BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

If history hurts your feelings . . . .

But not in propaganda, science nor history has the essence of the renaissance shown itself. Rather the true renaissance has been a matter of the spirit and has shown itself among the poets as well as among the novelists and dramatists. W. E. B. Du Bois, 1926, Encyclopedia Britannica.

In this essay, Dubois made many interesting points, but the more interesting thing is that the Britannica editors had decided—for their new 13th edition, 1926, to include a piece on American Negro literature. Once that decision was made, their choice of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois to write it was inevitable. Born in Great Barrington, MA, on February 23, 1868, Du Bois was by 1920 internationally known, the leader of a new American renaissance, an awakening of the black community to the promises of American life. His own awakening came at Fisk University. There on scholarship money from his home (and largely white) Congregational Church, he encountered American racism in its most brutal stage, the late 19th-century suppression of the formerly enslaved. The KKK rode the countryside; lynchings were common; the black vote was suppressed by night terror and ‘daylight’ legislation. So Du Bois became a student of himself and of ‘his’ people. There followed a PhD at Harvard (1909) which came after a period of intense study in Berlin. There he learned how not to be an “outsider” but also learned how to view the American experience from afar. Understanding racism as a social construction, a brutal artificiality, he deepened his scholarship and fashioned a new understanding of how best to dismantle the artifices of segregation. As a cofounder of the NAACP and editor of The Crisis, he urged race pride as essential to progress, and was impatient with those who, like Booker T. Washington, urged patience. Of course Du Bois welcomed the ‘Black Renaissance’, and (having already established his international presence) was also a natural choice for the 1926 Britannica’s ‘new’ interest in American black culture. But it was then, too, that DuBois was reminded that in this game nothing is ever easy. Soon after his 1926 contribution, a staffing change at the Bitrannica brought Du Bois under a new editor, Franklin Hooper, who found Du Bois too militant and far too likely to hurt the feelings of its American (white?) readers. Du Bois and his new editor even fell out over Du Bois’s insistence on capitalizing the noun ‘Negro.’ But there were more substantial issues, with the editor refusing to accept Du Bois’s views on the positive contributions to American democracy of “black Reconstruction.” In the end, the Britannica did not even pay DeBois for what he’d already done, judging his work too ”opinionated” for the tender intellects of the encyclopedia’s readership. We’ve heard too much of this lately, in American educational politics, and should now be wise enough, and tough enough, to understand Du Bois’s anger. ©.

[Stanley]

Censorship and comedy
I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world’s greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared The Family Shakespeare. Thomas Bowdler, 1808.

Surnames often originate from particular occupations. “Baker.” “Cooper,” and “Smith” are obvious examples. So the very first “Appleby” was likely an orchardist: Old English ‘æppel’ (for fruiting trees in general) plus the Old Norse ‘by’ for farm or enclosure. But in the modern era, some surnames acquired new meanings all on their own. For instance, Thomas Crapper (1828-1916) is alleged to have invented the flush toilet. Probably not: but he did patent a toilet called “Thos. Crapper’s Waterfall No. 1,” which is close enough. Less controversial than the ‘crapper’ is the ‘spoonerism.’ That’s a word or phrase mispronounced in such a way as to make a nonsense. So a “well-oiled bicycle” becomes a “well-boiled icicle.” The word ‘spoonerism’ memorializes the Rev’d W. A. Spooner (1844-1930), a faculty member of Christ Church College, Oxford. He probably never uttered more than two ‘spoonerisms’, but they were enough to make the label stick (or, if you prefer, to make the stable lick.). But the verb “to bowdlerize" really does belong to Thomas Bowdler, who died on February 24, 1825, and he owns the word because he published an expurgated Shakespeare, The Family Shakespeare, a book which first saw the dark side of the moon in 1808. But again, I fear, the attribution is not quite true. For the idea of rendering Shakespeare decent appears to have originated in the unfertile brain of Thomas’s younger sister, Henrietta Maria Bowdler. She was at the time better unknown (for like many females of her era, she published anonymously) for her religious tract Sermons on the Doctrine and Duties of Christianity. One of her Christian duties, apparently, was to fleece Shakespeare of any irreverent or immoral words. This resulted in the expurgation of about 10% of the immortal (immoral?) Bard’s words. But her idea so excited her brother Thomas, in real life a medical doctor, that he went on to expurgate Edward Gibbon’s classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, apparently a monumental task. And a very exacting one. My (uncensored) edition of Gibbon runs to 8 volumes. I’ve recently begun reading it myself, have just finished vol. III, and I have yet to be offended. But then I haven’t such a tender conscience as the Bowdler siblings. They were indeed blessed. Henrietta Maria went on to publish a novel (1830) under her own name. Its subtitle was The History of an Old Maid. I hasten to assure you that I have nothing against elderly maidens. The three old maids that I knew really well, Angeline, Varina, and Josephine, would never have allowed any bowdlerization on their bookshelves. They all believed that life was too interesting to be concealed. ©.

[Stanley]

A Grander Opening

A wand’ring minstrel I—
A thing of shreds and patches,
Of ballads, songs and snatches,
And dreamy lullaby.
--from “The Mikado,” W. S. Gilbert and A. Sullivan, 1885

So sings Nanki-Poo, in the first act of Gilbert & Sullivan’s popular operetta. He is dressed patchily, as befits a minstrel, but he’s really the Mikado’s crown prince. The plot is ridiculously complicated; suffice it to say that Nanki-Poo eventually marries his true love, Yum-Yum, rips off his mask, and assumes his true (tenor) self. His royal father, the Mikado, concludes (basso) “Nothing could possibly be more satisfactory.” And another good thing about The Mikado is that it satirizes the absurdities of the town of Titi-Pu and its chief bureaucrat Pooh-Bah, who’s managed to take every office worth holding. So the musical is also a satire on Victorian society, but a gentle one, and the queen is said to have enjoyed it when the D’Oyley Carte company put it on for her and the royal family at Balmoral. One of the most enjoyable bits, for the royal entourage, was Nanki-Poo’s disguise as a “wandering minstrel.” For there was a musical group called “The Wandering Minstrels.” Mainly instrumental, they performed mainly for charity events. And they never, ever, took pay for their efforts. For, like Nanki-Pooh, they were wandering minstrels with a difference. The Minstrels were led by the Earl of Winton and his son, the Honourable Seymour, and both were right out of the Egerton stable, some of Victorian Britain’s finest breeding stock. Their fellow Minstrels were also crème de la crème: nobles, senior military. top bureaucrats. They existed from about 1861, disappeared in 1896, and raised great sums for charity. One of The Wandering Minstrels’ best charity nights came on February 25. 1871, when they played the first full performance to take place in the Royal Albert Hall. Of course there was later (on March 30, 1871) a ‘real’ grand opening. That was attended by the queen herself, her royal brood, their various royal and noble spouses, and just about every Pooh-Bah that Victorian Britain could get together (including a posse of Lords Mayors from the great industrial cities of the north, all beautifully adorned their robes of office. No, the crowd that in February pre-christened Prince Albert’s Hall and was serenaded by the Wandering Minstrels was made up entirely of those who had built the place, the architects, the artists, the engineers—and the bricklayers and navvies—who made the monument. It was a true ‘Triumph of the Arts and Sciences.’ Prince Albert would have liked that audience. To quote the Mikado, nothing could have been more satisfactory. ©

[Stanley]

Liberty and equality

You cannot fulfil your task without liberty, which is a source of responsibility. You cannot fulfil it without equality, which is liberty for each and all. Giuseppe Mazzini.

Thus Mazzini (1805-1872) proclaimed the goals of his ‘Young Italy” movement, and he lived long enough to see the reunification of Italy, albeit under a monarchical banner. Mazzini’s stirring stuff inspired radicals across Europe. In 1910, in England, Catherine Courtauld Osler chose the Mazzini quotation to front her pamphlet Why Women Need the Vote. Catherine Courtauld Osler was born (as Catherine Courtauld Taylor) on February 26, 1854 into one of old England’s most important out-groups, middle-class radicals. Not ‘middling’ in the American sense: they were too rich for that. But their status as religious dissenters, historically and still in 1854, kept them outsiders. Like many “outgroups,” they found satisfaction elsewhere, in banking and insurance (where Quakers played important roles), or manufacturing. The Taylors were Unitarians, thus excluded from the ancient universities (and some professions), and had long been ‘in trade.’ Rich traders too, and her childhood was spent in Taylor and Courtauld homes, where (during his English exile) Giuseppe Mazzini was an honored guest, along with British reformers like John Bright, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Fawcett. And then Catherine married into her outgroup, in 1873: Alfred Clarkson Osler, scion of the Osler manufacturing clan. The firm (noted for its glassware and crystal, was located in Birmingham. The Oslers called their home ‘Fallowfields’ (in Edgbaston), and labored to fertilize it with five children who became, in their turn, middle-class radicals. Meanwhile the parents. Catherine and Alfred, devoted themselves to good causes, peace and parliamentary reform for instance, but also women’s suffrage. Both of them, but suffrage was Catherine’s particular interest, along with a women’s debating society and the National Union of Women Workers. And both were in good standing in the radical wing of the Liberal Party. By 1910, however, the Liberals’ poor record in advancing the vote (and, in particular, force-feeding suffragist prisoners in Birmingham’s Winson Green Prison) drove Catherine and Alfred into talks with the infant Labour Party. Meanwhile, the Oslers kept on producing luxury glassware and furniture for a worldwide market, which gave Catherine plenty of time to devote to reform, not only the vote but the terrible working-class poverty that led to high infant mortality (“the terrible Massacre of the Innocent,” she called it). Today Catherine is memorialized in the ‘Fawcett Frieze’, a monument to feminist dissent, which stands in Parliament Square along with one to that crusty old chauvinist Winston Churchill. Equality and liberty remain difficult goals; some think them irreconcilable. That is not, however, Catherine Osler’s error. ©.

[Stanley]

Another 'farmer's daughter' story

Cold and raw the North did blow, bleak in a morning early;
All the trees were hid in snow, dangl’d by winter yearly:
When come riding o'er a knough, I met with a farmer's daughter;
Rosie cheeks, and bonny brow, good faith, made my mouth to water. From “Cold and Raw.”

“Cold and Raw” is an old Scots ballad that found its way into English print in 1651. A version of it was sung (by Polly Peachum) in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728). In the song, a farmer’s daughter (a ‘comely wench’ in some versions) is carrying barley to market when a passing gent offers her the stupendous sum of £40: half for the barley and the other half for a night of pleasure. Unlike Polly Peachum, who sold her soul to Macheath very cheaply, the farmer’s daughter retains her barley and her virtue and—for good measure—sends the gent home to keep better wedlock with his lawful wife. But it’s the other possibilities that made the song so popular in late Stuart courts. In all double entendre humor, it’s the thought that counts. But in the 1690s “Cold and Raw” achieved notoriety when Queen Mary II ordered her music instructress to leave off singing polite stuff by Henry Purcell and offer up “Cold and Raw” instead. It’s an interesting story because Mary Stuart was a conflicted individual, torn with guilt over her role in taking the crown from her Catholic father (“my heart is not made for a kingdom”) and depressed by failed pregnancies. The singer was Arabella Hunt, “Queen of Musick by the People’s choice.” Hunt, born on February 27, 1662, had her s début at the court of King Charles II when she was 13. Celebrated for her physical beauty and the clarity of her voice, and no bad hand with the lute, Arabella became music tutor for King James II’s Protestant daughters, Princesses Mary and Anne. Each would become (in their turn) queen after their Catholic father was overthrown in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. And Arabella Hunt had her own ‘farmer’s daughter’ story, too. In 1680 she’d given herself—in a proper marriage—to a gentleman called James Howard. No £40 here, but it turned out worse. James and Arabella lived together for six months before Arabella found that this James Howard was really Amy Poulter. Arabella claimed to be horrified, and the marriage was annulled, but as with the ballad “Cold and Raw” the spice of the story lingered on. At the Stuart court, spice was helpful, especially for non-royal aspirants. And so Arabella Hunt may even have profited from the scandal, not only staying on after James was deposed but becoming Mary II’s special friend and pensioner (for £100 yearly). Her 1692 portrait, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, shows Arabella at her best, soulful and beautiful. Sir Henry Purcell was not so well pleased. In revenge, he inserted the tune of “Cold and Raw” into his music for Queen Mary’s birthday in 1692. ©.

[Stanley]

The Victorian world in crosshatch.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/john-ten ... EYkerEPLzV
Visit this site for an early proof of ‘Alice,’ (for Through the Looking Glass, 1871) with Tenniel’s editorial notes.
Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

John Tenniel, the cartoonist who made Lewis Carroll’s ‘Wonderland’ real for generations of children—including me—was born in Liverpool on February 28, 1820. In 1840 his father, a fencing master, accidentally (in epée play) put out Tenniel’s right eye, but Tenniel concealed his (partial) blindness from his father (for kindness’s sake) and learned perspective by sketching animals at the London Zoo. In 1856, after only two years of marriage, he lost his wife (Julia Giani) to tuberculosis. He mourned Julia forever but privately, and in good Victoria style turned his household chores over to his mother, then his sister. For the rest of us he perfected his art (usually but not always comic) as the master cartoonist for Punch (36 years, 1864-1900, and over 2,000 woodblock prints). His blacks and whites still offer us telling commentaries upon Victorian values, in all their imperial insularity, and upon Victorian humor, in all its rollicking subtlety. Luckily, circa 1860, someone talked Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) out of illustrating his own Alice stories, and Dodgson picked Tenniel, mainly because of the cartoonist’s imaginative renderings of Aesop’s fables. The Dodgson-Tenniel collaboration was not always easy, but they kept at it. Wonderland appeared in 1865, and the Looking Glass in 1871. Editions printed with Tenniel’s drawings still sell well, and no wonder. Tenniel was 80 when he retired from Punch, and nearly 94 (and fully blind) when he died. That was only months before the outbreak of the Great War that brought Tenniel’s world to a crushing end. His drawings tell us what that world was like. They are easily available on the internet, or in old copies of the Alice books. Visit your local antiquarian bookseller!! The originals, much pricier, are shared between the V & A and Harvard University. ©

[Stanley]

'Loners,' not 'losers'.

We all have Proustian moments, but don’t really know about it until we read Proust.
Alexander McCall Smith, in 44 Scotland Street.

McCall Smith’s world is strangely attractive. ‘Sunnily realistic’ one might call it: an oxymoronic combination that explains why he’s sold millions of his fictions. They’re about realists in sunny Botswana and optimists in ‘Auld Reekie’ Edinburgh. I like the ones I’ve read, though 44 Scotland Street is not a ‘real’ address. There is a 41, but there the terrace ends. It’s a nice neighborhood, part of Edinburgh’s ‘New Town’, built when the city’s dour Calvinism was warmed by the hopeful realism of the Scottish Enlightenment. Perhaps Smith’s stories represent a late 20th-century reprise of the world of Adam Smith, Robert Burns, and Francis Hutcheson. But McCall Smith’s ‘real’ world was in the hard school of medical ethics, Edinburgh University’s medical faculty. There one of his colleagues was the clinical psychiatrist Sula Wolff, a woman who shone roomfuls of sunlight into the worlds of the autistic child and that child’s families. But she was no native-born daughter of the Scottish Enlightenment. She was born Sullamith Wolff in Berlin, Germany, on March 1, 1924. Her Jewish world darkened when Hitler rose to power. Her family sought refuge in London where Sula, just nine years old, was already intent on a medical career. After qualifying in medicine at Oxford, Sula met, and soon married, Henry Walton. After sojourns in Walton’s native South Africa (where apartheid made them feel aliens) and New York City, they moved to Edinburgh in 1962. There they both made distinguished professional careers in psychiatry Sula, clinician and scholar, specialized in autistic children. She found them to be remarkable individuals, vessels of hope and tragedy, intellectually gifted or otherwise eccentric and thus isolated from their peers. Of course Wolff counseled the children (Loners, she called them in a 1995 book summing up her work) but she also worked with the families, shepherding them all towards best possible outcomes. Loners, subtitled the Life Path of Unusual Children, concluded with her portrayal of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as one of those best possible outcomes. Meanwhile, she and her husband enlightened andenriched their university faculty (including its professor of medical ethics) and their adopted city. They lived in another part of the New Town, in Blacklet Place, not too far from Scotland Street. There they collected art, mostly modern, a huge collection which they willed to the National Gallery of Scotland along with a sustaining fund that is still making the news with dramatic purchases (recently of an early Picasso mobile). Sula Wolff also collaborated with her colleague McCall Smith on issues of medical ethics. Her life seems to have been a train of Proustian moments. ©.

[Stanley]

Woman Driver

I’ve never seen myself as a ‘girl driver.’ I’m just a driver. Danica Patrick.

Of course one takes Ms. Patrick at her word, but NASCAR and other racing authorities did make quite a bit of her gender during her glory years (roughly, 2004-2010). In that context, it’s at least interesting that, aged only 16, Patrick dropped out of high school and moved to England to pursue her auto-racing ambitions. England??!!?? Yes, indeed, and in English auto racing the ‘woman driver’ had long had a presence. As early as the 1930s there was quite a jam of them: Kay Petre, Margaret Allen, Colleen Eaton, and Doreen Evans. At Le Mans, in 1935, England’s MG driving ‘team’ was all female. And it was no mere publicity stunt. MG sent three cars to Le Mans and intended to win. But at that time the really dominant woman in English auto racing was Elsie Wisdom, who partnered at the Le Mans prix d’endurance with Kay Petre. They drove a Riley 1.5 litre Sprite. That car gave out, but the girls didn’t, and Elsie Wisdom soon joined the MG operation. At Monte Carlo, in 1938, Elsie and Dorothy Turner drove an MG PB, a very sporty roadster, to a good finish. Elsie Wisdom was born Elsie Mary Gleed in London, on March 2, 1904. Her father was a master watchmaker, prosperous enough to put his kids on motorbikes, and Elsie’s first racing experiences were to ride, as ballast, behind her brothers or in postillion. It was during this early period of passenger racing that she acquired the nickname “Bill,” which she kept as she moved into cars, racing for GWK, a Maidstone firm owned by Grice, Wood, and Keiller. And Elsie kept the nickname when she married Tommy Wisdom in 1930, although I suppose the marriage certificate was signed by her as ‘Elsie May.’ Whatever Tommy called her, Elsie-Bill birthed a child, a daughter, in 1934, but the Wisdom pair won more fame as partners, often competitors, on the racing circuit. Riding as herself, she won a number of big races and set speed records for hill climbs and circuit racing. At Brooklands circuit she earned a 120 mph badge in 1933, then the fastest-ever for a woman driver (although she came in second in the race itself). The racing exploits of ‘Bill’ Wisdom and other women drivers proved good business for MG, Riley, and Morris (Bill Wisdom drove a Morris Minor—no ‘sport’ about it—in European rallies) in 1930s and 1940s England, for women were becoming car buyers in their own right. Bill Wisdom raced until 1951, when she and Tommy were seriously injured in an Alpine rally accident. At that point, they retired from racing. Both died in 1972. But the legend of the woman racer was established, and in faraway Beloit, Wisconsin, in 1998, young Danica Patrick thought that she might like to take it up and make it her own. ©

[Stanley]

I didn't get a note yesterday. I've mailed Bob about it.

[Tripps]

Perhaps he's embarrassed about being an American at the moment.

I see that the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate are in single figures. Is there any opposition at all to President Trump's actions? Do they all support his actions? I think in UK we wouild have seen ministerial resignations by now. A small number of defectors would have a big effect. Such a thing would be a good launch platform for a tilt at the top job next time.

[Stanley]

I don't know David. All I can do is wait to hear from him. Remember they are six hours behind us..... I've mailed him about yesterday's note....

[Stanley]

The politics of sexuality.

Mourn for our hero, men of Northern race!
We do not know his sin; we only know
His sword was keen . . .
. . . All else … let us forget.
---from “Fighting Mac: a Life Tragedy,” by Robert W. Service

Robert Service (1874-1958) was no poet, and knew it. But the richest “versifier” of his time knew his markets. In Scotland this poem sold like oatcakes, for “Fighting Mac” had become a tragic hero. Thousands flocked to decorate his grave in Edinburgh’s Dean Cemetery. And yet, by the standards of his day, “Fighting Mac” had sinned, badly enough that King Edward VII was alleged to have advised Mac to shoot himself and thus avoid further scandal. And so he did, in Paris, on March 25, 1903. Hector Archibald Macdonald was born March 4, 1853, in Ross-Shire, Scotland. His family were relicts of the Highland Clearances, his father a crofter who eked out his income as a stonemason. Just so, the boy Hector joined the new industrial workforce as a tailor’s apprentice in the booming business of kilts and clan tartans. Then, in Service’s doggerel, the boy “flings his hated yardstick away.” Or, more prosaically, he lied about his age to enlist in the 92nd Gordon Highlanders. There followed the most extraordinary (by any “yardstick”) military career. Reckless courage and severe discipline brought him promotion upon promotion. In the second Anglo-Afghan War his courage at Kandahar made him a lieutenant. Further promotion came in the first Boer War where he was taken prisoner but displayed such extraordinary bravery that the Boers returned his sword. Then came Macdonald’s crowning achievement, at Omdurman, September 2, 1898, Macdonald (with the battlefield rank of brigadier-general) hurled his regiments into battle to save Kitchener’s main force and bring home the bacon. Macdonald, now a national hero, was knighted, appointed aid-de-camp to Queen Victoria, and awarded a substantial cash gift by parliament. A poor boy had risen through the ranks in an era during which the British army was still trying to escape the moronic tradition of conferring military command by purchase. But, posted to Ceylon in 1902 to command the British troops there, rumors of his homosexuality became more substantial, including even a probable affair with the royal governor’s son. Sent home “to avoid further scandal”, Mac's only path was to return to Ceylon for a court-martial. Instead, “with wide, wan, woeful eyes” (Service, of course) he shot himself. In our more enlightened age, we mourn the nearly contemporaneous ‘tragedy’ of Oscar Wilde. But Wilde was born wealthy, a “gentleman” who, from birth, moved among gentlemen. Surely the more profound tragedy was acted out by a Scottish crofter’s son in a posh Paris hotel on the rue de Rivoli. ©

[Stanley]

Not Shakespeare.

Alas, poor country!
Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot
Be called our mother, but our grave . . .

Thus Macduff laments Scotland’s state under Macbeth’s rule. And what else could happen? Macbeth and his ruthless lady turned the world upside down, not only by killing their lawful king but by violating ancient traditions of hospitality—for Duncan was their guest, supping ‘neath their own roof. The play itself, a tragedy, is dated 1605-1606, just two years into the reign of King James I, who had been King James VI of Scotland before, in 1603, he traveled south to succeed the great Elizabeth. But it’s unlikely that Shakespeare wrote his “Scottish Play” for James. A regicide, however resolved, was not suitable entertainment for an early modern monarch. In 1605-6 the very idea of a Scottish play was, in Scotland, almost oxymoronic. There may have been Mystery Plays in the Highlands, and James VI himself had sponsored court masques (for instance, one celebrating the baptism of his son Prince Henry). But it was OK for kings to flatter themselves, and the Highlands were savage and Catholic. In Edinburgh, around the eastern coast, and in much of the lowlands the new reigning culture was dourly Protestant and Calvinist, and play acting as such had been forbidden by the Kirk in 1564. Putting on a character (‘play-acting,’ the essence of drama) was among the worst of idlers’ sins. However, ‘literature’ did flourish in Protestant Edinburgh, and not only in theological tracts. If drama was out of court, poetry was to be encouraged. James VI was a poet of sorts, and in his first publication as king (aged 18, newly unencumbered by a regent) had laid down the rules in his essays (as “a Prentice”) on the Divine Art of Poesie. And one of the most loyal of Edinburgh poets was John Burel, who died on March 5, 1603, just a month before King James started his trek southwards. Burel’s father was a butcher, and in the closed economy of early modern Edinburgh a wealthy one. So there’s no mystery of how the boy gained his mastery of Latin and his knowledge of historical tracts, which he used heavily in his poetical works. Burel’s poetry was also Protestant. He wrote to serve the Reformation, often to advance the cause of particular reformers—not least, of course, James VI himself. Burel also wrote to attack the opposition, Catholic plotters like the earl of Huntley and even his own (Catholic) brother-in-law. He had flashes of brilliance, but has become only a footnote in literary history. It may be a blessing, for Burel wrote in Middle Scots. It’s a dialect of English, but not as easily digested as the Elizabethan elegance of that other butcher’s boy, Shakespeare of Stratford. Well, Will wasn’t really a butcher’s boy, either, but that’s another story. ©

[Stanley]

Bob mailed Monday's note to me. Here it is....

Cricket is baseball on Valium. Robin Williams.

It’s a funny quotation, and meaningful. But the two sports must have a common ancestry. Both use bats and balls to play “innings” and score “runs.” “Batsmen” are often caught “out” by “fielders.” Even more importantly, both share a veneration for statistics. Organized cricket, older than organized baseball, started keeping “stats” in the 18th century. That was at first a lackadaisical process. But from 1864, when the Wisden Cricket Almanack, was founded, cricketing statistics have flourished like locusts. Latterly, the role of statistics in cricket analysis and commentary was further strengthened by William Howard ( ‘Bill’) Frindall. born on March 3, 1939, in Epsom, Surrey. Later he liked to say his birth came during a Test Match (South Africa v. England in distant Durban). And he played the game of course—in school, in the RAF, and once even for a ‘County’ side, albeit in the second eleven. And then in his elder years he served as a fast bowler in charity matches. His bowling was “eccentric” and might have been dangerous had it been as fast as he claimed. But when it came to keeping score, he was meticulous. He began in that science while he was still in the RAF, hitting the Big Time in 1966 as a volunteer statistician for BBC’s Test Match Special. He never left. Soon he was permanent, his inexhaustible command of statistics (on the day and from the past) playing counterpoint to John Arlott’s masterful (and artful) commentary, first on BBC Radio 3. At times it became almost a cross-talk act, a bit of comedy. Arlott, a gravelly-voiced commentator who, unusually, knew when to keep quiet, would occasionally call Frindall in for a fact or two and, sometimes, comic relief. Soon the “bearded wonder” was a fixture, the more so when Test Match Special translated to television. Frindall served the BBC for decades: and international cricket. He kept score for hundreds of internationals (377 of them proper five-day “Tests”, so he could say that he spent five years of his life at that task), and edited many cricket publications “of record,” including even a few Wisdens. He added a bewildering number of refinements to keeping score, especially one-letter codings. There was even a Frindall code for when batsmen had to sprint between wickets (“S”, of course). So it you had a Frindall score sheet in hand, you could report a cricket match as if you were there. Some said that Bill Frindall made statistics essential to cricket, not merely important. It was a blessing, then, that this human computer was also very good company. Bill died of cricket, too, in 2009, contracting Legionnaire’s Disease while on a cricketing tour of India. Not quite 70, he never became the Grand Old Man of cricket commentary. Statistically, he could have been. ©

[Stanley]

The Red Bishop

Gradually I realized that loving individuals would not shift some of their greatest needs unless the structures of society were attended to also. David Sheppard.

David Sheppard arrived at this insight while serving in a Church of England mission in London’s East End. There he prayed plenty, for he was an evangelical who believed in the power of prayer. It was prayer that led him through tectonic shifts in his own career. But in battling the East End’s social geography, its generational poverty, its casual criminality, its slums, its abandoned mothers and their kids, Sheppard concluded that prayer alone could not suffice. Prayer worked for him, but he was already blessed. David Sheppard was born in Surrey’s ‘stockholder belt’ on March 6, 1929. His father was not a stockbroker, a stroke of luck given what was going to happen to stocks later that year, but a lawyer, a solicitor, and his legal work and God’s mysterious ways had given the Sheppard family enough resource to send the boy to an ancient “public” school, Sherborne. Oddly, Sherborne (not a very large place) has produced more success stories than the East End, many of them leading Conservative politicians but more than a sprinkling of generals, admirals, and company directors. As Sheppard went up to Cambridge it seemed more likely that he would be a leading cricketer. He did just that for the Cambridge ‘light blues,’ then became one of the youngest ever County Captains (at 21, for Surrey), and then a promising batsman for the national ‘Test’ side. From the sport’s “gentleman” end, Sheppard excited cricket’s “Old Guard” as a potential Test captain. He captained one tour (Pakistan, 1954), but blotted his copy book: partly through poor fielding but mostly because, at Cambridge, he’d converted to evangelical Christianity. While making cricket history, he’d taken holy orders, sweated away in an East End Mission, led an anti-apartheid campaign in his own sport, and then (reputedly at the insistence of a Labour prime minister) was in 1975 made Anglican Bishop of Liverpool. There David Sheppard constantly irritated right-thinking Conservatives with his insistence that prayer alone could not solve and, really, did not even address, England’s underlying social, economic, or racial problems. Rather, he insisted that ‘Caesar’ (that is, the government) must take up the tasks (first of diagnosis, then therapy), using its public power to engineer a fairer future for all. To many Tories, particularly to that staunch Methodist Margaret Thatcher, Sheppard reeked of Marx and materialism, so it was no surprise to them when, after retiring from bishoping for the C of E in 1997, David Sheppard entered the House of Lords and, as Baron Sheppard of Liverpool, took the Labour whip. Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, already sitting in the Tory benches, probably did not approve. ©

[Stanley]

Mr. Cricket

I didn’t wear a helmet because I wanted to show that the bowler wasn’t intimidating me. Also, that’s just the way I liked to bat. Viv Richards.

In baseball, some pitchers enjoy ‘dusting off’ batters: making them duck or (better yet) sprawl, literally throwing them off their game. Thus rendered tentative, they are easier to get out. But hitting the batter is always a mistake. If it’s an accident, he gets on base. If it’s deliberate it can get a pitcher chucked out of the game and has caused riots. But in cricket aiming at the batsman is part of the game. When a really fast bowler meets a really top bat, aggression rules. And not just the bowler. As a batter, Viv Richards played his own game, the ‘glare’ game, and he mostly won the glare game because, once the bowler bowled, he had walk all the way to his ‘mark’. Back turned, he couldn’t return the Richards glare. Richards should have patented that fierce stare, for he was a batsman full of swagger. But Richards’ real triumphs came from his bat, not his stare or swagger: runs scored, boundaries reached, hours at the crease. Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards was born on the island of Antiqua on March 7, 1952. It was my good fortune to settle in England, and play the game a bit, at about the time that Richards and the West Indians began to rule cricket. He was taken on by Somerset in 1973 and then made his Test debut for the West Indies in 1975. Richards was an astonishing fielder, taking miraculous catches (helmetless of course) in the slip and, sometimes, at ‘silly point’ (never was a fielding position better named) right off the bat. He could be a dab hand at bowling, too, specializing in spin, but it was his batting that one remembers. There were explosive innings in one-day matches and endurance miracles in five-day internationals (he scored 291 against England in 1976). But what made him captain of the West Indies (1984-1991) was his mastery of the game and his ability to lead a team made up of a whole band of swaggerers and glarers. It also helped when in 1983 Richards resolutely refused, though offered a mountain of cash, to lead a touring side to South Africa. Like C. L. R. James, another West Indian icon, Richards learned self-regard from his mastery of cricket: certainly too much self-regard to be made into an apologist for apartheid. He and his West Indian sides enjoyed the game, reveled in it. And they kept on winning, too. Michael Holder, Joel Garner, Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards: wild colonial boys, consummate sportsmen, they made the old game come alive. Now sanity and, I am sure, the insurance companies have made helmets mandatory. But Viv Richards (Sir Vivian, if you please, for he was knighted in 1999) provides measured commentary on cricket for the BBC. When he’s on I am reminded of his glory days, glare, swagger, and bat, and of the ‘West Indian era’ in international cricket. ©.

[Stanley]

Surfing through life.

Surfing leads you through life, especially when you’re young and with hope in your heart. Tom Blake.

In all my years of advising college students, that thought never entered my mind. I was attuned to the practical. ‘Have you thought about changing your major?’ ‘Maybe you should take a year off.’ ‘You can’t solve your parents’ problems.’ Once, to a Junior who thought he might be a novelist, I suggested a long road trip, and even helped find scholarship money for it. But never surfing. For Blake, surfing sufficed, the theme along which you can plot his life’s story. Surfing made him one of this year’s inductees to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, specifically for U.S. Patent No. 1,872,230, granted in 1932. At that point Tom Blake was 30, having been born (in Milwaukee) on March 8, 1902. His mother died 11 days later, so his father farmed the baby out to a series of aunts and uncles in northern Wisconsin and Duluth, where he did not graduate from high school. He spent almost the whole of the rest of his life bumming, living out of car trunks, in beach shacks, sometimes in the luxury of a commercial van. He wrote several articles and two books. The one on the mysteries of life (Voice of the Atom) cites Christ, Mohammed, Spinoza, Emerson, and Einstein, among others. Of course he cited Thoreau, too, because Blake made a life out of living simply. For most of it, until he was 62, he kept body and soul in contact by working as a life guard. And there were a few years, during WWII, when he did duty in the US Coast Guard. But otherwise he was a jack of many trades, including as a Hollywood stunt double. (Ruggedly handsome, he ‘did’ Clark Gable a couple of times.). And, oh yes, he invented the modern surfboard. When he arrived on the surfing scene in Hawaii, and in 1924 Hawaii was the only surfing scene, he found the native boards too heavy and too unwieldy. So he lightened them, first by drilling holes but then (for that patent) by hollowing out their structures and adding reinforcement. It revolutionized surfing. He added some refinements, notably a keel (“skeg,” he called it, for he’d learned some history), but these were not patented. He doesn’t seem to have become very rich, and he was not the sort to hire lawyers to defend his patent rights. So he continued his long road trip, lifeguarding, surfing (and taking surfing pictures with a camera he’d waterproofed), and writing those books. But we all get old, and eventually, aged 65 he went back to Northern Wisconsin, parked his van on Superior’s shores, taught local kids how to swim and paddle, and became a ‘character.’ In the Northwoods, people can be tolerant of eccentricities. He moved into town in 1986, died in 1994. His gravestone, in Richland, WI, says only that he was once in the Coast Guard. I think he needs a new one. ©.