfect for making matches, ladies voting on the men, and vice versa. Their affair began there when Emily was married to Lord Cowper and Palmerston (then known as “Cupid”) was still playing the field. When Cowper died the way opened, and in 1839 the marriage was approved, somewhat sniffily, by the young Victoria, who hoped they would be settling for each other. After all, the bride was already 52. Viscountess Palmerston was born Emily Lamb on April 21, 1787, her mother married into what became the Melbourne dynasty. Who her father was heaven only knows, for her mother had many affairs, some of them beginning at the first Almacks club. Emily’s first portraits, as a child and then at 16, show her charms, and her mother was intent on making her a good marriage. That came in the shape of Lord Cowper, a man who, famously, was “not as stupid as he looked,” but still deadly dull, and so Emily looked for others to love. Eventually she settled on Palmerston, bore him at least one child (DNA would probably tell us more), and then married him. He was 55. Whatever Victoria expected, it turned out to be a love match, rivaled only by that between Victoria and Albert. The whole thing suggests that some revisions are necessary in the popular meaning of the word “Victorian.” There was of course a Victorian underworld. But there appears also to have been a Victorian overworld and, for a time, Emily was its queen. ©

[Stanley]

FERRIER

Lucky, this point in time and space
Is chosen as my working place;
Where the sexy airs of summer,
The bathing hours and the bare arms.
The leisured drives through a land of farms.
Are good to the newcomer. W. H. Auden, 1933.

This is from one of Auden’s early poems, “Out on the lawn, I lie in bed.” He came to dislike it and later revised it into a darker verse. But Benjamin Britten made it the center-piece of the second movement in his Spring Symphony. It’s an unusual work, scored for a boys’ choir and a tambourine (and an orchestra, of course, and three solo voices, alto, tenor, and contralto). At its premier, in Amsterdam, in 1949, the contralto was Kathleen Ferrier, for whom the first two lines had personal meaning. Not only had the part been written for her, but that she was there at all was a stroke of luck. She was one of those late discoveries, a jewel plucked out of time and space. Kathleen Ferrier was born in a small end terrace in Walton-le-Dale, a Lancashire mill town, on April 22, 1912. Early she showed talent at the piano, and was encouraged in it by her mother and schoolteacher father. She did well at the keyboard, and it began to look like a life, playing solo or as an accompanist in local halls and then, in 1931, on BBC radio. In 1935 Ferrier married a bank clerk, moved with him to Silloth in the far northwest. It was not a happy marriage, never consummated, but it had its moments. The critical one came in 1937, when, on a dare from her husband, she filed two entries in a festival contest in the cathedral town of Carlisle, vocal as well as piano. She won in both, but it was her voice that copped her the grand prize. It took her to Manchester, where Sir Malcolm Sargent heard her and advised her to seek tuition in London. And in wartime London she was a sensation. It was partly her beauty. “What a face!” said her sister contralto Marian Anderson, “but what a voice!” And she did have an unusually large voice box. While that must be true of all the great contraltos, it was said of Ferrier’s larynx that you could put an apple in it. But what really fixed it for her was her sheer enjoyment which came of finding that perfect working place. For Ferrier, it would not be the opera. She tried that in two roles, one of them often repeated, but her chosen working places were the concert hall and the recital. In the latter, she was never again the accompanist, but her accompanists all joined the Ferrier fan club, along with the likes of Sargent, John Barbirolli, and Bruno Walter, and of course Britten. Sadly, the career to which she gained such late and lucky entry was short-lived. Stricken with cancer in 1951, she continued to sing, almost to her last breath. She died in 1953, leaving so much unsung. ©.

[Stanley]

BORU

Down with fiends who dictate ‘gainst our will!
Down with all devils who our race would quell!
Down with our foes who stand in freedom’s way!
And Erin bless our efforts for the fray.

--from The Address of Brian Boru, by David Reidy (1867)

Not finding a ready market, David Reidy had to publish this long poem at his own expense, in St. Louis, Missouri. The Reidys were an old Irish clan (ó Riada) that long ago held the kingship of Munster. I can’t identify this Reidy, but given his passion he might have been a United Irishman or one of the USA branch of the Molly Maguires. He wanted the foreigners out of Ireland, and so chose to celebrate Brian Boru, the legendary High King of Ireland, who did just that at the Battle of Clontarf, on April 23, 1014. Except that, back then, the hated foreigners were Norsemen, Vikings, raiders who’d been terrorizing Erin for maybe two centuries and who’d established a permanent foothold at Dubh Linn. Of course the Vikings had Irish fifth columnists on their side, not Ulstermen at this time but a ragtag of Norse-Gaels. Ireland was a collection of Gaelic kingdoms, nine of them if we include Dubh Linn. It was a shifting mosaic, with much fighting between kingdoms (and, within them, between clans). Brian Boru’s rise to power was a long one (he was in his 70s when he fought at Clontarf). But, fittingly enough for an American ó Riada like David Reidy, it took place in Munster, and it was as a Munster man that Brian Boru won recognition as High King of the whole of Ireland--except for that Viking enclave of Dubh Linn. And so Brian Boru led quite a large army, thousands of medieval Molly Maguires we might say, against the hated foreign invaders. Except that that most of the ‘Dubh Linners’ were not ‘aliens.’ Indeed, the king of Dubh Linn, Sigurd, was married to Brian Boru’s daughter Sláine. And prominent in Sigurd’s equally large army were the Gaels of Leinster, a large kingship just to the west of Dubh Linn. Battle was joined at Clontarf, a site now absorbed into modern Dublin. It was a very bloody affair, like something out of Beowulf but sung in Gaelic; the leading participants were clan chiefs and kings like Dubgall mac Amlaib on Sigurd’s side and Domnall mac Eimin on Brian Boru’s. And Brian’s brother ‘Ulf’ identified as a Viking. A lot of blood was shed, several thousand killed in battle or slaughtered afterwards, and you’d have to be a geneticist to decide which side’s blood was greener than the other. But Boru’s men won the day, and for modern nationalists Clontarf has become an Irish triumph. Not, however, for old Brian Boru, who was killed, as were his son, grandson, and nephew. With no heir apparent, the high kingship passed to another clan chief, but by 1023 they were all at it again, like the legendary cats of Kilkenny. ©.

[Stanley]

BIRDMAN

I don’t wish to be didactic,
But there’s something enigmatic,
In this game the Pink Bird plays with time.
So I’ve cast my lot with his’n,
In this mangrove-studded prison.
And I’m looking for the reason and the rhyme.

--Robert P. Allen

Allen never made the grade as a poet. This doggerel was delivered, ex temp, at a gathering of the like-minded, members of the Audubon Society. So his audience knew that the ‘Pink Bird’ was the flamingo and that the ‘mangrove-studded prison’ was the Everglades. At that time, the late 1950s, there was concern about the species’ survival, and Allen was doing what he knew best, studying the birds in nature, doing their things: taking flight, feeding, nesting, whatever it took to be a flamingo. For a human observer, that meant hours in brackish water, sometimes neck deep, always in the company of mosquitos, and sometimes alligators. A better artist than he was a poet, Allen caricatured himself aboard a ‘gator, binoculars in hand, his pipe curling skeeter repellent, and (insecurely perched on the gator’s tail) a camp Coleman keeping the coffee hot. It didn’t have to turn out this way, but it did. Robert Porter Allen was born on April 24, 1905, in central Pennsylvania, his father a respected lawyer, his mother a schoolteacher. Perhaps they thought he’d become a lawyer or a schoolteacher. Anyway they sent him off to Lafayette College to learn how to be something. Instead, he dropped out. After some seafaring adventures he turned up in New York, where he turned his childhood enthusiasms about camping and hunting into his adult callings of studying birds and saving them. He proved a genius at both, good enough to get paid for it, early on as warden at this or that Audubon preserve, then from 1933 (aged 28) as Director of all Audubon “Sanctuaries”. The name itself implied safety, refuge, preservation. Robert Allen took a more aggressive line. He would not only preserve a species. He would see it prosper. He was most famous for his campaign to save the whooping crane. That took him from the cranes’ wintering grounds in Texas to Canada’s far north (where once during a storm he found himself neck deep in the ice-choked waters of the Great Bear Lake). And it made him famous. Better yet, it saved the whooping crane. He then moved on to the roseate spoonbill, the “Pink Bird,” and warmer waters. Sadly, he died at 58, on site, in Florida waters, at work for the flamingo. He left behind him the Robert Allen Keys, off the Everglades coast, a few ‘Robert Porter Allen’ nature preserves—and, of course, the whooping crane. They are still ‘endangered,’ ( a recent census counted 700 individuals), but when Allen started there were only 20. ©.

[Stanley]

UNCERTAINTY

This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian. Only technical details are missing. Wolfgang Pauli, 1958.

Pauli made this outrageous claim in a letter to fellow nuclear physicist George Gamow. Nestled between the sentences, Pauli’s “Titian” was an empty rectangle, proportional to a museum canvas but, of course, missing the details. It was in a response to a criticism (from Werner Heisenberg) of Pauli’s latest attempt to postulate a “unified field theory.” Pauli’s theoretical strivings, and his dry humor, were both typical of the man. And he coined the witticism while in the last stages of pancreatic cancer. Wolfgang Ernst Pauli died later that year. He was 58 years old, having been born in Vienna on April 25, 1900. For nearly 40 of those years he’d been at or near the forefront of physics, having presented his first academic paper (on Einstein’s theory of general relativity) when he, Pauli, was only 18. His second major publication extended that one, into a very long (237 pp) treatment of general relativity for a German scientific encyclopedia. Einstein thought it excellent. It was soon published in book form and remains a standard reference, at least for those who understand relativity. But Pauli himself was already at work on quantum theory, which would place the atom itself (and, potentially, the universe) on a different and in a critical sense unmappable path from that hoped for by Albert Einstein. Pauli contributed much to quantum theory, its uncertainly principle, its conviction that, at base, nothing could be accurately measured. He would be the first (1931) to postulate the existence of the neutrino. He would win the Nobel Prize in 1945. He was a brilliant pioneer of quantum mechanics. And yet he always hankered for a solution that would, somehow, tie everything together, make it all measurable or at least orderly. Perhaps, like Einstein, Pauli didn’t want to think of a god who played dice with the universe. “Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect . . . simplicity.” I don’t understand any of it, myself, but from my reading I see Wolfgang Pauli scurrying around the edges of the discussion, trying various middle grounds, and using humor as one of his laboratory instruments. Indeed he had a distrust of all laboratory devices. He broke quite a few of them, and one of the jokes told about Pauli was that he and any apparatus could not occupy the same space at the same time. And he looked the part, too, a lot like the actor Peter Lorre (who, we forget was always better at comedy than at noir) who was, as it happened, born in Budapest. Both of them were defined Jewish by the Nazis and so had to live and work elsewhere. Pauli found refuge first in Switzerland and then in the USA, where he worked with Albert Einstein, tried to find a better unified field theory, failed, and still won a Nobel. ©

[Stanley]

SUPERIORITY

Adaptability plus Opportunity is God’s call to any position in life. Erminnie Adelle Smith.

Feminism has expressed itself in many ways, not least in a demand for citizenship, an equality that makes women fully functioning members of a democratic polity. Most modern histories of women have focused on that side, with excursions into adjacent territories: women in the professions, for instance, or women in the pulpit. But some of Erminnie Adelle Smith’s most enduring accomplishments had to do with women together, women in groups, meeting together to exercise their womanliness. So in 1876, operating out of her home in Jersey City, she founded the Aesthetic Society of New Jersey. She was its president every year before her death in 1886. 1876 was the American centennial, the 100th anniversary of that year when a bunch of founding fathers (as we call them) gathered in Philadelphia to proclaim some self-evident truths about equality. So ‘equality’ was not new as a concept, although exactly what it meant was still being worked out. One evidence came in 1868, across the river in Manhattan, at a dinner at Delmonico’s held to honor Charles Dickens at the end of his second (and last) visit to the US. Some were not allowed to purchase tickets for the occasion, apparently on the ground they were female, and they formed their own club, Sorosis. Mrs. Smith was there, too, and Sorosis clubs would have longer and more successful lives than the Aesthetic Society. Sorosis clubs sprung up even in Missouri. And like Mrs. Smith’s Aesthetic Society, there was more to them than mere equality. As “Aesthetic” implies, there was a whiff of elitism about them, even the idea that the feminine might be superior to the masculine. Indeed the Aesthetic Society ladies met to discuss all manner of things, science and mathematics for instance, And Mrs. Smith was ready for them. Erminnie Adelle Smith was born in upstate New York on April 26, 1836, She was educated at one of those “Female Academies” that preached the revolutionary notion that girls could learn things like science, mathematics, and the ancient languages. Erminnie married well, and produced children, and kept house, and studied geology (in Germany) and then Anthropology (in New York). She became a recognized expert in both, one of the first scholars to notice that the Six Nations of the Iroquois had a matrilineal power structure. So that’s the sort of higher matter that the ladies of the Aesthetic Society, and later the Sorosis Clubs, got together to discuss, along with, of course, how best to manage a woman’s world, the home, its gardens, and its male inhabitants. Some of these women would become suffragists. But others would not, and (had she lived long enough) Erminnie Smith might have been one of these others. ©

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WOODY AND WALTER

People worked for me who didn’t want to work for Disney anymore. Walter Lantz.

In P. G. Wodehouse’s “Buried Treasure.” a struggling portraitist dreams of fame, fortune, and caviar—if only he could invent a cartoon character and give up on portraiture. Through unlikely but comic misadventures, he burns his way to success. The story first appeared in 1936, and surely Wodehouse—who had some Hollywood experience behind him—had Walt Disney in mind, for in 1936 Disney was riding to riches on the unlikely backside of ‘Mickey Mouse’ ®. But P. G. could have had Walter Lantz in mind. For this was about the time that Lantz, a newcomer to tinsel town, was on holiday with his second wife, Gracie, and being kept awake by a pesky bird that persisted in making holes in their mountain cabin. It was, of course, Woody Woodpecker, the noisy, nosy bird who would make Lantz’s fortune as one of the most popular cartoon characters of the 40s and 50s. Walter Lantz never became as famous as Disney, nor as rich. But still, it was a pretty good outcome for a man born (on April 27, 1899) of poor immigrants from Italy’s poorest regions. His parents, a Lanza and a Gervase, had already taken new names, more ‘American’ perhaps, but had not prospered accordingly. After his mother’s early death, Walter grew up assisting at his father’s grocery and drawing doodles on the woodwork. This was in New Rochelle, NY, and one of the customers was perceptive enough to notice and rich enough to give the lad a scholarship to the Arts Students’ League of New York. But as with Wodehouse’s Brancepeth Mulliner, painting didn’t ‘take’ for Lantz, who instead found work as an assistant in several prospering comic franchises, notably The Katzenjammer Kids and Mutt and Jeff. He then found his way west, working for Universal on such cartoon immortals as Wally the Walrus, Andy Panda, and the much less onomatopoeic Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. About when Walter and Gracie wed, he struck out on his own, and it was that damned woodpecker that made his fortune. Woody Woodpecker first appeared as a bit player in a 1940 short, and began his rise to stardom in the next year. Woody’s voice, including that manic laugh, was first supplied by Mel Blanc. When Mel went elsewhere (to better pay and greater fame as ‘the voice’ for a bunny, a duck, and a pig), Gracie Lantz stepped into the breach. Walter didn’t approve, and Gracie made her application anonymously, on tape, but she got so good at it that, in due course, her name would appear among the credits. Walter never did make as much money as Walt. But enough: Lantz became a noted philanthropist, an elder statesman of the cartoon industry. He never did win an Oscar. But he did get one of those new “lifetime achievement” awards in 1979. Well deserved, I think. ©

[Stanley]

NAMES

One birth of my bosom;

One beam of mine eye;

One topmost blossom

That scales the sky.

Man, equal and one with me, man that is made of me, man

That is I. –From “Hertha” (1871) by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Swinburne (1837-1909) was a Victorian era iconoclast, thus not everyone’s cup of tea. But his poem spoke to the depths for a student at Girton College, Cambridge, who chose “Hertha” as her nickname ‘in hall.’ The nickname stuck, and she is today known as Hertha Ayrton, pioneer woman scientist, electrical engineer, and inventor. Hertha Ayrton was born Phoebe Sarah Marks on April 28, 1854, in Portsea, Hampshire. Her father, a clockmaker, was a refugee from Tsarist Poland, but he soon died leaving Sarah, one of the older of his 7 children, to help her widowed mother make ends meet, first as a seamstress (like her mother), then as a governess. But she had an ungovernable temper and, luckily, was taken in by maternal aunts who ran a school in north London and were themselves part of an unusual social circle that included the novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). So Sarah, as she liked then to be known, found her way to Girton, one of Cambridge’s first women’s colleges. There she organized the college’s volunteer fire department (all young ladies, by definition), led its choral society, chose the name “Hertha”—and imbibed some of Hertha’s spirit, too, for she became interested the science of matter, motion, and energy. She excelled, but as Cambridge didn’t yet concede degrees to women, Hertha got her paper qualifications at the University of London. In London she took further instruction from the physicist William Ayrton, a widower who was no stranger to women’s liberation. So they married. She birthed two children, brought them up well, and eclipsed her husband in scientific endeavor in wave theory and electrical engineering. Several of her electrical inventions had to do with housekeeping, but by no means all, and she became known as a scientist in her own right. Of course she was still a female, and the Royal Society wouldn’t, therefore, accept her as a fellow. But it did publish her papers. Through those and her inventions she became well known in Britain and on the continent. Not surprisingly, Hertha was also a leading suffragist, having been converted to that cause while at Girton. Indeed Hertha Ayrton named her eldest child, a girl, after Barbara Bodichon, one of Girton’s founders. A chip off two old blocks, “Barbie” Ayrton would become a Labour party activist and later an MP. Today, “Hertha” Ayrton, who named herself after a Swinburne poem, is recognized as one of the most influential women in the history of British science. ©.

[Stanley]

ST JOAN

Bastard, Bastard! In the name of God I command you that as soon as you hear of Fastolf’s coming, you will let me know. For if he gets through without my knowing it, I swear to you that I will have your head cut off. Joan of Arc to Jean de Dunois, 1429.

Not a ‘maidenly’ way to speak for a young woman who called herself ‘Jehanne la Pucelle’ (Joan the maiden), but she was addressing a ‘bastard,’ the illegitimate son of the Duc d’Orléans. At issue was whether the French should abandon the city of Orléans to the English. Had they done so, the fortunes of the Hundred Years War would have tilted towards the English, who probably would have gone on to take the French throne. The wars began in 1337 when Edward III of England tried to make good his claim to the French throne. It was a pretty good claim, but it was contested—for more than a century. It's wrong to see this as a battle between “France” and “England,” for alliances were dynastic rather than national and certainly not linguistic. But by 1429 things looked bad for the ‘French’ side. The English controlled Paris and northern France. Orléans, on the south bank of the Loire, was the northernmost outpost of the French claimant, the ‘dauphin,’ and was under siege. Worse, the English besiegers were about to be resupplied (with herrings, for it was Lenten time) by a wagon train led by Sir John Fastolf, and despite Joan’s fury Fastolf and his fish got through. Well fed and hungry for revenge, the besiegers surrounded Orléans and kept up their blockade of the Loire. Significant supplies could not get to the city. The burghers and the military garrison would either starve or die by fire and sword, the grim fate of any besieged city that had refused to surrender. And then came Joan of Arc, la pucelle, a military maiden (a young woman in arms) but also a religious sensation, a seer and a prophet. Her expedition to Orléans was as much a pilgrimage as it was a military maneuver. It became more so when a ‘miraculous’ shift in the wind, on the evening of April 29, 1429, allowed Joan and a smallish retinue to enter the city from the river. Perhaps she brought food with her, but more importantly she raised the city up, forcing the garrison to accept burghers as comrades in arms. Joan, only seventeen years old, was much later (especially by Romantic French painters of the 19th century) pictured armored, mounted, and bearing a flag. She did participate in three battles, notably the one that destroyed the main English fortification. And the city was finally and fully liberated on May 8, 1429. That will be celebrated, yet again, in Orléans this spring, along with a celebration of the more modern liberation which came with VE day on May 8, 1945. Vive la France!! And all we anglophones got out of it was William Shakespeare’s unforgettable John Falstaff. That’s not a bad deal, but it wasn’t victory; for thanks in part to Joan of Arc, France became French. ©.

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PLUM PUDDING

It follows that cathode rays are charged particles moving with high velocities, that the size of the carriers must be small compared with the dimensions of ordinary atoms or molecules. J. J. Thompson (1897)

So said Joseph John Thompson, at his Royal Institution lecture, on April 30, 1897. His Royal Institution audience would have included non-scientists, many eminent in other fields, and it was perhaps for them that Thompson then said that such an announcement might seem “somewhat startling.” Indeed so, for although the ‘atom’ had been part of philosophical discourse for some time (more than 2,000 years), it was only during the 19th century that experimental science had come to grips with it. However, the atom was still generally seen as a unit, a “primordial element,” a thing complete in itself. And here was Thompson saying that the atom itself had parts—or more exactly, particles. Not only that, but these particles had motion and energy, and both could be measured separately from the parent atom. Perhaps to settle his audience, Thompson called these particles ‘corpuscle’ and likened the whole structure of the atom to that of a plum pudding in which these corpuscles were embedded, rather like raisins, or plums. But in your average plum pudding, plums and raisins are stationery. The whole thing about Thompson’s corpuscles is that they were not fixed. The scientists in his audience would have known about this. In Germany, X-rays and cathode rays had been discovered, and actually imaged. In France, Madame Curie had melted ice with a lump of purified radium. These phenomena could not be ‘magic.’ And although wave theory might possibly accommodate them (certainly in the case of x-rays) J. J. Thompson was more into matter and motion and settled on the idea that material things, “corpuscles.” were a more satisfying explanation. After all, they had to be something. A magnet could deflect their course, even turn them at right angles. They carried an electric charge, which could be measured or at least defined as negative, and they could ‘infect’ a cloud of gas with that charge. Thompson was not, like many modern physicists, a wordsmith, and so he used an old term to describe them: ‘corpuscles.’ Some of his professional colleagues preferred ‘electrons,’ a coinage Thompson soon came to accept, however reluctantly. If you had to choose a single date for the origins of modern nuclear physics, April 30, 1897 would be a reasonable candidate. If the atom was not a singularity, if it had parts, it could presumably be taken apart. It remained for Albert Einstein, only a few years later, to suggest that doing so could release tremendous amounts of energy. Hey, presto!! The modern age began with a general helping of plum pudding served up by J. J. Thompson. ©

[Stanley]

LATROBE.

But what is to become of a widow with sick children in this wretched and desolate place? From the Journal of Benjamin Latrobe, 1806.

On a stifling day in August 1806, Benjamin Latrobe went for a walk through a “low, swampy piece of ground” when a woman popped out of the bushes brandishing a loaded pistol. Latrobe was taken aback, but after disarming his ‘assailant’ he found that, recently widowed and desperate for help, age wanted to sell the gun to buy food and medicines. Latrobe and his companion, Bishop John Carroll, did what they could to relieve her, but the incident set Latrobe to speculating on the desperate state of Washington, DC. People had come there to take part in the new Federal City project. Some were mere speculators. Their failures did not distress Latrobe. But this gunwoman was among many worthy people who faced death from disease or the ruin of idealistic dreams in a place that was to be the shining symbol of a republican revolution. Those who could find work were only paid by the piece, and when funds dried up or the weather worsened they fell prey to fevers. Only the month before stonemasons remodelling the president’s mansion, the ‘white’ house, had petitioned Latrobe about low pay and the oppressive heat. Short of funds, he could only relieve them from the heat, allowing them midday rests. Sadly, Latrobe reflected that one of the masons was the direct descendant ot John Lenthall, the Speaker of Oliver Cromwell’s revolutionary House of Commons. Such a man deserved better. Benjamin Latrobe, the architect hired to realize L’Enfant’s dreams for the new nation’s capital, was born in northern England on May 1, 1764, into an organized community of Moravian pietists, refugees whose aim was to live as Christ had intended. Theirs was a primitive communism based on brotherly (and sisterly) love, and Latrobe’s father was their pastor. So young Latrobe served an apprenticeship in community service, first in Yorkshire and then in several surviving Moravian communities in Germany. But he could not summon up sufficient piety and found work, instead, as a surveyor and draftsman for London architects and engineers. He prospered, but his wife’s death (in 1793) left him shattered and with two dependent children. His hope for a more secular utopia took him to the USA, where he became about the only ‘architect’ in the young republic. His mark is everywhere, starting with the Virginia State Penitentiary (itself an artifact of reforming zeal) and the Bank of Pennsylvania, and then of course several of Washington DC’s new public buildings, not least the White House, the Treasury, and the Capitol itself. Latrobe also designed Bishop Carroll’s new cathedral church in Baltimore. Latrobe never did realize his hopes for a national community that would match his public buildings. He died of yellow fever in New Orleans and was buried there, in the Protestant cemetery. ©.

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BOATING

George said: “Let’s go up the river.” --From Chapter I of Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog), by Jerome K. Jerome, 1889.

So these three young men were sitting around, talking about what ailed them (nothing much, really), about what might be done about it (a sea voyage was suggested, and turned down partly because of the ailments), and then George made his startling motion. The dog, whose name was Montmorency, objected to this “bally foolishness,” but the motion, having been made, was voted upon and carried three to one. So the three (and the dog, who hadn’t much choice in the matter) made their plans, procured limited supplies, and (after a short train journey which took them above the tidal reaches) set off upriver. Along the way, the dog Montmorency would make a number of observations, as would “George” and “Harris,” but the narrative was carried by “J”. He was Jerome K. Jerome, born in the industrial town of Wallsall on May 2, 1859. His parents were Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Clapp, but his father (a lay preacher and ironmonger) reregistered as Jerome C. Jerome and young Jerome followed suit. The middle initial “K” honors a hero of the 1848 revolution in Hungary, General György Klapka. It was a failed revolution, and may tell us something about Jerome Klapka Jerome’s sense of humor, whimsical, indirect, unexpected. So was his life. The family moved to London where Jerome developed the ambition to become an author, essayist, critic, man of letters, a recognized Victorian model. At first he failed, and tried other things, including school teaching and acting, but at length he returned to writing, enjoyed minor success, and in 1888 married the recently divorced “Ettie” Marris. They honeymooned on the Thames in “a little boat”, and it was this interlude that quickly became Three Men in a Boat, Ettie being sacrificed to Jerome’s friends George Wingrave (“George”) and Carl Henschel (“Harris”), and Montmorency, I think, an invention. The book is as odd as its author, and wasn’t liked by critics. Punch thought it vulgar (“common”), which may explain its huge success. The publisher, pleased but surprised, thought that people ate it. But it was read, by thousands, in England of course but also the USA. Pleasure boating on the Thames became more fashionable, and Montmorency, too, as a popular dog’s name and even a metaphor. Later, Kenneth Grahame would do his turn of “messing about in boats” with Wind in the Willows (using just the sort of animals that Montmorency loved to chase). But Jerome K. Jerome never again enjoyed such success. He did write some, and sold enough, but there is only one Three Men in a Boat. If ever you worry about feeling at loose ends, I recommend it: not as a cure, but as a palliative. ©.

[Stanley]

COVENANTS

Hereafter . . . no part of said property shall be occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race . . . Extract from a neighborhood covenant, 1911.

To clarify what “not of the Caucasian race” meant, the covenant went on to specify that no property covered by the covenant could be sold to or rented “by people of the Negro or Mongolian Race.” This 1911 covenant was not signed by nine of the 39 property owners. So there was no unanimity. Even so, the city of St. Louis and the state of Missouri stood ready to enforce the covenant, and did so when, in 1945, one of the properties (at 4600 Labadie Avenue) was sold to J. D. and Ethel Shelley, black parents with their six black kids, who had moved into St. Louis from rural Missouri. They moved to the city for its job opportunities and to escape the raw prejudices of rural Missourians, ‘down home’ folks. So the Labadie Avenue neighbors, represented by one of them, Louis Kraemer, brought suit against the Shelleys and demanded the assistance of the city and state in enforcing the racial covenant. Clearly important issues were involved, and the case went all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court, which decided in favor of Kraemer et al. So J. D. Shelley appealed. The case went to SCOTUS where it was decided in favor of Shelley. It’s often said that the decision rendered illegal and unconstitutional racially restrictive covenants. It didn’t. The USA is a free country in which, if one wants to be a racist jackass, one can be. QED. Rather SCOTUS rendered racially restrictive neighborhood covenants nugatory. What was unconstitutional about Kraemer’s original lawsuit was that it demanded the assistance of the state of Missouri to enforce the 1911 covenant. And the United States Supreme Court saw in that demand a clear violation of the 14th amendment. The US Supreme Court, at that time, was full to bursting with judges who, oddly enough, believed that words (the words of the 14th amendment) were to be taken at face value. So the judgement in Shelley v. Kraemer, delivered on May 3, 1948 was unanimous. But the vote was 6-0, not 9-0. Three justices, Robert Jackson, Stanley Reed, and Wiley Rutledge, recused themselves. They lived in neighborhoods that had racially restrictive covenants. Thus we can assume that Jackson, Reed, and Rutledge were Caucasians. They were; but their sense of judicial ethics is more important. Just as their six colleagues thought that words mean something, so the three believed that judges should not sit in a case in which they might be thought to have a vested interest. So it is in several ways that the Shelley v. Kraemer decision reminds us that we could do better, in both legal substance and judicial ethics. By the way, 4600 Labadie Avenue still stands, a nice double-fronted house, in brick. It needs only a memorial plaque. ©.

[Stanley]

BULLDOG

A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for a grandfather. Thomas Henry Huxley, June 30, 1860.

Thus Huxley began his famous reply to Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford. The exchange, one of the most famed in the history of science, was at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which in 1860 took place in Oxford. At issue was Charles Darwin’s recently published On the Origin of Species (1859). Of course scientists were present, but science was still largely an amateur pursuit; Bishop Wilberforce was an amateur scientist. Indeed, he’d written a massive review of Darwin’s book. The review was not yet published (it would be), and Wilberforce’s plan was to stick pretty much to the outlines of his review. But his reputation for wit tempted him to depart from the script. So he asked Huxley whether he, Huxley, descended from apes through his mother’s or father’s sides. Funny or not, Huxley called it out as a profoundly unscientific question. He went on to say that if he were to be ashamed of any ancestor it would be of one whose only contribution to science was to obfuscate it through aimless rhetoric and religious prejudice. The good bishop would get his own back, later, by spiking a proposal to grant Darwin a knighthood. But Thomas Huxley knew whereof he spoke. It was not only about Darwin’s theory (Huxley harbored doubts about that); rather it was about science as such and about his own life as a scientist. Thomas Huxley was born in Ealing, now part of London, on May 4. 1825. His father soon became an unemployed school teacher, a disaster that removed young Thomas from formal education. Largely self-taught, Huxley moved towards science by reading about it and then, as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy, doing it. He became expert on, especially, the anatomy of invertebrates. He also noticed some singular parallels (for instance between birds and dinosaurs), but still doubted the idea of the evolution of species. When he published these doubts, in 1848, Charles Darwin was so impressed that he took Huxley on, instructing the young man in the science of speciation. So Darwin helped Huxley to become a professional in science, a field still dominated by upper-class amateurs. And Huxley made a living out of it. Not much of one, but enough. So when “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce made his joke, Thomas Huxley’s guns were already loaded, powder primed. The Oxford debate helped make Darwin’s Origin famous, and acting as “Darwin’s bulldog” Thomas Huxley would go on defending Darwin, but at the same time advancing science as a professional discipline whose rules and procedures made it capable of continuous improvement. For Thomas Huxley, science itself was a case study in evolution. ©

[Stanley]

[This newspaper] will zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty . . . warmly advocate the cause of Reform . . . assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy . . . and support, without reference to Party . . . whatever measures may promote the moral advantage or the political welfare of the community.

Thus read the “Prospectus” of a new weekly journal, The Manchester Guardian, issued on May 5, 1821. This may be taken as the newspaper’s birthdate, and so today The Guardian is 224 years old. It is, then, a survivor. We began our subscription in 1974, during the first general election campaign of that troubled year. We then lived in a little village, Over Kellet, in north Lancashire. Now in St. Louis, USA, we continue to subscribe, although in these latter days we’re not called ‘subscribers’. Rather we are ‘members.’ And our ‘copy’ comes to us online, for the Guardian has changed through time: else how could it have survived? Most readers resident in Britain also take the paper online, although it retains a print edition—in tabloid format—for those who insist on newsprint feel and ink smell along with their morning tea and their streaky bacon (or, more likely, their organic porridge). But it remains a crusading journal, self-consciously so, and it can hector. Why else would it describe Donald Trump (in reporting his 2024 election victory) as a “convicted felon?” Of course that’s what Trump is, a convicted felon, so in one sense the Guardian was merely reporting the truth. But it is also a selected fact. The paper could merely have given Trump’s age, or the color of his hair, or even his weight. But the Guardian chose to say that the president of the USA was a convicted felon. In that it has remained faithful to its 1821 promise, for when the news of the day has a moral spin, the Guardian can usually be depended upon to twirl. Some find that tiresome. Others call it “fake news.” Paulette and I find it refreshing. The paper has also been amazingly independent. It certainly cannot be depended upon to support Britain’s main left wing party, Labour, although one of its journalists, Owen Smith, once was and may again become a rising star in Labour. And most of the time we’ve subscribed (or remained “members”) the paper has been independent in a profound sense. It was owned by nobody: or more accurately by a self-perpetuating trust, the Scott Trust, obliged by its charter to plow its profits back into journalism. The problem was that there were no profits, so in 2008 its ownership was rearranged to enable more ‘capitalistic’ behavior. But then in 1821 its owners were Manchester capitalists, so it was back to base. As for the Bliss household, we always start with the Guardian’s “quick crossword.” Just like the newspaper, the quick crossword is set just a little above our normal speed. It’s a daily goad. Long may it continue. ©

[Stanley]

OPEN HOUSE

Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours its own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich upon the poor. Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787.

In 1784, Thomas Jefferson was appointed American minister to France, a post he still occupied in 1787. He performed that duty more than passably. The French loved him (though not as much as they loved wise old Ben Franklin, who often uttered his aperçus from beneath his coonskin cap), and Jefferson loved the French—or some of them, especially those nobles and bourgeois already committed to the Enlightenment. He felt only pity for the French poor, ground down by centuries of misrule and merciless exploitation. Pretty rich for a man who owned other human beings, you might say, but perceptive nevertheless. Jefferson did believe that in the best of all possible worlds equality would be the best measure of humanity, and in 1780s France equality was not the rule. The nation itself was owned by its king and his aristocrats (courtiers and bureaucrats), and they fed well. Americans abroad in these years, notably Jefferson himself, John Adams, and old Ben, often noted how fortunate the young republic was in the fact that it was not Europe. Jefferson was a deeper thinker than most of them, but he also had a closer look at economic cannibalism, French style, because he often attended Louis XVI’s court at the Palace of Versailles, about 15 miles outside Paris. Versailles itself, its satellite palaces, its formal gardens and its hunting grounds, was the very definition of excess. Built up over many years and opened formally by the ‘Sun King,’ Louis XIV, on May 6, 1682, the Palace of Versailles was the very definition of architectural overkill and decorative excess. Immediately it became the epitome of desire (‘lust’ would be the choicer term) for those monarchs who would make themselves absolute (for instance the Stuarts of Windsor or the Hohenzollerns of Potsdam). Had it enjoyed modern plumbing, its bathroom fixtures would have been solid gold. Instead, Louis XIV, his Bourbon successors, and their courtiers enjoyed looking at themselves in gold-framed mirrors, dancing on polished marble floors, and competing in how sumptuously they could accommodate their mistresses. Paulette and I visited the place in the early 1990s when we were invited to a wedding in Paris, at the American Church. We took a day trip to Versailles. I found the palace and grounds both astonishing and depressing. Today it’s defined as a World Heritage site and a French national treasure. The very best thing about it is the change in title. The nation whose blood and sweat fed Versailles now owns it. We America should not wish to emulate anything about it. ©.

[Stanley]

CHIPS

It now seems possible to envisage electronic equipment in a solid block with no connecting wires. The block may consist of layers of insulating, conducting, rectifying and amplifying materials, the electronic functions being connected directly by cutting out areas of the various layers. Geoffrey Dummer, May 7. 1952.

Geoffrey Dummer (1909-2002) was an electrical engineer working at the UK government’s Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE). More specifically, it was an RAF facility, established in 1935 in the quiet countryside around Malvern, Worcestershire. It’s there that some of the most important developments in radar detection took place. Dummer’s main job was ‘reliability engineering,’ and this focused him (and his colleagues) on the speed and accuracy of radar in plotting the position of, say, a Luftwaffe squadron intent on reducing nearby Birmingham to rubble. In most human endeavors speed and accuracy are uneasy partners at best, even mutually exclusive, but when it comes to electric currents and pulses the case is different. So they came up with this idea. It was a good one, and so Dummer announced the “integrated circuit” on May 7, 1952, at a conference, in the USA, the “Electronic Components Symposium.” I’m personally impressed by the modesty, even the literal-mindedness, of the language itself, which mirrors the phlegmatic tone adopted by Crick and Watson when, in 1951, they launched us into a new biological universe. Just so, Geoffrey Dummer backhandedly announced the age of the “microchip,” which is what we call the ‘integrated circuit.’ Or, more succinctly, for we’ve become deeply enamored of speed, the “chip.” When I was a kid, “chip” was a word we used for dried buffalo droppings, recommended to all Boy Scouts as the best way to start a campfire (if you could find a buffalo). Dummer did not then claim to have invented the new usage. Nor did he afterwards. Modest to a fault, he always credited Americans for the actual, working silicon chip, notably Robert Noyce on the science side and risk-hungry American investors on the money side. But once the idea was out there the actual thing appeared with amazing speed and then proliferated even faster. In 1965 Gordon Moore (who combined science and money) predicted that the number of transistors ‘printed’ into a chip would double every year. Moore’s Law, as it’s now called, has proven to be just about right. The ‘computer age’ was not born on May 7, 1952. But computers back then were huge, and they were hot, and compared to our current desktops, pads, and phones they were as slow as molasses in January. Early computers were, then, a kind of mixed metaphor. Geoffrey Dummer’s “solid block with no connecting wires” made computing into an exercise in concision.. ©.

[Stanley]

MURRAY

The noble ladies who manage the Suffragette hospital in Endell Street … are men in the best sense of that word, and yet women in the best sense of that word also. The Tatler magazine, July 1916.

That’s not a left-handed compliment. It’s ambidextrous. The Tatler’s editor, Clement Shorter, meant to praise. He was, after all, a great advocate of the literary works of the Brontë sisters, and although his magazine was written by, about, and for London’s high society, it was generally of a progressive temper. And the Endell Street Hospital was a reforming wonder. Founded only in 1915 (and over War Office opposition), it had by July 1916 treated thousands of war wounded, and by the time it closed its doors in 1920 it had treated tens of thousands. Its success rate was phenomenal, not least because the ‘noble ladies’ were so fiercely and lovingly efficient. Both women were medical doctors, still a rarity. Both were and continued to be radical suffragettes. They were Louisa Anderson and Flora Murray. Anderson’s mother had been one of the first women doctors in the UK. Flora Murray was, as they say in Scotland, ‘of that ilk.’ She was born in Murraythwaite, near Dumfries, on May 8, 1869, her father a Murray (of course) and a retired Royal Navy captain who’d taken up his role as a landowning laird. He and his wife, a Graham, saw to it that Flora was well educated at private schools in London, Germany, and France. Flora became fluent in all three languages, a devoted punster it seems, but hankered after more, and in 1890 began her medical education at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson’s London School of Medicine for Women. She first studied nursing but soon (1903 and 1905, at Durham University) qualified as a doctor. Murray then settled in London, where, by 1911, she was deeply involved not only in medicine but in the suffrage movement, as both protestor and medic. Here she met Louisa Anderson and in 1912 the two founded a small hospital specifically for women and children. Then came the war. The two, already experienced in medicine and hospital administration, volunteered for service, but the War Office would not have them. So they went to France, where the authorities were more tolerant (or desperate) to run a military hospital in a fashionable new hotel on the Champs d’Elysées. Their great success in Paris brought them back to London and the Endell Street Hospital, and to another dramatic success. After the war, both returned to private practice but maintained their domestic relationship. Sadly, Murray succumbed to cancer in 1923 and was buried in the village churchyard. Anderson’s ashes were eventually (1943) scattered elsewhere, but their churchyard monument memorializes them together. Its long inscription ends “WE HAVE BEEN GLORIOUSLY HAPPY.” They were also gloriously successful. ©.