BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools." Herbert Spencer, 1891.

In my limited experience of the species (there are few of them about, nowadays), the auto-didact is peculiarly subject to several vices. He (or, more rarely, she) is too likely to have opinions set in stone, idées fixes (especially about things worth and not worth study), and most of the bad habits of the intellectual poacher. They can be brilliant (although teaching oneself is not the best recipe for brilliance), but they lack awareness of self and context, regard self-criticism as a kind of surrender, and use their special (indeed idiosyncratic) perspective to distort. Such a one was Herbert Spencer, sociologist, historian, philosopher and, some would say, traducer of Charles Darwin. Spencer was born in Derby, England, on April 27, 1820, of stout dissenting stock. He soon rejected his parents’ religion but set out to live and think as a nonconformist, perhaps as an eccentric. Self-taught to a fault, one might say, he refused an offer of a Cambridge education, more than dabbled in natural history, political philosophy, economics, and rhetoric, taught school, worked for a bit as a civil engineer, and from the early 1850s took up life as an essayist and, in due course, as a public intellectual. In the process he developed a natural rights philosophy that rather selectively (and some would say ex post facto) praised the successful and damned the failed. It is said by some that he almost married George Eliot, but given her view of the social process and its injustices I think that may be a fairy tale. At best it was “almost;” and anyway, at about this time, along came Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), a revolutionary work in its own right, but one which in one or two of its chief findings made Herbert Spencer’s hard heart sing. So he translated Darwin’s theory of descent by natural selection into his own “survival of the fittest.” Spencer’s creation, “social Darwinism,” fit right into the positivism of his age, bathed the egos of those individuals and ‘races’ who thought themselves to be God’s last word, and deluded generations of students into thinking that Charles Darwin believed that human society should, must be, and indeed was without mercy, red in tooth and claw, and built to reward as its “fittest” those who happened to be at its summit, devil take the hindmost. ©

[Stanley]

"Oh! Who can ever be tired of Bath?" Caroline Morland, in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, 1816.

The Crescent (with the Pump Room in the left foreground), in Buxton, Derbyshire, was originally (1779-1789) the work of John Carr, architect, born on April 28, 1723. Carr’s signature style is called neo-Palladian. Many of his buildings still survive, stately homes, town halls, even a race course, as do the 23 mineral springs over which the Crescent was built. The springs, the Pump Room, and the Crescent itself are the main foci of a massive restoration project overseen by a trust headed by the 12th duke of Devonshire and largely lottery financed. The Crescent was first commissioned by the 5th duke of Devonshire, circa 1777. John Carr—whose father was a mason-stonecutter—died in 1807, by then probably the wealthiest architect in England. The ‘new’ Crescent will house a spa, medical facilities, a luxury hotel, a restored concert hall, and other amenities—including, of course, flowing mineral springs. The restoration project has taken a decade longer than originally envisaged, not least because no one knew quite how many springs Carr’s original design had protected, and exploited, to make Buxton one of Europe’s premier spa towns and the Crescent itself a place where those who wished to be seen went in order to be seen. ©

[Stanley]

"All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies." John Arbuthnot.

Even in the midst of our epidemic, many political leaders seem unable to understand how bound we are by the laws of chance, by probabilities. This may underlie some of their other disabilities, not least their refusal to accept pollution as a principal cause of climate change and human illnesses. Their ignorance is perhaps understandable, for while Muslim mathematicians had toyed with probability thinking for several centuries, Westerners have been tussling with it for only about 400 years, and it takes time for some politicians to catch up with actual knowledge. One probability pioneer was a Scotsman, John Arbuthnot, born of that ilk (in Arbuthnot, Kincardineshire) a few days before his baptism on April 29, 1667. His father was a cleric in the English church, a fact that may have given young John a feel for faint chance, and it was notably in mathematics that he prospered in school and at Marischal College, Aberdeen. Another encounter with chance came when most of his family opted for the Jacobite cause in 1689. But John tested the wind, concluded differently, and moved to London, where he found work as a mathematics tutor and pleasure as a satirist. He published the first English work on probability in 1692 (really a translation of Huygens) and his first satire (a diatribe against certainty) in 1697, and thereafter made the two vocations fit together like ham and eggs. To these he added a medical expertise, and this (and his amiability) brought him attention at court and, in 1707 (with the Act of Union) an appointment as physician-in-ordinary to the often-ill and always-eccentric Queen Anne. He may have played a role in Anne’s on-and-off relationship with Sarah Churchill. On the side, he studied birth ratios between males and females, found that ratio surprisingly consistent over time, and made (in the process) several important advances in probability theory—and in gambling theory, too. But there is little doubt that, in his own time, he was far better known for his satire—and well-loved for it by his fellow Tory satirist, Jonathan Swift. Surely we could use Arbuthnot today. Someone who knows his statistics and can cut savagely with his pen would make mincemeat out of our president’s epidemiological ignorance. ©

[Stanley]

"My story has to be retold so that history does not repeat itself.” Diet Eman, circa 1994.

Today is my 77th birthday, and it’s also (more memorably) the 75th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s suicide. I wrote a poem about it once, “Hitler Died on my Second Birthday,” and was going to send that out today instead of my usual ‘anniversary note.’ Next year, perhaps. Only I have just learned of another birthday person, Berendina Roelfina Hendrika Eman, generally known as Diet (‘Deet’), born in The Hague, Netherlands on April 30, 1920. She was brought up in, and remained a member of, the Dutch Reformed church, wherein she learned a stern moral code that made it difficult for her to lie, even when (in 1940) she became a member of the Dutch Resistance. Her group called itself HEIN (acronymically “Help Each other In Need”), and in it for the entire occupation (nearly five years) she sheltered, fed, and shepherded to safety Jewish refugees, downed Allied airmen, and fellow resisters on the run. As a sideline (as a bank clerk, she was good at it) she forged identity papers and ration cards for her charges and served as a resistance courier. Her boyfriend Hein Seitsma did the same. He didn’t make it, captured just before liberation and tortured to death at Dachau, but he left Diet with an engagement band, inscribed Amor vincit omnia. And she conquered. Diet was captured near the end but concealed her identity. Her punishment was to launder the clothes of resistance fighters who’d been executed by firing squad (they were shot in the stomach to maximize the pain, and the blood). Released, she guided a Canadian tank squadron in its attacks on remaining pockets of Germans and their Dutch collaborators. “At that moment,” she said, “I felt I had won the war.” Afterwards, Diet kept quiet about her exploits until, married and living in Grand Rapids, Michigan (a Dutch Reformed community), she heard a fellow resistance fighter speak. And then (in 1990, at symposium in a Dutch Reformed college in Iowa) it all came out. Her memoir, interestingly, is entitled Things We Couldn’t Say (1994). She became a US citizen in 2007 and long outlived Adolf Hitler, whom she identified (correctly, I think) as an incarnation of evil. Diet Eman died in September, 2019, at home, in Grand Rapids, mourned and admired by all who knew her. She had come upon her courage gradually and then she had worn it well. You couldn’t possibly ask for more. ©

[Stanley]

"After what my generation went through, and what these glamour boys earn for what little they play, it's a joke." Chuck Bednarik.

In Philadelphia, in the early 60s, I attended Penn football games to watch the Quakers lose. Then on Sundays the Eagles came to win at Franklin Field. I never attended an Eagles game, but the crowds that came to watch provided an education in class and culture. Many were working-class people with money; compared to the Penn football faithful, they were flashy, fleshy, and brassy. I remember sequined shoes (high heels) on the women and Sinatra hats on the men. They filled Franklin Field, and I heard their roars from our fire escape at 3801 Walnut. The Eagles were a powerhouse, and in ’61 and ’62 Chuck Bednarik was still the crowd’s iconic hero, and although he was a Penn graduate, he was one of them. He was born in Bethlehem (Pennsylvania, that is) on May 1, 1925, of Slovakian immigrant parents, attended Slovakian language schools, and didn’t do so very well academically or in football. But Chuck got his education in WWII, a teen-age terror as a B-24 waist gunner, 30 missions worth. He returned to Pennsylvania, and trading on the GI Bill, his strength and bulk, and his new smarts he enrolled at Penn and, at Franklin Field, knocked opposing Ivy League gents dead, playing “Iron Man” football on offense and defense. He was All-American several times. On the Eagles for 14 seasons, he was an All-Pro regular on offence (center) and defense (linebacker), famous for crunching tackles and devastating blocks. Once he laid the Giants’ star Frank Gifford out for two seasons, causing a goal-line fumble that won the game for the Eagles. He was known as “Concrete Charlie” not for that but because, back then, even All-Pro linemen didn’t make much money, and he sold cement in the off season to keep him, his wife Emma, and their kids in some kind of style, possibly in sequined shoes and Sinatra hats. Nor, in retirement, could Chuck bring himself to be an avuncular elder statesman of the game. Rather, he waxed eloquent about the sport’s decline, its “pussy-foot” players with their gross salaries and their antics (on-field and off), its zillionaire owners, its show-business air. Chuck lived a long time, but in 2015 he probably died of those crunching tackles. His obituaries—which appeared everywhere—nostalgically recalled the day when real footballers played real football for 60 minutes straight. Few mentioned Chuck’s bitterness and its tinge of racism. ©

[Stanley]

"Peggy Mount was a moth around whom everyone gathered." Obituary in The Scotsman, November 2001.

The British theatre has a long tradition of leading ladies (and men) who don’t really “look the part.” Their mothers may have thought them beautiful or handsome, but beyond that expression of parental pride their looks never got them anywhere. What was left was talent, and a bit of luck perhaps. In Peggy Mount’s case, she was denied even her mother’s pride. She was born Margaret Rose Mount, in Southend, on May 2, 1915. Her father (a grocer’s assistant) might have loved her, but he died when Peggy was five, and from the first her mother favored her elder sister for both looks and talent. A burning accident didn’t help, but as it affected her legs at least it didn’t show. As for the rest, she later recalled, she was made to know that she was “fat and ugly.” She found relief, support, and love from a Southend Methodist drama group, moved on from that to acting lessons, and then scraping a living playing bits in provincial and touring repertory. Her face would never launch any ship, but she learned to make it do—and it did a lot. After well more than a decade’s touring, she was ‘discovered,’ and in 1956 played a starring role, in London as an authoritarian mother-in-law (perfectly named “Emma Hornett”) getting her comeuppances. The reviews were ecstatic. She was “more intimidating than a fixed bayonet—and with a voice . . . that could have made a sergeant major tremble.” Her Mrs. Hornett ran for three years, 1231 performances, and was her making. Thereafter came a series of roles in TV, generally sitcoms, that made her “the nation’s favourite dragon.” But she wanted to be remembered for her work on stage and in film, more than noticeable as Juliet’s nurse in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and as Mrs. Bumble in Oliver! On stage she excelled in Restoration comedy, Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals and Mrs. Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer. She made those artful surnames make sense. Her finest hour (actually a long run) came in 1977, playing Mother Courage exactly as (the critics noted) Brecht had intended. Peggy Mount went on until, in 1998 on stage in Uncle Vanya, she suddenly went blind. She played out that whole performance on the mark, so to speak. ©

[Tripps]

Well this has kept me from being bored today.I remembered the play/ film which made her famous - it was called Sailor Beware. My velcro memory told me that I learned the name Carnoustie (in fact a Scottish golf course) - played by a young Gordon Jackson - from the film. Michael Caine had a bit part as 'Sailor'. Not a lot of people know that.

I looked at the Wikipedi entry for Peggy Mount. This gave her father as Arthur John Mount, and her mother Rose (nee) Penney. Uncle Bob said her father died when she was five, but Wiki says when she was fourteen. I very helpfully pointed out this discrepancy to Bob, and he replied very promptly, and was having none of it. He said he relied on the Dictionary of National Biography and was sticking with five years.

Lots of searching with just free resources, and without the aid of Ancestry produced little result. There didn't seem to be any Arthur John Mount. I then looked at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (not sure if that's the one Bob uses) which revealed that in fact her father was called Alfred John Mount and not Arthur.

I'd not been able to find any Arthur Mounts, but found one Alfred John Mount who died in Rochford (Essex) in 1930. that would make Peggy about fourteen at the time. So - looks like Wiki is right about the date, but wrong about her father's name, and Bobs source is wrong about the date.

Not sure that I'll tell him. . . .

[Stanley]

Go on, be a devil David..... Tell him you feel the matter should be brought to a conclusion...

[Stanley]

"I'm a dealer in magic and spells,// In blessings and curses// And ever-filled purses." From The Sorcerer, 1877.

In 19th-century England (and in the American South) gentry, and those who needed gentrification, often named their sons from their wife’s family names, her maiden name perhaps, or failing that someone from further up the distaff family tree. That was how Richard D’Oyly Carte (born in Soho, London, on May 3, 1844) got the D’Oyly. His mother, née Liza Jones, had a D’Oyly somewhere in her background. As for the ‘Carte,’ his dad had been born a ‘Cart’ but had decided that the frenchified ‘Carte’ looked better on his firm’s nameplate. That was Rudall, Carte, & Co., makers of fine woodwind instruments for the best players in London. The firm prospered, and once D’Oyly Carte had dropped out of London University, in 1861, he joined the firm, but not as an instrument maker. Instead he became a theatrical agent, including in his lists the likes of Clara Schumann and Adelina Patti. His agency prospered and he caught the bug, first writing some light operas of his own, then branching out into production, putting on Offenbach’s La Perichole at the Royalty Theatre. Then fate took a hand, and D’Oyly Carte got the bright idea that Arthur Sullivan should be asked to write the libretto for W. S. Gilbert’s Trial by Jury. It debuted on March 25, 1875 and was a stunning success for all concerned. For Gilbert & Sullivan, immortality. For the lead performers in what became a permanent company, two decades of nearly constant employment. And for D’Oyly Carte, it brought his own kind of fame not only as a theatrical impresario but as one of London’s leading hoteliers. In 1889 he opened the Savoy Hotel to celebrate The Gondoliers. Before that, he’d built the nearby Savoy Theatre (1881) to celebrate Patience. And Patience came after Trial by Jury (1875), The Sorcerer (1877), HMS Pinafore (1878), and The Pirates of Penzance (1880). It preceded Iolanthe (1882) A collaboration sans pareil, it was not without its stormy years. There was a long estrangement after The Mikado (1885) and then again after The Gondoliers. The latter rift was healed by D’Oyly Carte’s second wife, Helen, and in the 1890s another G&S run added to D’Oyly Carte’s fame and wealth. He died in 1901, leaving an estate far larger than the combined wealth of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. There’s a moral there somewhere. ©

[Tripps]

Phew. . .I took Stanley's advice, and got an immediate reply. Pleased to say he took it in good humour and sent back -

"Thanks. It’s great to have such a discerning readership. And of course I will blame Stanley for THAT!!! "

[Stanley]

That's all right David, he has been blaming me for years! For everything.....
It's worth the stick though, I think you will agree.....

[Tripps]

Just had a follow up email from Uncle Bob - Nice.

"I should say also that I took some flak from my wife, Paulette, who’s a Peggy Mount fan from way back. "

Cheers.
Bob


So that's two Paulettes in two days - I hope everyone is keeping up. I think that qualifies as mildly spooky.

[Stanley]

Yes, I rang her yesterday and spilled the beans, she said she would look into it......



Bob and Paulette in St Louis.

[Stanley]

"The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected." Will Rogers.

Some say William Horace DeVere Cole was born in Blarney, others say in Ballincollig, but in any case it was County Cork, Ireland, on May 5, 1881. His father, an aristocratic officer in the British army, soon died in India, leaving his son a share in a quinine fortune. His mother Mary inherited substantial Irish properties. Horace, as he preferred to be called, joined the army as soon as he could leave Eton and, in the Boer War (1899-1902) rose to captain and conducted himself like an officer and a gentleman. He was seriously wounded, twice. Then, when he came back and entered Cambridge, he set about becoming one of the greatest practical jokers in modern history. Some of his handiwork was simply “undergraduate gross,” as when he walked the streets of Cambridge with a cow’s teat protruding from his fly. But he could show a touch of genius. In February 1910 he impersonated the Sultan of Zanzibar and made a state visit to his own college (Trinity) and to the Lord Mayor of Cambridge, being received in both places with all due honors. At Cambridge, he became fast friends with Adrian Stephen, his sister Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, and others of the Bloomsbury Group, and some of his later, classic pranks were performed in concert, so to speak, with several of that ilk, including another state visit, this time to HMS Dreadnaught as the Emperor of Abyssinia. One would like to know what Virginia Woolf did in this farce—but she was there, playing her part. Cole went on to other high jinx and low, marrying (first) an Irish heiress, barely 18, and (second) a scullery maid, Mabel Winifred Mary Wright. Horace fell on hard times and died poor in Paris in 1936, by then a remittance man, paid to stay away by those whom he now embarrassed. The scullery maid, Mabel, went on to achieve her own notoriety, first as the wife of the eminent scholar Mortimer Wheeler, secondly as the lover of Augustus John, and finally (1954) as the would-be murderess of her would-be lover, the theatrical impresario Anthony, Baron Vivian, whom she shot in the stomach. She got six months for that, then (it seems) faded from view. Quite a tale, and I think it’s all true. ©

[Stanley]

"Perhaps you do not care for such old relics, but . . ." Lydia Folger Fowler to William Lloyd Garrison, 1867, enclosing a shard of oak from the old Wilberforce mansion in London.

To be the “first” this or that is, in history, usually interesting in itself. To be second is, in comparison, a kind of booby prize, often forgotten. But let’s give some space today to Lydia Folger Fowler, the second American woman to become a medical doctor, for she came from an interesting family background and, in her own right, lived an interesting life. She was born on Nantucket, May 5, 1823, into a family with a long New England pedigree and into a kin network where women made some history, like her cousins Lucretia Mott (a Quaker campaigner for, among other things, prison reform), Maria Mitchell (an astronomer), and her aunt Phebe Coleman, (poet and water colorist), all of whom I have already celebrated in these notes. For that matter Lydia’s mother was a Macy, but those Macy stores were still far (1858) in the future. Her parents thought girls should be educated, and so she was, at Wheaton Academy, joining the faculty there at 20. She then married Lorenzo Fowler, a phrenologist, and, at first, became one herself. Lorenzo continued phrenologizing, measuring the skulls of famous people to see what made them famous (like Dickens, Poe, Bryant, and a Baron Rothschild), but Lydia branched off into medicine, obstetrics and childhood especially, getting her MD (#2 for women) in 1850. She was mainly a homeopath, but thought of herself an eclectic practitioner, preferring what worked to theory, and became expert in midwifery, a follower of the odd notion (Holmes and Semmelweis) that cleanliness in childbirth was a good idea. And given her family background what else could Lydia be but a campaigner for women’s rights? She played a leading role at Seneca Falls in 1848 and was an inspiration to many, not least Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She also lectured, free and for fees, on many subjects, but especially childbirth, childrearing, and Temperance with a capital ‘T’. She and Lorenzo moved to London where he promptly died. Lydia went on, practicing in medicine and lecturing in reform, until 1879. She’s buried at Highgate, not too far from Karl Marx, who was also born on May 5, though in 1818. ©

[Stanley]

"All art needs the visible world and will always need it. Quite simply because, being accessible to all, it is the key to all other worlds." Ernst Ludwig Kirchner..

These days of plague, the St. Louis Art Museum (affectionately, “SLAM”) has responded magnificently, sending out its “Object of the Day” and revamping its website to provide virtual tours to anyone who, in normal times, might want to go. If ever you do visit, you’ll find a great collection of German expressionist painting, circa 1900-1935 (in galleries 214-215). SLAM’s collection, post-facto evidence of the importance to St. Louis’s prosperity of 19th-century German immigration, includes several works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, born in Bavaria on May 6, 1880. He was brought up to be historically conscious, not least of his mother’s French Huguenot roots, which might have made him feel odd boy out in Catholic Bavaria, but the family moved back to Protestant Germany (Dresden) where Kirchner was educated. His parents encouraged his artistic leanings but wanted him to have a day job, and it was when Kirchner was learning to be an architect that he was really seriously infected by the painting bug. In 1905 he and two fellow students (whose works also are featured in SLAM galleries) self-consciously formed a new movement, Die Brücke, their aim to make art that would “bridge” German historical traditions with modernism. Inspired by late medieval and Renaissance artists (in Kirchner’s case, particularly Albrecht Dürer), they and their fellows in the movement produced art that, while it may not be to everyone’s taste (still today, French modernists draw bigger crowds and bigger bucks), I find its imagery to be striking, unforgettable, even magnificent. It can be quite as whimsical as Picasso, as in Kirchner’s “Tavern” (in SLAM), but the overwhelming feeling in Galleries 214-215 is dramatic, dark, possibly foreboding. But if this art makes one think of Hitler in the offing, one is mistaken. When the Nazis came to power, Kirchner and his fellow bridgebuilders were classified “degenerate” and “un-German.” Heartbroken by this, horrified by other aspects of Nazi policy, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner committed suicide in Davos, Switzerland (another subject of some of his more whimsical work), in 1937. ©

[Stanley]

"Everything that occurs out of necessity . . . is mute. Only chance can speak to us." Milos Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

I am not a historian who sees the past as a seamless web, infinitely interconnected. That way lies chaos theory, which I leave to those qualified in it, like meteorologists. I am content with coincidences, some of them fortunate as well as fortuitous. This one starts with the first mayor of Boston, John Phillips (1770-1823), a reformer. Inter alia, he was an advocate of public education. When he died, just such a work was in progress. This was the first “English” school in Boston (“English” to distinguish it from Boston Latin), a coincidental collaboration between a local Mechanics Association and (for middle-class spice), a clerical cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson and a lawyer grandson of that crusty old revolutionary Sam Adams. So in 1824 they named the new school the Phillips English School. It was intended for the white children of Boston’s mechanical folk (an English school for black children was set up nearby, the Abel Smith School). But as the anti-slavery and abolitionist movements warmed up, the Phillips School thought again and, in 1855, admitted its first black pupils. This cohort included Miss Mary Eliza Mahoney, then aged just ten. She’d been born of freed slaves from North Carolina on May 7, 1845, and early in her life decided that she would be a nurse. So that’s what Mary Eliza did, with the help of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American female MD, and Maria Zakrwzewska, a Polish-German immigrant who became (about) the fourth American woman MD, who together founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children, which, besides offering care for women and children (including paupers) also opened educational tracks for females wanting to become health professionals. Mary Eliza Mahoney entered the school in 1878, graduated with honors, and became, in white Boston, an exceptionally successful professional nurse. Mary Eliza was also a public agitator for equal rights, another coincidence. The last coincidence I have space for this morning is that Mayor John Phillips’ eldest son, Wendell (1811-1884), became Boston’s leading (and most militant) abolitionist, a backer of John Brown, and (by the way) an advocate for public education, racial integration, and women’s rights. No doubt it was all just accident, but we could use a few more like it. ©

[Stanley]

"The Works of Nature are the only Source of true Knowledge, and the Study of them the most noble Employment of the Mind of Man." Henry Baker, Microscopes Made Easy, 1742.

In one of Wodehouse’s best stories, the 9th Earl of Emsworth stands on the ramparts of Blandings Castle and trains his new toy, a telescope, on a distant cow. What happens after that has nothing to do with telescopes, but the picture is appealing. Such scientific toys did traditionally occupy the leisure time of English aristocrats and gentlemen, which may be why Henry Baker’s microscope manuals were consistent best sellers in the 18th century. The first, Microscopes Made Easy (1742) went through five editions (and by the way helped to sell microscopes, some, no doubt, to fluffy-minded elderly earls). Baker wrote on many scientific subjects, collected many “curiosities” (from both natural and human history) and from 1741 was a member of the Royal Society. But what he was famed for was his success in teaching deaf and dumb children to speak. Henry Baker was born in London on May 8, 1698, his father a clerk in chancery and his mother the daughter of the comptroller of the “Petty Bag Office.” Baker apprenticed to a bookseller, then (in 1720) went to the country to visit a rich relative whose 8-year old daughter had been born deaf and, consequently, had never learned to speak. It was one of those cases of some odd talent meeting a pressing need. In an order short enough to be worthy of note, Baker taught the girl and her younger siblings (both also ‘deaf and dumb’) how to speak and read. Baker became something of a philosopher of speech and language, but in his tutelage of the silent he concentrated on the physiology of speech, lungs, breath, diaphragm, the muscles of the mouth and throat. Whatever his secret, and it did remain one, he developed a reputation while English gentlemen and aristocrats kept supplying a clientele. Baker also married Daniel Defoe’s daughter Sophia (1701-1762), and became a poet and essayist in his own right. But that’s another story. So too is what happens after Clarence, Lord Emsworth becomes bored by that cow: swinging his ‘scope to take in a more distant pasture, he spies his feckless younger son Freddy, and Freddy is kissing a girl. ©

[Stanley]

:"Garibaldi's Englishwoman." The life of Jessie Jane Meriton White Mario.

Can one inherit a political gene? Surely not! And yet the case of Jessie Mario causes one to pause. Her biological mother was Jane Meriton, a refugee liberal from New Orleans, devoted to educational reform, who ended up in Gosport, Hampshire, married to a shipbuilder (Thomas White), a stern biblical literalist. But Jane died when her daughter was just two. Yet Jessie grew up to become a heroine of the Italian Revolution, a symbol of Italian national unity, and then a crusading journalist devoted to raising up Italy’s “miseria,” its working poor. Jessie Jane Meriton White, born in Gosport on May 9, 1832, carried her mother’s name and seemed somehow to carry her mother’s values, too. But then Thomas White, a fundamentalist in religion, was a reformer in politics and an enthusiast for the Young Italy movement of Giuseppe Mazzini. Rejecting her father’s biblicism as “humbug,” 21-year-old Jessie turned up in Sardinia, in 1854, an eager recruit into the army of Giuseppe Garibaldi. She’d wanted to be a medical doctor, but on the spot she learned how to nurse the wounded and comfort the dying. She met Mazzini too, and at his request returned to England to agitate for the cause. Back in Italy in early 1857, nursing again, she experienced military disaster and imprisonment and met Alberto Mario, Garibaldi’s lieutenant. She married him. The odd couple (Alberto’s military figure contrasting with the plump, cigar-smoking Jessie) traveled to the USA to recruit men and money, then back to battle in Italy, Jessie now as “Garibaldi’s Englishwoman” and (with the rank of Major) commander of his ambulance corps. Famously, nursing under fire on the battlefield, Jessie tore up her underclothes to use as bandages and tourniquets. After the triumphs of victory and unification (you cannot keep a good woman down), Jessie Jane Meriton White Mario turned to crusading journalism, Italian correspondent for The Nation and author of exposés on the lives and deaths of Italy’s poorest, notably the cave dwellers of Naples and the Sulphur miners of Sicily. She also biographed Garibaldi and other, humbler heroes of the unification struggle. When she died in 1906, Italy’s first Nobel laureate, Giosué Carducci, eulogized her as a national figure: una donna fantastica. Indeed. ©

[Stanley]

"The United States is a constitutional democracy." From the majority (8-1) opinion in Smith v. Allright.321 US 649.

In politics one finds strange bedfellows; just so, in a single lifetime one can observe chameleon-like changes. When I was a lad, it was the Democratic Party in the South that bent every effort to deny the vote to citizens of color. That is undeniable. Today the vote-deniers are Republicans. But the mechanisms are different, as “race” has been ruled an unconstitutional criterion for whether (or not) a citizen is (in a full sense) a citizen. Among the mechanisms Democrats used in the South was the “white primary.” Political parties, being “voluntary associations,” could set their own rules, and the Texas Democracy (as in several other states) set country club rules that only “white citizens . . . shall be eligible for membership.” Previous court decisions (as recently as 1935) had endorsed such rules as “constitutional,” but in 1943 a Houston 5th ward dentist, Lonnie Smith (a human being of African descent) challenged it by suing a county election official, S. S. Allright. The case was eventually heard in a differently constituted court in a different time, a war against Nazism, and in Smith v. Allright, May 10, 1944, the US Supreme Court ruled (8-1) that the Texas Democratic Party was sufficiently “public” that such a rule contravened Amendment XV of the US Constitution. Of course it took a while for the change to percolate through a racist social fabric, but percolate it did. Among the observers of Smith v Allright was a young 5th ward neighbor of Dr. Smith’s, Barbara Charline Jordan (1936-1996), a preacher’s daughter. Inspired by Lonnie Smith’s case, and his courage in bringing it, Ms. Jordan would one day represent Houston in Congress, and in a memorable speech in 1974, she would give the nation (not to mention President Richard M. Nixon) a televised lesson in the history and theory of the United States Constitution. And Barbara Jordan was a Democrat. So, today, those who would deny the vote to black citizens are Republicans, and Smith v. Allright is among the reasons that Republicans must use other criteria and other means to deny not “equality” as such but rather “access” to the vote and to the power that should go with the vote. It is, I guess, a crab-like kind of progress. But it’s certainly a change. ©

[Stanley]

"Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man's power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened." Germaine de Staël.

In a self-centered way (penicillin saved me in 1948) I can testify that innovation, scientific and technical, preserves and extends human lives. It also kills and endangers. Refrigeration is an example. Without it, our mass production, distribution and consumption of food would be impossible, or certainly very hazardous. But until the 1930s, refrigeration also killed. The gases first used in cooling tubes were either explosive or poisonous. In May 1929, a leak in such a system was one agent in an explosion and fire that killed 123 people in a Cleveland, Ohio, hospital. Enter Thomas Midgely, already famous as an inventive chemical engineer, who within a year discovered what looked like a perfect solution, an inert, odorless, heavy, and non-toxic gas that we came to know as Freon-12, or chlorofluorocarbon. Thomas Midgely, born in Beaver Falls, PA, on May 11, 1889 (the son of an immigrant inventor), began as a mechanical engineer, and in General Motors labs had discovered that tetraethyl lead suppressed “knock” in GM’s increasingly high-compression auto engines. He knew lead was a poison (indeed it had poisoned him and other coworkers), but GM assured the world that, in such small quantities, it it wouldn’t harm anyone. To make sure that lead didn’t harm car engines, Midgely invented an additive to cause the lead to be expelled with the exhaust. Midgely made plenty of money from his discoveries, but gave back, too, for instance as the director of the Ohio State University Research Foundation. It took government regulators and independent scientists—and the explosion of automobile and refrigerator production—to discover (later in the 20th century) some serious, nay fatal, drawbacks in both freon and tetraethyl lead. Thomas Midgely died too soon to appreciate these ironies. He’d come down with polio; so he invented a harness device that enabled him to get out of bed and into a wheel chair on his own power. It went spectacularly wrong, and on November 2, 1944, alone in his bedroom, Thomas Midgely was strangled to death by his own invention. ©

[Stanley]

"You know very well, and so do all those who know anything about my affairs, that I could not have done the business at all . . . without you." Richard D'Oyly Carte to Helen Lenoir, 1886, explaining her raise in salary.

If you are a Gilbert & Sullivan buff, the 1999 film Topsy-Turvy is recommended. Built around the creation (1884-85) of The Mikado, it portrays the harmonies and tensions between W. S. Gilbert, Arthur Sullivan, Richard D’Oyly Carte and their resident company of actors. I’ve seen it twice, and must now see it again, because I can’t recall how it played Helen Lenoir, D’Oyly Carte’s secretary. It cast her as 6th lead, but she was in truth more than that, possibly the star of the show. Helen Lenoir (born in Scotland on May 12, 1852 as Susan Helen Couper Black) took pride in her Huguenot ancestry, and at about the time she went off to college she became Helen Lenoir. London University didn’t yet award degrees to mere females, but it conceded that Helen Lenoir mastered its program in mathematics and logic. She then went off to teach, but caught the acting bug, an odd choice for such a shy young woman. That brought her into contact with D’Oyly Carte, and at the age of 25 Helen became his secretary and, very soon, the ‘master of logic’ in all his multifarious activities, not only the Gilbert & Sullivan ‘franchise,’ but his agency business as well, and soon enough his wondrous London hotel, the Savoy, (in which Helen installed hydraulic lifts, the talk of the town). She was busy enough as his secretary (Walter Sickert entitled his 1884 portrait of her “The Acting Manager,” in which she looks ready to drop), but in 1888, soon after the death of Carte’s first wife, Helen Lenoir became Helen Carte. Before and after Carte’s death (1901), she oversaw everything in London, provided the oil that kept Carte, Gilbert, and Sullivan running smoothly, and managed touring companies doing “G&S” revivals in the British provinces and the USA. Helen Carte made 15 Atlantic crossings on that business and on Carte’s lectureship agencies. In an atmosphere of constant upset and wild success, everyone loved her. Indeed one wonders if she were not the woman before the men. A London audience, perhaps more knowledgeable than we, gave Helen Carte an opening night curtain call in a 1906 revival of Yeomen of the Guard. The hurricane of applause nearly swept this frail, shy widow (dressed and hatted entirely in white, holding an all-white bouquet) right off the stage. Helen Carte died (of her busy-ness) in 1913. ©

[Stanley]

"The arranger doesn't get any royalties. But I had so much fun doing it, I never even thought of that at the time." Gil Evans.

My parents often holidayed northwards, and as we drove towards (say) Kenora, or Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), or Ottawa dad always used to say that “we must be getting close to Canada. The gardens are nicer.” So the child that was I associated fine public gardens with Canada, never thinking about the brains, skills, and personality quirks needed to nurture so many beautiful blossoms in such a cold climate. Indeed it turns out that Canada is a cool place, offering us “Americans” useful contrasts not only in its public gardens but its public health systems, its record of international cooperation, and in Canadians’ weary toleration for our Canada jokes. But who ever thought of cool Canada and jazz? Enter Gil Evans, born Ernest Gilmore Green in Toronto on May 13, 1912. As a sometime Miles Davis fan, I was vaguely aware of Gil Evans (the record label might say “Arr. Evans”), but it turns out that the collaboration was much closer and way more important than the credits suggested. Evans’s road to get there was a long one, a childhood in western Canada, then Washington state, then California, then a spell in the US Army and American citizenship. Along the way he “picked up” music rather than learned it, and though he was a whiz at the piano he early displayed genius in arranging and composing, first for his own band then for others. His eclectic musical associations came to include Miles Davis in the late 1940s, with two Evans tracks on Davis’s perfectly-titled Birth of the Cool; that collaboration continued, but no one tied Evans down. Among Gil Evans’s credits you will find a real odds bods crowd, from Tony Bennett to Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Weill to Cannonball Adderly, Astrud Gilberto to Peggy Lee. Virtually everyone testifies to his genius, which included bringing classical idioms into jazz and then into pop. Evans’s compositions were often hugely difficult. It was said that one band leader used them to punish his players. But to the musical illiterate they can seem breathtakingly simple. A wondrous example, a Canadian garden of jazz composition, color and cool, is Miles Davis’s album Quiet Nights (1963). I listen to it often, and sometimes when I’m driving North. ©

[Stanley]

" Ed Ricketts was a remarkable scientist and a remarkable character who probably invented modern marine ecology." Professor Stuart Thompson, marine biologist, writing in the Stanford alumni magazine.

On my 14th birthday, our neighbor Jean Lodwick (who taught junior high English) asked me how old I was. She already knew the answer, but when I told her she said, “then you’re old enough for this,” and handed me John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945). I was in no significant sense a repressed child; still, for me, that novel was a liberation. Its heroes were many, of all sorts, and most of them were as common as dirt. Like the Row itself, they were “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” They didn’t all love each other all the time, just mostly; but they all loved “the Doc,” and if the novel has a plot it’s about a couple of parties they planned for the Doc, the first a failure (he didn’t even show up), the second a community triumph. Readers who like to think that novelists mean what they write have long known that the Doc was, really and truly, a real person, someone who did touch many lives, a mostly kindly man who collected sea creatures (mostly intertidal ones), wrote about them, and philosophized about life, science, poetry, and people, in short about things that mattered. “Doc” was Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts, born in Chicago on May 14, 1897. Steinbeck was not the only Monterey visitor to be taken by Ed Ricketts, but from 1930 the two spent a good deal of time together, including collecting voyages to Baja and Juneau. They were planning a third when, in May 1948, Ricketts’ car met the SP’s Del Monte Express at the Drake Avenue crossing in Monterey. To adopt what Steinbeck wrote about the Doc, Ed Ricketts “would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it to a kind of wisdom . . . everyone who knew him was indebted to him. And everyone who thought of him thought next, ‘I really must do something nice for Doc.’” Luckily, Ed Ricketts lived long enough to read Cannery Row and to be pleasantly exasperated by his immortality, which he thought undeserved. Others disagree. Today, at the Drake Avenue crossing, you can find a bust of Ed Ricketts. It’s often decorated with flowers, no doubt by people who’ve read Cannery Row and then decide to do something nice for the Doc. ©



My picture of Cannery Row in 1979.

[Stanley]

"Are we not formed with passions like your own?// Nature with equal fire our souls endued,// Our minds as haughty, and as warm our blood?" 'Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to her husband,; 1724. Mary Wortley Montagu.

In the midst of our very own plague, let’s remember Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, born into an aristocratic family (the Pierreponts, earls of Kingston) on May 16, 1689, an early advocate of inoculation against smallpox, a plague of her time that took her brother and left her, as a child, badly scarred. Her father possessed one of the best private libraries in England, in which she taught herself Latin and learned to love literature and writing. She learned also to love herself and never to doubt her right to be a woman. This began, perhaps, with her admiration for Aphra Benn, author and dramatist of the Caroline court, but is also evidenced in her private poetry. She wrote it in Latin, entitled it “The Entire Works of Clarinda,” and in 1710 sent to the Bishop of London with a cover letter demanding women’s right to receive a formal education. Nor would she accept her father’s choice of a husband, but eloped with a different aristocrat, Edward Wortley Montagu, then accompanied him on his embassy to the Ottoman Empire, whence she wrote the letters for which she is most famous, and from which she returned convinced of the value of inoculation. But that wasn’t her only accomplishment, for she was also a poet and a satirist, friends with and then an enemy of both Pope and Swift, who both winced at the sharpness of her pen. Indeed we could call her satires of Pope cruel, and they led critics of an earlier age to call her prose “masculine” as if that were, in a woman, a fault. Lady Mary could see no virtue in subordination. In her writings she attacked, as in her life she rejected, the double standards of patriarchy. For Lady Mary, masculinity in a flawed man was just another misfortune, one that conveyed no rightful power and implied only vice. So let’s remember her for that, as well as for her courageous ability to appreciate good sense in another culture. In Constantinople, she saw more than an effective prophylactic against smallpox; she witnessed the private lives of elite Ottoman women, and believed them to be freer—and less corseted—than their western sisters. ©