BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

WRITING ABOUT SCIENCE

True that a plant may not think; neither will the profoundest of men ever put forth a flower. Donald Culross Peattie, in Flowering Earth (1939).

Science writing, defined as ‘writing about science,’ has become a recognized profession. That was probably inevitable, given the extent to which science has reshaped human life, but one person who hurried the inevitable was Donald Culross Peattie, born in Chicago on June 21, 1898. Both his parents were prominent midwestern journalists (Omaha Daily Herald and then the Chicago Tribune), and his mother Ella was also a noted novelist and civil rights advocate (for women and people of color). Donald started out a French major (which would have some effect on his later life), but then came his annus mirabilis, 1919, when he took a break from office work in New York City to visit the Bronx Botanical Garden. He was smitten. So off he went, first on a collecting expedition up and down what became the Appalachian Trail and then a transfer to Harvard where he majored in botany. He graduated in 1922, a year which also saw his first publications. There were a couple of science research papers and a brief period working for the US Department of Agriculture. But he also won a prize for his poetry. He completed his quandary by marrying a novelist, Louise Redfield. In the future he would do some “science writing,” notably the still-standard field study Flora of the Indiana Dunes (1930), but for the most part he would write about science, mainly biology. He would write knowledgeably, of course, for he had the training. His works would be informative and full of the latest findings. Indeed he would be one of the first scientists to see the ant colony as a genetic organism in and of itself. But he wrote for a lay public, and he wanted his readers to appreciate the beauties of nature, its poetries. He got some daily training in this art through a column in The Washington Star , which came to literary fruition in his An Almanac for Moderns (1935) in which each day is greeted by a brief note on natural history. He and Louise Redfield lived in various places, including French Provence and the Illinois prairie, patches of planet earth on which he constructed eloquent nature studies. Along the way Peattie developed a special affinity for the tree: the tree in general but also the trees of this or that place, or of this or that botanical family. His tree books began with Trees You Want to Know (1934). His tendencies to poetry and personification date his work, making it seem a little too ‘flowery,’ if you don’t mind the pun, for today’s readers. But two of his tree surveys have been recently reprinted, and a compendium volume (A Natural History of North American Trees) appeared in 2007. Donald Peattie died in 1964, when his brother (a geologist, by the way) remembered him affectionately as a poet—and a bit of a pest. ©.

[Stanley]

HOT AIR

I hope to use science to advance and innovate . . . setting a world record is indisputable proof of the success of a new design. Julian Nott.

During his 50-year career, Julian Nott set (or broke) 79 world records. That’s not to mention 96 British records. That astonishing tally requires one to make up some of the measures, and Nott did that, too, for almost all of them relate to ballooning. And ballooning has many categories, hot-air and high altitude since ballooning’s 18th-century origins, but quite a few others. There is the “high pressure balloon”, there are balloons using solar power to warm their trapped air, and some balloons lift up using supercooled helium (at -175oC). Each of these were among Julian Nott’s innovations, and in each he set records. Julian Nott was born earthbound, near Bristol, England, on June 22, 1944, his father a company director and his mother an innovative journalist. He earned degrees in physical science at St. John’s College, Oxford, but there was no hint of ballooning until, at a disco party in swinging London (it was 1969), he gave his then girlfriend (as a birthday present) a ticket to ride in a balloon. She was not moved. But he discovered a lifelong passion. Within a year Nott had his ballooning license and quickly qualified as a leading eccentric, amateur to a fault. Fascinated by the “Nazca Lines” of the Peruvian Desert, he speculated that they could have been drawn from above, and went to Peru to build a hot air balloon of materials the Nazca people had mastered (basically fire and loomed cloth) to establish the point. There was some science to this, but it was mostly eccentricity. From then on, Julian Nott took the scientific route in ballooning. When he wasn’t gaining commercial sponsorships for floating over the Los Angeles Olympics he was working with NASA and other mainly American agencies and companies in high altitude ballooning and the technical innovations that, necessarily, went with it. His experiments with cryogenic helium, for instance, had to do with the idea of using balloons to explore Jupiter’s gaseous surface—a very cold and windy place. Besides a set of long-distance records, Nott flew balloons to record heights in newly designed pressurized cabins, then jumped out of them to set new parachuting records, one when he was 72 years old. He assisted at another, higher jump (135,000 feet). He was no daredevil, no Evel Knevel. He was a scientist known for his excessive cautions. Ironically, Julian Nott died after a safe (soft) landing near San Diego, in 2019. Once down, his spherical high-pressure cabin, now gravity-bound, tumbled down a steep desert slope and pinned him to earth. He died two days later of his injuries, and perhaps of his age. He was 75. ©

[Stanley]

THE VILLAGE IDIOT PROBLEM

The global village will have its village idiots and they’ll have global range. Martin Rees.

So wrote Martin Rees in one of his early stabs at futurology, entitled On the Future: Prospects for Humanity (1999). Given the impact of the Trump presidency on world politics, it seems prescient. But it would be mistaken to view it as pessimistic. His own life is a story of progress. He was born in York, England, on June 23, 1944, the son of school teachers who believed that every child’s genius—whatever it was—could be brought into sunlight where, well-watered and properly nourished, it might blossom. With that end in mind, they moved to wildest Shropshire (on the Welsh border). There they founded a progressive boarding school, aptly named Bedstone College. The school (its motto is caritas) survives, and the idea worked for Martin too. His love for mathematics was encouraged, and he took it on to Cambridge and a First Class Honours baccalaureate. There followed a doctorate in astronomy and (pun intended) a stellar career, which he played out in various institutional settings, including Sussex, Princeton, and Oxford. But mostly in Cambridge where he held a succession of prestigious chairs and in 2004 was elected Master of Trinity College. Astronomy per se doesn’t have a Nobel Prize, but he’s won almost everything else, including an appointment as Astronomer Royal. A life-long member of the Labour Party, Rees was ennobled (2009) as Baron Rees of Ludlow. Back home, in other words: and he further cultivated that image by taking his seat as cross-bencher, a political independent, with no ax to grind. But he is worried about the future of the human race. Partly it’s just a question of numbers. The sun, our original source, has about 6 billion years to run; Rees as mathematician finds it impossible to believe that homo sapiens will still be on hand. Chances are about 100% that genetics, evolution, will come up with something very different. More immediately, that is within any conceivable time span, he states our challenge differently—and as something we could meet, and surmount. I suspect that today, on his 81st birthday, he’d advise us to stop electing village idiots (e.g. Boris Johnson) or, if we can’t avoid that, to learn how to control their excesses. More generally (and more urgently) Martin Rees has been telling us that it’s way past time to start mastering our technologies. If we don’t, they’ll eat us up, poison us, fry us to a frazzle. He does so with good humor, in the British style. As he reminded his auditors on a prominent New Jersey campus not too long ago (2013), “God invented space so that not everything had to happen at Princeton.” Happy 81st Birthday to Baron Rees of Ludlow. ©.

[Tripps]

Speaking of village idiots - There is some evidence that this is true -

Reform UK MP Lee Anderson says "if you took the VILLAGE IDIOT from all of the 6000 villages in the UK and put them all into Tottenham, David Lammy would still be the village idiot."

[Stanley]

Looking at Lee Anderson all I can say is that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.....
Have you noted that Bobs Bits is getting about 700 hits a day?

[Stanley]

NOBLESSE?

Past youth and strength, butt under guardian still,
I have my own, but serve anothers will. ca. 1663.

When Sir Dudley North penned this couplet, he was 61; but clearly he was not yet a fully free man. His father, the 3rd Baron North, lived on until 1666m when Dudley finally assumed the title. Only eleven years later, plagued by ‘the stone’ (“Nephritic Torture”, he called it), he died on June 24, 1677. He’d weathered other plagues, too, notably the political curse of Civil War when, reluctantly but prominently, he’d supported the parliamentary cause. Then came the Restoration of 1660, when, kneeling in penitence, he secured a pardon from the new monarch. And all this while (from 1638, indeed, when he was only 36 and newly married), he’d been charged by his father with the responsibility of restoring the North family’s tattered fortunes. That had not been a great success, either, involving constant cajolery (of neighbors and tenants) and heavy reinvestments in draining Cambridgeshire fenlands—which probably never would produce great profits. Add to all that his dissolute youth, when he’d laid London low with the capital’s riff-raff and as boon companion to the ill-fated Prince Henry, and you have a formula for the unhappy, tempest-tossed life of a 17th-century English aristocrat, spiced heavily with political turn-coatery. And yet Dudley North comes down the ages with a different reputation, not spotless perhaps but with a pleasing amount of polish. One part of it was a very happy marriage, to Anne Montagu in 1634. Forgiving to a fault, Anne accepted the love poems he’d written to his mistress “Serena” (during his boisterous youth) as ‘really’ intended for her, and then bore him 14 children. She raised ten to adulthood, a good score for this troubled century, then arranged good marriages for all of them, six sons and four daughters. And through all of this, Dudley himself learned the virtues of finding and then nurturing communities of interest, as father, as a war-time politician and as a manager of the North family estates. Supporting parliament during the civil wars came easily to a man from Cambridgeshire, a Puritan-infested county, and one already busy with extensive land-drainage schemes which required long-term and common cause efforts of whole rural neighborhoods. Well before his second son (also Dudley North, 1641-1691) became an early advocate of building common wealth through free trade and entrepreneurialism, Sir Dudley North learned that common interest and cooperation showed the best way forward for Cambridge landowners, politically and economically. And he wrote about it all in his (posthumously printed) memoirs. Born into wealth and power, Sir Dudley North, 4th Baron, found peace and satisfaction in what he called the “Pastoral charge” of community and family. ©

[Tripps]

Have you noted that Bobs Bits is getting about 700 hits a day?

Yes but how many are from living breathing sentient individuals and how many from robots?

I think that a more accurate measure is how many views an attached photo gets. My recent attachment in "Politics" has just made the 100 mark, after about five days in a fairly prominent position in the list of active topics. That's a lot more than usual, and I think better reflects the scale of things.

PS The picture of Manet's Flaneur is the current record holder at 251 views. Goodness knows why.

PS:- I note that currently-
In total there are 7 users online :: 5 registered and 2 hidden (based on users active over the past 60 minutes). Most users ever online was 22 on Fri Oct 25, 2013 9:41 am

[PanBiker]

Just a note, the bots and crawlers are classed as users in any calculations as they use the background anonymous user account for access onto the system. Guest users use a similar universal account also which allows them read only access.
The bots can and do make hundreds of hits every day. It only takes a few seconds for a bot to register a change on the system a lot faster than any sentient user can scan posts.
I can disable them all but that would be counter productive. There are about 50 bots, spiders and crawlers in the admin console, I have disable all but about 10 of the better known ones. I have always thought that there should be a way of excluding them from post hits. Someone will probably have developed an extension to do just that but we don't do extensions.

[Tripps]

I think that means that you agree with me. . .

I would estimate about 20 - 30 hits at most by real people per day, and that's probably on the generous side.
The robot hits have a value of course, and may indirectly drive more people to Bob's Bits after a search.

[Stanley]

I don't attempt to analyse them as I have no facts but I take the number as a measure of activity and at the moment it's very high. Bots or humans, a hit is a hit in my book.

[Stanley]

KEWPIE?

I thought about the Kewpies so much that I had a dream about them where they were all doing acrobatic pranks on the coverlet of my bed. One sat in my hand. Rose O’Neill.

Early in my teaching career at Lancaster University, I reacted to a student’s brilliant tutorial presentation thus: “you’ve just won the Kewpie doll.” Of course I was immediately asked what that meant, for I had plunged the students, all of them British, into a culture gap. All I could offer was that Kewpie dolls were given as prizes at the Grundy County Fair, in rural Iowa, circa 1950. It wasn’t much of an explanation, certainly not a patch on the student’s performance, but it did get me through the tutorial. I’ve since discovered that the Kewpies were the invention of the extraordinary Rose O’Neill, that they had made her a fortune and had become something of a popular icon for many things, babies of course but also for the cause of women’s suffrage. Rose O’Neill was born in Wilkes-Barre, PA, on June 25, 1874, the child of Irish immigrants. Ambitious immigrants, I might add, for the family soon moved (by covered wagon, no less) to Nebraska, where her father started in business as a bookseller. Rose’s talent as an illustrator was home grown, first noticed when in 1887 she won a drawing contest put on by an Omaha newspaper. Within five years, she was a successful cartoonist-illustrator, her work appearing in several midwestern papers. She then moved to New York and her drawings moved on to a national stage, notably through women’s magazines, but in 1897 she was taken on by the humor weekly, Puck, then the only female on the permanent staff. This brought her money, fame, and a deadbeat husband. She soon shed the guy and aimed for greater things. She would, for instance, travel to Europe to learn sculpture from Auguste Rodin and to dabble, at least, in modern painting. In the USA, Rose engaged with the suffrage movement, giving money to the cause and joining public demos. She also took on commissions for ‘serious’ illustrations in books and literary magazines. It was in the midst of all this, sometime around 1908, that Rose dreamed up the Kewpie, a cartoonish baby character of varied expression but always with a sprig of hair curling up from the top of its skull. Rose’s Kewpie pushed for “Votes for Women” but, more than that, was aimed to be “a sort of little round fairy whose one idea is to teach people to be merry and kind at the same time.” “Kewpie” was derived from “Cupid,” etymologically, but there was little eroticism in the image unless looked at by a Freudian. Kewpies were also (or at least seem to me) to be gender-free. Whatever the judgment on that issue, the Kewpie became a sensation, the subject of an ongoing Rose O’Neill comic strip and, manufactured in bisque, a big winner on the doll market, the genuine Kewpie produced by the German firm J. D. Kestner. And Kewpie adorned more than suffrage posters, but became an advertising symbol too: among many others, for Kelloggs Corn Flakes and Jell-O. Meanwhile, Rose O’Neill developed her own persona, to judge by her pictures of a vaguely pre-Raphaelite image, and withal a New Woman alive to the pleasures and potentialities of life. But she spent too much, too quickly, on herself and also on her family. The last Kewpie comic strip appeared in 1937. Rose herself died, penniless, in her family’s Ozark homestead. I suspect that those Kewpie Doll prizes at the county fair were, really, remaindered goods. Today genuine German Kewpies sell for thousands, but that’s a different story. ©.

[Stanley]

SPORTSPERSON

It’s just not enough to swing at the ball. You’ve got to loosen your girdle and really let the ball have it. Babe Didrikson Zaharias.

There are a few variations on this, but the girdle always figures. That’s odd, for in pictures of Babe Zaharias at play, there is no evidence that she needed a girdle. Whether teeing off, or pitching a baseball, or jumping a hurdle, the Babe was as lithe and lean as a person could be. In her day, sports writing was a male preserve, so not all sportswriters admired Babe Zaharias’s athleticism (some journalists preferred their women to be girdled), but the great Grantland Rice thought her the most perfect combination of muscle and motion he’d ever seen. Babe Zahariaswas born Mildred Ella Didriksen, in Beaumont, TX, on June 26, 1911, the daughter of immigrant parents. She took to games almost immediately. Many think (and she often claimed) that the nickname “Babe” came her way because of her excellences at baseball, for her teen years were the Ruth era in professional baseball. But her mother always called her “Bebe”, in good Norsk style, so the jury is still out on that one. Whatever the name, she was, or became, a great athlete in a veritable multitude of sports. Golf of course, and baseball too: but she competed also in several track and field specialties (javelin, hurdles, high jump), tennis, and basketball—not to mention pool (both the green baize and swimming). Babe first got headline exposure on a Dallas insurance company’s sports team, playing in multiple sports. Then she won three medals at the 1932 Olympics (she would have won more but at that time a woman could compete in only three specialties); but she became best known as a golfer. She played first as an amateur (in “open” tournaments, on the men’s circuit), then turned professional and helped establish the ladies’ pro association, the LPGA. Then she spent three years in purdah, regaining her amateur status (again, in several sports). But in my youth she was a pro golfer, plain and simple, utterly dominant in the LPGA, and loving partner of another ladies pro, Betty Dodd. Perhaps to conceal the issue, Babe was married (to a pro wrestler, George Zaharias, “The Crying Greek from Cripple Creek”). But that was more than a convenience, for they stuck to each other through her greatest challenge, her fatal cancer. Indomitable, Babe Zaharias won her last tournament wearing a colostomy bag, having spent her last years raising cancer awareness and funding cancer research. When the Babe died, she was mourned by President Eisenhower. Sixty years later, Donald Trump honored her posthumously with the Medal of Freedom. No Republican, as far as I know, ever worried about which bathroom the Babe used. But then she was only ever a gender bender, not a gender breaker. Babe Zaharias was also the greatest athlete of her era. ©.

[Stanley]

HOT

I think we are dealing with an audience that is almost functionally illiterate, that has grown up on television and comic books. I. A. L. Diamond, 1982.

Pretty pessimistic, grim even, and thus a little out of character, for I. A. L. Diamond was famous for witty dialogue, especially in partnership with Billy Wilder. Their most famous Hollywood collaborations, Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960) are full of situations and dialogue that seems to assume greater capacities and more sophistication in the audience, notably the killer in the closing scene: “I’m a man!”//“Well, nobody’s perfect.” But by 1982 Diamond may have been assuming the bitter old man role. He’d entered his 60s. The Wilder partnership was winding down. Diamond may have thought, and certainly said, that Hollywood was filling up with crass youngsters whose only ambition (being rich already, and Harvard-educated) was to make more money (at least enough to serve cocaine at their parties). Not like Wilder, certainly not like I. A. L. Diamond, who always aimed at “class.” Diamond had a life story to match. He was born Itzek Dominici, in what is now eastern Romania, on June 27, 1920. The family soon emigrated to the land of promise, well, Brooklyn anyway, where young Itzek did well in high school, especially mathematics, and on the side established himself as a wit. In a community made up largely of new immigrants, that latter skill was helpful, and with it he moved on to Columbia University. There wit began to replace mathematics, and Itzek legally established a new ID as I. A. L. Diamond. The surname is close enough to Dominici, but the I. A. L. came from outer space, or maybe it stood for Interscholastic Algebra League. He also loved books and reading, literally, as a member of Columbia’s Philolexian Society. And with all that Diamond made himself indispensable as the leading campus jester, orally and on paper. He took all this to Hollywood where he hired himself out as a wordslinger, at first an uncredited one. Some successes followed, but then he met Wilder, another rootless exile who had already found success (and “class”), but was in search of a new writing partner. There were several Wilder-Diamond films, not all of them great successes, but Some Like It Hot is now reckoned to be a real classic, and not only in its intelligent dialogues. It’s a satire on America’s gangster decade and an extended joke about our obsessions with gender. With two drag queens in it (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon), I’m surprised it hasn’t yet been banned in Florida. But then, part of it was filmed there, wasn’t it? I don’t know who wrote which lines, but prefer to take Diamond’s widow’s word that it was a replay of their off-screen chatter, a verbal competition from which neither contestant emerged triumphant. Next time you get a chance to watch Some Like It Hot, listen to the words. ©.

[Stanley]

RACE

The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof. Ashley Montagu. 1984.

This memorable dictum appears in Montagu’s editorial introduction to his Science and Religion. In it, Montagu and a dozen contributors map the gaps between modern sciences and modern religious fundamentalism. It remains one of my favorite books though it was the proximate cause of disaster in one of my early attempts at fundraising, when a prospective donor turned out to be (also) a creationist. So what was intended as a convivial dinner party became a battleground. Among the casualties, killed in action, was my proposal for a science scholarship at the honors college. It’s a complicated story (the prospective donor was, after all, an electrical engineer), but not as complicated as the life of Ashley Montagu. He was born Israel Ehrenburg, in London, England, on June 28, 1905. His parents were refugees, Jews who’d fled the pogroms of the Tsar’s empire and wanted no repeat. So Israel set out on an assimilationist path, exceling in school and changing his name. In this his model was the extraordinary scientific pioneer Lady Mary Montagu (1689-1762), and he could have done worse. So off he went, as “Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu.” Besides his new name, he fashioned a new past, transforming studies at London University into an Oxbridge education in order to gain admission to Columbia’s PhD program in anthropology. But there was truth to it, too, for he had acquired both interest and expertise in human studies, and he did eventually gain a Columbia PhD (1938). There was also genius. Montagu crusaded against academic racism (notably in anthropology, biology, and psychology), arguing from his own findings, and from others, that humans were of one species, not several “races,” indeed that the whole concept of race was Man’s Most Dangerous Myth. That appeared in 1942. Then (1946) came Montagu’s leading contributions to the United Nations’ “Statements on Race.” Both would be used by the US Supreme Court to undergird its unanimous decision (1954) on racial segregation in schools, and in the process made Montagu himself a target for the American Right. He lost his job (at Rutgers). Down but by no means out, Montagu rebounded to become one of the great popularizers of science in 20th-century America, notably in the human sciences: evolutionary biology and psychology. His scientific researches on evolution (and embryology) also convinced him of The Natural Superiority of Women (1952), which made him popular in at least some quarters of the feminist movement. Ashley Montagu, né Ehrenburg, remains for me a guiding light. But I will never again use him in pursuit of charitable donations. In that particular market, he can be dynamite. ©

[Stanley]

ENERGY FOOD

We consider ourselves to be part of, as well as funders of, civil society and we still follow the old Quaker imperative of speaking truth to power. From the mission statement of the Barrow Cadbury Trust, 2017.

Since its 1969 merger with Schweppes, Cadbury Chocolate has gone the way of all flesh (or the way of international capitalism), merging to leverage markets or stock values, moving production to exploit cheap labor, and then finally (‘the last bean’, in 2016) dispensing with its commitment to buy its raw material only from “fair trade” producers. But in the firm’s heyday, Cadburys became the very symbol of socially responsible (and socially responsive) capitalism. In 1861, Cadburys was old, down, and almost out. But under the leadership of second- and third-generation Cadburys the firm dropped its tea and coffee lines and took flight with chocolates, in increasing varieties. And through it all the Cadburys (almost all of them) remained Quakers to their cores. Evidence of their beneficence survives. Bournville, the model village Cadburys built for its workers and their families, may have gone ‘private,’ but it still offers low-cost housing in a high-cost market. And then there is the Barrow Cadbury Trust. It was named after Barrow Cadbury, a grandson of the ‘first’ chocolate Cadbury. Barrow (1862-1958) combined his work as CEO of ‘the firm’ with a wide range of charitable enterprises including schools, hospitals, and international peace. At first glance, one can only wonder how he found the time (we know how he found the money). It seems a miracle, at least until we encounter Barrow’s wife, Geraldine Southall Cadbury. She was born into the Society of Friends on June 29, 1865, her Quaker parents already into the businesses of doing well and doing good. Well educated, handsome, and energetic, Geraldine was a good catch for Barrow Cadbury. They married in 1891. Then, after producing three more Cadburys (1892, 1895, 1900), Geraldine hit her stride and was soon outpacing the whole family in good works. She started with a lying-in-hospital for poor women, then free Kindergartens for their children, then training facilities for schoolteachers. But she quickly moved beyond that, especially to the peace movement, women’s rights, and juvenile justice. In her iconography, the goddess of justice was not blind and did not wield a sword. She acted that image out as one of Birmingham’s first female magistrates, one who also donated whole institutions to the rehabilitation of young offenders. For Geraldine, it was not “philanthropy.” She did not like the word’s elitist implications. Elon Musk probably suspects her of empathy, and she would plead guilty. In order that their mission might carry on, the couple founded the Barrow Cadbury Trust in 1920. It lives on, leaving one to ask, whatever became of the chocolate? ©.

[Stanley]

HOOKER

I was aware of Darwin’s views fourteen years before I adopted them and I have done so solely and entirely from an independent study of the plants themselves. Joseph Dalton Hooker, in an 1860 letter to a friend.

There is ample evidence that this is a true statement. Charles Darwin often confirmed that Hooker was his oldest and best scientific friend, first as interrogator and critic and then contributor to the content of On the Origin of Species (1859). In the famous 1860 ‘debate’ over Darwin’s thesis, Hooker is the one who spoke in most detail, and in greatest length, in attacking Darwin’s critics, notably Bishop Sam Wilberforce. Hooker answered “Soapy Sam” not with a better joke (as did Thomas Huxley) but with evidence about the geographical distributions of plant species. That was, well before 1860, Joseph Hooker’s strongest ground. He was born on June 30, 1817, into a family of botanists. Most of them, like his banker grandfather Dawson Turner, were amateurs. But Joseph’s father William Jackson Hooker was a professional scientist, Regius Professor of Botany at Glasgow and soon (1841) to be named founding director of the Kew Botanical Gardens when they were first taken under government ownership. Son Joseph did even more to make science into a profession. Indeed, by the time Joseph Hooker succeeded his father at Kew, 1865, he was a scientist. He’d studied medicine at Glasgow, and in 1839, before ever he met Darwin, he’d been appointed assistant surgeon on the Ross Expedition to the Antarctic, charged to collect and catalog natural history specimens. That’s how he met Darwin, who’d had a similar appointment on HMS Beagle, and they got to know each other after Hooker read Darwin’s Beagle journal. They then traded data, tried out ideas, including the first glimmerings of Darwin’s revolutionary theses about natural selection. Hooker took these ideas with him on scientific travels in India, notably in the highest Himalayas, noting (among other things) the geographical and altitudinal distributions of species. So by the time “Soapy Sam” made his weak joke about which of one’s grandparents one might choose to be the monkey, Hooker was ready to respond seriously, and in scientific detail. Indeed Hooker himself told Darwin that it was he, and not Huxley, who made the most killing points and won the most applause. It was appropriate that this occurred on Hooker’s 45th birthday, June 30, 1860. Hooker’s scientific future included the Kew directorship (for decades), during which time he secured the gardens’ scientific functions, continued his defense of Darwin’s thesis, and entered a long collaboration (including a North American expedition) with the Harvard botanist Asa Gray. In all his doings, Joseph Hooker comes down to us as a scientist. But he couldn’t stop being a gentleman. He left the rough stuff to Darwin’s bulldog, Huxley. ©.

[Stanley]

MODERN MAJOR GENERALS

Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform.

And tell you ev’ry detail of Caractacus’s uniform.

In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,

I am the very model of a modern Major-Gineral.

--Lyric from The Pirates of Penzance, 1879.

Nearly 150 years on, “The Major-General’s Song” is the best-known of all Gilbert & Sullivan compositions. It has been analyzed, word by word, for its insights into Victorian middle-class culture and humor. A well-known 1859 statue of Caractacus, for instance, had dressed the barbarian rebel (Caractacus was English, of course) only in a loin-cloth, which must have brought a knowing chuckle. And it was well known that the ‘modern major general’ thus gently satirized was Garnet Joseph Wolseley (1833-1913), only recently (1874) knighted and promoted to that exact rank. That promotion came in recognition of Wolseley’s success in defeating a native rebellion in Victoria’s African empire. It (and a £25,000 cash reward from parliament) also honored Wolseley’s long, often heroic, service, which had begun under the patronage of the ancient Duke of Wellington when Garnet Wolseley was only 14 years old. More than all that, however, Garnet Wolseley was, really and truly, a modern major-general, in 1879 the hero of the struggle to reform the British army. That struggle (a war within, one with many battles) had deep roots and a long history, but it began to draw blood in 1868, when Prime Minister William Gladstone’s secretary of war, Edward Cardwell, abolished the punishment of flogging ‘in the ranks.’ Other reforms followed, most famously the end of the ancient practice of buying (and selling) officers’ commissions. Even becoming a mere ensign was expensive. A colonelship broke the bank, so as an officer rose in the ranks he sold his former commission to help finance his new one. And this in a country intent on reforming its civil service!! Besides such obvious abuses, the British army had grown too small for its tasks of securing the empire and insuring peace on the home front. It needed a competent officer corps but also a much larger body of enlisted men. These reforms did not come fully into effect until “General Order 70” was issued on July 1, 1881, by Cardwell’s successor at the War Office, Ernest Childers. Reforms were stoutly, sometimes hysterically, opposed by officer corps mossbacks (in both navy and army), but one officer who consistently supported them was the very modern Garnet Wolseley. To drive the point home, George Grossmith, the actor who premièred the role of Major General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance, came on stage sporting Wolseley’s trademark moustaches. An audience that knew about Caractacus’s loincloth could not have missed the joke. ©.

[Stanley]

AMISTAD

Her Majesty's Government anxiously hope that the President of the United States will find himself empowered to take such measures, in behalf of the aforesaid Africans, as shall secure to them the possession of their liberty, to which, without doubt they are by law entitled.

So wrote the British ambassador, Henry Fox, to the US Secretary of State, John Forsyth, concerning the Amistad case. La Amistad had sailed from Havana. It carried a few passengers, but its main business was to trade its freight along Cuba’s north coast. But on July 2, 1839, the most valuable part of its freight revolted, killed the captain and several crew members, and took over the ship. So the freight was human, and when La Amistad finally made landfall, in New London, Connecticut, the exact legal status of these human beings became an issue. In due course, the case (curiously entitled The United States v. Amistad, although the schooner itself could hardly be a litigant) was decided on behalf of the freight. The survivors (two had died in the shipboard struggle on July 2, and five had perished in the New London jail) were adjudged to be free individuals, human beings with wills and rights of their own. “Mutiny,” a capital crime in itself, could not therefore be the issue. Rather, as free persons illegally held in chains, they were entitled to use any means necessary to regain their freedom. The Supreme Court decision did overturn the lower court’s judgment that the Amistad prisoners should be (if they wished it) transported at government expense. So that task was taken over by an abolition society. And the Amistad “cargo” was returned home, to west Africa. Their leader, Sengbe Pieh aka Joseph Cinque, resumed his family life (he was a rice farmer with a wife and three children), and lived until 1879. The case was an incredibly complicated one, including even salvage claims from the coast guard crew that had escorted La Amistad into New London harbor. It is mainly and rightly seen as a landmark in the internal America struggle over human slavery. Today, though, in the era of Trump, it is also interesting as a case involving immigrants’ rights and the powers of the presidency. Once it was decided that Sengbe Pieh was in fact not enslaved, he became a human being endowed with a powerful panoply of human rights. And Secretary of State Forsyth, though himself a slaveowner and eager not to offend his southern allies, advised the British ambassador that the president of the United States could not interfere with the workings of justice in the states or in the federal courts. President Martin van Buren might have liked to see the Amistad’s cargo as mutineers and murderers (and sent ‘back’ to Cuba as slaves), but he was bound by the Constitution (and his oath of office) to stay within his sphere. The Amistad case remains a lesson for our times. ©

[Stanley]

IRONIES

Colonial slavery shaped modern Britain and we all still live with its legacies.

We still live with and within the inheritances of slavery. This truth, easily demonstrable, discommodes some US politicians, who affect to worry that it might hurt the feelings of white children. The British seem to be a tougher, more resilient people, and the above quotation is from the mission statement of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, an important part of a nationwide accounting of the costs and benefits—both still accruing today—of 300 years of British involvement in slavery, the slave trade, and the plantation system. One focus has been the growth of the Pinney family fortune. Starting with Azariah Pinney in the 1680s, the Pinneys waxed rich on sugar and slaves. While they were at it, they kept meticulous plantation records. So today we know a lot about the Pinneys and their profits, and about Pinney heirs who brought their money back to Britain to establish estates, sit in parliament, invest in banks, and (one Pinney at least, in the 1730s) attend Christ’s College, Cambridge, en route to becoming a proper English gentleman. The same researchers have constructed a collective biography of 900 named Pinney slaves whose blood and toil (between 1685 and the end of British colonial slavery in 1834) financed all this British history. One of the more interesting facts about all this is that the Pinney fortune, made in racial slavery, originated in a Englishwoman’s liberation. She was Hester Pinney, born in Dorset on July 3, 1658. Hester never married (perhaps taking a lead from the disastrous marriages of her elder sisters) and she left no children. But, thrown back on her own resources, she built a fortune, first on needlework, then on fine lace. Her laces did so well that she moved to London, set up her own business premises (in a tavern at first), and went into new trades, including lending money at interest. Hester Pinney lived long enough to invest in the South Sea hysteria, but she was smart enough to sell her stocks before the bubble burst. Along the way, she established close ties with a lawyer and banker named George Booth, then outlived him and (in 1725) was named executrix of his estate. And what has all this to do with slavery? Hester Pinney was a religious dissenter, a radical, and so was her brother Azariah. Cut from similar threads, Azariah Pinney joined with other radicals to support Monmouth’s Rebellion in 1685. He was captured and sentenced to hang, but Hester had enough cash on hand to bribe the judges and have Azariah transported. With Hester behind him, Azariah proved yet another good investment. Once freed from his indenture, in Nevis, he began to build his own Pinney fortune on the backs of enslaved human beings. It’s an irony. If it hurts anyone’s feelings, I apologize in advance. ©.