BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

The queen of cotton.

I don’t like it to be said that I invented wash-wear cotton, because there were any number of people working on it. Ruth Benerito.

You’re probably going to be wearing cotton today, likely next to your skin. If you’re like me, you prefer cotton to polyester because it’s warmer in cold weather, cooler in warm weather, or because it doesn’t absorb, store, and then pay back (with compound interest) the least attractive of your natural odors. Chances are, then, that your cotton is not ‘natural’ cotton. It has been treated in various ways. The most important of these treatments makes cotton into something not-quite-cotton. This treatment does not blend cotton with some ‘better’ polyester or coat it with special fluids. Rather it changes the cotton molecule to make it stronger and suppler than ‘natural’ cotton. Natural cotton wrinkles, “naturally.” It wrinkles while you wear it. It wrinkles whether you hang it on your bedpost or throw it on the floor. It wrinkles especially well when you wash it. The natural cotton molecule is a long polymer with relatively weak hydrogen bonds, natural-born “wrinklers.” Strengthening those bonds was the work of a research chemist, Ruth Benerito, born Ruth Rogan in New Orleans on January 12, 1916. In her generation, few women became research chemists, and she always thanked her parents for clearing her paths. Precocious in school, Ruth entered Tulane’s women’s college at 15, graduated BS at 19, and then returned to Tulane to teach (as an adjunct) and to work on her Masters. Then came a PhD at Chicago and (in 1953) a research post at the federal Department of Agriculture (USDA) labs in New Orleans. One of the USDA’s obsessions was to find a safe place for cotton in a market being flooded by new “miracle” fabrics, and Ruth Rogan (after her marriage Ruth Benerito) led the team which figured out how to do that by changing cotton itself. Benerito always resisted efforts to credit her with the discovery, and indeed “wrinkle-resistant” cotton had been a work of many hands over much time (including a 19th-century Shaker community in Maine). But Benerito turned the trick by ‘repairing’ the cotton polymer, causing it to “crosslink” with other cotton molecules and thus, essentially, to create a ‘new’ cotton. On labels, it’s ‘wrinkle-resistant,’ not ‘permanent press.’ And it’s pleasanter to wear. Ruth Benerito retired from the USDA in 1981 with 54 other patents under her belt (including a flame-resistant cotton and a new method for intravenous feeding of wounded soldiers), but she was then still an unsung heroine of science. Luckily, she lived long enough (until 2013) to become better-known, thanks in no small part to ‘woke’ feminism and its passion to write up a new, more accurate history. ©

[Stanley]

From rags to riches. (If you beat the odds.)

I mean to turn over a new leaf, and try to grow up ‘spectable.’ Horatio Alger, Jr., 1868

Horatio Alger, Jr., was born on January 13, 1832, in Chelsea, MA. He was descended on both sides from the very first Puritan settlers. His father, Horatio, Sr., a Unitarian minister, hoped to see his son into the ministry. Horatio was well-educated at home and in school, and then worked hard enough at Harvard to be Phi Beta Kappa and the 1852 class poet (he’d learned his poetry at source, from Longfellow). Horatio did indeed go into the Unitarian ministry, but was soon defrocked for pederasty. His fame today rests with what he did afterwards, which was to write books for boys, books of a particular kind. Indeed, he’s credited with a whole genre, the ‘Horatio Alger story,’ in which a poor lad (or, once at least, lass) triumphs over many adversities to become, above all things, respectable. Alger’s first really successful retelling of our favorite national myth came in serial form, with the story of Ragged Dick; Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks, which was published as a novel in 1868. In it, Dick’s (re)discovery of his inner virtues, allied with several strokes of good fortune (including saving a drowning child), ragged Dick becomes Richard Hunter, Esq., a youngish worker with a new suit of clothes, his very own apartment, and (Richard knows, and we are assured) a rosy future. Horatio Alger went on to produce many similar stories, including a whole ‘Ragged Dick’ series, but never himself moved into that rosy future. He was, instead, dogged by failure and, in a homophobic society, isolated by his closeted sexuality. Eventually he fled New York to live with his sister’s family and died poor in Natick, MA. His greatest success came later, not least in the form of the Horatio Alger Association, founded in 1947 to celebrate the rewards of hard work, to perpetuate the nobility of triumph over adversity, to make real the plot lines of the Ragged Dick stories. The association gives out scholarships to ragged dicks (and, latterly, ragged janes) and annually welcomes into its membership a rainbow coalition of self-made heroes. There have been, so far, 750+ awardees, in annual “classes.” They make an odd grouping, a rainbow indeed, for it includes (inter alia) Fred Trump and Oprah Winfrey, Sam Walton and Herschel Walker, Herbert Hoover and Condoleezza Rice, Jane Seymour and Clarence Thomas. If we agree that all of these Alger figures triumphed over the odds, can we not also agree that for most of us it’s the odds that really matter? We must treat the Horatio Alger myth as myth. His novels are make-believes. His real life of struggle, isolation, and failure offers a better guidebook for Americans. ©

[Stanley]

Nothing Received from Bob for yesterday's note. I have mailed him.....

[Stanley]

It worked.... We have a Twofor....

The humanity of all Americans is diminished when any group is denied rights granted to others. Julian Bond.

If you look online, you can find a picture of two elders of the Civil Rights movement, each 74 years old, at a civil rights ‘summit’ held at the LBJ Presidential Library in 2014. They chat amiably, as elder states-persons often do, but in their hotter youths they’d been bitter enemies. They were John Lewis and Julian Bond. Lewis was a poor sharecropper’s son who’d got his start, in rural Georgia, at a Julius Rosenwald (think Sears Roebuck) charity school. Julian Bond was born (on January 14, 1940) into what W. E. B. Dubois once called the ‘talented tenth,’ the vanguard that would lead American blacks into the promised lands of equality and freedom. Bond’s parents were prominent educators at black colleges, and they sent their son to Morehouse, in Atlanta, long a ‘talented tenth’ incubator, where Julian quickly became a leader in sit-in and ride-in agitations for equal rights. Almost as quickly, he moved to a radical position. Bond dropped out of Morehouse and tuned in, becoming a co-founder first of SNCC (‘Snick,’ the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), and a decade later of the SPLC (the Southern Poverty Law Center). Bond never went as far as the Black Panther Party, never fully embraced ‘Black Power,’ but he developed as a serious critic of American ideologies, opposed to the Viet Nam War, supporter of gay rights and reproductive freedom, at odds enough with the Democratic Party “establishment” to nominate Gene McCarthy at the 1968 national convention (and, in turn, to be nominated for vice-president, a nomination Bond modestly declined for he was still ‘only’ in his 20s). Bond was successful, too, in Atlanta politics, riding the Voting Rights law into the state house despite annual efforts to redistrict him out of office, and in 1968 winning a US Supreme Court case against the Georgia legislature’s attempt to unseat him for the crime of opposing the war in Viet Nam. 18 years later, Bond’s embrace of this wider political agenda cost him a primary race against John Lewis, who highlighted Bond’s radicalism (especially his alleged ties to ‘drug culture’) to win the official Democratic nomination for Congress (where Lewis served for over three decades). But in those decades the two would move ever closer, Bond as radical flibbertigibbet and outsider intellectual, Lewis plugging away as a leader of the Black Congressional Caucus, both scarred (and scared) by rising hysterics in the Republican Party (members of what Bond called its “Taliban wing”). So by 2014 they were, again, old friends, as they had once been as black youths eating at lunch counters and riding Greyhounds in the apartheid South. ©.



Lord Woodbine: The Forgotten Sixth Beatle. Headline in The Independent, July 1, 2010.

The River Windrush joins the Thames at Newbridge, the quaint name of a 700-year old span with even quainter pubs at each end. One is The Rose Revived, where an American friend once sang old English folk songs to great acclaim. Poetic scenes and poetic names: but it’s music that’s on my mind today. That’s because the River Windrush gave its name to a prize of war, a German boat relaunched in 1946 as the Empire Windrush. Under its German name it had helped to transport Norwegian Jews to Auschwitz, but a better voyage came in 1948, when it brought 492 West Indians to London, some for education or training but most to become British. Other ships, similarly loaded, arrived pre- and post-Windrush, but poetry won out, and the name became symbolic; the “Windrush Generation” helped to make the UK a modern, multiethnic melting pot. One of the 492 could stand for all the rest. He was Harold Adolphus Phillips, and he came to England to work. Born in Trinidad on January 15, 1929, he’d already been in England, lying about his age to enlist in the RAF, aged only 14. He trained at RAF Burtonwood, but peace came before he could take flight. He returned to Trinidad to cultivate several skills, and brought them all to England where they helped him keep body and soul in contact. He worked as a machinist, carpenter, gardener, electrician, whatever brought money in, but the Trinidadian skill that stuck was calypso, not only as performer, but as composer and lyricist, specializing (as he had in Trinidad) with songs crafted out of the day’s news and his own experience. West-Indian hip-hop, one might say. One of his songs featured cheap cigarette brand-names, and for a time Adolphus Phillips was better known as Lord Woodbine. Settled and married in Liverpool, Phillips (Lord Woodbine) worked daytimes and played at night, but by 1955 it was music that made his life and made him a central figure in Liverpool, with recordings and performances at various working-class venues. There Phillips became an impresario-performer, and there he befriended young local talents, including Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Just how much Lord Woodbine influenced the Beatles (then the ‘Silver Beetles’) is still a matter of some dispute. Lord Woodbine did organize the Beatle’s first big tour to Hamburg, Germany (once the home port of the ship that became the Empire Windrush), which must have helped the Beatles’ bank accounts. As for the music itself, McCartney said ‘quite a bit’ in a 1997 documentary. But today let’s call it poetry, from the River Windrush and the Rose Revived to the River Mersey and the Cavern Club. I’d like to include the River Evenlode, too, but I can’t find a connection. ©

[Stanley]

The Lestrange Archive

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959.

The further one moves back in time, the more difficult it is to research the history of private lives. The difficulty is less if we look at the rich, for their lives required literacy and numeracy, and their social positions involved them in public affairs. We learn more easily of their public personas, and through that something of them as individuals. What did they eat? How did they dress? How did they spend their leisure time? Whom did they marry? How did they parent their children? That we can even ask such questions owes to the survival of family archives, not state papers or parliamentary records. And of these one of the most complete is the Lestrange archive in the Norfolk Record Office, Norwich, England. The archive proper covers a huge span (1199 to 1952), and has many highlights, but it was particularly well kept during the Tudor era, the lifetimes of Sir Thomas Lestrange (born ‘about’ 1490 and died on January 16, 1545) and his son, Sir Nicholas (1515-1580). Both were eminent enough locally (and nationally) to leave tracks in public records. But we know more about them as men because of the faithful bookkeeping of their wives, the Lady Anne Lestrange and her daughter-in-law Lady Katherine Lestrange. While Lestrange menfolk bought monastic lands, consolidated their estates, and occasionally politicked in London, Anne and then Katherine ran complex households, dressed and disciplined their servants, entertained many guests, bore quite a few little Lestranges and then oversaw their childhoods. So we know, for instance, that the Lestrange servants were dressed in and fed with local produce (woolens and linseys, turnips and wheat, beers and ales). The family (and their guests) dressed, dined and drank better. Their foods were spiced with seasonings purchased in distant markets, then washed down with imported wines. And we have their costings. Through Anne Lestrange’s domestic records, we know that Sir Nicholas often hunted and hawked with his neighbors and in evenings gambled at cards. He often lost small sums and always paid up, cultivating good standing with his fellow hunters and hawkers. And we know that when the younger Lestrange died in 1580, his Lady Katherine saw to it that he was buried (as he wished) “without pompe or pryde of sumptuows or costlye Funeralles.” The ladies Lestrange minded their p’s and q’s. Throughout, they built a ‘new’ Hunstanton Hall, which survives to this day as a Grade I listed building just outside of a village now called Old Hunstanton. But they were not related to the Lestranges of the Harry Potter saga—no ravens graced their coats of arms. And thanks to Anne and Katherine, we know that these Hunstanton Lestranges were quite real. ©.

[Stanley]

A revolutionary man of color.

My soul feels free to travel for the welfare of my fellow creatures both here and hereafter. Paul Cuffe.

The name ‘Cuffee’ was common amongst enslaved persons in the British West Indian and North American colonies. Indeed it came to be used (usually in a derisory way) by enslavers to denote all male slaves. But it’s not of English coinage. It derives from ‘Kofi,’ given to Ashanti boys born on a Friday, and thus helps us to identify Kofi Slocum as a person stolen from the Gold Coast of Africa. Kofi’s owner, a Massachusetts Quaker named Slocum, was conscience-stricken enough by 1745 to allow Kofi to ‘purchase’ his freedom. In 1746, Kofi married a local woman, a Wampanoag named Ruth Moses, and they settled in the Elizabeth Islands where they worked for wages, fished, foraged, and raised a large family. Their youngest son, Paul, was born on Cuttyhunk Island on January 17, 1759, and in 1778 would adopt the legal name Paul Cuffe. He needed the name because he’d already sailed for colonial whalers, then for the fledgling American navy. He’d been captured by the British, imprisoned, but had chosen to be an American and, once freed (again, one might say), became a successful patriot smuggler, working in partnership with an elder brother to break the British blockade by ferrying supplies to the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Patriot enough to petition the patriot authorities of Bristol County against paying taxes because he could not vote. From that base, Paul Cuffe would become one of the richest merchants in southeastern Massachusetts, a ship builder and a ship owner specializing in the coastal trades but by the early 1800s in transatlantic commerce. In 1811, he docked his 109-ton brig Traveler into Liverpool, the first ship there to be “owned and navigated by Negroes.” It was poetic justice, for Liverpool had been an important port of call in the slave trade. And there’s no doubt that, besides being a ship builder, ship owner, merchant, and farmer, Paul Cuffe was politically aware. He continued to agitate for his full rights as a Massachusetts citizen (with some successes) and, further afield, to work for the end of slavery. He could not yet be an abolitionist, but by 1811 he was fully committed to emancipation and transportation, using his skills and his wealth to further the cause of a freedman’s colony in Sierra Leone. In this he worked with British merchants and philanthropists, and with US President James Madison. In a capital city largely built by enslaved labor, Paul Cuffe became, in 1812, the first African-American to enter the “White House” as an honored guest. He died in Westport, MA, in 1817. His last words were “let me pass quietly away.” But not yet. Today in Massachusetts it is Paul Cuffe Day, as it has been since January 17, 2017. ©.

[Stanley]

An unintended consequence of American independence.

Now all my young Dookies and Dutchesses
Take warning from what I've to say
Mind all is your own as you touchesses
Or you'll find us in Botany Bay
--Australian folk song.

Early modern English courts were renowned for imposing justice, not mercy, but should a judge wish to be clement he could sentence criminals to transportation rather than hanging. Very early on, England’s American colonies were the main destination, so there’s a good chance that many of us have a cutpurse perched in our family tree. And it’s humbling to think that some convicted persons chose to hang rather than to travel to Virginia. But the British colony most closely associated with ‘teeming refuse’ is, of course, Australia. That it became so owes at least partly to American independence, recognized by treaty in 1783. But the newly-discovered Antipodes (specifically, Australia) offered an alternative. And so it is that Australians (those of European descent) celebrate “Australia Day” every January 26. Thus they commemorate the landfall of the ‘First Fleet’ and its cutpurse cargo. In poetry, song and story, the place is Botany Bay, where the first ship of the ‘First Fleet,’ HMS Supply, made landfall on January 18, 1788. Botany Bay had always been the target, partly because it was where Captain Cook landed in 1770, announced to the indigenes that he had “discovered” them, and then claimed their land to belong, instead, to King George III. Cook later paid for his Euro-arrogance, but in Hawaii rather than Botany Bay. In January 1788, it was quickly decided that Botany Bay was not a good place for either inhabitation or rehabilitation. It was too shallow. Its narrow mouth too subject to tidal currents and contrary winds. There wasn’t much fresh water. And there were far too many natives roundabout, and (perhaps remembering James Cook) they didn’t seem all that friendly. As more ships in the First Fleet arrived, it was decided to move along the coast a few miles to a better bay, deeper and easier of access, and with a good source of fresh water. So the First Fleet regathered in what we now call Sydney Harbor (specifically, Sydney Cove) to discharge its human jetsam and begin the processes of civilizing them and possessing the continent. So Australia Day is NOT January 18, but January 26. If you sail to Australia, chances are you will dock in Sydney Harbor, but if you fly you’ll likely land in (hopefully on) Botany Bay, for Sydney Airport is Australia’s busiest, and its longest runways extend as landfill well into Botany Bay’s shallows. Sydney itself has expanded to fill the bay’s north shore—but its headlands are a national park and nature preserve, where you can take a “bushwalk” to learn about Australia’s aboriginal cultures and, perhaps, appreciate ironies. ©

[Stanley]

Give credit where it's due?

Great things can happen when you don’t care who gets the credit. Mark Twain.

Henry Bessemer was born on January 19, 1813, of French Huguenot stock. His father, Anthony, was a die-maker and glass grinder credited with several impressive discoveries which, parlayed into money in both France and England, enabled Anthony to buy a small estate in Hertfordshire, where Henry was born. Anthony’s only son, Henry continued in his father’s tradition of tinkering. Among Henry’s least useful inventions was a pencil lead made out of the plant plumbago (lead’s scientific is plumbum). Much more promising was Henry’s method of affixing stamps to legal documents. By puncturing the paper (for instance, a deed or a will) as well as the stamp, his device made forgeries nearly impossible. But the idea was taken over by the government, leaving Henry bereft of credit and out of a job. This disappointment may be why, when Bessemer did invent an industrial process for converting brittle iron into tensile steel, he resisted efforts to acknowledge those who helped him make the process profitable. He took out his UK patent. #2768, for the “Bessemer Converter” in 1855 and soon announced his success through an essay in The Times of London and a widely circulated science paper. But there were snags, most of them arising from Bessemer’s only partial command of chemistry. These were corrected by consultations with a Swedish smelter, Göran Göransson, and the British metallurgist Robert Mushet, and by 1860 Bessemer’s new Sheffield steelworks were churning out good steel in significant quantity and at significant profit. He was also licensing out the “Bessemer Process” to other Sheffield steelmasters. By the time Sir Henry Bessemer died (in 1898) his converters (in his own and in licensed companies) were putting out 11 million tons annually. Bessemer continued to tinker but generally unsuccessfully (his seasickness-proof steamship lounge was a famous failure). And in his memoirs he continued to claim full credit for his greatest success, though he had as early as 1867 granted Robert Mushet a small annual pension). Still, many Americans continued to believe that a Kentucky ironmaster, William Kelly, had “really” invented the process, and Bethlehem Steel displayed a “Kelly Converter” at its head office until, finally, it too succumbed to the Bessemer story. In truth, steel had been made for millennia, and in several cultures (China, South Asia, Southern Africa, and Europe). Bessemer and his helpers ‘converted’ an historic skill into a modern industrial process, and for that they deserve much credit. ©.

[Stanley]

The first principles of the first Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge.

I should like never to be forgotten, to do something great for my country which would make my name live for ever. But I am only a woman. From Anne Clough’s diary for 1841.

Of England’s two ‘ancient’ universities, Cambridge proved the more reluctant to admit women (students and faculty) to full membership. Not until 1948 did Cambridge grant an actual Cambridge degree to an actual female, and it was as if to sweeten a bitter pill that that degree was honoris causa, granted to Elizabeth, George VI’s queen consort. An earlier vote on the subject of women graduates, in 1897, had provoked a mob to hang (in effigy!!) a woman student mounted on a bicycle—perhaps because the first women’s college, Girton, was so far down the Huntingdon Road that Girton students did, indeed, cycle to classes. Newnham College, the second for women (1871), was closer in and the focus of a second mob attack, in 1921, by fearful but un-cycled male students. Indeed Newnham had been closer than Girton to the center of things, and not only geographically. Anne Clough, one of Newnham’s founders and (1871-1892) its first principal, was responsible for its location (much nearer than Girton to the old colleges). She was also a persistent campaigner for female equality, willing to take a half-loaf, any compromise that brought emancipation nearer. Anne Jemimah Clough was born in Liverpool on January 20, 1820. Never formally schooled, she was educated by her mother and early formed an ambition to teach. Encouraged by her brother, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, she set up her own school at Ambleside, where she joined a lively intellectual circle. When Arthur died in 1861, Anne moved south to superintend the education of his daughters (one of them, Blanche Athena Clough, became Principal at Newnham just in time for the 1921 riot). Made secure by a bequest from an aunt, Miss Clough was a perfect candidate to ‘ward’ the welfare of Newnham’s first six students when the college was only a rented house. For Clough, the student was the center of what mattered: the female student in Cambridge’s aggressively male world. She had gender equality in mind, but would not sacrifice her young women on that altar. Behind the scenes, she curbed her temper and took what she could get. Anne Clough was instrumental in getting the college built close to the center of things, central in making Newnham non-sectarian (her bequest to Newnham in 1892 required the college to remain non-sectarian), and clear in her view that it was a positive good for young women to pursue their higher education in feminine company. She would take pleasure in knowing that Newnham remains today a women’s college, long after 1979, when Girton went coed, thus copying most of the once all-male colleges. To this day, Newnham College remains a female place. ©.

[Stanley]

It takes two men to make one brother.

We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty. Israel Zangwill.

Israel Zangwill was born in London’s East End ghetto, an ethnic enclave, on January 21, 1864. But he grew up to contain multitudes. From another perspective, he became ‘a bundle of contradictions.’ These different Israels originated in his parents, who shared the scarring experience of being refugees from the pogroms of eastern Europe but had little else in common. His father, from Russia, was an itinerant peddler who really wanted to be a rabbi. Eventually he abandoned his family and went to Jerusalem to live an aesthetically orthodox life. His mother, from Poland, was cut of different cloth. She wanted her brood to be at home in England and would brook no opposition to that aim. Israel’s childhood followed the mother’s lead. He excelled in school in various places (for his father was an itinerant), but back in London became a star student at the Jews’ Free School (today known as JFS). From there Israel went to London University where, despite the handicap of being an evenings-only student, earned distinctions in French, English, and ‘moral science.’ After a spell teaching at the JFS, he won independence as a writer: serious fictions about the meanings of life and short, comic pieces for The London Puck and Jerome K. Jerome’s The Idler. Life took a more serious turn when (1895) Israel married Edith Ayrton, daughter of a leading Cambridge professor (of Physics) and herself a bundle of contradictions. Edith’s birth mother was one of the ‘Edinburgh Seven,’ a pioneer medical student; her stepmother brought her up Jewish; and Edith became a novelist and a militantly moderate suffragist. She encouraged Israel (who supported her suffragist campaigns) to become a more serious person, and he did, criticizing British Jews for their indecisions (between ‘Reform’ assimilation or ‘Orthodox’ purity). His mother versus his father? Perhaps. Predictably, when Israel Zangwill ‘converted’ to Zionism, his was a Zionism with a difference, not Palestine-centered. Israel even toyed with the idea of a Jewish Zion in Texas, a fascinating thought, and in the end he disavowed the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (for a future Jewish “homeland” in Palestine) because Balfour made no provision for the Arabs whose Palestine was, then and there, a homeland of its own. Happily married to Edith, Zangwill called his countryside home “Far End,” raised a couple of successful children, and died an unreconstructed contradiction in 1926. He elected cremation, and at his funeral ceremony the officiating rabbi spoke to the text “Flame thou wert; to flame thou hast returned.” Israel’s ashes rest in peace at the Jewish Liberal Cemetery in suburban Willesden. ©

[I'm impressed that he rejected a homeland in Palestine because the Palestinians would have to lose a homeland. He was ahead of the curve....]

[Stanley]

The bicyclist amateur of archaeology.

He was here at the beginning and he was here at the end. Mrs. Edith Pretty on the work of Basil Brown at the Sutton Hoo dig.

The Sutton Hoo treasures at the British Museum must be on any ‘must-see’ list. I first viewed them in 1971, on a break from the manuscript room. It’s a collection from a 7th-century burial mound, items of rare beauty (and brute savagery), all intended to ease their owner’s transition to the world of the dead. There’s even an ornamental whetstone, should the double-edged sword need sharpening. What I have since learned about Sutton Hoo’s discovery is almost as wonderful, notably the role played in it by one of history’s more unlikely scholar-archaeologists, Basil John Wait Brown, born not too far from Sutton Hoo on January 22, 1888. His was a poor family, his father a farm worker and wheelwright who acquired a tenancy. But the family had a history. Basil learned of it through his grandfather’s almanacs and astronomical charts. Basil’s formal schooling ended in 1900, but he continued in evening classes, in self-study, and when the BBC came along by listening to the wireless. So he became an expert draughtsman, gained competency in several languages, and became a noted amateur astronomer. Still a tenant farmer, Basil was fascinated by ancient ruins, found several on his own, and gained parttime work (at about £1 to £2 weekly) with local museums. So when Edith Pretty began to pester local museums to look into some odd mounds on her land, they fobbed her off with Basil Brown, and in 1938 he arrived on his faithful bicycle and set to work with two of Mrs. Pretty’s laborers. Their first season was not hugely productive, but Brown had identified a larger mound as a likely ‘ship burial.’ Excavation began in early May 1939, and by June enough had been found to attract the attention of experts, who (being experts) wanted to take over the work from the untutored and unqualified Brown. Edith Pretty insisted that Brown retain a watching brief. And so Brown was there in late July, when the burial chamber was opened and its magnificence became headline news. War intervened, and after volunteer war work Basil Brown continued in his amateur passion for ancient digs. Gradually, his role in the Sutton Hoo discoveries became better known. In the mid 1960s, Brown and his wife (they’d married in 1923) gained a civil list pension from the crown and knot of private supporters, and by 1968 they were able to buy the small cottage which they’d first rented in 1935. One benefactor told Brown than now he might “achieve immortality.” Possibly. There have been a couple of BBC documentaries on Brown, a recent movie (The Dig, starring Ralph Fiennes as Basil) and I am told that the BM now pays heed to Brown’s role in finding the burial mound at Sutton Hoo. When you do see the treasures, think on Basil Brown, their first finder. ©.

[Stanley]

From the Viking Rollo to the Kaiser Bill.

The ‘great fire’ of Alesund, January 23, 1904.

On our visits to Norway we missed Alesund, often said to be the country’s most beautiful market town. This owes much to its setting, on a narrow neck of land at the opening of the Geirangerfjord, but also to its architecture. This is partly because ‘old’ Alesund no longer exists. Like most Norwegian fishing ports, Alesund (the Old Norse name translates as ‘sound of the eels’) was built of wood, and it burned to the ground on the night of January 23, 1904. Although there was but one fatality, an elderly woman, over 10,000 people were left homeless (the 1900 census listed almost 12,000 inhabitants) in the dark and cold of a Norwegian winter. Various state agencies rushed to help, but the town’s savior was not Norwegian at all. Kaiser Wilhelm II, by his own lights history’s greatest Prussian, was accustomed to holiday in fjord country, and Alesund’s plight touched his Nordic heart. He sent emergency supplies (and military barracks) and then contributed money and patronage to the task of rebuilding. So still today, Alesund is a city of stone, brick, and iron, not of wood, and (some say) looking more like Vienna than like Bergen. And what makes Alesund unusual was the prevailing architectural style of the rebuilding. Perhaps at Kaiser Bill’s insistence, but more likely because most of the Norwegian architects drawn into the project were young and Berlin-educated, the new town became a showpiece of Jugendstil, the ‘young style’ then sweeping Europe and known as Art Nouveau. Today, that heritage is celebrated at the Jugendstilsenteret, a 1905 building which began life as a pharmacy but is now an internationally recognized Art Nouveau museum with a nearly perfect Jugendstil interior. In gratitude to Wilhelm II, the town erected a memorial statue that still stands in a city park. Gratitude had limits, however; during the Nazi occupation (1940-45) Alesund became notorious (to Hitler’s generals) as a center of the resistance and a port highly suspected of continuing contact with the Scottish islands. As the city replenished and grew, it remained a fishing port, but with the North Sea oil boom many fishermen abandoned the eel, cod, and herring trades to run supplies to the oil platforms, and ship and platform building became big businesses (though not in or near the city center). In the much longer run, Alesund is said to have been (in the 9th century CE) the home port of Rollo, a Viking chieftain who settled down from raiding to become the founding father of the Dukes of Normandy. So, through William the Conqueror, Rollo’s great-great-great grandson, the ‘sound of the eels’ contributed its bit to the invention of England. The land of the eels, not of the Angles? ©.

[Stanley]

Ernst Hoffmann, the Tomcat Murr, and Aunt Charlotte.

I resolved to make the fullest use of the power within me and describe as with a magic wand the circles within which all life around me should dance for my delight. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann.

I first learned of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann through reading Robertson Davies’s The Lyre of Orpheus (1988), a comic fiction in which a lost Hoffman composition is translated into a modern, Canadian opera. The ‘lost’ composition is a Davies invention, and other elements (magical, daemonic, absurdist) in the novel render it suspect as a ‘real’ insight into Hoffmann’s life. But the more one finds out about Hoffmann the more he appears to have been a very odd spirit indeed. In the novel, Davies makes much of “Katers Murr”, Hoffmann’s supernatural alter ego fitted to one of the novel’s odder characters. One of Hoffmann’s best-known works was Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (“The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr,” 1819). Scholars have long thought that the “Auntie Littlefeet” of the Murr stories was Hoffmann’s complete fabrication, but it turns out that she was based on his aunt Charlotte, one of a trio of eccentrics (the other two were his uncle Otto and his aunt Johanna) who parented Hoffmann after he had been abandoned by his birth parents. Ernst Hoffmann lived with these three eccentrics, all unmarried, from age 2 until his late teens, and they had a great influence on his life. Not least, they encouraged him to read, to draw, and to compose at the piano and, in tune with the times, he read the precursors of the modern age, Goethe, Rousseau, and Schiller. So what else could Hoffmann become but one of the leading spirits of the Romantic Era, novelist, composer, critic, essayist, artist (caricaturist, really), and constant reinventor of himself. One of his inventions was that third name, Amadeus, adopted in homage to Mozart, for Hoffmann was born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann in Königsberg, Prussia on January 24, 1776. It was even then something of a German island in a Russian sea, and it would change hands several times during the Napoleonic wars. That contributed to Hoffmann’s strangely peripatetic youth and perhaps also to his disdain for the real worlds of war and politics. Just so, he trained for the law (his forbears were jurists), but would instead live the life of an artist, a stranger in his own country, an alien in the profoundest sense. After several brushes with the law, with the invading French, and even with officers in the Prussian army, he chose fantasy. It’s his The Nutcracker and the Mouse King that Tchaikovsky used to create his fantastic ballet. Hoffmann would also inspire Poe’s horror stories, Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, and Davies’s The Lyre of Orpheus. “ETAH” (as Davies calls him) is clearly someone worth knowing about. ©

[Stanley]

Here comes the bride . . . .

Here comes the bride. The royal wedding of January 25, 1858.

Scholars who think that history is, or can be, made by heroes, point to the early death of the German Kaiser Friedrich III as a European, or even a global, tragedy. Friedrich reigned as German emperor for only 99 days, and his death (from throat cancer) on June 15, 1888, signaled, they say, the death of German liberalism. His son Wilhelm II, aka “Kaiser Bill,” marched Germany towards empire and militarism and thus towards catastrophe: not only defeat in World War I but the crippling Versailles treaty, the feeble Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler, the Holocaust and a second world war. It is indeed one of the great “what ifs” of history, and it’s weighted in undeniable facts about Friedrich III, not least in his public defenses of German Jews against the anti-Semitic crusades of historians like Heinrich von Treitschke and courtier-clerics like the Reverend Adolf Stoecker and their sinister nonsenses about the ancient purities of a German “folk.” The idea that Friedrich might have made a heroic difference depends on a whole series of might-have-beens, including the pipe dream that Europe’s increasingly heated imperial rivalries could have been settled around a conference table. There is also the necessity of ignoring the reactionary temper of the Prussian Junker class and its super-competent Svengali, Otto von Bismarck. But maybe if Friedrich hadn’t smoked so much tobacco, ormaybe had his resulting cancer been diagnosed sooner, or maybe had it been successfully removed, then maybe the new German state might have evolved into a constitutional monarchy. What can be said with certainty is that Kaiser Friedrich’s liberalism, such as it was, owed much to his wife Victoria, the eldest child of Britain’s Queen Victoria. As Britain’s Princess Royal, Victoria was almost as German as Friedrich himself, and emotionally attached to her father, Prince Albert of Saxe-Cobourg and to his reforming notions. In their long wait for Friedrich’s accession, the royal couple did aim to make Germany “liberal” (in the 19th-century sense) and did hope to snooker Bismarck. But again one is confronted with impossibly long trains of might-have-beens. What is utterly certain about all this is that, on the day it was sealed, January 25, 1858, in London’s Chapel Royal, the Princess Royal processed to the altar to the stately cadences of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. It had been composed in 1842 as incidental music for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Princess Victoria and her royal beau institutionalized it, secular music for a religious ceremony. I guess that’s liberal, too. And Felix Mendelssohn was a Christian convert. ©

[Stanley]

Queen Anne's "real" favorite.

Don’t go to the movies to do historical research, unless it’s historical research about movies. Tony Kushner.

Yorgos Lanthimos’sThe Favourite (2018) was an “historical comedy drama.” Set in the court of England’s—after 1707, Britain’s—Queen Anne, and filmed in and around Hatfield House, it seeks historicity, as does its Baroque soundtrack. Its characters are appropriately dressed and wigged, and Emma Stone (the American who took the part of Abigail Masham) met the challenge of learning an English accent—and not your modern BBC stuff, either. And the film’s main characters really did exist: Anne herself (played by Olivia Coleman), Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), and Sarah’s poor cousin Abigail Masham. And all three were lead players in a real drama that was considered bizarre, occasionally sinister, and entirely worthy of satire. But it would be unwise to use The Favourite as source material for a college course on early modern English politics, nor on early modern lesbianism, and certainly not on the care and feeding of rabbits. Queen Anne’s court was a place of intrigue and plotting. Favorites did rise and fall. Anne’s constant pregnancies and their failures did do her great harm, and were crucial to the question of the royal succession. And Sarah Churchill was at or near the center of things. But the Queen’s most successful favorite, a woman who was in Anne’s life before Sarah Churchill and still there at Anne’s death, plays no part in the film (or none that I can remember). And if Yorgos Lanthimos had known about her, he might have found her life a source for any number of “historical comedy-dramas.” She was Elizabeth, Duchess of Somerset, born Lady Elizabeth Percy on January 26, 1667. As the only surviving child of an earl, she became at her father’s death one of England richest females, heiress to the vast Percy estates. Given the general run of things for women, even noblewomen, at the time, she thus became a valuable property. And since she was three years old, that’s how she was viewed at first, a little girl whose marriage needed to be arranged as advantageously as possible. Her first marriage ended in a bizarre murder in 1682. She was a suspect, but she walked away from it even richer, and within three months of the murder she was again wed, this time to the duke of Somerset. She didn’t like him but bore his children and became his partner in court politics, and a constant friend and companion of the Princess and future Queen Anne. At Anne’s court, Elizabeth was successful enough to attract the baleful attentions of the satirist Jonathan Swift. Three centuries on, Yorgos Lanthimos, a lesser talent than Swift, missed her entirely. That’s rather sad. She would have made a great film. ©.

[Stanley]

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!!

"Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.” Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born in rural Cheshire, England, on January 27, 1832. He would become famous as Lewis Carroll, the author of the “Alice” books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871), and the nonsense poems Jabberwocky (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876). Not only famous, but prosperous, for these publications sold like flapjacks during his lifetime, including to Queen-Empress Victoria, who was not as solemn a person as she looked. Later, the ‘Alice’ books were translated into plays (Alice in Wonderland as a musical), and Carroll enjoyed the notoriety they brought him. He was also an accomplished—albeit an amateur—photographer. Taken together, Carroll’s Alice books and his photography have raised doubts about his sexuality. Photos and drawings of Alice Liddell, the little girl to whom the Alice stories were first told, have struck some modern scholars as pedophilic, or unhealthily erotic. Possibly so. Or not. More certainly the whole debate says something about our contemporary views of sex and sexuality. On these matters, we may have more to learn about ourselves than about Lewis Carroll or Charles Dodgson or, heaven help us, about Alice Liddell herself. What is quite apparent is that the man lived a full, interesting life. To do this, he triumphed over a shyness made more acute by an overbearing father, by his own stutter, and by his slight physique. His was a family full of clergymen, his father of the high church, Anglo-Catholic variety, but Carroll’s own theological speculations suggest a sturdily Calvinistic core. His enthusiasm for the theater and the arts also set him apart from Oxford’s prevailing orthodoxy, and he was unusual among Oxford faculty for never taking holy orders (Alice’s father, the head of Christ Church, excused him from that requirement). As for the stutter, it may have bothered Dodgson more than it bothered his friends. And he made many friends, not only Alice Liddell and her little playmates but adults, some of them women whose company he enjoyed: too much, his siblings thought. And Carroll the eccentric story-teller was also a bit of a wild card in his main profession, mathematics tutor at Christ Church. Some of his surviving computations are today seen as original, indicative of an ability to speculate deeply if not to work steadily. He also found strength enough to survive his unhappiness as a schoolboy at Rugby, which in his time was no place for a sensitive plant. On the whole, Carroll and Dodgson were characters one might like to have around, for education or entertainment. That was the judgment of the Liddell family; it’s good enough for me. ©

[Stanley]

Entrepreneur and artist.

Amongst the several mechanic Arts that have engaged my attention, there is no one which I have pursued with so much steadiness and pleasure, as that of Letter-Founding. Having been an early admirer of the beauty of Letters, I became insensibly desirous of contributing to the perfection of them. John Baskerville, 1758.

Thus John Baskerville explained himself, in the preface to his new edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost. 1758 was not, however, the birth year of the Baskerville font, He’d brought it out a year earlier in a new edition of Virgil, “Publii Virgilii Maronis Bucolica, Georgica, et Aeneis (Birminghamiae: Typis Johannis Baskerville.” In the years remaining to him (he would die in 1775), Baskerville would print 52 more books, mostly classics and all in his eponymous font, and they are collectors’ items. Princeton University owns 43 of them, including six copies of the 1757 Virgil, and boasts that they are among “the most beautifully printed books in the English language.” Chances are you will have Baskerville in your word processor, so please try it out. John Baskerville was baptized near Kidderminster on January 28, 1706. The English (at least those towards the upper reaches of the social scale) were just beginning to embrace consistent spelling and standard penmanship; and it was as a ‘writing master’ that John Baskerville first hung out his shingle in Birmingham in 1726. He moonlighted as a gravestone cutter who paid attention to the looks of his letters, and a small slate from 1728 advertising his skills (in Roman, Italic, and Gothic) can be viewed today in Birmingham Central Library. In that same year his parents mortgaged their freehold to help John expand his business, and diversify it. He would prosper as a ‘japanner’, inventing new processes for lacquering, hiring highly skilled craftsmen to execute these processes, and paying them well. But Baskerville never lost his fascination with letters, and in the most literal sense of that word. He wanted to craft letters that looked their parts. His ultimate design was based on what he learned from Italian calligraphy and from other printmakers like William Caslon (look him up). To show off his own font at its best, John Baskerville also invented a new ‘woven’ paper, calculated to take perfect impressions of his font’s delicate proportionings. Today we do it with “pixels” and call it progress. He would have disagreed. Along with his multiple skills, he was a noted controversialist. Militantly atheistic, John Baskerville directed that he be buried in unconsecrated ground at his estate (which he called “Easy Hill”!!), but with the accidents (or ironies) of time his remains have fetched up in a Church of England cemetery. Original castings of his typeface are more appropriately interred in the Cambridge University library. ©.

[Stanley]

Science, politics, ethics, and nature.

The scientific man has to work for truth . . . but he is never more than a trustee for posterity, and has no authority to define the functions or limit the freedom of those who follow him. Richard Gregory.

Founded in 1869, the weekly journal Nature became, and remains, the world’s most influential English-language science publication. Its online edition has over 3 million subscribers. It has published research of earth-shaking importance, including Crick and Watson on DNA (1953), Meitner and Frisch on nuclear fission (1939), and Wilson on plate tectonics (1966) Clearly Nature is interdisciplinary, and usually its research papers are summaries, early reports rather than exhaustive treatments. Much of its content can be read with profit by amateurs, a quality that inhered in its original DNA. It was founded by the astronomer Norman Lockyer and the publisher Alexander Macmillan to convince a literate audience of the relevance of scientific research, and something of science’s beauty, too. It drew its motto from Wordsworth (“To the solid ground of nature trusts the Mind that builds for aye”) and included in its pages musings about science and ethics, science and philosophy, science and progress. So Nature’s recent intrusions into politics (both endorsements and attacks) are not “new.” They’ve been meat and drink for a series of editors, not least Richard Gregory. Gregory was appointed scientific editor in 1905, editor-in-chief in 1919, and ran the show until 1945. Although Gregory became ‘scientist’ enough to be offered an astronomy professorship in 1897, his was an unusual and amateurish background. He was born in Bristol on January 29, 1864, his father a cobbler. Gregory left school at 12 and might have continued in shoemaking, indeed apprenticed to a cobbler in 1879, but luck led him first into evening classes and then to a job as a lab assistant in a local college. He did well enough in both to win a scholarship to a London technical school, where he published his first ‘scientific’ paper (on the properties of spun glass) and became Norman Lockyer’s laboratory assistant. From that basis, the cobbler’s son became a leading science writer, even a scientist in his own right. He retained his father’s enthusiasms for political reform (and perhaps his grandfather’s Methodist zealousness) to advocate science and science education as essential in Britain’s rivalry with Germany, but after World War I (chastened, perhaps, by the bloodshed) Gregory (now Sir Richard) became an internationalist abroad and a Labour party activist at home. For him, science was progress incarnate, the best route to prosperity and to peace. The journal Science still reflects those hopes, as it has from its first issue. It will have much to say about the upcoming American election campaigns. ©

[Stanley]

From San Berdoo to Storm Lake

If you're really interested in acting there is a part of you that relishes the struggle. It’s a narcotic in the way that you are trained to do this work and nobody will let you do it, so you’re a little bit nuts. Gene Hackman, 2004.

Gene Hackman has long been among my favorite American actors, and it seems that he’s been there ‘forever,’ but in fact he was a late comer. His big breakthrough didn’t come until he was 41, in The French Connection (1971), as NYPD detective Jimmy (‘Popeye’) Doyle, a chewed over, cynical, and unlovable maverick who, suspensefully and accidentally, becomes a hero. He’s played many very different roles since, often brilliantly, but in my mind he’s still ‘Popeye’ Doyle, his natural role, his type cast, his celluloid alter ego. Indeed Gene Hackman came up the hard way. He was born in San Bernadino, “San Berdoo” in the local argot, on January 30, 1930. He was an all-American kid, born of several immigrant strains, with an undependable father who abandoned Gene’s Canadian immigrant mother in 1943. Soon after that Gene spent a year or so in Storm Lake, Iowa, interesting because the town has been a breeding ground for mavericks, but it was more important to Hackman that he fetched up at the Pasadena Playhouse acting school with another misfit, Dustin Hoffman. Hackman and Hoffman were voted “the least likely to succeed” in their year, and that almost came true in New York, where the two enjoyed unemployments, Hackman making ends meet by pickup work in a chain restaurant. When Hoffman was plucked to play Benjamin in The Graduate (1967), he almost dragged Hackman with him as Mr. Robinson, the cuckolded father. But Gene was too young, and director Mike Nichols solved that problem by hiring Murray Hamilton, a little older and a lesser challenge to the makeup team. Hackman’s 1967 role, that got him an Oscar nomination for supporting actor, was as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde. Afterwards, on the whole, we can say that Hackman in Hollywood took the Bonnie and Clyde route to stardom, his inner person perfectly displayed as Popeye Doyle and then as an FBI agent investigating the Civil Rights martyrdoms of 1964 (Mississippi Burning, 1988). Those roles were played straight, but Hackman could overplay, as he did in the Superman movies (as the hyper-villain Lex Luthor). But to speak truth, Hackman could also do well as a nice guy, as in the warm-hearted basketball film Hoosiers (1988). Another example of his versatility came when he “did” Royal Tenenbaum in 2001. So the chances are that Gene Hackman has lurking inside of him a good guy, as well as a ‘Popeye.’ Hard-bitten and/or soft-cored, I wish Gene Hackman a happy 94th birthday, which is a possibility as he’s rumored still to enjoy good health. ©.

[Stanley]

A woman in a man's world.

The Den Mother of Abstract Expressionism. Title of a 2018 review article on Betty Parsons.

In 2011, LA’s Getty Museum urged visitors to tour its special exhibition (on “Crosscurrents” in modern art) with a particular question in mind: “Is It Still a Man’s World?” It was a good question. Indeed, one could say that in the 20th century, modern American modern art reeked of male chauvinism. The abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock strode out of Cody, Wyoming (in his cowboy boots!!), to spatter his paints onto huge canvases. One might call him ‘male’ in his methods as well as in his madnesses (alcohol, fast cars, and fast women), and it's his character as well as his art that provokes this question: how many females figure in your list of famous abstract expressionists? Few, I’ll warrant. But there is another side to Pollock’s story, the woman he married in 1945 and who planted him in the Long Island countryside, kept his nose to his canvases, tolerated him, and then after he was dead (1956) in his very own car crash (DWI in a sporty Oldsmobile, with two female passengers) kept him alive in the art market. She was very much a she, Lee Krasner, and she’s now appreciated as an artist in her own right, not merely as Jackson Pollock’s minder. And there are other women in the story, too. The Pollock-Krasner team slept, ate, worked, and painted on a Peggy Guggenheim grubstake. And not only that: the gallery that Lee Krasner liked to take Pollock’s spatters to was the Betty Parsons Gallery, and Betty Parsons was the person to go to if you were an abstract expressionist running short on your rent money. Betty Parsons was born (confusingly) Betty Pierson on January 31, 1900, her parents members in good standing of the New York elite. Her family divided its time between New York, Palm Beach, Paris, and Newport, and when the time came they sent Betty to Manhattan’s best girls’ school. In 1919 they married their débutante off to Schuyler Livingston Parsons, an older man whose first names marked him as an aristocrat’s aristocrat. But Betty, who’d already exhibited signs of restless rebellion, didn’t like him, and when in 1922 she divorced him (in Paris), her parents disinherited her. Ten years later, the Great Depression wiped out her alimony, and she made her own way in the art world. Well-connected personally with other elite women of similar tastes, Betty took part in the founding of the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1946 set up on her own as the Betty Parsons Gallery right in the heart of the posh 50s, 11 E. 57th. Until her death in 1982 she exhibited Pollack, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, and a few foreigners—most of them male. But Betty Parsons was a watercolorist, and like Lee Krasner she’s now valued as an artist in her own right. And about time, too. ©

[Stanley]

Saga-spinner and librarian,

Yet was he a right mighty man, and much beloved of all folk. From The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue, transl. by Eiríkur Magnússon and William Morris, 1891.

Despite their comforts, or because of their comforts, many educated Victorians went in search of an heroic age in which men were men and women were, well, women. Thus they revived the legends of Guinevere and Arthur, her cuckolded king-husband. But for some Arthur’s Round Table and good-deed-doing knights proved too tame. These malcontents went in search of wilder oats, and found them among the Old Norse who had once pillaged Anglo-Saxon England, ruled the northern isles, and left their place-names littered across the landscape. They had also left their ‘sagas,’ their own heroic legends, first handed down orally (spoken or sung, as the word ‘saga’ implies) through the generations, and later committed to runestones and to paper. Of these the most heroic sagas were Icelandic in origin, comprehending long voyages in stormy or fog-bound seas, first landings in Iceland, and the settlement there of new “steads” ruled by great kings and their great-hearted women, legendary folk whose moralities were not especially “Victorian.” Many of these sagas were brought to England by the Icelander Eiríkur Magnússon. He was born in eastern Iceland on February 1, 1833, the son of a Christian minister called, of course, Magnús (for Icelanders had yet to settle on permanent family surnames). As a younger son, Eiríkur was not thought a likely lad, but his brother’s death sent him to school and then to theological college. He aimed to be cure of souls in his father’s parish, but his linguistic expertise brought him to the attention of a British bible society intent on producing a safely Protestant and wholly Icelandic Bible. So Eiríkur settled in England, helped with that Bible, and found a market for the Icelandic Sagas, which he began to translate (into a stylized English) in 1864. Many of these are available in E-text today, notably those volumes Magnússon published in co-partnership with William Morris, the designer, artist, and primitive socialist who had already acquired a medievalist enthusiasm and was glad to absorb into it the saga-stories. The Magnússon-Morris titles included The Story of Howard the Halt; The Story of the Heath-Slayings; The Story of Grettir the Strong; and The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue. You get the idea? If such titles whet your appetite for the strangely heroic, you can access these and others on the internet: or see them in ‘modern’ guise in Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ and, even more recently, the Harry Potter saga. Through all this, Eiríkur Magnússon’s other life was that of a reforming, modernizing librarian at Cambridge University, but that is an almost entirely different saga. ©

[Stanley]

Balto versus Togo.

Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod. 1995 book by Gary Paulsen, who finished 41st in the 1983 “Great Race of Mercy.”

Alaskans are always eager to self-identify as different, not so much un-American as hyper-American. They’re proud of their eccentricities, and not surprisingly link these to their state’s distinctive climates, its supersized mosquitos and Kodiaks, and of course its rank as our biggest state, one that could take in two Texases and still have enough empty space to add in an Oklahoma. But for all of its oddities, Alaska has no Alamo, no foundation myth. It was just a real estate deal, ‘Seward’s Icebox,’ purchased from Tsarist Russia at the bargain-basement price of two cents an acre. Until the gold rush of 1898, that was thought excessive—and most of the gold was in Canada’s Yukon. So, instead of romance, Alaskans invented the Iditarod, or to give it its full name the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, an impossibly long run for mushers (in these latter days there are women- as well as men-mushers) and their dog teams who battle blizzards, windchill, sea ice and snowbanks, to get from Willow to Nome. It used to be from Anchorage to Nome, but Alaskans have had to cope with climate change, and these days the trail from Anchorage is too unlikely to be snowbound in March, when modern Iditarod teams mush off into the almost unknown. Being Alaskan, the Iditarod is not old, its first incarnation coming in 1973, and it’s admitted that its links with Alaskan history are mainly symbolic (hardship, eccentricity, etc.). But it does commemorate a real event in Alaskan history, “The Great Race of Mercy,” when dog teams and their mushers carried a small (20 lbs.) cylinder of anti-diptheria serum from Nenana to Nome. They ran it as a relay, involving 20 mushers and about 100 dogs, and that made it a bit easier (or at least faster) than the modern Iditarod, 675 miles in just 5½ days, when on February 2, 1925 the last of the mushers brought his sled into plague-stricken Nome. The serum was distributed, lives were saved, headlines were made. And heroes too. That last musher was a Norwegian, Gunnar Kaasen, and his lead dog a Siberian named Balto. So both man and dog were immigrants, but in 1925 it proved easier to make a hero out of a dog-immigrant than a human-immigrant, and Balto became better-known than the French immigrant chien Rin-Tin-Tin—for a least a season, long enough for a Balto statue to be sculpted and mounted in New York City’s Central Park. It’s still there. The plaudits should have gone to a Finn, Sepp Seppala, and his lead dog Togo, who ran the longest leg of the relay (264 miles!!), but then historical accuracy has never been Alaskans’ greatest virtue. Anyway, the main thing was the serum, not the truth. ©.

[Tripps]

Thanks for mentioning the Iditarod.

It's another of those words that have stuck in the velcro section of my memory like Ordzhonikidze.
I don't get many opportunities (none in fact) to use it.

Why "mushers" though? Is it connected with the Romany word - as in "from a mush in Shepherds Bush" as used in Steptoe and Son? I doubt it. More research needed.

[Stanley]

"In the late 1860s, this term was recorded as mouche, which likely comes from the French marche, "go" or "run." Today, even more confusingly, mushers are more likely to say "Hike!" than "Mush!"
I did a quick furtle David, you piqued my imagination!

[Tripps]

you piqued my imagination!

That was the idea.