BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

A little self-knowledge is a dangerous thing. Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano.

Among the too many unread fictions on my shelves is Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947). The sin of not (yet) reading it is compounded by the fact that it was lent to me, years ago, by a friend, a coal miner’s daughter whose father had read it while on breaks in his South Wales pit. Its pages are still dark with coal dust, a forbidding black-lung fiction that, one day, I will summon up the courage to read—and then the greater courage to return. Malcolm Lowry’s short life, tormented by his genius and by alcohol, began in Cheshire on July 28, 1909. With some speed he came to fear his wealthy, autocratic father and despise his social-climbing mother, and he may have taken to drink (at a private school) as a form of rebellion. Lowry’s rebellion also included jazz (he was a passable ukulele player), a brief period as a teen-aged deckboy on a tramp freighter, a hugely undistinguished degree at Cambridge, two stormy marriages to Americans (Janine Vanderheim, 1934-40, and Margerie Bonner, 1940-57) who recognized his brilliance and (mostly) tolerated his excesses, and quite a bit of writing. Along the way, that hated dad (until he died in 1945) kept bailing Lowry out (of jail, debt, and other scrapes), and through it all the writing continued, sometimes at white-hot speed, other times (Under the Volcano was rejected in 1940 and then substantially revised) slowly or in fits and starts. The other works, some autobiographical, others fantastical, a couple published posthumously (Lowry died a probable suicide in 1957) seem to be of interest mainly because Under the Volcano has been accepted as a masterpiece. When I get around to reading it, I will find that it chronicles a day (indeed, the last day) in the troubled life of an alcoholic British consul, one day that takes place literally “under the volcano” (it was Popocatepetl, in Mexico, near where Lowry and Jan lived for several years). ©

[Stanley]

An excellent prince doubtlesse had he ben lesse addicted to Women, which made him uneasy & allways in Want to supply their unmeasurable profusion. John Evelyn on the death of King Charles II.

If you are an aficionado of the horse race (for me a not-yet-acquired taste) you may have heard of Goodwood, in England. It is not quite as famous as Ascot, nor has it Cheltenham’s distinction of being the site of Robert Benchley’s “They’re Off!” (surely the funniest piece ever written about the Sport of Kings), but it’s a pleasant, undulating, irregular grassy track and as good a place as any to learn about one of the more recondite lines of the British nobility, descendants of women who (as P. G. Wodehouse once put it) could not say no to King Charles II. For Goodwood is on the estate (and near the residence of) Charles Gordon-Lennox, Earl of March, currently married to the daughter of the 3rd Viscount Astor and himself likely to become the 11th Duke of Richmond. March is a photographer of some note but more to the point is a direct descendant of Charles II and Louise de Kérouaille, maybe not the king’s favorite mistress but the longest-lived one, whose eldest son Charles was born on July 29, 1672. At a tender age (in 1675) the little bastard was created Duke of Richmond in the English peerage and Duke of Lennox in the Scottish peerage and given quite a bit of real estate, in both kingdoms, of which Goodwood is one relict. Although the first Duke was not particularly talented, he held many offices, professed as many religions as he needed to in late Stuart and early Hanover England, played high stakes cricket, and had good genes. The dukedom survives to this day, and along the way the 3rd Duke created the racecourse (in 1802). The current Earl of March, the eldest son of the house, has counted amongst his distant cousins (all of them descended from the 1st Duke) Princess Diana Spencer, Camilla Bowles, Duchess of Cornwall, and for good measure Sarah Ferguson who insists that she is still Duchess of York. Those royals do get around, and not just racecourses. ©

[Tripps]

Oddly enough I'm watching Glorious Goodwood on Ch 4 as I read this.

FranklinD has just landed the biggest gamble of theweek season by a narrow margin. Cost Wm Hills alone, a million.

'Not yet acquired' - Try a bit harder - you'll enjoy it - there's a story behind every horse.

What does recondite mean?

[Tizer]

"What does recondite mean?"
You need special knowledge to what what it means.
I imagine Bob enjoyed writing the line: "..the little bastard was created Duke of Richmond.."

[Stanley]

Ours is a story of the ideals of equality, fraternity and social and economic justice struggling against the forces of domination, exploitation, intolerance and tyranny. Fatima Jinnah, Message to the Nation, 1963,

Several diversities of Islam and of Pakistani society are embodied in the life of Fatima Jinnah, born in Karachi on July 30, 1893 into a mercantile family with roots in urban Bombay and rural Gujarat. Educated in a Catholic convent school in Bombay, where she excelled, Jinnah moved on to the University of Calcutta where she qualified as a dentist and, after graduation, became a leading dental surgeon in Bombay. But the rising tide of nationalism and her brother Muhammad’s political eminence vaulted her into public life, where she first identified as an eloquent critic of British rule, then as an advocate of a two-nation solution to the subcontinent’s religious and ethnic rivalries, and not incidentally (after she was widowed in 1929) as the housemother of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s rambling mansion in Karachi, his “bright ray of life and hope” for a modernizing, socialist, and democratic Muslim state. She became a leading member of the All-India Muslim League and then, after partition and independence, the co-founder of the Pakistan Women’s Association. Though she and her brother were of the Shia sect, they hoped for a non-sectarian politics, and both married outside the Shia faith. It was a tragedy when Muhammad died, in September 1948, of tuberculosis and its complications. In mourning, Fatima Jinnah retired from politics to write her brother’s biography. But after Pakistan slid under the military dictatorship of General Ayub Khan (supported by the USA as a hero of capitalism and quickly accorded a state dinner—at Mount Vernon!!—and a ticker-tape parade in New York), Fatima (as “Madr-i-Millat”, Mother of the Nation) led a disparate coalition in a last-ditch attempt to bring back democracy. In the rigged 1965 elections, she won the popular vote but lost the presidency. Two years later, Fatima was found dead in her Karachi residence. Rumors persist that she was murdered (beheaded) by the regime. ©

[Stanley]

It is now possible for a flight attendant to get a pilot pregnant. Richard Ferris, CEO of United Airlines.

In my lifetime, what might be called (with increasing inaccuracy) “minority movements” have transformed my discipline, as historians now assiduously trace histories of oppression and exclusion (e.g. of blacks and women) and discover heroes who somehow stood against those tides. But some stories remain hidden. Even in Britain the names of Pauline Gower (1910-1947) and Dorothy Spicer (1908-1946) are not well known, but they were aviation pioneers. Both were born into wealthy families (Dorothy Spicer on July 31, 1908), and both were well educated (Spicer in a private school in Brussels and then University College London). So when each became fascinated by flying (by taking to the air as passengers at “flying circuses”) they at least did not have to struggle against poverty when they decided to make a life of it. Being women in what was a man’s sky, they soon fell in with each other, qualified as pilots, and then as airplane engineers (in the process putting together a long string of “firsts” and “seconds”). And then (naturally) they joined the circus circuit, enjoying notoriety as lady aviators in the Crimson Fleet Air Circus and flying (and maintaining) a string of planes (one after the other), including a Simmonds-Spartan they christened “Helen of Troy.” Soon they established the first (and only?) air ambulance and commercial passenger services owned and operated by women. Come the war, each married an RAF airman and served in auxiliary flying. Had they lived longer they might well have become famous, but in 1946 Spicer was killed in a commercial air crash in Brazil (where she had gone with her husband to establish a passenger service) and Gower died giving birth (to twin sons, who survived) in 1947. But Spicer and Gower did leave us a book with great photos, rare and long out a print, Women with Wings (1938). And so say all of us. ©

[Stanley]

To do no evil is good. To intend none is better. Claudius.

America’s discourse on race has not been an inspiring subject and appears this year to be getting worse, but aspects of it are deeply interesting. One such was the recognition (by many of our founding fathers of the colonial era) that their own ancestors had, within written memory, been “savages” while other peoples had been “civilized.” Native Britons had no written language, dressed in animal skins, had few if any buildings taller than a ground floor, and used human sacrifice. On those counts and others, our founders noted, the old English had been “inferior”—vastly so—to Romans, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, and Chinese. It was too bad that people like John Winthrop and Thomas Jefferson didn’t know about the similarly superior Benin or Zimbabwean cultures of sub-Saharan Africa. But “civilization” had been brought to England, first by the Romans. Not by Julius Caesar, who came, saw, fought, and left, but by the Emperor Claudius, who was born on August 1, 10 BCE, in Gaul (the first Emperor to be born outside of Italy), and ascended to the imperial throne 51 years later. Claudius conceived and executed the invasion and began the occupation while he was still consul in his nephew Caligula’s bizarre reign, but it was a pretty smart move from a Roman point of view and when the time came to dispose of Caligula (Romans rarely allowed their emperors to die in bed), Claudius was the natural choice. Meanwhile the English learned how to build second storeys, wear cloth clothing, take baths, and export grain, gold, tin, and slaves to Rome. As for Claudius, he would be poisoned, when his time came, by his grand-nephew, a guy named Nero. So, just as Claudius brought “civility” to England, the English would bring it to America. The natives would learn civility and benefit, or refuse it and pay the price. It was not a great attitude, but it was not modern racism, either. ©


Oh, two such silver currents when they join do glorify the banks that bound them in. Lucy Clifford's epitaph, 1929, drawn from Shakespeare's King John.

When in 1875 Lucy Lane (born August 2, 1846) married William Clifford, all London was agog, for these young lovers were beautiful, bright, talented people. Lucy was a scribbler, William a brilliant mathematician and philosopher whose startling geometries of space and time would be more fully worked out by Albert Einstein. It seemed a marriage made in heaven, except that neither was a believer. In 1876, William’s radical conception of social ethics impelled him to renounce his very considerable inheritance (in favor of his father’s second, younger, family, left destitute by his death). And why not? The widow and orphans needed the money, and William and Lucy Clifford were young, healthy, and well established professionally. And so they carried on, producing their own babies (two girls) and setting up a famous salon attended by the likes of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and James Clerk Maxwell. And then William died, in 1879. Lucy was not exactly bereft (Queen Victoria and Benjamin Disraeli arranged a Civil List pension), but times were harder than she’d expected, so she made herself into a good novelist, a passable poet, a successful playwright, and a brilliant writer of children’s stories (e.g. The Anyhow Stories, 1882). Best of all Lucy maintained the salon, and continued to her death to draw to it such as George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, and Rudyard Kipling, and, latterly, the likes of J. M. Barrie, Virginia Woolf, and the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Most enduringly, she struck up an intimate, literary relationship with Henry James who thought her “the bravest of women and the finest of friends” and left her with over 100 fascinating letters and, in his will, £100. James knew that “Auntie” (as he sometimes called her) no longer needed the money, but that she would treasure the thought. Lucy Clifford died in 1929, and is buried next to William at Highgate, under a modest stone and striking epitaphs. ©

[Stanley]

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Percy Shelley, Ozymandius, 1818.

An interesting aspect of 19th-century archaeology was the competition between Europeans to discover artifact “trophies” from the civilizations of the past and bring them back to their great national museums. At first the context was largely between Britons and the French (the Germans got involved later), perhaps spurred by Napoléon’s invasion of Egypt (1798-1801). You can see some of the end results in the British Museum and the Louvre, statues and bas reliefs, some of them magnificent (others, in my view, merely massive). Quite a few came from Susa, in present-day Iran, the takings of widely separated expeditions, the first (1850-51) British, the second (1880-81 and again in 1885-86) French. The French explorations were led by Marcel-Auguste Deiulafoy, born to an aristocratic Toulouse family on August 3, 1844, and educated primarily in civil engineering. Indeed, his main interest in the Susa site had nothing to do with the huge pieces he sent back to the Louvre, rather with the principles of town planning and architecture that he unearthed and surveyed. In this respect it is good to remember that it was in Deiulafoy’s youth that Napoléon III and Baron Haussmann began the project of making Paris into a modern and imperial capital, a project continued by the Third Republic (after the 1870 collapse of the Second Empire) in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. “Vulgarity triumphant” some critics called the “new” Paris, and perhaps the gaudy, gigantic trophies that Deiulafoy sent back to the Louvre can be seen as ‘political’ baubles. After all, at Susa they had been created to invest the rule of the great Darius I with power and mystery. Perhaps they could perform similar service for the French colonial imperium. ©

[Stanley]

American literature, for all its affirmative spirit, is the most searching and unabashed criticism of our national limitations that exists Daniel Aaron.

I am not sure whether Daniel Aaron’s Russian parents immigrated legally or not, but their son—born on August 4, 1912—lived long enough to deliver his opinion about our current president’s birth nation (the USA, in case you were wondering). More to the point Aaron became a great interpreter of American culture and a founding father of the “American Studies Movement.” Born in Chicago, he reached his teens in LA and then returned to Chicago for high school. Then it was a Michigan BA, which he completed brilliantly before going on to Harvard where, in 1943, he became Harvard’s first-ever PhD in “American Civilization.” At Harvard he studied with and under some of the greatest scholars in American history and literature, including Perry Miller and F. O. Mathieson, and shared with them the view that the USA was such a singular place that it needed to be studied from the perspectives of both the humanities and the social sciences (although Aaron strongly self-identified as a humanist). His own publications were numerous and luminous, and he took pretty much all of America as his canvas. He had a particular interest in and reverence for “progressive” America but his editing of the strange “Inman diaries” showed he understood the importance of our reactionary traditions and of our failures, too, particularly of our failure even to come to terms with, let alone eradicate, the stain of racial slavery. But in the long run, it may be that Daniel Aaron’s greatest contribution to American culture was to co-found (in 1979, with R. W. B. Lewis, Eudora Welty and others) The Library of America, a project that one hopes will never end: cheap, dependable editions of American writing, in good bindings and on good paper, a boon to students, to scholars, and indeed to anyone who wants to sample the richness and diversity of American discourse. Daniel Aaron himself finally stopped reading, and writing, on April 30, 2016, at the tender age of 103. ©

[Stanley]

[village sports and wakes] lead to drunkennesse, whoredome, gluttony, and other filthie sodomiticall exercises. The Rev'd Philip Stubbs, 1555-1610.

The opening of the Rio Olympiad is a good time to celebrate the life of Robert Dover, who may have founded and certainly named the “Olimpick Games Upon the Cotswold Hills.” Indeed, for several centuries after his death, they were known as “Mr. Robert Dover’s Olimpick Games.” We do not know Dover’s birth date, but we do know that he was born (in the Cotswold town of Chipping Camden) in early 1582, that he attended Cambridge University, and that he was admitted to the bar in 1623. He subsequently dabbled in the law in and around Chipping Camden. But in the 1630s he became involved in village sports, and it’s interesting because in the 1630s traditional village sports were a political issue. Sports were an idle pastime, and English Puritans knew that idle pastimes were Satan’s playthings. Possibly a Catholic and certainly not a Puritan, Mr. Robert Dover decided to make a Big Thing of village sports in Chipping Camden, and for several years organized and celebrated foot- and horse-racing, jumping, wrestling, sword play, “spurning the bar,” country dancing, and (no doubt) foot-ball. In 1636, the whole business was celebrated in a London publication about Mr. Dover’s Olympics, prefaced by 33 poems (including one by that notorious anti-Puritan Ben Jonson) and endorsed by a number of Charles I’s courtiers including the groom of the royal bedchamber (himself a Chipping Camdenite). And make no mistake. These “games” were political. No doubt the local vicar, a Puritan sympathizer, stewed in his study, but come the outbreak of open war between parliament and crown, the Reverend Mr. Bartholomew suspended the games, which did not resume until the Restoration of 1660, by which time, sadly, Mr. Robert Dover had been resting in peace, in St. James church’s burial ground, for eight years. ©

[Stanley]

The hairs will rise and stand upright upon your head, when you sees this; I can not with words express how amazing this is. Pehr Kalm to Ben Franklin, September 1750, describing Niagara Falls.

Any who might still want to think of colonial America as an Anglo-Saxon realm should take a peek at the lower Delaware valley (Pennsylvania, Delaware, and West Jersey). There Quakers dominated, and their radical toleration successfully retained the region’s first settlers (Dutch, Swedes, and Finns), added to them Welsh and English Quakers and Swiss and German pietists, and further retained a substantial population of native Americans. Into the bargain, Quakers’ increasing discomfort with slavery meant that by the Revolution the African population included many freedmen. The presence of Swedes was one reason Pehr Kalm traveled there, sailing from his native Scandinavia in late 1747 and then on from London on August 6, 1748. Indeed, he found in America a Swedish wife (daughter of a Lutheran minister, as Kalm was the son of one), and took her home with him in 1752. But what he was really after was collecting plants. In natural history, his was the century of collection and classification, and Pehr Kalm was a disciple (indeed, had been the star pupil) of the great Linnaeus, and he was sent to America not to find a wife but to find plants, describe them, draw them, classify them, collect specimens and seeds, and send them back to Scandinavia (he was by then professor at a Finnish university) where, it was hoped, they could help to modernize and diversify the economy. In London, he’d brushed up on his English and met leading Anglo-colonial scientists like Peter Collinson, who set him up with Ben Franklin, who doubtless gave Kalm plenty of advice as he set off on his collection journeys (mostly northwards). Kalm’s publications, and more especially his copious journals, offer insight into 18th-century science but also (for he observed and classified human nature, too) into the economic dynamism that came, even then, with diversity, open migration, and toleration. That was more difficult to send back home. ©

[Stanley]

Sometimes I lose. Sometimes I win. Mata Hari.

Margarethe Geertruida Zelle was born in Holland on August 7, 1876 and (convicted of espionage) was executed by a French firing squad on October 15, 1917. Whether she was actually guilty of spying for Germany is still a matter of dispute among those interested in such things, and her trial was certainly a cruel farce, but her stage name—Mata Hari—became a byword for any woman of high intrigue, low life, and questionable morality. She probably deserved that fate, unkind as it was, but in her defense it has to be noted that she began her adult life training as a kindergarten teacher. This did not last very long, apparently because of her headmaster’s unwanted sexual attentions, and so at only age 18 she answered an ad placed by a Dutch army officer, stationed in Indonesia, who wanted a wife. This was not a happy and may have been an abusive marriage, but it did reintroduce her to the high life she had enjoyed as a child (before her parents’ divorce and deaths), for her husband (named McLeod) was something of an aristocrat. Left high and dry by McLeod, she had affairs with other officers but, more to the point, became an exotic dancer with the stage name of Mata Hari (which can be translated as “eye of the day” or, less poetically, as “the sun”), and it was in this guise that she returned to Europe and a life that was certainly full of sex and intrigue. Even before WWI broke out, Mata Hari was reasonably famous as a dancer and model, but more dangerously was ill-famed for bedding down with German, French, and British officers. She may have dabbled in intelligence. She may even have been a double (or, possibly, triple) agent. Whatever, she was implicated in a decoded German message, and the French high command (looking for some way to explain their bloody miscalculations) settled on Mata Hari as a fall girl. And so, refusing both blindfold and bindings, she fell. ©

[Stanley]

My work is simply a search for pretty mathematics. It may turn out later that the work does have an application. Then one has had good luck. Paul Dirac.

One of the best liked physicists of the 20th century was also one of the oddest, Paul Dirac, born in Bristol, England, on August 8, 1901, and destined to live his life in a realm of beauty, a realm to be found, he always insisted), in the world of higher mathematics. Dirac famously distrusted words for their imprecision, and (from childhood) often chose to remain silent for that reason. His colleagues defined a “dirac” as a rate of conversation equal to one word per hour, and Dirac himself insisted that he would never start a sentence unless he knew exactly where and how it would end. (How, then, should we define a “trump”?) Dirac took his first degree at Bristol (in engineering) but then moved on to Cambridge where his sheer brilliance won him an almost instant doctorate and then the Lucasian chair (once held by Isaac Newton, later by Stephen Hawking) at the tender age of 30. The stories of Dirac’s brilliance are also, often, the stories of his eccentricities, and it is generally conceded that he was lucky to find a wife already accustomed to living with physics (she was Marci, sister to the Hungarian Nobelist Eugene Wigner). Dirac himself shared the 1933 Nobel with Erwin Schrodinger (he of the impenetrable riddle about a dead and/or living cat), for quantum advances in quantum theory. He continued to innovate mathematically, to receive honors aplenty, and become a much loved senior statesman in his field, a man about whom others liked to tell stories, in words of course. But in the late 1930s Paul Dirac refused a knighthood because, it was said, he did not want to be addressed by his first name. So King George had to be satisfied with bestowing on this very odd bird the OM (Order of Merit). In his age, Dirac took a chair at the University of Florida, and (in 1984) was buried in what must have seemed, to him, the mathematically unlikely town of Tallahassee. ©

[Stanley]

If children fail to understand one another, it is because they think they understand one another. Jean Piaget.

One of my recurring dreams or nightmares (doesn’t everyone have them?) is set around my final examination, circa 1963, in Prof. Aronfreed’s course on developmental psychology. I got an A in the final (and for the course) but spent most of the examination period explaining why I couldn’t understand the questions. I was probably to blame for this incomprehension, but at the time (and since) I cast Jean Piaget as the real villain of the piece. Piaget’s theories dominated Aronfreed’s course, and as a result we had to learn about (and distinguish between) several stages of childhood mental growth. There were also quite a few substages, as the child moved from the howling egomania of early infancy to become (if everything went well) a more or less sociable individual capable of waiting for her food, brushing her teeth after meals, and terrorizing the boys. Jean Piaget’s own childhood began in Neuchatel, Switzerland, on August 9, 1896, and he was still developing when I surprised Professor Aronfreed with my puzzled resistance to his theories. I do remember that Piaget had the interesting idea that to study children it was necessary to observe them in set situations and then, as they became vocal, ask them set questions, record their behavior and/or their answers, and try to make (both qualitative and quantitative) sense out of the results. Piaget began all this by studying his own (three) children, and although he moved on to research with others he has been criticized for basing his work on too few children drawn from too narrow a social spectrum. However, he remains influential, possibly still the most famed of all developmental psychologists. As for me, having now lived through two children of my own, I am now a little less puzzled than I was in 1963. But the nightmare persists. ©

[Stanley]

Oblige a man to rise at four in the morning, and it is probable he will go willingly to bed at eight in the evening. Ben Franklin, An Economical Proposal, 1784.

Morning exercise is said to provide one with good thinking time, and it was on his morning horseback ride (in Petts Wood, Kent, in 1905) that the English builder William Willett thought up daylight saving time. It was summertime in Kent, and early morning in such northern latitudes is indeed daylight time, and yet Willett noticed that most households along his route were shuttered, their inhabitants still abed, idling away, most likely asleep. It was also the high summer of Edwardian liberalism, and if you were a successful Edwardian gentleman and had a bright idea you put it about. Willett qualified on all counts, born on August 10, 1856, and now a builder of fine houses for the quality, in London and the home counties, and so he wrote a pamphlet (Waste of Daylight, 1907) arguing that moving the clocks back (his idea was 20 minutes per week for four weeks in April) would enable people to make better use of daylight, save on energy costs, and (doubtless) be up and about earning enough money to buy “Willett-Built” houses. Willett was by no means the first to have the idea. The Romans did it, and then in 1784 Ben Franklin, noting that polite Frenchmen were abed until noon, expanded on “early to bed and early to rise” with a humorous proposal for progressing Paris time—for progress’s sake, of course, and also to save millions of tons of candle wax. And in the issue, during WWI, the Germans beat the British to it. But on May 21, 1916, the Brits followed suit, just a year after Willett’s death. Still, William Willett is fondly remembered in England for his morning rides and their role in giving us our evenings. Near Petts Wood there is a public house called The Daylight Inn, and deep in the woods you may find the Willett Memorial, a sundial, set permanently to one hour ahead of the Greenwich mean. ©

[Stanley]

Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day. Gifford Pinchot.

Those who measure the rightwards trajectory of the Republican Party like to cite Teddy Roosevelt, he of the big stick, but better candidates can be found in the Pinchot family, notably the brothers Amos and Gifford Pinchot (Gifford was born on August 10, 1865). Their father James was a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist entrepreneur who married well (into a family of Manhattan real estate millionaires), made more money by manufacturing and marketing cheap and luxury wallpapers, and then became a timber baron, laying waste to the remaining eastern woodlands. He was also a leading Republican (in three states!!). As he waxed wealthy, he waxed regretful, especially at the devastation his companies had wrought in the forests. And so James turned to conservation forestry. Gifford (whom he sent to France to study woodland management) would crusade for conservation pro bono, while Amos would look after the family businesses (and apply conservation management principles to its forestry operations). For good measure, James endowed Yale University’s School of Forestry (in 1900). Even before that, Gifford, back from France, had become an active advocate of both forestry management (selective cutting, reseeding, water conservation, multiple usage) and wilderness preservation and, crucially, bosom friend of a young New York politician, Theodore Roosevelt, also a committed conservationist. When TR was vaulted into the presidency in 1901, Gifford followed him to Washington to become (after the passage of enabling legislation) the first (and still the most famous) Chief of the US Forest Service. Pinchot’s strongly-held view that only the national government had the power (not to mention the property) to effect lasting conservation management policies has been abandoned by today’s Republican Party (see its 2016 platform). Its sense of noblesse oblige seems a bit attenuated, too (see its 2016 candidate). ©

[Stanley]

The King of Stop and Go. Vincent Bendix.

Paulette’s great-grandfather Carlsen immigrated—probably illegally—as a contract laborer (a line worker) for the Rock Island Railroad. He lived in Rock Island camps, mainly in western Iowa, and was paid in Rock Island scrip (and thus bought everything at the Rock Island store), but they had too many Carlsens and so his line boss changed his surname to Brown. But he stayed Lutheran. Another immigrant Swede who settled along the Rock Island line (in Moline, Illinois) was the Reverend Jan Bengtsson. For convenience’ sake, he changed both his name (to Bendix) and his religion (to Methodist). His son Vincent Bendix (born in Moline on August 12, 1881) was also inventive, but in a different way. Already at 13 he built a chainless bicycle, then ran away from home at 16 to take a succession of jobs in New York. The two that stuck were maintaining Otis electric elevators and working on Glenn Curtiss’s “Torpedo” motorcycles. He also attended night school (engineering) and in no time was back in Illinois (Chicago), setting up the Bendix Motor Buggy production line (by license, in the Triumph factory). He sold over 6,000 of them, not bad going, but when Triumph went bust he was ruined. Temporarily at a loss, he invented a mechanical starter, adopted by Chevrolet, that made cranking a car easier but by 1919 was paired with an electric starter that made cranking unnecessary. And Vincent Bendix’s fortune was made. But he kept on making it, turning next from car starters to car stoppers (brakes), and then to airplanes, then to helicopters. Vincent built an empire, and a fortune, and frittered most of it away on harebrained promotions and on luxuries for his luxurious houses (from the Palmer mansion in Chicago to the Studebaker estate in South Bend to his very own “Ocean Front” in Palm Beach). Bendix is still a name to reckon with but Vincent sold that, too, to General Motors, in 1937, shortly before his own bankruptcy, in 1939. ©

[Stanley]

God intended women to be outside as well as men, and they do not know what they are missing when they stay cooped up in the house. Annie Oakley.

Our “good old days” have always been mythic and in 2016 they are becoming poisonous. But some have taken a realistic view. Abe Lincoln, asked in 1859 to recount his log cabin youth, replied by quoting Gray’s “Elegy”: “’The short and simple annals of the poor.’ That’s my life and that’s all you or anyone else can make of it.” Another log cabin child (Phoebe Ann Mosey, born in Ohio on August 13, 1860) lived long enough to write her own “annals,” but also had dark memories. Three of her eight siblings died in childhood, and two in their twenties. And at ten Annie was bound out to neighbors whom she remembered as “the wolves.” After two years of hard labor and physical abuse, she ran away, lived rough, was taken in by kindlier folk, and then returned home to help her widowed mother and surviving siblings. How to help? Even as a young child Annie had been good at trapping, and now she used a gun, shooting game and selling it to local restaurants. And so it was that in 1881 she was entered (on a $100 bet, put up by a Cincinnati hotelier with the unlikely name of Jack Frost) in a shooting contest against Frank Butler, a traveling show marksman. This was a big bet (over $2,000 in today’s $$), and Annie won it, apparently on the 25th shot. Within a year Ann Mosey had married Butler (happily and lastingly), joined his traveling roadshow, and made her reputation as “Miss Sure Shot” or, more famously, as Miss Annie Oakley. It was under the “sure shot” sobriquet, in 1885, that she (and Frank) joined Bill Hickok’s Wild West Show. Sure Shot or Annie Oakley, she would perform in Paris and New York, before kings, queens, plutocrats and presidents, but she made almost as much money suing William Randolph Hearst for libel. And, remembering that her good old days had been pretty bad, Annie campaigned for women’s rights (and gave away almost her whole fortune) in order to save others from her own troubles. ©

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The sweetest race I ever rowed in. Jack Beresford, on the double sculls final at Berlin, 1936.

The rowing weekend at Rio seems a good time to recount the amazing feats of the grand old man of British rowing, Jack Beresford, a medal winner in every Olympics from 1920 through 1936. That last win (against a German pair in Hitler’s Berlin Olympics) must have been especially sweet, for Jack was a Pole, but his father (who had emigrated to London as a fairly wealthy youngster) changed his name to Beresford, and Jack followed suit. Born in 1899, Jack rowed at Bedford School, was badly wounded in WWI, and returned to rowing as therapy. By 1920 he was good enough to take silver at Antwerp, in the single sculls, losing by a hair’s breadth to one Jack Kelly, a Philadelphia bricklayer whom the IOC had tried to disqualify because he wasn’t amateur enough. But when they found out Kelly was a rich bricklayer all was well, and the two became fast friends. Kelly’s son, also Jack, went on to win twice at Henley (1947 and 1949, under Beresford’s approving eye), and his daughter Grace went on to win Monaco. Meanwhile. Jack Beresford had won gold in Paris, silver in Amsterdam, gold in Los Angeles, and the Berlin gold, all this time also copping just about every world championship for which he was eligible (in sculls, double sculls, and fours), despite his small stature (at 5’9” and 154 lbs. he was a tiny oarsman). Beresford’s last world championship came in the double sculls at Henley in 1939, against a much younger and bigger Italian pair. The race finished in a dead heat. Tradition required a quick rerun, but in a shower of exhausted good sportsmanship the four oarsmen decided to share the gold. Thirty-one years later, as a race official at Pangbourne, Jack Beresford dived into the Thames to save a schoolboy oarsman, but he failed. The boy’s death haunted him until the day he died. That death came in 1977, the morning after Jack (Wiszniewksi) Beresford had presided over the annual dinner of the Thames Rowing Club. ©

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My eagerness to serve my race and humanity must be my excuse. Henrietta Davis, volunteering to serve in Ignatius Donnelly's campaign for president, 1892.

Those who think that slavery was on its way out by the 1850s should consider the infamous Jacobs Bill in Maryland in 1859-60. It proposed to enslave all the children of Maryland’s (large) freedman population and deport their parents. It narrowly failed to pass a referendum, and one of its leading opponents was George Hackett, a freedman, who might have been best known for that courageous public campaign were he not also the stepfather of Henrietta Vinton Davis, born in Baltimore on August 15, 1860. Henrietta’s mother married Hackett six months later, and together they taught the girl that she was and would be just as good as anyone else. Henrietta was educated in Washington, achieved teaching certificates in the District and her home state, and was teaching in Reconstruction Louisiana at 16. She returned to Washington to care for her mother and worked for Frederick Douglass in the Office of the Recorder of Deeds. But as Douglass realized her talents lay elsewhere, and with his support Henrietta began her career as a public speaker, actor, and civil rights activist. On the circuit, Henrietta Davis performed various black roles (especially in dialect), but she also broke the color line performing Shakespeare and reading Friedrich Schiller and Mark Twain. Politically she was active in white politics and first backed the Populist and then the Socialist parties, but in 1919 she met Marcus Garvey, and was converted to the cause of black nationalism and his Universal Negro Improvement Association. Never a Garvey acolyte (she broke with him finally and forever in 1932), she nevertheless played several prominent roles in the UNIA in the USA, the Caribbean, and Liberia. Henrietta Davis, grand old dame of black pride, died in 1941. She is buried in her native soil, at the National Harmony Memorial Park, Largo, Maryland. ©

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Her style began and ended with herself . . . she scorned to take a mean advantage, and never exercised her powers but for good. An appreciation of Madam Celeste in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1882.

At its best, theatre is where performers make the imaginary real and audiences collude by suspending disbelief. It’s a sort of public confessional, and the immense popularity of theatre in 19th-century America and Britain should caution us against seeing those societies as laced up and prudish. One of the most popular actors of the time, Céline Céleste, suggests much about the imaginative lives of our ancestors. Born in Paris on August 16, 1811, she enjoyed huge success as a dancer a three-year American tour that began in New York in 1827. She made four further US tours (1834-37, 1842, 1851, and 1865), and also toured on the European continent, but her fame was based on the English theatre. There her long liaison with impresario Benjamin Webster (as lover, business partner, and mother of his daughters) seems not to have unduly offended public morality. Indeed her sheer pluck in making, losing, and regaining wealth as an actor-entrepreneur earned her much admiration, including from Charles Dickens (she played Madame Defarge in a famous dramatization of A Tale of Two Cities). But that was a conventional role, and what is really interesting about Céline Céleste is that her most famous roles were those in which she crossed gender and/or ethnic lines (whether as actor or dancer, or both). She was a Gipsy, an American Indian passing as French, a Turk in European mufti. Also, Madame Céleste played men disguised as women, women disguised as men, and in at least one drama she went from girl to male military spy (both French) to boy (Arab) and back again. To add to her mystery and exoticism, her best roles were mute (incidentally allowing her to conceal her relatively poor command of English). So the next time “Victorian prudery” or somesuch phrase is ready to trip off your lips, pray keep silence in honor of Madame Céline Céleste and her mid-Victorian vogue. ©

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The only protection against injustice in man is POWER. Marcus Garvey.

In 1901, impelled by a lynching in his home state, Mark Twain wrote his bitterly ironic “United States of Lyncherdom”. It was accurately titled. American lynching had reached its peak of productivity (230 in 1892, 130 in 1901), and almost always the victims were black. It was also the Jim Crow era, with states (especially in the South) imposing legal segregation in most walks of life (and death and defecation, for cemeteries and toilets were of course included). So it was that many black leaders, most famously Booker T. Washington, urged patience and politeness. “Cast down your buckets where you are,” he advised. Washington thought his own lifetime too dry a season for integration to flourish. Others disagreed, founding the NAACP in 1909 (a year with “only” 82 lynchings) to press for “equality now.” But another response, black separatism, would also prove popular. And along came Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., and his Universal Negro Improvement Association to lead the charge. Born in Jamaica on August 17, 1887, Garvey sharpened his wits as a laborer (skilled and unskilled) and journalist in the islands, Latin America, and Britain, and from 1914 devoted his considerable talents to black nationalism. His American tour, coinciding with the 1917 East St. Louis race riots (further evidence of the virulence of white racism), was a whirlwind success, resulting in an American arm of the UNIA, a national newspaper and various business ventures including a shipping line. Garvey’s endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan and of white racists like Senator Theodore Bilbo ruled him out for most black leaders, who were glad to help the US government investigate Garvey’s activities, orchestrate his deportation, and in due course celebrate his death, which came in London, in 1940. But Garveyism still flourishes, a persistent measure of our failures.©

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Bridge Over Jordan. Title of Amelia Platts Boynton's autobiography, 1991.

Various August 18 anniversaries remind us that our democratic rights were not easily won. In 1911, August 18 was the birthing day of Amelia Platts, in Selma, Alabama. On Amelia’s 9th birthday, in 1920, neighboring Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, a victory of the women’s suffrage movement. Alabama had already ratified (in 1919), but neither state legislature had Amelia in mind, for she was a female of African descent, and both states had (with malice aforethought) made it nearly impossible for black people to vote. It was a measure of Amelia’s courage that she did qualify to vote in 1934, but most of her Selma neighbors could not or did not dare to do that. Then, on Amelia’s 52nd birthday, August 18, 1963, James Meredith became the first black person to graduate from the University of Mississippi, and in the same year Amelia (now Mrs. Boynton) took up a leadership role in a voter registration drive in Selma. There was much resistance, for Selma’s white minority did not want to concede freedom, and in 1965 SNCC and SCLC came to town and (with Martin Luther King and John Lewis) Amelia began to walk across the Edmund Pettis Bridge on her way to Montgomery, only to be turned back by Alabama’s state police. Amelia lay on the bridge, beaten unconscious. Those scenes of violence and bloodshed produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (and a successful march to Montgomery for Amelia). Then in March 2015 Amelia (aged 103 and now Mrs. Robinson) marched, or rather wheeled her way, across that same bridge with President Barack Obama, whose guest she had been at that year’s State of the Union address. By the time that Amelia Platts Boynton Robinson died (8 days after celebrating her 104th birthday), she had seen struggle and, through struggle, had made progress. You can read a bit of her story in a memorial plaque on Boyntons Street, in her old home town. It’s named for Amelia and her first husband, Sam, who was also brave. ©

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All in Good Time. The autobiography (2000) of George Daniels.

If you are one of those mortals obsessed by time, forever glancing guiltily at your watch, August 19 is your day, the birthdate of three famous clock- and watchmakers, each of whose heritage timepieces now sell for millions. Two were born within a few years of each other, Seth Thomas (Connecticut, August 19, 1785) and Edward Dent (London, August 19, 1790). But theirs was an era of craftsmanship, and who would expect the third to be a child of the 20th century? But George Daniels, master watchmaker (and historian of watchmaking) was born in England on August 19, 1926. Born illegitimately, Daniels learned to prefer childhood neglect to abuse, though he suffered from both and often escaped to the streets of London. But while in the army (1944-47) Daniels applied his mechanical talents to repairing comrades’ watches. Demobbed, he used his army gratuity (£50) to set himself up as a watch repairman. It was not a promising trade but his skills, and a chance meeting, brought him into the world of antique clocks and watches, and in 1965 he jointly authored Watches, now a standard work, and became associated with the Breguet Company of Paris. Offered a place with Breguet, Daniels decided to go it alone, continued to study and publish in horology (e.g. The Art of Breguet, 1973), but more importantly made watches and invented ingenious improvements in watch mechanisms, the most important one (an “escapement” wheel needing no lubrication) was adopted by Omega in the 1990s. He made very few watches (37 in total), and only once on commission, but they sold extremely well, and at his death (in 2011) George Daniels, skilled watchmaker born in poverty, left an educational trust (to City University, London) worth in excess of £20 million, mainly from the auction sale of Daniels’ collections of vintage watches (including a couple of his own) and classic motor cars. ©

Bob wrote later:

I gleaned some of my information from Daniels’ video reflections on his life. It’s on a wonderful website, “Web of Stories.” His recollections of his childhood, alternately humorous and harrowing, are particularly interesting and will take up maybe 15 minutes of your time.
The site itself is a hidden treasure, mainly reminiscences of famous Brits (e.g. Francis Crick, Katherine Whitehorn) but with a few yanks thrown in for good measure (Philip Roth, for example) and quite a few who traveled from one to the other. I must some day listen to Ernst Mayr’s reflections on this site.
George Daniels’ life stories are at http://www.webofstories.com/play/george.daniels/1

In about 85 2-3 minute clips.
Bob

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Mark the spirit of invention everywhere, thy rapid patents, Thy continual workshops . . . Walt Whitman.

Back in the day when you checked your tractor’s fuel level by dipping a stick into the tank, my uncle Ed invented a cheap and easily-installed fuel gauge for tractors, consisting of a small carburetor attachment and a short length of clear tubing. Ed was an inventive farmer, but this one was ill-timed, patented in the same year that almost all new tractors came out with modern gauges already installed. A luckier inventor was Jerome L. Murray, born in New York City on August 20, 1912. He was already inventing before he went to MIT. Aged 15, he devised a small generator so farmers could listen to (and, of course, buy) radios. Almost all farms were then without power, and in 1927 Crosby Radio paid young Murray good money for his windmill-antenna-generator. Coming out of MIT, Murray went to work for a Cleveland engineering firm and kept on inventing. But he was paid just one dollar ($1) for each invention, and after amassing $16 in invention bonuses Jerome set up for himself and embarked on a life of (his own) inventions. Before it all ended (he died in 1991), Jerome Murray took out 75 patents. Many of us use them, or have used them, starting with the TV antenna rotor (he made millions on this one) and moving on through the audible pressure cooker (brilliant!!), the high-speed dental drill, the electric carving knife, the power-adjusted car seat, and the modern airport boarding ramp (for those who remember boarding planes in rain, snow, wind, searing heat, and/or freezing cold). Murray was proudest of his peristaltic pump, devised for keeping patients alive during heart surgery. “Because it saved lives,” Jerome gave that one away (presumably for less than a dollar) to Johns Hopkins Medical School. Its basic design is now used for everything from kidney dialysis to the canning of baby peas. ©