BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

ABBESS MATILDA

Gemma sui generis . . . tota virillis etat. [A jewel of her race . . . she had all the qualities of a man.]. From the eulogy on Matilda de Bailleul, Abbess of Wherwell, circa 1214.

Wherwell Priory must be one of England’s most desirable residences, a long, elegant house, whitewashed, that comes with fishing rights on the Test, Hampshire’s famous trout stream. The priory is currently inhabited by the Hon. James Hogg, who may or may not succeed to the hereditary earldom of Hailsham, a title conferred on the heirs male of the Hoggs by Queen Victoria in her Jubilee year. It has long been suspected that the priory was built with stones taken from Wherwell Abbey, a Benedictine nunnery that bit the dust after Henry VIII divorced the Church of England from Rome. But when the Dissolution of 1540 hit Wherwell (and made its stonework available for the ‘Priory’) the abbey was already in decline, a victim of scandals (some of them unprintable) and mismanagement. For the Abbey, that sad state was nothing new. Founded in Saxon times, the Abbey had been in 1144 burnt to the ground by Queen Matilda during her effort to (re)claim the English throne from King Stephen. Shortly thereafter Wherwell Abbey was taken over by another imperious Matilda, Matilda de Bailleul, who by the time of her death (December 14, 1214) had reestablished the Abbey, secured its rents, and attracted a thriving spiritual community of 40+ nuns. This Matilda may not have had “all the qualities of a man”, but she came from a family network of knights and barons who, in Flanders, had proved relatively unconcerned about gender. Some of Matilda’s kin who were women became captains (castellans) of various Flanders castles. So when her own short and childless marriage ended, she already knew how to become Abbess of Wherwell and then to put the Abbey in order. The exact details of how she managed this miracle cannot today be known. But a later inventory of the Abbey’s sacred relics suggests that as Abbess Matilda made good use of the new cult of Thomas Becket, that ‘troublesome priest’ who was sainted in 1173 for his (fatal) defiance of King Henry II. She may also have used some of her own wealth to restore the Abbey’s buildings, its vineyards, and it rents. In order to make her reforms stick, Abbess Matilda made new alliances with powerful aristocrats, not all of them local, which helped the Abbey to acquire new rents as well as secure old ones. Probably her best gift to the Abbey was to bring in her successor, her niece Euphemia, who succeeded her as Abbess. Euphemia also wrote the eulogy quoted above, and in her own long tenure (1214-1257) continued to augment the abbey’s prosperity and add to its physical plant. Modern archaeology has, since the 1990s, told us much more about how Matilda and Euphemia rebuilt the Abbey and its outbuildings. As for Wherwell Priory’s current occupants, the Hoggs, that’s another story. ©.

[Stanley]

WILKINS

Our dark lady is leaving us next week. Maurice Wilkins to Francis Crick, May 7, 1953.
The ‘dark lady’ was Rosalind Franklin, whose work (with Wilkins) on x-ray crystallography was to prove vital in discovering the structure of the DNA molecule. Primary credit for that went to Crick and his colleague James Watson, who published their (very modest) rough draft in Nature on April 25, 1953. It was a short and very modest piece in which they gave some credit to both Wilkins and Franklin. A decade later, Franklin had died (of ovarian cancer, in 1958) and in 1962 Wilkins, Crick, and Watson shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology for their discovery. Nobels are never awarded posthumously. Still, Franklin’s “exclusion” has become an issue. In the BBC docudrama on DNA’s initial discovery, “Life Story” (1987), the obvious tension between Wilkins and Franklin is played to the hilt, and Wilkins (portrayed by Alan Howard) appears as an ineffective and rather resentful misogynist. Maurice Wilkins was born in New Zealand on December 15, 1916. His parents, well-connected to Ireland’s Protestant ascendancy, soon returned to England where Maurice excelled as a young scientist and went up to Cambridge. There he flubbed his finals (in Physics), but had impressed his tutors well enough to go on to a PhD and research in nuclear physics. In California he worked on the atomic bomb project. Once he saw its results in Hiroshima and Nagasaki he switched to biophysics and in 1946 returned to King’s College, London. There, inspired by Erwin Schrödinger’s What is Life?, he developed his own approach to study of the “genetic material”, using, first, sound waves and then x-ray crystallography. Early in 1952, new post-doctoral assistant, Rosalind Franklin, produced the famed “photograph 51”, a sight of which would inspire Watson and Crick to produce their double helix model, their Nature article, and to claim major credit for the discovery. At issue still is whether, or how far, Wilkins or Franklin had grasped the significance of ‘photo 51.’ It will probably never be resolved. Unhappy at King’s (and with Wilkins), Franklin soon moved on, first to important research on the polio virus, then to her fatal cancer. She spent some of her last months with her good friends Francis and Odile Crick. Maurice Wilkins went on to propose, and prove, some vital corrections to the Crick-Watson model of DNA’s helical structures and chemical bonds. He also developed a dislike of Jim Watson and deepened his personal friendship with Francis Crick, which I think showed good judgment. As for his relationship with Dr. Franklin, it was complicated but not “dark.” It serves us best as a reminder that in the world of science, as it existed in the middle of the 20th century, women were not yet regarded as equals. Maurice Wilkins, as professor of biophysics at London (he was promoted after his 1962 Nobel), lived long enough to make some amends for that. ©

[Stanley]

This topic has had over 2000 views in eight hours..... A mystery. ((They aren't all bots!)

[PanBiker]

This topic has had over 2000 views in eight hours..... A mystery. ((They aren't all bots!)

I am somewhat more pragmatic, the majority probably are, a bot, spider or crawler hit only takes a few nano seconds in passing, they don't sleep and work 24/7/365.

[Stanley]

PILTDOWN

So long as man is interested in his long past history, in the vicissitudes which our early forerunners passed through, and the varying fare which overtook them, the name of Charles Dawson is certain of remembrance. We do well to link his name to this picturesque corner of Sussex—the scene of his discovery. I have now the honour of unveiling this monolith dedicated to his memory. Sir Arthur Keith, speaking at Piltdown, Sussex. July 1938.

In long retrospect, and read carefully, this must be seen as a classic example of damning with faint praise. Chances are that Keith, an eminent anthropologist, already suspected that Charles Dawson’s great find, “Piltdown Man,” was not the skull of a prehistoric human. Charles Dawson, a not very successful lawyer, was well known in Sussex as an amateur paleontologist, collector of artifacts—and hungry for wider recognition. In 1908, “a workman” (still unidentified) brought him a skull fragment from a quarry. Further finds followed, and on December 18, 1912, Dawson revealed Piltdown Man to the Geological Society of London. By then it consisted of a large-brained skull case and an ape-like jaw. Dawson had already won the support of eminent scientists like the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the British Museum’s Arthur Smith Woodward. Woodward and Dawson coauthored an influential paper in 1913. Teilhard de Chardin found another tooth at Piltdown, which (he said) added to the skull’s authenticity. Sir Arthur Keith joined in the chorus of praise. From America, Henry Fairfield Osborne added his weighty presence (he was President of the American Museum of Natural History). There were doubters, almost immediately, and their numbers grew; but the full extent of the hoax was only proved in 1953, when better dating techniques showed that Piltdown was a human skull (medieval) tied to a primate jaw and some cleverly altered teeth. It was an ingenious hoax, a series of discoveries that fit together seriatum. Dawson himself has become, as the police say, a person of interest. But the hoax was also over-elaborate and unbelievable. So interest has centered on why so many reputable scientists were taken in. Were they co-conspirators? Possibly. Some of the modifications of skull and teeth suggest a more than amateur exertise. A more fruitful line of inquiry is that many of the pro-Piltdowners were ‘scientific racists’ who welcomed the idea that big-brained humans might have a European (as opposed to an African or Asian) origin. Certainly Osborne and Keith were themselves leading eugenicists who believed that ‘miscegenation’ threatened the inner qualities of Anglo-Saxon ‘racial stock.’ And whoever his accomplices may have been, however many or few they were (speculation has extended that field to include Sir Arther Conan Doyle), Charles Dawson was Piltdown’s hoaxer-in-chief. Altogether, Piltdown is an instructive story, not least in a time when our American president is (also) our hoaxer-in-chief. Meanwhile, Charles Dawson’s memorial pillar still stands at Piltdown. ©.

[Stanley]

BANG

Hähnchen, von Physik verstehst Du Nichts. [Hahn, dear, in Physics you understand nothing.]. Lise Meitner to Otto Hahn, probably late 1938.

On December 17, 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, split a uranium atom. Both were chemists. We now know the process as ‘nuclear fission’. It is significant that both words were borrowings: ‘fission’ from biology and ‘nuclear’ from physics. As Lise Meitner wittily (and, I think, kindly) pointed out, they had crossed a boundary and found themselves in need of a translator. But there were many other boundaries that were crossed. Ever since the phenomenon of radioactivity had first been studied and named by Wilhelm Röntgen and Marie Curie (among others), scientists had known that something odd—not predicted by Isaac Newton’s clockwork universe—was afoot. Then Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity convinced many that the atom (or at the very least some atoms, the ‘radioactive’ ones) carried tremendous, astounding, potential energy. By Einstein’s formula, that energy (‘E’) was equal to some multiple of the speed of light—squared!!! And the speed of light is a very big number. So the race was on, and whether it was cooperative or competitive (it was both), scientists from several countries were among the runners. Germany and Austria were well represented, but so were Britain, France, and Denmark. And we mustn’t forget Italy, where Enrico Fermi headed up a remarkable team devoted to the idea that you could bombard one kind of atom with neutrons from another and make something brand new out of the collision. So in a decade—the 1930s—of worsening international and racial hatreds, scientists could think of themselves above the fray, beyond it, not exactly ‘neutral’ but somehow autonomous agents pursuing still unknown ‘truths’ about the universe and its tiniest constituents. Geopolitical boundaries were not the only crossings. Women were important players, too, and in fields where, traditionally, they had long been considered aliens. These transgressors included Marie Curie’s daughter Irène (who like her mother crossed the line between physics and chemistry) and, above all others, Lise Meitner who, besides being Austrian and female was Jewish. WWII shattered these interconnections. It was the western Allies’ good fortune to be on the safe side of several boundary crossings, but the old prewar sense of cooperation in pursuit of truth helps to explain why so many of these “exiles” became active in peace and disarmament movements after the fruits of their labor had incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And in Berlin, Fritz Strassmann and his wife Maria had declared their own loyalties by sheltering a Jewish musician from the Nazi storm. Fermi fled Italy (for Chicago and the Manhattan project) to protect his Jewish wife. And as for the science, Fritz Strassmann would have killed himself rather than to help Hitler take possession of an atomic bomb. ©.

[Stanley]

POLHEM

It’s easy to see the timeless appeal of a design movement like Scandinavian style, with its emphasis on minimalism, functionality, and natural materials . . . . Vogue, December 2024.

When Vogue magazine starts spouting about ‘timelessness,’ the historian within me wants to reach for a wrecking ball, then use it. Of course Vogue was talking about the simplicity and functionality of Scandinavian furniture and domestic design. The magazine went on to cite IKEA and its airy bed- and dining-rooms: ‘domestic spaces’ in modern advertising language. But IKEA dates only from 1943 (my birthyear too), and Vogue’s analysis didn’t get deeper than the cultural state of play in Scandinavia at the end of WWII. But if we think about “minimalism, functionality, and natural materials” we can go much further back in Scandinavian history, to the astonishing career of Christopher Polhem, born on the Swedish island of Gotland on December 8, 1661. His father was of Germanic and perhaps even noble origins, but was a trader, most likely from one of the Hanseatic ports. Christopher might have stayed “German” (towards that end, his father sent the boy to a German school in Stockholm), but papa died in 1669 and the young Christopher fell under the care of a maternal uncle. So he grew up Swedish. Thereafter his sounds more like a story from Popular Mechanics than from Vogue. Clever in his hands, Christopher took up clock repair, including some big ones in church towers. So several Swedish Lutheran clergymen discovered him to be clever in his head, too, and (after teaching him Latin and Greek), arranged his entry into the University of Uppsala at the advanced age of 26. There, besides excelling in his classical studies, he repaired the cathedral’s astronomical clock, which hadn’t ticked for a century, and in the process became even better at utilitarian design. We might better call him an engineer, for he soon became one. His fascination with clockwork gears grew into an expertise at much larger operations, stressing functionality for sure, when he became the chief engineer at the Falun (copper) Mine in central Sweden. Part of Sweden’s power owed to its mineral wealth, not so much in gold or silver but in useful ores. Falun had been mined since Viking times, but by 1690 had become inefficient. The ore was deeper. The fuel (wood) used for refining the ore and moving it was becoming more distant, and King Charles XI appointed Christopher Polhem to address those problems. After surveying the mine and traveling through Europe, Polhem hit on several engineering solutions, using the power of falling water (with a little help from a treadmill or two). So the king promoted him, and as director of the Swedish Laboratorium mechanicum Polhem’s fame and influence grew. He designed new mining works, canal locks, and even metalworking factories. And waterpower remained the basis of his work. The Laboratorium still holds design models of works built by Polhem or his students. You can see them on a recent “Google Arts & Culture” webpage. They don’t look very simple, and would probably fail to sell on the IKEA model, but when you consider that they were made entirely of wood and powered entirely by water, you may get a better sense of the historic roots of Scandinavian design, or as we might better call it, engineering. Among other triumphs, one of Polhem’s water-powered, wood-machined factories produced the best padlocks available anywhere in Europe. When you can make wood and water cut intricate metal parts for keyed padlocks, you have become an engineer. Scandinavian functionality has deeper roots than Vogue imagined. ©.

[Stanley]

MICHELSON

n eminent physicist has remarked that the future truths of Physical Science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals. A. A. Michelson, 1894.

My suspicion is that Michelson was quoting himself. Certainly he repeated this idea, with subtle alterations of phrasing, several times; and most emphatically in 1903, when he enclosed it in quotation marks and prefaced it with the statement that the “fundamental laws and facts of Physical Science . . . are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted is exceedingly remote.” When Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity upset the physical science applecart and proved Michelson wrong, Michelson had the grace to admit it. But before Einstein won the Nobel prize for his vandalism, A. A. Michelson had his own Nobel, in 1907, and it was awarded to him for his success at quantifying the speed of light. That light had a velocity was a new idea. The ancients—Greeks, Hebrews, Romans—thought of light as a quality. You had it, or you didn’t. In the 11th century, a Persian philosopher suggested otherwise, but it wasn’t until 1676 that the Danish astronomer Ole Rœmer proved the idea by observation. But since light moves so very quickly, measuring its actual velocity seemed beyond earthly possibility. Albert Abraham Michelson, born on December 19, 1852, came along at just the time to fix those problems. Michelson was born in East Prussia, of Polish-Jewish parents. The family emigrated to the USA in 1855, where Albert grew up in the mining camps of Nevada. In 1869, he won a midshipman’s appointment to the US Naval Academy where, after his required sea duty, he joined the faculty as instructor in physics. There he became interested in work done (mainly in France) on the speed of light. At Annapolis, then at Case, and finally at the University of Chicago, Michelson made this his life’s work. ‘It is so much fun,’ he said much later. He never did get it down to the sixth decimal point, for he was earth-bound and there are, on earth, just too many technical problems. (If light has speed, it possesses some physical properties, and thus can be interfered with.) But the so-called Michelson-Morley experiments, over a 22-mile course set up with mirrors in the southern California mountains, he came close enough to deserve the 1907 Nobel Prize. So a Polish Jew became the first American Nobelist. But we Americans liked immigrants better, once upon a time, even if they were, like A. A. Michelson, “godless.” As for the velocity of light, Albert Einstein would show that it could even be affected by gravity, but that was at a scale well beyond anything that Michelson’s earth-bound experiments could measure. Still, today, the speed of light (whatever it exactly is) remains one of the basic laws of physics, a barrier beyond which we cannot move or imagine—at least, that is, for the moment. ©

[Stanley]

BEERESS

I had rather be a beeress than a peeress. Dame Margaret Greville.

Doubtless Dame Margaret spoke truth, but remember that in 1891, at 27, she married the Ronald Henry Fulke Greville, in hopes that one day she would become a peeress by right. A dashing captain in the 1st Life Guards, the Hon. Ron was the heir apparent of the Greville title in the Irish peerage, and his father, 2ndBaron Greville, was then already 50. Hoping one day to be a baroness, Maggie convinced the Hon. Capt. Greville to resign his commission. The Grevilles were already accustomed to marrying into money, and the bride had plenty of that. Margaret Greville was born Margaret Anderson on December 20, 1863, the natural daughter of the Edinburgh brewer William McEwan (1827-1913) and his mistress Helen Anderson. After Helen’s husband (a porter in McEwan’s brewery) died in 1885, William McEwan did the right thing and married Mrs. Anderson. Even righter, he adopted Margaret (his only child). So when Margaret Anderson married Ronald Greville, she was a beeress. She might have become a peeress, too, but Ronald Greville predeceased his father (by one year), and the title went to his younger brother, who did the Greville thing and married an American heiress. But Ronald’s widow, Margaret, could assuage her grief. Her father had already showered her with gifts, including the Polesden Lacey estate west of London, and on his death (in 1913) Maggie Grenville became a beeress in her own right. A lover of material things, Maggie decorated the place lavishly, or tastelessly, And she continued to cultivate the royals, now the Windsors, with entertainments and lavish gifts. The young royal stammerer, then Duke of York, and his bride Eizabeth Bowes-Lyon spent part of their honeymoon at Polesden. It seems to have been a genuine friendship, but not everyone approved of Maggie Grenville. Her acid tongue could injure and offend. Many disapproved of her politicking, domestically and in diplomacy, and her admiration for Adolf Hitler alienated all sorts, including Harold Nicolson, Violet Bonham-Carter, and Winston Churchill. Cecil Beaton made her bad taste legendary. Wikipedia calls her a philanthropist, and George V did make her a Dame in recognition of her charity work in WWI. But throughout her life, and at her death, her chief philanthropies were to the royal Windsors and a couple of their continental cousins. Recently, Charles III’s Camilla has been seen wearing a Margaret Greville tiara. The diamond-encrusted coronet was a gift to the then queen mother Elizabeth and passed on to Elizabeth II, in accord with Maggie’s proviso that it be worn “only by a queen.” But Maggie did leave Polseden Lacy to the English National Trust. Next time you are there you can compare her tastes, and perhaps her politics, to those now ascendant in Washington DC. ©.

[Stanley]

BOULTINGS

It’s life, son. It might make you laugh at your age, but one day it’ll bloody make you cry. Actor John Mills, playing the Ezra Fitton role in the Boulting brothers’ film “The Family Way” (1966).

It’s a funny, sad film, turning on a young couple’s hope for an escape from their Lancashire working-class world: their wedding, their canceled honeymoon flight to sun-soaked Majorca, and then real life living-in with the groom’s parents. Hayley Mills plays Jenny, the disappointed bride, who does a nude scene (it’s chaste, even virginal, by today’s standards). The young husband, Arthur Fitton, is rendered impotent, initially by a collapsing bed but then by “life.” There’s a good score, composed by a still young Paul McCartney. What’s interesting, though, is that the Ezra Fitton quote was used (in 2013) by a leading English critic to sum up the film careers of the Boulting brothers, John and Roy, The Family Way was a Boulting brothers film, and it was shown by the British Film Institute’s 100-year retrospective. John and Roy Boulton were born twins (30 minutes apart) in Bray, Berkshire, on December 21, 1913. It was hard to tell them apart, and not only because they were identical twins. When they became famous filmmakers, they worked together, one directing, the other producing, or vice-versa; sometimes they co-directed. In The Family Way, Roy directed (and wrote)l John produced. Both were paid by a legal entity called ‘Boulton Brothers’, which is how they are remembered today. They are also remembered, mainly, for their comedies, which satirized many aspects of post-war British (really ‘English’) life. The Family Way (1966) ‘did’ the working class. I’m All Right, Jack (1960) ‘did’ trade unions (with a couple of cuts at the British film industry). Lucky Jim (1957) ridiculed universities and their resident academic birdlife. Heavens Above! (1963) had a go at the Church of England (and perhaps God, too). Other films, less well remembered, perhaps, satirized the army, the bar (that is to say, barristers), and the Foreign Office. A common butt of the Boultons’ jokes was, of course, the class system. When in the late 1960s and early 70s I getting accustomed to England, I was advised (by a couple of Welsh friends, as it happens) that if England wouldn’t come to me I should take in the Boulton Brothers’ comedies. I still think it was good advice, even though in 2013 The Guardian’s film critic found them far too soft around the edges. Post-war England, he thought, needed harder-shelled comedies than Roy and John ever produced, or directed, or wrote. In 2013, that was understandable. And it should be mentioned that the Boulton Brothers best film, Brighton Rock (1948), was not at all comedic. It’s one of the darkest of all noir films. When they first exported it to the USA, they called it Young Scarface. ©.

[Tripps]

From 'I'm all right Jack' - perhaps my favorite film clip of all time -

[Stanley]

ROBINSON

Whenever Richard Cory went down town

We people on the pavement looked at him;

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

From “Richard Cory”, by E. A. Robinson.

“Richard Cory” first appeared in Robinson’s Children of the Night, a collection published in book form in 1897. The poems, especially “Richard Cory,” kept on appearing, in my high school literature anthologies, and was certainly loved by my English teacher (grades 10 through 12), Oakley Valimore Ethington. Much earlier, it had so affected young Kermit Roosevelt that he showed it to his father, Theodore. I’m not sure of the date, but it was probably after Theodore had become, by several quirks of fate, President of the United States. Impressed, and made aware of E. A. Robinson’s difficulties in life, President Roosevelt invited the poet to dinner at the White House. Robinson respectfully declined, for he owned no suitable dinner attire. Unoffended, Teddy Roosevelt made E. A. Robinson collector of customs for the port of New York, with an annual salary of $2,000. That would be $69,000 today which, Roosevelt hoped, would be enough to enable Robinson to continue to “improve” American literature. Robinson took the job and produced, among other poems, “Miniver Cheevy,” another much-anthologized poem. Some might call it poor payment. In 1897, the “imperially slim” Richard Corry went home, one pleasant night, and shot himself dead. In 1913, Miniver Cheevy, “born too late . . . coughed, and called it fate, and kept on drinking.” Robinson’s poetry was ironic, melancholy, even bitter, but it’s better to see it as ‘disappointed’. America’s promises had not been kept, and from small town Maine, where he’d been born on December 22, 1869, and where he returned after a brief seasoning at Harvard, Edward Arlington Robinson articulated his sadness, or anger, in innovative, reflective poems. In much the same vein, out in the rural Midwest, Edgar Lee Masters had similar things to say, for instance through the ironic, regret-full epitaphs he carved on the gravestones in his Spoon River Anthology (1915). Oakley Ethington loved those, too, and read them to us in a fluid voice that ran from baritone to tenor. Observing their America, Robinson and then Masters found much to hope for but also much to worry them—a belief in limitless possibilities confronted a very limited reality. Robinson would go on to win three Pulitzers for his ironies. He and Masters would inspire other writers, notably William Faulkner, to explore other gaps between vision and reality in this land of the free and brave. And in Teddy Roosevelt, the most ebullient of American presidents (at least, until his polio-paralyzed cousin Franklin took the helm), found in E. A. Robinson some genius to encourage. TR, himself a weakened child of wealth, had gone west to make a man of himself, then come back east to put at least a few things right. He attacked urban corruption, he tried to bridle “malefactors of wealth”—and he encouraged a poor poet to write about it, all of it. Today we have a president who exudes boastfulness and claims victimhood, and who thinks he can remake America by chiseling his name onto the façade of a national cultural institution. Personally, I much prefer the lines laid down by Teddy the Roughrider and the pessimistic poet of Gardiner, Maine. ©.

[Stanley]

PROUD GAL

I don’t want to ‘pass’ because I can’t stand insincerities and shams. I am just as much Negro was any of the others identified with the race/. Fredi Washington

In the US, north and south, white fears about “miscegenation”, as expressed in statute law and lynch lawlessness, never kept pace with the realities established during the long slavery era. Fredericka Carolyn Washington, born in Savannah, GA, on December 23, 1903, was living proof of that. Her blue-grey eyes, pale skin, and brown hair testified to several generations of ‘interracial’ sex, involving ‘white’ males and ‘black’ females. But in Georgia Fredi was black, and so were her pale-skinned parents. The Washington family had enough resources to send Fredi and her younger sister Isabel north to school, a convent school operated by the “Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People.” Fredi and Isabel stayed north, and stayed ‘colored,’ too. In the 1920s they established themselves as ‘colored’ dancers and singers, living in Harlem and, at first, appearing in Harlem nightclubs and revues. It was a challenging time. Racist traditions were now being backed up by the pseudo-scientific theories of the eugenics movement. At the same time, the Harlem Renaissance gave substance to notions of black pride, black self-sufficiency, while a nascent rights movement, in the shape of the NAACP, began the long struggle for civil equality. In New York, Fredi and Isabel moved downtown, to Broadway, to dance, sing, and act in all-black or mainly-black productions. Both of them got good—if patronizing—notices from leading critics, for instance in the New York Times and the New Yorker. Then Isobel married an ambitious Harlem clergyman-city councilor named Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and went into politics. Fredi Washington went into the movies. First she played herself, a Cotton Club dancer unlucky in love and life in the tellingly-entitled Black and Tan (1929). She played a bit part in The Emperor Jones (1933), a Paul Robeson vehicle, and then hit the big time, Hollywood style, with an important role in Imitation of Life (1934), Claudette Colbert starred, but the whole plot turns on race, and Fredi played Peola Johnson, a black girl who grows up wanting to be white. That was an ambition that Fredi, in her real life, always denied. As herself, whether as a critic-essayist for Adam Clayton Powell’s The People’s Voice, or as an activist in the NAACP and the Urban League, she was “black, and proud of it.” As if to prove her point, Fredi married a posh dentist from Stamford, CT, who was blacker than she. Cultural change in Hollywood had made her too white to play as a housemaid, but still too black to be a heroine. In Hollywood, Fredi ‘retired’ to an advisory role. In New England, she held court in Oak Bluffs, the famed black enclave on Martha’s Vineyard. She was, after all, a “mighty proud gal,” and she played that role beautifully, all her long life. ©