BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Race, Gender, and Politics: The Grunwick Strike.

There are many types of animals in a zoo.   Some are monkeys . . . others are lions.   We are those lions, Mr. Manager.   I have had enough—I want my freedom.   Jayaben Desai, 2007, recalling her confrontation with the Grunwick Company. 
   
The ‘Grunwick Strike’ of l976-1978 was a pivotal moment in modern British history.   Caused by sweatshop policies at a photo processing plant in north London, it was ultimately a failed industrial action.   But in its beginning the strike won the support of the British trades union movement and engaged the sympathy of the Labour government.   Even Yorkshire coal miners traveled south to join the picket lines, and government minister Shirley Williams was among those Labour politicians who publicly supported the strike.   All the strikers wanted was better pay, humane treatment, and union recognition, modest aims enough.   But when Grunwick refused to accept government mediation, and when the postal workers union tried to impose a nationwide mail ban on the company (a serious matter in the old days of photo developing and printing), matters escalated.    On the right, an extreme libertarianism found its voice in the pugnaciously-named NAFF (the National Association For Freedom) which, later, as the “Freedom Association,” would provoke the Conservative party into Thatcherism and then Brexitism.   Grunwick also exposed critical fault lines within the Labour movement.   And the strikers themselves?   Well, it’s interesting that they were, almost all of them, women and, beyond that, women of South Asian origin.  And they were led by Jayaben Suryakant Desai, a woman who was unlikely to take ‘no’ for an answer to her anger.   Desai was born in Gujarat, a border state of modern India, on April 2, 1933.  Her family were locally prominent landowners, and even as a teen she’d taken to the streets to support Indian independence.   She’d then married, and moved with her husband to (then) British East Africa, where the family prospered, her husband in a managerial role.   But there was no place for Indians in a newly independent and aggressively African Tanzania, and in 1968 the uprooted family finally found refuge in London where, to help make ends meet, Jayaben Desai had to take a low-paying job in a company, Grunwick, which had found its niche in a low-cost service market.   Its eagerness to exploit women workers of foreign origin had about it a tinge of racism, a whiff of sexism, and (not least) pure managerial arrogance.  Indeed, it may have been Grunwick’s attitude towards its women-workers taking toilet breaks that led to Jayaben’s outspoken defiance as a she-lion.  Looking back on Grunwick, occurring as it did in our first few years in Britain, I am tempted to see Fate itself lurking behind the Grunwick strike, outlining its causes and predicting its consequences.   ©.  

[Stanley]

Fishing as metaphor.

The fish adores the bait.    From Jacula Prudentum, by George Herbert.

I first learned to tie fishing flies at the Izaak Walton League in Des Moines, Iowa.   There the stress was on trout flies, some (e.g. the spectacular and difficult Royal Coachman) designed to attract fishermen rather than fish.  There were no trout streams within 100 miles of Des Moines, but that didn’t matter.   Making flies was an art.   Fishing with them was a moral enterprise, a test of skill, of patience, of devotion.   In each sense, the fly-tying instructors were at one with the league’s namesake, for Isaak Walton himself (1593-1683) had written ‘The Book’ on fishing.   His The Compleat Angler (1653 ad infinitum) was itself a metaphorical devotion on the spiritual improvements to be found in fishing.   That Walton himself used live bait (the livelier the better) was something I learned later.   But he was unlikely to view the worm as a fall from the grace of the fly.   He could see high art in earthly things, a talent Walton learned from his friends, now known collectively as the metaphorical poets.   John Donne was the first of these, the vicar of Izaak’s parish (St. Dunstan’s, London), and not only a poet but a man who fished.   In his long life, Izaak Walton came to know several poet-priests well enough to write their biographies. Among them was George Herbert, born in Montgomeryshire to a prominent Anglo-Welsh family on April 3, 1593.   Herbert learned much about poetry, music, and the arts from his mother’s social circle—and piety, too, for these friends included John Donne.   At Cambridge, where he got his MA at the (then) advanced age of 23, Herbert gained a closer friend in Nicholas Ferrar, a patron of poets and the founder of an idealistic Anglican community at Little Giddings that, centuries later, would inspire T. S. Eliot.   George Herbert might have become a politician (under the patronage of his kinsman the earl of Pembroke and the favor of King James I) but after the king’s death Herbert chose the other path open to him and began his clerical career in a village not two miles from Little Giddings.  He would later move to a Wiltshire parish.  Herbert’s writings make him out to be a devoted parish priest.   No absentee nor multiple clerical offices for him.  Indeed, he used his own inheritance to repair his parish church at Fugglestone St. Peter in Wiltshire.  And, of course, George Herbert wrote poetry, of a complex and metaphorical sort.   He would even construct his poems to look their part on the printed page.   Given all these circumstances, I am happy to take Isaak Walton’s word for it that George Herbert was also a complete angler.   It would be nice to know whether he fished with flies or worms, or prudently chose whichever bait the fish most adored. ©  

[Stanley]

Master Carver of Lime Wood

Gibbons . . . gave wood the loose and airy lightness of flowers, and chained together the various productions of the elements with the free disorder natural to each species.   Horace Walpole.
   
Historians often run across documents too delicious to forget but too tangential to use.   My own favorite was a ‘Civil List’ from early in Queen Anne’s reign, circa 1703.   The Civil List records the costs of the crown and the royal household.   One of the smaller items on this particular list was a payment to Grinling Gibbons, a craftsman then at work on the Queen’s Orangery at Kensington Palace.   I cannot remember the exact sum, but it was on the order of £30, certainly not more than £40.   Now in 1703 that was a considerable payment: considerable enough to be civil-listed, just as Gibbons’ superlative skills had made him ‘Master Carver’ in successive royal households, from Charles II to George I.   But Gibbons’ payment was dwarfed by the pensions still, in Anne’s reign, being paid to Charles II’s mistresses Louis de Kéroualle and Barbara Palmer, whose services had been rendered very much in the past tense, as Charles himself had died in 1685.   Charles had also made both of them duchesses suo jure (in their own right), ranks they kept.   Gibbons never rose higher than Master Carver.   I regarded these pensions as badges of England’s lost innocence, but they also offer us a way to assess the contemporary value of Grinling Gibbons’ very fine art, his delicate and vivid carvings in wood or, latterly, in marble.   In point of fact, the work Gibbons did at Anne’s Orangery was among his last works in wood, the medium for which he is now most famed (and now more highly regarded, one might add, than either the Duchess of Portland or the Duchess of Cleveland).  Grinling Gibbons was born of English parents in Rotterdam, Holland, on April 4, 1648.   He moved to England 20 years later, and was introduced to Charles II in 1671 by the diarist John Evelyn.  The king was so impressed that he commissioned Gibbons to ‘do’ the dining room at Windsor Castle.  Having never been a guest there, I can’t tell you whether those Gibbons carvings still exist, but his surviving commissions (royal and otherwise) abound in museums, palaces, stately homes, college libraries, and churches throughout England.   He worked mainly in wood (he preferred lime wood) to produce panels and ‘medallions’ of great delicacy.  Depth too, despite the physical limitations imposed by doing ‘wall-work.’   There are human figures, too, notably in his memorial panels.  He occasionally used himself as a model.   After his work on Anne’s Orangery, which is in wood, he turned to marble.   His surviving works are priceless.   But once upon a time, they were far less costly than the pensions paid to royal courtesans.   There’s a moral in that, somewhere. ©. 

[Stanley]

A life pleasant, sociable, and very long. But . . .

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.     Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan (1660).

So, in the state of nature, we live nastily, brutishly, and briefly.   That is the ‘spin’ that has stuck to Thomas Hobbes, but the whole quotation, and Hobbes’s whole life, suggest a more considered view.  Thomas Hobbes was born in rural Wiltshire, England, on April 5, 1588, of a family involved in skilled trades, respectable except perhaps for his father, the not very good curate of the parish of Brokenborough.   By the time Hobbes had settled in as tutor to the son of the earl of Devonshire, central Europe had broken into the brutality of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).   Then England itself was broken by the Civil Wars of the 1640s, the beheading of King Charles I (1649) and the instabilities of a republican regime that had, when Hobbes began drafting Leviathan, dissolved into the one-person rule of Oliver Cromwell.   It might have been enough to make a misanthrope of anyone.   But throughout his very long life, Thomas Hobbes was the soul of humanity, certainly to his many friends, to his employers, the Cavendishes, and above all to his first biographer John Aubrey, who gave Hobbes one of the longest and most affectionate essays in Aubrey’s Brief Lives.   Taking first one, then the next, of the earls of Devonshire on their youthful grand tours (in Italy and France), Hobbes established himself as a generous tutor but also as valued company for several precursors of the European Enlightenment, even gaining the admiration of René Descartes.  In  philosophical and theological disputation, openness and generosity were Hobbesian trademarks, valued rarities in an age when disagreement often deteriorated into discord and war.   So Hobbes put a high value on civilization, the gifts of peace: not only the luxuries and comforts brought by trade, but mathematics, the sciences, the life of the mind.   When his worlds descended into war and savagery, then, Thomas Hobbes was willing, nay eager, to submit to any authority that could promise peace.   Perhaps Hobbes was first moved towards this ‘authoritarian’ philosophy by his experience as a stockholder in the Virginia Company.   Part of his stipend from the Cavendishes came in Virginia stock, and during the infant colony’s most blood-soaked years (1619-1623) Hobbes attended the London company’s disputatious meetings, learning too much about how readily Englishmen abroad, and then at home, could descend into savagery and destroy the value of his stockholding.   ©.  

[Stanley]

Natural history as an unbreakable circle.

I have, in my postulates, begged the fact of creation, and I shall not, therefore, attempt to prove it. Creation, the sovereign fiat of Almighty Power, gives us the commencing point, which we in vain seek in nature.   Philip Henry Gosse, in Omphalos, 1858.  
 
It has often been pointed out that the revolution wrought in our thinking by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) was, like many revolutions, long in coming.   Darwin himself spent an agonizingly long time on it, and his conceptual framework was laid down by many, including his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin.   But besides precursors, there was in existence already a large army of counter-revolutionaries.   Among them, of course, were the religiously orthodox, but we’d be wrong to see them all as god-crazed fundamentalists.   Many we’d today call scientists were ready to tear Darwin (and Alfred Russell Wallace) to shreds.   Among them Philip Gosse had already nailed his colors to the mast with the publication of Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (1858).   Philip Gosse, born in Worcester, England, on April 6, 1810, was already well-informed on the problem.   He’d made himself into an eminent and widely-read natural historian.   His childhood interest in living things had become his profession, partly as a science popularizer but also as a scientific innovator.    He’d written the book on the insects and other terrestrial invertebrates of Newfoundland, but then (after examining the insects of Alabama) had returned to England and deep study of the creatures of the sea, plant and animal.   By the 1850s he was well-known.  He could claim to be the inventor of the modern aquarium (a considerable scientific achievement) and the first curator of the aquarium of the London Zoological Society.   His writings, in rather purple prose, engaged the interest of a widening readership, and any stigma attached to being merely  a self-taught amateur had been removed by his election, in 1856, as FRS, a fellow of the august Royal Society.   So he was pretty familiar with the science of his day, including the works of Darwin’s many precursors, geologists who’d begun to think of the world as very old and naturalists who looked for scientifically defensible explanations of sea fossils found on mountain tops.   Gosse, a devout Christian and member of the Plymouth Brethren, wrote Omphalos to construct a theory which could integrate these ideas with the Genesis narrative.   Any such effort is going to be overflowing with difficulties, and Omphalos is, to say the least, difficult, starting with the metaphorical oddity that ‘omphalos’ is Greek for ‘navel’  and the unanswerable question of whether Adam had one.   Omphalos was a game effort, but it was an early demonstration that the geological knot between ‘creation’ and ‘evolution’ is neither religious nor scientific.   It is unlikely to be untied.   ©.  

[Tripps]

I have, in my postulates, begged the fact of creation,

Nice for us amateur pedants to see the word 'begged' - interesting that the quote is from 1858.
See elsewhere 'begged the question'.

[Stanley]

Nice observation David. I noted that when I was transferring the text . I like 'postulates' as well.

[Stanley]

Branklyn Garden, Perth, Scotland.

The garden . . . has been evolved naturally and the principal aim has been to give plants the proper conditions.   Dorothy Graham Renton.  
 
It’s raining heavily today in Perth, and a stiff southeasterly will make it cold, too.   So there won’t be too many visitors at the Branklyn Garden, a National Trust Scotland (NTS) property.    There’s little parking there, so anyone who does make it will have to walk from the city center.  That’s not too far away, and the garden itself is not large: not quite two acres in extent.   But it’s full of secretive nooks and intriguing crannies, and fuller still of plants: 3500 species and goodness knows how many specimens.   Almost all of these still spring from stocks planted by Dorothy Renton, née Robertson, who was born in Perth on April 7, 1898, grew up in Edinburgh, and in 1922 married John Renton, a land agent.   Between them, there was prosperity enough to buy a rough hillside lot in Perth, taste enough to build a charming Arts and Crafts house, and vision enough to create a jewel of a garden.   It’s said that John did the landscaping and Dorothy did the planting: a division of labor that would make their garden famous.  It’s a tumbledown of rocks mixed but ancient in origin (Perth sits astride an important dividing line in Scottish geology), and plants (or, more accurately, seeds) found for Dorothy by British explorers.   They came from every continent, often from their remotest corners.   Thus Dorothy Renton faced a problem, or rather two problems.   Which seeds could best survive in Perth’s general climate?   How could she create places at Branklyn which were (in terms of soil or drainage, sun or shade, wind or shelter) ideal for her selected seeds?    She succeeded at those tasks well enough to become a recognized authority on gardening, which she saw as a dual task: bringing the best plants to the best milieux, or if necessary vice-versa.    Not only that, but the Rentons together became subscribers to some of the great botanical expeditions of the early 20th century.   Notable among them were George Forrest’s (1873-1932) explorations in western China and Frank Ludlow’s (1885-1972) forays into Tibet.   And of course you will find at Branklyn all sorts of plants from the British Empire and Commonwealth, including the Canadian Rockies.   So Dorothy’s garden is in some ways a museum piece, a domestic illustration of Britain’s imperial power, almost a political essay.    But it remains a thing of beauty, which you can follow day by day on the NTS staff’s Facebook® page.   Today already, one visitor has entered the comment that she couldn’t see the plants for the rain.  But the NTS maintains a tea room at Branklyn, where at all daytime hours the soaked and the windswept can warm themselves from the inside out.   ©.    

[Stanley]

The freedom of falling.

I tell you, honey, it was the most wonderful sensation in the world.   Georgia Ann Broadwick, recalling her first parachute jump.

Elders recalling their youthful exploits are prone to exaggeration and nostalgia, but we can take Georgia Ann Broadwick’s word for it.   She was only 15 when she became the first female person to make a parachute jump, and the freedom of falling must have been, for her, a wonderful sensation.   Georgia Ann Broadwick was born into poverty, in rural North Carolina, on April 8, 1893.   Probably a preemie, she weighed just 3 pounds at birth.  Life never let “Tiny” get much bigger.   So this tiny girl child was married at 12, a mother at 13, and almost immediately a widow or perhaps (internet sources disagree) an abandoned single mom, working long hours in a southern cotton mill in a seemingly endless struggle to make ends meet.   Instead, she saw a sky-diving exhibition, at a county fair, put on by ‘Charles Broadwick’s World Famous Aeronauts’, begged to be taken on, or taken away.   Not too much later, the eponymous Broadwick adopted her as his daughter, perhaps to avoid the complications that might arise from transporting a female minor across state lines.   Or they may have traveled as a married couple.   At any rate, “Tiny” Broadwick made her first jump at Christmas  1908; soon she was the Aeronauts’ headliner.   Married or adopted, Tiny Broadwick was a wisp of a girl, cute as a button, dressed in frills and bows and then, later, in ‘flapper’ style.   And this “Tiny” jumped out of a hot air balloon basket and fell through the sky, only to drift to the ground under a silk parachute.   That she was only 4’8” tall and 85 lbs. made her jump safer and, at the same time, added to the drama of it all.   Both Tiny and her adoptive father, Charles Broadwick, were innovators.   Charles’s fundamental design of the parachute survives still, and for her part the ‘ripcord’ was Tiny’s idea, born of an almost-accident and then became standard issue.   Tiny also may have been the first (of any gender) to parachute from an airplane, in 1913, piloted over Los Angeles by Glenn Martin, yet another pioneer of flight (think ‘Martin-Marietta’), and she went on, with Martin, to demonstrate her art, or science, to the fledgling US Army Air Corps.   All in all, it was more fun than spending fourteen hours a day tending cotton spindles.  Tiny made so many jumps that she had to give it up in 1923 (her 89 pounds put too much weight, too many times, on her ankles).   But she lived on until 1978.   She’s buried ‘back home’ in the solid ground of North Carolina.   You can see one of her parachutes (and her ‘ripcord’ pack) at the Smithsonian.   When you do see it, think of Tiny’s “wonderful sensation” of launching herself into the open air, then drifting down to the target and to the oohs and aahs of an admiring crowd.   ©.  

[Stanley]

For all eclipse hunters.

For He was such whose study laid open Olympus,
And traced new circuits through the sphere of the world.
         --from the dedication to Vincent Wing’s posthumously published Astronomia Britannica (1669)

My son Daniel and I witnessed yesterday’s solar eclipse from a quiet spot in Bollinger County, Missouri.   The county name has a curious origin (a German Reformed pioneer, George Frederick Bollinger, first settled there in 1793 under license from the Spanish intendant who was himself married to a Shawnee woman), but how we got there is curiouser still: by an interactive online map which told us exactly where to go and by Daniel’s accurate forecast of where in Bollinger County the sky would be clearest.   I thought it all astonishing.  But we homo sapiens have been predicting eclipses for many centuries, possibly for several thousand years. Even what we arrogantly call scientific accuracy came early, notably in Edmund Halley’s prediction of the eclipse of May 1715 which tracked across southern England from Cornwall to Norfolk.   Halley got the track almost right and was only 4 minutes off as to its timing.   Halley depended on the work of Copernicus, of Tycho Brahe, and Isaac Newton, all of them, like Halley, great scholars.   But Halley also used the work of the much less well-known Vincent Wing, notably Wing’s Astronomia Britannica (1669).   Vincent Wing was born in Rutlandshire on April 9, 1619.   He trained up as a surveyor and became a good one.   That made him into a mathematician of necessity, but he went well beyond that, impelled to self-study by his youthful enthusiasms for astronomy and its starry-eyed sister, astrology.  Vincent Wing made himself into an authority on both, publishing many astrological almanacs and several foundational works on astronomy that brought the imaginative worlds of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe to an English audience still largely enamored of Ptolemy’s mapping of the heavens.   One of Wing’s almanacs sold especially well, but his writings on astronomy should put him on our map.   Certainly Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton were among his readers.    Almost as a sideline (to his surveying, his astral predictions, and his stargazing), Wing also made and sold sundials.   At all these things, he prospered enough to win many friends, to provoke a few adversaries, and to establish the Wing family (sons and nephews) as a kind of astrological and astronomical dynasty.   Decades after Vincent Wing’s death (from consumption, in 1668), Edmund Halley improved on his speculations by predicting an eclipse.    In 1715, in London, Edmund Halley’s totality ran to 3 minutes and 33 seconds.   In Bollinger County, MO, in 2024, Daniel and I got 4 minutes plus.   Vincent Wing’s universe still works.  ©.  

[Stanley]

Public power and private rights.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.   From Article One, Section 8, of the Constitution of the USA, 1787.   

Thus the Constitutional Convention of 1787 granted to the new national government an important power that has been since been built on to help create the ‘deep state’ now complained of, bitterly and often, by our very own lunatic fringe.   Indeed the power of copyright (both copyright granted and copyright withheld) is a very great one, and thus one which any small ‘d’ democrat should view with concern.   After all, the modern state is almost infinitely more powerful than its predecessors, able to grant us nearly free medical care, provide us with not-insubstantial public pensions, enable us to fly in controlled air space, and safeguard our access to a gargantuan supply of public domain information, the WWW, which itself began as a government enterprise.   All in all, therefore, I do not view the deep state as my enemy.   The history of the copyright power suggests that the growth of the powerful state has been (and can be) a great boon to ordinary folk, people like you and me, offering us enhanced rights and greater liberties.   Some of the most important of these rights and liberties are those which protect us from our more powerful, wealthier, fellow citizens, including corporations.    Copyright law offers a good example, particularly today, for today is the anniversary of “The Statute of Anne,” more prosaically known as “The Copyright Act of 8 Anne c. 19,” which came into operation on April 10, 1710.   Much amended since (for powerful states like things to work more smoothly), it remains the the core, of copyright (and patent) law throughout the Anglophone world and (because it works so well and so powerfully) just about everywhere else, too, prominent exceptions being Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, where governments express their power in different ways and on behalf of other interests than mine.   8 Anne c. 19 created a new form of property, the published word, and more importantly lodged its ownership in those who had produced it.  The idea that government should control “publication” was an old one.   But what Anne’s statute did was to take ownership away from a chartered monopoly, the Stationers’ Company (made up of printers and publishers), and lodge it instead with the writers.   I prefer this idea of having my copyright (and my liberties) protected by a powerful state.  To whom would my right, my liberty, belong should the deep state be destroyed?  Or even seriously weakened?  On the whole, I lodge my right in the ‘deep state.’   It’s a vessel that doesn’t work perfectly (how could it?), but since 1710 it has generally sailed on a good bearing.   In stormy seas, that’s good enough for me.  ©  

[Stanley]

Naming the thing.

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.   Percy Lavon Julian.   

Names matter.   So in the ‘Civil Rights Era’ Montgomery, Alabama, built a new school and defiantly named it after Robert E. Lee.   Soon the school boasted a bronze bust of General Lee, and later added the curious instruction that no Robert E. Lee pupil should “defame” this patron saint of the Old South.   Lee was at first an all-white school.   But times change, and so do school names.   In 2020, Montgomery ‘defamed’ General Lee by renaming the school the Percy Julian High School.   Other Montgomery school names were changed at the same time, in similar directions, but let’s concentrate on Percy Lavon Julian, who was born black in Montgomery on April 11, 1899.   His ambitious parents wanted the best for their children, most of whom would graduate from college, but not in the Jim Crow South.  Percy got his BS degree from Depauw, Greencastle, Indiana.   But Julian had not escaped American apartheid.   Greencastle was still segregated, and Depauw itself, although it admitted black students, would not allow them to live on campus.  Nevertheless, Percy did well.  He majored in chemistry, graduated (in 1920) as Phi Beta Kappa and class valedictorian.   The 1920s was a high water decade for the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, and that may be why he went elsewhere, to Harvard and an MS in Chemistry, but fair Harvard wouldn’t take him on as a PhD in order to avoid the solecism of having a black grad student supervise white undergraduates’ lab work.   Enter now the Rockefeller Foundation, which sent Julian off to the University of Vienna where he won his PhD, became fluent in German, and reveled in an intellectual society that (at that time) chose not to worry about his color.   Percy Julian then taught at Howard, in D. C., married another pioneer black PhD, Anna Roselle (PhD, Penn, Sociology), taught briefly at Depauw but left because Depauw still didn’t want a black professor.  So it was in the private sector that Percy Julian became famous as a synthesizer of various plant materials (notably soybeans and yams), which he—brilliantly—turned into fire retardants, paints, and cortisone and other important human hormones.   By the 1950s, Julian had his own laboratories and wealth enough to move into Oak Park, Illinois, where still his color dogged him.   Thugs (presumably palefaces) tried to firebomb his house, and at one point he and his son (Percy Julian, Jr.) stood guard with shotguns.   By the time I reached graduate school (in Madison, WI) Percy Jr. was there as a prominent civil rights lawyer who also defended anti-war protestors.   But it was another 60 years before Percy, Sr. was honored in his old home town by renaming the Robert E. Lee High School.   Names matter and. like time, they pass.   ©

[Stanley]

Looking for the real glove-maker's son.

For truth is truth, though never so old, and time cannot make false that which was once true.  Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford. 
  
My  great-grandfather, Daniel Kerr (1836-1916), placed two small alabaster busts, one of William Shakespeare and the other of Francis Bacon, at either end bookshelf, as if in opposition, or apposition.   One vogue in Daniel’s time was to argue that it was Bacon (aka Lord Verulam) who was the “real” Shakespeare.    Today, the favored “real” Shakespeare is Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, who was born at the family seat (Hedingham Castle in Essex, not in Oxfordshire) on April 12, 1550.   One problem with the Oxford theory is that the 17th earl died in June 1604, at which point the impostor (you know, the one called “William”) had yet to produce eleven “Shakespeare” plays, including the tragedies of Othello, Lear, and Macbeth and the intriguingly imaginative The Tempest.   Did Edward de Vere, the inheritor of one of England’s most ancient earldoms, leave these with William Shakespeare as if in trust?  Leaving that question aside, de Vere did have some literary talent.   He was a fairly prolific writer of love poetry, quite a few of them sonnets, and was said to have been a playwright, too.   Since in his lifetime he was praised for his writings, it seems odd that he should have kept hidden his authorship of the eponymous William Shakespeare’s pre-1604 output.   That comes to about two dozen plays, including all the “Henries”, the doomed love of Romeo and Juliet, and the comedies that gave us such remarkable women as Katharine, Beatrice, and Rosalind.   Queen Elizabeth and her court really enjoyed at least some of these plays, and it seems unlikely that de Vere, a courtier himself, would have wished to keep his authorship a close secret.   He was a blowhard, a notorious spendthrift, a self-made (and self-imagined) hero, a champion jouster, one who played the courtier game well enough to marry into the Cecil family (his father-in-law William Cecil, Baron Burghley, was one of the queen’s most trusted advisors) and outrageously enough to abandon Anne Cecil (before her death) and dally with a succession of mistresses.    How could this self-publicist have resisted the temptation to admit that he was (among all his other invented characters) really the man who wrote As You Like It (1599) and Hamlet (1600)?   The whole “real” Shakespeare fantasy has to do with our problem of thinking that literary masterpieces could flow from the mind of a man with little formal education and no pedigree worth recording.   I don’t know Daniel Kerr’s view on the Bacon vs. Shakespeare issue.   But Daniel was a Radical Republican (in the days when that phrase meant something), and he might have liked to think that a mere glove-maker’s son from a sleepy provincial town could have been the real William Shakespeare.  ©. 

[Stanley]

A life for labor.

I never got any publicity, but that never bothered me. It was enough just to get your ideas across. Clara Mortenson Beyer, 1987.

Clara Beyer was right about the publicity; her life is a ‘behind the scenes’ story. But she got her ideas across to her grandson, Don Beyer. Don was 40 when Clara died in 1990, then detoured from a successful business career to enter politics. He’s a Democrat who served first as Lt. Governor of Virginia, then as US Ambassador to Switzerland during the Obama administration, and has since 2015 represented Virginia’s 8th district in the US Congress. Like his grandmother, he’s long been active in supporting various public welfare programs, but (before he took up politics) as a volunteer. Clara Mortenson Beyer was born to Danish immigrant parents on April 13, 1892: born poor, for her father was an unsuccessful chicken farmer. But she became poorer still when he died. Clara and her mother then went to work at the bottom of California’s volatile labor market (as fruit pickers in season and domestic servants out of season). She never forgot those experiences, and throughout a long life she labored to bring legal protection and welfare safety nets to others like her. She worked her way through college and graduate school, earned an MA in labor economics at the University of California Berkeley, and began her doctorate there. Like many female grad students of that era, she found it necessary to leave school, made bearable by an appointment at Bryn Mawr College, to teach labor economics. She fit right in, encouraging her privileged students to investigate sweatshop conditions in industrial Philadelphia and encouraging workers to do something about it. Her activities at Bryn Mawr soon took her to Washington, where she worked for Felix Frankfurter’s Labor Policies Board. Her behind-the-scenes influence did not wane when she worked there with the daughter of another future SCOTUS justice, Elizabeth Brandeis. Ms. Mortenson then married the economist Otto Beyer, birthed three boys. She reared them too, but without settling down. When Franklin Roosevelt came to Washington with his ‘New Deal for the American People’ she and her husband joined up. Clara found her behind-the-scenes berth in Frances Perkins’s Department of Labor. There she continued to study market inequities and work to right them as associate director of the Bureau of Labor Standards. Her government career lasted through the Eisenhower administration. She retired from government service but continued to get her ideas across, not least to her grandson Don, who in 2011 founded (and funded) the Clara Mortenson “Women and Children First Award.” It just goes to show that the good women do often lives on after them. ©

[Stanley]

Stonehenge, circa 3100 BCE, and still very much alive.

During my boyhood I visited [Stonehenge] at all hours, under every conceivable condition of weather—in driving tempests of hail, rain and snow, fierce thunderstorms, glorious moonlight and beautiful sunshine.    Cecil Chubb. 
   
Stonehenge is indeed a marvel.   When I first saw it, it was threatened by highways and defaced by steel fencing (the latter to protect it from hordes of tourists, including myself).   I think the authorities have since effected better protections, and Stonehenge benefits also from improving explanations of how it came to be and what its functions were.   But the greatest mystery resides in the fact that it was for nearly two millennia a site of religious significance.   That is a great span of time.  Almost by definition, no Christian cathedral can match that record, no Muslim mosques, and if there’s an older synagogue I don’t know about it.   Of course every religion has its ups and downs, its internecine wars, its martyrs and heretics.   So one assumes that those who actually built Stonehenge (a very long haul) ) and then worshipped there, had the occasional spat, even theological bloodlettings, about what it all meant.   Today’s Druids, by appearances a contentious lot, can’t agree among themselves, and it would be foolish to think that their predecessors, ‘druids’ or whatever, enjoyed 2000 years of spiritual consensus.   It’s almost as interesting that Stonehenge was private property, until, in 1918, its then owner deeded it over as “a gift to the nation.”   He’d only bought it in 1915, for £6,600 (then about $30,000).   That’s about $1 million in today’s dollars, but still, for Stonehenge, a bargain: and a curiosity, for how had a harness-maker’s son got so much money?    Cecil Herbert Edward Chubb was born not far from the world’s greatest stone henge, on April 14, 1876.   A clever lad, he went to Cambridge where he got a First in natural sciences, and then a law degree, and was admitted barrister in 1907.   He was also a good cricketer, and at a charity cricket match against a team from the local lunatic asylum, he’d met, and later married, Mary Bella Fern.   She was the niece of the asylum’s owner, and when she inherited the asylum in 1910 Chubb gave up the law and became the manager of what was then England’s largest lunatic hospital.   Chubb was good at the job, indeed a pioneer in mental health, and this may be how he got hold of £6,600.   He intended Stonehenge as a gift for Mary Bella, and continued the practice of charging attendance fees at Stonehenge, but for various reasons, including perhaps his war work with shell-shocked soldiers, he (and, presumably, Mary Bella) decided to give the place to the nation.    For his pains, he was made a baronet, Mary Bella became Lady Chubb; and today we can all visit Stonehenge—for £25 per adult.   Chubb charged one shilling in 1915.  Then or now, it costs money to maintain a stone age monument.   ©.  

[Stanley]

The Social History of the State of Missouri: a horse's posterior and a baby's behind.

The only way an artist can personally fail is to quit work.   Thomas Hart Benton.
    
Last summer, an old man visited Missouri’s capitol building to view his likeness in a mural .   He stood beside it, gave interviews, then gave to the state the artist’s original sketch.   That was a good thing, for in the mural he’s a baby, sprawled (protestingly?) on his mother’s lap while she changes his diaper.    On the floor a basket of clean (?) diapers awaits its time.  So we’d call the style naturalistic.   Study the mural’s history (the artist titled it “The Social History of the State of Missouri”), and we’d call it ‘realist,’ too.  It shows the babe and his ma at a political meeting, before women could vote, and she’s got her back to the speaker.  Beside its realism, the mural exemplifies  20th-century “regionalist” painting.   The artist was Thomas Hart Benton, born in Neosho on April 15, 1889, and by the time he’d done the mural he had become an acknowledged leader of the American regionalist school.   It was a surprising turnout.  His father, Maecenus Benton, represented the Neosho district in the US Congress, 1897-1905.  More importantly, his great uncle was the ‘real’ Thomas Hart Benton, US Senator from Missouri’s entry into the union until 1854.   “Old Bullion,” as he was known, was a law unto himself, a slave owner who’d supported the annexation of Texas.   But he’d never liked slavery, and he opposed the ‘Great Compromise’ of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.   And although he never saw it made law, he also figures as a father of the Homestead Act of 1862, which preserved the west for freehold family farming.   His nephew Maecenus, on the other hand, was called ‘colonel’ because he’d served in the Confederate army to defend slavery and then, as a Democrat in Congress, defended ‘Jim Crow,’ America’s apartheid.   Thomas Hart Benton the painter was cut of a different cloth.   You can find that out by viewing the mural (in Jefferson City or online), or by considering Benton’s life.   As his birthname suggests, he was intended for politics.  He was sent to a military academy to make good connections, to learn a useful art, and to wean him from painting.  But weaning didn’t work.   With his mother’s support, he continued to paint, studied in Chicago and then in Paris, and began his professional life as a modernist, experimenting in the abstract and indeed teaching Jackson Pollack.  But he turned to regionalism and returned to Missouri to leave the state with a reminder of its varicolored past.   It’s mural well worth studying.  It even includes a mule with a horse’s rear end, said to be the artist’s response to not getting paid.   The baby’s name, by the way, was Harold Brown.   He looked well last August.  He looks ornery in Benton’s mural, which was, I think, the artist’s intention.   ©  

[Stanley]

An earlier information revolution.

He that tholes overcomes.   Personal motto of William Chambers.   

‘To thole’ is Scots English for ‘to bear,’ ‘to endure,’ or ‘to tolerate.’   It would be out of place amongst highland clan mottos, usually rendered in Gaelic or Latin (or, sometimes, in French) and reeking of honor, gallantry, or defiance.   And William Chambers was, emphatically, a Lowland Scot.  He was born in Peebles (not only a lowland but a border town) on April 16, 1800.  He achieved his first successes in ‘Auld Reekie,’ Edinburgh, and perhaps his most ‘tholing’ triumph was to do something to overcome the reek, the stinking Edinburgh miasma made of coal smoke and open sewers..   Chambers did this as an elected public steward, but also used his own private fortune.   For instance, Chambers spent upwards of £30,000 (£4 million today) of his own on the renovation/restoration of St. Giles Cathedral, and more yet on other projects, mostly on or around Edinburgh’s “Royal Mile.”   Chambers’s memorial statue, erected in gratitude for his good works, stands a bit off that beaten track, on Chambers Street.  Another Edinburgh statue to Chambers’ credit is that of Greyfriars Bobby, the faithful Skye terrier who stood guard over his master’s grave for 14 years.   As Lord Provost, Chambers had minted Bobby’s municipal dog license.  No surprise, that: for among his other tholings, William Chambers was the Director of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.   But we remember this paragon of Scottish (lowland) virtue for his services to knowledge.   After his father’s bankruptcy, Chambers began small, as an apprentice bookseller, but he rode the crest of the industrial revolution as editor, printer, and publisher of a host of printed works.  His main aim was to spread good knowledge (accurate and truthful, current or past) by making it affordable.   His most famed production was The Chambers Encyclopedia, in print from 1860 to 1979, but we must not forget his ‘penny press’ output, in various formats, through which Chambers salted the earth (at least, the Anglophone parts of it) with the best information he (or his many eminent contributors) could find.   Three decades ago, the advent of the internet and its World Wide Web led many optimistic futurists to predict a golden age of democratically accessible knowledge: cheap to read but also inexpensively open to new producers.   How well has that turned out?   Not too well, if you follow (for instance) the efforts of Vladimir Putin’s internet ‘bots’ to subvert democracy in other countries, including the US and the UK.   But in an earlier information revolution, William Chambers tholed to overcome fictions with facts, and we should honor him for that, as well as for Greyfriars Bobby’s dog license.   ©.  

[Stanley]

Mapper of the Moon. 

I could never extinguish the enthusiasm for astronomy once it arose in me.   Giovanni Battista Riccioli, 1651. 
    
One lesson that infants learn (or, to their cost, fail to learn) is that the earth doesn’t move.   We move over, or fall onto, solid ground.  That first, fundamental, lesson in physics helps us to understand why it was so difficult for people to accept Nikolaus Copernicus’s argument that the earth was not the stationary center of the universe, but was always in motion.   There were of course other reasons than mere common sense for our reluctance.   Not least, for Catholics, the pope declared (twice!) that Copernicus’s heliocentrism was a heresy, which forced even Galileo to confess that his own observations and calculations were—must be—in error.    Another, and perhaps more important reason for our willful ignorance was that many respectable astronomers did hew to the geocentric line of reasoning.    They provided strong arguments, and with observations and measurements to match, that the earth was indeed the still, silent center of the universe.   In our wisdom, today, we tend to regard such astronomers as reactionaries, or at best timid timeservers, for we like to see “science” as a story of steady progress, success piled on success.   But we should take them more seriously.   In astronomy, Giovanni Battista Riccioli stands out as a brilliant oppositionist.   Born in Ferrara as Galeazzo Riccioli on April 17, 1598, he became ‘Giovanni Battista’ on taking his vows as a Jesuit, a soldier for the pope, in 1628.   A novitiate since 1618, Riccioli had studied the usual humanities curriculum, including or course theology but including mathematics.   As his chosen name suggests, he wanted to become a missionary, but the authorities thought him better employed as a university theologian.   That’s what he called himself.   But on the side he was an astronomer, and a serious one who had, or found, good reason to reject Copernicus and follow the papal line—more or less.   And he was a peculiarly generous debater who saw real genius in his opponents (at least, in Copernicus, Gallileo, and Tycho Brahe), and devoted his life to building a scientific substructure (in such basics as weights, measures, and motion) for a not-quite geocentric universe.  Instead, Riccioli’s measurements and calculations brought him to advocate a kind of scientific compromise, seen today as a brilliant (if mistaken) theory.   Along his way, he geographed the moon, naming many of its most prominent features after such “opponents” as Copernicus, Kepler, and Gallileo.   So when in 1969 Apollo 11 landed on the Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquillitatis) its crew looked out upon a Giovanni Riccioli moonscape.   That the Apollo actually hit its target, however, depended on Copernicus and Newton.   After all, they were closer to the ‘truth’ than Riccioli.  ©. 

[Stanley]

Finding liberty in Manhattan.

Freedom and liberty are not synonyms.  Freedom is the gift of God, Liberty the creature of society.   Liberty can be taken away . . . but on whatsoever soul Freedom may alight, the course of that soul is henceforth onward and upward.   James McCune Smith, 1853

James McCune Smith was born enslaved in New York City (Manhattan) on April 18, 1813.   His father, Samuel, was a prosperous merchant (almost certainly white) who had purchased his mother, Lavinia, in South Carolina, and brought her to New York as his property.   The exact nature of his parents’ relationship can only be guessed (Smith called his mother a “self-emancipated woman”), but under the terms of New York’s ‘gradual’ emancipation law, James himself became a free person of color on July 4, 1827.   By then, aged 14, Smith had already had some public exposure.   As one of the brightest lads at New York’s African Free School, he was chosen to address the Marquis de Lafayette on that hero’s 1824 visit to the young republic.   As impressed as Lafayette was, and bright as he might have been, young Smith self-identified as black and was called black by his society.  So, wanting to be a medical doctor, he travelled to Britain where he graduated MD, from the University of Glasgow, in 1837.   After further training in Paris, he returned to New York where he received a hero’s welcome.   This was partly because of his personal achievement, but also in recognition of his growing reputation as an anti-slavery activist.   McCune Smith returned to the Republic of Slavery to fight for both liberty and freedom.   He married a woman of color, Malvina Barnet.  Together they raised a family, while   James McCune Smith prospered as a leading physician (of a very modern and scientific sort) and apothecary.  An advocate of “public health,” he also became a leader amongst American abolitionists, black and white.   Smith wrote the forward to Frederick Douglass’s famous autobiography and, with Douglass, founded (1853) the National Council of Colored People.   He was appointed physician at the Colored Orphan Asylum, and his successful pharmacy, on Broadway, catered to a large and mixed clientele.   In the process, James McCune Smith became a wealthy man, even employing white servants in his household.   There’s also some evidence that he and more certainly his and Malvina’s children were beginning to “pass” as white.   The final blow came in 1863, with the anti-draft race riot in Manhattan and its many black victims.   After a life of struggle to establish freedom and liberty for people of color, James McCune Smith retreated to the safety of Brooklyn where the family identified as white.   His surviving sons all married white women.  Smith, who died in 1865, had named his first-born Frederick Douglass Smith, but that child had died in his infancy, in 1854.    The Smith family’s odyssey into Brooklyn was an American tragedy.   ©.    
 

[Stanley]

Collecting private money for public good.

If DDT should ever be used widely and without care we would have a country without freshwater fish, serpents, frogs and most of the birds we have now.    Richard Pough, quoted in The New Yorker magazine, 1945.  
  
To use DDT’s proper name, Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, is to begin to hear its dangers, but under its internally rhyming trade name it seemed a miracle.   Its devastating effect on insects was discovered by a Swiss scientist who (in 1948) got the Nobel Prize for his pains.  Meanwhile, the chemical industry marketed it under a dozen (or so) aliases.   But it took Rachel Carson’s brave Silent Spring (and a lot more action) to get it banned in the USA in 1972 and then, internationally, in 2004.   It remains in use, for malaria control only, in countries unable to afford other means.   In 1945, Richard Pough was already a seasoned campaigner for better, cleaner, less lethal environments, not for mosquitos I suppose, but not just for ‘nature,’ either.   Indeed, he undertook his first ‘campaign’ to save what was then left of the great earthen mounds of the Mississippian culture at Cahokia, just across the river from St. Louis.   That was in 1922, when Pough was only 18.  Puzzled by such activism in one so young, an Illinois state legislator asked Pough “What’s in it for you?”   Pough’s answer was “Nothing.”  That remained his creed.   On the other hand, he did make a career out of it.   Richard Pough was born in Brooklyn on April 19, 1904.   A geologist father and a mother who was an MIT graduate aimed him towards science, which is why he went to MIT himself, and graduated.   But he’d also acquired a love of the outdoors, camping, fishing, hiking.   In 1932, he took time off from managing his camera shop in Philadelphia to take friends on a hunting outing to Hawk Mountain, near Reading, where they discovered hundreds of dead hawks,   Appalled at the massacre, Pough collected the carcasses, pictured them, and began a campaign to save the hawks of Hawk Mountain.   Within two years, he’d talked a New York philanthropist into making the place into a preserve for birds of prey.   This became Richard Pough’s modus operandi, working with private funds to preserve nature for the public.  Among his philanthropic trophies (for he was a hunter, after all) were the Wallace family (of Readers’ Digest fame) and Katharine Ordway, one of the principal heirs of Minnesota’s 3M fortune.   In a very long life, he would work for the Audubon Society, help to found the World Wildlife Federation and the American branch of Nature Conservancy.  What was in it for him?  For many years, he directed the conservation activities of the American Museum of Natural History.   That, I think, was where he got his salary.   But Richard Pough is best remembered as a private agitator for the sake of our common wealth and our public health.   ©.  

[Stanley]

Flight deck officer of the Starship Enterprise.

Don we now our Takei apparel, fa la la la la, la la, la la.   George Takei, 2011.  

George Takei’s comment, quoted above, came when the Tennessee State Senate passed its “Don’t Say Gay” bill.   Takei said a few other things about the bill, for instance suggesting that, in Tennessee, “Gay Pride” parades might become “Takei Pride” parades.  Takei himself had ‘come out’ as gay only a few years before, in 2005, but one might say he’d been coming out almost all his life.   George Takei was born Hosato Takei, in Los Angeles, on April 20, 1937.   Japanese was Hosato’s first language.   He came out in English only later, in school, where he passed by the nickname his father had given him, ‘George.’ This was not, by the way, in honor of George Washington, but of King George VI of Britain, whose coronation took place when Hosato was three weeks old.   Takei’s next coming out was from the concentration camp at Tule Lake, California, where George and his family had been ”interned” as “enemy aliens” after Pearl Harbor.   They emerged as poor as church mice (or temple mice, for the Takeis were Buddhist); but  they conformed as best they could.   George became a model Boy Scout in the Koyasan Temple’s Troop 379.   He did well in school, too, and won admission to California’s flagship campus at Berkeley, where he aimed to study architecture.   He came out of there pretty sharply to earn his degrees (BA and MA) in Theater at UCLA.   His acting career, early on, had its ups and its downs, but in 1966 George found his berth as Sulu, the flight deck officer on the space ship Enterprise, in the (to me) surprisingly long run of Star Trek, not only the original Roddenberry TV series but in several of the spinoffs that came after, finally graduating to “Captain Sulu” in a 1996 reprise, Star Trek: Voyager.   Along the way, Star Trek gathered its own fandom, folk who even attended Star Trek conventions.   Among these aficionados, it was an open secret that Sulu, George Takei, was gay, that he had had some off-set difficulties with Captain Kirk, and that he (George) was in a special relationship with a man, Brad Altman.   But for non-trekkers like me George Takei came out with a bang, with a public announcement in 2005, then marriage (to Brad, of course) in 2008, and a string of public comments and appearances where Takei’s ready tongue (witty, satirical, sometimes acid) made me think that, really, I should have taken Star Trek more seriously.   But Takei had long been active in California politics, even as a pioneer in the creation of LA’s new rapid transit system.   So George Takei’s coming out was a long process, and had to do with much more than sexual preference.   He has made some missteps, but on balance I’d credit him with a fine sense of humor, and common sense, too.   The Tennessee Senate still lacks both.   It needs to come out.  ©.   

[Stanley]

Horace Rumpole personified.

If someone tries to steal your watch, by all means fight them off. If someone sues you for your watch, hand it over and be glad you got away so lightly.   John Mortimer. 
  
I’ve enjoyed legal humor, aka laughing at the law, since my dad first told me of Mark Twain’s finding two men buried together under a headstone that said “here lies a lawyer and an honest man.”   My preferences lie with lawyers who can laugh at themselves, and among these few I single out the English barristers Alan Patrick Herbert (1890-1971) and John Clifford Mortimer (1923-2009).    There are uncanny life parallels between the two, not least that they were both knighted, as it were despite their lèse majesté recidivisms.   And they both railed against the absurdities of English divorce law.   I prefer Herbert, who was happily married and whose classic Uncommon Law: Being 66 Misleading Cases (1935) is still in print.  Paulette and I have two copies, one being quite insufficient.  But we have way more Mortimer, for he was more prolific (one book a year from 1947 on), and was at the height of his fame while we lived in England (1969-1997).   John Mortimer was born in London on April 21, 1923.  His father was a distinguished lawyer, prosperous enough to buy the best education for his only offspring.   That education almost didn’t stick.   The boy got in trouble at Harrow and then didn’t well at Oxford, scraping through with a Third-Class degree (in law!).   But he learned how to outrage his superiors, a talent he nurtured even after becoming, himself, rather superior.   He wrote poetry and love letters to boys, dressed flamboyantly, and ‘scaped military service (awful eyesight, not bone spurs).   He joined his father’s ‘chambers’ at the Inns of Court, but at the same time took a job writing continuity at Pinewood Studios and, to top it all off, married Penelope Dimont (née Fletcher) on the very day her divorce decree became final.   Penelope was heavily pregnant, too, but not by her first husband—rather by her second lover.   Their marriage proved stormy in several ways, including competitive writing (she became famous, herself, writing as Penelope Mortimer), and ended in 1971.   Meanwhile, John Mortimer established himself as a character, a public figure of no orthodox views (other than a chronic heterodoxy), and an author of many and varied works, including self-critical autobiographies of rare sensitivity.   But he’s most famed, today, for his legal alter ego, Horace Rumpole “of the Bailey.”    Unsuccessful in almost every way known to his profession, often plonked beneath his eyebrows in Chateau Thames Embankment, and inescapably married to Hilda (“she who must be obeyed”), Horace Rumpole constantly pulls criminals (not always minor ones) out of legal stews while he reminds us all that the law can be as funny as the proverbial crutch.   ©.  

[Stanley]

Photographer of the mountain west, and its peoples.

The platinum printing process gives the most beautiful image one can get. It has the longest scale and one can get the greatest degree of contrast. It's not a difficult process; it just takes time.   Laura Gilpin. 
   
The Kodak ‘Brownie’ was a marketing miracle.   First introduced in 1900, it sold for $1.   That’s ~$33 today, so it was ‘affordable’ rather than ‘cheap,’ but it took off.   Its simple design put the mysteries of photography within a child’s reach, and its trade name underlined the point.   Brownies were mythical characters, goblin pranksters or fairy princesses, and then very popular in children’s stories.   ‘Brownies’ sold well, and the resulting demand for Kodak films (which was the original idea, anyway) would make Eastman Kodak a giant goblin of its own type.   And some children, once bitten by the Brownie bug, would grow into great adult photographers.    One of them was Laura Gilpin, born in Colorado on April 22, 1891, who got a Brownie for her 12th birthday.   In 1903, that probably would have been a ‘Brownie II,’ which sold for twice the price, but her parents could afford it.   Her dad was a rancher, her mother a wealthy debutante from St. Louis.   By Christmas that year, Laura wanted, and got, her own developing tank, so she could both take and make her own pictures.   She got better at both under the tutelage of pioneer photographer Gertrude Kasebier, who also may have taught Laura a few things about her (Kasebier’s) miserable wedded life.   At any rate, Laura Gilpin never married, but entered a lifelong companionship with her childhood nurse, Betsy Forster (1886-1972).   Among Gilpin’s pictures is a long series with Betsy as the main subject.   But Gilpin is better known for three other specialties, landscape studies of her home territory, modern architecture, and Native Americans.   Gilpin, who grew up at the border between the high plains and the front range of the Rocky Mountains, followed her dad around the west always carrying with her a camera (no longer a Brownie) and her special development apparatus.    Her interest in art and architecture arose originally from accompanying her mother on a ‘grand tour’ of Europe in 1922-23.    As for the Native American photos (some now in the Library of Congress, although the bulk of her work is in the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth), we can credit Gertrude Kasebier.   But then there was always Betsy Forster, who after caring for Gilpin during the great influenza epidemic of 1918 took up a career as a public health nurse in the Navaho reservation.   While Forster integrated traditional Navaho and modern medicine (much to the irritation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs), Gilpin preserved Native culture in the very exacting medium of platinum prints.   After Betsy’s death in 1972, Laura Gilpin removed to Santa Fe.  She died in 1979, and is buried (with her mother) at home in Colorado Springs.  © 

[Stanley]

Myth, Miracle, and Fact.

I once loved a maid, a spot welder by trade
She was fair as the Rowan in bloom
And the bloom of her eye watched the blue moorland sky
I wooed her from April to June
On the day that we should have been married
I went for a ramble instead
For sooner than part from the mountains
I think I would rather be dead
        --Ewan MacColl, ‘The Manchester Rambler,’ 1932.
On April 24, 1932, a number of walkers trespassed on private lands to walk up to Kinder Scout, not so much a mountain but the highest point in England’s Peak District.   It was the Kinder Scout Trespass, celebrated in song and story and legend.   Ewan MacColl, then known as Jimmy Miller, was there, probably singing as well as walking, and later claimed to be one of 3,000 trespassers.   The song itself, often edited beyond recognition, became a trademark of English folk groups including, inevitably, “The Ramblers.”   It was sung in Britain in much the same way as, in the USA, we sang Woodie Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” (1940).   On one side, the signs read “No Trespassing,” and on the other side, the signs said nothing.    By 1969, when we arrived in England, there were so many veterans of the Kinder Scout Trespass, and so many more who knew someone who was there, that one might be forgiven for thinking that hordes of spot welding girls (with their coal miner beaus) made the trek, were beaten senseless by gamekeepers and their hired thugs, and then were thrown into Derbyshire dungeons for their pains.   In fact, it wasn’t quite so.   There were some scuffles.   Gamekeepers were there and did claim that the walkers disturbed the grouse and beat down the bracken.   A few arrests were made, and a half-dozen walkers were fined or imprisoned, but trespass was not, in fact, against the law in 1932.    But there were traditional public rights of way.   And landowners had tried to fence off moorland estates to save birds for hunters.   And on April 24, 1932, the trespassers, mainly a motley band of urban undesirables, including anti-fascists and Communists (and, horrors, led by a Jew named Benny Rothman, 1911-2002), did walk up to Kinder Scout, and then walk down again.    But there were certainly not 3,000 of them.  More likely 400.  But even after a half-century of revisionism, my old colleague John Walton was able to sum up the Trespass as an act of great and transforming symbolism.   Romance and all, the Kinder Scout Trespass helps to explain those public footpaths, their welcoming green signs, and the rights of way that they protect.   Beyond that, the trespassers can rest in peace, satisfied that their defiance led also to the British National Park legislation of 1949.   So go for a walk today, with a spot welder if you can find one, and (while at it) sing a song or two.   It’s an act of freedom.  ©

[Tripps]

I have Ewan McColl's autobiography. It's from a book club and is a scholarly tome of 375 small type pages. Published by Manchester University Press. I've been a fan of his Radio Ballads - especially The Ballad of John Axon - for more years than I wish to count.(At least 60 years.) I have it on an LP. That's probably why the house clearance auction upset me a bit. I would hate to see it go with twenty others for £3.

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It's incredibly detailed, with much description of his hiking, but the index is poor with no reference to Kinder Scout or Benny Rothman. The summary of Chapter 13 mentions he was "with the marchers as press officer of the campaign". Im surprised that there seems to be no more detail. Maybe my skim read has not found it yet, but the style of the rest of the book convinces me he would have covered such an important historical event in great detail if he had been there. I shall continue to search.

Show me as "unconvinced" - but persuadable if shown more evidence. I'll be back. . .

Spookily the latest advert for AI shows eye surgeons practising cataract operations, and a lady welder doing spot welding.