BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

WATERS

I am somebody because God don’t make no junk. Ethel Waters, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, 1951.

Ethel Waters’s autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, was first published in 1951. In retrospect, one might say it was a little before its time, for the modern Civil Rights movement was just getting underway, and the legal and extralegal structures of American apartheid were still pretty much intact—and not only in the southern states. But in 1951 Ethel Waters had already experienced quite enough of it. She was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, on October 31, 1896. Being born black wasn’t a particularly good start in 1896, and in her case less so. Her black mother Louise Anderson, a teenager, had been raped by an ‘almost white’ middle class pianist, John Wesley Waters, so baby Ethel was not a particularly welcome arrival. Ethel’s mother soon married, and Ethel was left in the care of her Anderson relations, notably her grandmother, Sally. It was a tough childhood. Ethel began to negotiate her way out of it by helping grandma Sally clean houses, then graduated to singing and dancing for a meager living. That was in a Baltimore night club, then came a few years in the lower reaches of the vaudeville circuit: Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta and places between. She fetched up in Harlem in 1920 aged 22, with a hard manner and a wonderful voice. Both helped her to become a star singer in night clubs, on disk (Black Star first, then Columbia), and (come the talkies) on short filler films. In some circumstances Ethel Waters could pass as white (it was her facial features, she later said), but she chose her blacker skin; and it was as a black artist that she made the big time, not just records but on film, and with a couple of Academy Award nominations (1943, for a song, and 1949, as a supporting actress). But throughout, there was a chip on Ethel’s shoulder, and it had to do with race, color, segregation. Elia Kazan, who directed her in that 1949 film, later recalled her “truly odd combination of old-time religiosity and free-flowing hatred.” You get the religiosity in the old (1905) hymn that she recorded and then used as the title of her autobiography. And some of the hatred comes through in the book itself. I knew none of this, of course, when I first saw her—several times—on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night TV show. Nor did I know that Sullivan faced much criticism from CBS head office (and some southern “blackouts”) for featuring black performers and (apparently worse) for daring to embrace Waters on camera. But that is a different story. It’s also a different story that Ethel Waters found some relief from the tensions of her life by embracing a different shade of religion. In 1957, she became one of televangelist Billy Graham’s most famous converts. I think that was ‘out of character’ for her. But then I grew up in a sheltered household. ©.

[Tripps]

As movingly, (a bit OTT if truth be told), performed by Lonnie Donegan in 1962.

[Stanley]

FIREWORKS

A little black dog, with long silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny, wee nose. The dog Toto, in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900).

‘Toto’ became a cairn terrier in the 1939 movie, and no cairn terrier would stand for being described as cutely accoutered with a “funny, wee nose.” The moniker ‘Toto’ is said to come from an Indiana town where Baum’s family owned a lakeside cabin, and might have derived from a local Native American word. But what about an Italian origin? I’m thinking of Antonio Toto, born in Florence, Italy, sometime in 1499 and who died on or shortly before November 1, 1554, probably in London, England. Toto was the first ‘court painter’ in English history, but more appropriately (for a cairn terrier’s namesake) he was first trained as a maker of fireworks. At least so he was described in Giorgio Vasari’s classic Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550). Vasari was relieved to report that young Antonio repented of such a mundane trade to train with his father as a painter. Somehow King Henry VIII of England heard of young Toto, and hired him as “Serjeant Painter” for his court. Toto arrived in 1519, aged only 20. He married twice (to English women), and was naturalized in 1538. He survived Henry VIII and continued in the same role under Henry’s son King Edward VI. All this is known from literary evidence, not from any Toto paintings, for none of his artworks survive. It seems likely that he ‘gifted’ one or two paintings per year to Henry VIII, perhaps a condition of his position as Serjeant Painter to the court. In return (for as divine right monarch, and however fat, senile, and diseased he became, King Henry was the fountain of all English liberty and privilege) Toto received not only board and lodging but a few income-producing properties and, in 1540, a small monopoly. With Guy Fawkes Night approaching in England (November 5), it’s best to think of Toto as a fireworks maker, and certainly more appropriate when thinking of the psychology of cairn terriers. But what’s really strange is that young Toto was first hired, in 1519, to design a tomb for Henry VIII and his then Queen, Catherine of Aragon. Some drawings of that very elaborate project survive, but the tomb itself was never finished. There was of course the annulment, or divorce. Then Henry went through several queens, too many wars (with Scotland and France), and an off-again, on-again Reformation of the English church. And as Henry aged and became more paranoid, it became ever more dangerous even to contemplate his death. For whatever reason, Henry VIII was buried under a plain marble slab at Windsor. Much later, a new slab was provided, with a merely descriptive inscription. And Antonio Toto, once an apprentice dipintore di fantocci, now Serjeant Painter to the English court, lived on. ©

[Stanley]

QUEEN FOR A DAY

This is the day that the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. Psalm 118:24.

Besides being one of the OT texts most used in Christian worship, this was the title of the music composed (by Georg Friederich Handel) for the 1734 wedding of Anne, Princess Royal, with William, heir apparent to the Prince of Orange. While one can’t doubt the princess’s religiosity, this was a bit of wishful thinking, for her marriage to Willam was dynastic and political. It’s only partly that the bride and groom were first cousins. More important was Britain’s ripening rivalry with France, in which a firmer alliance with the Netherlands might play a critical role. And a subtext was Princess Anne’s own dynastic ambition. She still harbored the idea that she (or an heir) might one day succeed to the British throne. This was not popular with her father, George II, nor with her brothers who, being male, were the more likely heirs apparent. Indeed during her first (false) pregnancy, Princess Anne returned to London in hopes that the child would be born on British soil. Her royal father would have none of it, and sent her back ‘home’. In the end, nothing came of it. George II survived them all; and when he died in 1760 the British crown passed to his grandson, King George III. Princess Anne was born in Hanover on November 2, 1709. Parliament’s Act of Settlement (1701) had already named the Hanover royal family as the likely successor to the crown, and so the Hanovers set themselves to learn English. Anne’s grandfather, George I, never mastered the tongue, and she spoke it much more fluently than even her father, who became King George II in 1727. Probably thinking of making his daughter more marriageable, George II made Anne “Princess Royal”, and she was perhaps the most popular of the Hanovers. She was tutored in music by Handel himself, in court life (and English ways) by the Countess of Portland, and made herself popular with leading parliamentary politicians. She was reported as saying that she “would die tomorrow to be Queen today,” and partly to forestall that her father put her on the European marriage market. First was the Crown Prince of Prussia, then (oddly or daringly) King Louis XV of France. That foundered on its own unreality, but one might say that Prince William of Orange came through in 1734 faute de mieux. Still, Anne van Hanover, as she became known in Holland, did her best to consolidate the power of the House of Orange in the maelstrom of Dutch domestic politics. When her husband did indeed succeed as Stadholder, in 1747, she did pretty well, and when he died in 1751 she became “governor” of the United Provinces and guardian to her royal son, then aged only three. It wasn’t quite like being a “real” queen regnant, but it was as close as history allowed her to get. ©

[Stanley]

TROTTER

If mankind is to profit freely from the small and sporadic crop of the heroically gifted it produces, it will have to cultivate the delicate art of handling ideas. Wilfred Trotter, in “The Commemoration of Great Men,” 1932.

Wilfred Trotter was not optimistic about the prospects for this ‘delicate art,’ party because he thought it was so very delicate. In the same lecture, he lamented our human inability “to distinguish between a new idea and nonsense.” If that were not enough cause for pessimism, or despair, Potter went further to note that some great ideas had the potential to become “more deadly than cholera or bubonic plague and far more cruel.” Here he cited—as particularly deadly—Aquinas, Calvin, Hegel, and Marx. Our common “herd instinct” made us all too likely to murder each other for the sake of such ideas. Given this litany of charges against human stupidity, it’s not surprising that Trotter has yet to attract a biographer. That’s a pity, for Wilfred Trotter lived a fascinating life. Born near Gloucester, England, on November 3, 1872, he suffered through childhood with a still undiagnosed musculoskeletal disease. Perhaps because of this, Trotter developed an ambition to become a medical doctor, and in 1892 graduated from the University of London with top honors in medicine. He followed that up with a science degree. After some years’ service as a demonstrator in anatomy, he turned to surgery. He became a pioneer in neurosurgery and a couple of other surgical fields, most notably oncology, and in 1928 he performed a daring bronchial surgery that restored King George V to health. This made him ‘Sir Wilfred,’ an honor he accepted reluctantly. Meanwhile, Trotter had developed an interest and expertise in psychoanalysis. In 1908, with Ernest Jones, he was one of the few English speakers to attend the first international conference on psychoanalysis. Trotter developed close personal relations with both Jones and Sigmund Freud. Impulsively and romantically, he proposed to Jones’s sister Elizabeth on a railway platform. That produced a happy marriage, although at the time he barely knew the woman. Later, Wilfred Trotter was instrumental in bringing Freud to London and safety from Hitler (speaking of murderous ideas). Then it was Trotter the surgeon who advised against any further operations for Freud’s fatal cancer. But it was as a social psychologist that Trotter became best known, his studies on what he called ‘the herd instinct’ coming out just in time for World War I. And all this busy while Wilfred Trotter treated each of his medical patients personally, as individuals, and gave fully of his professorial time and talents to mentor young surgeons at London’s University College Hospital. And I haven’t even mentioned his works on the history and philosophy of science. Some day, there must be a biography. ©.

[Stanley]

STURDY LASS

A sturdy lad . . . who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, all in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 1841.

In 1841 Emerson’s hero had to be a lad, and the “city dolls” Emerson contrasted him with were boys, too, only rendered effete by their privileged background. But here’s an Emersonian heroine, Alice Gossage, born unprivileged in rural Dane County, Wisconsin, on November 4, 1861. She never went to Congress (she had to get the vote first) and she never bought a township, but she did a lot of things and always landed on her feet. Her parents’ marriage was blighted by their poverty and her mother’s repeated pregnancies. Hoping for better things, the family moved further West, to Vermillion in the Dakota Territory. Here Alice started teaching first grade when she was 14. It didn’t bring in enough money, so she worked as a typesetter for one of Vermillion’s two (!!!) newspapers, and when that didn’t make family ends meet she went across the street to set type, also, for the other one. Meanwhile she turned down two men who’d wanted her for a wife, and it was in the process of trying to get another job, out west in Rapid City, where she found a husband who suited her. He was the editor and publisher of the Black Hills Journal. She didn’t get the job, but she got the guy, Joseph Gossage, not least because he agreed that she did not need to be a mother. But she was a wife-worker, and when Joseph fell ill and continued feeble, she took on more of the newspaper work. Alice sold ads, she wrote copy, she edited, and she continued, whenever necessary, to set type. And although she didn’t preach in a pulpit, like Emerson’s lad, she preached in the newspaper (now called the Rapid City Journal) about women’s rights to vote, to hold property, to have lives of their own. On the side, she taught Congregational Sunday School, played the church organ on Sundays, and became a founder-member of the South Dakota Press Association. As vice-president of the local women’s suffrage group and a leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, she took to the streets, too. If all that wasn’t enough, Alice Gossage still taught school and, at home, gave private piano lessons. I can think of very few persons, lads or otherwise, who so closely followed the Emersonian model. Rapid City thought so too. When she died in 1929, the town closed down in her honor. Later, the state historical society published her courtship correspondence, hundreds of letters, 1879-1882, with Joseph Gossage. I haven’t read them yet, but I like to think they sound a bit Emersonian. ©

[Stanley]

Bob was admitted to hospital yesterday for a small routine operation. That's why he sent two Notes. He hopes to be back today but if he isn't you'll know why.

[Stanley]

I have reached out to Bob but as yet I haven't heard anything. I'll let you all know as soon as I have any news.....

[Stanley]

Here's what Bob said on the 3rd of November.
I sent two anniversary tea today because I am in for surgery today, a nephrectomy, which (with modern technology) will keep me in hospital for only 24 hours. There’s a cancer in my right kidney. It wouldn’t have been spotted but for my annual checkups as part of the Kidney transplant system here at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, so although I’d rather not have surgery for cancer, on the whole, I am very lucky to be able to have it at this early stage.
If anyone inquires please tell all friends etc that I expect to be on stream again on Wednesday.

He's a bit behind schedule so I have mailed him again! You will know as soon as I do.

[Tripps]

He's a bit behind schedule so I have mailed him again!

In the army it was called a 'non exemption parade' - though I think that even then, a hospital admission for kidney surgery might get you a 'chit'. Perhaps it was different in The Cheshires.

[Tripps]

I have reached out to Bob but as yet I haven't heard anything

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[Stanley]

[Stanley]

I have good news.... I received this from Bob.
Out of hospital and OK. Very lucky, all things considered. Don’t seem to be missing the right kidney and I am certainly not missing its cancer. Not yet up to the blog, though. One should come through tomorrow. Love, Bob.

[Stanley]

BANNEKER

I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United States a negro, the son of a black man born in Africa, and of a black woman born in the United States, who is a very respectable Mathematician. Thomas Jefferson to the Marquis de Condorcet, August 30, 1791.

Jefferson wrote to Condorcet about the mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker, born in Maryland (rural Baltimore County) on November 9, 1731. Jefferson was “happy” convey evidence of Banneker’s qualities to Condorcet for several reasons. Like Emily du Châtelet before him, Condorcet tried to convince the French of the beauty and usefulness of Newton’s integral calculus, so Jefferson led with Banneker’s mathematics. Both statesmen were involved in the creation of new and better political societies, “republics,” and in 1785 Condorcet had proven—mathematically, in what’s still known as ‘Condorcet’s jury theorem’—that majority rule was very likely to be ‘correct’ and, even better, safe. Both men were also committed to civil equality, Jefferson most famously in his eloquent preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, in which equality justifies revolution and forms the theoretical basis for self-government. For his part, the Marquis de Condorcet was virtually a founder-member of the international Society of the Friends of he Blacks. Since both also, and necessarily, believed in our ability to improve ourselves, of course Jefferson was “happy” to tell Condorcet about Banneker. ‘Delighted’ might have been a better word, but it’s not one that Jefferson often used. But Jefferson didn’t get it quite complete. Benjamin Banneker was born black but free in a slave society because his grandmother, Molly Welsh, had wit enough to win her freedom (she was transported to Maryland as a convicted felon), establish her own farm, buy a couple of African slaves, and then marry one of them, Bannka, who supplied the family with a surname, anglicized to ‘Banneker.’ Her daughter Mary showed the same resource when she married another freed slave, ‘Robert’, originally from Guinea. So when Benjamin Banneker was born he had a name, a status, and a history, and he was made more aware of it all by his grandmother Molly, who taught the boy how to read and write and how to be himself. Benjamin learned the other tricks of his trades (surveying and astronomy) from other immigrants, the Ellicott brothers, who were intrigued enough by this clever black man to hire him. When Andrew Ellicott was hired by George Washington to survey the 10-mile square “Federal District” to be established on the banks of the Potomac, of course he’d bring Benjamin into the operation. And of course Benjamin would bring himself to the special attention of Thomas Jefferson, as a perfect American model for universal liberty and equality. It’s a very American story, one which still needs work if we are to follow its diverse plot lines to their just conclusions. ©.

[Stanley]

Yippee!!

[Stanley]

STANLEY

“Dr. Livingston, I presume?”

“Yes. I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you.”

Thus on November 10, 1871, Henry Morton Stanley “found” the reverend doctor David Livingston. The words themselves, widely reported and then even more widely repeated, were a later invention, but they ring with several truths: about the two men, about the romance of 19th-century exploration, and about the realities of the imperial carve-up of sub-Saharan Africa. Henry Morton Stanley was commissioned to find Livingston by the New York Herald. His success, if it happened, was worth the investment. It would make good copy, and in the increasingly competitive world of mass journalism good copy sold papers and good sales drove advertising revenue. Jules Verne’s fiction (Around the World in Eighty Days, 1873) was based on similar thinking, and sold like hotcakes. But Stanley himself was on a voyage of self-discovery. Born illegitimate in Wales, he’d been brought up in desperate and sometimes beastly circumstances. When in 1859 he fetched up in New Orleans, he invented yet another version of himself, and a new name. Now “Henry Morton Stanley”, he fought in the US Civil War, first on one side, then the other, and when those stories finished he became a reporter for the Herald, first in North Africa. His Livingston expedition was not wholly a Herald venture, though. He was also acting as an agent-explorer for the King of the Belgians, eager to join in the scramble for Africa—and to reap its profits. David Livingston’s story was parallel in some respects. But his childhood in Scotland had been respectably poor, leaving him devoted to self-improvement. His upbringing made him into a medical doctor and a Presbyterian missionary, and so he ventured into Africa where he would find himself a wife (herself a missionary’s daughter), bring Christianity and good health to the benighted natives, and as a bonus to himself and the folks back home, map the continent and suppress the Arab slave trade. By the 1860s most of David Livingston’s funding was coming not from the London Missionary Society but from the Royal Geographical Society. His authority came from Her Majesty’s Government as a sort of general license to find the source of the Nile and gather information which might help HMG to end the slave wars and slave trade. Livingston’s further explorations killed his wife and sickened him. He never did find the source of the Nile. He made pitifully few converts (only one, in fact, has been documented). He’d found that his own expedition included militant and merciless slavers. Whether David Livingston was in 1871 lost enough to be “found” by Henry Morton Stanley is an interesting question. But its significance is mainly for the biographer. The historian is more likely to be impressed by the ironies. ©

[Stanley]

STANLEY

“Dr. Livingston, I presume?”

“Yes. I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you.”

Thus on November 10, 1871, Henry Morton Stanley “found” the reverend doctor David Livingston. The words themselves, widely reported and then even more widely repeated, were a later invention, but they ring with several truths: about the two men, about the romance of 19th-century exploration, and about the realities of the imperial carve-up of sub-Saharan Africa. Henry Morton Stanley was commissioned to find Livingston by the New York Herald. His success, if it happened, was worth the investment. It would make good copy, and in the increasingly competitive world of mass journalism good copy sold papers and good sales drove advertising revenue. Jules Verne’s fiction (Around the World in Eighty Days, 1873) was based on similar thinking, and sold like hotcakes. But Stanley himself was on a voyage of self-discovery. Born illegitimate in Wales, he’d been brought up in desperate and sometimes beastly circumstances. When in 1859 he fetched up in New Orleans, he invented yet another version of himself, and a new name. Now “Henry Morton Stanley”, he fought in the US Civil War, first on one side, then the other, and when those stories finished he became a reporter for the Herald, first in North Africa. His Livingston expedition was not wholly a Herald venture, though. He was also acting as an agent-explorer for the King of the Belgians, eager to join in the scramble for Africa—and to reap its profits. David Livingston’s story was parallel in some respects. But his childhood in Scotland had been respectably poor, leaving him devoted to self-improvement. His upbringing made him into a medical doctor and a Presbyterian missionary, and so he ventured into Africa where he would find himself a wife (herself a missionary’s daughter), bring Christianity and good health to the benighted natives, and as a bonus to himself and the folks back home, map the continent and suppress the Arab slave trade. By the 1860s most of David Livingston’s funding was coming not from the London Missionary Society but from the Royal Geographical Society. His authority came from Her Majesty’s Government as a sort of general license to find the source of the Nile and gather information which might help HMG to end the slave wars and slave trade. Livingston’s further explorations killed his wife and sickened him. He never did find the source of the Nile. He made pitifully few converts (only one, in fact, has been documented). He’d found that his own expedition included militant and merciless slavers. Whether David Livingston was in 1871 lost enough to be “found” by Henry Morton Stanley is an interesting question. But its significance is mainly for the biographer. The historian is more likely to be impressed by the ironies. ©

[Stanley]

ALLISON

Everybody talkin’ ‘bout the seventh son.

In the whole wide world there is only one.

And I’m the one, I’m the one . . .

The one they call the seventh son. Mose Allison, “The Seventh Son,” ca. 1963.

In many mythologies, seven is a good number, and the seventh son of a seventh son has special powers, some good, some bad. He can

. . . make your little heart skip a beat

Heal the sick, raise the dead,

Make the little girls talk outta their heads.

Allison sings it with gusto and to a beat you can’t skip. I first heard it, and other Allison songs, in 1965, when I started courting Paulette. I was a music illiterate, and given his accent, the beat, and the accompaniment, I leaped to the conclusion that Mose Allison was a black man from somewhere south, the Delta maybe, and singing (in the style of others like him) of subjection and liberation. Like a lot of guesswork, this was wrong in parts. Mose Allison was born in rural Mississippi on November 11, 1927, as John Allison, Jr. He was not the seventh son, nor was he black, but he did pick cotton. He learned most of his musical skills at home, from both parents, and at his all-white school, where he played trumpet. But he learned his idiom elsewhere in Tallahatchie County, from jukeboxes that played real down-home stuff, Delta-style. He wrote some songs, too, and began to perform them. After college level studies in English and Philosophy, at Ole Miss and LSU, he took his BA, his skills, and his idiom to New York City where he worked into the jazz world. It was the idiom that broke through and took him to his first few albums (1958-1963). His best songs, including “Seventh Son,” came from southern black artists like Willie Dixon, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Jimmy Rogers, but “Parchman Farm” was his own, recalling

Puttin’ that cotton in an eleven-foot sack

With a twelve-gauge shotgun at my back.

To be fair, Allison had picked cotton on his father’s farm, and given his accent and his chosen musical idiom it’s easy to see him (certainly to hear him) as a black man out of the Delta. Mose Allison gave credit to those who wrote these songs, wrote quite a few as himself, and there were always black artists in his backing groups, including Art Farmer’s brother Addison (at the drums). And as for Addison Farmer, he was from Council Bluffs, Iowa: not exactly Delta country. Mose Allison’s scholarly approach to his art eventually got him an honorary doctorate from LSU (appropriately, in Humane Letters) and, on his death in 2016, an admiring obituary from the Guardian’s jazz critic, John Fordham, who correctly places Allison’s music as in an American idiom. It’s polygenic, like the rest of us. ©.

[Stanley]

MCNEILL

Patriotism, humanity, or the love of God may lead to sporadic outbursts which sweep away the heaped-up wrongs of centuries; but they languish at times, while the love of self works on ceaselessly, unwearyingly, burrowing always at the very roots of life, and heaping up fresh wrongs for other centuries to sweep away. From Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901).

Chesnutt’s novel was an early and (for its considerable merits) lasting monument to the infamous Wilmington (NC) insurrection of 1898—so far, the only successful political coup d’état in US history. The insurrectionists overthrew an interracial city government, murdered scores of Wilmington’s black citizens, torched black businesses and buildings, and established racial apartheid as an American way of life. Chesnutt himself, a North Carolinian by birth, tried several solutions to this problem, including brief periods “passing” as white, but in the end (as his novel demonstrates) chose to be black and a dissenter. It’s probable that the insurrection led another nearly white Wilmingtonian to move north to achieve her ambitions, her definitions of freedom and equality. She was Bertha Clay McNeill, born just across the Cape Fear River on November 12, 1887. Her parents had successfully negotiated post-Civil War crises to be freehold farmers and see to the education of their eight children (Bertha was the youngest). Several would become associated with local black newspapers, notably the Cape Fear Journal and (later) the Wilmington Journal, and Bertha would, much later, contribute a regular column to the latter. Instead, she moved north, to Washington, DC, where she studied at Howard University and, in 1908, after graduation, began her long (53-year) teaching career. Besides teaching (in Baltimore and in Washington), Bertha McNeill became an activist. Probably Wilmington made her one. She began by building black identity in ‘separate but equal’ ways, for instance as a charter member of the all-black National Association of College Women (she was elected president in 1923). Very soon, however, she was breaking down (or breaking through) color lines in other areas, notably the movement for women’s suffrage. But her most lasting contribution came with her membership of, then leadership roles in, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. The WILPF was lily-white in its beginnings (an international conference held in the Netherlands during WWI). Bertha McNeill joined it in 1934. Soon she was chair of its Interracial Committee, where she convinced her sisters that “peace and freedom” involved much more than international relations. The domestic violence of segregation, the bloodstained history of ‘separate but equal’, these domestic wars required intervention. This soon brought Bertha under the scrutiny of McCarthyite red-baiters, but this black child of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 could not be bluffed into silence. After all, she’d seen worse. ©

[Stanley]

BERKELEY

Poems: by the late George Monck-Berkeley, Esq., . . . With a preface by the editor, consisting of some anecdotes of Mr. Monck Berkeley and several of his friends. (London, 1797)

This book contains George Monck Berkeley’s poems, some perhaps improved upon by the “editor,” who was George’s mother, Eliza Berkeley. George’s poems, ran to 170 pages. Eliza Berkeley’s “preface” was 630 pages, and she could have written more. The preface interests scholars, for whatever Eliza’s original intentions it tells us more about her than about her son, the poet, who died, aged 30, in 1793. Eliza Berkeley was born on November 13, 1734, in Berkshire, where her father, Rev’d Henry Frinsham, was vicar. For lack of a brother, she and her elder sister inherited a considerable estate, valued at perhaps £80,000, some of it in real property but most deriving from the paper holdings of her maternal grandfather Francis Cherry (who had also failed to produce heirs male). As readers of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice will surmise, none of it was entailed on a male line. One wonders how Miss Lizzy Bennett might have turned out had she carried such a fortune into the marriage market, but this particular Eliza, Eliza Frinsham, was warned by her mother not to take advantage of the money, nor of her excellent education. “You will never get a husband” if you show off either your wealth or your brains. “Men like quiet wives;” and in due course (1761) Eliza became one. It was a good marriage; the Rev’d George Berkeley was the son of the famous missionary-bishop-philosopher, and made a good career in the established church, three good vicarages followed by an important church office at Canterbury Cathedral. And there were two sons: one who died aged only 9; and George Monck Berkeley who became the apple of his mother’s eye. He may have been something of a slow starter, but he went to Eton, then Oxford, and finally to the far north at St. Andrews, where he seems to have improved. But he was always, at heart, a very good boy, and we find this out in Eliza’s ‘preface.’ His mother, after rejecting traditional advice to leave the baby in a crib, played a central role in bringing George up, and a good deal of the preface is tied up in quoted dialogue between mother and son. There are many other conversations, reported or remembered, in some of which we find early uses of dialect and accent, as in young George’s conversation with a Scottish “gewd weef” (good wife) on his way north to St. Andrews. Throughout, George is sensitive to the worth and merit (good and/or bad) of each companion (high or low). He even likes street urchins and foreigners. But what Eliza Berkeley offers us, at this distance, is not just a mother’s loving memory of a lost son. It’s an intelligent woman’s autobiography, or perhaps even a novel-in-waiting. It’s available online, and might be profitably read in conjunction (comparison and contrast) with Jane Austen’s masterpiece. ©

[Stanley]

SWAHILI

Mlevi wa mvinyo hulevuka, mlevi wa mali halevuki. Swahili proverb roughly translated as ‘He that is drunk on wine gets sober, he that is drunk with wealth does not.”

Considered as a separate language (thus capable of its own wise proverbs), Swahili is of recent origin, for it came into widespread use round about 1000CE, as a lingua franca (a common language of trade, war, and religion) used by Arab traders working Africa’s east coast and into its interior. In the middle ages, a Swahili dialect was carried to the west coast of India by Arab and Portuguese traders, but now seems to have gone extinct. But Swahili has proved too vigorous to kill in east Africa, where today it is an official ‘state’ language in several newly independent nations (notably Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania) and it is recognized as an indigenous tongue by the Organization of African Unity. Spoken for centuries, Swahili began to be written early in the 18th century CE, and all the original scripts are in Arabic. Still today about 40% of the vocabulary stems from Arabic loan words, and an easy conclusion is that the rest are Bantu. When European powers began their “scramble for Africa” in the 19th century, they found Swahili to be of great practical use in creating ‘colonies.’ Unlike most Bantu dialects, Swahili does not depend on the subtleties of “tone” to convey meaning. The Germans were first to make Swahili an official language, in Tanganyika, but the British soon followed. This was mildly ironic, as one of the ‘civilizing’ (as opposed to drunkenly greedy) motives of western imperialism was the suppression of the Arab slave trade. Perhaps the greatest of the British appropriators of Swahili was John Willoughby Tarleton Allen, born a vicar’s son in Buckinghamshire on November 14, 1904. Expensively educated at Marlborough and Westminster schools, he took his Oxford degree (in Literae humanores) into the service of Britain’s Empire. Allen learned Arabic in the Sudan, but it was in the League of Nations ‘mandate,’ Tanganyika, where he became entranced by Swahili in its Arabic guise. As the British East African colonies (including the Tanganyika mandate) moved towards independence, Allen established his own independence as a senior scholar at Makerere University College, devoted to the study of Swahili poetry and proverbs. He (and his wife Winifred) taught Swahili, translated old Swahili texts (from the Arabic), and worked on the standardization of Swahili based on the language as it was spoken on the offshore island of Zanzibar. There is some reason to believe that John and Winifred Allen hoped to see Swahili become a language of political and cultural unification in east Africa. If so, that has failed, so far. But today Swahili has become much more than a traders’ pidgin. It’s a recognized school subject, and one can get a college degree in studying its history, grammar, literature—and its wise proverbs. ©

[Stanley]

RADICAL PRINTER?



You made me very low-spirited last night . . . you are my only friend, the only person I am intimate with. I never had a father, or a brother—you have been both to me . . . yet I have sometimes been very petulant . . . Yours sincerely, Mary.

Thus Mary Wollstonecraft apologized to Joseph Johnson for her untoward comments, over dinner, at Johnson’s house. Johnson was 21 years Mary’s senior, so he could have played a father’s role, but it’s better to see him as patron, not parent. He’d met Mary and taken her on as a paid contributor to his Partisan Review. She wrote 200 pieces for the Review before Johnson published her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and her novel Mary: A Fiction (1788). One does not easily think of Mary Wollstonecraft apologizing to any man for her ‘petulance,’ so Johnson becomes a person of interest. Joseph Johnson was born in Liverpool on November 15, 1738. His parents were dissenters—active Baptists; and dissent (and toleration) would be lifelong principles for him. Otherwise he left Liverpool behind him in 1753, when he was apprenticed to a London printer and bookseller. In a long career, Joseph Johnson would set up in business for himself, and in several partnerships. And not only as a printer. Through making contracts with living writers (and buying majority shares in the works of dead authors like Shakespeare and Milton), Joseph Johnson would become the very model of a modern major publisher. His business prospered mightily, and at his death in 1809 he left a very large estate, valued at over £60,000. Since he had never married, it was distributed to old friends, more or less distance relatives, and a £200 annuity to Mary Wollstonecroft’s illegitimate daughter Fanny. All that would seem to place Joseph Johnson clearly in the ranks of English radicalism. Indeed Johnson’s writers would include radicals of several sorts, notably Joseph Priestly and Benjamin Franklin. And as time went on London publications espousing the cause of the American and then French revolutions would come out under the Johnson imprint. And there were other kinds of radical who found a publishing home with Joseph Johnson, notably Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s uncle. Johnson would publish (or orchestrate publication of) the many British pamphlets that attacked Burke’s conservative manifesto, Reflections on the Revolution in France, including Wollstonecroft’s “Vindications” (of the rights of men, 1790, and then of the rights of women, 1792). Johnson himself would be jailed for sedition as the result of some of these printings. And yet his personal politics have proved difficult to establish. He remained throughout a dissenter (though he shifted to Unitarianism) and an advocate of religious toleration. He established his own ‘salon’ or circle, a very different one from that of Samuel Johnson. But it seems safest to conclude that Joseph Johnson was just a freethinker and an extremely successful publisher of free thoughts. ©

[Stanley]

GHOSTS

Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant. Even the trees seemed to become flat and lifeless, like wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees.

Thus Eleanor Jourdain remembered her odd experience of the gardens at Le Petit Trianon, once Queen Marie Antoinette’s domicile at Versailles. It was on an August evening in 1901, and Eleanor was there with Charlotte Moberly, then Principal of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. Charlotte wanted Eleanor to come back to Oxford as her Vice-Principal. Eleanor did later succeed Charlotte as Principal. But their evening amble at Versailles was the start of a stranger story. Both women felt that something had happened to them in their 1901 ramble, but only later did they begin to compare notes about it. Ten years later, in 1911, they published their story as An Adventure, in which they recounted meeting a passel of ancients, some of them in the court dress of the oncien régime (including Marie Antoinette herself), others garderners and peasants (including one sinister old man, dreadfully marked by the smallpox). They published An Adventure anonymously, as ‘Elisabeth Morison’ and ‘Frances Lamont’, because they knew it would be controversial enough to roil the waters at St. Hugh’s. Indeed it was controversial. Spiritualism of several sorts was still fashionable in Edwardian England, but increasingly subject to criticism and ridicule and, as such, not the sort of thing to be associated with St. Hugh’s, where women were still struggling to become ‘real’ Oxonians. Not until 1921 were they able to take actual degrees from the university. The authors’ ‘real’ identities became widely known in the early 1920s, and ever since the book has become meat for various theoretical explanations, mostly Freudian. Such treatments fit either author more or less well, but especially in the case of Miss Jourdain. Eleanor Jourdain was born on November 16, 1863, the eldest of ten children in a family made for Freud, with an overbearing father (a vicar who did not really believe in women’s higher education) and a cold, sometimes cruelly sarcastic mother. Several of Eleanor’s younger siblings escaped this environment to become distinguished scholars, but Eleanor had a more difficult time of it. The theory runs that she saw in the ghost of Marie Antoinette (all aglow and reading to her children) the regally accommodating mother figure that she never enjoyed as a child. Well, perhaps so, But her principalship at St. Hugh’s suggests other possibilities, including sheer bloodymindedness. Once in position, Jourdain played favorites and invented enemies, and in ways that recall the alleged fickleness of Marie Antoinette herself. Her term ended with her dismissal. Instead of being guillotined, however, Eleanor died of a heart attack at home in north Oxford. A more recent and down-to-earth explanation of the Versailles Adventure is that the two women accidentally gatecrashed a masquerade and then tried to make a story of it. ©.

[Stanley]

MEDDLESOME PRIEST

Wherefore, strictly adhering, in this matter, to the decrees of the pontiffs, our predecessors, and confirming them most fully, and, as it were, renewing them by our authority, of our own initiative and certain knowledge, we pronounce and declare that ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite have been, and are, absolutely null and utterly void. Pope Leo XIII, 1896.

Thus, ‘ex cathedra,’ Leo XIII pronounced ‘the nullity of Anglican orders.’ It’s an interesting document, for the most part assuming good will on both sides of a long-festering issue, and even inviting the current Anglican episcopate to rejoin the Roman ranks, but Leo could not accept the Church of England’s claim to embody—physically and historically—the apostolic succession. Along the way Leo rejected the contrary arguments of some (even Catholics). He did not name names, but he must have included, amongst those erring clerics, the French priest Pierre le Courayer, whose . 1725 tract Dissertation sur la validité des ordinations des anglois had argued that Anglican ordinations were historically and spiritually valid and should not, therefore, continue to divide adherents of Canterbury from the Roman faithful, This ‘meddlesome priest,’ Pierre-François le Courayer, born in Rouen on November 17, 1681, had been ordained in 1706 and had already involved himself in controversy, for he had declared himself opposed to the papal bull Unigenitus and thus sympathetic to the Jansenist movement within the French church. This may have inclined Le Courayer towards his later defense of Anglican ordinations, for the Jansenist ‘heresy’ contained within it tendencies towards Calvinism and opposition to the ultra-monarchism of Louis XIV. Or perhaps Le Courayer was among those 18th-century French thinkers who saw in England a nice, “republican” balance between monarchical stability and Enlightenment ideals. Whatever the case, Le Courayer’s 1725 defense of the historicity of Anglican ordinations brought him still more trouble in France. After defending his views in public, with another tract (1726) he took ship for England and what he intended to be a temporary refuge (first from a heresy trial before the bishops of the French church). He never did accept his excommunication and claimed access to communion, by the Catholic rite, to the end of his very long life. In England he was treated as a hero by many, and in 1733 was granted the highest accolade of an Oxford D.D. But his presence in England was not universally welcomed. His ‘catholicity,’ still strong, proved especially attractive to English churchmen still desirous of closer (or even restored) relations with Rome. Indeed he was introduced into England by an exiled Anglican bishop who had supported the Catholic Stuart claim to the British throne. As Leo XIII’s papal bull was to prove over a century later, too much water had already flowed under too many bridges. Resident in England, Fr. Pierre François Le Courayer found himself a priest without a church and a citizen without a country. ©.

[Stanley]

THE SOMME

It is a considerable strain to be constantly under fire armed only with a camera. Part of a draft press release, November 24, 1916.

During the Battles of the Somme, July through December 1916, debate raged over how far or even whether the British Army might benefit from film coverage. This was ironic, for the Somme itself has become, along with Verdun, symbolic of the bloody futility of WWI trench warfare. Taking together the allied armies, and the opposing Germans, the Somme engaged something over 3 million men in battle. Over a third of these were casualties, mostly death, and for what? The allies liked to call it a victory, for the German front lines fell back, on average, about 3,000 meters. That’s about 300 casualties per meter, and on some days it was worse than that. One assumes, or hopes, that the British high command spent relatively little time arguing about cameramen under fire. But that had been a worry from the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. Then, would-be filmmakers had been moved away from the British sector and into Belgium. Among these pioneers was Arthur Herbert Malins, born in Sussex on November 18, 1886, By 1910 Arthur was “George” and, recently married, was working as a cameraman for a motion picture company specializing in short comedies. In late 1914 he was at the Belgian front making short films for Gaumont. He then talked the French into making a documentary, cleverly entitled Brilliant French Victory (1915). Its popular success in British cinemas led British commanders to think there might be something in it, and by the end of the year George Malins was making Official Pictures of the British Army in France, a series that had its first showing in London in early 1916. So he was, so to speak, ‘in position’ by the start of the British offensive at the Somme. While British officers still debated about how much leeway to give Malins, he was filming Somme battlefield footage, ferrying it back to London studios, cutting and splicing. His The Battle for the Somme, a 75-minute silent narrative, had attracted over 20 million viewers before the Somme campaign was half over. Given the close quarter combat he covered, not to mention his own daring, he was constantly at risk, and the heavy cameras of the era didn’t help. Mostly it was cinema verité, the real McCoy, although he did “stage” a couple of ‘over the top’ scenes, whether for the drama of it or to maintain narrative continuity. Mullins portrayed the war realistically, warts and all, and so contributed to the ongoing debate about war reporting. In Malins’ case, the British Army resolved the matter by giving him a bravery award and a medical discharge, thus removing him from the field, UNESCO has declared his Somme documentary as a heritage “memory.” The chances are that you’ve seen at least some portions of this battlefield classic, digitally re-mastered. ©.