Sunday round-up 1 September 2024
Birthday wishes to O.J. Simpson's lawyer, the last Bee Gee and one of the League of Gentlemen, 85 years since the German invasion of Poland and 20 years since Beslan
The beginning of September already! Breaking out the paper hats and jelly today are legendary British cartoonist Nick Garland (89), increasingly-out-to-lunch attorney and law professor Alan Dershowitz (86), actress, writer and producer Lily Tomlin (85), last Bee Gee standing Sir Barry Gibb (78), ubiquitous veteran session drummer Russ Kunkel (76), singer, entrepreneur and beat-turner-around Gloria Estefan (57), Dutch football hero and former Newcastle United manager Ruud Gullit (62), Australian soap phenomenon and alleged singer Craig McLachlan (59), The League of Gentlemen’s Steve Pemberton (57), author, activist and one-time “Mrs Salman Rushdie” Padma Lakshmi (54), Ferrari Formula 1 driver Carlos Sainz Jr (30) and American actress and singer Zendaya (28).
No longer with us but born on this day: Dulwich College founder Edward Alleyn (1566), founder of The New York Herald James Gordon Bennett Sr (1795), Russian general Aleksei Brusilov (1853), Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875), armoured warfare pioneer Major-General J.F.C. Fuller (1878), Coronation Street legend Violet Carson (1898), world heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano (1923), Conservative cabinet minister and would-have-been Thatcher dauphin Cecil Parkinson (1931), country star Conway Twitty (1933) and 9/11 mastermind Mohamed Atta (1968).
Today in 1897, the first underground rapid transit system in North America opened. The Tremont Street Subway in Boston was initially very modest, serving only five stations: Boylston, Park Street, Scollay Square, Adams Square and Haymarket. But it is still in use, subsumed now into the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s 26.7-mile long Green Line, which carries on average around 140,000 passengers every day. The tunnels were created to take streetcars off the crowded surface streets of Boston, by then a city of more than half a million people and the fifth-largest in the nation (after New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and St Louis).
Eighty-five years ago on this day, at 4.47 am, the German pre-dreadnought battleship Schleswig-Holstein, at anchor in the Free City of Danzig, opened fire on the Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte. They were the first shots of Germany’s invasion of Poland and traditionally of the Second World War (although the Chinese population of Manchuria, which had been invaded by Japan on 18 September 1931, might argue they had hardly been at peace). Wehrmacht units had already started crossing the Polish border and the Luftwaffe quickly bombed Polish airfields and the Tczew Bridge across the Vistula. Warsaw fell on 28 September and organised Polish resistance came to an end on 6 October after the Battle of Kock.
A decade after the invasion of Poland, Carol Reed’s The Third Man had its world première at the Ritz Cinema in Hastings. It is a towering, magnificent, dark masterpiece, my favourite film by a comfortable distance, starring Trevor Howard, Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles and Alida Valli, with a screenplay by Graham Greene, production by Reed, Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick and an unexpected, brilliant, idiosyncratic soundtrack by zither player Anton Karas. I wrote about the brooding unhappiness at the centre of the film for CulturAll last year.
On this day 50 years ago, a United States Air Force Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spy plane piloted by Major James V. Sullivan, accompanied by reconnaissance systems officer Major Noel F. Widdifield, set the world record for the fastest flight from New York to London. The journey was completed in one hour 54 minutes 56.4 seconds, at an average speed of 1,806.964 miles per hour. The aircraft, Blackbird 61-7972, was on its way to the Farnborough Air Show; it made its final flight on 6 March 1990 and is now on display in the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, annex of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum at Washington Dulles International Airport.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Beslan school siege. A group of armed terrorists from the Riyad-us Saliheen, at the instigation of Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, occupied School Number One in Beslan, North Ossetia, taking 1,100 hostages including 777 children. The terrorists demanded that Russia withdraw its military forces from Chechnya. Russian security forces quickly erected a perimeter around the school, with the deployment of police, Internal Troops, Ground Forces, Special Purpose Mobile Units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Spetsnaz special forces. The terrorists had gathered the hostages in the school gymnasium, which they wired with improvised explosive devices and surrounded with tripwires, also threatening to kill 50 hostages for every one of their number killed by the security forces and 20 hostages for every one injured. The Russian authorities pledged to negotiate rather than use force, but talks foundered the following day and the security forces cut off supplies of food, water and medicine. At 1.03 pm on the third day, there were two explosions, still unexplained, somewhere in the gymnasium. As shots were fired, the security forces decided to storm the school buildings. Fighting continued until around 1.00 am on 4 September. 31 terrorists were killed, as were 333 others, including 186 children. It stands as the deadliest school shooting in history.
If you like early Christian saints about whom little is known, it’s your lucky today. Today is the feast of St Terentian (d. AD 118), St Vibiana (3rd century AD), St Verena of Zurzach (AD 260-AD 320), St Sixtus of Reims (d. c.AD 300), St Constantius of Aquino (6th century AD), St Lupus of Sens (AD 573-AD 623), St Giles the Hermit (7th century AD) and St Nivard (7th century AD).
Today was marked in the Soviet Union as Knowledge Day, traditionally the first day of the new school year, and is still observed in Israel because of the large number of former Soviet refugees. Australia is marking the first day of spring with Wattle Day, while any remaining fans of the late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi (you know who you are) will no doubt be commemorating the anniversary of the Al Fateh Revolution in Libya.
Factoids
After the passage of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, which made it illegal to discriminate against women, including in employment, training and education, the headmaster of Heaton School in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Henry Askew, announced that he would abide by the provisions of the new legislation by extending corporal punishment to girls as well as boys. This may not have been what lawyers call the “legislative intent”.
The cabinet secretary, Simon Case, is expected to step down at the end of this year due to ill health. He is the 13th person to hold the role since its establishment in 1916, and of those, 12 have held either undergraduate or postgraduate degrees from Oxford or Cambridge. The exception is the first cabinet secretary, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Maurice Hankey (later Lord Hankey), who was commissioned into the Royal Marine Artillery at 18, after leaving school.
Of those 13 senior civil servants, eight were educated at independent schools, four at grammar schools and one at a voluntary-aided Roman Catholic school.
There are six legal deposit libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland: the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Dublin Library. (Trinity College remains a UK deposit library despite Ireland leaving the United Kingdom in 1922.) Under various statutes, one copy of every book (which includes pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, sheet music and maps) published in the UK must be sent to the British Library, while the other five libraries may request a free copy within a year of publication.
Today is the anniversary of the death in 1159 of the only English pope, Hadrian IV. He was born Nicholas Breakspear in Herefordshire in about 1100, though little is known about his early life. He became an Augustinian canon regular at the abbey of Saint-Ruf near Avignon, eventually rising to abbot, and came to the attention of Pope Eugene III (1145-53) who appointed him a papal legate and used him on a number of diplomatic missions. When Eugene died, Anastasius IV was elected to succeed him but, aged around 80, died after 18 months as pope, and when Breakspear arrived in Rome at the end of 1154, the College of Cardinals elected him pontiff. He lasted less than five years as pope, and is regarded as having been tough and effective, but his historical fame derives largely from his status as the only Englishman to have been elected pope (and it seems unlikely there will be another, with a community of less than four million and religious observance declining sharply).
Only 44 Englishmen have ever been made cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church, the first being theologian and archdeacon of Rochester Robert Pullen, who was elevated in 1144 (Breakspear was the second). At least two are believed to have been possible candidates to become pope (“papabile”, or “pope-able”): Thomas Wolsey was promoted as a candidate in the conclave of 1521-22 and again in 1523 when it is rumoured, perhaps implausibly, that he received 22 votes on the first ballot (27 were required to win); while Reginald Pole won 26 votes, just two short of victory, in the first round of voting at the 1549-50 conclave.
An Englishman who is elected pope is the basis of Hadrian the Seventh (1904), a strange, prissy, wonderful, camp novel by the equally strange Frederick Rolfe, an English Catholic novelist who styled himself “Baron Corvo”. It features a frustrates would-be priest, George Arthur Rose, who believes he has been denied ordination by scheming within the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He is visited by two senior clergymen, one a cardinal archbishop, who tell him that the papal conclave is deadlocked and they wish, in order to make amends for the wrongs done to him, to take him to Rome for ordination. On arrival he is promptly elected pope, taking the name Hadrian VII in honour of Nicholas Breakspear, and embarks on a fantastical programme of geopolitical reform and reordering before being assassinated. Robert McCrum, writing in The Guardian in 2014, called it “both a book of its epoch—orchidaceous, eccentric and weirdly obsessive, some would say mad—as well as being, in D.H. Lawrence’s summary, ‘the book of a man-demon’.” I loved it as a teenager, but you should make of that what you will.
St John Fisher, bishop of Rochester from 1504 to 1535, was a cardinal for 32 days. An opponent of Henry VIII’s break with Rome and loyal to papal supremacy, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1534 for refusing to swear an oath recognising the monarch as Supreme Head of the Church of England. On 21 May 1535, Pope Paul III created him cardinal priest of San Vitale, hoping to persuade the king to show clemency towards him. It had the opposite effect: Henry forbade the cardinal’s hat or galero, the symbol of the rank, from being brought to England and promised to send Fisher’s head to Rome instead. On 17 June, having been deprived of his episcopal office by act of attainder, Fisher was put on trial for treason, found guilty and condemned to death by hanging, drawing and quartering. The sentence was commuted to beheading after a public outcry and Fisher was executed at Tower Hill on 22 June. He was canonised by Pope Pius XI on 19 May 1935, the only cardinal ever to be martyred.
It is the 110th anniversary of the death of Martha, the world’s last passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius). The species was mainly found in the deciduous forests of eastern North America and particularly flourished around the Great Lakes but was gradually hunted to extinction partly because of its extraordinary vulnerability: low-flying birds could be felled with sticks or stones. It was reckoned that even an amateur hunter could bring down six with one shotgun blast. Martha was aged 28 or 29 when she died and had lived in Cincinnati Zoo since 1902. By 1907, she and two male companions were the last surviving passenger pigeons, and they died in 1909 and 1910. Martha died of old age at around 1.00 pm on 1 September 1914, her body found lifeless on the floor of her cage. Her body is now on display in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.
Cetshwayo kaMpande, who became the Zulu King today in 1873, led his people in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, despite having sought repeatedly to maintain peace with Britain, and was deposed after the Battle of Ulundi. He went into exile, first in Cape Town and then in London, but returned to Zululand in 1883. He died on 8 February 1884. He is depicted in Cy Enfield’s brilliant Zulu (1964) as a brave and heroic warrior, and played by his great-grandson Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who was prime minister to the Zulu royal family from 1953 to 2023 and president of the Inkatha Freedom Party from 1975 to 2019.
“Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself yet identifiable for others.” (Orson Welles)
“The Third Man”: released 75 years ago today, Carol Reed’s tale of black marketeers in post-war Vienna, scripted by Graham Greene, is a towering masterpiece of cinema. If you haven’t seen it, stop reading NOW and watch it. It’s 104 minutes and you will never spend them better. Of course the cast is brilliant: Trevor Howard cynical and world-weary but humane as Major Calloway of the Royal Military Police, Joseph Cotten as the amiable, naïf but dogged dime-store novelist Holly Martins, Orson Welles—who is on screen for maybe 10 minutes in total—as the mercurial, half-demonic Harry Lime and Alida Valli, broken and defeated but dignified, as Anna Schmidt, Lime’s girlfriend. Bernard Lee, already in his 40s, appears as an RMP sergeant. And the music! Reed abandoned the idea of conventional orchestral score and instead used a tune he had heard Anton Karas, a Viennese zither player, performing in a restaurant. It is weird, like nothing else in cinema, and works brilliantly. No film will ever be perfect, but, bloody hell, Carol Reed came very close (possibly because he was taking Benzedrine for much of the filming so that he could work 20 hours a day).
“Get Carter”: tonight BBC2 is showing this dark, violent 1971 Michael Caine thriller which is now (rightly) regarded as a classic of British cinema. Adapted from Ted Lewis’s novel of the previous year Jack’s Return Home, it sees Caine’s London gangster Jack Carter return to his (improbable) home town of Newcastle upon Tyne after the suspicious death of his brother. It deserves its legendary status for the sour menace which Caine brings to the role, for the stark brutality of its portrayal of crime, for its distinctive jazz-infused soundtrack by Roy Budd and for some superb supporting performances from Ian Hendry as second-string hoodlum Eric Paice, Bryan Mosley as local bigwig Cliff Brumby, an unlikely but brilliant John Osborne as crime boss Cyril Kinnear and Geraldine Moffat as Caine’s “love” interest Glenda. For anyone who grew up in the North East, it’s also an invaluable snapshot of that cusp of the 1960s and 1970s when so many buildings were being torn down and so much development was going on, much of it driven by the ambitious, corrupt T. Dan Smith. Say it with me: you’re a big man but you’re in bad shape…
“How They Dug The Victoria Line”: courtesy of the iPlayer (and underrated archival resource), this 1969 BBC documentary charts the construction of the Victoria line and is narrated by Macdonald Hastings, father of journalist, editor and writer Sir Max Hastings. Running from Brixton to Walthamstow, the line took six years to excavate, the first entirely new branch of the London Underground for half a century and is the second busiest on the network, with more than 300 million passengers each year. When it was completed in March 1969, HM The Queen marked the opening by travelling from Green Park (her local station, I suppose) to Victoria. A fascinating examination of ambition, modernity, ingenuity and backbreaking toil.
“Crime and Punishment: The Story of Capital Punishment”: 13 August was the 60th anniversary of the last executions in the United Kingdom, when convicted murderers Gwynne Evans (HMP Strangeways, Manchester) and Peter Allen (HMP Walton, Liverpool) were hanged separately but simultaneously for the killing of John Alan West in April that year. This documentary from the BBC’s Timeshift series examines the history of capital punishment from its widespread threat and use in the 18th century to its diminishing and increasingly controversial employment in the 1950s and 1960s. Last year I wrote about the death penalty, highlighting the curious fact that it was a liberal establishment rather than overwhelming popular feeling which saw its gradually discontinued then banned. A worthwhile examination of the history, justification and popularity of the state’s ultimate sanction.
“Slow Horses”: series four of the Apple TV spy thriller starts next week. Based on Mick Herron’s outstanding, tense, dark, funny Slough House novels, this is some of the best television drama in years. Much of the initial screenwriting was done by Will Smith, part of the team which produced The Thick of It and Veep and who acts as showrunner, and actress and comedienne Morwenna Banks, a stalwart of Channel 4’s groundbreaking comedy Absolutely and wife of David Baddiel. The cast is first-rate, headed by Gary Oldman as crude, cynical, brilliant Slough House boss Jackson Lamb and Dame Kristin Scott Thomas, icy and perfect as MI5 chief Diana Taverner, as well as Jack Lowden, as often bemused as heroic, as River Cartwright; Saskia Reeves quietly outstanding as Catherine Standish, damaged, alcoholic but dedicated and noble; Christopher Chung brilliantly obnoxious as Roddy Ho; and Rosalind Eleazar as Louise Guy, perhaps the most normal occupant of Slough House and able to see if not escape the madness around her. High-quality, highly enjoyable espionage, as gripping as it is funny.
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” (Groucho Marx)
“What The Freshman Class Needs To Read”: an ambitious prescription from The Atlantic by Sir Niall Ferguson and Jacob Howland for an “intellectual foundation: for new undergraduates. They start with the assumption that for a liberal education “students, like rowers, face backward in order to move forward”, and try to construct a core of texts which should be universally studied. It is part a reaction against the turning away from the concept of a “canon” by Ivy League universities and their increasingly narrow and ideological focus. The proposed curriculum begins with summer reading of Homer’s Iliad and runs through to C.S. Lewis, Solzhenitsyn and Malala Yousafzai. Thought-provoking.
“Building on Kursk”: another really interesting and useful piece on Ukraine’s current offensive in Kursk Oblast by Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman. Here he explains that President Zelenskyy sees the operation as part of a much wider plan to reach a successful conclusion to the conflict, which includes cutting Crimea off from Russian territory, striking Russia’s energy infrastructure and extending the reach of Ukrainian forces far beyond the border to attack airfields and other military targets. I was particularly struck, and persuaded, by the argument that Russia’s often-broadcast “red lines” have almost all melted away when confronted by reality. There is a long way to go, but this article gives a glimmer of hope that Ukraine is thinking in a sophisticated and strategic way.
“Robert Harris on the affair that put Britain on the brink”: Johanna Thomas-Corr interviewed Robert Harris for The Sunday Times about his new novel, Precipice, a fictional account of prime minister H.H. Asquith’s romantic (and perhaps sexual) relationship with the much younger Venetia Stanley in the early years of the First World War. Harris made his debut as a novelist more than 30 years ago now, with 1992’s brilliant and plausible Fatherland, and has explored the cryptographical world of Bletchley Park, the Senate of ancient Rome, the Dreyfus affair and other historical episodes. Talking about Precipice, he explains that he’s “fascinated by power” and the magnified flaws of those who exercise it. The affair between Asquith and Stanley has long intrigued him: “I always thought you could make a case that Venetia was probably one of the most influential figures in British political history”. Whether he has anyone else in mind when he sketches a sexually incontinent, Balliol-educated prime minister is for readers to decide…
“Jack Schlossberg: America’s vanity heir”: the always-acute Kara Kennedy Clairmont captures something hugely important in this profile for The New Statesman of Jack Schlossberg, now political correspondent for Vogue (but also grandson of President John F. Kennedy). Coming at the same time as his uncle, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, suspends his campaign for the presidency, Kara’s piece illustrates the enduring hold the Kennedy clan exerts over the American public and shows its unhealthy and entitled side. As she notes, “Schlossberg has made a name for himself as… just kidding. His name was made already.” It’s now nearly 80 years since JFK was first elected to the US House of Representatives, yet membership of the family still seems to be a passport to credibility in any field you choose. Will it ever wane?
“How the Russian Establishment Really Sees the War Ending”: there has been a great deal of rumination on how Ukraine finds a path to an acceptable end to the current conflict but this Foreign Policy article by Anatol Lieven examines the issue from the perspective of Russia. He argues that very few influential Russians seek or expect a complete military victory over Ukraine, and there is a consensus around consolidating the current territorial gains and ending the active hostilities. There is also no expectation of these gains being formally recognised by the international community. However, the possibility of restoring the pre-2014 borders is not seriously contemplated, and Ukraine’s post-conflict neutrality is a key demand. It is extraordinarily difficult to disentangle rhetoric from reality on both sides, and an early resolution seems unlikely.
My friends: we did it. We weren’t just marking time…
… we made a difference, as President Reagan said. We made the city stronger, we made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all. Chairete.