Sunday round-up 14 July 2024

Bastille Day! Also birthday greetings to Bruce Oldfield and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, while the Church of England commemorates John Keble

As we reach the middle of the month, birthday greetings, cake and the bumps for former NATO secretary general Javier Solana (82), one-time Sony Music chief (and ex-husband of Mariah Carey) Tommy Mottola (76), king of couture Bruce Oldfield (74), star of Party of Five and the inexplicably popular Lost Matthew Fox (58), Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden (47), general-purpose icon and goddess Phoebe Waller-Bridge (39) and former Sunderland AFC winger and convicted child-sex enthusiast Adam Johnson (37).

Born on this day but now having proceeded to their allotted destination are long-time chief minister of France Jules, Cardinal Mazarin (1602), French novelist, diplomat and racist Arthur de Gobineau (1816), symbolist legend Gustav Klimt (1862), County Durham-born archaeologist and Middle East expert Gertrude Bell (1868), last khedive of Egypt and the Sudan Abbas Helmy II (1874), poglavnik of the fascist Independent State of Croatia Ante Pavelić (1899), folk pioneer Woody Guthrie (1912), 38th president of the United States Gerald Ford (1913), Swedish cinema legend Ingmar Bergman (1918) and former editor of The Times and acme of pomposity Lord Rees-Mogg (1928).

On this day in 1789, famously, a crowd of around 1,000 revolutionaries stormed the fortress and prison of the Bastille in Paris, where the Place de la Bastille now stands. It was a symbol of royal authority and oppression, but by the time of the assault there were only seven prisoners detained there: four forgers, an Irish “lunatic” called James F.X. Whyte who had been confined at the request of his family, an alleged conspirator in the attempted assassination of Louis XV in 1757, Auguste-Claude Tavernier (described in prison records as un homme de néant, a “nothing”), and an aristocrat, Hubert, Comte de Solanges, who had been imprisoned again at familial request for “perverted sexual practices”, specifically incest with his sister Pauline. Another inmate, the Marquis de Sade, had been transferred to an asylum in Charenton 10 days previously. The garrison of the Bastille was small, 82 invalides (soldiers no longer fit for front-line duties) and 32 grenadiers from the Swiss Régiment de Salis-Samade, under the command of the governor, Bernard-René Jourdan, Marquis de Launay; his father had held the position years before and Launay had been born in the Bastille itself. Fighting broke out around 1.30 pm but by 5.00 pm the governor, realising the potential for a bloodbath, ordered his troops to stop firing, and half an hour later opened the gates to the mob. It was a mistake for Launay personally: he was seized and dragged to the Hôtel de Ville where he was badly beaten while the revolutionaries debated what to do with him. At last he shouted “Enough! Let me die!” and kicked a pastry chef named Desnot in the testicles, whereupon he was stabbed to death and his head was sawn off and put on a pike.

Today in 1881, the 21-year-old outlaw William H. Bonney, better known as “Billy the Kid”, was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, having escaped from jail and evaded capture for several months. He is alleged to have killed 21 men, having committed his first robbery just before or after his 16th birthday (the exact date of his birth is unclear).

In 1933, the German government promulgated the Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses, or Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, which authorised “genetic health courts” to order the sterilisation of anyone suffering from a range of genetic disorders (some of which were in fact not genetic), including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, Huntingdon’s disease, deafness, blindness and severe alcoholism. In its first full year of operation, beginning on 1 January 1934, the legislation saw 84,600 cases come before the courts and 62,400 sterilisations carried out. It was, horribly, only the beginning of the Nazi eugenics programme which used the concept of Lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life”, to proceed from sterilisation to execution by 1939. Between 200,000 and 300,000 people across Germany and occupied would eventually be killed.

On a happier note (I assume?), today is the anniversary in 1983 of Nintendo’s release of arcade game Mario Bros., the first in the Super Mario Bros franchise.

Liturgically, it is the feast of St Camillus de Lellis (1550-1614), an Italian priest who founded the Camillians and is the patron saint of the sick, hospitals, nurses and physicians, whose assistance is also invoked against gambling. (In the United States, his feast is celebrated on 18 July.) We also commemorate the Blessed Boniface of Savoy, an Italian aristocrat and monk who was archbishop of Canterbury from 1241 to 1270. The mediaeval chronicler Matthew Parris described him as “noted more for his birth than for his brains”, though he was an effective ecclesiastical administrator, and after his death a cult developed around him. When his tomb in Hautecombe Abbey, in Savoie in south-western France, was opened in 1580, his body was found to be uncorrupted. He was beatified in 1839. In addition, it is the feast of St Deusdedit, the first native-born archbishop of Canterbury (AD 655-c. AD 664), of whom very little is known, while the Church of England remembers John Keble (1792-1866), one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, who today in 1833 delivered his sermon “National Apostasy” at the University Church of St Mary in Oxford.

Iraq marks Republic Day, in honour of the 1958 overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy and the murder of King Faisal II by the Nationalist Officers’ Organisation, led by Brigadier Abdul-Karim Qasim, who became prime minister, and Colonel Abdul Salam Arif, who became deputy prime minister. It came six months after Iraq and Jordan had formed the Hashemite Arab Federation, a response to the alliance of Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic. Ten years and three days later the régime was again toppled by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and the Ba’ath Party; al-Bakr became president of Iraq and his vice-president was a 31-year-old army officer and fellow native of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein.

It is National Tape Measure Day for any American readers, though also National Mac and Cheese Day (I can see a potential connection). It’s also Shark Awareness Day, though you may wonder exactly how aware of sharks you really need to be in a land-based environment. My sister has a terrible fear of sharks, but my former university flatmate operates a simple yet effective policy: he doesn’t go to where they live and mess up their lives, and expects them to repay the courtesy. As he lives in Blantyre, it seems to be working.

Factoids

1. “Jingle Bells”, one of the most frequently sung songs in the world, was composed in 1850 by James Lord Pierpoint, though it was not published until 1857. He was a Boston-born organist and composer who enlisted in the Lamar Rangers (later the 1st Georgia Cavalry Battalion), a Confederate militia unit, in 1861, serving throughout the Civil War, but, musical composition aside, is now chiefly notable for being the maternal uncle of pioneering financier John Pierpoint Morgan, founder of what is now J.P. Morgan & Co. Morgan also financed the 1901 merger of the Carnegie Steel Company, the Federal Steel Company and the National Steel Company to create the United States Steel Corporation, the world’s first billion-dollar private enterprise. In the 1907 Bankers’ Panic he pledged substantial amounts of his own money and persuaded fellow financiers to do the same to shore up the American financial system. The country had no central bank until the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.

2. One of Sir Keir Starmer’s more surprising ministerial appointments last week was that of former home secretary Jacqui Smith as minister of state for higher education (she will be granted a life peerage to take up the role, having lost her seat in the House of Commons in 2010). She is the first former home secretary to accept a non-cabinet ministerial role since Sir John Simon (home secretary 1915-16, 1935-37) was created Viscount Simon and served as lord chancellor in the wartime coalition but outside the war cabinet.

3. Sir Keith Joseph and Nigel Lawson, who sat together in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet from 1981 to 1986, were related: Lawson’s first wife Vanessa (née Salmon) was the great-great-granddaughter of Samuel Gluckstein (1821-73), founder of tobacco merchant Salmon and Gluckstein, who was Joseph’s great-grandfather. Joseph’s sister Julia then married Sir Samuel Gluckstein, grandson of her own great-grandfather Samuel by his son Isidore. To make it more piquant, Isidore and his brother Montague Gluckstein were two of the founders of hospitality giant J. Lyons & Co., which from 1949 to 1951 employed a young research chemist called Margaret Roberts, later Thatcher.

4. Joseph was briefly an unlikely and reluctant potential candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1974 as it became obvious that Edward Heath, who had lost three of the four general elections into which he had led it, would have to be displaced. Whatever slender chances he may have had vanished in October 1974 when he made a speech in Birmingham in which, in relation to poverty, he said that “the balance of our population, our human stock is threatened”. It was an unwitting but fatal whiff of eugenics and emphasised his unsuitability for the rigours of party leadership, but he had not chosen the phrase, “human stock”, himself. It had come from a speechwriter at the new Centre for Policy Studies, a young mediaeval historian and fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, called Jonathan Sumption; he was called to the Bar at Inner Temple the following year and in 2012 was sworn in as a justice of the United Kingdom Supreme Court.

5. Last week, you may recall, we commemorated the tribunal in 1456 which absolved St Jehanne d’Arc of heresy, awkwardly 25 years after she’d been burned at the stake. Retrospective justice can work both ways, however. In January AD 897, Pope Formosus was put on trial for perjury and having improperly obtained the papacy. There was a minor challenge in that he had been dead for nine months: his corpse was disinterred, dressed in papal vestments and placed on a throne to face a trial presided over by his successor-but-one Stephen VI, the so-called “Cadaver Synod”. The dead pontiff was found guilty, all the measures and acts of his papacy annulled and orders conferred by him declared invalid. The vestments were torn from his body, three fingers of his right hand cut off and his body thrown into the River Tiber. Truly, the arm of the law is long indeed in the Roman Catholic Church.

6. For some, this life is a passing fancy. John I, king of France and Navarre, was born a monarch and died a monarch, but those two points were only four days apart. He was born on 15 November 1316, the posthumous son and successor of Louis X (1314-16) who died after drinking too much cooled wine following a vigorous game of real tennis. As Louis left a pregnant wife, his brother Philip was appointed regent until the child was born. The infant king’s cause of death is unknown, though it was an age of very high child mortality, but inevitably there have been rumours of foul play ever since. His uncle succeeded him as Philip V and many suspected he had smoothed his path to the throne by poisoning John.

7. Former health secretary Alan Milburn has been in the news this week as the new Labour government ponders reform of the National Health Service. Milburn was MP for Darlington from 1992 to 2010 but he is not, at least on some counts, the town’s most extraordinary representative. Ignatius Trebitsch-Lincoln (born Trebitsch Ignác to a wealthy Jewish family in Hungary in 1879) was only a Member of Parliament from January to November 1910, as a Liberal, and stood aside in the second general election of that year for personal financial reasons. He was rejected as an agent by British intelligence during the First World War, subsequently recruited by the Germans, captured in the United States and imprisoned for fraud in HMP Parkhurst from 1916 to 1919, his British nationality being revoked. In the 1920s he travelled to China and found himself employed by a series of warlords, after which he converted to Buddhism and in 1931 became abbot of a monastery in Shanghai under the name Chao Kung. By the late 1930s, he was making anti-British propaganda for imperial Japan, then established contact with representatives of the Gestapo. At some point around 1940, he topped his career by proclaiming himself the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism and the incarnation of Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. He died in Shanghai in 1943. It is either an inspiration or a cautionary tale for all former MPs who find themselves suddenly unemployed. Aim high.

8. I was listening earlier this week to the first episode of podcast The Rest is History’s examination of the story of the Titanic. (It was owned and operated by the White Star Line, which in 1902 had been bought by the International Navigation Company, later the International Mercantile Marine Company, financed by J.P. Morgan, above). The 710 survivors of the sinking of the Titanic on 15 April 1912 included one Japanese man, a 41-year-old civil servant from the Ministry of Transport called Masabumi Hosono. He was returning to Japan from Russia, where he had been studying the railway system, and was a second-class passenger on the ship’s maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. After the Titanic struck the fateful iceberg, he eventually managed to board a lifeboat and was rescued by the RMS Carpathia later that morning, completing his journey to New York. When he eventually returned to Tokyo, he found himself publicly condemned and dismissed from his job (although he was soon re-employed), and allegedly denounced as immoral by a professor of ethics. It seems that he was regarded either as having failed to show a spirit of self-sacrifice, or else to have forced his way on to a lifeboat and rejected obedient conformity. He died in 1939, having kept silent on his ordeal.

9. A vast store of mythology has grown up around the Titanic in the 112 years since her loss. For example, no-one ever tempted fate by saying the ship was “unsinkable”, though Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipyard which constructed Titanic, did describe her as “practically unsinkable”. However, one fact is chillingly accurate: the provision of lifeboats was woefully and fatally inadequate. The Titanic had 20 lifeboats in total: 14 standard wooden Harland and Wolff lifeboats with a capacity of 65 and four Engelhardt collapsible lifeboats capable of accommodating 47 people. There were also two emergency cutters each with a capacity of 40. The total capacity of her lifeboats was therefore 1,178, more than the minimum required by Board of Trade regulations which demanded that ships over 10,000 tonnes made provision for 16 lifeboats with a capacity of 990. Unfortunately, the Titanic set sail with around 1,317 passengers and roughly 885 crew, a total complement of more than 2,200, which was almost double the capacity of her lifeboats. In the event of sinking, a huge death toll was inevitable, and so it proved. Somewhere between 1,490 and 1,635 people were lost.

10. The Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, being held in Paris later this month, will include a new discipline, breaking (what I, as very much a passive observer, would call breakdancing). It might seem a peculiar event and not much of a sport per se, but bear in mind some of the activities which have in the past been part of the Summer Olympics: croquet (1900), cricket (1900, but will return in 2028), jeu de paume (1908), pelota (1900), polo (1900-36), roque (1904), rackets (1908), tug-of-war (1900-20), lacrosse (1904-08, returning in 2028) and motor-boating (1908). Funny old world.

“If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed” (Stanley Kubrick)

1. “The Conversation”: this week I went to BFI Southbank for a screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s taut, nerve-jangling, paranoid masterpiece released in 1974, between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. It was followed by a fascinating Q&A with Walter Murch, the editor and sound mixer for the film for which he won an Academy Award the following year. I hadn’t seen The Conversation in years and was reminded anew what an extraordinary film it is: Gene Hackman as surveillance expert Harry Caul is at his best, and John Cazale (as his assistant Stan Ross) and Allen Garfield as professional rival William P. Moran are brilliant in support. The paranoia and mistrust which pervade the film were both emblematic of the time and foreshadowed what was to come. Filming began at the end of 1972, in the aftermath of Richard Nixon’s crushing re-election as president, and it was eventually released on 7 April 1974, a month before the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary began impeachment proceedings against Nixon as the Watergate scandal unfolded. The subject of electronic surveillance could not have been more apposite as the charges against the president hinged on taped conversations in the Oval Office. This was American cinema of the 1970s at its very best.

2. “Inside Story: Traitors to Hitler”: this week the BBC repeated this 1979 documentary which examines the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler and the aftermath, including the gruesome trials of the plotters by the Volksgerichtshof, the People’s Court. This summary justice was presided over by the appalling Roland Freisler, who had been an observer at the Moscow show trials on the late 1930s and had clearly learned a great deal. I discussed the July plot in an essay on counterfactual history in May and one should not imagine that the conspirators were pristine, high-minded democrats. Nevertheless, Hitler decided they should be punished with exceptional cruelty, demanding that they should be “hanged like cattle”: 4,980 people were executed, many left to die slowly suspended from meat hooks. It was by many accounts filmed for the Führer to watch at his leisure. A sombre but gripping examination of a dark episode even by the standards of the Third Reich.

3. “Sir Keith Joseph and the Market Economy”: following last week’s election result and the severe setback for the Conservative Party, my mind has naturally turned towards the prospect of rebuilding and renewal, and to the intellectual and ideological revolution carried out by Margaret Thatcher after 1975. This May 2013 Gresham College lecture by Professor Sir Vernon Bogdanor profiles Sir Keith Joseph, one of the most important minds behind Thatcherism, and tells his fascinating story from a modernising, mildly interventionist housing minister under Harold Macmillan to the agonised and repentant prophet of the free market in the mid-1970s. (There is a full transcript here.) Joseph was intellectually brilliant, elected a prize fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, in 1946 and, with Margaret Thatcher and Alfred Sherman, co-founder of the Centre for Policy Studies as a think tank to champion economic liberalism and challenge Keynesianism. His influence has been profound.

4. “Dolly Parton: Here I Am”: on Friday, BBC Four showed a series of programmes about country legend Dolly Parton. Now look, I am unashamed and vehement in my boundless admiration for Dolly. Not only is she one of showbusiness’s great survivors, she is a formidable commercial force and a hugely effective philanthropist. This 2019 documentary profiles her career, which began when she moved from her native Appalachia to Nashville in 1964. Her initial success was as a songwriter, but in 1967 she released her first album, Hello, I’m Dolly, and joined established star Porter Wagoner on his successful television show. She turned 78 at the beginning of this year remains a music icon. How could she be other? As far as she can recall, she wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” on the same day. No-one works harder, and no-one works smarter.

5. “The Last Waltz”: I was talking to a cinephile friend earlier in the week who said—admitted, almost—that he thought much of Martin Scorsese’s work was overrated. There are some films about which I agree, but it started my mind thinking and soon I was recalling his magnificent 1978 documentary showing the last concert by Canadian-American group the Band. Growing out of the backing musicians for first Ronnie Hawkins and then Bob Dylan, the Band brought together five musicians of profound and generational talent: Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm. Robertson died last summer and Hudson, a strange, eerily gifted multi-instrumentalist is now the only survivor, turning 87 next month. With two albums, Music from Big Pink (1968) and The Band (1969), they revolutionised American roots, folk and country music: author and music critic Greil Marcus called the latter “a passport back to America for people who’d become so estranged from their own country that they felt like foreigners, even when they were in it”. The Last Waltz shows their 25 November 1976 concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, and is a record of the last hurrah of a unique musical act, lovingly crafted, but it is also astonishing for the guest stars who appear. It shows the esteem and eminence the Band had within the industry by the mid-1970s: Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan, of course, but also Eric Clapton, Neil Diamond, Emmylou Harris, Dr John, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Ringo Starr, Muddy Waters, Ronnie Wood, Neil Young… An immaculate snapshot of an exceptional collection of talent.

“Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else” (Gloria Steinem)

1. “Why India will become a superpower”: veteran economics commentator Martin Wolf made a very even-handed assessment in The Financial Times of India’s likely economic growth. Prime minister Narendra Modi said last year “I have an unwavering belief that in 2047, when the country celebrates 100 years of independence, my country will be a developed India”, and, while one can argue about definitions and specific strengths and weaknesses, it is clear that India is growing and growing fast. Last year it overtook China as the world’s most populous nation, and it is a young country, while China has a demographic ticking time bomb in the form of an ageing population combined with a low birth rate. India is clearly the centre of economic gravity in the Indo-Pacific region and Western foreign policy needs to make that a foundational assumption.

2. “Trump is planning for a landslide win”: a sobering read from The Atlantic by Tim Alberta which focuses on key Trump advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, and the way they have designed the Republican candidate’s election campaign painstakingly around the perceived weaknesses of President Biden. They believe they can effect an “electoral wipeout”, which would, in Alberta’s words, “obliterate entire downballot garrisons of the Democratic Party, forcing the American left to fundamentally recalibrate its approach to immigration, economics, policing, and the many cultural positions that have antagonized the working class”. However, all of this has been founded on the assumption that Trump will face the 81-year-old incumbent, and Wiles and LaCivita now openly admit they are starting to think about a new candidate. This is a very well informed and informative piece, but it will not leave you thinking a second Trump presidency is any less likely.

3. “Labour must address who our universities are for”: I don’t necessarily agree with every point in this Financial Times article by Professor Tom Sperlinger of the University of Bristol, it’s very much worth reading because it takes a radical look at the fundamental premise of higher education. I violently agree that “the sector has become too homogenous, with smaller universities struggling to compete against more prestigious ones for the same students on similar courses”, and there is a lack of discourse over tuition fees: politicians know how toxic the issue can be, as the Liberal Democrats discovered, yet the fact that they’ve been frozen for years is robbing universities of an income stream. If we rule out a huge injection of public expenditure, we need to have a ground-up review of what we want from the university sector, and how best to achieve it.

4. “What Should Britain’s Role in the World Be Now?”: a sharp analysis in Foreign Policy on the new government’s intentions in international relations which raises some interesting questions. Dr Bronwen Everill is the director of Cambridge’s Centre for African Studies and points to issues like Britain’s post-colonial legacy and growing Russian and Chinese influence in middle-income states: both countries are hungrily seeking allies in the Sahel as France and the United States gradually disengage. I have been very critical of Labour’s foreign policy so far and have been not at all reassured over the past week, but Everill is wholly fair in the dissection she provides.

5. “A foreign policy that sees the world”: a fascinating and astrigent op-ed from The Washington Post on “progressive realism” in foreign policy by Robert Wright, the man who coined the term. It is timely because the new foreign secretary, David Lammy, has adopted “progressive realism” as the label for his vision of Britain’s approach to the global community. Regular readers will know that I have a very sceptical view of Lammy in his current role, and more generally of the new government’s extraordinarily woolly thinking and conflation of words with deeds, so there is a degree of malicious satisfaction on watching Wright systematically and incisively shred Lammy’s (mis)interpretation of the original concept. You don’t have to agree with everything Wright says—I don’t—but he is a clear thinker and a courteous if merciless critic.

Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets…

… as Thackeray wrote in Vanity Fair, for our play is played out. Alla prossima.