Sunday round-up 15 September 2024

Who knew Tommy Lee Jones and Oliver Stone were exactly the same age? Candles too for Jimmy Carr and Sophie Dahl, and it is Battle of Britain Day

Who’s been up all night waiting impatiently to open birthday presents? Former diplomat, Conservative MP and Piers Morgan’s father-in-law George Walden (85), actor, director, producer and screenwriter Tommy Lee Jones (78), director, screenwriter, producer and ain’t-coming-back conspiracist Oliver Stone (78), singer and Mike Oldfield collaborator Maggie Reilly (68), writer of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Men in Black Ed Solomon (64), fashion designer Amanda Wakeley (62), prime minister of Slovakia and recent assassination attempt victim Robert Fico (60), couldn’t-be-nearer-the-knuckle comedian Jimmy Carr (52), Her Majesty The Queen of Spain (52), Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (47), model and author Sophie Dahl (47), actor Tom Hardy (47), His Royal Highness The Duke of Sussex (40) and reality television star and singer Heidi Montag (38).

Gorging on sponge cake in days of yore were explorer Marco Polo (1254), stalwart governor of the Habsburg Netherlands Queen Mary of Hungary and Bohemia (1505), Church of England priest and plot inventor with a “Canting Fanatical way” Titus Oates (1649), inaugural president of the National Constituent Assembly and first mayor of Paris Jean Sylvain Bailly (1736), writer and historian James Fenimore Cooper (1789), 27th President of the United States, 10th Chief Justice of the United States and 24-stone behemoth William Howard Taft (1857), legendary automobile designer and manufacturer Ettore Bugatti (1881), writer, columnist and Algonquin Round Table stalwart Robert Benchley (1889), novelist and crime writer par excellence Dame Agatha Christie (1890), actress and pioneering scream queen Fay Wray (1907), historian, author and aesthete John Julius (Cooper, 2nd Viscount) Norwich (1929), does-he-not-like-that England football manager Graham Taylor (1944) and renowned soprano Jessye Norman (1945).

Today in 1830, William Huskisson, MP for Liverpool and former cabinet minister, became the world’s first widely reported passenger railway fatality when he was knocked down and killed by George Stephenson’s Rocket at Parkside station near Eccles. It was the formal opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, and Huskisson, recovering for surgery to relieve inflammation of the kidneys, ignored medical advice in order to attend. He was a passenger in a special train for the prime minister, Field Marshal The Duke of Wellington, and when it stopped to take on fuel and water, Huskisson alighted, wanting to shake hands with the premier to repair a breach which had resulted in his departure from the cabinet two years previously. As he did so, another train pulled by Rocket approached on the other line, and someone called out the warning “An engine is approaching. Take care, gentlemen!”

There were three options. Most of the passengers got back on the Duke of Wellington’s train, while some crossed over the track and out of the way altogether. It would also have been possible to stand safely in the four-foot gap between the two tracks. Huskisson, panicking, attempted a calamitous combination of all of these. He was notoriously clumsy, had never regained full use of one arm after breaking it in two places and was still recovering from surgery; twice he started to cross the other line and twice changed his mind, then tried to clamber back on board Wellington’s train. Stephenson’s assistant Joseph Locke, at Rocket’s controls, realised what was happening and threw the locomotive into reverse but it needed at least 10 seconds to stop. Huskisson clung to the door of Wellington’s carriage but it was unlatched and swung slowly open into the path of Rocket, which hit him and the door, threw him on to the track and ran over him, mangling his leg. Huskisson was transferred to another carriage and taken to Eccles station and thence to the local vicarage but a doctor deemed it impossible to amputate his leg safely. Huskisson died at 9.00 pm, having made his last will and testament, at the age of 60. He is buried in St James’s Cemetary in Liverpool.

On this date in 1916, at the Battle of Flers–Courcelette in northern France, tanks were used in combat for the first time. C and D Companies of the Heavy Section of the British Army’s Machine Gun Corps, deployed 32 Mark I tanks against German lines, with mixed success: only nine successfully crossed no-man’s land, but the psychological impact on the defenders was enormous. Although slow and cumbersome, and prone to getting stuck in larger craters, the Mark Is could cross trenches and holes of up to nine feet and simply rolled over barbed wire. Their armament of two Ordnance QF Hotchkiss 6 pounder guns and three Hotchkiss M1909 machine guns was moderate, but it was obvious that the new technology was revolutionary, though not everyone thought so initially. In 1919, Major-General Sir Louis Jackson, a Royal Engineer and former instructor at the School of Military Engineering at Chatham, would remark with astonishing lack of foresight, “The tank was a freak. The circumstances which called it into existence were exceptional and not likely to recur. If they do, they can be dealt with by other means.”

Today in 1954, at 1.00 am, outside the Trans-Lux Theatre on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street in New York, Billy Wilder assembled his cast and crew for The Seven Year Itch. Its star, 28-year-old Marilyn Monroe, stood over a subway grate as a train passed underneath and said to her co-star Tom Ewell, “Ooh, do you feel the breeze from the subway?” You know the rest.

In 1981, the United States Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to approve the nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. The 51-year-old judge from the Arizona Court of Appeals had been nominated by President Ronald Reagan and was the first woman to serve on the nation’s highest court. She was a moderate Republican who had been assistant attorney general of Arizona (1965-69) and then a member of the Arizona State Senate (1969-75), and would sit on the Supreme Court for 25 years until retiring on 31 January 2006. She was succeeded by Justice Samuel Alito. In 2004, Forbes ranked her the sixth most powerful woman in the world.

If saints are your jam, then, my word, what a day it is for you. It is the feast of St Nicomedes, a martyr of the early church of whom nothing else is known; St Alpinus, a 4th century AD bishop of Lyon; St Nicetas the Goth (d. AD 372), a martyr who is invoked against birth defects; St Mamilian, bishop of Palermo (d. AD 460); St Aprus, bishop of Toul (d. AD 507); St Joseph of Alaverdi, a 6th century AD Syrian monk who founded a monastery in Georgia; St Mirin (Ad 565-AD 620), prior of Bangor Abbey in County Down and patron saint of Paisley in Renfrewshire; and St Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510), patroness of Italian hospitals. It is also the Feast of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary (oh come on, you all know them: the Prophecy of Simeon, the Flight into Egypt, Christ among the Doctors, meeting Christ on the Via Dolorosa, the Crucifixion, Christ’s descent from the cross and the burial of Christ).

In the United Kingdom, we mark Battle of Britain Day. Today in 1940, the Luftwaffe launched its largest single operation of the campaign against London, 620 fighters and 500 bombers, in an attempt to draw out and defeat the Royal Air Force. Fighter Command despatched 630 Spitfires and Hurricanes, and, while fighter losses on both sides were roughly equal, the German bomber force was badly mauled. Although the German assessment of the day’s events was (unrealistically) positive, two days later Adolf Hitler postponed Operation Sealion, the invasion of Britain, until further notice. (He would formally cancel it on 3 March 1942.)

Celebrating Independence Day are Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, all of which declared their autonomy from Spain in the Act of Independence of Central America (Acta de Independencia Centroamericana) today in 1821.

Under the auspices of that fine body, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, today is International Day of Democracy. It is also World Afro Day, Wife Appreciation Day and National Cheese Toast Day, so that really is something for everyone.

Factoids

1. Sandra Day O’Connor (see above) was the first female associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, appointed in 1981. Since then, five other women have joined the court, of whom four are still incumbents: Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1993-2020), Sonia Sotomayor (app 2009), Elena Kagan (app 2010), Amy Coney Barrett (app 2020) and Ketanji Brown Jackson (app 2022). Only Day O’Connor and Coney Barrett were nominated by Republican presidents.

2. Ruth Bader Ginsburg served as a Supreme Court justice for 27 years, while Sandra Day O’Connor sat for almost 25 years. Justice Sotomayor has another 10 years to serve before she matches Day O’Connor and 12 to beat Ginsburg as the longest-serving female justice, but she is already 70 years old. Justice Kagan, a year behind in service, is 64.

3. We sometimes underestimate the sheer social and cultural magnitude of the Norman conquest of England after 1066, but one very marked impact was on the choice of names for children. Within half a century of the Battle of Hastings, barely a quarter of children were given Anglo-Saxon names, and by the middle of the 13th century, so far as we can tell, the overwhelming majority of boys were given one of four names: William, Henry, Thomas or John. The devotion of Henry III (1216-72) to the cult of St Edward the Confessor (canonised in 1161) broadened the range slightly, but anyone who reads Tudor history will see that quintet of names everywhere.

4. Since 1066, excluding disputed monarchs, only two English kings have been uniquely named: Stephen (1135-54) and John (1199-1216). One British monarch is the only example of her name, Anne (1702-14), and one ruler of the United Kingdom, Victoria (1837-1901). If we use the same timeframe for Scotland, there are two one-offs, Edgar (1097-1107) and John (1292-96) before the Union of the Crowns in 1603.

5. The above must be balanced by those kings and queens whose regnal names were not their first names by birth: Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria), Edward VII (Albert Edward) and George VI (Albert Frederick Arthur George). By contrast, when Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary) was told of her father’s death and her accession by her private secretary, Martin Charteris, he also asked what regnal name she would use. “My own name, of course,” Her Majesty replied. “What else?”

6. Fifty years ago today, in 1974, Liza Minnelli, elder daughter of Judy Garland, married for the second time. Her new husband, director and producer Jack Haley Jr, was the son of Jack Haley, who had played the Tin Man opposite Garland in The Wizard of Oz (1939). They divorced in 1979.

7. Haley was a replacement in the cast of The Wizard of Oz for actor and dancer Buddy Ebsen (later Jed Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies). Originally cast as the Scarecrow, Ebsen swapped roles with Ray Bolger to play the Tin Man, but began to experience body aches, muscle cramps, and shortness of breath and was eventually hospitalised. It transpired that the aluminium dust in the Tin Man’s make-up was coating his lungs and preventing his blood from being properly oxygenated. When Haley was brought in, the production crew switched to using an aluminium paste instead, although that gave him an eye infection which kept him off the set for four shooting days.

8. With a hat-tip to Alwyn Turner’s Crisis? What Crisis?, in November 1970 it was reported that there were “ten coloured policemen in London”, though “five have joined in the past three weeks”. The Metropolitan Police at that point had around 20,000 officers.

9. Welsh actor Michael Sheen is notable for (among other achievements) his tripytch of dazzling performances as former prime minister Sir Tony Blair in The Deal (2003), The Queen (2006) and The Special Relationship (2010). He has an eerie ability to inhabit the persona of real people without executing an impersonation, and it has served him well professionally. Others may have been more prolific, though I struggle to think of any, but who can boast of having portrayed (purely in alphabetical order) HRH Prince Andrew, Aneurin Bevan, Sir Tony Blair, Caligula, Brian Clough, Sigmund Freud, Sir David Frost, Henry V, Art Honeyman, Dr William H. Masters, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Nero, Robbie Ross, Antonio Salieri, barrister David Sherborne, Chris Tarrant and H.G. Wells?

10. Sheen was brought up in Port Talbot in south Wales, and now lives there after stints in London and Los Angeles. It is a town of just over 30,000 people, in the news this week because of its steelworks, but it has punched above its weight in contributing to acting and performing (Richard Taylor, Bernard Fox, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Rob Brydon, Rhod Gilbert, Sheen, Paul Potts) and politics (George Thomas, Clive Jenkins, Geoffrey Howe and, if you must, Steve Bray). Intriguingly, Burton and Howe were only 13 months apart in age, though their careers diverged.

“Television is basically teaching whether you want it or not.” (Jim Henson)

1. “The Battle of Britain”: given the day, I strongly recommend Guy Hamilton’s colourful and stirring 1969 narrative. It is not perfect, but just start with the glittering cast: Sir Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard, Kenneth More, Robert Shaw, Christopher Plummer, Susannah York, Patrick Wymark, Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir Michael Redgrave, Edward Fox, Michael Caine, Curd Jürgens, Barry Foster, Ian McShane… The aerial combat scenes are vividly arresting, and the story captures the real sense of peril that was felt on the British side. While it is largely agreed now that there was no plausible path to decisive victory for the Luftwaffe, Britain was exposed and isolated. As Richardson’s Sir David Kelly reflects after losing his temper with his German counterpart, “The maddening thing is that he’s right. We’re not ready. We’re on our own. We’ve been playing for time—and it’s running out!” The soundtrack by Ron Goodwin is outstanding, especially then iconic “Aces High”, originally entitled “Luftwaffe March”.

2. “Timeshift: How to Be a Good President”: with polling day on 5 November rapidly approaching, the BBC iPlayer has resurrected this timely 2008 documentary by journalist and writer Jonathan Freedland. (Warning: my jaw dropped at Cristina Odone’s vile and dismissive condemnation of Monica Lewinsky, effectively blaming the then early-20s intern for somehow ensnaring the Great Man, President Bill Clinton.)

3. “Scene by Scene: Lauren Bacall”: in 2000, the Northern Irish writer and director Mark Cousins secured a rare interview with screen legend Lauren Bacall, then 75 years old and fresh from a Broadway revival of Noël Coward’s Waiting in the Wings. Forthright and no-nonsense, Bacall was a challenging subject, impatient with pleasantries, but she and Cousins found a visible and vibrant chemistry and she seems, almost against her will, to enjoy herself. It would be impossible to conduct a boring interview with Bacall: wife and co-star of Humphrey Bogart, directed by Howard Hawks, John Huston, Michael Curtiz, Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Rob Reiner and (to her regret) Michael Winner, staunch political campaigner and Democratic activist who defied McCarthy and supported Adlai Stevenson and Robert F. Kennedy. A dazzling performer and a penetrating interview.

4. “Hitchcock at the NFT”: from the BBC iPlayer vaults, a 1969 interview with Alfred Hitchcock to mark the director’s 70th birthday. Asking the questions is a wry and slightly humbled Bryan Forbes, screenwriter and director at that point perhaps best known for Whistle Down The Wind (1961) and The L-Shaped Room (1962). Hitchcock’s career was largely over by this stage—he would direct two more films, Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976)—and he had been making films for more than 45 years, starting with silent melodrama and ultimately working with the biggest stars of his day. Forbes’s professional experience sharpens his questioning and Hitchcock is open, good-natured and revealing about the way he went about his craft. Recorded at the National Film Theatre (now BFI Southbank), it is a symphony of brown and beige.

5. “The Rest Is Politics: Leading—Audrey Tang”: Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, in the “Leading” strand of their all-conquering podcast, interview former Taiwanese minister of digital affairs Audrey Tang. They discuss how technology can improve public services and strengthen the democratic process, how Taiwan has rebuilt trust in politicians and the country’s tense relationship with the People’s Republic of China. Tang is a fascinating figure, a childhood prodigy and computer programmer who became one of the world’s first transgender, non-binary cabinet ministers and has pioneered limited government and radical transparency: “My existence is not to become a minister for a certain group, nor to broadcast government propaganda. Instead, it is to become a ‘channel’ to allow greater combinations of intelligence and strength to come together.” A fascinating and innovative approach to the business of managing a state which provides much food for thought.

“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.” (Samuel Johnson)

1. “Understanding the Other”: a poignant and profound article from Tom Barnett’s excellent Substack about Springfield, Ohio, suddenly in the spotlight because of Donald Trump’s emphatic and disturbing claims of Haitian immigrants eating family pets (yes, I wrote those words in that order). Tom’s wife works in Springfield so he can offer some specific insights, but his more general point is one of cautious understanding of “the other”. Yes, bad things are happening, and perhaps closer to home than many Americans would have imagined, but individual instances are not the same as patterns or generalities. Moreover, just try to understand: not sympathise or condone, but understand, which is of course an essential ability in foreign policy as well as life.

2. “The Sign and the Seal: A Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant”: I mentioned in Thursday’s essay that I read this 1992 Graham Hancock volume when I was on holiday in Jerusalem nearly 30 years ago and enjoyed it. At this relatively early stage, Hancock had not fully immersed himself in the deeper waters of conspiracy and pseudo-history and, although the book has plenty of flaws, it is entertaining and intriguing, and, as I said in Thursday’s piece, not utterly implausible. It examines the story of the Ark of the Covenant from its appearance in the Bible to the current claim of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church that the ark now rests in the Church of Our Lady, Mary of Zion, in Axum in northern Ethiopia, hidden from view and accessible only to the monk who guards the church. The consensus is that whatever is in the church is a fake or replica, which may well be true. Conclusively, though? I don’t know. It’s one of the few far-fetched pseudo-conspiracies I’m willing to award a degree of intellectual house room.

3. “Mark Cousins: The Story of Looking”: this is in a way shameless self-promotion but, hey, my blog, my rules. Mark Cousins (see above) is deeply knowledgeable about cinema but also approaches the medium in a lyrical, almost magical way; he is also, as I discovered, an absolutely lovely man. A few years ago, he agreed to write an article for CulturAll, the digital arts journal I edit with my friends Alex Matchett and Mariana Holguín, based on his book The Story of Looking. He frames film as an exercise in perception and understanding, reminding us that each of us sees the world in our own way and filters it through our own experiences and influences. As he concludes, “looking is accrued and related to wisdom. It is mutual, twinned collaboration between me and the world around me.”

4. “Independent Investigation of the National Health Service in England”: within a week of being appointed health secretary in July, Wes Streeting had invited Lord Darzi of Denham, professor of surgery and former health minister, to conduct a swift review of the condition of NHS England. The report was published this week (I wrote about it in The Spectator) and it delivers punchy, straightforward conclusions: there has been sustained underinvestment in infrastructure, estates and equipment, the NHS lags decades behind the private sector in its use of technology, clinical outcomes are often poor and, in some ways most worrying, the problem is not a simple lack of resources but their mismanagement. Anyone interested in how we deliver healthcare should read it. I’ve known Ara Darzi off and on for nearly 20 years, since he advised the House of Commons Health Committee on its inquiry into independent-sector treatment centres, and he’s a dazzling and dynamic man: full of energy and innovation, unstuffy, practical and impatient for change. I don’t doubt the accuracy and judgement of his diagnosis. The question now is how the government addresses the problems he has identified.

5. “Germany’s immigration crackdown will heap pressure on Brussels”: Katja Hoyer is an excellent historian of Germany (and an early interviewee of CulturAll, plug plug), but she has also emerged as a first-rate explainer of her native country to an Anglophone audience. This article in The Spectator is a very useful analysis of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s declared crackdown on immigration as he desperately tries to challenge the electoral rise of the nationalist Alternative für Deutschland, and the way it will affect Berlin’s relationship with the European Union. It also comes as the new French prime minister, Michel Barnier, is promising a tough approach to migration and identity in France. The truth is that the open-borders ideals of the European Commission and its dedication to freedom of movement are looking increasingly out of kilter with public opinion across the continent. As Katja concludes, “if Germany is heading for a paradigm shift on immigration, then Brussels will likely have to follow”.

You and I will meet again, when we’re least expecting it…

… as the late Tom Petty sang. One day in some far off place, I will recognise your face, I won’t say goodbye, my friend, for you and I will meet again. Kalí su méra.

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