The Codebreaker Girls – Only 99c!
3 weeks ago
Tory Historian happens to be what is vulgarly described as a sucker for newsreels of the past. What a joy it is, therefore, to find two videos on the History Today blog, one of people celebrating in the streets in 1918 on hearing that the war is finally over and the other is a longish piece of various dignitaries arriving for the Versailles Conference. There is even a sequence of the documents being signed. One wonders where the Pathé News cameraman is standing as the pictures always seem to be above and behind everybody else.
Or PMQs as they are known not so affectionately. Tory Historian's Blog mentioned the fiftieth anniversary of this tradition before. Nevertheless, a section on the Parliamentary website seemed like a good opportunity to revive the subject. There are many interesting links in the piece, but it is somewhat unfortunate that it is so badly written and edited.
There is, for example a reference to a Parliamentary Breifing Note. Really, that rule ought to be known by people who work in the House of Commons. And what does the first sentence mean?
"The 24 October 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of Prime Minister's Question Time as a permanent parliamentary event." The 24 October 2011? Dear me.
Still, there are many gems of interest to people who find parliamentary history and traditions interesting. Go to it with a will, say I.
In Federalist 51, James Madison (or it might have been Alexander Hamilton) wrote:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.Tory Historian has always though that it is the practical and rational attitude of the Founding Fathers to the people (or the People, if one prefers) which is so attractive about their ideas. Here were no utopian idealists who saw what they wanted to see but hard-headed individuals who knew that there was no such thing as an ideal politician or an ideal voter.
Jeremy Black, a conservative historian who is probably a member of the Conservative Party as well, writes in History Today about the grievance industry.
Grievances are a characteristic of post-Cold War history, as various ‘liberated’ peoples have adopted historical claims in the service of their political goals. The end of the Cold War discredited Marxism as an official creed and lessened its influence as a basis for analysis, resulting in a major shift away from the understanding of society linked at an international level to the expression, revival or rise of national grievances, notably within Eastern Europe.Using the past to justify actions in the present is a very old game, indeed. As old as history itself. It is possible that the number and frequency of grievances aired in the public sphere has multiplied since the end of the Cold War but, on the whole, I think not.
Grievances provide an easy way to mobilise identity and expound policy; and the use of grievance in this fashion by one party encourages its use by another. The copy-cat nature of public history has become very apparent, as in rival Chinese and Japanese accounts such as those inspired by recent territorial disputes in the East China Sea. Grievance becomes a means both to interrogate the past and to deploy the past to justify current actions.
Public grievances seem to multiply in direct relation to the compensation available, either in financial or political terms. Sometimes that compensation is simply the demand that certain, otherwise unpalatable, actions be condoned as the Chinese government expects and receives from numerous commentators.
Sometimes it is a question of simple acknowledgement as, I think and hope, with the Armenians and the 1915 massacre, though the insistence on that insidious word "genocide" makes one wonder. Frequently, however, it is a demand for more direct compensation with money or land. Why I do not think this is a particularly post-Cold War phenomenon is because there is one set of horrors for which precious little compensation has been paid out in any shape or form, and that is horrors imposed by Communist regimes.
Art confiscated by Communist governments has not been restored and there are no signs that it will ever happen; property confiscated is supposed to be restored in theory but in practice it rarely happens, unless some particular national group can be blamed; apologies have been half-hearted and attempts to air those grievances in international bodies have not had much success. There is, indeed, no point in producing those historic grievances if the perpetrators are not listening.
Tory Historian finds a great deal of C. S. Lewis's writing entertaining and instructive. A copy of Mere Christianity, the published version of Lewis's extremely successful wartime broadcasts on religion and morality has produced many gems.
Lewis says that some people have suggested to him that moral judgement that we all, according to him, have is, perhaps, just an instinct like other instincts. Not so, replies he. Instincts are like the notes in music but it is moral judgement that tells us how to play them. Left to themselves, instincts will not guide us and they never do. Even the best instincts can steer us in the wrong direction.
The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of these that will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials 'for the sake of humanity', and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.This is a phenomenon we have all become very familiar.
News comes of two incredibly principled poets, who, one assumes, fight like anything for their various fees and royalties, withdrawing from the T. S. Eliot poetry prize, because ... oh fie ... it is now sponsored by nvestment management firm Aurum Funds. Oh, oh, oh. Smelling salts someone, please.
The Poetry Book Society negotiated the three-year sponsorship deal with Aurum earlier this year. The deal followed the withdrawal of its Arts Council funding – a move protested by over 100 poets including Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage.TH is a little confused. It would appear that when "such institutions" give money voluntarily to sponsor a poetry competition, that is wrong and evil but if money is extracted from them by the state in the form of taxes and then handed over in the form of subsidy, that is good.
Kinsella told the Bookseller that he "fully" understood why the poetry organisation had looked elsewhere for funding, "given the horrendous way they were treated, but as an anticapitalist in full-on form, that is my position".
"Hedge funds are at the very pointy end of capitalism, if I can put it that way," he added.
Oswald, who pulled her collection Memorial from the prize on Tuesday, believes that "poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions".
All one can say is that it is a good thing that people like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo did not think along those lines. Neither did T. S. Eliot, as it happens. He spent a good part of his life working in a bank and then running a publishing firm that made profits.
USS West Virginia:
USS Shaw:
USS Arizona:
Pictures of Pearl Harbor devastation, courtesy of Naval History and Heritage Command
Tory Historian has mentioned before (here and here, for instance) that detective stories are the most conservative of literary genres. And here is an article I wrote on it last week for Taki's Magazine.
Consider what happens in a detective story, even a modern one that purports to have a leftward (or “enlightened”) leaning: A crime, probably murder, is committed, possibly followed by similar crimes. The world is turned upside-down as a result. Together with the detective, we cannot rest until the perpetrators are discovered and brought to justice. The perpetrator is at the very least prevented from repeating the crime. Human life is sacrosanct. Murder is wrong, no matter how you look at it. It is the ultimate crime. It destroys nature’s balance, which can be restored only by the culprit’s discovery and his or her punishment. In a century that saw the casual elimination of millions of people, this highly moral attitude became and remained attractive to many people. This has continued into the new century, which has not started off too well.Do read the article. The more hits it gets the better it is for yours truly.
Have not yet read Robin Harris's The Conservatives - A History. In the meantime here is John O'Sullivan's excellent review that makes one want to rush out and get the book immediately.
November 28 is a double anniversary. In 1919 the first woman MP actually to take up her seat in the House of Commons was elected. Nancy Astor contested the seat of Plymouth South after her husband had succeeded to the title and went up to the House of Lords. She beat the Liberal candidate, Isaac Foot and, as the left-wing Spartacus Educational reminds us, her victory annoyed many professed feminists as she was definitely not one of them and a Conservative to boot. Also an American but she had made her home in Britain.
Time went on but left-wing attitudes did not change and similar attacks were directed at the first woman Prime Minister of this country, also a Conservative but in no way American, Margaret Thatcher. November 28, 1990 was the day on which she formally tendered her resignation to the Queen. Many of us can remember the shock of the occasion.
There have been previous postings about Thanksgiving and its significance both for the United States and the Anglosphere in general. (here, here and here)
This time Tory Historian brings to the notice of all the First Thanksgiving Proclamation - June 20. 1676. This was not, as it happens, the first celebration of Thanksgiving, which took place in 1621, to celebrate a bountiful harvest. Interestingly, it was not till 1942 that the exact timing of Thanksgiving - last Thursday in November - was fixed by Federal law.
Happy Thanksgiving to all in the Anglosphere.
Another topic that needs to be covered at length on this site (and if any reader wants to pitch in with a few paragraphs, these will be much appreciated). To start with, here are Sir David Cannadine's comments as his new book, The Right Kind of History, is published. It is a history of history teaching in this country and a review copy is on its way to me. So I shall be able to write about the book itself.
In the meantime, what has Sir David to say about the present and the future of history teaching in British schools?
If we must have a compulsory curriculum then history should most definitely be part of it but is there any point in making it compulsory if the content is so poor. If children learn no dates, no consecutive knowledge of events and acquire no understanding of what happened in this or any other country then making that compulsory will not improve matters. Those of us who are not Princeton professors know that, in this case, Michael Gove happens to be right, when he says that
A generation of children knows virtually nothing about British history and leaves school "woefully under-nourished", Education Secretary Michael Gove warned today.Even if they happen to have heard of those particular facts they rarely have an idea of which of them came first as history is taught, if at all, in bits and unrelated pieces. Time, surely, to take the problem seriously. Perhaps, my idea of setting up a school or college that taught only history to all those who are willing to pay should be thought about more seriously.
Even university students studying the subject are failing to recall basic historical facts, he said. Mr Gove said that around half of young people were unaware that Nelson led the British to victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, or that the Romans built Hadrian's Wall.
As it happens there were two events of some importance on that day, both deaths, though the immediate reporting for many days, weeks, months and, it sometimes feels, even years, has concentrated on one: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
This blog refuses to go into any conspiracy theories, especially as most of them have been disproved by recent re-examination of the evidence, and would merely like to point out that the way political attitudes seemed to be one year before the election, Kennedy seemed reasonably certain to lose. Of course, many things could have happened.
However, there is no question that the assassination of the American President in broad daylight while he was being driven in an official motorcade, shocked the country and the world. It is fair to say that it was not Kennedy's presidency, which had its ups and downs, mostly downs, but his assassination that changed American politics though one hopes only temporarily.
The other event of that day was the death of C. S. Lewis, one of the best known children's writers, literary critics and popular Christian philosophers in the English-speaking world. His death was not dramatic but the outcome of a long illness and even longer refusal to look after himself properly.
This blog may have some reservations about Lewis's writings and even greater reservations about the sentimentalization of his life but has no doubts whatsoever that of the two men who died forty-eight years ago, he is the one whose name will continue to be honoured by people of all ages.
ADDENDUM: It has been pointed out to me that another important writer died on that day: Aldous Huxley of laryngeal cancer and, possibly, drug abuse in Los Angeles.
Tory Historian is a great supporter of the London Library, which is described by Wikipedia, probably accurately, as "the world's largest independent lending library, and the UK's leading literary institution".
Founded in 1841 by various people, but most notably Thomas Carlyle who was dissatisfied (as he so frequently was) with the British Library and did not, it is said, have enough books about the French Revolution, it has been at 14 St James's Square since 1845, always changing yet remaining the same. In the last few years a great deal of new space has been added through the purchase of an adjacent building and much construction and reconstruction the problems of which drove many members quite frantic. None of that work had been possible without the unparalleled generosity of Valerie Eliot, the great poet's widow, who donated £2.5 million. The new building, located behind the main St James's Square one, formerly known as Duchess House, is now called the T. S. Eliot House though TH would have preferred Old Possum House. Ah well, can't have everything.
This is what the Library itself has to say:
1841: As The London Library was founded in 1841 we've been taking a look at other significant literary events that took place in the same year and as well as being busy founding The London Library, Thomas Carlyle published On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History. Another early supporter of the Library, Charles Dickens, published The Old Curiosity Shop. In the same year Punch magazine was founded in London and Horace Greeley began publication of the New York Tribune.Hmmm.
All one can add is that the library's history collection is magnificent but nothing can beat the Reading Room and its extraordinarily comfortable armchairs. Warning: do not sink into them if you do not wish to fall asleep.
And why not? Pubs, in their many manifestations (yes, inns and public houses have changed over the centuries), are an intrinsic part of British history, different in different parts of the country.
London Historians are organizing a second History in the Pub event [scroll down to fourth item] on November 29, between 7 and 9 at The Bell, 50 Middlesex Street, Spitalfields.
Here is an account of the first, highly successful event.
The Duke of Wellington, one of Tory Historian's heroes was a considerably more important politician (as well as an overwhelmingly important military commander) than TH had been led to believe at school. He was also a man who was admired unstintingly by all except the Radicals (and even they inclined to some admiration).
Sadly, none of that is true and Tory Historian needs to rethink everything read in those textbooks and heard in the lessons. It would appear that the Duke did have a great deal of political aptitude and a very good understanding of European affairs as well as a great fear (like most military men) of another European war. He was central to British politics for many years after Waterloo and went on serving as a public servant almost until the day of his death. Many of his political judgements were considerably more intelligent and penetrating than those of people on the other side who were the heroes of those long-ago school lessons.His funeral on November 18, 1852 "caused as much of a stir in the mass media of 1852 as did Sir Winston Churchill's in the middle of the twentieth century". This link will lead to a list of references and illustrations in contemporary Illustrated London News. Here is a brief account of the funeral - it was the last heraldic state funeral held in Britain.
A massive 10 hour raid by the Luftwaffe left Coventry devastated on November 15, 1940.
Viscount Castlereagh has never been given his full due by his own countrymen, argues Professor Bew in this article. There is, he says, an attempt to make him sound entirely relevant to the modern age but that is wrong, too.
The truth is that Castlereagh can be understood only as a product of the time in which he operated, rather than as a bearer of any timeless insights. Nonetheless, as his descendant, the Marchioness of Londonderry, argued in 1904, he was not ‘the old-fashioned Tory that ignorant opinion supposes’. Often presented as the enemy of Enlightenment, he travelled widely in Europe, read a broad range of literature and eschewed the anti-Catholicism of many of his peers in England and Ireland. He was convinced that the only approach that government could take towards religion was one of toleration and that each man had the right to make his peace with God on his own terms. True, he was an enemy of political reform, but this was because of the dangers of mob politics which he saw first-hand in Paris during the French Revolution and Ireland during the rebellion of 1798.Professor Bew's own book will undoubtedly put the matter right. Well, we hope so, anyway.
Thus Castlereagh’s mind was conservative and enlightened at the same time – and no less the one for being the other. ‘I think those people who are acquainted with me,’ he told the House of Commons in 1817, ‘will do me justice to believe that I never had a cruel or unkind heart.’
Tory Historian was delighted to read this item in the Daily Telegraph a few days ago.
RJ Balson and Sons, a butchers based in Bridport, Dorset, boasts an astonishing history that is almost 500 years old.The business has expanded and is thriving.
Experts have traced the businesses roots back through 25 generations to when founder John Balson opened a stall in the town's market on South Street in 1535.
Since then dozens of family members have worked as butchers in the market town, passing their skills down the generations.
And 476 years later, the shop remains a thriving business and has been named Britain's oldest family run retailer.
It has been in its present location since 1880, not far from its orginal location.One can but hope that the account books have been preserved somewhere for all the centuries. What a mine of fascinating information they would be.
According to the Institute for Family Business, this makes it the oldest continuously trading family business in Britain.
The firm sells its produce, including 20 varieties of sausages such as els, boar and ostrich,l all over the world, with a large customer base in America.
It also sells exotic fare such as pheasants and guinea fowl but has remained close to its traditional roots.
