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. ©.

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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. ©.

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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. ©.

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FLEMING

It was just an idea I had . . . I was so besotted with cycling that I thought, “Well, you could keep fit by riding a bicycle.” I had this idea that I could do just that. Billie Fleming, in a BBC interview on her 100th birthday, 2014.

So it was that Billie Fleming, then known as Billie Dovey, set off from the New Horticultural Hall, London, on January 1, 1938. She rode a state-of-the-art bicycle, a 3-speed Rudge-Whitworth, supplied by one of her sponsors. Her only other commercial sponsor was Cadburys, who sent her a 5 pound slab of chocolate every day. She’d set herself no great goals other than demonstrating that cycling was great fun (she was “besotted” with it) and good for your health and temper. But it became a ‘thing,’ with some press coverage (quite a few photos) and popular support. She traveled light, dressed for the weather, whatever it happened to be. She wore no helmet, carried no food packs, no water bottle even, and stopped along the way to eat in cafes. She went out cycling every day. By December 31, 1938 Billie had cycled 29,603.4 miles, her distance certified by watchers hired by Cycling Magazine and by her on-board cyclometer (which itself was checked periodically). Of course she carried her own tools, but rarely needed them as the Rudge-Whitworth proved a dependable steed—and, miraculously, she had only one flat tire during the whole year. She averaged 81 miles per day, but hit 189 miles on one outing (York to London). It delighted her and also the League for Health and Beauty. Aimed at women, the League promised that daily exercise would enhance health and beauty, while also promoting good temperament. In Billie’s case, it seems to have done all these things. Billie Fleming was born Lillian Bartram on April 13, 1914, in central London, the daughter of John Bartram, a skilled toolmaker, and Julia Mary his wife. Billie left school at 16 to be a secretary, then at 18 took up cycling as a pastime, encouraged by a boyfriend. She didn’t marry him and, as a cyclist, soon left him in the dust to marry an accountant named Freddy Dovey, It was as Billie Dovey that she set her record and became, in advertising copy, the “Rudge-Whitworth Keep Fit Girl.” She left Freddy after WWII, but then cycled into a marriage to a professional cyclist, George Fleming, in 1963, Pictures from her 1938 marathons show Billie as a strong woman who made her clothes and hairdo look good whatever the weather, and in George Fleming she’d found the perfect companion, Together they cycled all over, just for the fun of it (though she did garner some individual records). Billie’s 29,603 mile record stood until a year after her death, when it was broken by another Englishwoman. Both records were then far surpassed by the American Amanda Coker. But those record rides were fully-equipped and sponsored expeditions. Billie Fleming had more fun. Interviewed in 2014, she said so, in so many words. ©.

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GRESHAM

frelie moue in space . . . And that the Scriptures speake nothinge againste the moueinge of the Earth and the Sun's standing still. Edward Gresham, Astrostereon: or, a Discourse of the Falling of a Planet (1603).

Thus Edward Gresham proclaimed the validity of Nicolaus Copernicus’ ‘new view’ of a sun-centered planetary system. But modern scholarship has been slow to see Gresham as a pioneer of a new astronomy. In 1603, Gresham aimed mainly to demolish a popular astrological prediction. It was a plague year, and some ‘foretold’ that a planet would fall to earth and signal either the end of the plague or its indefinite prolongation—depending upon whether it fell to sea or on dry land. Gresham, an eminent astrologer, wrote to dispel this astrological prophecy as non-sense. And his argument was not primarily astronomical but rhetorical, stated in traditional forms of academic discourse, paradoxes and syllogisms. Another factor which obscured, or (pardon the pun) eclipsed Gresham as an early English adherent to Copernican theory was his notoriety as a practitioner of magic and witchcraft. We want our scientific pioneers to be purely and emphatically “modern.” But Edward Gresham was also an astrologer, a magician, a necromancer, and a witch. How could he, at the same time, be a Copernican astronomer? And there is evidence that his contemporaries valued him for his mysterious arts, not his adherence to a new science. Edward Gresham was born in England’s far north, Yorkshire, on April 14, 1565. Likely he was connected to London’s Gresham dynasty, headed by the banker-goldsmith Sir Richard Gresham (he of ‘Gresham’s Law’, an early explanation for currency inflation), which may explain why Edward turned up as a Trinity College, Cambridge, BA in 1584. Thereafter Edward became principally known for his superstitions, as we would call them today. He was connected with the John Dee group, involved in astrological predictions, the casting of fortunes, magic, and the shadowy spy trade that flourished in the conspiracy-riven courts of Elizabeth I and James I. One of Gresham’s Almanacks predicted the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, and could have gotten him hanged. He escaped that fate to play a part in the sordid divorce between Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex and his countess. Her case was that the earl was impotent, and she used magical “charms” provided by Gresham to prove the point—that is, to render the earl actually impotent (he may have been impotent, anyway, but that’s another story). As if that were not enough, Gresham then became involved, witch-wise, in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, Devereux’s friend who was determined to frustrate the countess’s scheme. Gresham escaped exposure (and hanging) as he died before the plot was exposed. But he had already buried his charms, his images, all his magical paraphernalia, for he understood his peril as well as he understood Copernican theory. ©.

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FANMAIL

I can only say that there is no piece in the whole I would vote to leave out, tho’ severals where I would draw my pen over lines, or spill the ink-glass over a verse, from the esteem which, though I have never had the pleasure of his acquaintance, I nevertheless entertain for the author, and the interested wish that [he] should be unspotted as well as superexcellent. Frances Dunlop to Robert Burns, February 26, 1787.

When I last visited Scotland’s National Portrait Gallery, decades ago, there hung a portrait of an elderly lady. Aged and infirm, she still looks as if she’s about ready to get up and give someone (the viewer, the portraitist?) a piece of her mind. Her wedding portrait, taken when she was only 17, gives a somewhat different expression, as of course it would, for then she needed to be both innocent and enticing, but there’s still a willfulness about her, And so it turned out. In life she was Frances Dunlop, born Frances Wallace of Wallacetown, Ayrshire, on April 15, 1730. She was a collateral descendant of the national hero William Wallace, and an heiress in her own right when she married John Dunlop of Dunlop in 1747. Family tradition says it was an elopement, and one can believe it looking at either portrait. Besides birthing 13 Dunlop children, she read widely the heroes of her era, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Paine for instance, yet steeped herself also in the kirk’s Calvinist theology. So when she first read a volume of Robert Burns’ poetry (in late 1786) she was ready to love him for his philosophical radicalism and reprove him for his indecencies. Being a Wallace by birth, she also heartily endorsed Burns’ Scots patriotism and his use of Scots (a distinctive variant of English, not a Gaelic strain) in his verse. So of course she wrote to him, embarking on a long correspondence. The whole of it is still available online, in an 1896 edition which (unfortunately, I think) “corrects” her spellings, her punctuations, and rendered her letters (and his) into paragraph formats. Burns was a frequent guest at her estate, and at least an occasional beneficiary of her desire to be a literary patron. Frances wasn’t wealthy enough to put Burns on Easy Street, but he would not have liked that, anyway, and he was pleased enough that she joined the growing ranks of his subscribers (sponsors of his publications) and, more than occasionally, sent him £5 Bank of Scotland notes (or almost £1000 today). She cooled on Burnes before he died, but there was a reconciliation at the end. These letters show us how polite Scottish society, in the ‘Scots’ lowlands, could love Burns as a national poet and live with his unabashed earthiness, Burns died in 1796. Frances Dunlop lived on, now patronizing a woman poet (a milkmaid, no less, and proud of it), until 1815. But Frances still lives in the national portrait gallery, ever ready to rise from her easy chair and reprove us for our rude ways and our falls from grace. ©.

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FRANCE

It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, the poor have to work before the laws’ majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread. Anatole France, 1894, in Le lys rouge (The Red Lily)

Satire like this is much needed today, with our absurd, almost comic, maldistributions of wealth and power. In its own time, it helps to explain why Mark Twain excepted Anatole France from Twain’s general condemnation of the French and most things français. In Twain’s years, the “Lincoln of our literature” particularly liked Anatole France’s Penguin Island (L’Ile des pinguouins), a Swiftian satire not unlike Twain’s own Connecticut Yankee fable. But in 1908 both Twain and France were, so to speak, already en passant. Twain died in 1910. But Anatole France lived on long enough to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1921) for his “nobility of style . . . grace, and true Gallic temperament.” For a generation stunned by the carnage at Verdun, Ypres, and Passchendaele, Anatole France’s ‘noble’ style was not only old hat but downright insulting. Anatole France’s Nobel outraged an avant garde which could not be satisfied by gentle satire, however witty it was. At Anatole France’s state funeral, three years later, a Dadaist breakaway (they called themselves the ‘Surrealists’) asked permission to open France’s casket and slap his face. It was denied of course; so as second best they issued a pamphlet urging the nation to bury (along with Anatole France) its “trickery, tradition, patriotism, opportunism, skepticism, and heartlessness.” Anatole France, born Jacques Anatole François Thibault on April 16, 1844, may have been a fair target for by 1921 he was an establishment figure. A conservative? Well, most famously he had bitterly attacked Émile Zola and his naturalist school as signaling the downfall of French literature and morals, and over a lifetime of writing copiously and in every genre France (who’d really named himself after his dad’s bookstore) certainly seemed to represent the nation in print. So the Surrealists’ anger is explicable, again in context of “The Great War” when “true Gallic temperament” and “Teutonic courage” had slaughtered a whole generation. But we should remember France’s early, courageous support of Zola in the Dreyfus Affair and his eloquent homily at Zola’s funeral (in 1902 and at least as contentious as France’s would be), wherein France praised his adversary’s “monumental life work and his great and glorious deed.” In “L’affaire Dreyfus” Zola had, France declared, become himself “a moment in the universal conscience of mankind.” So perhaps Anatole France’s Nobel was not, after all, such a bad idea. I am reasonably sure that Mark Twain would have approved of it. It was just badly timed. ©

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LADY MARGARET

Just as women's bodies are softer than men's, so their understanding is sharper. From The Book of the City of Ladies, c. 1405, by Christine de Pizan.

In this fascinating work, Christine de Pizan populated her imaginary city with almost a hundred women, or rather monuments to them. A treasured ‘court writer’ (for King Charles I of France and several great nobles), Christine was anxious to remind such men that they were not alone in their greatness. Most of her heroines were drawn from the Bible and myth, but several were drawn from Christine’s own lifetime, indeed from her acquaintance, including Queen Isabeau (Isobel) of France, a “very redoubtable princess, powerful lady.” Christine de Pizan would live long enough to pen an early tribute to a peasant girl who became a warrior woman (Jeanne d’Arc) but in her City of Ladies women were praised mainly for their noble and ‘womanly’ qualities. In that sense, we might populate the City of Ladies with Margaret Holland, born sometime before April 17, 1388. Lady Margaret Holland, to be exact, for she was the daughter of Thomas Holland, earl of Kent. Thus Lady Margaret was a direct descendant of King Edward I. Holland money and royal blood made her a hot marriage prospect, and in 1397, still in her teens, she married John Beaufort, bastard son of John of Gaunt. The marriage might have been made in heaven, but it was also part of a negotiation that secured Beaufort’s legitimacy by the Pope and his ennoblement by King Henry IV as earl of Somerset. She birthed six children, survived the executions of her Holland relations in 1400 (for their attempt to overthrow King Henry), and then survived the death of her husband John Beaufort (in 1410) to marry Thomas of Lancaster, King Henry IV’s second son and become duchess of Clarence. That second marriage proved childless, but Margaret had managed to save, for herself, a big enough share of the Holland estates to be the richer partner. When Margaret visited the French court, in 1421, (where I suppose she might have met Christine de Pizan, her retinue included over 400 servants. From her achieved eminence, she married each of her six children off very well, including her son John to Margaret Beauchamp. That second marriage would, a generation further on, produce Henry Tudor, better known as Henry VII. The more immediate (and better?) measure of Lady Margaret Holland’s noble but womanly qualities was her tomb, in Canterbury Cathedral. Having done her duties, and retired from them to a religious life, she died in 1439. By her direction, her body was moved to Canterbury Cathedral and buried there in a side chapel. Not only had she built (or rebuilt) the chapel, but the stained glass windows now reflect her dynastic significance. And, again by her direction, the bodies of her two husbands were exhumed and buried beside her, one on each side. There they all rest today, polished alabaster effigies and all, reminding us of one medieval woman’s sharper understanding. ©

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SUPERYACHTS

My job is not to have some ego fancy of ‘what you should have, Mr. Client;’ I try to find out from the owner what really suits his style of living on the boat—how he spends his time, what his priorities are, and his friends and family—and put the right boat around them. The architecture gives you what you want on the water. It’s a lifestyle. It’s how it works. Ed Dubois, 2010.

In the above, “it” is the business of designing super yachts for the super rich, and Ed Dubois was one of the leading architects of that business. He was born on April 18, 1952, in decidedly middle class and landlocked circumstances, one of four children living in a nice house on a nice street in East Croydon, Surrey. His dad, a retired army officer who’d become a gentleman’s outfitter, earned enough to put young Ed in private school, again landlocked, but early on his parents took him to the ponds of Regent’s Park, where (first) he loved to sail wooden models. Soon he was making them himself, then sailing a rented skiff in the Boating Lake. Ed qualified as a ship’s architect at technical college (now the University of Southampton), in an innovative course that required students to spend a whole term, each year, apprenticing in the business. After graduation he stayed on with the Channel Islands firm he’d apprenticed with, and was soon designing racing boats of some size, quarter-ton, half-ton, and three-quarters ton as the classifications then went. In the late 1970s his boats began winning in named races, and Dubois went into business for himself. He was enamored of aero- and water-dynamics, and he had a “feel” for both, drawing by hand and eschewing computer aided design. His racing yachts were things of beauty. They were also getting bigger. In 1986, Dubois built his first superyacht, the 37 meter Aquel II. Over the next 30 years (he died in 2016) he designed over 100 ‘superyachts,’ a term he didn’t like but it was the one the super rich wanted, and also went into the motor superyacht business. His last sailing ‘superyacht,’ the Ngoni, took to the water a year after Dubois’ death. It is indeed a thing of beauty, but it’s also testament to the existence of a super market, world wide, of rich buyers, with rich tastes, and often not sailors themselves. The Ngoni, now being resold (for £58 million), is called in ads “Powerful, Edgy, Radical, Luxurious.” As for ‘beauty,’ there are plenty of gilt fittings, and a huge TV that rises out of the floor in the owner’s suite. It requires a crew of nine, including a captain (not, presumably, the owner) and, probably, a masseuse, for its gym includes a massage table. Aesthetics don’t enter into it. Ngoni’s original builder, the Dutch company Royal Huisman, advertises its new products (much dearer than £58 million) as the “ultimate expression(s) of personal freedom.” This sort of monetized ‘freedom’ is an ancient business. Roman emperors had their own superyachts. And Ngoni’s original owner knew exactly what he wanted, never mind Ed Dubois. The owner was the buyer, and he called his ultimate expression of personal freedom “the Beast.” ©.

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CONFESSIONS

I have injured my Neighbour so often by Forgeries, Cheats, &c, that I think it is scarce possible to recount them. Robert Young, April 1700.

Thus Robert Young confessed shortly before he was hanged, at Tyburn, on April 19, 1700. Gallows confessions should not be depended upon. Some condemned persons wanted to make a clean breast of it, perhaps to clear their way to heaven. Others took it as one last opportunity to boast of their criminal inventiveness. In Robert Young’s case, it was a bit of both, for he’d had an amazing criminal career, and he did hope to make a successful atonement. And why would anyone believe this man? At an earlier trial (in 1693), an observer reported that Young had displayed “not a ranting impudence, but a most unparalleled, sedate, composed impudence.” But we do know quite a bit about Robert Young, for one of the intended victims of Young’s greatest forgery (in 1692-1693) was Thomas Sprat, the Bishop of Rochester. Young could have put Sprat himself on the gallows for his alleged part in the “flowerpot plot” (to dethrone King William and kidnap Queen Mary). So the good bishop did his homework and, with the help of others Sprat produced an evidenced narrative of Young’s life. Arising from dubious parental origins in Lancashire, circa 1656, Young’s criminal career picked up speed in Ireland in 1680 with a bigamous marriage (to Mary Hull, who became his confederate in crime) and fraudulently convincing several bishops of the Church of Ireland to give him curacies in Waterford, Roscommon, and Dublin itself. Found out, he and Mary fled to England where further forgeries (written by Young in the hand of the Archbishop of Canterbury) landed them both in the pillory. They then moved on to London, traditionally a great market for forgers and spies and made more so by the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. Posing as a displaced Church of Ireland cleric begging for help, he collected quite a few refusals, each of them signed and sealed. These signatures would form the basis of Young’s biggest fraud, accusing several bishops (including Thomas Sprat) and John Churchill, then earl of Marlborough, of involvement in a plot against William and Mary. The incriminating documents were hidden in a flowerpot, and trial proceedings were begun. It all fell apart, and Young was lucky to suffer only imprisonment and (again) the indignities of the pillory. While in Newgate prison, he made contact with counterfeiters. So prison was his only real college (he had claimed both Oxford and Trinity College Dublin as alma maters) and the cause of his final downfall, for counterfeiting was treasonable. Incriminated by fellow alumni of Newgate, and certainly guilty of an extraordinary criminal career, Robert Young was hanged. John Churchill went on to greater things. Mary Hull stayed on in Newgate, unhanged, for another four months. Bishop Sprat enjoyed the hanging and a contemplative old age. ©.

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GWILLIM

I have not wrote lately so long letters as usual having been busy drawing birds &c. Elizabeth Gwillim to Hester James, writing from Madras, Spring 1803.

Elizabeth Gwillim had arrived in Madras, British India, two years previously. From the first “so long” letter (to her mother, in February 1801) her letters had been full of detail, almost photographic in her descriptions of houses, gardens, landscapes, and especially of the local people, in all their varieties of castes, colors, and customs. She had her prejudices (she was a well-born Englishwoman of Georgian vintage), but her letters are remarkably open-eyed and open-minded. At first she doesn’t even mind the heat, although the climate did not allow her to grow some English herbs and vegetables. But actually from early 1802 she has “been busy drawing birds.” And from now until the end of her correspondence (she died in Madras in 1807) her letters home include requests for watercolor pigments of almost all hues (oddly, no greens at all), and the best papers available, some for writing but most for her watercolors. Elizabeth Gwillim was born Elizabeth Symonds on April 20, 1763, in Hereford, England, the daughter of a skilled stonemason soon promoted to the surveyorship of Hereford Cathedral. Some of Thomas Symonds bas reliefs can still be found in the cathedral and in local parish churches. Thomas seems also to have seen to the education of his three daughters, for Elizabeth had more than a nodding acquaintance with Latin, and both she and her sister, Mary Symonds (whom she called “Polly”) were taught to paint by the landscape artist George Samuel. In 1784, Elizabeth married Henry Gwillim, an Oxford graduate and already a jurist of some distinction, but he was also a local boy, born in Hereford in 1759. She birthed several children, but they died in infancy and (in her letters) she described herself as childless. It was an affectionate marriage, the couple sharing interests in art and architecture, and remained so when, in 1801, Henry was appointed to a judgeship in Madras, a province then under the tender care of the East India Company. Mary Symonds sailed with them to India. Her letters, too, evince an open-minded urge to portray Madras as she saw it. Both of them painted landscapes, townscapes, houses and gardens, but they are most famed, today, for their watercolors of local fauna, birds for Elizabeth and fish for Mary. The detail is exceptional, for both preferred to paint living specimens (in the Madras heat and damp, dead ones spoiled too quickly), and Elizabeth’s watercolors are particularly admired, so she’s now described as “ornithologist and naturalist” as well as a distinguished precursor of John James Audubon. Her gifts were recognized at the time, but most of her watercolors disappeared, and except for one scientific name, of a magnolia specimen painted by her, Elizabeth Gwillam faded from view. Then a large portfolio of her watercolors were found, in a London bookseller’s basement, by a man who happened to be the McGill University librarian, Casey Albert Wood. They were first displayed in Ottawa in 1927. For a full history, and not least the amazingly pictorial letters home of Elizabeth Gwillim and her sister Mary Symonds, please visit the website of “The Gwillim Project” at https://thegwillimproject.wordpress.com . Based at McGill, and including the work of McGill students and faculty, it was financed by Canada’s Social Science Research Council and has called forth a response from two English museums which hold some of the sisters’ works, including the Linnaean Society. The Gwillim Project website, like Elizabeth’s watercolors, is an eyeopener. ©.