OneGuyFromBarlick

December 18, 1916

On ne passe pas. General Robert Georges Nivelle, 1916.

That translates as “they shall not pass,” and was the initial command given by Nivelle, the French commander during most the Battle of Verdun. Since “they” did not pass, we can call Verdun a French victory. But that stretches the word “victory” beyond breaking point. At Verdun’s end, on December 18, 1916, the French drove the Germans back from positions they had won at the battle’s beginning. But the Germans’ initial attack was on February 21, so the ‘battle’ lasted almost 10 months. It’s thought to have been the longest battle in human history, and it cannot be called ‘decisive.’ It was the slaughter that both command HQs intended it to be. WWI would last another two years. Verdun did bring about shuffles in both commands, but none were conclusive. On the French side Nivelle replaced Philippe Pétain who then replaced Nivelle. The casualty lists render irrelevant generals’ ambitions and egos. There were ¾ of a million casualties (about 75,000 each month) and perhaps 420,000 dead. And if you want an accounting, “about” half were French, “about” half German. And all of them for so little. The Verdun battle raged back and forth, a bloodthirsty monster chained in place. The village of Fleury changed hands more than a dozen times! We visited Verdun in 1985, on return from camping in the French Alps. On our way back to Britain, we camped just outside Strasbourg and then a few miles west of Verdun. Thus we followed the modern bloodlettings between France and Germany, first over Alsace and then over the “Verdun salient.” But Verdun had been a strategic battleground for a very long time. “Verdun” derives from an ancient Gaullish word meaning “strong fort,” and so it had been since even before the days of Attila the Hun. In 1916 the French made Verdun into a rallying cry. “On ne passe pas” recruiting posters went up everywhere, and thousands more Pierres and Alains answered the call, then in their turns died or deserted or survived. The battle site became a national shrine. One still gets to it by traveling the “Voie Sacrée,” and there are hectares of graves. The battlefield’s center has been left as it was, pockmarked by shell craters which fill with every rain—just like 1916. But since the next bloodletting, World War II, Verdun has been internationalized. In the Ossuary, an austere building, German and French bones (the ‘unidentified’) are piled together willy-nilly, and the road surrounding the Ossuary is called L’avenue corps Européen. For me, the most memorable sight was the arrival at Verdun of a German tour bus. As its passengers stepped out, a local guide spoke, in German and in French, about Verdun’s new role as a peace memorial. Let’s hope it stays that way. ©.

Standard English
Where shall we look for standard English, but to the words of a standard man? Henry David Thoreau.

Rebel that he was, Thoreau joked about standard English as a conformist tendency. He behaved strangely too, living in the woods to “learn what it had to teach,” even refusing to pay his local taxes in order to protest against a distant, unjust war. We love him so deeply for his nonconformities that we scarcely notice his immaculate spelling and his exemplary grammar. When Henry went to Harvard, “English” had become so “standard” that Noah Webster thought it time to produce an American dictionary of the English language. Indeed ‘standard English’ was the product of the previous century, the 18th. It was in several ways just a social accident. In England, the ‘polite’ classes got together for more than politics, at spas like Bath and Tunbridge Wells or in the London season. They attended race meetings (to watch the horses and ape each other). It became almost common to educate their children (boys) in “public” schools where they learned how best to express themselves. Quite a number went on to university. Others joined the ‘learned professions.’ It was a process, and in it middle and upper class English folk learned how to speak, to drop their local accents and regional usages—and how to spell. People became more conscious of this ‘process’ because it was overseen by the learned among them, of whom the great lexicographer (and wit) Dr. Samuel Johnson may be taken as a type, an early incarnation of the grammar police. But there were other overseers, notably from the skilled trade of printing. In England the exemplar of proper English as printed was William Bowyer, born in London right at the cusp the century (December 19, 1699), and born a printer. His father was a printer. His mother was a printer’s daughter. His father, also William (1663-1737), was already making waves in printing. He believed every print shop should have an editor (“corrector” was the word he used), and he made his son into a better corrector. And not only as an apprentice. Indeed young William went up to Cambridge, where he spent six years polishing his Latin and mastering Greek and Hebrew. And, it should be added, English. He came back to his father’s shop to set and print the works of some of the century’s greatest writers (e.g. Swift and Pope), to standardize the rules by which they wrote, and (by working to rule) to irritate beyond measure the less disciplined scribblers of the era. And there were in 18th-century London plenty of scribblers. Young Bowyer continued to “correct” them (we might say “edit”), and to make his press into a quality place that assiduously looked after copyright and began to develop the idea of a standard text (of this or that classic). Using his talents (and his old Cambridge connections) William Bowyer became the printer for parliament (first the Commons, then the Lords), for the Royal Society, even for a Frenchman called Voltaire. Bowyer died a rich man, leaving generous endowments to the Stationers’ Company, and leaving behind him (at least) seventeen apprentices. He also left behind his typefaces, in several scripts (including Coptic!), and his detailed commercial records. His accounts and his manuscript reflections on the processes of printing in “standard English” can be consulted in university libraries (Oxford and Columbia, but not Cambridge) and in his book, Literary Anecdotes. ©

First Lady of Hollywood

There are worse things in life than being called a lady. Irene Dunne, 1977

Even before her acting career was over, Irene Dunne was known as ‘the first lady of Hollywood,’ and that would seem to be a fair assessment. There was general gnashing of teeth and wailing that she never won an Academy Award, but she was nominated five times, and in a variety of genres. The ones that survive in the world of internet streaming are her ‘screwball’ comedies, so one learns that dizzy dames can also be ladies. Probably her best were the two she did with Cary Grant, The Awful Truth (1937) and My Favorite Wife (1940). Both have to do with a wronged wife. In 1937 Dunne was Lucy Warriner, wrongly accused of an affair with her voice coach and then unjustly divorced. In 1940 she was Ellen Arden, thought lost at sea and declared dead, who then shows up on her husband’s (second) honeymoon. Both farcical plots are happily resolved, with Dunne’s heroines restored to the rightful heroes (both played by Grant). Of course the films have spicey bits, but in post-Hayes Hollywood the spice was sugared. Dunne’s own marriage (to Francis Griffin) was a sweet one, though in publicity interviews she did remember a bit of spice. When they first met, Griffin asked her for her phone number. “I don’t give my number to men I don’t know. It’s Plaza 5048.” This was when Dunne was still finding her feet on the New York stage and he was 44 and a bachelor dentist. Irene Dunne was 29, having been born (in Louisville, Kentucky) on December 20, 1898. But youth being the Thing, she claimed a 1907 birthdate. Presumably, she told Francis the truth about her age, but whatever—they stayed married until Francis died in 1965. By then he’d become involved in real estate. She’d already retired from films and took over the real estate firm. It was easy, for they’d long been partners in other ways, as adoptive parents for instance, and demon fundraisers for this or that charity (or, during WWII, for war bonds), but what really identified them was their service to the Catholic Church. Both were faithful communicants (Dunne daily), and in 1953 Pius XII named them to papal knighthoods. Of course Irene Dunne couldn’t be a knight, so she was made Dame of the Holy Sepulchre. She was, after all, a lady. And she was identified with conservative political causes, too, not least the Republican Party. An active Eisenhower supporter, she’d been named to the American delegation at the UN, where she was (predictably?) especially engaged with UNICEF. For her this was a non-political appointment, and she did see herself as a moderate, opposed to “extremism” whether it was Right or Left. She was, at her beginning and to her end, conservative and Catholic. ©.

Science of society, science of nature.

In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense. Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin, 1902.

Thus Kropotkin aimed to kill the Spencerian fallacy of ‘social’ Darwinism. The idea that natural selection guaranteed “the survival of the fittest” was applied (by Kropotkin) to whole species and not to individuals. So he entitled his 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. This did not go down well among the captains of industry and finance, the dominating individuals of the era. After all, had they not survived and prospered in the rough, competitive world of the industrial revolution? They were, must be, “the fittest,” their survival both predicted and explained by Charles Darwin’s revolutionary theory. Peter Kropotkin’s dissent can be explained partly by biography. He was, so to speak, born ‘fit,’ in Moscow, on December 21, 1842, already a member in good standing of the Tsarist aristocracy. His father owned great tracts of land and the serfs who worked it, and it would have been easy for young Peter to accept the notion that all this was nature’s decree. As a child, he did act kindly towards the family’s serfs and servants, but at age 8 he was chosen for the Tsar’s elitist Page Corps, traditionally a training ground for the Russian military or bureaucracy. It might have been so, but his first posting took him to Siberia, Russia’s very own frontier. There the plight of the locals (natives and imports, many of the latter political prisoners) further weakened his Tsarist loyalties. On the side, as it were, he became a social critic, even reporting (to newspapers) on the plight of the political exiles. So, by degrees, he became a socialist, a collectivist, even a dangerous revolutionary and, as such, was exiled (to Switzerland and then to England). Many thought his antipathy to social Darwinism and theories about the importance of “mutual aid” in evolutionary success grew from his social and political anger, and there’s truth in that. But it’s also the case that the “mutual aid” idea was popular among non-political Russian scientists, and many years later Stephen Jay Gould suggested that Kropotkin and others were also influenced by Siberia itself, the natural laboratory within which they studied evolution. It’s a harsh place, large parts of it frozen tundra, other parts dessicated deserts. Survival alone was a greater challenge than survival in concert. Today, with our new knowledge of symbiotic cooperation between species (not only animals but plants and fungi), Kropotkin makes more sense. All that may also help to explain why Kropotkin himself embraced anarchism and rejected the forced collectivization of the Bolshevik revolution. His anarchism was based on ideas of voluntary association, ideas he could also draw from his observations of the struggle to survive in Siberian nature. ©.

Which 5th is the Fifth?

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven. Ludwig von Beethoven.

Thus spoke the artist as a Romantic, an individual like no other, a mortal being who has (defiantly?) found the Genius that lurks in us all. And by implication that could be extended to the claim that there is only one “5th Symphony,” Beethoven’s of course. It has knocked down through the ages as “the Fate symphony.” It begins dit-dit-dit-dah, the Morse code for ‘V’, victory, and Roman for the Arabic 5. Winston Churchill would use the opening phrase (played by tuned drums!) to preface messages sent to secret agents in Hitler’s Fortress Europe: ‘Fate knocking at the door.’ So when I had spending money of my own, I asked my dad which classical work I should buy. “Beethoven’s 5th” was his answer. In my nearly perfect innocence, I bought Beethoven’s 5th, but my 5th was Beethoven’s piano concerto “The Emperor.” I’ve since recovered from the embarrassment, partly because I was (much later) encouraged to learn that the public premiere of the Symphony in C Minor, in Vienna, on the night of December 22, 1808, was a bit of a bust anyway. The premiere took place at the Theatre an der Wien. It was meant as a benefit for Beethoven, important in the days when even genius composers were financially dependent on prince-patrons. It was, appropriately, all-Beethoven, who conducted the orchestra and used the night to premiere (also) his sixth symphony, the “Pastorale,” the “Choral Fantasy,” and his fourth piano concerto. So Beethoven composed, but on the night he also played at the piano. He led from the keyboard the 4th concerto of course but added a solo piano ‘improvisation’. In addition, there were extracts from two Beethoven masses, a gloria and a sanctus. So there was a lot on the evening’s programme. “Too much of a good thing,” one attendee wrote, and indeed the evening did not go well. The Theatre an der Wien was a prestige venue (it still stands and is still used), but it was a cold night. Sitting there for over four hours proved too much for too many in the audience, and there’s abundant evidence that the performers were not best pleased, either. Beethoven and the concertmaster exchanged words, and glares, and at one point (during the Choral Fantasy) the orchestra was commanded to repeat a flubbed passage. It should have been a night to remember for the right reasons, a multiple premiere of works that have since become standards in concert halls worldwide, but it was remembered for the wrong reasons. Besides all that, my mistaking a concerto for a symphony fades to adolescent insignificance. And it was very soon after that cold night in Vienna that musicians, critics, and scholars began to Beethoven’s “real” Fifth as a work of abundant genius. ©

A very cold case.

Edmund Berry Godfrey, raised for his services to King and Country to the rank of Knight, having filled the office of Justice with a singular faithfulness and diligence, was snatched at last from the sight of his kin on 12th Oct 1678 and found on the fifth day following, having suffered an abominable and hideous death. The rest let History tell. Inscription (translated from Latin) on a stone tablet in Westminster Abbey, London.

Trouble is, ‘History’ hasn’t been able to tell “the rest” of this bizarre tale about the sad end of Edmund Berry Godfrey, born in Kent on December 23, 1612 and found—doornail dead—on October 17, 1678. There is much evidence that Godfrey was indeed murdered. Even that was disputed at the time, and the notion of suicide keeps rearing up in modern treatments. The problem is that the rest of the evidence (and there’s a lot) provides no clear guidance on crucial questions of modern forensics: who did it? why did they do it? How? We don’t even know when. Godfrey disappeared for five days, and although his body was carefully examined, the state of medical science in 1678 leaves us with no certainty as to the time of death. What is clear is that Edmund Berry Godfrey’s fate precipitated a profound crisis in English politics. Rumor ruled that Godfrey was killed by Catholics. Rumor had it that Catholics were plotting to take over the English crown, subvert parliament, destroy the Church of England, even replace King Charles II with his younger brother James, Duke of York, a Catholic convert. Godfrey knew some of the plotters. Or in his duties as magistrate he'd found out something about the plot. And so Godfrey had to be killed. Simple as that!! Case closed. Except it wasn’t. The so-called Popish Plot mushroomed into the Exclusion Crisis (1678-81). New parliaments were called, each one striving to exclude the duke from the succession. And in turn the Exclusion Crisis turned into the Tory Reaction which culminated in the peaceful coronation of that very Catholic king, James II. The matter wasn’t resolved, really, until 1688-89, when King James was overthrown by a foreign invader invited by domestic fifth columnists, many of whom had in 1678 tried to make political hay out of Edmund Godfrey’s murder. That was the “Glorious” Revolution, so-called because it restored crown-in-parliament, and saved crown-in-church, all at once and with little bloodshed. So it is that we forget about poor old Godfrey. His is one of those cold cases that time forgot. It was so full of false witness and wild conspiracy theories that we’ve lost interest in who he was. I’ve thought of him recently, as Paulette and I have been (re)watching the fine BBC crime series, New Tricks, in which three retired London cops are brought back into service as the “Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad”. Each of them are as eccentric as Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (who was himself a rather odd bird). Sadly, the BBC missed the opportunity to get them together. ©

Gender + Confusion = Comedy

How do you do. I am Charley’s aunt from Brazil, where the nuts come from. From the stage play Charley’s Aunt (1892), by Brandon Thomas.

In Elizabethan England, women’s stage roles were played by males, boys whose voices had not yet broken. It was required by law, so Shakespeare’s boys could be cast as women in tragedies (poor misunderstood Cordelia in Lear) and comedies (wild and witty Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), and everything in between. So, once upon a time, cross-dressing was required by law. But there are deep psychological rewards unearthed by men playing as women (or, of course, vice versa), and cross dressing on stage has featured in many cultures, from pre-Socratic Greece onwards. Gender is a powerful identifier, but it’s not all-powerful, so crossing gender lines has dramatic potential. Recently, politicians have made hay of it, getting their knickers in a twist over gender confusions in grade school bathrooms. But on the modern stage cross-dressing is more commonly the stuff of comedy. One reason for that was the worldwide success of the comedy Charley’s Aunt, in which an Oxford student of aristocratic lineage (Lord Fancourt Babberly, “Babbs” to his friends) finds himself playing the role of a rich Brazilian widow, Donna Lucia, the auntie of Babbs’s friend Charley Wykeham. Comedic chaos follows, coming to crisis when the “real” Donna Lucia intrudes. Charley’s Aunt was a huge success in London, almost simultaneously in provincial theaters, and then enjoyed record runs in New York, Paris, and Weimar. Translated to film, it would lead hit parades in several countries and cultures (including two versions in India). In the USA, in 1941, it became Jack Benny’s favorite film, Benny as “Babbs” of course. The original Charley’s Aunt was the creation of a bootseller’s son, Brandon Thomas, born in Liverpool on December 24, 1848. His father was successful enough at boots to finance Brandon’s education (in private schools), but the whole idea was to bring Brandon up to business. Brandon tried almost everything but boots, but finally absconded to London at the tender age of 31, where he could freely continue his adolescent fascination with theatre, acting initially in minor roles, in touring companies, in club venues. He was successful enough to begin writing plays himself, and with success. Then in the 1890s (Oscar Wilde’s decade, we might call it) came Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt, and his world would never be the same again. It was a success he wanted to escape from, but after his death (in 1914) his wife took over the royalties—which kept coming in—and two of his three children became regulars on the English acting circuit (often playing in Charley’s Aunt revivals). You should see a film version (Benny’s is still available) before it gets banned by our political pecksniffs. It’s actually funny, when you think of it. ©.

The Scottish enlightenment.

Did not strong connections draw me elsewhere, I believe Scotland would be the country I would choose to end my days in. Benjamin Franklin.

Old Ben, who put a high value on being agreeable, probably said the same thing about France when he was in Paris. But his was a widespread sentiment. As Voltaire put it, “we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilization.” The Scottish Enlightenment was the “common sense” powerhouse of progressive thought in the 18th-century Anglophone world. One of its founders might have been Archibald Pitcairne, born into the Edinburgh haute bourgeoisie on December 25, 1652. ‘Might have been,’ except he was too quarrelsome, his wit too acid, to qualify as a pioneer of Scotland’s reasonable, accommodating, even genial version of the new moral universe of the Enlightenment. In Scotland it was no favor to be born on Christmas Day. Christmas celebrations had been illegal since 1560. The Scottish ‘kirk’ frowned on Christmas as a popish invention, and it was a criminal offense even to bake a “Yule Cake” for one’s neighbors. It’s possible that Archibald Pitcairne’s family secretly celebrated the day (and Archibald’s nativity) for, unusually amongst Edinburgh’s burghers, the Pitcairnes were Episcopalians, devotees of the English state church. And in his later life, Archibald did enter the lists as a religious maverick in Presbyterian Scotland. He attacked the kirk’s cultural monopolies, satirized its sectarian tendencies, and then went further in the 1690s by supporting the regal claims of the exiled James II. Some even believed Pitcairne to be a closet Catholic. He blamed his allegedly treasonous Jacobite writings on his drinking habits, and his worst enemies were willing to believe that. They’d already suffered the rough side of Pitcairne’s tongue and the sharp end of his pen over other issues. Most of these disputes were over medicine and mathematics. Pitcairne had qualified in medicine at Rheims, taken a chair in medicine at Leyden, and then had embraced the very new mathematics (and mechanics) of Isaac Newton. A systemist at heart, he’d put them together and come up with come very odd ideas (about the ‘physics’ of illness, one might say). These ideas put him at odds with many contemporaries. And yet, at the same time, he’d fought to establish Edinburgh as a center of intellectual enquiry. One might argue that his efforts would lead to the founding (1726) of the Edinburgh University School of Medicine and, eventually (1783) the Royal Society of Edinburgh. But one would have to underline “eventually.” It was not until 1968 that Christmas day became a legal holiday in Scotland, and Archibald Pitcairne was well before then lost to the national memory. He drank himself to death in 1713. ©

The hereditary principle and the gender line.

One of the strongest proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ass for a lion. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776).

For Paine the biggest ass of all was George III, “the royal brute,” whose belief in heredity was so strong that he created more than 400 hereditary nobles. That record was not surpassed even by Queen Victoria, although her reign was much longer. Interestingly, George III also held the record for peeresses, female aristocrats who held their title suo jure (each “in her own right”). I think there were 19, far outstripping Victoria. George’s motives were under fire during his reign, and not merely from revolutionaries like Paine. It was believed that George made peers in order to safeguard his government’s majority in the House of Lords—and even in the Commons too, if this or that new creation owned a “rotten borough.” But then what of George III’s peeresses? By gender-definition they could not sit in the Lords, and it would be unseemly for any lady to engage in electioneering. Looking at one of his lady peers, the Countess of Bath, one can only conclude that wealth had something to do with the king’s mania for ennoblement. At the time of her elevation (1789) she was the sole heir of one of the richest men in Europe, and when her father died she became, suo jure so to speak, one of its richest women. She was Henrietta Laura Pulteney, born (needless to say) in very auspicious circumstances on December 26, 1766. Her father, William Johnstone, had married into the Pulteney fortune and (though he was already rich in his own right) was decent enough to change his surname to Pulteney. This was perhaps because his wife was a Pulteney heiress. The Pulteney male line held the hereditary earldom of Bath, which is probably why (when Laura Pulteney was only 26 years old) she became Countess of Bath suo jure. This complicated things because the custom was that each place (shire or port city or country town or famous spa) could have only one peerage named after it. So a special vote (in the Lords) was held to allow the oxymoron and, in a left-handed sort of way, confirm ex post facto Tom Paine’s contempt for the hereditary principle. Laura’s peerage has some relevance for American history, for the Pulteneys (and hence the young countess) were among colonial New York’s greatest landowners, having speculated in vast acreages made secure by Britain’s victory (over France) in 1763. After American independence, the Pulteneys sold up, but their footprints can still be found in place names in upstate New York, not only in towns called Bath, Pulteney, and Henrietta, but in place names too. It’s enough to make old Tom Paine spin in his shroud. As for the countess herself, she died without issue so her noble title died too. Suo jure is not “forever.” ©

"Play!"

The only way to counteract something bad happening on a Nelson number was to get your feet off the ground. David Shepherd, 2003.

All sports have superstitions. In baseball, you don’t lend someone else your bat. In cricket, there’s a belief that something (usually bad) will happen (usually to a batter or the batting side) when the score reaches 111. This is known as a ‘Nelson number,’ after Admiral Horatio Nelson, who died in glory at the Battle of Trafalgar. Nelson died missing one arm, one eye, and (in cricketing legend) one ‘something else.’ Or, as in the tear-jerking Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), “one arm, one eye, and one destiny.” There appears to be no statistical evidence for this superstition, but it’s been made famous by the on-pitch antics of umpire David Robert Shepherd, who—when a score reached 111, was known to dance a little jig in order, he said, to stop “something” bad happening. But happening to whom? On pitch or somewhere else? As a respected, and universally loved, umpire, Shepherd wouldn’t—or couldn’t—say. But by the time Shepherd became an eminent ump (he began umpiring internationals, “Tests,” in 1981) dancing a little jig was awkward because he’d become a little stout. So the crowds loved it, this portly John Bull, looking for all the world like a Toby jug, getting his feet off the ground out there in mid-pitch. David Robert Shepherd was born in north Devon on December 27, 1940, not far from Instow, where his parents ran the village shop and his mother served as postmistress. His younger brother would take over the business. David followed his father’s footsteps to become a cricketer. Indeed he did better than the old man, becoming a more-than-competent middle order batsman for Gloucestershire, thus a “First Class” cricketer. But his weight kept him back, and on his retirement from the game he decided to qualify as an umpire. By 1981 he was on the international roster, and before he finished (in 2005) Shepherd had umpired a record 66 Tests, 69 one-day “internationals” and 3 World Cup finals. He was the very model of a modern umpire. Geniality personified, he eased tension between the sides, joked with the captains, reminded fast bowlers that they were not licensed to murder lower-order batsmen. He was firm in his decisions, though sometimes he sought a reassuring nod from his partner umpire. Of course Shepherd was not faultless. No umpire can be, and in the 2001 Tests between England and Pakistan his bad decisions threw a match (and thus the whole Test series) to Pakistan. Such was his reputation that he considered resigning. And such was his reputation that every cricketing nation urged him to stay on. So when he died in 2009, back at Instow (where he aided in his brother’s village shop) his obituaries (in England and in other cricketing countries) testified to a well-judged sporting life. ©.

If you gain a right, exercise it.

I wanted to [go to college] but my father did not share my views. My father wanted me to be a musician. He wanted me to play the piano. Burnita Shelton Matthews, interview (1975) with the Suffragists Oral History Project, University of California.

Burnita’s brother was a more gifted pianist, but their father did not want him to be a pianist. So he went to college, then on to law school, while she stayed home, in Claiborne County, Mississippi, where her father ranched cattle, grew cotton, played politics, and sat as a judge in chancery. Burnita Shelton was born there on December 28, 1894, but she didn’t stay. Burning at the injustice (or absurdity) of her father’s views on gender and piano playing, she studied hard, passed the federal civil service examinations with flying colors, and in 1916 went to Washington, DC, to get a government job. She also got herself a husband, Percy Matthews, an army pilot who’d qualified as a lawyer. Burnita was not in Washington to find a husband, or for that matter to secure a civil service job, but rather to get a law degree, which she did in 1919. In 1947, Burnita Shelton Matthews was appointed judge in the DC district court, thus becoming the first woman to hold such a federal judgeship. There was a certain measure of fame in that “first,” and as judge she presided over some important cases, notably Paul Robeson’s appeal for restitution of his US passport and Jimmy Hoffa’s first bribery case. But her more solid accomplishments came from her work as a lawyer, 1919-1947, working to ensure that winning the vote (the 19th Amendment, 1920) might actually mean something for women in their daily lives. As a new-minted lawyer she worked with others, notably Alice Paul, to decide that the National Women’s Party (NWP) still had much to do. State and national courts still applied statute and precedent to keep women in their ‘proper’ place, here unable to do business, there constrained by husbands’ or fathers’ absolute control of “community property”, in other places unable to work if married or, worse, pregnant. Her first big victory, however, was monetary. The government wanted the Supreme Court to have its own building, and the best site for that was the dilapidated HQ of the NWP. In 1921 the property was condemned and a ludicrous purchase price was set. Was this sweet revenge for the insult of the suffrage amendment? No one would admit that, but the NWP took the US government to court over the property’s commercial value, and this young woman lawyer from rural Mississippi walked off with a check for nearly $300,000, then the largest settlement in US history of an eminent domain case. That’s $5.3 million in 2024 currency: not bad for a piano player. Mrs. Matthews went on to win many cases—in federal and state courts-that were more substantial in principle, but sometimes the cash is the thing. ©

Of turbulent priests and choleric kings.

Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest? King Henry II (1170).

Or, one should say, attributed to Henry II. The actual line comes from the 1964 film Becket, wherein King Henry (Peter O’Toole), sunk in a drunken rage, soliloquizes about his former friend Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury (Richard Burton), and explodes with this invitation to murder the archbishop. In that sense the 1964 film is a faithful rendering of what happened. For it was on December 29, 1170, that several (probably four) of Henry’s faithful courtiers assassinated Thomas Becket. The murder happened on or near the central altar at Canterbury Cathedral, a suitable venue for Becket was quickly proclaimed a martyr, then sainted by Pope Alexander III. The assassins were ordered to do penance (by serving in the Crusades for 14 years), and King Henry himself had to ‘fess up, publicly, at a French cathedral. That much is known; that much is accurate; and, indeed, the whole thing was serious. Becket and Henry had been friends. Becket owed his episcopate to this friendship. They had fallen out. And in their conflict Becket used the Pope and the king of France to challenge Henry’s power. Turbulent priest!! But much of the rest is legend, testament to our ability to create and then nurture “tradition.” So one sees the 1964 movie’s monologue, “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest”, quoted as ‘fact’ and used to illustrate this or that brouhaha in the White House, the Kremlin, the Palace of Westminster or any other seat of power. But linking these latter-day evidences of human frailties with past realities is problematic. For starters, King Henry II couldn’t speak English. So whatever he said, it was in Latin or Old French. Nor was Henry only the King of England. The Norman invasion of 1066 (and all that) and then Henry’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine made him the Angevin king of many places. He ruled (or claimed) more territory in France than he did in the British isles. His temper tantrum took place in one of Henry’s French castles, and his hit men had to sail the Channel to murder Becket. It would take 500 years, many battles, and several judicious assassinations to effect a divorce between England and France. Had it all turned out differently, we’d probably be quoting Henry in French. One thing, though, is clear. Turbulent priests are always problematic. They are especially so when they serve turbulent kings in turbulent times. Rumor has it that several high priests of the MAGA movement are already falling out, for instance over immigration and inoculation, and they haven’t yet even moved into the palace. When they do, the White House will be a space to watch. Turbulent priests and short-tempered monarchs are an explosive mix. ©

Of Pippins and Permains.

WHAT Soil the Apple loves, what Care is due
To Orchats, timeliest when to press the fruits,
Thy Gift, Pomona, in Miltonian Verse
Adventurous I presume to sing . . .
. . . But my Native Soil
Invites me, and the Theme as yet unsung.
John Phillips, 1708

‘Pomona’ is the Roman goddess of apples, Milton was Milton, and this poem was entitled CYDER, in caps, when young John Phillips was still a student at Christ Church, Oxford. He was born a vicar’s son at Bampton, Oxfordshire, on December 30, 1676, so he was older than most collegians of the day, and he spent more years there than most. But he was no slow learner. At Oxford and at Winchester School he read deeply, mastering Latin and Greek of course. And CYDER proves him to have been no slouch in his native tongue. But why sing of apple cider? And at such length? The poem, a georgic, takes up 1,469 lines and comprises two “Books”, dedicated in turn to two school friends, John Mostyn and Simon Harcourt, “pressed” in friendship, and they (and others of Phillips’s friends from school and college) responded in kind when the poem was published. So there’s a theme of love and friendship between youths. CYDER is also a paean to Phillips’s native lands, England of course but more particularly apple-cheeked Herefordshire, where his family held an estate. There apples were picked, pressed, and barreled as cider. Indeed, if you want to learn how cider was being made in 1700, you could do no better than read this poem (it’s online), where you follow apples from well-manured ground to the mature tree to the fallen fruit; thence to the press. Then you taste the apples as cider, first fresh then fermented (where it challenges the grape). And then the solid refuse is recycled back, as animal feed or manure. So besides being a georgic, the poem is an epic and a cycle. It’s also patriotic. But it doesn’t name the Blenheim battle (1704) or Blenheim’s hero, for John Phillips was a high church Tory and so were his friends. Rather it celebrates Queen Ann and her new crop of Tory ministers. But that Toryism makes even more surprising the poem’s praise for John Milton, poet laureate of the 17thcentury’s Puritan revolution: not only naming Milton in the first lines but using Miltonian mechanics (free verse in five-footed lines) to sing of apples, their juices, and the juices’ uses. It is that, scholars say, which makes John Phillips’s verse so important. Phillips himself died very young, in 1709, back in Herefordshire where the apple-tree buds were just beginning to wake from winter’s sleep. He’s buried there, too. But his friends placed a memorial in Westminster Abbey, in Poet’s Corner. If you read the poem, you will think that tribute justified. And you will learn much about apples. ©.

Up the Irish!!!! Happy New Year!!!

My favorite food from my homeland is Guinness. My second choice in Guinness. My third choice - would have to be Guinness. Peter O’Toole.

Peter O’Toole (1932-2013) must have been Irish (his middle name was Seamus). He was educated in Catholic schools. And he was often to be found in his cups. The cancer that killed him was alcohol-related, and a fair share of his lifetime consumption was that wonderfully sweet yet slightly burned and certainly dark brew from Dublin, Guinness stout. It’s a reasonable bet that around the world tonight, Irish folk (and any who wish themselves Irish) will drink in the New Year by quaffing black Irish gold. And it’s appropriate. Not only is Guinness a Dublin brew, but we could say that Guinness (the stout) was born on this day, December 31, 1759. For it was on that eve that Arthur Guinness (1725-1803) signed and paid for a lease on an existing brewery site at St. James’s Gate, Dublin. Guinness was not a new-minted brewer. He’d made beer when in the employ of an Irish estate, and then in 1755 set up on his own—upstream from Dublin on the River Liffey, So, Guinness is an Irish drink, except when it’s brewed elsewhere. Guinness opened its first American brewery quite a long while ago. That closed down but new ones opened up in Baltimore in 2018 and then Chicago last year. There are now, I think, seven “Guinness” breweries worldwide, and there are many more places where the stuff is brewed under license. And for that matter, Peter O’Toole was born in England (Leeds), thought himself “retired” from Catholicism and as a “bogus” Irishman. In his best movie role (as in beer, tastes on this issue vary) he was excessively English. For that matter, the original Arthur Guinness (though undeniably “Irish”) was a child of the Protestant ascendancy, descended from Ulster Scots and a very loyal communicant of the (Protestant, Anglican) Church of Ireland. Arthur did favor freeing Irish Catholics from their various legal disabilities, but when. during the French Revolutionary Wars, Irish nationalists threatened to tear up the imperial union with Britain, Guinness proved a Loyalist, For generations, Dublin tipplers were likely to refer to Guinness as “Protestant Porter” (or worse). Arthur was also, unlike Peter O’Toole, a prominent Temperance advocate. When Temperance meant “temperance” this was not hypocrisy. After all, Arthur Guinness made beers and ales. Drunkenness in Dublin came from whiskeys, most of which (including the fabled Jameson’s Irish Whisky) were made by Protestants. Indeed the whole business (Irish booze > Irish politics > Irish religion) is hopelessly complicated. But Arthur Guinness’s 1759 lease runs for 9,000 years at about £45 annually, so it’s not going to clear up tonight. So “Up The Irish!” and “Happy New Year!” And, if you must have a drink, make it a Guinness. ©.

Difficult subjects explained familiarly.

When you plead in favour of ignorance, there is a strong presumption that you are in the wrong. Mrs. B, in Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Political Economy (1816).

Conversations on Political Economy was one of Marcet’s “Conversation” books. She finished Conversations on Chemistry, in 1805, but did not have it published until 1819, perhaps because a woman would not (or should not?) be able to undertake such a subject. But Jane Marcet was not comfortable with ignorance, and each of her five Conversations (publication dates 1816-1842) are prefaced by arguments that women and children should become conversant in what was going on in the world. Each book is, indeed, a conversation. Questions are asked (by Caroline and Emily) and answered (by “Mrs. B”) and Marcet delivers it all in familiar terms (or, as each title puts it, “familiarly explained”). Jane Marcet was born in London on January 1, 1769, the first child of a wealthy Genevan banker, Anthony Haldimand, and his English wife, Jane Pickersgill. Simple mathematics suggests that Jane Pickersgill was pregnant when they married (August 6, 1768). But never mind. There would be eleven more children before Jane the mother died (1785), at which point Jane the eldest daughter became ‘manager’ for a large and talented family. Her own interests (at first, painting) were also encouraged, and she learned a lot about banking and trade. So did her brother William Haldimand, who became a director of the Bank of England and would, in the 1810s and 1820s, be one of the principal financers of the Greek Revolution. Jane then became interested in chemistry. She married the Genevan chemist Alexander Marcet in 1799, and attended the lectures of Humphrey Davy. The Marcets moved to Russell Square, building on to their house a scientific laboratory. In it, their four children learned with them, and so once again Jane was involved in a lively household, made livelier by the fact that it became one of London’s leading salons, attended by (inter alia) Davy, the historian Henry Hallam, the pioneer mathematician Mary Somerville, and the radical sociologist Harriet Martineau. The Marcet lab was a large one. The novelist Maria Edgeworth reported a Marcet experiment in which the family built a “paper fire-balloon” measuring 16’ x 30’ and then invited all the neighbors to see it fly. Meanwhile, Jane Marcet wrote her essays in programmed learning, one question and answer leading on to the next pair. Her books were at once accessible and solid, with many English editions and even more American ones (the latter pirated, of course). Michael Faraday said that his interests in science were first aroused by Jane Marcet’s Conversations, and there’s good evidence that she was required reading in the American childhoods of the brothers William and Henry James. Later, about 1950, I learned how to make Jane Marcet’s invisible ink. Happy New Year!!! ©.

Superconductor.

Attenuation equals 16 db it says. Eureka! Whoopee! From the laboratory notebook of Donald B. Keck (1970).

In and around St. Louis (from the urban center to the rural hinterlands) crews have been busily at work installing fiber-optic cable. It’s not woven “cable” and there’s no metal in it. It’s a “loose tube” construction, about 2” in diameter, a bundle of small tubes sheathed in a dayglo orange plastic. In the cities it often runs in or alongside existing tunnels from previous installations. In the countryside, it’s threaded through the earth, about 2-3 feet down. And it’s meant to carry information, at speed and in quantity, from wherever information is produced to wherever it’s consumed. Inside the dayglo are several cores, each of them again made of some kind of poly-plastic, and inside each of those is the matter that carries the information. For shorthand, it’s called optical fiber. It was invented by a Corning Glass team led by Donald B. Keck. Kech was born in Lansing, Michigan, on January 2, 1941. Although his father was a physics professor at Michigan State, he wasn’t fated to follow. His mother taught literature, and in any case young Keck was known, in high school, for his prowess at waterskiing. In the late 1950s, that had career potential, but a serious boating accident intervened. He went to MSU to study electrical engineering but got sidetracked into the physics of it. Keck got his physics PhD in 1967 and went to work at Corning’s research division, where he and his colleagues messed around with (of course) glass. Besides being Corning’s main product, glass is odd. It is a solid with some liquid characteristics, it is chemically inert, and its main component, silicon dioxide, has a crystalline character. Spun into fibers, it becomes a superconductor that moves electrical charges (light) with little loss (“attenuation” in Keck’s notes). This potential had long been noted, but glass in its usual form distorts and deflects light. Keck and his team made glass fiber carry light almost faultlessly. 38 patents later (optical fiber is produced with various ‘dopes’) it is in practice the best way we have of moving information, channeling it into different band widths, bringing it right home to my Macbook. At 84, Keck has retired. He left Corning on 2002 to set up his own company. He still lives near Corning’s main works in upstate New York but holds a courtesy appointment at a Florida university. He's a major benefactor of MSU and other educational institutions and of the Red Cross. So we’ve not yet run out of Kecks. And we are not likely to run out of silicon dioxide any time soon. Silicon and oxygen are among the earth’s (and the universe’s) most plentiful elements. But our local fiber optic installations have been financed by Biden money, which in the age of Trump may not be as inexhaustible as SiO2. ©

Like patience on a monument.

I have spent my entire life trying to interest people in poetry. Jill Balcon, 1984.

Certainly Jill Balcon spent years trying to convince people—and the world—of the poetic genius of her husband Cecil Day-Lewis. The jury is still out on that question. There’s some doubt that he was even a very ‘good’ poet. Day-Lewis did hold poetry chairs at Oxford and (briefly) at Harvard, and from 1968 to his death in 1972 he was Poet Laureate. After his death, Balcon edited and published a complete Day-Lewis collection, and periodically tried to get a memorial to him placed in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. Each time, the Abbey refused. This may not have been a judgment on DayLewis’s poetry but on his scandals. Indeed, Jill Balcon had been named co-respondent in the divorce case brought against Day-Lewis by his first wife. Balcon and Day-Lewis married on the very day the decree became final (April 27, 1951). And their marriage not only ended Day-Lewis’s first marriage but also his very public affair with the actress Rosamund Lehmann. In 1951 Day-Lewis was 47. Jill Balcon was 26, born on January 3, 1925, the stunningly beautiful daughter of Sir Michael Balcon, the CEO of Ealing Studios, a pioneer in British film who didn’t approve—not of Jill’s wedding, not of her new husband, not of her decision to be an actor. But that’s what she was, and a good one. She’d already appeared in two classic Ealing films, and was carving out a place for herself on the West End stage and, as a reader, on BBC Radio. Indeed, despite her beauty, some thought her voice her finest instrument. Jill Balcon continued to act, mainly on stage, and to read, now including public readings with Day-Lewis as well as on the BBC. And all this despite Day-Lewis’s continued infidelities. “He had charm,” she later reflected, “in the original sense of the word.” She first saw him when he gave a reading at her girls’ school, Roedean, when she was 12 (1937), and then again at a public reading (this time, both performing) in 1948. They fell in love like adolescents, carving their initials on a tree outside T. S. Eliot’s London residence. And so they married, and so they had children, Tamasin (b. 1953) and Daniel (b. 1957), both of whom would become famous (cookery writer and film actor, respectively). In her old age, Jill Balcon sometimes thought she was only a “relic” of other people’s famous lives, an artifact. But she was her own person, one of rare accomplishments. After her husband’s death in 1972, she continued to act, to do readings (of poetry, but also novels and memoirs.), and to share her thatched cottage in rural Hampshire with new partner, where she created, and tended, an “exquisite” beautiful garden. In 2009 she was buried next to her poet-husband. And as far as I know there’s still no Day-Lewis tablet in Westminster Abbey. ©

Sport and liberation.

What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963).

C. L. R. James established himself as a writer on cricket under the tutelage of the great Neville Cardus (1888-1975) who covered cricket for the Manchester Guardian while James was (occasionally) playing the game in the semi-pro Lancashire League. James had already learned the game on the devilishly difficult pitches of Trinidad, where he was born (in Tunapuna) on January 4, 1901. His parents’ ambitions for their baby may have been signaled by his baptismal name, Cyril Lionel Robert James. James internalized those ambitions and accepted his schoolmaster father’s view that education was the only way for a black boy to get ahead in this island outpost of the British empire. So he studied hard, “worked like a black” as the saying then went, performed superbly on his exams and in 1910 won a scholarship to the Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain. But he was a rather dark black boy, and in the island’s complicated hierarchy of color something more was needed. Young James found that alternative (or additional) route in sport, track and field and soccer (he was a champion high jumper), but especially cricket, quintessentially the sport of imperial England. And in Trinidad cricket reflected the racial hierarchies of imperialism, whites on top, coloreds in all shades populating the middle, and blacks in the lower orders. But James found that on the pitch what really mattered was talent. The crude nature of Trinidadian pitches (particularly their ‘matted’ wickets) made talent all the more important. And talent had to be carefully cultivated, for cricket is a complicated game. Education enabled James to rise. Cricket liberated him. It was that which makes Beyond a Boundary a great book, some would say the greatest book ever written about any sport. But he didn’t stop with cricket. C. L. R. James is better known for his histories, for his literary theory, for his stories and novels, and for his Marxism (he was of the Trotskyist persuasion, being unable to bear the bureacratic brutalities of Soviet Stalinism). In England, he knew just about everybody in literary and political circles. He spent over a decade in the USA, loving Americans but puzzled by their politics, His American Civilization (finally published in 1992) is worth a read. He began it while in prison (for a passport violation) in New York. James is most famed for The Black Jacobins (1938), his study of the Haitian revolution of the 1790s which made Toussaint L’Ouverture a hero of humanity and delivered an important message: “The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression.” But you should probably start with his book on how cricket liberated C. L. R. James. ©.

Ready, set, whip.

To remember you with your cigar, to feel that you’ve always listened, to know that we were your life. It’s hard not having you around. Gravestone inscription, Hillside Memorial Park, Culver City, CA (1999).

Epitaphs are not always accurate, but there’s something sweetly convincing about this one for Aaron Lapin. Clearly Aaron’s family remembered him warmly. And in his case, the last sentence is a killer. For Mr. Lapin was the inventor of Reddi-Whip®, and anyone who has ever tabled a holiday dinner (turkey & stuffing, sweet potatoes and mashed, gravy and cranberry sauce, and probably Brussel sprouts for balance) will think of whipped cream as the very last straw, even though it renders palatable the pumpkin pie. It requires special ingredients, just the right types of cream and sugar, a cold mixing bowl, and a lot of elbow grease—and if you prepare it ahead of time (a cook’s dream) it loses its zip. How much easier it is to take that can of Reddi-Whip® out of the fridge and, taking care to hold it upside down, bend its nozzle, point it towards the pie, and let it fly. Hey presto, you’ve got your dessert!! Aaron Soffer Lapin was born in St. Louis on January 5, 1914, and (as if to prove that the city was once a French outpost) was nicknamed “Bunny” Lapin. He planned to be a lawyer, and crossed town to Washington University to gain entry, but the Great Depression intervened and Bunny, instead of bringing suits, started selling them. Then wartime rationing beckoned anyone who could think fast about foodstuffs. Lapin first hit upon an artificial whipping cream, Sta-Whip. It was made mainly of vegetable oils and one can imagine that, once whipped, it stayed whipped. Urgh!! But when in 1946 a local company patented a lined, pressurized, aerosol cannister, the Spra-tainer, Bunny leaped. Refrigerated, it could have more real cream in it. And it sold, if you’ll pardon me, like hotcakes. It was first sold via milkmen, an extra on their local routes, but it went national almost instantly. Bunny invented a better valve, and by 1951 he was the “Whipped Cream King.” It went to his head a bit, Cadillacs for transport and Gloria Swanson’s mansion for shelter. This was not the house built for Gloria in New Jersey by old Joe Kennedy, but a real Beverly Hills dreamhouse where Bunny could afford the time needed to listen to his kids and wield his cigar. Meanwhile, back in St. Louis he kept things going with the Clayton Corporation and then a new subsidiary which he called “Bunlap.” And if all that seems a bit frothy and insubstantial, you might think again. That convenient stuff has been labeled one of the most influential inventions of the 20th century. And from recent experience I can testify that it works well on apple pie, too. It’s not the real thing, but it’s quick and easy and, as long as you keep it cold, it stays whipped. ©.

All politics is personal.

Oh, William dear, if you weren’t such a great man you would be a terrible bore. Catherine Gladstone.

William Ewart Gladstone met the beautiful woman who would become his wife as early as 1834. They married in 1839, but theirs was not a conventionally long courtship. Instead of pining for William, Catherine was actively courted by nine other men, all eminently eligible bachelors. Gladstone himself would later count them up. Why William took up this potentially hazardous accountancy is an interesting question. But his wife is more interesting. Catherine Gladstone was born Catherine Glynne on January 6, 1812 at Hawarden Castle, Flintshire, Wales. The Glynne baronetcy was of a respectable age, Catherine’s father being the 8th baronet Glynne. But William was only the fourth son of a newly-minted baronet, a Liverpool merchant. And young William was a rising MP who identified as a Tory, speaking eloquently against the Reform Bill of 1832 as threatening “the very foundations of our social order.” Over his very long parliamentary career, Tory William would become a Liberal reformer, four times prime minister, an advocate of Irish ‘Home Rule’, and a demon for a rainbow of (private) charitable causes. Catherine Gladstone had much to do with this. She never did change his conventionalities, his neurotic tidinesses. In their personal traits they remained perfect opposites. But she broke new ground by becoming an adept ‘political spouse,’ arguably the first ‘first lady’ of British politics. Famously, Victoria loved Catherine Gladstone, even while the Queen found William intolerable. And Catherine trained William up as best she could. She birthed eight children, unconventionally breast-feeding them all while acting as foster mother for her dead sister’s dozen. William’s political education began when, while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he saved the Glynne estate (and Hawarden) from the indignities of bankruptcy. It continued while he and Catherine engaged in a variety of private charitable enterprises, for instance convalescent homes for those who, while poor, had the bad luck to fall ill. They also discovered a joint enthusiasm for “saving” young prostitutes from their trades (a proclivity that has provided much fodder for Gladstone scholars). Meanwhile, Catherine saw to it that the Gladstone brood prepared themselves for good marriages and/or useful lives. And she was her husband’s political manager, whether supplying him with sherried egg nogs for his Commons speeches or accompanying him on electioneering tours. There’s some evidence that William’s fourth premiership exhausted them both. He left office a broken man and then died in 1898. Catherine carried on, eccentric queen of chaotic Hawarden, until her death in 1900. ©

Probabilities?

Probabilities must be regarded as analogous to the measurement of physical magnitudes; that is to say, they can never be known exactly, but only within a certain approximation. Emile Borel, Probabilities and Life (1943).

Consider the chances that a brilliant mathematician, who as a school student in the late 1880s had scored first in a series of national exams, would at age 72 (in 1943) publish a book entitled Les probabilités et la vie, that it would be published in Paris during the Nazi occupation, and that this same old man would, at the same time, be serving in the French Resistance. Pretty small, you’d say, verging on the infinitesimal. And yet there was a “resistance,” and many French people participated in it, people of all sorts, genders, ages, and stations, so why not an elderly mathematician? And there are a few facts, ‘datapoints’ let’s call them, about Emile Borel’s life that improve the odds, make his wartime heroics less unlikely. Emile Borel was born on January 7, 1871, in the Midi, where his father was a Protestant minister and, on top of that, the village schoolmaster. This gave Emile a minority identity, which he improved upon (after his father’s death) by being taken into the household of his much older sister, whose husband was another Protestant minister. Then the boy was a whiz at math, the very definition of a minority calling, and so brilliant was he that at age 28 he was appointed to one of France’s most prestigious chairs in mathematics. He should have been too old to serve at the front in WWI, but he went anyway; then was plucked back to Paris to work on the mathematics of warfare. Come the peace he found that most of his old students had been killed at war, and the horror of that made him an early exponent of a united, democratic Europe. He also served several terms as a socialist legislator, and then (a thoroughly unlikely choice) he returned to the Midi to be mayor of his home village. In 1941, his public record rendered him a suspicious character to the Vichy government and the Nazi occupiers, and he was imprisoned for a month. Add all this in and his wartime role in the resistance—and publishing a book on “probability and life”—become more, well, ‘probable.’ Borel is also the guy who first proposed the likelihood that an infinity of monkeys typing on an infinity of typewriters might well (re)produce the works of Shakespeare—except what Borel actually predicted was that they would replicate the printed collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale. And please note that Borel said it was not absolutely certain: just very, very, very probable. If you still need to be convinced that an ancient mathematician might risk his life for la liberation de la France please note that Emile Borel was also a pioneer in game theory. So for him the unlikely became—almost—a certainty. One could almost bet on it. ©.

Circus!!!

Circus n. A place where horses, ponies, and elephants are permitted to see men, women, and children acting the fool. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1906).

‘Running away to join the circus’ is a trope of modern fiction and modern life. It’s what young Sam Clemens and then his alter ego Huck Finn might have done, had it not been for the liberating lure of ‘The River.’ But what about running away to create the circus? That’s what Philip Astley is said to have done, when, in 1759, he ran away from an intolerable situation in his home, Newcastle-under-Lyme in the English Midlands. But creating the modern circus was not then in Philip’s mind. He was only 17 (born on January 8, 1742), and it was wartime (the Seven Years War). So Philip ran away to join the 15th Light Dragoons. He exceeded (by 6 inches) the then maximum height for cavalrymen, but he had a way with horses, a military bearing, and he was taken on as a corporal. His war record was almost miraculous. In one battle, in Germany, Corporal Astley captured the French standard. In another, he rescued the Duke of Brunswick. So the war hero was promoted Sergeant-Major and, after the peace, was presented to the new British king, George III. He might have returned in triumph to Newcastle. Instead, he took his fame (and his white charger, Gibraltar) to a fashionable riding school near London where he served as groom, trainer, and poster boy. It went to his head. Within a year he had his own riding school where (besides teaching young men to wheel and charge) Astley and Gibraltar performed riding tricks and a kind of horseback comedy. These proved popular, and Philip (and his new wife, Patty) soon made the shows into their main income stream, with side entertainments—in the ring, of course—by clowns, acrobats, and musicians. By stages, the riding school became ‘Astley’s Ampitheatre,’ moved a little west to a prime location at the southern end of Westminster Bridge, and became the birthplace of the modern circus. Not without trouble: the chartered London theatres protested. Astley had no royal license to ‘perform,’ and he was jailed for breach of monopoly rights. But he obtained his own royal charter, built ever more stately hippodromes, not only in Westminster proper but also in Dublin and Paris. That last was badly timed, in 1789, and after a performance in the presence of Queen Marie Antoinette, had to close down owing to revolutionary disturbances. War followed, and Philip Astley, aged 60, reenlisted in the British cavalry (the Duke of York’s regiment, no less), served with distinction, and then returned to the circus business he had created. Some new ventures succeeded. Others failed. But the riding ring stage had been re-set as the home of the modern circus, a place of wonder to which discontented youth could forever escape. ©

Moss gatherer.

To enjoy the beauty of the mosses does not require an intimate acquaintance . . . even to learn to know a few of them is part of a good education. Elizabeth G. Britton, 1894.

This good advice came in the second (“Part II”) of Elizabeth Britton’s six 1890s essays on “How to Study the Mosses.” If it required no “intimate acquaintance” to study mosses, it would still be wise have a good microscope, access to existing textbooks, and the delicate motor skills and tools needed to dissect mosses. Then one would need skills in pen and ink drawings and watercolors. So there is an air of middle-class domesticity in these “advices.” In other early writings, Britton gives the mosses names, “Little Brownies” for instance, or “humpbacked Elves.” One is reminded of, Beatrix Potter (1866-1943), writing of Flopsy, Mopsy, and their brother Peter, all the while producing quite exact drawings and watercolors of fungi. In most of Elizabeth Britton’s later writings she adopts a scientific tone while further developing as a draughtswoman and watercolorist. And both Potter and Britton were the female children of upper middle-class parents, in London and New York, respectively. Elizabeth Britton was born in New York City on January 9, 1858 to James and Sophie Knight. Her liberation began sooner than Potter’s, for the Knights’ wealth was based on Cuban enterprises, a sugar plantation and a furniture factory, and much of her childhood was spent about 50 miles east of Havana, where she and her four sisters learned Spanish and explored the landscape. Elizabeth completed her education at New York’s Hunter College (then a ‘normal’ school), and began teaching there almost at once, aged only 17. There she moved quickly towards science, botany, and published her first scientific paper in 1881. She then married a Columbia University geologist, Nathaniel Britton. The marriage was childless, but she turned him into a botanist (one of considerable note) while she became one of America’s leading bryologists. Her early writings suggest amateurishness, and along the same lines she played important roles in forming America’s first botanical society and then (with her husband) the New York Botanical Garden. Both were well connected enough to attract monied support (from, among others, Teddy Roosevelt) and to undertake collecting expeditions in various parts of the USA, maritime Canada, and—of course—the Caribbean. As a woman, Elizabeth’s research role began as a volunteer or adjunct, but by the 1910s she was recognized as a scientist suo jure. By the time she died (1934) she’d published over 300 scientific papers, all the while continuing to encourage ‘amateur’ participation in botanical societies, garden clubs, and preservation efforts. And there’s no doubt that Elizabeth Britton loved her mosses. ©.

I can vouch for the beauty of mosses. Mrs Tiz and myself attended a course on mosses at Chelsea Physic Garden, London, in the 1970s when we were living in Surrey. As well as lectures we were taken on visits to locations to a wide variety of mosses. We were so swept up in bryology that besides buying a modern book on identification we found and bought one first published in 1855. Almost the whole book comprises a set of hand-painted pictures of British moss species. The colours are still as vivid as when we bought it. Across the top of the title page is a signature, obviously old and written with a fountain pen: `Jesse Spottiswoode 1855'. This has extra interest when you look at the reverse of the title page and see printed at the bottom `Published by Spottiswoode & Co, London', referring to what was one of the largest printing firms in London. So Jesse might have been a member of the family.

Spottiswoode & Co: Grace's Guide

Housekeeper.

There is a new institution that begins to make and, if it succeeds, will make a considerable noise, It is a club of both sexes to be erected at Almacks. Horace Walpole, 1770.

This “club of both sexes” was the more unusual because of its rules for electing new members. Male candidates were voted on by female members, and vice versa for females. Horace Walpole, a well-connected writer, confessed to wasting time there, enjoying good food, drink (male members paid for the wine!), witty conversation, and endless card games. There were dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, intellectuals like Walpole and Oliver Goldsmith, and the club met in fashionable Pall Mall. Its founding nexus were ladies of the Blue Stocking Club and the so-called ‘Female Coterie,’ and a lot of their conversation turned on the equality of the sexes. That was not an especially difficult topic at the very top of English society, which then abounded with rich heiresses and suo jure countesses, but it’s odd that one of the club’s founding members (and a founding member of the Female Coterie) was a Welsh outsider, identified as a “Miss Lloyd.” She was Rachel Lloyd, certainly a provincial for she was born in rural Carmarthenshire on January 10, 1722. Any Welsh rough edges were smoothed in part by her mother’s wealth, and Rachel herself inherited £3,000 from her father. But what really gave Rachel her entrée in London was her post as the housekeeper at Kensington Palace. Once ‘the’ London residence of the reigning monarch, Kensington at the start of George III’s reign was well on the way to its later role as the “aunts’ palace,” a residential bin for royals safely down the line of succession and not a few eminent courtiers. It was already being split into “apartments,” #1 for George III’s sixth son. Rachel acquired quarters, furnished with royal nick-knacks, which overlooked Kensington’ main entrance, which she policed with some effectiveness. Obviously she knew people. She also had money of her own. But she had wit, too, and was not loath to use it. Besides her housekeeping, she served as companion to varied aristocrats (lords and their ladies) on continental tours and spa stays. She augmented her income by being clever at cards and her reputation by just being clever. In some ways she was a figure of fun, satirized by Goldsmith as “Biddy Buckskin” in She Stoops to Conquer. And she did have some rough manners, tending to shake hands (rather than curtsy) when she met someone new—including Walpole’s Parisian confidante the Marquise du Deffand. But she survived, prospered, and in the 1790s was hostessing ‘break-fasts’ at Kensington, sometimes for scores of fashionable guests. Miss Lloyd did not, however, survive long enough to keep house for the young Princess Victoria, born at Kensington in 1819. Now that would have been really interesting. ©