Sunday round-up 11 August 2024
Hip-hip-hooray for Steve Wozniak, Hulk Hogan and Jah Wobble, the anniversary of US combat troops leaving Vietnam and the ratification of the Weimar Constitution
Hastily written cards and a fiver sellotaped inside for St Andrews graduate and Emperor Palpatine-playing Ian McDiarmid (80), Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (74), former wrestler, blond bombshell and Donald Trump enthusiast Hulk Hogan (71), Staffordshire-born singer-songwriter Joe Jackson (70), one-time MP for North Down and generally adored presence at Westminster Lady Hermon (69), SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son (67), bassist, singer and “not his real name” Jah Wobble (66), endurance podcast legend Joe Rogan (57), Tony-winning actress Sophie Okonedo (56), comedian and actress Isy Suttie (46) and professional Thor impersonator Chris Hemsworth (41).
No longer eligible for the bumps are long-winded Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892), anthropomorphism advocate Enid Blyton (1897), French commander at Dien Bien Phu General Christian de Castries (1902), novelist Sir Angus Wilson (1913), writer and historian Alex Haley (1921), televangelist Jerry Falwell (1933), former president of Pakistan General Pervez Musharraf (1943), king of the piano ballad Eric Carmen (1049) and revered actor and singer Ian Charleson (1949).
On this day in 1804, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, having been defeated by Napoleon in the War of the Second Coalition, assumed the additional (and hereditary) title of Emperor of Austria. This was partly in response to Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor of the French earlier in the year and was technically against imperial law, but the Holy Roman Empire, having just celebrated its 1,000th anniversary in 1800, was clearly now tottering on the edge of collapse. The imperial title was theoretically an elective one, but, with the exception of the period from 1742 to 1765, it had been in practice hereditary in Francis’s Habsburg family since 1440, but assuming the new dignity of Emperor of Austria essentially gave him a plan B. It would be needed: after defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz, Francis abdicated as Holy Roman Emperor on 6 August 1806 and declared “we hereby decree that we regard the bond which until now tied us to the states of the Empire as dissolved”. The last vestige of Roman imperium which had begun arguably with the creation of the Republic in 509 BC was gone.
In 1919, this day saw the signing into law of the Constitution of the German Reich by President Friedrich Ebert, creating what would become known as the Weimar Republic. It was largely the work of a Prussian lawyer called Hugo Preuß who had been Minister of the Interior from February to June 1919 before being appointed Rech Commissioner for Constitutional Issues. He was a founding member of the liberal German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei) and based his draft constitution on three principles: that political authority belonged to the people; that Germany should be a federal state; and that it should be a democratic, law-abiding member of the international community. American journalist William L. Shirer called the Weimar Constitution “on paper, the most liberal and democratic document of its kind the twentieth century had ever seen… full of ingenious and admirable devices which seemed to guarantee the working of an almost flawless democracy”. However, the presidency had potentially very broad powers compared to the chancellor and the cabinet, and the electoral system produced a fissiparous Reichstag with a profusion of small splinter parties, making stable governing coalitions elusive. In less than 14 years, Adolf Hitler would be appointed chancellor.
On this day in 1945, only three months after the end of the Second World War in Europe, residents of the Soviet-occupied city of Kraków decided on an extraordinary retro activity of an anti-Jewish pogrom. The pre-war Jewish population had been around 80,000 but most had been killed in the Holocaust; by the summer of 1945, however, survivors and refugees had come to the city and there were around 6,600 Jews in Kraków. Since June there had been rumours and suspicions that a Jewish woman had tried to kidnap a Christian child to kill him—a full-on, no-nonsense, traditional blood libel—followed by stories of the discovery of the bodies of 13 Christian children. By Saturday 11 August, some believed there had been 80 victims. Groups of young men had frequently gathered in Kleparski Square to throw stones at the Kupa Synagogue, and on the fateful day someone tried to seize a 13-year-old boy hurling stones. He escaped and ran to the nearby marketplace shouting “Help me, the Jews have tried to kill me!”
That was all it took. A mob broke into the synagogue, where Saturday prayers were taking place, beat the Jews who were worshipping and set fire to the Torah scrolls. The nearby Jewish hostel was attacked and then Jewish men, women and children were beaten on the streets and their homes broken into and ransacked. Some Jews taken for treatment of their injuries were assaulted again in the hospital. Late in the afternoon, the synagogue was set alight. Some Polish soldiers and policemen actively took part in the pogrom. There was one recorded death, of a 56-year-old Jewish woman named Róża Berger: she had been shot through the closed door of her home then beaten with the breech bolt of a rifle. She had survived life in the Kraków ghetto during the war, had escaped before it was liquidated in March 1943 and was then imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau with her daughter and granddaughter from August 1944 to January 1945. She is buried in the New Jewish Cemetery at 55 Miodowa street.
Today in 1972, the last United States combat troops withdrew from South Vietnam. The last to leave was the 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment (“Gimlets”), 196th Infantry Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division, although some 7,000 civilian personnel from the Department of Defense remained in Saigon to support the government of the Republic of Vietnam under President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army in 1975 and the last US personnel were airlifted out of the embassy on 30 April.
On the theological side, it is the feast day of St Clare of Assisi (1194-1253), one of the first followers of St Francis and the patroness of (deep breath) eye disease, goldsmiths, laundry, television, bicycle messengers, good weather, needleworkers, remote viewing and extrasensory perception. The Church of England commemorates the great Victorian divine St John Henry Newman (1801-90), who was a leading figure of the Oxford Movement before converting to Catholicism in 1845, being ordained in 1847 and created a cardinal in 1879. Newman was canonised five years ago, in 2019, and his feast day is marked in the Roman Catholic Church on 9 October.
In Chad it is Independence Day, marking the final end of French colonial rule in 1960, while Japan celebrates the relatively recently introduced occasion of Mountain Day, which provides “opportunities to get familiar with mountains and appreciate blessings from mountains”. It is also National Bakewell Tart Day and Play in the Sand Day (I’m OK, thanks).
Factoids
As you will see below, I have been reading a history of British Rail, and it is a striking reminder of how very, very bad we are at predicting future trends. For a variety of reasons, British Rail never adopted a sensible or strategic approach to the phasing out of steam locomotion, and it led to some wasteful actions. Emblematic is the last steam-powered locomotive to be built by British Rail, a BR Standard Class 9F called 92220 Evening Star. It was constructed at the company’s Swindon Works and completed in March 1960, after which it was used mainly as a heavy freight locomotive in BR’s Western Region, but it emerged into a world that was changing fast. In March 1965, Evening Star suffered minor damage in a shunting accident at Cardiff Docks and was withdrawn. It would never return to ordinary service: British Rail’s last main line steam service for passengers, the Fifteen Guinea Special, left Liverpool Lime Street at 9.10 am on 11 August 1968, travelling to Manchester Victoria, Carlisle, Manchester Victoria again and back to Liverpool Lime Street at 7.59 pm. A ban on main line steam traffic came into force the following day. So Evening Star was obsolete anyway, and had had a working life of precisely five years.
Carl Bernstein, 80, the Washington Post investigative journalist who, with Bob Woodward, helped bring the Watergate scandal to public attention (see All The President’s Men, below) is an icon of journalism but has left a cultural footprint in other ways too. From 1976 to 1980, he was married to the brilliant writer and director Nora Ephron, and would go on to date Bianca Jagger, Martha Stewart and Elizabeth Taylor. In 1979, he had a much-publicised affair with Margaret Jay, daughter of then-prime minister Jim Callaghan, wife of the British ambassador in Washington, Peter Jay, and leader of the House of Lords under Tony Blair; Ephron used the experience to write her 1983 novel Heartburn, adapted for cinema three years later with Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. The film also featured the Carly Simon hit “Coming Around Again”, and saw Kevin Spacey’s cinema debut as “Subway Thief”. So, in a sense, Bernstein was played on the big screen by Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson in the space of 10 years. Not bad going for a journalist.
As some readers may know, I live in Chiswick in west London. It was originally an area famous for its dairy produce: the first record of the name is around AD 1000 as the Old English Ceswican, or “cheese farm”, which by the 15th century had become Chesewyk. It is mildly famous for many things but they include being the location of the first V-2 rocket to hit London, landing on Staveley Road at 6.43 pm on 8 September 1944. It is the last resting place of Oliver Cromwell’s third daughter, Mary, Countess Fauconberg; artist William Hogarth; Private Frederick Hitch VC, 2nd Battalion, 24th (2nd Warwickshire) Regiment of Foot, of Rorke’s Drift fame; actor and comic writer Michael Flanders (ashes scattered in the grounds of Chiswick House)
Chiswick-born celebrities include Western Australia’s first professional architect James Wright (1854), marine engineer Sir John Thornycroft (1872), maritime artist Montague Dawson (1890), comic actor Richard O’Sullivan (1944), John Entwhistle (1944) and Pete Townshend (1945) of The Who, Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan (1945), Tiswas legend Sally James (1950), scientist and broadcaster Baroness Greenfield (1950), pop icon Phil Collins (1951), late comedian and film-maker Mel Smith (1952), songstress-turned-gardener Kim Wilde (1960) and actress Kate Beckinsale (1973).
I will avoid listing all the famous residents of Chiswick, as there are many, except to say that I used to live on the same street as Colin and Livia Firth. But some of the more unexpected temporary inhabitants have included Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Vincent van Gogh, W.B. Yeats, painters Camille and Lucien Pissarro, playwright John Osborne, Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden, Glaswegian “King of Skiffle” Lonnie Donegan, actress Elizabeth McGovern, fellow Downton Abbey alumna Phyllis Logan and her husband actor Kevin McNally, Irish journalist and writer Fergal Keane and Geordie light entertainment workhorses Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly.
Chiswick Post Office, a peculiarly unlovely concrete box on Heathfield Terrace, was nominated for Room 101 on the BBC2 series of the same name by actress and long-time resident Dame Sheila Hancock in 2005.
While in no way suggesting the end result was unsatisfactory, the capture and trial of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, former head of Referat IV B 4 of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or Reich Security Main Office, which dealt with the extermination of the Jews, presented a number of legal difficulties. Eichmann was kidnapped in 1960 from Buenos Aires, Argentina, by a team of agents from Mossad and Shin Bet, after Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion decided against requesting his extradition; Argentina had by then a track record of refusing to extradite alleged Nazi war criminals. So Israel violated the sovereignty of Argentina to abduct a German national. Eichmann was charged under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, a 1950 statute passed by the Knesset, so the legislation under which his trial was held was not extant at the time of his crimes, and indeed the country which created it did not at that point exist. Nor were his actions against the law of the jurisdiction in which they were committed at the time they were committed. In addition, most of the deaths he was held to have caused took place at the Auschwitz concentration camp, at that time located in the General Government, a German-occupied zone of southern Poland but by 1960 in the territory of the Polish People’s Republic. So Israel kidnapped a German national from Argentina for crimes largely committed in Poland, under a law of a country which had not existed at the time of these crimes. When he was hanged at Ramla Prison on 1 June 1962, it was the first (and so far only) use of the death penalty by the civil authorities in Israel’s history.
7 Up, the lemon/lime carbonated drink formulated in 1929 by Charles Leiper Grigg of the Howdy Corporation of St Louis, Missouri, was originally named “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda” and marketed as a hangover cure. Until 1948, it contained lithium citrate, a mood stabiliser still used to control mania, hypomania, depression and bipolar disorder.
It is impossible to be definitive because of the distance and time and lack of written records, but a candidate for the world’s oldest continuously occupied city is Jericho in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank. There is archaeological evidence of human settlement by the Natufian culture as far back as 10,000 BC and year-round habitation from around 9,600 BC. Bronze Age Jericho was destroyed in the 15th century BC and many scholars maintain that the site was uninhabited for 500 or 600 years, but recent archaeological evidence has challenged that supposition. If you exclude Jericho, the next strongest contender is probably Byblos in Lebanon, which was first settled between 8,800 and 7,000 BC and has been continuously inhabited since 5,000 BC.
The oldest continuously occupied settlement in the United States is probably Oraibi, a Hopi village in Navajo County, Arizona. It was established around 1100 and by the middle of the 18th century had a population of around 10,000, but due to disease and drought this had fallen to just 750 by 1905. The current population is believed to be around 100.
“You don’t exist unless you’re on TV. Yeah, it’s a validation process.” (Hunter S. Thompson)
“All The President’s Men”: this week saw the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation as president of the United States due to the Watergate scandal. Two reporters from The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, published a book on Watergate while Nixon was still in office and it was rapidly made into a film by Alan J. Pakula, with Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein. It’s a perfect mid-1970s American film, with equal measures of distrust, paranoia and crusading liberalism, and shouldn’t be taken as a blow-by-blow hyper-accurate account of what happened. On the other hand, it is serious movie-making, taut, exciting and well-crafted, and as well as the dazzling leads there are great performances from Jason Robards as Post editor Bill Bradlee, Hal Holbrook as shadowy source “Deep Throat” and Stephen Collins as former White House aide Hugh Sloan. There aren’t many films which effectively champion the role of a free press, and this is a worthy advocate.
“Corridors of Power: Should America Police The World?”: a timely and authoritative eight-part documentary by Israeli film-maker Dror Moreh, was made in 2022 but brilliantly apt as the US presidential election approaches. Narrated by Meryl Streep (see Heartburn, above), this series traces the tides of American foreign policy over the past half-century and asks what the US role on the global stage should be, what its limits are and what effect it has had. It was originally packaged as a two-hour feature film but this is the full footage and it is gripping. The interviewees, many of them no longer with us, are matchless: Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Baker, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power…
“The Cruel Sea”: last night BBC2 happened to show Charles Frend’s 1953 adaptation of Nicholas Monsarrat’s novel about Second World War convoy escorts. With outstanding performances from Jack Hawkins as George Ericson and Donald Sinden as his right-hand Keith Lockhart, it is a surprisingly brutal and clear-eyed examination of the experience of the war at sea. The supporting cast includes Stanley Baker, Denholm Elliott and Virginia McKenna and there is no jingoism or triumphalism: as Hawkins narrates at the beginning “The men are the heroes; the heroines are the ships. The only villain is the sea, the cruel sea, that man has made more cruel...” If you have, inexplicably, never seen this, watch it: one of the best war films Britain has ever made.
“The Rest Is Politics US”: Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci round up the week in America, looking at Vice-President Kamala Harris’s selection of Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate, a strange period of inactivity from Donald Trump and the extent to which Harris/Walz has changed the dynamic of the election campaign. Kay and Scaramucci remain entertaining and engaging hosts with a warm working relationship, and the latter is consistently more thoughtful, analytical and informed than he seems to want to let on. I find this a handy way of pulling back and seeing the week’s landscape in full, and it’s a good sign that the 45-50 minutes always seem to fly past.
“The Fight for Saturday Night”: first aired in 2014, this BBC documentary presented by Lord Grade of Yarmouth is a nostalgic examination of the titanic struggle between the BBC and ITV for dominance of the Saturday evening television audience from the 1970s through to the 1990s. This mattered to an extent hardly imaginable today, with the BBC’s The Generation Game regularly attracting more than 20 million viewers, while ITV’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? peaked near that in its early days in the late 1990s. Now even a stalwart of the schedule like Casualty will only be seen by two million people or so. Grade is a confident, swaggering television giant, which some find off-putting, but he has done it all and seen it all: after managing Morecambe and Wise and Larry Grayson and poaching Bruce Forsyth from the BBC to London Weekend Television, he was controller of BBC1 (1984-87), chief executive of Channel 4 (1987-97), chairman of the BBC (2004-06) and executive chairman of ITV (2007-09). Grade is now halfway through a four-year term as chairman of media regulator Ofcom. They don’t make them like this any more.
“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” (Blaise Pascal)
“British Rail: The Making and Breaking of our Trains”: a passionate and learned history of our nationalised rail network by transport guru Christian Wolmar. He has obvious political sympathies, and you can feel how much he wants BR to succeed, and he does usefully dispel some urban legends, but, except for a period in the 1980s, it’s hard not to sigh and cringe at a peculiarly British tale of short-termism, infighting, territorial disputes, outdated practices and a staggering ability to see what the future might bring (in the early 1950s there was huge enthusiasm for an integrated rail and helicopter network with combined train stations and heliports in major cities). But Wolmar also gives a sense of the sheer scale of the organisation which inherited 20,000 steam locomotives when it was formed in 1948. With Great British Railways in prospect, we may be seeing a slow process of renationalisation but many of the challenges faced by British Rail have not gone away. Still, a fascinating social history as well as an infrastructure polemic.
“Will Ukraine’s Kursk offensive pay off?”: at the time of writing it is still unclear how Ukraine’s daring incursion into Russian territory will unfold, but this summation by the excellent Mark Galeotti in The Spectator is as good an analysis as I’ve read. His main thesis is that Ukraine wants to change the narrative and shake up the conflict, which has become (literally) entrenched in the east. That feels plausible, as at least one motivation, and there are signs that it has unsettled Vladimir Putin. But we’re a long way from a denouement yet.
“No room for reform?”: quite a brave piece in The Critic by writer Steve Dew-Jones on the possibility and power of redemption, which seems an unfashionable concept currently. He draws on the example of American evangelist David Wilkerson who founded an addiction recovery programme called Teen Challenge in Brooklyn in 1958, and argues that “there is hope for positive change, even for those who have committed the most heinous crimes”. Dew-Jones suggests, rightly, that if people can genuinely be reformed then it is not just the individuals but society as a whole that benefits. He accepts he is in a minority, with a public consistently in favour of tough criminal penalties, but I’m glad he is making the argument. We have to find room for rehabilitation somewhere.
“The Truth About Trump’s Press Conference”: Tom Nichols makes the straightforward but telling argument in The Atlantic that, almost unconsciously, we have normalised to ourselves the fact that former president Donald Trump, who may well yet return to the White House in January, is not just dishonest but rambles, free-associates and makes Baron Munchausen-level claims about himself and others. Were it a different politician, we would surely ridicule them and congratulate ourselves that they were a fringe figure, ranting and weird, yet Trump has somehow priced it in. He has no compunction in saying things which are obviously, manifestly, probably false, and a worrying number of his supporters take it all as revealed truth; but one starts to wonder if he even perceives a difference between truth and falsehood any more, even on a practical, let alone an ethical, level. If you think about it too much, it is genuinely frightening.
“Nixon: A Life”: Friday was the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency of the United States, an act unique in the country’s history, and former Conservative cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken wrote an interesting recollection for The Spectator. I was reminded of his 1993 biography of the 37th President, which I read a few years after its publication as an undergraduate, and enjoyed its persuasive challenge of the received wisdom. Was Nixon an honest or moral man? No, manifestly not: but then, nor were many of his contemporaries. But Aitken makes a strong case that he was an extremely able president, especially in the field of foreign affairs, and achieved a great deal in his five-and-a-half years. He was a complex, hyper-intelligent, vulnerable, flawed man, but as contemporary American politics unfold, it does present a new perspective on Watergate.
Sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I have failed…
… as President Nixon said in his resignation address to the American people on 8 August 1974. But always I have taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt once said about the man in the arena, “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is not effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deed, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievements and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly”.
Arrivederci.