BOB'S BITS

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"Love Among the Butterflies: The Travels and Adventures of a Victorian Lady," diary entries edited by W. F. Cater, 1982.

All diarists ‘edit’ their journals in the loose sense that they decide what to write, but some edit them post facto. John Winthrop’s diary, sometimes called the “History of New England, 1630-1649,” is one such document, often more a justification than a journal. But Margaret Fountaine’s diaries, while very self-consciously written, were kept inviolate, an unchanging record to which she often referred as an aide-memoire of what she did, where, and what she had thought about it. She kept diaries from age 16 to age 78. By her direction they were to remain ‘sealed’ until 1978, the 100th anniversary of her journals’ birthing day. So on April 15, 1978 (one hopes with due ceremony) the 12 volumes were unpacked, opened, and the reading began. Everyone knew she had been an extraordinary person, a world traveler and an enthusiastic lepidopterist, a collecting obsession she followed for money and for love. Margaret Elizabeth Fountaine was born on May 16, 1862, in Norwich, England. Her diaries revealed that her “ruling passion [was] the love of independence” (annual ‘accounting,’ April 15, 1883). In 1891, an uncle’s modest bequest made that independence plausible, and she carefully husbanded both the capital and her collecting income to travel, often alone and into very wild and inhospitable places: Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America. She often rode horseback (never side-saddle!!) but preferred a bicycle when conditions allowed. Whatever “independence” meant to her, it didn’t exclude men. Her first escape from home was to pursue a man (a chorister at Norwich cathedral). He left her in the lurch, and once a British consular official in Turkey threatened her with a breach of promise suit, but from about 1901 she normally, though not always, lived and traveled with Khalil Neimy, a Syrian Greek. After his death in 1929, it was back to butterflies, alone, whether for her personal collection (22,000 specimens) or for museums and other scientists. She died at Mt. Saint Benedict Abbey in Trinidad, where she’d gone on another collecting expedition, aged 78. ©

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"The highest powers in our nature are our sense of moral excellence, the principle of reason and reflection, benevolence to our fellow creatures and our love of the Divine Being." Edward Jenner, MD.

Having ‘done’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu only last week, it seems right to do Edward Jenner today, for it’s his birth anniversary and it was he who, thinking long and hard about Lady Mary’s role in bringing smallpox inoculation to Britain, introduced a safer and surer immunization procedure. Edward Jenner was born a vicar’s son in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, on May 17, 1749. Both his parents’ families were of the respectable gentry, and most of Jenner’s life was spent in and around Berkeley, where he established his medical practice, married a cousin, and looked after his properties. But Jenner did spend nearly three years in London (1770-1772), during which he apprenticed to the eminent surgeon John Hunter and made valuable contacts with men of science, notably Joseph Banks. These contacts, which Jenner maintained after his return to Berkeley, help to explain his notably scientific (and social) conduct as a country doctor. Jenner’s practice included a regular 400 square mile circuit, on horseback, on the western fringes of the Cotswolds, hilly country and long rides, and in at least two places he was the focus of “medico-convivial” societies which met fairly regularly in country inns. There and in his correspondence he discussed (among other convivial subjects) the art and science of medicine. A beneficiary of (and sufferer under) Lady Montagu’s “variolation” method of inoculating with actual smallpox, Jenner interested himself in local stories of those who’d contracted cowpox and then, it seemed, never fell prey to the far deadlier smallpox. Finally, in the 1780s, he experimented more thoroughly, exposing 28 known cowpox survivors to smallpox. He began deliberate cowpox vaccinations as early as 1796, published his findings in 1798, and his reputation was made, with an MD ‘by repute’ from St. Andrews and his work published in the USA and translated into Latin and five modern languages. Jenner was not the very first to use cowpox pustules in this way, and his findings were not universally accepted, but by consensus he is today the one person credited with a safe and sure inoculation against the killer disease of smallpox. ©

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"He was so far ahead of his contemporaries that no one could understand or appreciate his work." From a 1996 retrospective on Wilhelm Hofmeister in The American Journal of Botany.

It was only in the 19th century that the words “science” and “scientist” came into general use as descriptors of a profession and its professionals. But not all who practiced science’s special way of thinking were professionals, for still the 19th was a century in which science, like many sports, was practiced by “gentlemen and players.” Among the gentlemen scientists of the time was of course Charles Darwin, but there were many others, including Wilhelm Friedrich Benedikt Hofmeister, born in Leipzig on May 18, 1824. His father was an established publisher of practical bent, and so sent his son to vocational school (the Germans, almost as literal-minded as the English, called it a Realschule), and young Wilhelm proved as practical as his dad, leaving Realschule at 15 to take up a publishing apprenticeship in Hamburg. But Wilhelm had already acquired a fascination with plants, and as he moved up in the book trade he continued (every morning between 4AM and 6AM) his experiments in plant morphology. Terribly myopic, he depended on fine microscopes, and so made remarkable advances in understanding plant physiology and its functions. At 25, he published on plant embryology. Then, at 27 (1851) came a book on sexual reproduction in plants which led immediately to an honorary doctorate for Hofmeister and did much to prepare the German world for its relatively ready reception of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Indeed Hofmeister was an instant convert on first reading the Origin. His own researches went on, in their turn influencing Darwin’s later work, and finally resulting in Hofmeister’s appointment to prestigious botany professorships, first at Heidelberg (1863) and then at Tübingen (1872). He died in 1877, still somewhat underappreciated in his time, although Mendel would use his work to begin his genetic experiments with sweet peas. Today, this gentleman scientist is seen as standing on a par with Charles Darwin, an intellectual pioneer of great foresight for whom science had remained a gentlemanly pursuit. ©

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"What passes for cookery in England is an abomination." Virginia Woolf, 1927.

If you’ve not yet seen Fawlty Towers (BBC, 1975, 1979) you must. It’s streaming on Britbox, thus still providing excruciating comedy for those who can bear it: every horror story you’ve ever wanted to believe about the English private hotel, its hospitality (if at all present, grudging and calculating), its food (veggies boiled to mush, meat from workmen’s boots), and its proprietor, in this case the inappropriately manic Basil Fawlty, confident of his hotel’s glorious future but weighted down by its present realities (which include his wife Sybil). But today there are in England non- or anti-Fawlty Towers. Of several possibilities, let’s pick Miller Howe, at Bowness, overlooking Windermere in the English Lakes, for we’ve been there, stayed there, dined there. First a private mansion, it was an OK hotel when in 1971 it was taken over by John Tovey, and for over a quarter century he made it into a place where one could go assured of pleasant, unruffled service, somewhat over-lovely bedrooms, and the sort of food that actually made headline news, though never (as far as I know) for ptomaine. John Tovey was born in Barrow-in-Furness on May 19, 1933, a working-class boy in a working-class town, where he endured a grim childhood from which his first burning ambition was to get away. He did that, to Southern Rhodesia, but came back, first as a theatre manager in Barrow but then as general dogsbody and apprentice chef at Sharrow Bay, the Lake District’s other fine hotel, on Ullswater. Then on to Miller Howe, which he bought for £36,500 and transformed into a £2.5 million business, famous in particular for its evening meals (always a set menu) but pretty amazing, too, for breakfast. You didn’t need to stay there to eat there, but it helped. The idea of driving home (in our case, 50 miles) after a Miller Howe meal was the only unattractive thing about the experience. Tovey sold Miller Howe in 1998 and moved to South Africa with his partner Paolo Rebello. He died in 2018, widely mourned by lovers of fine food served with panache, which is often the best condiment and forever beyond the reach of Basil Fawlty. ©

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"One man's vulgarity is another man's lyric." Justice John Marshall Harlan II, 1971, in overturning a state of California conviction for obscenity, Cohen v. California.

The other day a question from my great-niece Clara set me to thinking about family history, not family history as a discipline but the histories of your family and mine. Families are vessels freighted with historical cargo; understanding your family’s course can tell you a great deal about the history of other families, of all families. And some families’ histories can reveal interesting (if sometimes poetic) truths about the past. Take for instance American legal history’s two John Marshall Harlans. The first (1833-1911), was the author of the sole dissent in the segregation case, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the Supreme Court legitimized the bastard notion of “separate but equal.” Justice Harlan wrote, famously if in 1896 futilely, that the Constitution was color-blind. The second was his grandson, sometimes called John Marshall Harlan II, born on May 20, 1899, who as a lawyer, an indefatigable prosecutor, and judge was ever conscious of his grandfather’s career and significance. Indeed, Harlan II always used Grandpa Harlan’s gold pocket watch. Harlan II also served as Supreme Court justice, 1955-1971. He was nominated by President Eisenhower to be a conservative counterweight to the “Warren Court,” and indeed he was, adopting the policy and in a sense the persona of ‘judicial restraint.’ He came on to the court too late to participate in the unanimous reversal of Plessy, in the 1954 Brown v. Topeka case, so we cannot know for sure whether this conservative justice would have joined in what was a vindication of his grandfather’s lone dissent. Harlan’s whole career makes this a difficult, intricate question, but the nine southern senators who voted against his confirmation, in 1955, were in no doubt about his commitment to civil rights, and they were correct. John Marshall Harlan II agreed that the 14th amendment made the constitution color-blind and in a sense case-blind when it came to equal enjoyment of First Amendment civil rights; that was its original purpose and also its current social and moral utility. To extend its reach was therefore consistent with the idea of ‘judicial restraint.’ Perhaps it was also the view of the man who carried his grandfather’s gold watch in his vest pocket, close to his heart. ©

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"I give myself this advice. Never fear truth, be it ever so contrary to inclination and feeling." Elizabeth Fry.

Early Quaker writings ran heavily to martyrology, for the movement in its infancy produced plenty of martyrs, testifying to how far men and women could be moved by their inner light. But in the 18th century Quakers settled down. Many Friends translated their moral energies into sugar, chocolate, banking, the new sciences, and even steam engines. But that Quaker conscience remained to stir many into battle against the ills of the world, and in such battles Friends were not always genteel. There are many illustrations of this truth, but the title of paragon belongs to Elizabeth Gurney Fry, born into a large Quaker family in Norwich, England on May 21, 1780. Her father was one of those Quaker bankers, and as rich Quaker girls often did she married a wealthy Quaker merchant, Joseph Fry (whose family was in the sugar business). They had 11 children in 21 years (seeing 10 into adulthood), 1801-1822, but right in the middle of all those kids, in 1813, Elizabeth visited Newgate Prison, was horrified, and set herself to the task of prison reform. There was a brief interlude when the Fry and Gurney families banded together (as Quaker families did) to rescue Joseph’s business, but from 1816 Elizabeth Fry wife and mother became also Elizabeth Fry tireless reformer, advocate for women prisoners then prisoners generally, tireless foe of inhumane punishments and conditions, opponent of transportation, and (among other things) the first woman to testify in parliament (in 1818). When Joseph again went bankrupt, Elizabeth’s brother bankrolled her efforts, which branched out from prisons and punishment to embrace (inter alia) antipoverty, abolition of slavery, women’s education, and peace. By the time Elizabeth Fry died, in 1845, she was famous, standing in perhaps as the nation’s friendly conscience, and certainly a person known to have the admiration of the young Queen Victoria and of Robert Peel, the politician Victoria was learning to respect. Today, memorials to Elizabeth Fry pepper England and the world beyond; but in 2016 the Tory government took her face off the £5 note, replacing it with Churchill’s—no Quaker he. ©

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"Tintin! Are you dead? Say yes or now but answer me!" Snowy the terrier.

A ‘cartoon’ was orginally a cartone, Italian for a particular sort of paper, but in the Renaissance it was transmuted into a preliminary draft of a painting, and these days a cartoon by, say, a Raphael or a da Vinci would be worth a fortune if you could find one outside of a museum. But in Belgium there is today a whole museum dedicated to the work and memory of a modern cartoonist, La musée Hergé. It’s a beautiful, unflinchingly modernist building, quite substantial, with Hergé’s copyright signature emblazoned on the front elevation, and in and around the building you can follow the career of the cartoonist himself and (probably more to the point) of his most famous creation, Tintin. Tintin was and remains a very young journalist whose courage and curiosity keep getting him into scrapes from which he always escapes, sometimes by his own wit, sometimes thanks to Milou (“Snowy” in Anglophone editions), a wire-haired terrier with an “unquenchable” thirst for whisky. “Hergé” is literally a penned name, and it belonged to Georges Prosper Remi, born to working-class parents in Brussels on May 22, 1907. He may have had an unhappy childhood, but he learned Belgium’s two languages, found in scouting an enjoyable escape, and began to exercise his journalistic and artistic talents in Jamais assez, his ambiguously titled school newspaper. Remi tried several pen-names, including ‘The Curious Fox,’ before settling on RG (pronounced hergé in French). Tintin took a little longer to evolve, first appearing (1929) in a reactionary Catholic newspaper and carrying a predictably right-wing (and racist) ideology. But as Tintin waxed popular and Hergé matured, Europe was transfixed by the Hitler horror, and Tintin developed a more anti-authoritarian bias that stood him (and Hergé) quite well in a future that has now stretched to over 120 million Tintin books in 30 languages, a huge European fan base, and, as per above, an impressive museum dedicated to the art and to the (populistic?) charm of the cartoon. I personally would prefer an American museum dedicated to Walt Kelly (1913-1973) and his “Pogo” cartoons, but I apologize for my parochialism. ©

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"I would rather die upon yonders gallows than live my life in slavery." Samuel Sharpe.

There is some dispute about the birth date of Archer Samuel Sharpe, known as Sam Sharpe, but none about his end, for on May 23, 1832, he was hanged for his leadership role in Jamaica’s last and largest slave rebellion, known as the Baptist War or the Christmas Rebellion. I first learned about him from a Lancaster student, a woman from Guyana, whose undergraduate Independent Study on Jamaica brought her a brilliant first-class degree and me a better understanding of both West Indian and North American slave systems. In 19th-century Jamaica, as in 18th-century Virginia, Baptist churches were among the few places where whites and blacks experienced some forms of equality in status and equity in process. Sharpe, who took his surname from the man who owned him, was born enslaved on a Montego Bay plantation. He was allowed to become educated, and became a leader among slaves and a devout Baptist. He flourished in the church led by an English Baptist missionary, Thomas Burchell, and in the 1820s Sam Sharpe was ordained as a preacher and elder in the congregation. Sharpe’s experience of equality and parity among his Baptist brethren contributed further to his local reputation and his self-respect. Meanwhile, in Britain, the emancipation movement was reaching its climax. Reading the reports, Sharpe believed (mistakenly) that parliament had abolished slavery, and in that belief organized fellow slaves to protest working conditions, always atrocious but brutal during sugar harvest. But it was harvest; the planters reacted with force, and what had been intended as a strike became a rebellion involving, at its height, perhaps 60,000 slaves. It was put down, savagely; that, and the public brutalities of the “justice” that followed undoubtedly contributed to the final Emancipation vote of 1833. Sam Sharpe was among some 350 slaves who were hanged in that aftermath. Justice was finally done in 1975, when Sharpe was named one Jamaica’s seven National Heroes. His likeness appears on the nation’s $50 bill, his name in several institutions and on many monuments. The Rev. Thomas Burchell is similarly remembered. ©

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"She remained at her post." The last words of the George Cross citation for Barbara Jane Harrison, 1969.

Readers of Schindler’s Ark (1982; it became Schindler’s List in its American edition and as a Spielberg film) encounter a realistic depiction of courage. In Thomas Keneally’s novel, Otto Schindler’s courage begins in small things, decencies you might call them, and although somewhat carelessly tended his courage grows larger with each passing decency, each “right thing to do,” until it becomes giant, magnificent, overpowering to witness. However rare, that kind of courage inspires hope as well as wonder, for it is explicable. One of the lucky things about being an historian (or a writer of anniversary notes) is that one runs into those stories with encouraging frequency. But then there are stories of courage that are harder to explain, such as that of Jane Harrison, born in Bradford, Yorkshire, on May 24, 1945. She seems to have been an ordinarily good girl in church, and she performed well enough in school to learn French and to nanny, first in Switzerland and then San Francisco. Enjoying the travel, she became a BOAC (British Airways) steward, Heathrow-based. On April 8, 1968, she was assigned to the tourist class cabin on a long-distance flight (Sydney by several stops). Just after takeoff, the plane’s second port-side engine exploded and the wing caught fire. By the time her plane crash-landed the fire had spread, but the flight crew had tutored the passengers in what to do, and the evacuation went well. Harrison directed operations at the rear of the plane. When the escape chute failed she encouraged passengers to jump; if they hesitated she pushed them out. She then returned to the interior to save the last four passengers, including an 8-year old girl and a disabled elderly woman. She was last seen disappearing into the smoke and flames. All five died. Harrison was awarded the George Cross; to this date she is the only woman to receive the award in peacetime. Several memorials and the George Cross citation testify to her act of courage, but they do not explain it. ©

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"His mourners will be outcast men // And outcasts always mourn." From the inscription on Oscar Wilde's tomb, Père Lachaise, Paris.

Robert Baldwin Ross’s name testifies to the Canadian source of his wealth, for his father was once Attorney General and his maternal grandfather the Prime Minister of Upper Canada (Ontario). But Ross, who was born in France on May 25, 1869, spent only his infancy in Canada When his father died in 1871, his mother Augusta Elizabeth took Ross and his four siblings to London. Ross, a sickly child, was privately educated but did go up to Cambridge in 1888. There he was bullied, badly, and left college never to return. His homosexuality was probably at issue; but his outspokenness on several other issues had outraged some; a reactionary professor was involved in the bullying. Ross returned to London, made peace with his family, and with the encouragement of his elder brother John (already a leading literary critic) embarked on a distinguished career as art critic, scholar, and buyer. In those roles he enjoyed eminence, not only as a trustee for the Tate; notably, he helped build the collections of new public museums in Johannesburg and Melbourne. He was preparing to travel to Australia to open Melbourne’s National Gallery when he died in 1918. Ross’s literary endeavors included his friendship with and encouragement of the “war poets” (notably Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen) who found in Ross a friend and in his luxurious London flat a refuge from the horrors of the trenches. What Ross is famous for today is, however, his friendship with and loyalty to Oscar Wilde, which began in 1886 and may be said to have ended, when, finally, in 1950 and in accord with Ross’s will, his ashes were placed in Wilde’s monument at the Père Lachaise Cemetery on the 50th anniversary of Wilde’s death. Ross had commissioned the monument (from Jason Epstein) in 1908, and at his request Epstein had designed into it a receptacle for that purpose. Ross was Wilde’s literary executor and undertook the monumental tasks of editing and publishing The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde (14 vols., also 1908). As a sort of postscript, Ross’s career included a long and fascinating legal campaign against Wilde’s prosecutors. It was successful, but that’s another story. ©

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"The plane dipped slightly. 'Mon estomac,' thought Hercule Poirot, and closed his eyes determinedly." Death in the Clouds, 1935.

When Hercule Poirot flies from Paris to London in Death in the Clouds (1935), there is of course a murder and Poirot of course suffers a bit of air sickness. His was in a Handley-Page HP42, a large 4-engine biplane. With two engines mounted in the upper wing, just above the cabin, noise alone would have been sufficient to upset Poirot’s finicky estomac. But biplanes were the order of the day, and if Agatha Christie had let Poirot fly French, he might have been in a Farman Goliath, even more ungainly, like a bus with two wings. It was used by French airlines, but its inventor was British, born Henry Farman, in Paris, on May 26, 1874. His father was Paris correspondent for a London paper, his mother was French; both had money, life in Paris was good, and soon Henry became Henri, young man about town and, once he’d given up life as an artist, a noted sportsman and dare-devil. He drove racing motorcycles and motor cars (as soon as they became available) and was fascinated by them as machines. So he was up the air, literally, almost as soon as airplanes were available, and in 1907 he and his brothers started building the things, making them better, faster, more reliable. Being first in anything aeronautical is disputed ground, but Henri may have invented ailerons, thus addressing the killing problem of lateral flight, he may have been the first to take up a passenger, and he certainly won prizes for the first long flights (first one, then two kilometers). The Farman firm was known for its innovations, and after supplying the French with warplanes in WWI (notably the Farman III), he turned to passenger planes and longer-distance routes. The Goliath entered service in 1921 and flew (sometimes with Henri Farman at the controls) not only to London and Brussels but also to North Africa. Goliaths were still in service in 1935, the year the DC-3 took its maiden flight. As for Farman, he lived long enough (he died in 1958) to fly in passenger jets. If he did, he must have found it a tame experience. ©

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The Cellist of Sarajevo

Of all the terrors of the Yugoslav civil wars, the Siege of Sarajevo stands out not just for its cruelties but for its cynicism. It lasted for nearly four years, from April 1992 to September 1996; a whole city, once famed for its culture and its diversities, held hostage to the genocidal dreams of the surrounding army’s Serb commanders. At least four of those men have been brought to justice before the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague, two of them now serving life sentences. Although among modern horrors it didn’t account for much (‘only’ 6,000 civilians were killed), the existential intensity of daily life in the besieged city—where getting one’s daily bread could bring death by sniper fire—has inspired tributes from the world of art. And there was one tribute on the spot, when on May 27, 1992, mortar fire directed at a food market ration queue killed 22 civilians. For 22 days after, in full view of Serbian snipers and mortar batteries, dressed soberly and formally as if for a concert, a lone cellist sat on the spot of the carnage, amidst the rubble and the memorial roses, and played Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. The brave soloist was Vedran Smailović, then just 36 but already principal cellist of the Sarajevo Symphony. His father, also a musician, had started a “Music to the People” series in Sarajevo; perhaps this was Smailović’s way of carrying on that mission. But his reckless bravery (in full view and in range of snipers and mortar batteries) and the music’s descending, melancholy melody caught and held—for a time—the world’s notice. Many thought him mad; he protested that he was trying to be a sane person in a mad world. Intending no spotlight for himself, he soon escaped to a quieter life; Smailović still lives today in at attic flat in Northern Ireland, at Warrenpoint, overlooking Carlingford Loch, where he writes music and, when he’s not playing chess, plays cello. A tribute to him will be played by Yo-Yo Ma today on NPR, perhaps to refresh our sinfully short memories. ©

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"Tell people the truth, they laugh. The truth is so tragic they have to pretend it's a joke." Lucille Kallen.

We were the first house on our street (in 1950) to get a television. It was a short street. The TV was tall, ungainly, with just a 16” screen. It had at the back a “color converter” which was why close lightning strikes made the Magnavox flicker color. It also flickered into color most Saturday nights, for 90 minutes of Your Show of Shows, starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. My parents loved it for its wit. I, aged 7 to 11, admired the stars’ double-takes and the plasticity of their faces. What we all should have been aware of (and I certainly was not) was the “Writers’ Room,” by all accounts (including Neil Simon’s play, Laughter on the 23rd Floor) a loudish nuthouse full of geniuses, including Simon himself, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, and Mel Tolkin. And there was one woman, Lucille Kallen, “a real writer” Reiner called her, perhaps to distinguish her from the male fakes who made all the noise. Kallen was born in Los Angeles on May 28, 1922, and got her training in how to make Coca’s character so memorable by being orphaned, brought up by her grandparents in Toronto, and then being sent to the Juilliard when everyone but she thought her a piano prodigy. But both her fingers and her practices were too short; Lucille dropped out and found her métier and her long-time writing partner, Tolkin, writing Saturday night revues at Camp Tamiment, a mainly Jewish resort in the Poconos that also gave us Woody Allen, Carol Burnett, Coca, and even Danny Kaye. Kallen also found her husband there, Herbert Engel, the less-sparkling but steady guy who washed the dishes and jerked the sodas. It was during their courtship that Your Show of Shows took off and flew, and one gets a sense of their marriage humor in lines that were crafted by Kallen.

Imogene (weary, downcast, busily housewifing): Where is the sense of adventure? Where is the fun? Where is the romance?

Sid: (surprised, immediately defensive): How do I know where you put things? I can’t even find my shirt!

Many scripts and six novels later, in 1999, Lucille Kallen got her due in a generous, affectionate New York Times obituary, including tributes from Writers’ Room survivors. Herbert, their children and four grandchildren also survived her. And so did her lines. ©

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"Sometimes a lady likes to have some fun." Rachel Weisz as Sarah Churchill, in The Favourite, 2018, referring her treatment of Robert Harley.

On his 30th birthday, 360 years ago, Charles Stuart entered London as the new and restored king. His remark on the crowd’s enthusiasm (that it proved him a fool for staying away so long) predicted the cynicisms of his reign (1660-1685). Meanwhile, on that same day, May 29, 1660, Sarah Jennings was born a few miles north of London. As Sarah Churchill, ultimately Duchess of Marlborough, she would survive the Stuarts and her husband the duke and prove that a woman could be as great a courtier as any man. At several points in her career, especially during the reign of Queen Anne (Charles Stuart’s niece who ruled from 1702-1713) Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, would supply cynics with a surplus of delights. Lasting delights: as witness the 2018 film The Favourite, wherein Sarah Churchill (played brilliantly by Rachel Weisz) cynically exploits her friendship with Queen Anne and then is displaced and discarded by an even more cynical Abigail Masham (Emma Stone). Never mind the film, though. From Sarah’s secret marriage to John Churchill, when both were really minor players at court, to her developing relationships with King James’s daughters Mary and Anne, and beyond, her rise now seems inevitable even through the upsets of another revolution which deposed James and brought Mary, then Anne, to the throne and gave rise to a precociously bitter and (for the players) hazardous political struggle between “Tories” and “Whigs.” The Churchills’ periods of disgrace and returns to favor were of course punctuated by John Churchill’s great military triumphs (notably at Blenheim, 1704, and Ramilies, 1706), but through it all Sarah kept her wits and maintained her balance. After the Hanovers acceded to the throne (1713) and the duke died (1722), Sarah finished the work at Blenheim and, more importantly, shepherded the Marlborough fortune and saw to the very advantageous marriages of her grandchildren. Holding the reins until shortly before her death aged 84, Sarah has as much right as her husband to be seen as the founder of the Churchill dynasty. ©

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"I have often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress . . . and at last I resolved to launch myself . . . and float whither it would lead me." Thoreau, 1849.

There is a sentence, a mere subordinate clause, in Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (first published on May 30, 1849), which years ago caught my eye. There he wrote about “shoals of migratory fishes . . . their scales gleaming in the sun.” It’s a word picture he’d painted a few years before when he’d been asked, likely by Ralph Waldo Emerson, to write a review of a new natural history for The Dial, the Transcendentalist journal. The book was full to the brim of anatomical detail and species behavior, each vertebrate classified (as per Linnaeus) by its names and in accordance with its imagined relationship with other species. Thoreau liked all that, and praised it warmly, but it missed something. Zeroing in on a passage about a small migratory fish, and its exacting biography, Thoreau pointed out that the author had missed entirely the mystery and wonder the thing, something (Thoreau thought) that one might catch from the silver scales’ reflection when the fish “turned suddenly in the stream.” For Thoreau, nature was to be studied and understood in some scientific sense, but it was also Nature, elemental, fundamental, a presence whose lessons were there to be wondered at. So in this book, ostensibly the journal of a boat and walking trip taken in 1839 by Thoreau and his brother John, there were certainly passages about the wonders of nature (and some science, too), but Thoreau used these to launch into reflections, speculations, arguments about life as it was being lived—and, he thought, too often missed—in his contemporary New England. In short, A Week on the rivers was much like Thoreau’s life. I find it pleasing that it was written during Henry’s sojourns in his $28.12½ cabin at Walden, and that it appeared in the same year he published his “Essay on Civil Disobedience.” In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Henry Thoreau tells us all we need to know about silver shad and rather more than that about how to live our lives as citizens and as human beings. ©

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"The government may maim by body by the torture of forcible feeding . . . but they cannot take away my freedom of spirit." May Billinghurst, on trial, 1913.

Like most words, “cripple” has a long history and many usages, including (oddly local, in the middle Atlantic states) a dense, swampy thicket. One now ruled obsolete (by the Oxford English Dictionary) is “cripple” adjectivally, as in ‘my cripple grandma,’ to indicate (for instance) that one’s grandparent has lost the use of her legs. But in Edwardian England, folk were not so circumspect, and so it was that May Billinghurst was known (to many newspaper readers) as “the cripple suffragette.” One supposes that this was because she was crippled, and she was a suffragette. Rosa May Billinghurst was born on May 31, 1875. Named after her mother, Rosa, she was ‘May’ throughout her long life. Very early in that life, at 5 months, she contracted polio, which left her without use of her legs. Her father (a banker) and her mother (heiress of a piano-making dynasty) decided to make that a challenge rather than a tragedy, and as her younger siblings (7 of them) came along, they fell in with it. Hers was a do-gooder family, and so, very early on, was she, social work in a workhouse, teaching Sunday School at her church, and active in the “Band of Hope” temperance movement. So it was perhaps not surprising that, when the suffragette movement came along, she joined up. What was unusual was that May Billinghurst became one of the more militant members of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), joining in their demonstrations and in their calculated lawlessness. Although she was always seated (spectacularly, in her custom-built ‘cripple tricycle’) she seemed to be always there. She was alleged to have hid stones under her blanket for the WSPU’s window-smashing campaign, and was found guilty. She went to prison for that, and at other times for other offenses, and suffered brutally from force-feeding during a prison hunger strike. But the best part of her story is that in one imprisonment (30 days at hard labor) the prison authorities balked. How does one make a ‘cripple lady’ do hard labor? May Billinghurst had already figured that one out, emphatically, with her own body. She went on at her hard labors after her death, in 1953, having willed her crippled frame for scientific use. ©

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“I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.” Morgan Freeman.

Morgan Porterfield Freeman is 83 today, having been born (in Memphis, TN) on June 1, 1937. I think he’s still in good health, despite the ill-effects of a car accident (in 2008) and an occasionally bad case of fibromyalgia. I’ve only seen Freeman in his old man roles, but he was a long while breaking into the big time. He acted in school plays, in Greenwood, Mississippi, and then Memphis (again), but his overriding ambition was to be a jet pilot. So he enlisted in the US Air Force in 1955, but the Air Force made him into an Automatic Tracking Radar Repairman, Airman 1st Class. On his own steam he subsequently qualified as a jet pilot, flying his own personal airplanes, which offered him some satisfaction. But that acting bug had never left him, and after the Air Force Freeman financed himself with a clerical job while attending acting school. He also learned to dance, a seeming detour, but it got him his first stage job (in 1964) and then in an all-black rendition of Hello, Dolly! But it was a long pull for a tall black guy with a deep voice, and Freeman himself considers 1987 his breakthrough year when, at 50, he played support as ‘Fast Black’ in Street Smart, a crime film. Since then, it’s fair to say, he’s become famous on film and on stage, even playing God. The voice and manner that got him that role also has made him a natural commentator for the Discovery TV series on physics, Through the Wormhole. In our political age, he’s been as engaged as anyone in Hollywood but has been rather unpredictable, which I would like to think pleases him and has found him some odd friendships, among them a long working relationship with Clint Eastwood. He’s a great admirer of Nelson Mandela, and tried to get Mandela’s autobiography filmed. Then, in 2007, Freeman purchased the film rights to John Carlin’s brilliant Playing the Enemy, about how Mandela ‘played’ the Afrikaner nation through his support of the national rugby side in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. In the film of the book, Invictus (2009), Eastwood directed and Freeman played Mandela. It may not have been his best old man’s role, but it was brilliantly done, accent, bearing, attitude. In that role, Freeman was Mandela, bowed down with age and yet triumphant. If you haven’t seen it, today would be a good time. ©

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"And the band played on."

When quite young, I read about the Titanic disaster; the book was a little heavy on the courage theme, less so on the misjudgments, but graven deep in my memory was the story of the ship’s band, playing “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship sank. That the band was playing has been confirmed, although which melody has been disputed. The resolution is that since they played for two hours, some survivors heard “Nearer My God” while right at the end others heard Verlaine’s “Chanson d’Automne.” Not a few heard “Alexander’s Rag-Time Band.” It may be that they went through their scheduled repertoire. The bandmaster of that brave ensemble was Wallace Henry Hartley, born on June 2, 1878, in Colne, Lancashire, his father a mill manager and his mother a weaver. When the mill burned, his father took work first as a bank clerk and then as the superintendent of a Methodist refuge in Huddersfield. Wallace early took to the violin, and soon was playing in church, then in municipal orchestras, then with a café orchestra in Leeds. In 1908, Wallace became engaged to a Leeds woman, Maria Robinson, whom he’d known for some years. In the same year he took a job as a violinist with Cunard, becoming the bandmaster on the Mauretania in 1910. Bandmaster Hartley made 80 Mauretania crossings before, in 1912, he took the same position on the new White Star flagship, the Titanic. She was about to take her maiden voyage, and he was thus unable to see Maria on that shore leave or, as it turned out, forever. Today, memorials abound around the world to Wallace Henry Hartley and to his musicians, too. To give them all their due, they were pianists Percy Cornelius Taylor (32) and William Theodore Ronald Brailey (24); cellists Roger Marie Bricoux (21) and John Wesley Woodward (33); violinists John Law Hume (22) and Georges Alexandre Krins (23); and double bassist John Frederick Preston Clark (29). The Titanic was holed at 11PM, April 14. At 12:15AM, April 15, 1912, the band gathered in their dress uniforms in the first-class lounge and played (for two hours) while their ship filled and sank. ©

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Wallace Hartley's body was recovered from the sea several days after the Titanic sank. Still in his bandmaster's dress uniform it was thought that he was a ships officer and his body retained rather than being buried at sea along with many passengers and crew. subsequently he was buried in the Colne cemetery and a memorial erected in the main Albert Rd.

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Wallace Hartley.jpg

[Stanley]

"Coade Stone" and the woman who made it.

If one wanted to be a liberated woman in Georgian London, a ‘public person’ in one’s own right, it might be wise never to marry, wiser still to have a great talent, and wisest of all to have a unique, marketable product. Such a one was Eleanor Coade, spinster, sculptress, and the sole proprietor (probably the inventor) of “Coade Stone.” The remarkable Eleanor Coade was born in Exeter, Devon, on June 3, 1733. She was named after her mother, but followed her father (a wool merchant) into the cloth trade and by the 1760s was trading in linen in London and in her own name. Aware of the fashion for architectural decoration, she bought an artificial stone workshop in 1769, perfected a new (or substantially modified an existing) recipe for making the stuff, and went into business. Soon she dominated the whole trade. Her Coade Stone was both more durable and more workable than other products, her artwork (and that of artists she employed or commissioned) more refined, and her business sense unequalled. Very early on she fired a man (Daniel Pincot) for claiming proprietorship when (clearly) he wasn’t even a partner. She did business as herself until 1799, when she took on a second cousin as partner, and then in 1813 reverted to “Coade’s Artificial Stone” until her death in 1821, aged 88. You can see her work, often her own designs, in many places (not least Buckingham, Windsor, and other royal palaces), and she fulfilled commissions from several of her era’s leading architects, notably Robert Adam, John Nash and the Wyatts. It can be the sculptural detail atop a pediment, or along a whole frontage (as at the Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich), a garden statue, or perhaps most famously the Lion Brewery’s trademark Lion which, after several journeys along London’s South Bank, now grandly guards the southern approach to Westminster Bridge, its stone tail always atwitch. Her recipe has been rediscovered (by a combination of hook and crook and chemical analysis), and one can again buy Coade Stone. As for Eleanor, this independent business person rated an obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine and the courtesy title of “Mrs. Coade.” But no man ever owned her. ©

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"Looking at the old map of the railways, it occurred to me that it might be possible to tidy it up." Harry Beck.

If you’ve visited London (or a friend or relation has) the chances are good that you have tea towel, a poster, or even just a post card map of the Underground, the ‘Tube,’ with its different-colored lines arranged logically rather than geographically. It was originally the invention of Harry Beck, Henry Charles Beck to his parents, a graphic artist who was born on June 4, 1902. His father, Joshua, was a man of some artistic accomplishment, and though it was not much young Harry took after him, even traveling to Italy to learn how to carve marble. In the end Harry settled for graphic design, learned at the same art school (in Highgate, London) where he met his wife Nora (apparently, he married up, or she down, but art students can be like that). He went to work, initially part-time, for London Underground, doing signaling charts, and soon got his idea for a signaling-chart sort of map for the whole system. He became a bit obsessed about it, both before and after it was actually adopted (first as a ‘pilot’) in 1932. But that’s understandable. Earlier underground maps erred on the side of accuracy, which was fine if you wanted (for instance) to know where to dig a hole in central London, but if you were traveling (say) from Finchley to Covent Garden or from Wembley Central to West Kensington, in the dark, deep underground, you didn’t need to know that much. You certainly needed to know you could make those journeys, and where to change lines to get to your destination, but exactly where you’d been was at best a minor curiosity. Harry Beck saw that logic, geometry, and readability should be the touchstones. His design, very graphic indeed, won through and is now typical of subway maps the world around. Greatly to Harry’s irritation, London Underground kept mucking about with his original, and the judgment is that his original map remains the best (unless, I suppose, one needs to use the Victoria or Jubilee lines). Today one of Harry’s first edition maps is advertised on-line for $2,100. And it’s only a print. A predecessor map, incomprehensibly accurate, is offered for just $71. Finally!! A market price as an exact measure of value!! ©

[Stanley]

"All my life I've prayed the Lord's Prayer, but I've never prayed, "Give me this day my daily bread." It is always, "Give us this day our daily bread." Bread and life are shared realities." Bill Moyers, 2006.

In early 1960, through something of a fluke, my parents met Senator Lyndon Johnson at the Des Moines airport and then dined with him, members of his staff, and a (very) few Iowa Democrats at the Hotel Fort Des Moines. Johnson was searching for Iowa delegates at that summer’s Democratic Convention (a fruitless quest), and goodness knows what he made of my folks (then liberal Republicans), but they liked Lyndon immediately, and I always enjoyed talking with them about that meeting. What I never asked them was, was Bill Moyers there? Chances are that he was, for he had known the senator for some time and was in the 1960 campaign one of Johnson’s top aides. Bill Moyers was born Billy Don Moyers, a laborer’s son, in Choctaw County, Oklahoma on June 5, 1934. He grew up in Marshall, Texas, where he became interested in journalism and religion, which during the 1950s were the twin poles of his existence, in college and at Southwestern Baptist Seminary. But a 1954 spell as an intern in Senator Johnson’s office weighted him towards politics, and in 1960 he rejoined Johnson’s entourage, later became deputy director of the Peace Corps, and then after the Kennedy assassination Johnson’s press secretary from early 1965 to December 1966. Their parting was a bitter one, and since then Moyers developed a career as a progressive journalist, editor for a time of Newsday, on Long Island, then a commentator for CBS News, and then finally his own man, as working journalist and CEO of Public Square Media. There and at PBS Moyers brought his liberal politics, his reportorial genius, and his religious faith to many issues, from the meaning of Genesis to the Clinton impeachment to the problems of truth, the Trump presidency, and the survival of democracy. He retired in 2017. His wife, Judith Davidson Moyers (they married in 1954), has followed a similar career path, worked together with Bill on many projects, and retired in 2015 as CEO of Public Affairs Television. They are still around, and I do still wonder, on occasion, whether Bill Moyers remembers that chance meeting in Des Moines, 60 years ago. ©

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"TRUTH, LOGIC, AND COURAGE." Banner Motto of the Congress of Racial Equality.

To update the usual preamble to my great-grandfather’s political speeches, it is ‘the year of our Lord 2020 and the year of our Republic 233.’ If one takes that long view, one must conclude that it is past time to end racism. Racism may be human nature, it is I suppose possible that ‘otherwise’ good people can be racist, even unconsciously, but we’ve been reminded yet again that racism hurts, racism maims, racism kills. It is a dread disease. Sarah Parker Remond, born on this day in 1828, was as a teenager thrown out of a Salem, MA, public school because of her color. As she put it later (taking the title page of a famous Salem novel) it was her very own “scarlet letter,” cut right into her heart, and she spent the rest of her life fighting it. This year, 2020, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery have been killed—murdered—by racism, but our demographics show that racism claims many, many more victims, for racism (allied with poverty) weighs people down with disease and early death. This last ten days, thousands have taken to the streets, braving one disease (Covid-19) to fight another (racism). It was just such thoughts, on June 6, 1942, led 50 Chicagoans to found the Congress of Racial Equality, which would become better-known as CORE. They were—fittingly—a diverse group, 2/3rds white, 1/3 black, and in gender terms not quite 50/50 (28 men, 22 women). They were union organizers, academics, professionals, but mostly students. In a time of war they had been pacifists, inspired by Gandhi’s non-violent campaign for Indian independence, and they agreed to use peaceful, legal means to end racial segregation. And they would not end it somewhere else, in Nazi Germany or the American South. They would end it where they were, in Chicago. Elsewhere too, they hoped, and they welcomed many new chapters in other places, at first mainly in the north, Midwest, and west, and mainly focused on racism at home, next door, in one’s own neighborhood, one’s own place of work, and on election days at one’s own precinct polling place. Those are hopeful places, and theirs was a hopeful model; and to hear, this week, of new diverse groups, thousands, taking to the streets in every state, again inspires hope. After 223 years, it’s good to have hope, as it was in Chicago on June 6, 1942. ©

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"Her works do follow her." From a 1916 obituary of Susan Elizabeth Blow.

Since we again have local heroes marching in our streets, let’s memorialize a local hero, Susan Elizabeth Blow, born in St. Louis on June 7, 1843. Her wealthy father was a Presbyterian, then considered a somewhat northern church in a somewhat southern city, and at church and in the household Susan absorbed those values, unionist and antislavery, but including the best education that Henry Taylor Blow could provide for his eldest, “Sue,” even if she was a girl. She responded well to schooling at home, in New Orleans and New York, and became active in the ‘St. Louis School,’ a philosophically-inclined group of reformers. Then, after she accompanied her ambassador father to Brazil as his secretary, came Susan’s annus mirabilis, her tour of Germany where she met, studied under, and absorbed the work of Friedrich Froebel in his “children’s garden.” She returned to St. Louis, a 30-year old missionary leader of the kindergarten movement. And Susan’s kindergarten (in the Des Peres School, Carondelet, from 1873) was to be public, for boys and girls, the first of its kind in the USA. Her first assistants, also young women (Mary Timberlake and Cynthia Dozier) were soon joined by 50 other trainees, and within 10 years the City of St. Louis had a kindergarten in every grade school. I like it that during the economic depression of 1873-1877, when public pinchpennies decided that Susan’s infant kindergartens were just too expensive, she organized a petitioning campaign to prove them wrong. Her schools survived. In 1884, sapped by hyperthyroidism, she ‘retired’ to Boston with her companion Laura Fischer, where instead of resting she directed Boston’s kindergartens, wrote a book on Dante, and translated several more of Froebel’s works on early childhood and its potentials. She continued to spread the word by correspondence and a grueling schedule of travel and public lecturing. When she died in 1916, the St Louis Globe-Democrat editorialized that though “a great commander is gone . . . the soldiers go marching on.” Indeed they do, and in that context it is well to remember that Susan Elizabeth Blow fought also to include kids of color in her ‘children’s gardens,’ just as her father had (in the 1850s) defended Dred Scott in his freedom suit. ©

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"If I am mad, as the Apostle saith, it is to God." Elizabeth Parker Avery, 1647.

Puritan New England deserves its reputation for intolerance. Settlers went there for their own and no one else’s religious liberty. But their church structure (Congregationalist) introduced fissures into the rock. Into one of those fissures crept—or, rather, marched—three ministers of decidedly conservative, heterodox opinions concerning church government and the nature of salvation. They were Presbyterians, and they were preparationists, softening Calvin’s hard decrees with the hope that one could, after all, do something positive to make oneself fit for grace. And they were all three from Wiltshire. They were Thomas Parker, born in Stanton St. Bernard on June 8, 1595, his cousin James Noyes, and his nephew John Woodbridge, and they all three of them became notorious oxymorons, unabashed Presbyters in a radically Congregationalist church order. What they made of it makes for fascinating reading. Tolerated by their congregations, they had to be tolerated by the authorities in Boston. But I’m more interested in Thomas Parker’s elder sister, Elizabeth Parker Avery. We don’t know her birthdate (or her death date), and we aren’t even sure who Mr. Avery was; but Elizabeth felt herself to be Thomas’s equal in wit and biblical knowledge, and she eagerly vented both wit and knowledge in public, in print, and in prophesying. Elizabeth circulated in radical ranks in Holland, England, and then Ireland, probably becoming a Fifth Monarchist, seeing in her life and times the working out of biblical truths, from her own salvation (accepted passively and in a truly Calvinist manner) to the deaths of her children and to the overthrowing of a sinful king. All of that was too much for her brother Thomas (a prophesier in his own right, as a man and minister), who published a tract (1649) indicating his disagreement with her opinions and his horror at her unfeminine act: “your printing of a book beyond the custom of your sex, doth rankly smell.” Doubtless, had Elizabeth followed her brother to New England, she would have felt the stings of Puritan intolerance. ©