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The three examples are respectively by George Sheringham, Andrew Power and Annie Gertrude Fletcher.
Curiously, the Daily Mail article gives no examples of Edward McKnight Kauffer, possibly the best of the artists whose career was made by London Transport. Here is one example.
We have just had Open House week-end in London and Tory Historian tried to visit a new place or two. Only one new place was managed: the fascinating and gorgeous Apothecaries' Hall.
Time was short so the second visit was to the Guildhall and the Roman Amphitheatre beneath the Art Gallery, both thoroughly recommended.
Naturally, there was a good deal of explanation of what the amphitheatre was used for and how it fitted in with Roman British life. Interestingly, the actual amphitheatres across the Roman empire were built out of public funds but the entertainment in them (if you can call events that involved the slaughter of hundreds of people and animals entertainment) was provided by rich nobles or even by the Emperor, especially in Rome itself. This was a way of bribing the populace, bread and circuses (panem et circenses) being a great Roman invention, much in use to this day.
Tory Historian, naturally, thought of the bread and circuses that were provided this summer by way of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, both descendants of certain ancient entertainments. There is, however, a great difference: they are still bribes to keep the populace happy but these days the bribes are paid for by the populace. They bribe us, thought TH, with our own money. In the case of those Games with our children's money as well.
Browsing through the internet Tory Historian came across this site: British History Online and found the London page of especial interest. The links read to a large selection of primary sources.
There was a time when every school boy and girl knew the name of the first railway casualty. William Huskisson, MP for Liverpool and former Cabinet Minister was attending the opening of the Manchester-Liverpool railway on September 15, 1830. He got out of his carriage and went to another one to speak to the Duke of Wellington (yes, yes, him again). As he climbed in he slipped and fell into the path of the Rocket, Stephenson's great engine, which ran over his leg and caused severe bleeding of which he died though he was immediately taken to a hospital by Stephenson himself.
That is all one mostly knew about him though Huskisson did have quite a distinguished career.
His was the last heraldic state funeral held in Britain.
For a number of reasons, not unconnected with recent events, Tory Historian decided to look up the comment, ascribed to General Sir Charles Napier in William Napier's History of Sir Charles Napier's Administration of Scinde, published in 1851, on the subject of sati or suttee or, in plain words, the habit of burning of widows on their husbands' funeral pyre (prohibited by Sikhism, incidentally).
This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.It seems that no suttee took place then or afterwards while the General remained in charge.
There is a strong possibility (though at present no more than that) that the archaeological dig in Leicester has, apart from making all sorts of other interesting discoveries, may have uncovered the body or, rather the skeleton of Richard III.
The University of Leicester has made a statement about it in which they explain:
We have exhumed one fully articulated skeleton and one set of disarticulated human remains. The disarticulated set of human remains was found in what is believed to be the Presbytery of the lost Church of the Grey Friars. These remains are female, and thus certainly not Richard III. The articulated skeleton was found in what is believed to be the Choir of the church. The articulated skeleton found in the Choir is of significant interest to us. Dr Jo Appleby has carried out a preliminary examination of the remains.So this could be the remains of the last Plantagenet king and the statement proceeds to give reasons why that is very possibly so. What of that crucial question: was he a crookback or not? The fifth point made states:
The skeleton found in the Choir area has spinal abnormalities. We believe the individual would have had severe scoliosis – which is a form of spinal curvature. This would have made his right shoulder appear visibly higher than the left shoulder. This is consistent with contemporary accounts of Richard’s appearance. The skeleton does not have kyphosis – a different form of spinal curvature. The skeleton was not a hunchback. There appears to be no evidence of a “withered arm”.Before we all start rejoicing in our mighty victory over Tudor
Mr Romanyuk is the complete Anglophile. To him there can be nothing wrong with Britain and if there is a dispute he takes the British side, even attempting to exonerate the British authorities in the somewhat dubious story of Nicholas II and his family to whom Britain apparently refused to give shelter. A muddled story, as Mr Romanyuk rightly says and in his opinion if anyone needs to be blamed it had better be David Lloyd George.
Naturally there are a few pages about Peter the Great and his stay in London, particularly in Deptford but in other parts as well. Bearing in mind recent comments about London being put on the map in the last couple of weeks, I was interested to read that "at the time [Peter's arrival in 1698] London was Europe's largest city: with a population of 675,000 at the beginning of the eighteenth century".
After some description of the devastation caused by the Great Fire and of the rebuilding that was going on, Mr Romanyuk adds that London was also a great sea port. In the year of Peter's arrival 13,444 ships had visited it.
Tory Historian remains convinced that this is the most exciting news story of the last few weeks: archaeologists are close to finding the body of Richard III in Leicester, where he was buried after the Battle of Bosworth Field.
The dig to recover the body of the king, who was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth by Henry Tudor in 1485, has already unearthed the long-lost Franciscan Friary where he was buried.The article gives a more detailed description of the finds already made, all of them of great importance to anyone who cares about England's (and Britain's) history, though why should an article, published on September 10 be giving information about an open day on the site that took place on September 8, is something only sub-editors of the Daily Telegraph can elucidate. The BBC, one may add, had it right: they reported that 1,500 people queued to see the exhibits and part of the site.
The church, which is also called Grey Friars, was known to be where Richard III was buried but its exact whereabouts had become lost over time.
Now archaeologists say the dig will move into the third week and say they are getting ‘tantalisingly close’ in their search for the body.
Dorothy L. Sayers was very complimentary about Woodthorpe's books and rightly so: they are highly amusing and the writing is sly, witty and polished. The plot of this particular one is, on the other hand, a little lame. The beginning is excellent in a Buchanesque way. Thee events coincide: the Leader (always referred to with a capital L) of a rather noxious movement, Keep Britain Free, whose members sport purple shirts, has been arrested for no apparent crime; a young boy has disappeared with his nurse and, almost certainly, it is a case of kidnapping; and an important member of the Purple Shirts has been murdered with another, less important member, being arrested on serious circumstantial evidence. The latter happens to be the estranged husband of the niece of Nicholas Slade, a writer whose satirical output is considerably less well known than his first, somewhat romantic novel, The Gods Are Just.
Nicholas Slade and his confidential clerk, Alfred Hicks, start an investigation into the murder as they both assume that the nephew by marriage could not have committed the crime.
Thereafter the plot disintegrates despite some very funny descriptions and episodes as well as a few barbed comments about the literary world. The solution to the crime(s) is neat though not altogether surprising but the holes in the plot are too big to overlook. Several important characters's behaviour remains unexplained; the reason for so much of the action in the past and the present taking place in a strange but delightful hotel on an island is not given; hints about certain people being possibly connected to the Purple Shirts are never followed up.
Most frustratingly we never find out how it is that a ridiculous organization that is full of self-important and childish characters, has no money and cannot impose discipline on its members despite the sub-military behaviour manages to build up a superb intelligence service. Whatever the Home Secretary does, wherever he goes, whatever instructions he gives, the Purple Shirt leaders know within the hour. Is there somebody close to the HS, or A Certain Person, as he is variously referred to, who is a member of the organization? If so, we never learn the truth.
There are, however, some interesting aspects to the novel. Nicholas Slade goes to the headquarters of the Keep Britain Free movement in Hampstead and finds that he dislikes them more than he had done before. Though the movement is a clear reference to Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (founded in 1932 and the book came out in 1934) the political ideology that is propounded at their headquarters are similar to those one would have heard in various Communist organizations of the period. (Well, it's not like there is that much difference between national and international socialism.) The Leader's comment about writers becoming as important as dustmen, no more but no less so, in the new order remind one of Lenin rather than Mussolini or Hitler and the notion of the corporate state being of far greater importance than the individual is central to all those isms and ologies.
Listening to the mildly insane burbling of the Purple Shirts, Nicholas Slade manages to formulate to himself what it is he does not like:
Slade, feeling that the more he heard of the Purple Shirt programme the less he liked it, sat on. He sat patiently, and gloomily envisaged the promised new State, which would deprive him of his cherished Times, employ him in writing propaganda, and, if he jibbed, or incautiously made a joke at its expense, hand him over to a soft of drumhead court-martial and have him put against a wall and shot. It was a dismal prospect.
Slade was not over much in love with the established order of things. Indeed, he had satirized it in many of his books. But there you were ... That was exactly where the shoe pinched. Slade could satirize the existing State, cartoonists could caricature it, the writers of funny columns could lampoon it ... and no one seemed to mind.Slade and Woodthorpe can see the difference in the basics but, for all of that, can also see that not everything is rosy in the garden.
After all, the plot is triggered off by a stupid and, probably, illegal order by the Home Secretary, not a man to be admired, to arrest the Purple Shirts' Leader, who bears the unlikely name of Duke Benedict (this was four years before P. G. Wodehouse's glorious creation, Roderick Spode) for nothing at all. Eventually, after several months in prison, he is charged with making seditious speeches. The only immediate outcome is that the Purple Shirts suddenly become quite popular as they are seen to be victims of the Establishment.
Slade is shocked but nor surprised to find that the political establishment that includes the Home Secretary and Scotland Yard is prepared to pervert the course of justice and to let an innocent man go to the gallows in order to protect the real killer's identity. In the end, the innocent man is released but the real killer goes unpunished except, possibly, in his own conscience. This is not a novel that supports the powers that be or the existing order of things. What it does support is the idea of how they ought to be.
Browsing through the shelves of a second-hand bookshop I came across a copy of Agnes Jekyll's Kitchen Essays as reprinted by Persephone Books. This is a fascinating collection of essays about food and cooking, originally published for a year in The Times and collected, in response to popular demand, as a volume in 1922.
Intrigued by the essays themselves and the name of the author, I proceeded to search for information. Mr Google yielded a certain amount, mostly to do with the book in my hands, which had already informed me that Agnes Jekyll was "the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite patron William Graham", married to soldier-diplomat Herbert Jekyll and "the guests at her first dinner party [the subject of one of her essays] were Browning, Burne-Jones and Ruskin". She was also Gertrude Jekyll's sister-in-law and the biographer of that formidable lady described Agnes as "an artist-housekeeper".
All very interesting but that does not, for example, explain why Lady Jekyll, as she became, was also Dame Agnes Jekyll. Even the publishers say vaguely that she was " created DBE for her involvement in numerous good causes".
I abandoned Mr Google and the internet and went back in true conservative fashion to the printed word, the Dictionary of National Biography, to be quite precise. Its entry on Agnes Jekyll was, naturally enough, shorter than that on her sister-in-law but full of information.
To start with, dates. Dame Agnes Jekyll was born in Ayrshire in 1861 and died at her home near Godalming in 1937. Her father was a Liberal MP as well as an art collector and her husband, Sir Herbert Jekyll was in the Royal Engineers with an extensive political and diplomatic career on the practical side. Among other assignments he was sent to inspect fortifications in Ceylon and Singapore and his wife travelled with him each time, whether to Paris, Dublin, Gibraltar or further afield.
They settled near Godalming where Lady Jekyll became a well known political and artistic hostess with what was considered to be an exceptional aptitude for presentation of food and wine as well as general housekeeping. But that was not all.
The mystery of her Damehood is explained. She was given a DBE in the New Year Honours of 1918 for her war work, which consisted partly of the chairmanship of St John of Jerusalem's warehouse for hospital supplies in Clerkenwell. Apparently she prided herself on answering every demand for supplies promptly. She was also one of the first volunteers to provide ambulance service when the air raids on London started.
Her public career neither began nor ended with the First World War. From 1884 to her death she was a member of the East End maternity hospital committee. For ten years she was chairwoman of the visiting committee of the Borstal Institution for Girls at Aylesbury and, according to the DNB, served frequently on juries if women were in the dock. I find this hard to understand as I do not think one can choose either the frequency of one's jury service or the cases on which one sits.
From 1925 she was a magistrate on the Guildford Bench and sat on the panel of children's courts. In response to her obituary, published in The Times on January 29, 1937, a letter described her as "exceptionally able amateur" and added that she would have been a great public servant had she been a man. That, one must admit, is a curious comment and shows how early the notion that public servants are only those who make a professional and paid career out of it. Amateur Dame Agnes may have been but she was a great public servant, all the greater for not getting any money for her various activities.
The lady of the house, in Agnes Jekyll's estimation, has to run matters herself, be aware of the food that is prepared, think ahead about provisions and inject new ideas and menus. It is up to the cook to deal with the practical matters though there is one delightful essay with some helpful recipes, entitled "In the Cook's Absence".
Other essays deal with new names and ideas for old recipes, favourite or otherwise (Gigot de six heures being somewhat more complicated but also more attractive than roast mutton with caper sauce), tea time dainties, dinners before theatre and suppers after, cooking for bachelors and for those who have found themselves considerably poorer after the war, picnics in winter as the average English hostelry was as unspeakable then as it remained for many decades afterwards, Christmas and Easter goodies, Italian food, cooking for the too fat or the too thin, and breakfast food.
What emerges is a clear picture of a hastily changing society or, maybe, a society that tried to return to pre-war norms and failed to do so, not least because the people themselves no longer liked those. In a number of essays the author talks about the pleasure of serving food in bright and heat-preserving pottery dishes (marmites for soup turn up repeatedly in the recipes) rather than on silver that, presumably, made every dish, regardless of what it was intended to be, tepid and somewhat tasteless. Finding bright pottery for the table and the kitchen, patterned table cloths and napkins was no longer just for bohemians but for the respectable middle classes as well.
At the same time the recipes are difficult: they tend to be far too complicated, made possible by the continuing presence of servants in the kitchen, aspic is still much used and the number of dishes that require the use of a salamander before serving is high. I may consider making one or two of the dishes. On the other hand, I know I shall re-read the book at some future date and enjoy the style and the descriptions, even the mild witticisms as much as I did the first time round.
While having the usual discussion about Lord Acton - he said "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely - I looked up his notable quotations and found an absolutely splendid one:
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.It comes from his essay The History of Freedom in Antiquity.
Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth Field that brought to end the reign of the Plantagenets and introduced a completely new dynasty which led to other dynasties though none of it can be seen as entirely legitimate. History Today has reprinted an article from 1985 about the actual battle and the various problems that surround it. In fact, as far as TH can make out, next to nothing is known about it.
What seems rather extraordinary is that the author of the article should so easily accept the Tudor myth of Richard III, the relentless tyrant and usurper.Surely, Polydore Virgil's account, written many years later and under the reign of Henry VII who was not known for his tolerance of people that doubted his right to the throne, cannot be taken as gospel truth and neither can the account of the supposed hunchback (not shown in the portrait that is a copy of one made in his life time) and monster given us by Sir Thomas More.
Here are a couple of links to previous postings on the subject: a report on a trip to the fifteenth century, courtesy of the RSC and on Shakespeare's handling of some thorny issues and the story of a trip to Leicester which mingles German expressionism with that city's celebration of the man their predecessors saw as the rightful king.
This picture of Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the truly great political writers of modern history, was found on a Facebook site, entitled Federalist Papers. It sums what is wrong with a great deal of modern politics and predicts the failure of liberal constitutionalism in its ability to deal with mass democracy.
The novel I have in mind is The Mystery of the Human Bookcase and it is not, pace its title, a horror story in the Poe mould but a very straightforward detective yarn with two excellent characters: Kirker Cameron, New York Commissioner of Police who, unusually, is not there for political reasons but because he is good at his job, having been trained at the Paris Sûreté and worked with Scotland Yard and Jerome Bland, the District Attorney who is not as smart or imaginative as Cameron but is completely honest and contemptuous of politics.
Anyway, they have found the body and discovered that it was, apparently, that of a well-known thriller writer, despised by Mr Bland and rather liked by Mr Cameron, who gives the following explanation:
Man was so made that he must torment himself with mysteries and enigmas and thus the detective story always had been popular. It was the most ancient form of self-torment, and, as Bland might remember, the first three ever written could be found in the Aeneid, Herodotus and the Jewish Apocrypha.This novel was first published in 1931 but one cannot help wondering whether the author had seen Dorothy L. Sayers's introduction to the first volume of Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. It starts with the words:
The art of self-tormenting is an ancient one, with a long and honourable tradition. Man, not satisfied with the mental confusion and unhappiness to be derived from contemplating the cruelties of life and the riddle of the universe, delights to occupy his leisure moments with puzzles and bugaboos.In the next paragraph she says:
Both the detective-story proper and the pure tale of horror are very ancient in origin. All native folk-lore has its ghost tales, while the first four detective stories in this book hail respectively from the Jewish Aporcypha, Herodotus, and the Aeneid.They are: The History of Bel and The History of Susanna from the Apocryphal Scriptures, The Story of Hercules and Cacus from The Aeneid, Book VIII and The Story of Rhampsinitus' Treasure-House from Herodotus Book II.
An extraordinary amount of excitement and patriotic fervour was erupting around me as I was reading Peter Whittle’s Being British – What’s Wrong With It?. Team GB (an expression that would have been guaranteed to bring nausea to any right-thinking or, for that matter, left-thinking of the old school person before the vocabulary of Cool Britannia permeated public discourse) was winning medals. All doubts about the pharaonic and overweening arrogance that created the mega-farce of the London Olympics for which we shall be paying for decades to come have been dispelled, at least momentarily. Britain was winning medals and nothing else could possibly matter. One person on another forum jubilantly wrote about the first couple of gold medals “because we are GREAT Britain” as if that was the definition of this country’s greatness.
It occurred to me, not for the first time, what a peculiar position sport occupies in our political and social consciousness. As far as sport is concerned all the virtues, so eloquently extolled by Peter Whittle in his book, that have been abandoned or made to seem embarrassing, become acceptable. People are allowed to wave flags and cheer their country (though some problems arise with people who appear to think that certain sportsmen and women are Scottish if they win and British if they lose). Even the BBC joins in.
There is another difference: for a short time the people who are presented as heroes and role models are not vacuous celebrities but people who have, necessarily, kept the old virtues of hard work, self-discipline and aspiration. This will not last. Soon we shall go back to endless gossip about celebrities, including loutish footballers, and the accepted “virtues” of instant gratification and celebrity for no apparent reason. Of course, Olympic medal winners are not particularly useful as role models in another way: very few people can achieve those standards. If we do want children and young people to aspire to achievement we need to present them with models they can emulate with some hope of success.
The cult of celebrity is not particularly new as a swift reading of past publications can tell us but as Peter Whittle points out, its overwhelming importance that excludes and dismisses the more traditional virtues that allowed people to achieve things in life is something new and immensely harmful to several generations of children in this country who find themselves unable to compete either with their coaevals from other countries or from the private educational sector.
Other problems raised in Being British – What’s Wrong With It? are the deliberate destruction by the self-hating political elite of pride in one’s country and one’s culture, the whole idea of multiculturalism related to it, mass immigration that is both cause and effect of it, the dismissal of working class virtues, their destruction through all the above and the overwhelming and rapacious welfare state, and, above all, complete ignorance of the country’s history. Of these I personally consider the last to be the most important. (Well, I would, wouldn’t I?) Not knowing or understanding the past means an inability to understand the present or to imagine a future.
Once or twice I found myself vigorously shaking my head in disagreement. For instance, history tells one that riots were a reasonably frequent part of English life till late in the nineteenth century as was criminality. All too often when Britishness is invoked the reference is to a relatively short period of around 100 – 120 years from around 1820 to the beginning of the Second World War, when the state took over the running of people’s lives, never properly letting go again and stifling all the many very good qualities that those people possessed. Nor am I impressed by any sentimental feeling towards the 1950s. A swift look at the films and books of the period will show a decade of greyness and depression despite the political hype (for how else would one describe Harold Macmillan’s famous comment about never having so good and one of net emigration. People did not simply talk about wishing to leave as they appear to do now according to the author of Being British but actually did so in large numbers.
Nevertheless, the main argument of the books is entirely accurate. Britain has created many good things in the country and in the world though often those who did the creating were the ones who found many of the solid British virtues tiresome and stifling, a curious contradiction noted by George Orwell many years ago, but those achievements have been deliberately denied and belittled by a weird self-hating elite. The people of the country have been deprived of their history, of their pride and self-respect. Given that this is a country and a culture that has been admired and emulated across the world (though not the NHS) it is strange and disturbing to see its denigration at home.
However, Peter Whittle (who is, incidentally, a good friend as well as the Director of the New Culture Forum) sees many causes for hope. The future might be brighter than the immediate past. People seem to be refusing to knuckle under: they remain stubbornly proud of their country and its achievements, they want to learn about its history and they are waking up to the importance and necessity of all that has been taken away from them. Let me recommend this book to anyone who is perturbed by what has been going on and would like to see the hopeful signs to develop into something more lasting.
.... Phyllis Dorothy James, a.k.a. P. D. James, the pre-eminent detective story writer of the day, a. k. a. Baroness James, who sits on the Conservative benches in the House of Lords. Many happy returns.
It is well known to all Wodehouse aficionados, of whom Tory Historian is one, that Bertie Wooster once wrote a column in his Aunt Dahlia's weekly journal, Milady's Boudoir, entitled "What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing". In the same way this article could be called "What the Well-Read MP is Reading".
In fact, it is called rather prosaically Keith Simpson's Summer Reading List and is a long list of books that Mr Simpson, Chairman of the Conservative History Group, thinks MPs might enjoy reading on their summer hols.
Few real surprises. As Mr Simpson says, there is a natural bias towards politics, history and conflict with a few lighter touches at the end, though at least two of these are books written by wives and daughters of politicians. The biography of W. T. Stead will be on TH's reading list, despite the mediocre reviews as will, possibly the books about China in the thirties.
The history of the Intelligence Division of the War Office, on the other hand, sounds fascinating.
