BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

In search of the typical Englishman

My boy, I’ve played every role in The Prisoner of Zenda except that of Princess Flavia. C. Aubrey Smith, cricketer, Englishman, actor.

Among the accomplishments of folk like Ringo Starr and Michael Caine is that they did away with the idea of the “typical Englishman:” stiff upper lip and all that. Their local accents came from somewhere else than Eton, they didn’t know how to be ‘reserved,’ and although Michael Caine once played an academic (in Educating Rita), neither one ran well in the erudition stakes. On top of all that, their knighthoods killed the stone-cold English gent stone dead. But if you love the old image, you can still see it in countless old movies. Only recently I’ve seen Nigel Bruce (1895-1953) play the role to near perfection as Sherlock Holmes’s stuffy Dr. Watson. Bruce added some icing to the cake by being, himself, the son of a baronet and a promising cricketer who’d brushed through Cambridge on his way to World War I (in which he served, gallantly, as a subaltern). A grievous wound led to an early end to his career as a stockbroker (doubtless he would have been a gentlemanly one); so he limped on to the London stage and from there to Hollywood and a stiff upper lip career as a ‘character actor.’ But the English actor who best conformed to, indeed helped to construct, the stereotype was Charles Aubrey Smith, born to an upper middle-class family in London on July 21, 1863. Since his father, a doctor, went by “Charles”, the boy became “C. Aubrey Smith,” which added a glow or gloss to his image at the ultimate Englishman (and rendered the ‘Smith’ uncommon). He played cricket, too, and very well, both at Charterhouse School and Cambridge: a fast bowler and a fair bat, Smith played for an English expatriate eleven while in South Africa in what was (only later) deemed to qualify as a “Test” match, so he was a real cricketer who more than once bowled against the great W. G. Grace. He was early drawn to films, and turned up in Hollywood in 1930. By then, Smith had such a fine moustache as to conceal any stiffness in his upper lip, but his impeccable Englishness was made part of his persona both in the studio (e.g. The Prisoner of Zenda, Waterloo Bridge, The Four Feathers, Rebecca, etc., etc.) and in Hollywood’s higher jinks, where he gained fame as the organizing spirit of the Hollywood Cricket Club. No doubt his bowling slowed with age, but he used his clout (and the ‘Ollywood Cricket Club) to shepherd a number of English actors into the American film set, including David Niven, Rex Harrison, Basil Rathbone and, of course, Nigel Bruce. What Smith might have done for Ringo Star or Michael Caine, heaven only knows. Sir Charles Aubrey Smith died in 1948, in Tinseltown, but his ashes were planted at home, in a Sussex churchyard. ©

[Stanley]

Etheldred is a traditional female name

Scientific people in general have a very low opinion of the abilities of my sex. Etheldred Benett to Samuel Woodward, 1836.

I’ve been writing ‘anniversary notes’ daily since 2012, and if they were collected and parsed one connecting theme would be ‘pioneer women,’ not least those who’ve overthrown the prejudices of centuries to blaze new trails in the sciences. That’s partly in tribute to the women scientists (from brilliant undergraduates to distinguished full professors) I have met. Now here’s another pioneer woman, Etheldred Benett, born in Wiltshire, England, on July 22, 1775. During her lifetime, geology became scientific (proceeding from evidence to argument, rather than vice-versa), and in her collecting, mainly of fossils, and in reflecting on them, she made several signal contributions. Notably, she demonstrated that soft tissues could be and were fossilized, however rarely, and she also discovered how to discover (pardon the redundancy) and then to classify microfossils. She was enabled to do these things by a fortunate concatenation of circumstances, not least location and timing, for her Wiltshire home was within reach of important chalk and limestone deposits then being quarried for building materials. She was also a female heir in her own right (suo jure) and she preserved that independence by never marrying, and so was able to do more than dabble—to achieve professional grade—in her avocations. Her baptismal name, Etheldred, helped those who never met her to think her a man even though it was a female name of hoary vintage, as in Ætheldreda, a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon princess turned saint. Some who appreciated Etheldred’s geological findings thought of her as male, notably Moscow’s Imperial Natural History Society when it admitted her into its fellowship as “Master” (dominum Etheldredus Benett). Benett sorted that through another of her ‘avocations,’ tracing back her family’s history to Anglo-Saxon times. Even to those correspondents who knew her as a she, Etheldred sometimes had to insist that her geological work “was written by myself.” Among those who read her reports, visited her massive collection, and were inspired to hypothesize about a very ancient earth was Charles Lyell, whose own geological work would create a usable frame of reference for Charles Darwin’s time-hungry theory of evolution. But during her life Etheldred Benett worked alone, just herself and her evidence. It wasn’t until 1848, three years after her death, that the (male) president of the Geological Society announced to a startled audience that soft parts could be, and were, part of the living world’s fossil evidence. He gave her the credit for this important finding. Today you need to travel to see her collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia. When the Academy was founded, in 1812, women were thought inherently unscientific. Now, the Academy has proof otherwise. ©.

[Stanley]

the archetypal "Prince"

From this arises the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince.

Renaissance Italy produced a good share of our culture’s greatest works: paintings, sculptures, buildings, literature, even what many regard as the foundation study of modern political science, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. That tract glorifies a different achievement of renaissance Italy, the rise of the ruler who, ruthless to a fault, marries power with wealth and then holds on to both with a steely grip. It was exactly these people who became the greatest patrons of Renaissance art. So they are famous today, yet infamous too. The Medici family of Florence and the Borgias of Rome are denounced for their cruelties, their treacheries, in many cases their lecheries (not least the several popes among them). The Medici and the Borgias retain some grip on the popular imagination, thanks partly to modern films, and even a recent television series. And Machiavelli recognized their draw by dedicating later editions of The Prince to the Medici. But Machiavelli’s real model was of another family and the founder of another dynasty: Francesco Sforza, born on July 23, 1401. He it was who inspired Machiavelli’s notion that when it comes to matters of state, the end must often justify the means. Francesco Sforza fit perfectly, not least because his beginnings were so very unpromising. Born the bastard son of a mercenary war lord, he entered the service of the then duke of Milan, a Visconti (they’re still around, too), developed a reputation for courage and great physical strength, and then (cleverly, in hindsight) married the duke’s illegitimate daughter, Bianca. He enjoyed, if that’s the right word, a very successful career as a mercenary soldier, wearing the colors of anyone who paid his hire, and sometimes fighting against his father-in-law. Francesco’s reputation brought him to the attention of another rising dynast, Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence, whose wealth (originating in banking and, it is said, double-entry bookkeeping) helped Sforza to buy his bloody way into Milan, where he unseated Visconti’s legitimate heir (Alfonso of Aragon, who’d brought royalty into Milan’s political culture). After four years of war and siege, Francesco Sforza entered Milan and proclaimed himself duke. Now reasons of state (a new ‘end’) justified diplomacy (a new ‘mean’), and the one-time bandit-mercenary became an apostle of peace, one of the first princes to aim deliberately for a balance of power among the warring city-states and small principalities of the Italian peninsula. And he passed power on, in 1466, to his legitimate son Galeazzo. Along the way, of course, Francesco Sforza patronized art, too. That’s what dukes did. But we know him best for his infamies. ©.

[Stanley]

A moral tale about plagiarism.

I work and I work, but still it seems I have nothing done. Alice Augusta Ball’s graduation quote in her college yearbook, University of Washington, 1912.

Universities and their faculties worry much about student plagiarism, and even now are tooling up to meet the challenges presented when students use the midwifery of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ‘write’ their essays. There is, however, a well-attested reluctance even to call out (let alone to punish) professorial plagiarism. There are many reasons for this, including the difficulty of defining plagiarism in legally unambiguous terms (‘beyond reasonable doubt’). The ‘apprenticeship’ nature of much teaching, especially in graduate study, presents another problem. The injured party (the apprentice-student) may find it difficult to challenge the plagiarist (the master-teacher). But the death of Alice Ball, at only 24 in late 1916, removed that problem entirely. One of her mentors simply took over her work and presented it as his own. It took the college almost 90 years to acknowledge the plagiarism, with a ceremony in 2000, while the state of Hawaii declared February 29th to be Alice Ball Day. That oversight was corrected only last year, and now Alice Ball Day happens every year, on February 28. There’s also a new tribute to Alice Augusta Ball in Seattle, where she was born on July 24, 1892, and her name has been added to a memorial frieze on the main building of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. That last seems curious, until you know that it was Miss Alice Ball, MA, who in 1915 discovered an effective treatment for leprosy while she was working as a graduate student and instructor at the College of Hawaii. Until the development of sulfa drugs in the 1940s it was the only effective treatment. But her death tempted one of her mentors, Arthur Dean, to publish her work as his own and, to add insult to post mortem injury, to call her treatment the “Dean Method.” That was poetically convenient, too, for he was also her academic dean and, for good measure, the college’s president. Another professor in Ball’s department exposed the plagiarism in a scientific paper in 1922 giving full credit to Alice Ball, calling her treatment “the Ball Method,” but this courageous act went unrequited until the 1990s when two historians, at the university, unearthed fuller evidence that the life-giving discovery was, indeed, Alice Ball’s. Dr. Dean (or, as you might prefer to call him, with all due redundancy, Dean Dean or Professor Dean or President Dean) may have thought he could get away with it because Alice was dead, or because she had only a master’s degree, or because she was a she, or perhaps because she was black, or maybe for all those reasons together—and then one more, his unmerited desire for fame and fortune, both of which are very powerful drugs, indeed. ©

[Stanley]

Goodenough is better than some.

One of the great mysteries of life is memory. I helped somebody who was trying to understand memory and the sources of memory and so on. But I learnt that it was a rather complex problem. John Goodenough, Nobel Prize interview, Stockholm, 2019.

People from talented families often tell us that talent runs in families. Perhaps it does, although exactly how and why are matters of dispute, and one family that might be “exhibit A” in the case would be that of John B. Goodenough, whose father Erwin was professor of divinity at Yale and whose siblings all became distinguished academics: Ward an anthropologist at Penn; Ursula a biologist at Washington U. in St. Louis, and Daniel, also a biologist, at Harvard Medical. John Goodenough himself would eventually become a Nobelist in Chemistry (2019, at age 97!), but wore many hats along the way, in mathematics, engineering, meteorology, and physics. John B. Goodenough was born in Germany, where his father was finishing up his theology PhD, on July 25, 1922. John was early discovered to be dyslexic, which he and his family seem to have regarded as a challenge rather than a handicap. He tried poetry to overcome his dyslexia, and continued to write love poems all his life. But he first excelled in mathematics (BA, Yale). In uniform for World War II, his talents made him a meteorologist rather than a GI grunt, and after the war he turned to physics, earning his PhD at Chicago in 1952. At first his research was into ‘electrical breakdown,’ which has to do with the process by which a normally insulating material can become, or be made into, an electrical superconductor. I don’t understand this, but it may help to explain why Goodenough’s first important work had to do with RAM, random access memory, a vital step in the development of small computers. Much of this was done at MIT. From there (in Physics), Goodenough moved into the Chemistry department at Oxford, where he made discoveries essential to the development of efficient, rechargeable, Lithium-ion batteries. We seem to be becoming increasingly dependent upon these things, in quite a number of ways, and this is why Goodenough (along with two others) was awarded his Nobel Prize, in Chemistry, along with Stanley Whittingham (now at SUNY-Binghampton) and Akira Yoshino (then at the Sony corporation and now at Meijo University). Goodenough was by decades the oldest of the three. Their work on Lithium had been sometimes competitive, sometimes collaborative, and while each holds various patents, the Nobel itself is definitely shared. After his time at Oxford, John Goodenough had gone on to an engineering chair at the University of Texas. His last publication—on a low-cost, high-energy, solid-state battery made of glass—appeared in 2017. In 2019, aged 97, he became both the oldest-ever Nobel recipient and the oldest living Nobelist. He died only last month, just short of his 101st birthday. ©.

[Stanley]

The Gaia Hypothesis as an ethos.

I’d sooner expect a goat to succeed as a gardener than expect humans to become stewards of the earth. James Lovelock, ca. 2010.

The earth became much quieter when James Lovelock died last year, exactly 103 years after his birth on July 26, 1919. Whether we are better off for the silence is another question, because for much of his life Lovelock was one of the our most persistent and persuasive defenders of the earth itself, that odd blue-green ball we live on and which, so far, has sustained us. He it was who, more than a half century ago, proposed the “Gaia Hypothesis,” the idea that our tiny blue-green ball is a self-sustaining organism, or should be, and that we humans, in our arrogance and ingratitude, threaten to disrupt the “garden” and bring ruin raining down upon us, every other living thing, and the balance-wheel biochemistry that has sustained us all. The noise he made and the eminence he achieved were unlikely outcomes for a Quakerish kid born of working-class parents, a kid who never made much progress in school. He left school to work as a photographer’s assistant, but some small, still voice within him (the Quaker bit?) sent him to evening classes at London University, where he so impressed his instructors that he ended up doing a science degree at Manchester. Averse to undue specialization, after taking his chemistry degree he did sidetrack for a while, trying ‘goat gardening’ (one might say) as a volunteer on a Quaker farm project. But Britain’s tooling up for war found him working on ways to prevent burn wounds for soldiers. Given his later career we might see a portent in his refusal to use animals (rabbits, as it happened) in his research, and it was also telling that, even though his work protected him from the military draft he still filed as a conscientious objector—and then, learning of Nazi atrocities, withdrew his CO application. He found consistency, and purpose, in his work for the American space agency NASA on the problem of finding life elsewhere in the universe or, more specifically, on Mars. Pondering the inhospitable chemical composition of the Martian atmosphere—what little there was of it—Lovelock came to see our blue-green planet as something of a miracle. No slouch as a scientist, Lovelock warned us of the fatal hazard presented by our love affair with CFC compounds (this as early as 1972). Our initial resistance to his warning further motivated Lovelock to publicize and prophesy about his Gaia hypothesis, that the earth should be conceived of as a single organism. Considered as a purely scientific model, it has been attacked by many scientists (not to mention by the fossil fuel industry), but as a moral vision it is something we must heed, for daily it is becoming more evident that our lives do depend on making goats into gardeners. ©.

[Tripps]

From his Wikipedia entry - looks like he had something of a late change of mind? Brave man to say it.

In this 2012 MSNBC article, Lovelock is quoted as saying:[43]

The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened.
The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now. The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time ... it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising – carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that.[43]
In a follow-up interview also in 2012, Lovelock stated his support for natural gas; he favoured fracking as a low-polluting alternative to coal.[30][56] He opposed the concept of "sustainable development", where modern economies might be powered by wind turbines, calling it meaningless drivel.[56][57] He kept a poster of a wind turbine to remind himself how much he detested them.[30]

[Stanley]

But what would he say if he saw the current pace of change? It seems to have suddenly speeded up.

[Stanley]

Mere words as deadly weapons.

Give me security for the future; I will dispense with what is called justice for the past. From John Thelwall’s The Rights of Nature against the Usurpations of Establishments (1796).

I’ve recently had cause to revisit Tom Paine’s satire on monarchy and aristocracy (and on all inherited power) in his Common Sense. Published in Philadelphia in early 1776, it was (in proportion to total reading population) the all-time best-seller in American history, and it helps to explain why the new nation, born in July 1776, became a republic based on the hopeful declaration that all men were born equal. America’s revolution roused republican hopes elsewhere, even in Britain. But they were killed by Britain’s savage reaction to France’s republican revolution: not killed stone dead, but dead enough. Even so, some brave British “citizens” (a mild enough term, but rendered revolutionary by events in France) did rouse up to work for a republican upheaval. Some were poets, others scientists, many were artisans—and some were satirists. Among the most successful was John Thelwall, born in London on July 27, 1764. After a modestly unsuccessful time as a silk mercer (his father’s trade), Thelwall turned satirist from being a gadfly scientist and minor poet. In a London speech (1792) he ridiculed monarchy by picturing a bantam cock standing on a dunghill and crowing loudly his bantam-weight message. It went down so well to a large audience (Thelwall claimed over 700) that it was published, and then sold so well that the publisher and Thelwall were charged with seditious libel. It was a serious charge, made almost comically so because, back then, ‘truth’ was not a defense. At trial, the crown’s prosecutors ridiculed themselves, and their monarch (George III), by telling the jury that that crowing cock was indeed the king! The amused the courtroom crowd, and the jury was entertained, too: well enough to find Thelwall and his publisher innocent. Both went free to loud huzzahs. John Thelwall was, then, a very clever satirist. He never actually said that George III was that bantam cock standing atop a pile of chicken manure. He left that possibly libelous assertion to the king’s attorney. So his point was driven home with the deadly force of courtroom laughter. Thelwall continued to move in radical circles, albeit more cautiously. Slight and plagued by ill health, in the 1790s he enjoyed dinners and plotting parties with such dangerous radicals as Wordsworth and Coleridge, was often spied upon by agents of the crown, then in 1798 retired to a small farm in Wales where, besides cultivating leeks, he made ends meet by teaching elocution to the up and coming. In 1819 he came out of retirement to memorialize the victims of the Peterloo massacre and to agitate for parliamentary reform, but not (apparently) for republicanism. He died in 1834, unsatisfied by the so-called ‘Great Reform’ of 1832. ©

[Stanley]

Birthright Citizenship and Equality.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Amendment XIV, Article One, the Constitution of the USA, July 28, 1868.

In July 1776 the Continental Congress of the American colonies made the “self-evident” truth of equality the astonishingly radical principle of their revolution. Equality was also the source of their notion that ‘the people,’ being equal, had not only the right but the duty to revolt and to create their own government. Since all the signatories, in 1776, were family patriarchs, many of them the owners of other human beings, and most of them significantly wealthier and better educated than the people they claimed to represent, arguments persist about the meaning and extent of equality in 1776. Some say that the Continental Congress meant only males, not ‘mankind.’ Some believe they intended to include only white people among the equal, perhaps only the “well-born and able”. Some simply dismiss them as hypocrites. But there is more than a possibility that these “founding fathers”meant what they said and hoped that they were right—or that history would, in the end, prove them right. Among historians, that argument remains unresolved. For citizens in general, ‘we, the people,’ of any gender, all skin shades, it’s better to see it as an unfulfilled promise. Then, in the middle of the next century, Abraham Lincoln, born poor white trash, and Frederick Douglass, born black and enslaved, helped to clarify a new definition of equality. This new definition was first written in blood (the Civil War) and then in ink, in the form of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution of 1787. The Fourteenth Amendment was proclaimed the fundamental law of the land by Secretary of State William Seward on July 28, 1868. Taking particular aim at the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that Americans of African descent were not only un-equal but had never been and could never be equal, “Amendment XIV” established the idea of “birthright citizenship,” regarded today as a radical (and still very nearly unique) declaration of civil equality. To borrow from the original Declaration of 1776, this amendment says that all persons born here are equal and have equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Again, as in 1776, it was a radical claim, a mortgage on the future, a promissory note. And so it remains. We’re still paying it off, and the best way to continue our payments is to make full use of our free and fair elections. As citizens, we are declared equal; therefore as voters we can transform the republic of 1776 into a modern democracy. ©

[Stanley]

Women in Church

41 Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, 42 but few things are needed—or indeed only one.[f] Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her. From the Gospel of Luke, 10.

The raising of Lazarus was, before the resurrection, Jesus’s greatest miracle. Lazarus had been four days dead, and yet there he was, restored to his sisters Mary and Martha. But Lazarus’s story appears only in the book of John: the most theological of the four Gospels. The ‘Lazarus’ in Luke was not the same person, only a poverty-stricken man in a moral parable. But today, July 29, is the Feast Day of Mary and Martha, who are important in Christian theology for other reasons than being Lazarus’s sisters. On the original feast day, the one where Jesus sends out his 72 (!!) missionaries, Martha does all the work, complains about it, and Jesus turns the complaint away by saying that it was what Mary had chosen, and then Mary anoints Jesus with oil. Given the status of women in ancient Bethany, it was a somewhat Delphic advice, but when Episcopalians of Philadelphia decided to ordain female priests they chose this feast day to do it. So it was on July 29, 1974, that the Episcopal Church added eleven women—known now as ‘the Philadelphia Eleven’—to its parish priesthood. It was a revolutionary act, apparently countermanding some other biblical dicta and also raising yet a further barrier to the Anglican-Catholic rapprochement for which many high-church Anglicans hope. Only four years before, the national (USA) conference of the church had voted the idea down, and did so again in 1973. So to do this, the Philadelphia diocese needed some special warrant. So the ordination ceremony was conducted by three retired bishops (all men of course): Daniel Corrigan (Colorado), Robert DeWitt (Philadelphia), and Edward Welles (Missouri). As importantly, they announced that they were doing their act not in defiance but “in the spirit,” no doubt hoping that their act of faith would move the mountain of the church. The ordination sermon, delivered by a Harvard theologian, was entitled “The Priesthood of All Believers” [emphasis mine]. This gave the ordination roots in Protestant history, for remember the first Reformers had dared to call allbelievers “saints,” so why could not female believers be clergy? And if the audience at Philadelphia’s Episcopalian Church of the Advocate needed further convincing that the “spirit” was moving their way, the sermon made the point explicitly by saying that the eleven women before him, soon to be priests, were “moving to the front of the bus,” a direct reference to the Civil Rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The spirit, however, has yet to move some Anglican provinces. A revolution that may have begun with Luke 10 has yet to move its full course. ©.

[Stanley]

The world turned upside down.

God hath made me chief Judge now to give sentence upon men and womens spiritual and eternal estate . . . I may be said to be the chief Judge [and] I do go by as certain a rule as the Judges of the Land do when they give Judgement according to Law. Lodowicke Muggleton, The Neck of the Quakers Broken . . . (1661).

Lodowicke Muggleton stands proof that the English Civil Wars of the 1640s were revolutionary, that they did turn the world upside down. Boiling up, not always from the bottom, came a host of radicalisms. Their names were libels conferred by their enemies: Ranters, Adamites, Levellers, Diggers, Quakers, almost ad infinitum and not meant to be complimentary. Most of them were religious radicals. It was, after all, a “Puritan” revolution, and they drew their inspirations, plural, from the English Bible, then spread their doctrines (often in print) to a surprisingly literate population. Some were violent (soldiers in the parliamentary armies); some, notably the Quakers, then abjured violence; most believed that a new world was being born in the form of Christ’s second coming. Among the most appealing were the Muggletonians, who had their start after the trial and execution of King Charles I, and took their lead from a couple of London tailors, John Reeve and Lodowicke Muggleton. They were cousins who thought of themselves as the last two witnesses in Revelation, “the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth,” and when Reeve died in 1658 his cousin Lodowicke, the ‘voice,’ carried on his task of judging the quick and the dead. He sounded merciless, not least when having a go at the Quakers, but he felt he was only an agent and that when Christ had the last word mercy would rule, saving possibly even half of the world’s sinners from the hell that was within them. Indeed, ‘hell’ was nowhere else than within, so sinners would not be saved from eternal fires but from their own self-tortures. Those unsaved would not suffer, but nor would they exist. (Muggleton didn’t believe in witchcraft, either, and thought Satan a figment of misguided human “reason.”) Of course with the restoration of monarchy, Muggleton was in trouble, but he survived, perhaps because he was judged harmless, or because his persecutors were charmed by his generosity of spirit. Lodowicke Muggleton was born in London in July 1609, but I celebrate him today because he was released from prison on July 30, 1679 (July 19, old style). He'd been jugged for blasphemy. Muggleton died in 1698. His sect lived on for centuries, celebrating the anniversary of Lodowicke’s release from prison, meeting quietly in secret places. The last of the Muggletonians (perhaps) was a Kent fruit farmer, John Noakes, who when he died in 1979 willed his Muggletonian archive (88 volumes!!) to the British Library. There they rest in peace. Perhaps. ©

[Stanley]

Fantasy and morality.

“There are all kinds of courage," said Dumbledore, smiling. "It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends. I therefore award ten points to Mr. Neville Longbottom.” J. K. Rowling, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Once one graduates from childhood and its elementary schooling in such problems as the distances between ‘mine’ and ‘thine,’ moral choices can become impossibly complex. I think this explains quite a number of modern phenomena, not least the gargantuan size of many best-selling biographies. So this morning I see on my bookshelf four biographies, equally fat, equally heavy, equally long. They are about Albert Einstein, P. G. Wodehouse, Gore Vidal, and U. S. Grant. I have read enough of each to know that they are about very different individuals. I also expect that I will never finish any of them, and I am sure the biographers never really finished them either. People do die, but the more deeply one studies a life, the more difficult it becomes to achieve concision. The universe of cause and effect that surrounds each person is of infinite reach and provides no clear stopping place. This helps us to understand why so many ethical philosophers invent stories—short stories—in order to arrive at their prescriptions. Just so, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, inter alia, invented a ‘state of nature’ to tell us how government itself probably began. This is true also of sacred texts—the pithy parables of Jesus spring to mind—used by the religious (of all creeds) to bring order and meaning into their lives. And it helps to explain the continued popularity of fantasy fiction, and not just for children. As a reader, I long ago graduated from The Wind in the Willows and Charlotte’s Web. And then came Tolkien’s Middle Earth sagas. And then finally (although I suspect ‘so far’ would be better) I encountered J. K. Rowling’s six-part serial about the education for life and wizardry of Harry Potter and his friends. Joanne Rowling (the author’s real name) was born in a small Gloucestershire place on July 31, 1965, just as I was introducing myself to graduate study in the social science of history. A moderately unhappy childhood left Rowling with a somewhat mediocre degree and an aimless outlook on life. Then came an unhappy (at best) marriage, a daughter, a divorce, and a constricted life on the British dole as a single parent with only barely visible means of support. Her heart was already in the right place (she worked briefly with Amnesty International) and her mind, too (Jane Austen was her favorite novelist). And then, on a train between Manchester and London (and in her mind somewhere else), she came across a small boy, purposefully abandoned on a suburban porch, and with a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead. And so we got Harry Potter, in The Sorcerer’s Stone (1995). It was first called The Philosopher’s Stone, which might have been a better title. ©.

[Stanley]

The academic administrator as hero.

No man is ahead of his time. Every man is within his star, each in his time. Each man must respond to the call of God in his lifetime and not in somebody else's time. Jesus had to respond to the call of God in the first century A.D., and not in the 20th century. He had but one life to live. He couldn't wait. Benjamin Elijah Mays, April 9, 1968.

One of the penalties of a long life is that one hears too many eulogies. I’ve been unlucky enough to deliver three, two at graveside and one from the pulpit, but mine never approached the eloquence of what Benjamin Mays said at of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral. What he said was right, and it was right that he should deliver it. Indeed the two friends had joked that each might be the best eulogist at the other’s funeral. Given that both had seen much trouble and endured many threats, these were serious jokes. Benjamin Mays was the much older (by 25 years), having been born on August 1, 1894, and expected to be the eulogized one. But they both led risky lives, saw much violence, and so it was just a matter of chance that Mays drew the longer straw, lived the longer life, and delivered the best eulogy I have heard. Benjamin Mays was the eighth child of parents who’d been born into slavery and escaped from it by force of Union arms. At emancipation, their enslaver was called Henry Mays. Hence the surname, which they kept despite Mays’s cruelties. Or because of them. Young Benjamin’s father disciplined his children harshly, toughening them up as Mays had toughened him. Benjamin grew up on a special plantation in South Carolina where, it was hoped, freedmen could learn how to negotiate their new world. But it was hard, not only because of the economics of cotton sharecropping. This was the era of lynch law, and the rise of a white Benjamin, “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, the state’s infamous race-baiting senator. So Benjamin Mays remembered Ku Kluxers threatening his father, Hezekiah, with guns and ropes, and of necessity he added tact to his toughness. He also learned the value of education, first in black schools and colleges. Then he met the challenge of Yankee education, at Bates College and then, briefly, at Chicago. After an interlude as a Pullman porter, he achieved a doctorate in divinity and a professorship. Then in 1940 Mays became president of Morehouse College in Atlanta. He continued Morehouse’s transition towards academic excellence (he started by getting the place out of debt), and there he became the mentor, then friend, of the young Martin Luther King, Jr. By the time King was murdered, Mays had retired from Morehouse. King is one of many evidences that Benjamin Mays wrought well, and in his old age he found he couldn’t stop. He died in 1984. His memorials (statues, endowments, buildings, gardens) are scattered across the landscape of American higher education, but his memory is enshrined in the eulogy he delivered for his friend in 1968. ©.

[Stanley]

Nick's Nora forever.

Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming. Myrna Loy.

It’s 1945, and three American servicemen are returning home, to Boone City, and they’re worried about taking up where they left off. If they could have done that, it’s not entirely clear that their stories would have had happy endings, but it proves impossible. Boone City has changed, and so have they. Homer’s hands were blown off; Al developed a taste for booze; Fred had married in a rush just before he left to fly too many missions in B-17 ‘tin caskets.’ There follow many difficulties, traced with feeling in the film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Even the film’s title, let alone its plots, portray the complexities my parents faced when dad came ‘home’ from Germany. I don’t know that mom and dad saw the movie (if they did, it would have been in the Quonset hut that served as Grundy Center’s cinema). But the nation loved it, because it managed to be ‘real’: funny, sad, a bit tragic, and its endings were completions. It ran away with box office takings and seven Academy Awards. One of the Best Years actors who did not get a statuette was Myrna Loy, perhaps because it was a little out of her line, she having made her best mark in comedies, slapstick or, in her “Thin Man” roles, as Nora Charles, the smart-talking, smart-dressing, gin-drinking wife of William Powell’s Nick, beau sabreur, social lion, and amateur detective. Of the other facts I could find about Myrna Loy, those that most strike my fancy are (1) she was named after a Nebraska whistle stop on the Burlington (CB&Q) railroad; (2) her big breakthrough came as a result of being pushed into a swimming pool; (3) her leftish politics got her on Hitler’s hit list; and (4) a statue made of her when (in 1922!!) she was a high school senior features in an early scene of Grease (1978). If she knew about it, and I imagine that she did, it must have given her pleasurable amusement; and as a star pleasurable amusement was her trademark. Myrna Loy was born Myrna Adele Williams in Helena, Montana, on August 2, 1905, to a rancher couple, David and Adelle Mae Williams. Oddly, the family acquired some Hollywood connections (David sold some LA real estate to Charlie Chaplin in 1915) and after David’s death in 1918 Myrna and Adelle moved permanently to southern California. Myrna’s first real job was at Grauman’s Theatre and she played “showy” parts in silents, 1925-29. She managed the transition to talkies but her career languished until director W. S. van Dyke pushed her into a swimming pool to test his instinct that she would make a perfect Nora in his upcoming film adaptation of Hammett’s The Thin Man. Her good humored, if damp, reaction got her the role and made her a star. Myrna would appear with co-star William Powell in 15 films, not all of them Thin Man sequels, and she starred in other famous films including her favorite, which was of course The Best Years of Our Lives . After all, she’d spent her war doing good deeds for the troops, at home and abroad. She never did win an Academy Award for a film, but she did get one for lifetime achievements. Among those achievements, she was a breast cancer survivor. At length, Myrna Loy died of old age (1993); and her ashes are buried under a simple granite marker in Helena, MT, her very own Boone City. If you get a chance to see her in action, on stream, my advice is to take it up; Myrna was a natural. ©

[Stanley]

The citizen earl.

This Quixote of the Nation
Beats his own Windmills in gesticulation;
To strike, not please, his utmost force he bends,
And all his sense is at his fingers' ends.
--From a contemporary satire on Charles Stanhope, 3rd earl Stanhope.

Many Americans know that ‘Chequers’ (in Buckinghamshire) is the country residence of the British prime minister. That’s because of the Churchill connection, for Winston spent time there during his premierships, and Chequers has played that role since David Lloyd George took up tenure in 1917. But British foreign secretaries have their own country place, in Kent, called Chevening. It’s theirs by “tradition,” but it’s a new tradition even by British standards, for Chevening has been in the government’s gift only since 1959. By the will of the then owner, the last (childless) Earl Stanhope, it was left for either a member of the cabinet or a descendant of King George VI. In the 1970s that curious condition seemed likely to be met by the then Prince of Wales, when he was considering marriage with his none-too-distant cousin the Hon. Amanda Knatchbull. At the time, she was too young to be told about it, and soon Charles married an even more distant cousin, but today’s story is about Chevening as the country seat of a much more interesting aristocrat, the 3rd Earl Stanhope, Charles Stanhope, born on August 3, 1753. His grandfather, the 1st earl, had had a close relationship with King George I, who created the earldom and, as icing on the cake, gifted Chevening to the Stanhope line. It was a whiggish family, vaguely on the whig side of 18th-century politics, made more so by marriage alliances with the Pitt family. So our Charles would be both cousin and brother-in-law to the ‘younger’ Pitt, but would fall out with Pitt over the French Revolution. Indeed, far from being a traditional whig in politics, the 3rd earl was a radical. Before he’d succeeded to the Stanhope title as earl, he’d tried to become MP for the radical Westminster constituency, and during the French Revolution he not only called himself “citizen” but headed up the “Revolution Society.” Stanhope was also an amateur scientist and full-time tinkerer, dabbling with the hazards of electricity and making himself an expert in optics. He’s best remembered today as the inventor of a newly efficient, all iron printing press and of a horseless steam carriage, both of which (upon further development, by later tinkerers) would make modern life so unquiet. He also remodeled and extended Chevening, and without ruining its character. Still bearing some marks of original architectural genius (Inigo Jones and a disciple of Christopher Wren), it remains a more attractive country place than Chequers, though less frequently in the news and, hence, much less well known. I predict that if his premiership survives much longer, Rishi Sunak will move there. It looks a suitable place for an investment banker. ©

[Tripps]

Splendid article - I learn a lot (again).

Regular antique programme watchers will know what a Stanhope Viewer is - now I know why it is so called. Google will show you hundreds.

More interesting is the Knatchbull girl - who seems very sensible and a good judge . . . .

"Mountbatten intended for himself and Lady Amanda to accompany Prince Charles on his planned 1980 tour of India.[13] Both fathers disapproved and it was decided he should go alone. Before Prince Charles was to depart, Mountbatten was assassinated by the IRA in August 1979. When Prince Charles returned, he proposed to Lady Amanda.[13] However, in addition to her maternal grandfather, she had lost her paternal grandmother and youngest brother Nicholas in the attack and now recoiled from the prospect of becoming a member of the royal family.[13]"

[Stanley]

Thanks David. I knew about Stanhopes but hadn't made the connection.....

[Stanley]

Scholar and pioneer.

Ensuring the Essentials: Minimum Wage Plus Social Insurance. The title of Barbara Armstrong’s first book, published in 1932.

My undergraduate university, Pennsylvania, required 40 ‘course units’ for graduation. Looking back, the most remarkable thing about my 40 is that only 7 came from courses taught by women. To underline the oddity, those 7 course units came from just 3 female faculty: Phyllis Rackin in English, Victoria Creed in French, and Elizabeth Flower in Philosophy. I was, then, a recidivist, not for their rarity but for their superb teaching. Even so, I took the maleness of my institution as ordinary, within the normal order of things. In graduate school I had no women professors and then took my first job at a university where, for fifteen years, there was just one female in my department (not counting the secretaries). Now that systemic fault has been corrected. In my career it happened quickly (I was appointed to my second job by a woman president), and nowadays it would require acute misogyny to get through to a BA with only three female instructors. That change took quite a bit of ‘affirmative action’ (as we call it, rightly), not to mention a mind-shift for a whole profession, but it also required heroes, pioneers. Near the top of any list is Barbara Armstrong, who snagged an assistant professorship at the University of California law school in 1925. It was the first such appointment at any American law school, and at Berkeley law she would be the only female prof for another 35 years, so we might better call her a frontier scout than a pioneer. Her long tenure was a tribute to her brilliance, emphatically not a concession to her gender. Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong was born on August 4, 1990, to German immigrant parents who had moved to San Francisco from the American Midwest. They were not rich, but she thrived in public education. Along the way, she became expert in poverty, its causes, and its potential cures, and with that in mind she entered Cal’s law school in 1913 and then, law degree in hand, took a legal eagle job with Associated Charities of San Francisco. There she was noticed by California’s progressive governor, Hiram Johnson, who appointed her to a commission on compulsory health insurance. When that didn’t work out, she returned to Cal for a PhD in economics, married, divorced, and began lecturing (untenured) in the law school. She married again, becoming Mrs. Armstrong a little before she became Professor Armstrong. The rest is history, but in it she became an authority on, and philosopher of, social insurance as the best way to stop poverty before it started. We owe her a lot, for the lonely row she hoed alone, and for so long, and so well. Given its ‘early’ timing, it was a wonder. ©

[Stanley]

Education and diversity.

We need to go back to the discovery, to posing a question, to having a hypothesis. Shirley Ann Jackson.

By invalidating race-based affirmative action admissions programs at Harvard and North Carolina, the Supreme Court has invited us to live with—and to perpetuate—existing inequalities in our society. I think there are ways for educational institutions to get around this, indeed to improve affirmative action policies, not least because our unscientific and ahistorical definitions of “race” make it an inaccurate criterion. But before we leave race-based policies behind, let’s celebrate the career of Shirley Ann Jackson, born black in Washington, DC, on August 5, 1946. She was admitted a Physics major at MIT in 1964. Since MIT then had no affirmative action programs, we can assume she was admitted not because she was black but because she was bright. Even so, she found MIT tough to negotiate. In 1964, there was just one other black female undergraduate. Nor was there an oversupply of females of any skin shade, in the faculty or among students. Lingering racial and gender prejudices made her loneliness seem deliberate, so besides excelling in physics Ms. Jackson set about to change things. Her student-led “Interphase Project,” neatly named, was a mentoring project aimed towards helping minority students (of several sorts) acclimatize. MIT was impressed and, impelled by various motivations, began to recruit more broadly. In Shirley’s senior year MIT admitted 57 minority freshmen, a modest number but exponentially greater than when she herself was admitted. Ms. Jackson went on to become Dr. Jackson (in particle physics) in 1973, the first American female PhD in MIT’s long history. Defining her more narrowly as a minority female, she went on to other “firsts,” at the Fermi labs outside of Chicago, the CERN project in Switzerland, and then Bell Laboratories, taught (physics, of course) at Rutgers, and then (1995) headed up the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the US government. She then became president of Rensselaer Poly and, later, served the Obama administration in advisory roles. All along her way, Jackson advocated for affirmative action, but she was not in herself a beneficiary of “affirmative action,” unless we consider as such the integration of her DC high school (it integrated only a few years before she entered). Hers was a middle-class family; her parents celebrated and encouraged her curiosity. Affirmative action can work better, in future, if we aim it at students born and raised and schooled in poverty. That will give us a target that is more general—and yet more accurate—than race, if we want to continue to use education to attack our most debilitating injustices. And for that, education is a good tool. ©

[Stanley]

Sainte Joanne of Arc? 1916 edition.

They are crying salt tears
Over the beautiful beloved body
Of Inez Milholland,
Because they are glad she lived,
Because she loved open-armed,
Throwing love for a cheap thing
Belonging to everybody—
Cheap as sunlight,
And morning air. –“Repetitions” (1916) by Carl Sandburg.

New York’s Adirondacks are tired old mountains, and don’t afford many mountaineering challenges (beyond blisters). But they have their high points. Their “46 Peaks” top 4,000 feet in elevation and present an endurance challenge that has been met by a number of hikers. Many are named for men, including Mount Marcy, the highest, named after the governor who at a very early date (1837) conceived that the Adirondacks might be made into a special place. Some bear native American names. Others wax poetic, including Mount Discovery, not one of the fabled 46 but a wooded hill with fabulous views of the higher peaks. In 1916 the Town Council of Lewis, NY, renamed it Mount Inez, after a woman. It remained “Discovery” on most maps, but “Inez” for Lewisians, until in 2019 it was agreed to petition for an official (re)naming, just in time for the 100th Anniversary of the 20th Amendment. So now the local tourist board invites visitors to take a “walk for liberty,” a short and well-marked trail (across private land) to the top of Mount Inez. “She” was Inez Milholland, born on August 6, 1886, and her wealthy father owned the mountainside. He it was who first proposed the name change, back in 1916 when Inez died, tragically young, at 30. But it was not mere fatherly sentiment, as powerful as that can be, for Inez and her dad had had a rather touchy relationship. For Inez grew into a woman of strongly held opinions, and didn’t always see eye to eye with her dad. In part she’s like a character out of a Edith Wharton novel, except that Inez kicked over her traces successfully and without a hint of apology. She enjoyed the perks of her upbringing: education at the best schools, a finishing touch in Europe, and a debutante year. But along the way she met the Pankhursts (mother and daughters) in England and became a militant suffragist, demonstrating in London and then, most famously, dressed in white and on a white horse, became the focal point of the 1916 suffrage march in Washington, DC. Mr. Milholland, a progressive millionaire, had some sympathy with all that, but not with her marriage to a Dutchman (unsanctified, at a London registry). He insisted on a church marriage in New York, and didn’t think much of Inez’s (and her Dutchman’s) approval of free love. But dad was devastated by her death, on a speaking tour of the West, later in 1916, and thought it right that the family’s mountain should be renamed for its rebellious daughter. Good thing, too, for when Inez died her younger sister took up the banner of liberty and civil equality. Though not, perhaps, atop the white horse. ©

[Stanley]

Advice from a past age.

Of all living creatures that God hath created there is none that hath more need of help one of another than man hath of man. Sir Thomas Fleming, 1590, in delivering judgment on a common law contract case.

Not much is known about Sir Thomas Fleming. Born in the early 1540s, he was the son of a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Mercers. Today that’s a charitable trust, also the oldest and most eminent of the great “Twelve” livery companies of the City of London. In Sir Thomas’s day it was involved in the woolens trade (as its name tells us) and was a royally-chartered monopoly. Working up from that secure origin, Thomas Fleming apprenticed in the law at Lincoln’s Inn and was made a judge of the Queen’s Bench court early in Elizabeth’s reign, for which he was knighted, and continued in that position until about 1600. Early on, he married well enough to establish himself as a gentleman in Hampshire (and served as a quorum justice in the county’s commission of the peace) with lands on the Isle of Wight and, from 1599, as owner of the Stoneham Park estate just north of Southampton. He bought it from the 3rd earl of Southampton, William Shakespeare’s patron. Since Fleming’s own patron was Sir Francis Walsingham, one of Elizabeth’s more successful Svengalis, we may call him well-connected. He was, however, not very well known then or since. But a few of his judgements and his ceremonial speeches survive, in fragments, and (like the quotation at the start of this essay), they show him to have been an eloquent purveyor of the best of his day’s Protestant values. In a 1595 ceremony presenting the then Lord Mayor of London at the Exchequer Court, he offered advice which is strangely relevant today.
He that taketh upon him the office of a magistrate is like to a good man to whose custody a precious jewel is committed; he taketh it not to retain and challenge it for his own, nor to abuse it while he hath it, but safely to keep, and faithfully to render it to him that deposed it when he shall be required. He must do all things not for his private lucre, but for the public's good preservation and safe custody of those committed to his charge, that he may restore them to him that credited in a better and more happy state, it may be, than he received them.
It was good advice in 1595 for a servant of the queen. It’s good advice today for anyone who would serve as the chief executive of a democratic republic. I suspect that the 45th president of the USA never read it. Sir Thomas Fleming died on August 7, 1613, while entertaining his tenantry at Stoneham Park. The Stoneham estate remained in the Fleming family until 1953. Today it’s a pleasant country park, redesigned in the 18th century by Lancelot Brown, and it is under threat from real estate developers. Yet another moral for our time. ©.

[Stanley]

Sweet peas, sea slugs, and the modern synthesis of Darwinian evolution.

If I may throw out a word of counsel to beginners, it is this: treasure your exceptions! William Bateson.

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) was an odd bird who found his roost as brother, then abbot, of an Augustinian monastery in Brno, Moravia (‘Brünn’ in the Hapsburgs’ empire). As abbot, Mendel became best known for his refusal to pay the monastery’s taxes, but before that he dabbled in many things, notably mathematics and botany. His mathematics helped him make sense of his work in plant hybridization. He gave a paper on the subject to a local science society, then published it in the society’s 1864 Proceedings. In the 19th-century world of learning that was not an especially obscure journal, and German was the language of science. The Proceedings went to several libraries, but Mendel gathered more dust than readers, and he went back to his bees and began his tempestuous career as tax-resisting abbot. Then, circa 1900, his work was ‘rediscovered’ by scientists in several countries, and a new science, “genetics,” was born. That word was coined (from the Greek for ‘birth’) by the biologist William Bateson, born in Yorkshire on August 8, 1861. Bateson was open about his admiration for, and dependence upon, Mendel’s pioneering experiments. He translated and republished Mendel’s original paper. Then, in mathematics, logic, and controlled lab work, Bateson would extend Mendel’s work beyond the sweet pea to take in other plant species and then animals (poultry, at first). Bateson published his work, first as early as 1902 in a book titled, generously, Mendel’s Principles of Heredity: A Defense, and then went on to a chair at Cambridge. For all this, Bateson is known (along, of course, with Mendel) as a ‘father of modern genetics.’ But it’s not as if he jumped suddenly on the Mendel bandwagon. Bateson was an early convert to the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, and early began to search for a mechanism that might explain inheritance, variation, and speciation. In this he concentrated on embryology, studying the early development of several very different species. He was especially interested in mutations, changes in body form which were, potentially, the engines of speciation. Bateson’s work would flower into a Nobel prize (1995) shared by three scientists for their discovery of a “genetic control for early embryonic development.” But in the 1890s Bateson searched for a logical (and mathematical) explanation of the variations he was discovering. That work got him into the Royal Society, but it was Mendel’s old paper that provided his particular Eureka moment. Bateson got some things wrong, of course. Science is like that. But Bateson’s work was fundamental to the ”modern synthesis” of Darwinian evolution. ©

[Stanley]

"Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough." John Betjeman.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth. Philip Larkin.

One of the odder things about the statue of the poet Philip Larkin is its resemblance to the statue of the poet John Betjeman. One can hardly imagine more contrasting poets, or poems. Betjeman’s sournesses, when one can find them (he didn’t much like London’s suburbs), are hidden by his sweet nostalgias, while Larkin’s sourness was constitutional and runs rawly through his poems and letters. He may have blamed all that on his parents. His “This Is the Verse” (which begins with “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”) is much beloved by rebellious adolescents. There was, doubtless, something in it. Philip Larkin was born near Coventry, England, on August 9, 1922, to parents who did not have a good effect on him. It was partly their pretentious yet utterly middling classiness, but mainly his father’s enthusiasms for Adolf Hitler and his mother’s acute depressions. Larkin escaped to Oxford, where he won a First in English (in 1943) and formed a fast, mostly lasting, friendship with another rebellious adolescent, Kingsley Amis. When they were there, I think, Oxford didn’t even ‘do’ American literature and thought modernism beneath contempt, so I can scarcely imagine what these two young lads said when they talked about, say, Jane Austen’s unrelievedly happy endings. But surely they appreciated her wit, which could bite, and they both developed a trade in biting wit. Amis could be spectacularly comic, as in Lucky Jim (1954), his first novel (recently described as “scabrous” by its American publisher, presumably as a selling point). Philip Larkin not so much. His wit is sharp enough, but overall it’s camouflaged. And “overall” isn’t much, either. Larkin’s entire output fits comfortably in a not very thick Collected Poems, first published in 1988. This was a posthumous publication, Larkin having died in 1985: complications of shingles, of all things! Before he toddled off, he was offered the post of poet laureate, to replace Betjeman, of all poets! Along the way, Larkin behaved admirably as head librarian at the University of Hull, a kindly boss and an innovative bookman (his was the first computerized library in the UK). He had three love affairs with women (at one time in the 1970s they ran concurrently), bits of which found their way into his poetry and mark him as a glum lover. But then one of those affairs ended only with his death. In 1984, Larkin turned down the laureateship, of course. And yet there are those statues, Betjeman’s and Larkin’s, both of them in front of railway stations, each portraying a kindly—if mildly distracted—figure. But then, they were executed by the same sculptor. And I am proof that a single reader can love their poems, unreservedly, though perhaps not at the same sitting. ©

[Stanley]

A child of slavery; a woman of freedom.

The cause of freedom is not the case of a race or a sect or a party or a class – it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity. Anna Julia Cooper.

Undergraduate students (and at least one presidential candidate) need to be reminded that slavery was not just another form of unfreedom, such as indentured servitude. As an institution it cannot be seen as a kind of training school conferring ‘useful’ skills. In the USA, slavery began in the colonial period and lasted nearly 250 years, much too long to qualify as an engine of upwards mobility for generations of the enslaved. For all that time slaves who learned carpentry or coopering became more valuable properties: then died in that same status. This ownership of human beings was absolute. When efforts to “reform” slavery were made, slave-state legislatures refused even to recognize the legality of slave marriages. That would be to accept the personhood of the bride, the groom, and (most particularly) their ‘valuable’ children. Yet slavery was a human institution. The long relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his property Sally Hemings (who was also Jefferson’s wife’s half-sister) comes to mind. There were many such liaisons, and a few were consensual in some way. At the very least, Hemings got her owner-lover-president to free her children. Anna Julia Cooper, born to a slave mother on August 10, 1858, might not have been quite so lucky—if the South had won its war to save slavery. And Anna Julia Hayward (her name before she married) did not even know certainly who her father was. Most likely he was her master. Or it might have been her master’s brother. Anna’s mother never said. Whichever, Anna was made free by southern defeat and by the 15th Amendment. Aged 9, she won a scholarship at an Episcopalian school for black girls. Already treated as a person by her mother, she now learned to see herself as one. She excelled in her studies and learned some “useful skills” which were her own. But the learning she loved was knowledge, which—as a female—she was not supposed to cultivate. So she married a black man who was a theological student. Anna might have gone on to become a very accomplished pastor’s wife. But her husband died, and Anna took to a long road which began at Oberlin College and finished at the Sorbonne, Paris, where in 1924 she became the fourth African-American woman to earn the PhD—for a thesis on French attitudes towards human slavery! Long before that, Anna Julia Cooper had made herself into an eloquent voice for liberation, as a woman, as a person of color, and as a human being who owned her own skills and made her living by them. Her words (repeated at the start of this note and now printed on USA passports and visas) are in themselves a rebuke to Ron DeSantis and to anyone who thinks of slavery as a different kind of skills training. ©