Sunday round-up 12 May 2024
In 1937 George VI and his consort were crowned, the Berlin blockade ended in 1949 and you failed to send birthday cards to Chris Patten and Susan Hampshire (again!)
Today you failed to send cards to actress Susan Hampshire (87), physician and presenter Dr Miriam Stoppard (87), former cabinet minister and last governor of Hong Kong Lord Patten of Barnes (80), architect Daniel Libeskind (78), underrated Handsworth-born musical genius Steve Winwood (76), lawyer and campaigner Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (74), skateboarding legend Tony Hawk (56) and actor Domhnall Gleeson (41), among others.
Today in 1937 the Duke and Duchess of York were crowned in Westminster Abbey. George VI would reign for 15 years, not long but a pivotal period and one in which the monarchy was perhaps saved from irreparable damage after the abdication of his elder brother Edward VIII, while Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, would live for 65 years. She lived through that strange time in British history, lasting just over 13 months, during which there were three queens: Her Majesty Queen Mary, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and Her Majesty The Queen.
This day in 1949 saw the lifting of the Berlin blockade. The Soviet forces stationed in what was then occupied Germany had begun restricting access to Berlin in March 1948, and a full-scale blockade was imposed in June in an attempt to wrest control of the city from the western Allies. At that point, West Berlin (the US, British and French zones) had 36 days’ worth of food and 45 days’ worth of coal, and the Soviet leadership dismissed the idea that the city could be kept supplied by air alone. They were wrong. Between 26 June 1948 and 12 May 1949, American and British aircraft transported enough food, fuel and other supplies, more than 2.3 million tonnes, to keep West Berlin alive: at the height of the airlift, one aircraft landed at Tempelhof Airport every 45 seconds. The United States dubbed the mission Operation Vittles, while the British, who provided about a quarter of the aircraft, called it Operation Plainfare.
In 2002, former US president Jimmy Carter arrived in Cuba for a five-day tour as a guest of Fidel Castro, president of the Council of State and first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. It was the first visit to the island by a serving or former American president since the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The United States maintains a broad embargo on Cuba, first imposed 66 years ago.
On the hagiographical front, it is a relatively light day for saints. Probably the biggest hitter is St Pancras, a 14-year-old Phrygian boy who was beheaded around AD 304 when he refused to perform a ritual sacrifice on honour of the Olympian gods. He is the patron saint of children, jobs and health (which seem to me three very distinct attributes), but is also invoked against cramps, false witnesses, headaches and perjury. It is also the feast of St Modoald, a 7th century archbishop of Trier who converted the Merovingian king Dagobert to Christianity, St Crispoldus, a 1st century martyr, and the slightly mysterious St Philip of Agira, who may have been a 1st century preacher from Cappadocia or a 4th century apostle from Thrace.
In the secular world, it is International ME/CFS Awareness Day and, because it is the anniversary of the birth of Dame Florence Nightingale, International Nurses’ Day. (Here is a recording of her voice made in 1890.) For American readers, it is Mother’s Day, although here in Britain we celebrated Mothering Sunday on 10 March. I can only advise you to follow the words of the great Tom Lehrer in his Oedipus Rex: “So be sweet and kind to mother now and then have a chat/Buy her candy or some flowers or a brand new hat/But maybe you had better let it go at that.”
Also don’t forget National Nutty Fudge Day.
Factoids
If you are a beer drinker, particularly in west London, you may have enjoyed London Pride, the flagship beer of Fuller’s Brewery. It takes its name from a flower, Saxifraga × urbium, which grew quickly in bombed-out buildings during the Second World War and was given its London Pride name to acknowledge the endurance of the capital’s population. Noël Coward (of course) spotted its symobolism quickly, and in spring 1941 was inspired to write London Pride, for the melody of which he defiantly cribbed from Germany’s national anthem, Deutschland über alles (based on Joseph Haydn’s 1797 hymn Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser). The beer was introduced in 1959 and is still brewed at the Griffin Brewery in Chiswick.
The Griffin Brewery, which is just over half a mile from where I sit, has the oldest wisteria in Britain. Two saplings were brought from China in 1816: one was planted outside what was then the Head Brewer’s cottage, while the other was taken to Kew Gardens but failed to take root and soon died (the existing wisteria at Kew was taken from a cutting of the Griffin Brewery plant).
In 2019, the South African Army announced that 52 of its reserve units would be renamed, setting aside colonial-era names and reflecting “the military traditions and history of indigenous African military formations and the liberation armies involved in the freedom struggle”. So the Transvaal Scottish (created in 1902 by John Murray, Marquess of Tullibardine, later 7th Duke of Atholl) became the Solomon Mahlangu Regiment, and Prince Alfred’s Guard (founded in 1856) was renamed the Chief Maqoma Regiment. However, the Cape Town Highlanders, slated to become the Gonnema Regiment, have so far retained their name. In 2022, Brigadier General Andries Mahapa, director of Defence Corporate Communication, said tersely, “Cape Town Highlanders has not officially changed its name and remain known as the Cape Town Highlanders”. It is now the only regiment in the world which wears a kilt in Gordon tartan.
Continuing an African/Scottish theme, and I owe this to a recent episode of QI, “Dundee United” is a Nigerian slang term for an idiot. It is sometimes shortened simply to “Dundee”, and in some contexts a Dundee can be one idiot while a collection of idiots is a Dundee United. Like so many quirks of usage, it is impossible to be certain how this began, but it may stem from a tour of west Africa undertaken by Dundee United in May-June 1972. Although playing small, local clubs, the Scottish players did not cover themselves in glory: they drew 2-2 with Stationery Stores FC, scraped a 1-0 victory over Benin Vipers, lost 2-0 to Enugu Rangers, drew again, 1-1, with Mighty Jets FC and were then hammered 4-1 by Stationery Stores. The Nigerian Daily Express marked their departure with the headline “Don’t Come Back”.
It is well known that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many American heiresses married into the British aristocracy, bringing cash injections to ancient but impoverished families in return for social standing and titles. They were known, somewhat unkindly, as “dollar princesses”, and the practice was extraordinarily widespread: between 1870 and 1914, American heiresses married 102 British aristocrats. It is, however, an extraordinary fact that in the 1900s, of only 27 non-royal dukes, two had duchesses who were not only American, but called Consuelo (María Francisca de la Consolación Yznaga, the Duchess of Manchester, and Consuelo Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Marlborough).
A word on the choice of titles and territorial signifiers. All life peerages include a territorial designation, but this is not part of the formal title: for example, Margaret Thatcher was Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire, but her formal title was Baroness Thatcher. Many, however, choose to include a place-name in the title itself, either to distinguish himself or herself from another peer of the same name (Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, for example, took that title in 1987 to mark himself from Lord Jenkins of Putney), or simply to indicate an attachment to a place (Lord Richards of Herstmonceux is the only Lord Richards). These must be agreed with Garter King of Arms, the senior member of the College of Arms, and there can be disputes. Herbert Morrison, Clement Attlee’s deputy and briefly foreign secretary, wanted to be Lord Morrison of London, but was advised that London was rather too sweeping for a life peer; he became Lord Morrison of Lambeth instead. When the former Liberal prime minister H.H. Asquith eventually accepted a peerage in 1925, he wanted to be earl of Oxford. It was an ancient title created for the de Vere family in 1141, becoming extinct in 1703, and was then used by the Tory statesman Robert Harley, who became Earl of Oxford in 1711, that title becoming extinct in 1853. There was a feeling that Asquith was suffering delusions of grandeur—the Countess of Salisbury wrote waspishly that it was “like a suburban villa calling itself Versailles”—and the College of Arms insisted that the former prime minister become Earl of Oxford and Asquith, to dilute the grandeur. It is currently held by Raymond, 3rd Earl of Oxford and Asquith, a former officer of the Secret Intelligence Service who was responsible for the exfiltration of double-agent Oleg Gordievsky in 1985.
When Duff Cooper, former Conservative cabinet minister and ambassador to France from 1944 to 1948, was offered a peerage in 1952, he was unsure what title to take. His wife, a society beauty born Lady Diana Manners, had become universally known as Lady Diana Cooper and wanted nothing to do with any name change; he teased her that he was considering the style “Love-a-Duck”. When he chose “Norwich”, she complained it sounded like “porridge” and let it be known she would remain Lady Diana Cooper. The slightly built Duff, on taking his title, cribbed from Alexander Pope and noted “A little Norwich is a dangerous thing”.
I am grimly fascinated by the last hours of the First World War on the Western Front. A German delegation headed by Mattias Erzberger, a member of the Reichstag from the Zentrum, the Catholic Centre Party, had arrived in France on 8 November 1918 and negotiations had lasted for three days, until a document declaring an armistice was agreed at 5.00 am on 11 November (Central European Time), with signatures being added between 5.12 am and 5.20 am. The Supreme Allied Commander, Marshal of France Ferdinand Foch, signed at around 5.45 am. The agreement stipulated that it would come into force, and end the fighting, at 11.00 am. Until then, however, the war continued, just over five hours of truly futile struggle. As far as we are aware, the last soldier to be killed was Private Henry Gunther, a 23-year-old Baltimore boy serving with the 313th Infantry Regiment near Meuse in Lorraine. His squad came upon a German roadblock with two machine-guns, and, fixing his bayonet, Gunther charged at the enemy. It was 10.59 am. The German gunners knew the armistice was within seconds of coming into effect and tried to wave him away but he kept advancing and fired once or twice. When he was too close for their safety, they opened fire, and Gunther was killed instantly.
The excitement is building, for those who find these things exciting, for the forthcoming XXXIII Olympiad in Paris. Part of the extended run-up to the games is, of course, the Olympic Torch relay, which begins with the Olympic Flame in, well, Olympia and sees the sacred flame carried to the host city where it lights the Olympic cauldron. The modern Olympic Games are, of course, a slightly jumbled blend of old, new and pseudo-mythical, and the relay is “inspired by practices from ancient Greece”. But it was, awkwardly, invented by the Nazis. The head of the organising committee for the 1936 Berlin Games, Carl Diem, was keen to emphasise Aryan Germany’s connections with ancient Greece: so the flame was lit in Greece with mirrors made by Zeiss, transferred to steel-clad magnesium torches courtesy of Friedrich Krupp AG and carried to Berlin, its progress lovingly charted by Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Still, it does make for dramatic visuals.
Joseph Goebbels was, by any measure, a monster, but he was a genuine academic doctor, awarded a PhD by the University of Heidelberg in 1921. His thesis focused on a minor 19th-century German romantic dramatist, Wilhelm von Schütz, and was supervised by Professor Max Freiherr von Waldberg. Goebbels had hoped to research under another professor, Friedrich Gundolf, but the latter had retired from teaching by the time Goebbels began his study. Both Waldberg and Gundolf were Jewish.
Television: “It will be of no importance in your lifetime or mine” (Bertrand Russell)
“Spacey Unmasked”: part of me felt voyeuristic watching this Channel 4 documentary, and I’ll say now that I have no definitive view on whether the accusations against Kevin Spacey are all true, partly true, or wholly false. I will say that I think Spacey is an exceptional actor of range and power: I haven’t seen him on stage, but just taking in Glengarry Glen Ross, The Usual Suspects, Se7en, American Beauty and Margin Call gives you a body of screen work of which any actor should be enormously proud. It was interesting to see him in an early-ish interview explain that he thought the more we knew about actors as people, the less effectively they could play their characters: he may, of course, have had an ulterior motive but I think he might have a point. But the current furore surrounding Spacey—despite the fact, as he is entitled to point out, that every charge against him has either been dropped or dismissed—rekindles an age-old debate of the tension between art and artist. Even if we think Spacey is a bad, bad man, does that affect how we regard his work, should it and can we even prevent it from doing so? The standard example, of course, is Caravaggio, one of the greatest of all painters but frequently in trouble with the law and responsible for the death, perhaps murder, of a young man in Rome, Ranuccio Tomassoni. I don’t have an answer but it gave me some intellectual pretext for watching this morbidly fascinating documentary.
“Secrets and Spies: A Nuclear Game”: this snuck up on me on BBC2 after Newsnight on Friday but was a very enjoyable survey of the role of intelligence and espionage in the Cold War, with some well chosen talking heads and a good narrative grip. I can watch almost unlimited documentary content about the Cold War and spying, but this does feel like a time in world events where those days of the 1970s and 1980s are resonant again, hopefully only distantly. This is a more accessible watch than Netflix’s masterful Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, which I’ve recommended before, but you could always watch both.
“The Mayfair Set”: this 1999 documentary by Adam Curtis is an absorbing study of post-war Britain’s apparent decline, the rise of the global arms trade and of asset-stripping, and the strange, powerful but sometimes sinister group of people who gathered around the Clermont Club, a casino opened at 44 Berkeley Square in 1962 by John Aspinall. Its initial membership included five dukes, five marquesses, nearly 20 earls and two cabinet ministers, and the men who jostle to the front here in Curtis’s documentary are SAS founder Colonel David Stirling, Anglo-French financier Sir James Goldsmith, Lonrho chief executive “Tiny” Rowland and investor Jim Slater. Curtis is easy to parody, and some of his characters parody themselves, but this four-parter brilliantly captures the angry, bitter, anxious times of post-imperial identity crisis.
“Margin Call”: this 2011 drama tells the story of the very beginnings of the great financial crisis through a 24-hour period at a major Wall Street bank as the true scale of the risks to which financial institutions had exposed themselves. Punchily written and directed by J.C. Chandor, it manages to make the baffling world of high finance poundingly dramatic, and there are fine performances everywhere you look: Kevin Spacey (see above), Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci and an outstanding turn from the always-brilliant Paul Bettany as head of credit trading Will Emerson. Revealing, dramatic and laugh-out-loud funny.
“Salman Rushdie: Through A Glass Darkly”: this extraordinary interview with Sir Salman Rushdie explores his near-fatal attack in 2022 and his recent book Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder. I admit that I have read very little of Rushdie’s work, and I failed to get through Midnight’s Children, but I admire him as a brave and bold and skilful writer, and a friend and intellectual companion of Christopher Hitchens. His ability to talk about his attack is stunning, and he brims with wit and intelligence. If I could treat the ordinary travails of life with the phlegm he shows about losing an eye and nearly his life, I’d think I was doing well. I was fascinated by his thought when he first saw, in his peripheral vision, the man who wanted to kill him: “It’s you. So it’s you.”
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means (Joan Didion)
“The Diminishing Returns Of Having Good Taste”: a really thought-provoking article in The Atlantic by W. David Marx on cultural arbitrage and the effect of the internet in making everything more accessible. We have never been able to read, see, listen to or do more, yet we have lost a sense of curation and regard it almost as an unfashionable and undemocratic imposition: who are you to tell me what is good and what isn’t? This has some advantages, but, as Marx explains, it has fundamentally changed the way we interact with culture and, crucially, how we transmit out preferences.
“The Case for Progressive Realism”: I post this not because I agree with it—there’s a lot to which I object pretty strongly—but this Foreign Affairs piece by shadow foreign secretary David Lammy is our most up-to-date sketch of what a Labour government’s approach to international relations might look like in ideological and philosophical terms. I will say clearly (I alluded to this in The Spectator on Friday) that I think Lammy is an odd fit for the Foreign Office, as he is reckless in speech and likes to parade his conscience, and I think he might find it hard going to deal with a second Trump administration if that should be the outcome of November’s presidential election. Whether Lammy, Sir Keir Starmer and the other leading figures in a Labour government can square the circle and create a foreign policy of “using realist means to pursue progressive ends” remains to be seen. Worth reading.
“Who are ‘the blob’?”: this article in The Spectator by Jordan Urban, a researcher at the Institute for Government, draws on a recent study, Who runs Whitehall?, and is a well-balanced and concise piece. I say that partly because it reflects my own duality towards the civil service. In the abstract, I think it has been, can be and has the potential even more fully to be a fantastic institution, but it has a number of major flaws and some of those flaws are contributing directly to poor governance on the United Kingdom and therefore to poor performance nationally and globally. I have written before that I simply don’t accept the Liz Truss-proposed notion of a “deep state”, but that does not mean everything is perfect. Civil service reform is vital, and must be thorough and radical, but at the same time ministers often create a difficult and adversarial atmosphere and we must avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Whether Sir Keir Starmer (a former permanent secretary in all but title) and his chief of staff Sue Gray (also a former permanent secretary) are well or badly placed to oversee this process is an open question.
“RFK Jr’s ‘history lesson’ on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine flunks the fact test”: it baffles me that anyone takes Robert Kennedy Jr even remotely seriously, as he seems to be an off-the-shelf crank who wouldn’t even register on the radar if it weren’t for his lineage and surname. But he does, and he’s posted a video on YouTube in which he trots out the drearily familiar Putin-adhering arguments which “demonstrate” that the West is responsible for the war in Ukraine and poor old Vladimir Putin is just defending himself against the expansionist big boys ganging up on him. I’m sick of hearing it but this systematic Washington Post analysis by Glenn Kessler is helpful in disproving outright lies and correcting wild misinterpretations and distortions. Of course, it will persuade no-one whose ideological framework depends on Russia being the good guys, but it is a public service nonetheless.
“How to solve ‘range anxiety’”: Rory Sutherland’s regular “Wiki Man” column from The Spectator, brief but invigorating and perceptive as always. I make no apology for banging the drum for Rory again and again, and this piece demonstrates the importance of perception and the enormous changes we can effect with relatively little effort or outlay if we think in the right way. I don’t drive regularly, as a London-dweller without dependents, but I’ve been in cars where the amount of fuel (fossil or otherwise) is expressed in terms of “range till empty”, and it’s hypnotic and mostly irrelevant. Yet it’s become one of the most powerful factors in the narrative on electric vehicles. Alas, too, they have been sucked into the more ideological section of the culture wars where evidence goes out the window and you are for or against things depending on your tribe. The market share of EVs remains very unevenly distributed, but do people really think internal combustion engines will be the standard by, say, 2050? I find it hard to imagine. So let’s find the best way to progress, not as dogma but to make personal transportation cheaper, easier and more sustainable.
Farewell
That’s your lot for this week. To quote Shakespeare’s most famous Dane, “My necessaries are embark’d: farewell”.
The amazing John rylands library on central Manchester was built by the widow of one of Manchesters first cotton millionaires. And she was Cuban by birth. The library is open and worth a visit. Then pop down the road to the People's History Museum too.