Sunday round-up 28 July 2024
Birthday wishes to Harry Kane and the King of Thailand, 484 years since Thomas Cromwell was executed and a happy Ólavsøka Eve to all my Faroese readers
Today’s birthdays are as diverse as ever, with cake and fizz for Barbadian cricket legend Sir Garfield Sobers (88), former Democratic senator for New Jersey and one-time basketball player Bill Bradley (81), cartoonist and creator of Garfield Jim Davis (79), HM King Rama X of Thailand (72), French motor racing veteran and four-time Le Mans 24 Hours winner Yannick Dalmas (61), actress Elizabeth Berkley (50), former prime minister of Greece Alexis Tsipras (50) and England football captain Harry Kane (31).
Born this day but, happily or not, no longer with us are poet and Jesuit priest Fr Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844), writer and illustrator Beatrix Potter (1866), painter, sculptor and artistic experimenter Marcel Duchamp (1887), philosopher and political thinker Sir Karl Popper (1902), novelist and poet Malcolm Lowry (1909) and first lady of the United States and style icon Jacquelin Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (1929).
It seems unfair to say that it is Henry VIII’s wedding anniversary, because when is it not, but today in 1540 he married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard. The King was 49 while his bride was around 17. His fourth marriage, to Anne of Cleves, had been annulled 19 days before but with only a single legitimate male heir, Henry was a sovereign in a hurry. They were married at Oatlands Palace near Weybridge in Surrey, Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, about whom I wrote in February, conducting the service. The King was obviously enamoured of the young lady-in-waiting but it was not a lengthy marriage. Towards the end of 1541, she was accused of various incidents of sexual impropriety, attainted by act of Parliament in February 1542 and was beheaded at 7.00 am on Monday 13 February at the Tower of London. She was probably 19 years old.
The same day as the King was married, the execution took place at Tower Hill of the man who had until recently been 1st Earl of Essex and a Knight of the Garter. He had been until 19 June Lord Great Chamberlain, Lord Privy Seal, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Governor of the Isle of Wight, but after an act of attainder stripped him of all his honours, it was proclaimed he could be recognised publicly only as “Thomas Cromwell, cloth carder”.
In 1794, the French Revolution reached perhaps the peak of devouring its own children. At noon, a Revolutionary Tribunal convened to consider accusations of counter-revolution against Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre and 21 co-conspirators. Robespierre, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, had tried to kill himself the previous night, placing a pistol in his mouth, but was left only with a shattered jaw and teeth. They were sentenced to death at 2.00 pm, then four hours later taken to the Place de la Révolution where the guillotine awaited. Robespierre was the 10th to be executed; he was 36.
In 1939, as the storm clouds of war gathered, archaeologists were excavating the Sutton Hoo burial ship near Woodbridge in Suffolk. The story of the excavation is vividly told in the Nexflix film The Dig (2021), starring Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan. On this day, the first outline of the famous Sutton Hoo helmet came to light in the soil. The most famous Anglo-Saxon artefact in the world? Probably.
Two canonised popes are commemorated today: St Victor I is believed to have been bishop of Rome AD 189 to AD 199, a Berber cleric who had to preside over a number of early doctrinal wrangles, while St Innocent I (AD 401-417) was a champion of papal authority in matters of faith. For any Welsh readers, it is also the feast of St Samson of Dol, one of the seven founding saints of Brittany who died in AD 565.
In the Faroe Islands, it is Ólavsøka Eve, the first day of a two-day national festival celebrated with boat races, football matches and Faroese chain dancing. It marks the opening of the islands’ 33-member unicameral parliament, the Løgting, one of the oldest legislatures in the world. San Marino celebrates Liberation Day, marking the date in 1943 when the Sammarinese Fascist Party was ousted.
In Canada, since 2005, today has marked “A Day of Commemoration of the Great Upheaval” after the late Queen issued a royal proclamation which marked the similar instrument of 1755 by which the Acadian population of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick had been expelled. An estimated 14,100 people were deported mainly to other parts of the North American colonies, 5,000 dying of disease, starvation or shipwreck, their land given to newcomers from Scotland and New England.
Factoids
When a prime minister forms a government, there is never room for everyone and some ministers have to accept positions lower in rank than they might have liked. However, Sir Keir Starmer’s administration contains no fewer than 24 junior ministers (i.e. outside cabinet) who were previously cabinet or shadow cabinet ministers). Ready? Ellie Reeves, Jim McMahon, Douglas Alexander, Baroness Smith of Malvern, Anneliese Dodds, Nick Thomas-Symonds, Dame Angela Eagle, Lord Coaker, Maria Eagle, Heidi Alexander, Sir Stephen Timms, Sir Chris Bryant, Andrew Gwynne, Seema Malhotra, Lilian Greenwood, Dame Nia Griffith, Kerry McCarthy, Luke Pollard, Catherine McKinnell, Mary Creagh, Baroness Chapman of Darlington, Emma Reynolds, Baroness Hayman of Ullock and Lord Kennedy of Southwark.
If the list of contenders for the leadership of the Conservative Party is as we expect (nominations close tomorrow), it will include three former home secretaries: Dame Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and James Cleverly. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the importance of immigration in current political debate, but if any of them is to be successful he or she will need to kick against the pricks of historical precedent. In the party’s 190-year history, only four leaders have been former home secretaries: Sir Robert Peel (1822-27, 1828-30), Sir Winston Churchill (1910-11), Michael Howard (1993-97) and Theresa May (2010-16). That is, I think, a mixed bag (and one should note that Churchill was home secretary during his time in the Liberal Party).
On 30 August 1889, Joseph Stoddart, editor of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, held a dinner at the Langham Hotel in Marylebone to attract new writers for his publication. Rudyard Kipling was supposedly invited but was on board a ship returning from India, but Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde attended and were commissioned to write. They produced The Sign of Four (February 1890) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (July 1890) respectively: not a bad return for one dinner. Kipling would contribute The Light That Failed in January 1891.
You may be enjoying the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad currently being held in Paris (track and field is not really my thing but knock yourselves out). As everyone knows, the first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896, but only four nations have competed in every summer games: Australia, Great Britain, Greece and Switzerland.
The history of the Olympic Games records participation by some countries now lost to history, some of which were not even independent states. These include Bohemia (1900, 1908, 1912), the Russian Empire (1900, 1908, 1912), the Saar Protectorate (1952), Malaya (1956, 1960), the British West Indies (1960) and the Yemen Arab Republic (1984, 1988).
The George Cross is Britain’s highest civilian award for gallantry and is “awarded to those who have displayed the greatest heroism or the most conspicuous courage whilst in extreme danger”. It was established in September 1940 and has only been awarded 416 times (1,358 Victoria Crosses have been bestowed since 1856), but three of these are collective rather than individual awards: Malta (15 April 1942), the Royal Ulster Constabulary (23 November 1999) and the National Health Services of the United Kingdom (5 July 2021).
The George Cross has never been awarded twice to the same individual, but three soldiers have been awarded a Bar (that is, a second VC) to their Victoria Cross: Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Martin-Leake, Royal Army Medical Corps (13 May 1902 and 16 February 1916); Captain Noel Chevasse, Royal Army Medical Corps (9 August 1916 and 2 August 1917); and Captain Charles Upham, 20th Canterbury-Otago Battalion, New Zealand Military Forces (14 October 1941 and 26 September 1945).
In 1935, at Riccarton Park Racecourse in Christchurch, New Zealand, Charles Upham met and danced with a dietitian and former nurse called Molly McTamney. The next day he proposed marriage but she declined, although they would maintain contact and eventually marry in 1945. McTamney was a distant relative of Captain Noel Chevasse VC and Bar.
The first “talkie”—a feature film presented with synchronised dialogue—was The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson, which premiered on 6 October 1927. Of the films made in the silent era up to that point, it is estimated that 75 per cent have been lost. Among these are the first screen adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet (1914) directed by George Samuelson; F.W. Murnau’s The Hunchback and the Dancer (Der Bucklige und die Tänzerin) of 1920; Hollywood (1923), featuring cameos by Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Mary Astor, Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford; and Alfred Hitchcock’s second directorial feature The Mountain Eagle (1926).
James Mason, the great actor and implausible Yorkshireman, attempted to register as a conscientious objector after the outbreak of the Second World War (although he soon came under a general exemption from military service for film work). This caused a break with his family, and Noël Coward refused to cast him in a role in the rousing patriotic naval tale In Which We Serve (1942) because of his stance on the war. Coward himself did not serve in the armed forces, though he did undertake some work for the intelligence services.
“A good movie will ask you questions you don’t already know the answers to. Why would I want to make a film about something I already understand?” (John Cassavetes)
“Chariots of Fire”: the BBC threw itself into the Olympic spirit with Hugh Hudson’s 1981 classic, written by Colin Welland and produced by David Puttnam. In case by some fluke you haven’t seen it, it tells the story of two British athletes at the 1924 Olympic Games (also held in Paris), Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams. The former, a 22-year-old science undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh, was a devout Christian who refused to participate in the heats for the 100 metres, his most promising event, because they were to be held on a Sunday and he was a strict sabbatarian. The latter, reading law at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and bridling at the casual antisemitism of the times, won the event which Liddell boycotted but took little pleasure in it. All right, the film does play fast and loose with the historical record at times, but it’s a magnificent piece of art, with outstanding performances by Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Nigel Havers, Ian Holm and a roster of other British stars; and the Vangelis soundtrack, despite being very early-1980s contemporary for a film set mainly in the 1920s, just works. And it was part of a hugely important time in British cinema: when Welland collected the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1982, he brandished the trophy and announced, the joy bursting out of him, “The British are coming!” Fun fact: the iconic scene of the athletes training on the beach actually happened in Broadstairs in Kent, but was filmed on the West Sands in my alma mater, St Andrews.
“London 48: How Britain saved the Olympics”: continuing the theme, Channel 5 screened a fascinating documentary about the first post-war Olympic Games held in London in 1948. The two preceding Olympiads had been cancelled because of the conflict: the 1940 games were initially scheduled to take place in Tokyo, ironically, then transferred to Helsinki before being scrapped, while London had been awarded the 1944 event. The lavish spectacle of recent Olympic Games is a million miles away from London in 1948, where rationing was still fully in place and there were genuine anxieties about how the athletes were going to be adequately fed. In the end they were allotted the increased rations given to dockers and miners, 5,467 calories a day instead of the normal 2,600. There were no newly built venues, with most events taking place at Wembley Stadium and the Empire Pool at Wembley Park, and the athletes were accommodated in existing buildings rather than in a specially constructed Olympic Village: male athletes stayed at RAF camps in Uxbridge and West Drayton and an army camp in Richmond Park, while various London colleges found room for the female athletes. The so-called “Austerity Games” might have been basic but they were a triumphant assertion of a return to peacetime normality after years of grinding, brutal conflict.
“Catching Britain’s Killers: The Crimes That Changed Us”: we are now so soaked in both crime fiction and true-crime documentaries, podcasts, books, fridge magnets etc, and exposed on a superficial level to so much detail about the investigation of crime, that it is easy to forget how much it has changed within a (well, my) lifetime. This BBC documentary relates how the murders of two teenage girls in Leicestershire, in 1983 and 1986, led to the invention of DNA fingerprinting and Britain’s creation of a world-first DNA database. It took some time for the admissibility of DNA evidence to be wholly accepted, especially in US courts, but it is now a staple of forensic science. A genuinely revolutionary scientific breakthrough which we now take largely for granted.
“Ford v Ferrari”: last week’s Sunday Times rather primly described this 2019 film as a “crowd-pleasing drama”, and I accept that it won’t interest everyone, but for all the motor racing setting it’s really a revenge drama. In 1963, the Ford Motor Company offered to buy Ferrari in order to expand its motorsport presence, but the wily autocrat Enzo Ferrari would not cede control of his racing division and later in the decade sold 50 per cent of the company to Italian giant Fiat on the condition that he remained in charge of Scuderia Ferrari, the motorsport arm of his company. Henry Ford II, chairman of Ford, was enraged by Ferrari’s ducking and diving and decided that if his company could not acquire the Italian marque then he would extract revenge by beating it at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, where Ferrari was dominant in the early 1960s. Ford vice-president Lee Iaccocca hired Texan former Le Mans winner Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) to build a car to win the race, and Shelby in turn hired his friend Ken Miles (Christian Bale), a brilliant but sometimes irascible racing driver and engineer to help. The result was the Ford GT40, which promptly won the race in 1966, 1967, 1968 and 1969, after six Ferrari triumphs in the preceding seven years. Revenge is sweet.
“Art of France”: another part of the BBC’s acknowledgement of the Paris Olympics was repeating the first episode of this glorious 2017 series on French art. I am an enormous and unashamed fan of Andrew Graham-Dixon, who has the erudition, enthusiasm and charisma to make art programming compelling, and one can hardly accuse France of having shirked in the aesthetic stakes over the years. This is joyous and uplifting.
“Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world” (Napoleon I)
“Britain’s geopolitical standing in the 2020s”: the Council on Geostrategy, a relatively new think tank focused “on shaping British strategic ambition in an international environment increasingly defined by geopolitical competition and the environmental crisis so that the United Kingdom is best able to succeed and prosper in the twenty-first century”, is producing a series of briefings to feed into the recently announced Strategic Defence Review. This first paper is a useful and interesting tour d’horizon which is upbeat about the UK’s potential but clear-eyed in identifying weaknesses and failings of previous policy. I have been critical of the new government on a lot of issues, including defence policy, but the innovation of having external experts—Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, Dr Fiona Hill and General Sir Richard Barrons—conduct the review in an open, transparent way is welcome. We will see in the first half of next year whether it has borne fruit.
“The Republican Party’s Elite Conundrum”: this Pamela Paul column from The New York Times neatly skewers a problem common to many populist parties of the right. Essentially what began as an attempt to appeal to a broad coalition, including perhaps traditionally left-leaning working class voters, has in some cases curdled into a deep hostility to “elites” of all kinds, including university graduates. As Paul remarks, “In its recent populist incarnation, Republicans downplay any whiff of intellectualism by avoiding big words in favor of Kid Rock fandom and trucker hat slogans”. This is problematic for aspiring politicians who have worked hard and made the most of good educations. As she says, it “puts those Republican politicians saddled with inconvenient Ivy League degrees in an awkward position, like the guy who shows up in a tux for a rodeo wedding”. The right has always had a tendency towards anti-intellectualism, and a vague celebration of the power of “common sense”, and that all too easily turns into thinking that intelligent people are somehow dishonest, sneaky or less than straightforward. It impoverishes our political discourse.
“Revive the roots”: a timely and constructive contribution to the rebuilding of the Conservative Party by Lord Goodman of Wycombe in The Critic. There is no question that the grassroots of the party have dwindled and narrowed: membership figures are no longer published (a red flag in itself) but 141,725 voted in the 2022 leadership election, reckoned as a turnout of 82.2 per cent. That suggests a total membership of around 172,500, less, as Goodman observes, than the Campaign for Real Ale. By contrast, for example, the National Trust can boast 5.7 million members, the Caravan and Motorhome Club 1.1 million and, worryingly for Conservatives, the Labour Party has around half a million members. We have to be realistic: Goodman notes that the Conservative Party peaked in the early 1950s at 2.8 million members, but that is simply not how modern voters behave. It is at least 30 years since any political party had a million members and there is no indication of that scale of mass participation returning. Nevertheless, Goodman’s fundamental principle is sound: a successful party needs enthusiastic, active and engaged members and a well-organised structure.
“Universal basic income: the bad idea that never quite dies”: this sobering piece by Chris Giles in The Financial Times addresses a policy that keeps bobbing to the surface, using taxpayers’ money to fund a monthly payment to every adult citizen. It has always sat uneasily with me, but for somewhat nebulous reasons, but Giles demonstrates that it would either be ruinously expensive or set at such a low rate as to be ineffective in lifting people out of poverty. He also points to recent research which debunks many of the more ambitious claims made for UBI: that it would lead to a healthier populace, and encourage education and self-improvement and thereby more economic activity. Rightly he characterises it as “a debate that has in the past pitted maths against ideals”, and no-one can argue against the idea of reducing poverty, but there is scant evidence that a universal basic income is an affordable solution.
“In defence of the personal statement”: it is reported that UCAS is discontinuing the personal statement as part of the university application process, to be replaced by three standardised questions. It is 31 years since I toiled at the umpteenth draft of my personal statement, and I dare say that, if I had been offered the option not to do it at the time, I would have grabbed it eagerly. It was hard work, involving self-promotion, persuasion, accuracy and a degree of second-guessing. But, as Philip Womack argues in The Spectator, university applications should be hard. Indeed, university should be hard. Personal statements are not demonstrations of every skill you might hope to cultivate in higher education, but they are, or were, no bad exercise, and marked a rare island of individuality in a sea of tickboxes.
This is a big world, that was a small town…
… as Taylor Swift reminds us, there in my rearview mirror disappearing now. À bientot.
This Sunday (July 26th) is also the feast of St. Anne, mother of Our Lady.