So Much for Nelson - now let's take on John Bull

I’m pretty sure that I’ve mentioned my love of Lewis Caroll’s Alice books, not the least part of which is my huge admiration for John Tenniel’s original illustrations for them. Tenniel was remarkable in many ways. His father was a fencing teacher, and in the course of instructing John once he caught him in the eye. John concealed the fact that he had been permanently injured and lost his sight in the eye over a period of time. To be able to draw as well as he did for as long as he did with only one eye is remarkable.

I also appreciate his political cartoons for Punch, although more for the incredible skill and facility of his drawing than through any sympathy with his politics. Tenniel was invited to become joint cartoonist for Punch in 1850, and he continued to produce what would amount to over 2000 cartoons for the magazine until his retirement over 50 years later in 1902. In terms of his political views, well, Tenniel was a man who was very much in sympathy with the urban, middle class readership of Punch and while he could be a trenchant critic of politicians and governments and their policies at home, his take on international relations could be pretty imperialistic.

I mention this because you may have read posts earlier this year when I discussed my collection of chocolate tins that Queen Victoria sent to troops serving in South Africa during the Boer War. Now, I think I’ve also mentioned how I love drawing before. Because of arthritis I’ve allowed two or three weeks to go by without producing any sketches, but I had a week’s leave from work this last week and so I took up my pens again. I made a copy of a Tenniel cartoon about the pollution of the Thames – here:-

I then thought to myself, I wonder what Tenniel made of the Boer War? Well, I say that I wondered, but really and truly I had a pretty good idea what I’d find. John Tenniel, by this time Sir John Tenniel, was, like the magazine’s readership, solidly in favour of the unjust war. Here’s my copies of a few of his cartoons from the weeks leading up to the start of the war and the first few weeks.

Now, Tenniel often used three allegorical figures to depict Britain – and for Tenniel Britain really meant England. When Tenniel wanted to depict Britain as a sympathetic figure, a figure of compassion and peace, he would use the figure of Britannia, like the figure from the 50p piece/old pre decimal one penny. When he wished to stress Britain’s might and power, he used the figure of the British Lion. When he used neither of these, he used the figure of John Bull.

Here’s a question for you. What nationality was the man who created the figure John Bull? Yes, that’s right. Scottish. In 1712, John Bull was created by Scottish satirist John Arbuthnot, in a pamphlet satirising the Whigs and their policies in the War of the Spanish Succession. In the succeeding decades Bull pretty much morphed into the archetypal representation of the free-born, corpulent, small c – conservative Englishman, hence his depiction even into late Victorian times as a, for want of a better word, corpulent English country squire from the 19^th century.

BRITANNIA CONSOLATRIX
BRITANNIA - :- ‘I will take care of you! Your man has gone to do his duty – and I will do mine!’

So, as for these cartoons, this one depicts a scene where a troopship in the distance is setting sail for South Africa, and Britannia is consoling a wife and children, whose husband, presumably, is on board the ship. The title is “Britannia Consolatrix” and the caption beneath reads:- ‘I will take care of you! Your man has gone to do his duty – and I will do mine!’ There’s a lot I don’t like about this. Firstly, the idea that it was anyone’s duty to go and fight in South Africa. Even judging by 19^th century standards this was an unjust and unnecessary war.

Then there’s the idea that Britain, represented by the allegorical figure Britannia, would do its duty, and take care of the casualties of war and their families. Now, I will admit that it was in 1901 that pensions were paid to war widows of NCOs and other ranks for the first time. But this had not been on the table in 1899 when the cartoon was made. Nor was it very generous when it was made, and it was subject to strict conditions regarding conduct and being of good character. Should a war widow remarry, for example, she would receive a very small sum and the pension would cease.

Even in the 21^st century we see British army veterans having to accept help from charities because of the injuries, mental and physical, that they received in the name of our country which are not catered for by the Ministry of Defence. So you can imagine just how little real help was available to veterans of the Boer War on their return to Britain.

 

“JOHN BULL (TO BOER) – “AS YOU WILL FIGHT, YOU SHALL HAVE IT.
THIS TIME IT’S A FIGHT TO A FINISH.”

This one appeared in October 1899, the year and month that the war broke out. The picture shows John Bull squaring up to a Boer farmer ( the word Boer itself means farmer).

The title is “Plain English” while beneath this there is the caption :-

“JOHN BULL (TO BOER) – “AS YOU WILL FIGHT, YOU SHALL HAVE IT. THIS TIME IT’S A FIGHT TO A FINISH.”

This needs some explanation. It’s probably best that I start with a slight digression. When I write of the Boer War as an unjust and unnecessary war, this is what I really feel about it. Which does not mean that I’m trying to paint the two Boer Republics as admirable nations. Their attitudes towards black native African nations was appalling, for example. But it is not as if the British were motivated to fight in order to ameliorate conditions for native Africans. No, they were motivated by Imperialistic shortsightedness and led on by the greed of men like Cecil Rhodes. Just my opinion and as always, feel free to disagree. 

So, as a background to the cartoon, Great Britain annexed the two Boer republics, The Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State, in the 1870s. Despite repeated attempts at negotiating a peaceful solution, Boer representatives were rebuffed time after time, and this led to rebellion and the first Boer War in December 1880. Superior tactics, and a British army that was poorly led and equipped , along with Prime Minister William Gladstone’s sensible refusal to allow the war to escalate into a more costly and wasteful conflict led to the war concluding in March of 1881 and a treaty which led to the reestablishment and independence of the two Boer Republics. So that’s what Tenniel means when he says ‘THIS time’.

Had gold not been discovered in the Transvaal, then the conditions that led to the Second Boer War may never have arisen. In the 1890s, the Uitlanders – a Boer term for foreigners, that is, prospectors and gold miners lured by the gold rush,- chafed at what they saw as the exorbitant taxes they had to pay, bearing in mind that they were ineligible to vote until they had lived there for 14 years. The Boer governments were willing to enter into negotiation with the British government which took up the Uitlanders’ cause and proved willing to move on this. However, the inflexibility of the British convinced them that war was inevitable, even though Transvaal premier Paul Kruger would say that declaring war on the British Empire was like defending yourself against a lion with a pocket knife. So strictly speaking Tenniel was not incorrect to suggest that the Boer republics started the fight – they declared war – but they really were given no choice, despite knowing that their chances of success were limited. 

Should Nelson Come off his Pedestal?

You know, I don’t see my mother and stepfather more than a couple of times a year, They live in Worthing and with the best will in the world their days of long drives or train rides and staying in hotels are a thing of the past. So to use a phrase, Mohammed must go to the mountain. When I do, I have this mischievous streak that makes me introduce the topic of removing Edward Hodges Baily’s statue of Admiral Nelson from the top of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square in London.

This is partly because I rather enjoy their reaction to it. The argument in favour goes – Horatio Nelson may not have owned saves, in fact he didn’t, but he was certainly in favour of continuing the slave trade and wrote in letters that he was considering speaking out against William Wilberforce in the House of Lords. Well, Trafalgar put paid to that and we’ll never know for sure if he would or not. But Nelson’s connections with the slave trade were brought into discussion in the furore following the pulling down of the statue of slave trader Edward Colson in Bristol in 2020 and there were articles in several of the dailies with people arguing for and against pulling Nelson off his pedestal.

My mum’s and step-dad’s reactions? To paraphrase – this is nonsense, it all happened over 200 years ago – you can’t change the past. Well, I certainly don’t agree that’s it’s ridiculous, but okay, it was over 200 years ago and you cannot change the past (although when I invent my time machine, watch this space). But it isn’t about that. It’s about changing your relationship with the past, if anything. It’s about asking the questions whether, with all we know now, we feel that this is an individual we should still regard as a national hero? And engaging in debate. Surely, if Nelson was as worthy of the honour as they thought he was in the 1840s when the column was erected, then a bit of honest discussion isn’t going to change that. But if he wasn’t, well, then burying our collective heads in the sand and ignoring it because it was more than 200 years ago surely is not morally justifiable.

Despite the way that I present my opinions to Mum and Tony, I do try to keep an open mind. If you can prove to me that Nelson is a good symbol of qualities that I value and respect, then I promise I’d be one of the protestors standing in front of the column to guard it from the bulldozers. But then, that would involve being prepared to have a discussion about it in the first place. And that probably ain’t happening any time soon.

Chariots of the Shaggy Dogs

Here’s a nice mythology question for you. What links Tata, Utnapishtim, Bergelmir and Deucalion? I’m sure you know or can work it out. Especially if I widen it out from mythology and include Japhet, Shem and Ham. And Noah. Yes, they all survived floods. Tata in the Aztec flood myth, Utnapishtim in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, Bergelmir ( a giant) in the Norse flood myth and Deucalion in the Greek.

Now, probably ever since the discovery of the epic of Gilgamesh tablets by Austen Layard in the middle of the 19^th century and its translation over the following decades this has led to much speculation ever since on just why it is that catastrophic world-threatening floods proliferate in the mythology and/or religions of so many cultures, many of whom surely cannot have had any kind of contact with each other.  Some writers have used it to try to disprove the literal truth of the Old Testament, while some have used it to try to prove the literal truth of the Old Testament. Some have tried to prove that all the flood myths derive from a single catastrophic event in human history – the great thaw at the end of the (last) ice age for example.

An author I very much enjoy, so long as I’m allowed to digest his work along with a healthy dose of salt, is Graham Hancock. He suggests that the proliferation of flood myths may have their origin in the ending of the last Ice Age. Well, I’m certainly no expert, but it’s not totally impossible. However, being as that is far too sensible an idea, Graham Hancock beefed up the silliness by suggesting that the reason why it made such an impression on humanity was because it was responsible for the destruction of a great, technologically advanced civilisation, (based in Antarctica) the survivors of which spread their knowledge and skills throughout the world. Hence the growth of world civilizations in different parts of the world at the same time. As a piece of fiction it’s great. As a theory, it suffers from a huge drawback, namely that there is no real evidence of the lost civilisation. Ah, but that’s because of a conspiracy amongst historians and archaeologists to deliberately NOT search where such evidence might be found. Hancock doesn’t say this in those words, but that’s the gist.

Like I said, I exercise my right not to agree with his ideas, but I don’t half enjoy reading about them. His book about the supposed location of the Ark of the Covenant, called “The Sign and the Seal” is a particular favourite. I doubt very much that the conclusions he reaches are correct, but I enjoy the journey that takes us to those conclusions.

Which is more than I can say about the work of one of Mr. Hancock’s better-known predecessors, Swiss author Erich von Daniken. Which is really what prompted this post. You see, I can’t remember exactly where, but I heard his name mentioned the other day, and I googled him, and was astounded to find that he only passed away earlier this year. I haven’t really heard anything about him in years. Von Daniken wrote the hugely popular “Chariots of the Gods” which is, if you like, a seminal text in the field of pseudoscience which theorises that mythology is ‘evidence’ of technologically advanced aliens visiting Earth in pre-history. I read Chariots of the Gods. Once. Personally, I preferred the Goodies’ 1970s parody . Within their ‘Book of Criminal Records’ there was a short section entitled, if memory serves me right ‘Was God An English Astronaut?”, where a cartoon compared the front of a Gothic cathedral with a space rocket – and a peeled banana, just for good measure.

They were all a bit thick really

This whole Trojan thing from my last post is getting a bit out of hand. A little research reveals that not only can you have a trojan horse and a trojan mouse, but you can have trojan cows, trojan dogs and trojan animals in general. With the cows and dogs, a trojan cow would be one that is a carrier for a disease that while the cow itself shows no symptoms, it can infect a whole herd who will. The term trojan dog refers specifically to a stray that has been rehomed from mainland Europe, which bears a significantly high risk of carrying infections that are extremely rare in this country but much more common on mainland Europe. Cue a mental picture of politicians of a certain, more right-wing persuasion ranting about the evils of ‘ these bloody Trojans, coming over here, infecting our pets and stealing their winalot.”

It’s an altogether more negative use of the adjective Trojan, somewhat closer to the original horse itself. I’ll be honest, I’ve always had mixed feelings over the whole Trojan War myth. I mean, I’ve never been entirely clear whose side you’re meant to be on. Without wishing to be mean, the Trojans are, in some ways a bit thick. Hecuba, mother of Paris, dreams that she will give birth to a flaming torch. Whatever lights yer candle, pardon the pun. The dream is interpreted and Priam and Hecuba are told that the child she will give birth to will be responsible for the destruction of Troy. Priam, unable to bear the thought of killing the child gives him to a herdsman to dispatch. He can’t bear to do the deed and takes him and leaves him on a hillside. He comes back nine days later, the baby is still alive and well, having been suckled by a she bear. He takes the kid home to bring up, and what happens next is set in motion. Stupid.

As for the Greeks, well, again, somehow most of them come across as the kind of people you wouldn’t want to play in a quiz team with. Let’s start with the greatest of them. Achilles. Now, he was made mostly invulnerable by being dipped in the River Styx as a baby. Only the heel by which she held him was not touched by the water. Well, I’m not being funny (you can say that again, says the reader) but – what would have been wrong if she had gone for a double dip? Or failing that, at least given his heel some proper protection? No wonder his shade was so angry in the Underworld.

Agamemnon. What a pillock! Lesson 1 in commanding an army. If your secret weapon is a virtually invincible Myrmidon with a short temper, don’t piss him off by stealing one of the girls he has taken as spoils of war. Oh, and when you get home, keep an eye on the missus if she suggests you should have a bath.

Even Odysseus, the supposedly smart one, was perfectly capable of acting like a complete div. (ah, these charming old world phrases). Having escaped from the attention of Polyphemus the cyclops and blinded him in the process, why the hell would you taunt him and reveal your real name when you’re sailing away. On the sea. Ruled by Poseidon, God of the Sea, and father of Polyphemus. It was like he didn’t even want to get home.

The Romans, so I’m told had a phrase – to tell the whole story from egg to apple – meaning to tell the whole story of something from start to finish. This refers to the Trojan War story. The egg is the egg from which the children of Leda and Zeus were hatched – Helen being one – while the apple is that eaten at the banquet following Odysseus’ return home and his defeat of his wife Penelope’s suitors. Well, if you go through the whole story from apple to egg there aren’t many characters who manage not to put a foot wrong somehow or other. I’m drawn to Penelope. After 10 years of Odysseus’ absence a group of dastards (once again, check the spelling) pressure her to accept Odysseus’ death and take one of them for a husband and new King. Penelope says she can not make a choice until she has finished making a death shroud for Odysseus’ Dad. (Not making this up.)She spends all day weaving it and all night unpicking it. Not sure when she sleeps, but you still gotta admit it’s smart. I can’t help thinking that if she’d gone to the war rather than Odysseus, they’d all have been home before the postcard.

Remembering the Wooden Mouse of Troy

In my post about the Gavin and Stacey quiz, I used the word phrase ‘gift horse’. It occurred to me to look into the derivation of the saying ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I’ll be honest, the idea of a horse as a gift did make me think of the wooden one given to the good people of the city of Troy. But then that never quite made sense to me. I mean, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth - because you might get a Greek spear in your eye for your pains? Somehow that didn’t work. Nor does the idea that the Trojans should just have blindly accepted the gift without checking It out. That’s essentially what they did anyway and look how that worked out for them.

No, the saying really means, when you get given a horse – and I have to believe that the gifting of an equine was maybe more common in days of yore than it is today -  you should just accept it with gratitude and not yank its mouth open to have a look at the teeth. Apparently, that’s a good way of checking the age and condition of a horse. A real horse that is. With a wooden one you can just count the rings. The point of the saying is to be grateful when you receive a gift or a piece of good fortune and not insult the giver by checking it and looking for flaws and negatives.

So, when would you think that we have the first recorded use of the saying, or something very similar? Actually in the 4^th Century AD in St. Jerome’s Commentarium in Epistolam ad Ephesios (Commentary on the Letter to the Ephesians) and it went something like this – Noli equi dentes inspicere donati”. Ah, they don’t write them like that any more. Basically it means, don’t look at the teeth of a horse you’ve been given. Maybe not as big a hit as his Latin translation of The Bible, but sequels can be difficult to pull off at the best of times.

Speaking of the Trojan Horse, I wonder how well acquainted you are with the term – the Trojan Mouse? If you’ve never heard of it, well it can be used in different contexts, for example, a small-scale change in an organisation – maybe in policy, maybe in procedure, whatever – that is designed to have a large-scale effect. I first heard of it in terms of a tactic you can use to persuade someone in a higher position of authority than you are to do something you want them to. Basically it involves introducing an idea to said authority figure in such a way that they come to believe it’s their own idea, take ownership of it and see it through to fruition. I wouldn’t say that I’ve made a habit of doing this and I wouldn’t say it’s been a conspicuous success every time that I’ve tried. But I did have a notable success once.

I made a point of dropping it into the conversation with a former deputy headteacher of mine that a colleague in another school had just told me that their headteacher had just instituted a policy whereby when a member of staff reached 20 years with the school – or at least within the local authority – then a recommendation would automatically be sent to the powers that be that they should receive the discretionary £250 award for long service from the authority. The Monday afterwards at the weekly staff meeting, our Head announced to the staff that, as a sign of how much he valued his staff, he had come up with a policy whereby everyone reaching 20 years with the school would automatically be recommended to the Authority for the discretionary award for long service. How did I know that the deputy would mention the idea to the Head? Because the Deputy was in his 19^th year with the school

Oh, he wasn’t quite the first person to benefit. Who was? Well, come on, who do you think?!

Oh. What's Occurin'?

I rarely quiz at the weekends. In fact I rarely quiz on any days other than Thursday every week, and one Wednesday each month. But I did go to a quiz on Sunday. Last month three of my daughters, my son in law Dan and Mary all attended a Disney themed quiz. I didn’t, partly so that I could look after my grandson Ollie, and partly because I’m strictly a Disney generalist while the girls and Dan are all ultra fans. They won, and the prize was a very impressive £50 meal voucher and £50 in cash.

Now when they got back their comments regarding the question master were of the ‘arse’ and ‘elbow’ variety.  Bear that in mind.

I staked my claim to a place in the team for the venue’s next quiz, last Sunday’s quiz, on the subject of sitcom Gavin and Stacey. Now, I always enjoyed Gavin and Stacey, and in the couple of weeks leading up to the quiz I watched every episode and all 3 Christmas specials again. Then , on Sunday afternoon, I decided to test myself. I googled Gavin and Stacey quiz. The first one on top of the search results page had 50 questions. Most of them were easy, but the half dozen or so I didn’t know, I memorised. Okay.

We got to the quiz, and on the way I joked, wouldn’t it be funny if the question master was such a rookie that he had just downloaded that same quiz off the net? Well, when we were given the answer sheets it certainly looked as if the question master really was just such a rookie. Because the headings for the five rounds were exactly the same as the headings on the quiz I downloaded. Then the quiz started. And the first question was the same as the first question on the quiz I’d downloaded. So was the second. And the third. In fact all of them.

Look, I didn’t plan it that way. But who was I to look a gift horse in the mouth? As it turned out anyway the gift horse was nothing like the gift it had seemed to be. For after the break between rounds three and four, our question master announced that the quiz was proving too easy, and so he’d made up another round using Chat GPT between the rounds. I wasn’t unduly worried. Even when he announced that this last round would be a Who Says This ? round. Well, we got there having scored 50 out of 50. Then for the improvised round, rather than using full quotations, he used which character says these short phrases. And the trouble is that many of them are said by more than one character at different times. So we got 6 on the round and lost by a point. Gutted.

I have never used Chat GPT for quiz questions. In fact I have never used it at all and after that I certainly won’t be using it for quiz questions any time soon. Do I blame the question master? Interesting question. Well, on the one hand, making up a quiz round after you’ve already started asking the questions is a no-no. But then so is downloading a quiz wholesale off the net which any member of the public and potential player could download themselves for free. The latter worked in our favour, the former worked against us. C’est la vie. We applauded the winners, thanked the question master, stayed until other teams started leaving then said our goodbyes without a word of complaint. I’ll leave it to you to decide how many of those were to be heard in the care on the way home, though.

Who's Afraid of the acute accent?

You may have noticed that that I’ve become rather interested in the history of chocolate in the UK over the last few weeks, following my acquisition of chocolate tins made for gifts to the troops from Queen Victoria in 1899 by Cadbury, Rowntree and Fry. I’ve been looking more specifically at Rowntree this weekend and it’s led me to ask a question that I haven’t been able to answer definitively. Namely, Nestlé acquired ownership of Rowntree Mackintosh in 1988. Was a conscious policy of insisting on the correct name Nestlé instead of the anglicised Nestles adopted, and in particular, was it adopted at this time and for this reason?

If you’re an old codger or codgess like me, I’ll bet you remember adverts from the 60s and 70s for Nestlé Milky Bar. Except you don’t. Because what you remember were adverts for Nestles Milky Bar. You remember how they went –a little skit in which a fresh faced, spectacle-wearing young shaver dressed as a wild west sheriff foils some dastards (check the spelling) in the course of their dastardly deeds accompanied by the jingle

“The Milky Bar Kid is strong and tough

And only the best is good enough

The creamiest milk, the whitest bar

The goodness that’s in Milky Bar”

Cut to aforementioned kid yelling “The Milky Bars are on me!” and the singers hit us with a final musical sting

“NESTLES Milky Bar!”

Watch very similar adverts from the late 80s onwards, and this sting has been replaced by “Nestlé Milky Bar!”

Don’t get me wrong, I happen to think that this is no bad thing. When you think of it, it was always a bit insulting to suggest that anglophones could not handle the complexities of the acute accent. I mean, for heaven’s sake, we Brits have 9 different ways of pronouncing the -ough – letter combination and most of us cope pretty well with that without incurring permanent injury.

Of course, it’s just as likely that advertisers of the time felt that British punters were more likely to go for a brand that at least sounds a bit British. Milky Bar dates back to 1936, and the very first Milky Bar Kid advert hit our screens as long ago as 1961. You’ve doubtless been asked the question – which screen character was first played by Terry Brooks in 1961 ?– I certainly have both asked it and answered it before now.

For what it’s worth, I’m kind of glad that we go the whole hog pronouncing the accent in Nestlé now. If nothing else it makes sense of their punning bird feeding chicks trademark. Just a thought.

A bit of a blow for Cadbury, I'll warrant.

When you get right down to it, it’s very difficult to know what members of the Royal Family really feel about things. It seems to me that the higher position they hold on the royal pyramid, the less scope that they have to show partiality. So I don’t actually know if His Majesty the King really doesn’t like chocolate. But obtaining a set of Queen Victoria Boer War chocolate tins has made me do a little bit of light research about the connection between the royal family and chocolate. What do you know, I found out that King Charles has withdrawn the Royal Warrant from Cadbury’s chocolate, and if I’m correct this is the first time they haven’t had one for over 170 years.

Queen Victoria first granted the Royal Warrant in 1854. We can be pretty certain that she was a bit of a fan from the way that Cadbury’s were her first port of call when she wanted to send a present of the finest British chocolate to soldiers fighting in the Boer War and it was in the course of finding out more about this that I discovered that Cadbury have lost their royal warrant.

The Royal household doesn’t go into details about why companies lose their warrant, but since 2010 Cadbury’s have been owned by US based Mondelez International. It’s believed that the King faced calls to withdraw warrants from companies still operating in Russia, as does Mondelez. Has it made a material difference to Cadbury’s? I’m sure that they would have rather kept it, given the choice, but I doubt it will have made much of a difference in terms of cold, hard cash. All it means is a certain loss of caché, no invitation to warrant holder shindigs and having to remove the crown logo from packaging.

I am coming to the point now. I’ve looked into royal warrants of appointment and would like to ask you this. Which monarch do you think was the first in the UK to grant a royal warrant? Yes, go through all the usual suspects – Victoria – Georges IV and III – Elizabeth I. Answer – Henry II in 1155.

Sort of.

I say sort of because, like a depressingly large number of quiz ‘facts’, the answer isn’t quite as simple as that. In 1155 Henry II gave a Royal charter to the Weavers’ Company in London. Royal charters were the predecessors to Royal Warrants of Appointment. But that doesn’t mean it was actually the first, it means that it was the first we have documentary evidence for, which is not quite the same thing. In the 1400s the Royal Warrant of Appointment replaced the royal charter, but I have been unable to find out who actually received the first. William Caxton was an early recipient, receiving the warrant from Edward IV in 1476. But was he the actual first? I don’t know.

It’s interesting to see who can grant warrants too. The only Royal Warrants out there at the moment were granted by King Charles and Queen Camilla. However, from the end of this year, I believe, the Prince and Princess of Wales will also be able to do so. Should King Charles predecease Queen Camilla, then she would continue to issue warrants.

There you go.

I Really Should Invent That Time Machine

I’ve read back my post about the Crystal Palace Park dinosaurs and I wouldn’t like to give the impression that I think that Crystal Palace Park itself isn’t a great place to visit, because it is. I haven’t been back for over 20 years, but I remember taking my kids there for a day out once when we were visiting my mum in Tottenham. Well, all of my kids are in their thirties now so that will give you an idea of how long ago. You know, the thing I enjoyed most about that visit, was walking up the steps that led to where the Palace itself was, and taking a good look at the sheer size of the footprint it had and letting my imagination run wild.

The Crystal Palace. 1900. The water tower on the left of the picture was a later addition by IK Brunel.

You see, I find the Crystal Palace itself very interesting. When I invent my time machine (honestly, it would be a lot easier if my future self who builds it would just pop back in time and leave me the blueprints) it will probably be the second place that I visit. What, the first? Oh, that would be Old London Bridge – which I would visit twice, firstly in about 1400 just after the remodelling of the Chapel of St. Thomas a Becket, and the second about 1629, just before the fire which destroyed the northern end, while Nonsuch House was in all its glory. But I’d love to see the Crystal Palace.

I’ll never know of course, but it’s not impossible that some of my ancestors might have visited the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851. A set of my 3x great grandparents and their family were living in Hammersmith down the road at the time. Then I remember my own grandmother talking about the Crystal Palace burning down in 1936. 

1936. After the fire but prior to demolition of the remains. Brunel's water tower remained until it was destroyed during World War 2.

I don’t recall her saying she had ever visited it, but again, it’s not impossible.

I will be honest, it’s the building itself that really interests me most, but I became interested in what remains from the Great Exhibition. If we take Old London Bridge, even though it was demolished in 1831 there are remnants of it to be seen if you know where to look. Well, I don’t know of any remnants of the original Palace building other than what’s there in Crystal Palace Park. However, as regards the exhibits within the Palace, well, that’s a different story. The Victoria and Albert Museum, whose creation was a direct result of the Exhibition, has tons of them, over 3000, I believe. But one exhibit that I have seen many times but never previously knew it was an exhibit in the Great Exhibition is in another well known London location, and it’s a clock.

It’s not Big Ben, mind you, and yes, I know that the name strictly speaking belongs to the bell, not the clock. But it’s not even the clock within the Elizabeth Tower if you want me to be that specific. No, apparently, the clock in the tower above the entrance to King’s Cross Station was an exhibit in the Great Exhibition. You know, it definitely could be. The dating works – Kings Cross was built in 1852, the year after the Great Exhibition. The contractor who built Kings Cross, Lewis Cubitt, was the same contractor who erected the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park.

Kings Cross Station c. 1910

I’ll be honest, I look at the façade of King’s Cross, and in terms of its design I find it hard to believe that it wasn’t built decades later than it was. The restraint and lack of ornamentation seems distinctly unVictorian, especially when you contrast it with the gothic splendour of the Midland Grand Hotel atop St. Pancras station – which is actually younger than King’s Cross.

Coming back to my time machine, the third and fourth different locations I would want to visit would be another London station, and the spiritual successor of the Great Exhibition. Third on my list would be the original Euston Station, specifically the Doric Arch that stood at the entrance.

Euston Station Doric Arch c. 1900

In terms of my own life, this was a near miss, as it was demolished just two years before I was born. The original Euston was the first terminus to be built north of the River Thames and construction began in 1837. Putting this into perspective, this was the same year that Queen Victoria came to the throne. London Bridge station, south of the River, had opened the year before. 1837 was a mere 8 years after the opening of the world’s first inter-city railway, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

By the time that the reference photograph I used to help with this sketch was taken Euston was already over half a century old. It’s tempting to imagine the awe that visitors exiting the station in those first decades must have felt .

The first threat to the arch came in the late 1930s when a radical plan to rebuild the station was drawn up, which would have involved moving the arch at the very least. The second world war put paid to this, however it only turned out to be a stay of execution. Despite the fact that both station and arch were grade II listed, the plan for the current station wee put forward in about 1960, and nobody in officialdom showed any appetite whatsoever for moving the arch to a new home. The London County Council balked at the cost, and Transport Minister Ernie Marples said all options for not demolishing the arch had been carefully examined and rejected. This was the same Ernie Marples whose company built motorways – not that he was at all biased, you understand. Pleas from great men such as Sir John Betjeman to be given time to raise the money to meet the cost of removing the arch and storing it until such time as a new home could be found for it were ignored.

Contrary to how it might seem from what I’ve just written, I do appreciate that you cannot keep things just because they have been there a long time. Otherwise we’d all be living in Bronze Age roundhouses.  But I do think that there was a very strong case for keeping the Euston Arch and I point my finger at those who made the decision and rushed to demolition, and am happy to say that you have let down the people you were working for and sold all our birthright for a mess of concrete.

As for my 4^th location, that would be the South Bank complex at the time of the 1951 Festival of Britain. It’s ironic that a politician who was heavily involved in the decisions to demolish the beautiful Waterloo Bridge, the London County Council’s Herbert Morrison, was the prime mover behind the Festival of Britain. By the end of the second world war Morrison, having been Home Secretary during the wartime coalition, had become Leader of the House of Commons in the Labour Government that followed, often deputising for Clement Atlee. Morrison picked up on the 1943 proposal from the Arts Council to hold an exhibition celebrating the centenary of the Great Exhibition.

1951 Festival Of Britain Dome of Discovery and Skylon

This didn’t become a world’s fair or expo – of which the Great Exhibition is often said to be the first – because post war Britain couldn’t afford it. The festival, then, as the name suggests, had no international or Commonwealth aspect to it, but was envisaged as a symbol of a Britain starting to recover from the devastation of the second world war.

There were Festival of Britain events staged in every country of the UK, but the focus was on the South Bank complex, and this is what my sketch represents. The two most visible symbols of the Festival in the sketch were the Skylon, a strange, needle-like construction that seemingly balanced in mid-air, and the Dome of Discovery.

In terms of sheer numbers the Festival was a great success, with 10 million tickets sold to events. In terms of architectural legacy though it’s a little more difficult to quantify. Very little of what was built for the Festival remained there for long after the Festival ended. The Royal Festival Hall is a grade I listed building, although to be honest it’s far from one of my favourite London buildings if I’m honest. However the Festival did promote contemporary British architecture and surely influenced some of the interesting buildings of the 50s and early 60s in the UK.

The Festival did little to help the Labour Government, mind you. The Government called a snap election in the hope of increasing their majority from the 1950 election. Despite winning more votes than any other party, the vagaries of the British electoral system meant that the Conservative Party won a working majority of seats, and Winston Churchill, who thought that the Festival of Britain had been a ridiculous idea became Prime Minister again.

If you had a time machine - where would YOU go?

The Fifteen Mile Journey that took three weeks (or so it seemed)

I do occasionally muse on the way that our perception of time changes as we ourselves age. Last weekend Mary, our daughter Jenn and I drove to Reading for an Overnight stay – either side of visits to Oxford and Bath. The journey was a bit longer than 2 hours, but sat in the back of the car, with a book, it seemed to absolutely fly by. That was a journey of 138 miles. I remember what seemed to be the two longest journeys I took as a kid were both on London buses and both of them were only about 15 miles. The number 65 bus from Ealing Broadway went all the way to Chessington – just Chessington Zoo in those days before the World of Adventures. That journey – a couple of hours at most, seemed to last about a fortnight. The journey that seemed to last about 3 weeks was the journey from our house in Hanwell to Crystal Palace Park.

We changed buses more than once, and so for this early 70s journey my parents bought red bus rover tickets. If these are a mystery to you, I guess they were a kind of forerunner to the one day travelcard. As the name suggests , this was a ticket that enabled you to use as many different red London buses as you needed on a particular day.

Why Crystal Palace Park? Hey, it was a nice place to visit – still is – but for the 8 or 9 year old me, the number 1 attraction was the dinosaur models. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Crystal Palace Park, but if you have, I wonder whether your reaction to the dinosaur models was the same as mine? You see, the models were made in the 1850s, and they were the ‘best guess’ as to what these creatures really looked like according to the fossils that had been found. And for some of them, the best guess did not prove to be a particularly good one. I really didn’t think much of them.

It wasn’t as if there wasn’t a lot of thought put into them. The models were sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, working under the scientific direction of Richard Owen. Look, I know that you’re all intelligent and knowledgeable people, so please accept that I’m not trying to insult your intelligence by telling you a little about Richard Owen. But how many people owe a lot of their place in our collective memory to a single word, like Owen does? That word, of course, being dinosaur.

Of course Richard Owen achieved far more in his life than just coining the word dinosaur. Not least among his achievements was being the driving force behind the British Museum’s Natural History collection being given its own separate establishment in South Kensington. It’s rather appropriate that Owen coined the term dinosaur, when you consider that in some ways he was a little bit of a dinosaur himself. I’ve seen it said that Owen was a staunch creationist who viciously opposed Darwin’s theory of Evolution through natural selection. That does not appear to be the case. Owen felt that species could and did change over time, but through other processes than natural selection. He was a vocal proponent of the argument that Man could not be descended from apes, and some of his contemporaries believed that he twisted and misrepresented facts to fit his argument.

On a personal level, Richard Owen does not seem to have been much liked. He was not above withholding credit for his contemporaries. For example, he wrote about prehistoric marine reptiles without once mentioning that the first ichthyosaur and plesiosaur skeletons were discovered by Mary Anning. Well, he was not the only early palaeontologist who displayed this misogynist attitude to Miss Anning. However Owen would also claim other men’s discoveries as his own. He famously claimed credit for the discovery of Iguanadon, completely ignoring the fact that it was in fact the discovery of Gideon Mantell. At one point he was even dismissed from the Royal Society’s Zoological Council for plagiarism. So maybe, just maybe, being remembered for inventing the word dinosaur is actually the best thing that could have happened to him.

I may be doing his memory a little bit of a disservice here. In everything I’ve read he comes across as a mean, austere and exceptionally humourless sort, but then maybe he did have his lighter side. On New Year’s Eve 1852 he and Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins hosted a celebration dinner inside the body of the Iguanadon model – the top of which was open for the occasion. Contemporaries including even Gideon Mantell were present. Maybe Owen was in a good mood because he was sitting at the head of the table, where the creature’s brains would have been. Mary Anning was not there, but then that wasn’t so much of an omission since she’d been dead for five years.

One of his Exceedngly Good Poems

Some teachers acquire a fearsome reputation amongst their pupils that is quite out of proportion to their physical stature. Miss Forsey was a good example and looking back I think that she was well aware of this and cultivated and enjoyed this reputation. For all that, I do remember with fondness some Friday afternoon lessons she gave us on ancient history. I think that this subject must have been a personal interest of hers as she taught us with knowledge and enthusiasm, and when I actually got to see the reconstruction of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin a few years ago, I immediately remembered Miss Forsey showing us a picture of it back in the baking hot summer of 1976.

I thought of Miss Forsey again today. My final addition to my Boer War Queen Victoria chocolate tin collection, the tin produced by Joseph Fry and Sons, arrived today, and I couldn’t help thinking of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Tommy”. If you haven’t read it, it goes like this:-

TOMMY.’

I went into a public-’ouse to get a pint o’ beer,

The publican ’e up an’ sez, ‘We serve no red-coats here.’

The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,

I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:

O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy go away’:

But it’s ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins,’ when the band begins to play,

The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,

O it’s ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins,’ when the band begins to play.

 

I went into a theatre as sober as could be,

They give a drunk civilian room, but ’adn’t none for me;

They sent me to the gallery or round the music ’alls,

But when it comes to fightin’, Lord! they’ll shove me in the stalls.

For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy wait outside."

But it’s ‘Special train for Atkins’ when the trooper’s on the tide,

The troopship’s on the tide, my boys, the troopship’s on the tide.

 But it’s ‘Special train for Atkins’ when the trooper’s on the tide,

 

O makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep

Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;

An’ hustlin’ drunken sodgers when they’re goin’ large a bit

Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.

Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy, ’ow’s yer soul?’

But it’s ‘Thin red line of ’eroes’ when the drums begin to roll,

The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll.

It’s ‘Thin red line of ’eroes’ when the drums begin to roll,

 

We aren’t no thin red ’eroes, nor we aren’t no black-guards too,

But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;

An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints;

Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints.

While it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy fall be’ind’;

But it’s ‘Please to walk in front, sir,’ when there’s trouble in the wind,

There’s trouble in the wind, my boys, there’s trouble in the wind.

It’s ‘Please to walk in front, sir,’ when there’s trouble in the wind.

 

You talk o’ better food for us, an’ schools, an’ fires, an’ all;

We’ll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.

Don’t mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face

The Widow’s uniform is not the soldier-man’s disgrace.

For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’

But it’s ‘Saviour of ’is country’ when the guns begin to shoot;

An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ everything you please;

An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees!

 

RUDYARD KIPLING.

I was introduced to this 1890 poem from the “Barrack Room Ballads” by the best Local Education Advisor for English that I ever met, when he suggested it as a poem to study alongside the hardy perennials like ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘The Soldier’. And it was while I was thinking about this poem that it suddenly occurred to me who it was who had first told me all about the nickname, Tommy Atkins. It was Miss Forsey.

I can’t remember the exact context after all these years, but Miss Forsey had asked the question – does anyone know what occupation you have if you’re a Tommy? – The answer, it appeared, was no. So she gave us a clue – It’s something to do with war.’ – A range of strange guesses followed, none of them right and I guess that maybe the right answer – soldier – was just too obvious. Miss Forsey went on to inform us that the nickname had come about because it was the sample name printed in the Army pay book.

Well, we like simple and straightforward explanations, don’t we? To be fair, from what I have read there is a lot of truth in this one. It seems that in The Soldier’s Account Book of 1815, every example form for the infantry had the example signature – Tommy Atkins – His mark -X. The explanation for that name is that I suppose it has a kind of Everyman quality to it. However, it seems as if the choice of name wasn’t quite as random as all that. For there is documentary evidence dating back to the middle of the 18^th century that Tommy Atkins was already being used as a generic term for British soldiers.

Here’s a wee footnote. According to Professor Richard Holmes’ excellent 2005 book ‘Tommy’, in the Soldier’s Account Book of 1815 they used a different sample signature for cavalrymen's forms which was, I kid you not, Sergeant John Thomas. I kid you not, Imagine if his signature had been used for the common or garden infantryman. I will be honest, I have real difficulty imagining Miss Forsey asking us in class what a John Thomas did for a living.

Oxford

Yes, thank you, I had a very nice weekend. Mary and I and our daughter Jenn visited Oxford yesterday, stayed overnight in Reading and popped into Bath on the way home today.

I have been to Oxford once before. About 10 years ago I took a busload of our most academic pupils to enjoy a taster day in the university. I liked it a lot but really didn’t see much of Oxford itself apart from the inside of some lecture halls. Yesterday we only scratched the surface but at least I did get to pay a visit to the Ashmolean Museum.

I’m sure you already know this, but the Ashmolean is the oldest public museum in the UK. It was created when Elias Ashmole passed on his collection to Oxford University on the understanding that it would be housed in a public museum which the University would build. Having seen at least part of the collection yesterday I’d say that the University got a pretty good deal out of it. I only scratched the surface when I got the phone call from Mary to come and have some afternoon coffee (I’m teetotal – I don’t touch tea) but the Museum had already passed the 2 hour test and while a coffee is always welcome I could have stayed longer.

Old Elias Ashmole seems to have been a bit of a lad, one way and another. He married a wealthy widow who was 20 years his senior so that he could avoid anything as distasteful as paid employment, for example. More pertinent to our story, though, was that he obtained the collection of John Tradescant the Younger. John’s father, John Tradescant the Elder was a very successful gardener to the nobility and even royalty, who was also an avid collector, not just of plants and seeds but also of curiosities. His son, John the Younger, was if anything even more of a collector. They called their collection, which they kept in Lambeth, The Ark, then the Musaeum Tradescantianum. Wily old Elias became friends with John the Younger and helped produce a catalogue for the collection. John the Younger lost his only son (John the Even Younger?) in 1652 and when he died in 1662 his will bequeathed the collection to Ashmole. John the Younger’s widow, Hester, contested the will – well you would, wouldn’t you? Her claim was that Elias had conned him into the will when he was blind drunk. Well, even if there was any truth to this, a widow, in fact any woman, could expect little sympathy from the courts in the 17^th century, especially considering that Elias had been a committed Royalist and had been rewarded at the time of the Restoration.

One less than finest hour for the Ashmolean concerns the remains of the ‘Oxford Dodo’. Tradescant the Younger had acquired a stuffed and mounted specimen of a dodo. We don’t know where from – there are records suggesting that a couple of dodos were brought to London in the last few decades before John II died, and it may well have been one of these. It was displayed in the Ashmolean from the Museum’s opening, but the care it was given was not all it could have been. In 1755 an inspection revealed that it was infested, and it was incinerated with only a foot and a head being deemed to be saveable. These are now in the Oxford Museum of Natural History. It’s not true to say they are the only extant remains of a dodo, but they are certainly the only remains with any soft tissue.

On the subject of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, the museum first opened in 1860. Now, sadly, I just didn’t have time to visit yesterday, but it’s on my list. I love a Natural History Museum and I’ve visited them in many cities. It’s quite possible that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who included a dodo as a character in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was inspired by the Oxford dodo remains in the Oxford Museum of Natural History, in fact it’s highly unlikely that he wouldn’t have seen it, living in Christ Church College himself. The famous painting of a dodo by Dutch artist Jan Savery was also on display in the museum, and it seems highly likely that John Tenniel based his illustration of the dodo on this picture, bearing in mind the similarities. The story of the dodo was well entrenched in the Victorian consciousness by the 1860s as a cautionary tale about man interfering with Nature. Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection” had been published on a few years earlier in 1859, and the huge furore surrounding it had heightened public interest in zoology and extinct creatures.

Coming back to the Oxford dodo, the tragedy is that these are the most complete remains of any single dodo, and the only known tissue remains  of one on the planet. As a footnote, in 2018 researchers from the University of Warwick, using highly powered scanners, discovered lead shot in the back of the head and the neck, leading to the conclusion that this dodo was shot, rather having died of old age or mistreatment as had been previously conjectured.

The phrase insult to injury seems somehow appropriate.

Off piste on the Butter Mountain

You must forgive me for going off-piste again with this post. Blame it on me being piste off that there's no Mastermind tonight

In the building where I work there is a ban on putting used Dolce Gusto/Nespresso coffee pods in the bins. And the thing is that I do like a Dolce Gusto when I sit down at my desk in the morning to find out how many calls to the DAP have come in overnight. Normally the empties are taken and disposed of by one of my colleagues. However, she was on leave all last week and part of the previous so on Thursday I took a carrier bag into work in which to carry away the empties and dispose of them elsewhere.

Come the end of the day, as I was taking my empties-filled bag to my car, my boss asked me what I was going to do with them. To which I replied that my plan was to add them to the EU’s empty coffee pod mountain. At this point it’s probably a good idea to tell you that my manager is still in her mid 20s. She looked at me askance. “You know,” I continued, “like the EU butter mountain?” No, of course she didn’t know. Total incomprehension. For one thing, we haven’t even been part of the EU for a good few years (sadly in my opinion, but feel free to disagree.) For another thing, according to my perfunctory research there hasn’t even been an EU butter mountain since about 2017.

I mean, it’s not that I’m nostalgic about the European butter mountain, you understand. I’m only nostalgic about the mental picture it conjured up the first time that I heard the phrase. When I was a kid it conjured up images of various woolly hatted continental types skiing down an unusually yellow and slippery mountain somewhere outside Strasbourg. I suppose I felt it belonged in the same category as Max Boyce’s outside-half factory and Ken Dodd’s jam butty mines. Somehow I can’t see the Destination X team visiting any of those destinations. Well, not in the first series anyway.