BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

MACAULEY

From my early youth I have read with delight those histories which exhibit Liberty in its most exalted state, the annals of the Roman and the Greek republics. Studies like these excite that natural love of Freedom which lies latent in the breast of every rational being. Catharine Macauley, in the foreword to the first volume of her History of England (8 vols., 1763-1783).

To write such a history was an audacious undertaking for a young woman in George III’s England. And she kept at it, through a short but happy marriage and a long widowhood. Along the way, Macauley considered who rightly belonged to that class of “every rational being.” As she wrote her history and observed the events of her own times, she concluded that “every rational being” included all adult persons, male or female, rich or poor, aristocratic or of the common herd. So she qualified as a radical democrat--and a well-read one. One of four children of John Sawbridge and Dorothy Wanley, born on April 2, 1731, Catherine Macauley inherited her share of two banking fortunes, which helped, and even more to the point read voraciously through her family library. That became a lifelong habit and was the main source of her self-confidence. When, newly married, she started on her History, she went to the then new British Museum to read the correspondence of King James I and his lover-confidante the Duke of Buckingham. The librarian thought much of it too racy for a young gentlewoman, to which Catherine is said to have replied “Phoo!” She read all the letters, not to gather evidence of their sexual liaisons, but to establish them as co-conspirators against the cause of English liberty. She continued on that course throughout all her History, then continued it with a subsequent volume (written in epistolary form) in which she dismissed the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 as an inglorious compact between a still-too-powerful crown and a grasping, easily manipulated political class. So it’s not easy to see Macauley as a “whig” historian, though many do. The American and then the French Revolution offered better hopes, and she entered upon the pamphlet wars of the time in hopes of real progress in empowering “every rational being” to assume their proper place in government. So it is as well to see Macauley as a political philosopher, certainly not ‘just’ an historian. Her advocacy of the American cause put her at odds with England’s governing consensus. Her early support of the French Revolution brought her into open conflict with the patron saint of conservatism, Edmund Burke. Macauley was not a majoritarian democrat. Better civil education was needed to bring the many-headed up to speed. Nor was she a feminist. But there’s evidence that Catherine Macauley’s radicalism (and her gender) inspired such as Mary Wollstonecroft and Mercy Otis Warren to examine the gender implications of radical egalitarianism. As for Macauley, her contributions to the process ended with her death, at 60, after her celebratory tour of the new republic across the Atlantic. ©

[Stanley]

BURROUGHS

How far are we from home? John Burroughs, March 29, 1921.

Those are John Burroughs’ last words, uttered on his Pullman car in eastern Ohio. They figured prominently in the New York Times’ obituary which appeared the next day, nearly filling a page of the paper’s March 30 edition. John Burroughs was indeed on his way home, returning to his beloved ‘Riverby’ on the west bank of the Hudson, near Roxbury. He’d been born near there, on April 3, 1837, the seventh of ten children. His parents farmed marginal land, high up from the river, looking towards the summits of the Catskills. But it remained “home” to Burroughs, who as a child found solace in nature and then, as an adult, became a world-renowned writer on nature and natural history. He was, accordingly, resistant to formal schooling. But he read widely and was inspired to write about the land and its wildlife. He took as his models Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and John James Audubon’s Birds of America, and so worked to sometimes competing goals. Burroughs aimed for accuracy, and yet also for beauty, meaning, even regeneration. His first writings, submitted to James Russell Lowell’s Atlantic magazine, were thought to be plagiarisms from Emerson. But as he continued he found his own voice, and that voice found a great response in a nation which was beginning to realize that its great progresses (westwards and citywards) had been in some respects destructive of nature and debilitating to humans. Burroughs’ writing was further improved by his literary partnership with Walt Whitman (in Civil War Washington, DC) and then by his admiration for William Dean Howells’ literary realism. In the process Burroughs gathered a reading public. His many books on nature sold well enough to enable him to return to Roxbury and build his “by the river” retreat right on the Hudson. That was his HQ, but Burroughs ventured forth often to enjoy outings with other naturalists, notably John Muir in Calfornia, and with eminent nature lovers too. Easily the most eminent of these was Teddy Roosevelt, who’d found his own regeneration in the Dakota badlands, but there were others. Among friends who announced their intentions to attend John Burroughs’ funeral were Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and E. H. Harriman. It was an odd fan club, and today John Burroughs has somewhat faded from view, at least as a great naturalist. But in his time and for his time, he was. I most admire his insistence (in attacking the likes of Ernest Thompson Seton) that nature writing should be realistic, not suffused with human literary tropes and plot lines. For St. Louisans, it’s interesting that one of our most expensive private schools, founded two years after Burroughs’s death, was named after him. It was a coeducational institution, non-sectarian and aimed at ‘progressive’ schooling. Its cofounder was Edna Fischel Gellhorn, radical feminist, and one of its first graduates was her daughter Martha. Among its classrooms is a 40-acre tract of Missouri woodlands given by Leo Drey, another pretty odd bird, a Jewish lumberman and ardent conservationist. John Burroughs might have approved. Henry Ford’s views are not recorded. ©

[Stanley]

ANGELOU

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings,
I know why the caged bird sings!

--From “Sympathy,” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1899.

1899 was the mid-point in a bad time, as the white south set about undoing the core result of the Civil War through its varied and brutal “Jim Crow” laws and local ordinances. That effort continues still, if in different forms, witness Donald Trump’s bizarre effort to outlaw the law by countermanding (by executive order!!) the 14th Amendment to the American Constitution. So Dunbar knew too well “why the caged bird sings.” So, too, did Maya Angelou, who chose the line, and the poem, as the motif or theme of her autobiography, She was born in unpromising circumstances, as Marguerite Annie Johnson, in the racially segregated city of St. Louis on April 4, 1928. In the course of a very long life (she died in 2014, aged 86) Marguerite-Maya conducted street cars, worked as a prostitute, danced with Alvin Ailey, acted with James Earl Jones, reported for an English-language paper in Cairo (that’s Egypt, not Illinois), produced broadcasts at Radio Ghana (and served as an administrator at the University of Ghana), cut an album of calypso music (as ‘Miss Calypso’), and worked on civil rights issues with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. (this last a neat trick in itself). And all that was before she was 40. Then, on her 40th birthday, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, an event which focused her frenetic energy on writing. For by now (well before, indeed) Marguerite Johnson was Maya Angelou, a name she took from her brother’s nickname for her and from her first husband, a Greek sailor. She knew “why the caged bird sings,” and so, now feeling free, she sang. Her autobiography may be her most lasting contribution, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) and running through six more volumes. There were also a couple of pretty famous poems that had a ‘this is my story: listen to me’ ring to them, including the one (“On the Pulse of Morning”) read at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993. Eventually, Angelou’s story of herself ran to seven volumes. It seems a lot, just for one life. But even without the poetry we might say that Maya Angelou earned every word in them. And so the caged bird sang. ©.

[Stanley]

SEEDS

The Stringless Green; The Iceberg; The Golden Bantam; The Black Beauty. Featured seeds in early Burpee’s Seeds catalogs.

These were, respectively and in date order of their first appearance, a bean (1894); a lettuce (1894); a corn (1902); and an eggplant (1902). You can still buy them. Indeed in 2024, Burpee’s Seeds made a special package of them all (and several other Burpee innovations) to celebrate the company’s 150th year. There were others in that anniversary package, for instance the Snowbird Sugar Snap (a pea, 1978) and the Fourth of July (a tomato, 1998), but the first four came out while Burpee’s Seeds was still owned by Washington Atlee Burpee, the company’s founder and chief scientist. W. Atlee Burpee, as he preferred to be known, was born in New Brunswick (not yet a part of British Canada) on April 5, 1858. The Burpee family soon moved to Pennsylvania, where his mother’s people, the Atlees, had deep roots, and his father (an eminent physician) might better develop his career. Indeed young Atlee was to be an MD, but already in his teens he preferred to mess about on the family’s Fordhook Farm in Bucks County. It was purposeful messing, though, first with poultry. Atlee did take a shot at a law career (a maternal ancestor had been an eminent jurist), but after two years at Penn’s law school he dropped out and went back to Fordhook where, fortified by a family loan, he entered the genetics business. Of course no one knew anything about the “gene” then, but farmers and gardeners had long been looking for new strains, hens that might lay more regularly, calves that came to market weight more quickly. At first, young Burpee (he was only 18 when he went into business legally) specialized in poultry. He did some selective breeding on his own, but he was a better traveler. Hearing of a new strain, he went off to look at it. If it passed muster, he bought breeding stock for Fordhook farm, tested it, watched it multiply, and then sold his “stock” by catalog and sent it out by the public mails. With his ‘bantam’ corn, new because it was yellow and because it was sweet, he changed a nation’s eating habits. So, too, with the iceberg lettuce and the stringless string bean. More to the point of Burpee’s prosperity, he changed a nation’s gardening habits, for seeds were his main product. Besides his experimenting and his traveling, he was an adept advertiser, writing most of the copy in his annual catalogs. In the 1880s he introduced a slogan that the company still uses, “Burpee’s Seeds Grow.” Out in Iowa, my grandmother’s large garden was a Burpee’s plot, and everything in it grew as promised. And as for genetics, it’s interesting that Luther Burbank and W. Atlee Burpee were cousins. Each enthusiastically praised the other’s work, and after their deaths Burpee’s son David bought Burbank’s business and copyrights. Blood will out? ©.

[Stanley]

BLACK BEAUTY

I hope you will grow up gentle and good, and never learn bad ways; do your work with a good will, lift your feet up well when you trot, and never bite or kick even in play.

The quotation comes from Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse (1877). It’s in horse language, and comes as advice from a nurturing mother, ‘Duchess’, to her beautiful, spirited son, the eponymous ‘Black Beauty’. Anna Sewell lived just long enough (until April 1878) to see the novel on its way to becoming the second-ever best-seller in English. To date it’s sold 50 million copies. One copy was brought to my 3rd-grade classroom by Susan Goldberg, who loved horses and drew them beautifully; and Miss Bielefeldt, our teacher, chose chapters from it to be read, aloud, by a succession of pupils. Bielefeldt wanted us to learn how to speak with feeling, and Black Beauty was a good vehicle. The stories are told by Black Beauty, a horse who through the many tribulations of his life tries to follow his mother’s advice. How well it works for him depends on the company he’s keeping, human or equine, but it ends so well that the aged Beauty can imagine himself back ‘home’, pasturing in the old orchard. He’s now again in good company and able to look forward to life’s Next Stage. That early tutelage from ‘Duchess’ gains resonance when one learns that the novel itself was dictated by Anna Sewell to her mother, Mary Sewell, who transcribed it and may have been the one who readied the manuscript for publication. Such a guess would fit the life stories of both women, mother and daughter. Mary Sewell was born Mary Wright on April 6, 1797, into a prosperous Quaker family. Early difficulties forced her to fend for herself (as a governess) until, at 22, she found a Quaker husband, Isaac Sewell, who gave her two children, Anna and Philip, and enough security to act as their instructor in life’s best arts and in practical knowledge. Anna became Mary’s particular care, partly because of a serious childhood injury (oddly, Black Beauty would suffer similarly, having once not lifted his feet up sufficiently well), partly because of recurrent illness. In Mary’s care, Anna began telling her horse story in 1870. Mary could strengthen Anna’s story because she had become, herself, a successful writer. Mary discovered the “knack” (as she put it) to render in prose and poetry her own exacting moralisms about the practicalities of domestic life and the necessities of a quest for goodness, mostly but not entirely in the Quaker style. Perhaps her most famous work came in verse form, Mother’s Last Words (1860), in which two boys learn that to follow their dam’s advice is the best plan for a life well lived. So when Anna Sewell began telling her Autobiography of a Horse, she had the perfect audience. Mary Sewell would outlive her daughter. Before Mary’s death, Black Beauty had sold over 2 million copies in the USA. Seven decades later, in Miss Bielefeldt’s class, the boys liked Walter Farley’s Black Stallion books better, but that is another story. ©

[Stanley]

MATILDA

Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable. From Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1988).

Adults gave Roald Dahl’s Matilda Wormwood reason enough to engineer her own liberation. Blessed with telekinetic powers and a vivid imagination, Matilda confounds her tormentors and, while she’s at it, lays waste to traditional rules for proper ‘girlish’ behavior. She will not submit. And she has just the right name for it. Dahl never came clean on why he chose ‘Matilda’ for her. Some have suggested Hilaire Belloc’s eponymous poem, but Belloc’s Matilda comes to a very charred end, punished appropriately for her besetting sin. It may be better to think of the name itself, which from its linguistic (German) roots suggests a warrior woman of very strong opinions and, perhaps, very short temper. But for today I nominate the Empress Matilda. On April 7, 1141, having defeated her cousin Stephen in battle, she wanted to be declared Queen of England. By conquest or by inheritance she had a good claim; instead, she was named domina Anglorum (‘Lady of the English’). The resulting confusion threw the realm into ‘the great Anarchy’, a period of civil war and shifting alliances which did not end until 1154—if then. This Matilda was quite a character. She was born in 1102, the daughter of King Henry I, and thus the granddaughter of William the Conqueror. King Henry I had plenty progeny, but few were of legitimate issue. Indeed, by the time Henry I died (1135) Matilda was his only legitimate heir. Of course she was a woman. But what a woman!! Aged only 8, her marriage to the heir of the Holy Roman Emperor had been arranged, and on July 25, 1110, Matilda was crowned “queen of the Germans.” After a decent interval, Matilda (now 12) was married to Henry V. But her husband’s imperial claim was disputed, and Matilda accompanied her husband on a campaign that made Matilda Empress of the Holy Roman Empire and ‘regent’ of the empire’s Italian provinces. When the emperor died, in 1125, the Empress Matilda—still childless—returned to her father’s tender care, married a Norman noble, produced a son, and entered on the stormy seas of Norman and English dynastic politics. Primogeniture was not yet a legal norm, so Matilda’s claim was better than most and as good as any, and she had a political pedigree. And so Matilda went to war against Stephen of Blois (who had seized the English crown) to establish her right. Eventually, her son would become King Henry II, so it can be said that she succeeded in the end. But from 1148 Matilda retired to Normandy where she governed her properties, lorded it over her nobles, waxed rich, and adopted the ways of piety. She died at 65. Her epitaph read, in part, “Great by birth, greater in her marriage, greatest in her offspring.” But those were her female roles: daughter, wife, then mother. She was also a “Matilda” in fact, a person to be reckoned with. ©.

[Stanley]

CHAMPION

I’m ‘enery the eighth I am, ‘enery the eighth I am, I am,

I got married to the widow next door,

She’d been married seven times before,

And ev’ry one was an ‘enery, she wouldn’t have a Willie or a Sam . . .

It takes an effort to remember that this ditty placed Herman’s Hermits above The Beatles in the pop charts for a month or so in 1965. It was an American release, perhaps because, in Britain, too many people might have remembered that the song was originally made famous by the man it was written for, Harry Champion, very possibly the prince, or if you prefer it the king, of the Edwardian music hall. Champion was born William Crump on April 8, 1865, in London’s East End. He never lost the accent, indeed made much of it, dressed to the nines in cast-off evening wear, top hat askew, baggy trousers, so hardly a kingly figure. But that was part of the comedy, made more poignantly funny when he sang his more famous song, “Any Old Iron?”, a rag and bone man touting for scrap metals on a London street. Though he’d been apprenticed into the shoe trades, as a leather cutter, the music hall was his ideal. He began performing for money in 1882, as William Henry Crump, but real fame came after 1890, when his agent (re)christened him Harry Champion and he made his West End debut. At about the same time he dropped the blackface element in his act and began attracting better songwriters. His comic persona, his quick-fire delivery, his piping tenor attracted critical praise. He married, happily, and moved uptown to a then semi-posh neighborhood in Tottenham, where Champion stayed the rest of his life. His best days came in that long Indian summer just before World War I. “Henery the Eighth” was written for him in 1910, “Any Old Iron” in 1911. Those and other original Harry Champion lyrics are easily found online, and there’s an online recording of Harry singing the Henery song. It sounds to me better than the one by Herman’s Hermits, a matter of taste no doubt. In his lyrics a few double entendres are peppered about (and some talk of chamber pots, for instance as Henery the Eighth’s “throne”) but it’s pretty clean stuff, really, and Champion became particularly well known for his musical riffs on Cockney cuisine: from boiled beef and carrots to pickled pigs feet (‘trotters’ of course), eels, and onions. After the blood bath of 1914-1918, music hall went out of fashion, but Champion and his family rode it out by racing horses (he’d saved some money and taken on some airs). He was still around to return to the stage during the 1930s revival of music hall entertainments, and so at his death in 1942 Harry Champion could be mourned as a veteran of six decades of popular performing and a link to the good old days of Edwardian jollity. ©.

[Stanley]

ADA

Let others wage war, but you, happy Austria, marry; for what Mars gives to others, Venus gives to you.

Thus, proverbially, the Hapsburgs grew their eastern empire through the marriage beds of their princes (and, occasionally, princesses). True or not for the Hapsburgs, it’s a good rule for understanding the role of marriages in the politics of the high middle ages. So it was that on April 9, 1139, Ada de Warenne married Prince Henry of Scotland. The marriage was consequent on (and may have been a subclause in) the Second Treaty of Durham, by which Stephen of Blois tried to secure the allegiance of King David of Scotland. Thus Prince Henry (David’s heir apparent) secured a well-born bride and a couple of English earldoms, all for the price of accepting his ‘vassalage’ to Stephen. And the lady Ada, still in her teens, was a good catch. Her father, Guilliaume, Comte de Warenne and Earl of Surrey, was of England’s Norman nobility, and her maternal grandfather was Henri I of France. So Ada, princess of Scotland, became an Anglo-Normal countess (of Huntingdon and Northumberland). King David, for his part, threw in the Midlothian manor of Haddington, including a palace, as a dower gift. From King Stephen’s point of view, it didn’t work out well. David continued to pursue Scotland’s dynastic interests, and thus became an ally (sometime openly) of the Empress Matilda, whose claim to the English throne was, genealogically speaking, better than Stephen’s. Meanwhile, Ada, Countess of Northumberland, became ‘first lady’ of Scotland. King David, already a widower, never remarried, thus leaving the business of producing an heir to Henry and Ada. Medieval chroniclers liked to call it a love match; in any case Ada did her bit, birthing a half dozen children. So when Prince Henry predeceased his father, in 1152, King David had grandsons, and at Scone in 1153 he named the eldest of them, Malcolm, his heir. Malcolm was only 11 at the time, and that he was able to hold the throne is often attributed to Ada, in effect (though not in title) queen regent. Whatever her political contribution (and she did import quite a few knights to serve Malcolm IV’s kingship) she is said to have concentrated on the dynast’s business of heir-production, even introducing a comely, naked maiden into Malcolm’s bedroom. Alas, Malcolm IV is known to Scottish history as ‘Malcolm the Maiden’. He died, possibly chaste and certainly childless, in 1165. But Ada retained enough influence to help her second son, William, continue the family succession. William would rule for 49 years, a minor miracle given the confusions of Scottish history. But the lady Ada, “Queen Mother of Scotland,” retired to her palace at Haddington where she adopted the ways of piety, founded a Cistercian nunnery, and readied herself for heaven. She died there in 1178, a grand old lady in her late fifties. ©.

[Stanley]

MINER

The fowl of the air recognized me as their deadly enemy. Hence the germination of this thought which sprouted and grew in my mind: That they would know a friend if they had one. Jack Miner.

No one knows when this eccentric thought entered Jack Miner’shead. He was born in Ohio on April 10, 1865, the middle child of ten, to parents who were themselves migratory birds, from the English Midlands. Soon, in 1878, they moved to Ontario, where they settled down on a farm not too far from the shores of Lake Erie. The farm didn’t raise much in the way of crops, but its clay beds turned the family to brick-making. Young Jack (he’d been christened John Thomas Miner) helped eke out the family’s income by hunting and trapping. He killed many birds, for the farm was on a major flyway for birds of all sorts, moving back and forth from their winter havens to their summer breeding grounds. Miner’s efforts to conserve rather than kill birds began with native species, grounded ones like quail and pheasants, for which he built shelters and nesting places. Then came the geese and ducks, attracted to the farm’s ponds, and in his late 30s Miner began deliberately to court the migrants, to make the ponds a resting place. By 1911, he was banding them, in hopes that he might discover more about their journeys. Miner was a conservationist by biblical conviction. God had put these creatures on earth to serve His highest creation, man, so it was man’s duty to make use of these birds, thus in man’s interest to conserve them. Typically, Miner’s aluminum bands were hand stamped with short biblical verses: “He careth for you;” “I walk among you;” “Be not afraid.” But there were pious aphorisms, and, always, the bands included Jack Miner’s P.O. Box address. Thus Jack Miner became literate, and able to formulate on paper the ideas that drove him, the hope that one day the birds might see him as a friend. And the world seems to have agreed. Before he died in 1944, aged nearly 80, he’d been awarded an OBE for his services to conservation in the British Empire, and for decades he’d been getting bands bands back from various points on the mid-continent and Atlantic flyways. He’d been lecturing on the subject since 1910, and delighted in pointing out that in some ways (notably lifelong mating) geese could teach people a thing or two. But Miner’s was a hunter’s “conservation.” He would preserve geese and ducks, but exterminate their naturalpredators. Predation was a human privilege, and we humans needed to conserve our friends the geese and eradicate the goose’s enemies. Hawks, eagles, owls, weasels, ravens, even the arctic fox roused Jack Miner’s ire. Jack Miner’s “natural” community didn’t include “predators.” Today, the Jack Miner Migratory Bird Sanctuary, Kingsville, Ontario, takes a more modern, ecological view of its task. ©.

[Stanley]

VIGELAND

This is my religion. Gustav Vigeland, commenting on his famous “Monolith” sculpture.

In Spring 1977, we found ourselves in Oslo, on a short Norwegian pause in our Danish holiday. The weekend outing had been meticulously planned, save for one thing. Oslo, perhaps despite Norway’s secular culture, was closed down for Easter as tight as the proverbial drum, from Noon on Good Friday to Monday morning. Among our improvisations was a longish walk in Frogner Park, once the tightly-designed green space for Frogner Manor. Frogner had a long history as a private estate, interesting in itself, was made over in the 19th century by several owners, including two (unrelated) German immigrant industrialists, then purchased by the city in 1896. The park’s museum was closed, as our hotelier had warned us, but we went anyway, mainly to see the Vigeland sculptures, the park’s outstanding feature. They were the work of a carpenter’s son, Gustav Vigeland, born Gustav Thorsen in rural Mandal on April 11, 1869. Trained in his father’s craft, Vigeland developed artistic ambitions and traveled through Europe to learn sculpture, notably with Rodin in Paris. Back in Oslo he adopted Vigeland as his surname, at once memorializing his idyllic youth on his grandparents’ farm and declaring his allegiance to the rising tide of Norwegian cultural nationalism. All in all, I found his sculptures troubling. Although in Vigeland’s Frogner Park assemblage one could see something of Rodin’s touch, a sensual appreciation of the human body, male or female, adult or child, other aspects were less attractive. Seen all together, singly or in writhing groups, the figures had a cookie-cutter sameness to them, a brutalism that reminded one of some of the darker aspects of 19th-century romantic nationalism, all it summarized by the birth-life-death cycle embodied in the assemblage’s rather bizarre central pillar, the “Monolith” sculpture, all 46 feet of it. Later, reading about the man, I discovered that he had indeed welcomed the German occupiers in 1941, and in some quarters he has been seen as a collaborator. But it’s a matter of dispute, and we need to remember that Gustav Vigeland was also the designer of the Nobel Peace Prize medal. It was never settled judicially, for Vigeland died before the liberation. Today, kinder critics call him a “vitalist” sculptor. As for our Easter weekend, we continued our exploration of Oslo’s out-of-doors attractions with a train ride to the Holmenkollbakken to watch Norwegians of all ages ski in deep snow and Mormon missionaries ply their trade. Everything else was closed, and we returned to Copenhagen on Easter Monday’s night ferry, puzzled by Gustav Vigeland’s ‘sculpture park.’ ©

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CONWAY

Each fresh peak ascended teaches something. William Martin Conway.

Taken by itself, this quotation is nothing more than a conventional aphorism that you might find in any ‘therapeutic’ book. It also encapsulates William Martin Conway’s astonishing life. Besides climbing a great many ‘fresh peaks,’ including several first ascents in the western Himalayas, he wrote books about mountaineering. Some were written as personal adventures. These have a “boys’ own” air about them, and sold well among his contemporaries. Conway also made himself into an expert topographer, first with guide books. But there were also careful maps and scholarly speculations that almost qualify him as a geologist, a student of land structures as far different from one another as the frozen wastes of Spitzbergen and Andean volcanoes. Taking all together, Conway became president of the prestigious Alpine Club, editor of the club’s Alpine Journal, and fellow (later, vice-president) of the Royal Geological Society. Along the way, Conway found time enough to become an expert on art and architecture, from medieval woodcuts to the high arts of the Renaissance. He wrote scholarly and popular books about it all, and occupied two of England’s most prestigious chairs, including the Slade professorship at Cambridge. There was even A Book of Art for Young People (1914), written (with his daughter, Agnes) in a grandfatherly style, in which the child-reader is treated respectfully, as a really rather knowing person who needs only to exercise his or her eye. Beyond that, Conway became an active politician, MP for the two ancient universities for over a decade. He was never quite sure of his ideology, and tended to make “inconvenient” speeches, until 1931 when he was kicked upstairs into the House of Lords as Baron Conway of Allington. There were other signal accomplishments, including an encyclopedia of art treasures in Soviet Russia (1925) and a rather alarming work of political philosophy, The Crowd in Peace and War (1915). All along the way he took (and collected) thousands of photographs, which now form the basis of the Courtauld collection. It’s an amazing collection of “new peaks” for William Martin Conway, born the son of a low-church (evangelical) vicar on April 12, 1856. Of course he was well educated, with a Cambridge BA (in history, 1879). At University, he developed his taste for mountaineering, which explains a lot. But perhaps the most important moment in Conway’s early life was his marriage “up,” in 1884, to the American heiress Katrina Lambard. He’d met her in an Italian art gallery when she was on her own grand tour. Her money (and her stepfather’s) help to explain his many accomplishments, including his (unsurprisingly tasteful) restoration of Allington Castle (1905-1935), of which Conway became 1st Baron. ©.