Sunday round-up 29 September 2024

Happy birthday to Lovejoy and Brett Anderson, and previously to Lord Nelson and Anita Ekberg, while we celebrate Michaelmas and World Heart Day

Today it’s streamers and bunting for Lovejoy legend Ian McShane (82), former president of Poland Lech Wałęsa (81), iconic television theme maestro Mike Post (80), actress Patricia Hodge (78), historian and author Professor Sir Richard Evans (77), Days of Our Lives veteran Drake Hogestyn (71), Olympic gold medallist and president of World Athletics Lord Coe (68), former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard (63), actor Ben Miles (58), Suede front man Brett Anderson (57), 80s-conquering pop twins Matt and Luke Goss (56), Playboy Playmate, actress and one-time birthday cake-dweller Erika Eleniak (56), actress and “Up yer bum!” adviser Emily Lloyd (54), actor and screenwriter Mackenzie Crook (53), actor, comedian and writer Robert Webb (52), popular tenor and Michael Ball associate Alfie Boe (51) and Hear’say and relationship-with-Darren-Day survivor Suzanne Shaw (43).

Born this day but now wiv da angles are Roman statesman and general Pompey (106 BC), Spanish writer and tax collector Miguel de Cervantes (1547), victor of the Battle of Plessey and first governor of the Bengal Presidency Lord Clive (1725), Britain’s greatest naval hero Vice-Admiral Viscount Nelson (1758), philosopher and economist Ludwig von Mises (1881), holiday pioneer Sir Billy Butlin (1899), pen perfecter László Bíró (1899), journalist and editor Diana Vreeland (1903), revolutionary director and film-maker Michelangelo Antonioni (1912), actor Trevor Howard (1913), winner of the 1962 Orpington by-election Lord Avebury (1928), creator of Inspector Morse Colin Dexter (1930), model, actress and fountain habituée Anita Ekberg (1931), singer, pianist, bigamist and incest-adjacent paedophile Jerry Lee Lewis (1935), two-time Italian prime minister and “Bunga Bunga” enthusiast Silvio Berlusconi (1936), amusingly named prime minister of the Netherlands Wim Kok (1938), ex-first minister of Wales Rhodri Morgan (1939) and actress and singer Madeline Kahn (1942).

This day in 1829 at 6.00 pm saw the first patrols by officers of the Metropolitan Police, which had been established by the Metropolitan Police Act 1829 that summer. It was the brainchild of the home secretary, Sir Robert Peel, a 41-year-old Lancashire Tory from a wealthy family of textile merchants. Law enforcement had previously been the responsibility of unpaid parish constables, with the army being called out in cases of serious public disorder. The Marine Police (later Thames River Police) was founded in 1798 to prevent theft around the Port of London and the lower Thames but the Metropolitan Police was England’s first modern law enforcement organisation. Its initial establishment comprised the joint Commissioners of Police of the Metropolis, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Rowan and barrister Richard Mayne (both Irishmen, coincidentally); eight superintendents; 20 inspectors; 88 sergeants; and 895 constables. Strenuous efforts were made to emphasise that the new police force was not a paramilitary organisation, with the officers wearing navy blue uniforms and top hats and being armed only with a wooden truncheon and a rattle to attract attention on case of emergencies. Their initial area of responsibility was a seven-mile radius from Charing Cross. The Met’s headquarters was at 4 Whitehall Place, backing on to Great Scotland Yard, which soon became the organisation’s metonym, and there were 17 geographical divisions, each denoted by a letter.

Today in 1918, the leaders of Imperial Germany’s Supreme Army Command (Oberste Heeresleitung), then based at Spa in Belgium, informed the Kaiser and his chancellor, Georg Graf von Hertling, that the military situation was hopeless and it was no longer possible to win the war. The Bulgarian Army had collapsed and the Armistice of Salonica would be signed between Bulgaria and the Allies that day, leaving Germany’s southern borders exposed to invasion. The naval blockade had resulted in severe food shortages in Germany, which was causing popular unrest, and while the soldiers on the front line maintained good morale, they were desperately short of numbers thanks to battlefield casualties, starvation rations and the onset of Spanish flu. The army was under the nominal leadership of 70-year-old Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, but the initiative came from the quartermaster general, his deputy General Erich von Ludendorff, who warned gloomily that he could not guarantee that the front line would hold for more than a few hours. Therefore he demanded that the government request a ceasefire, and recommended that President Woodrow Wilson’s peace plan summed up in his famous Fourteen Points be accepted. Hertling resigned the following day and was replaced by Prince Maximilian of Baden, a liberal (and homosexual) former general, who sent a message to the United States government on 5 October indicating that Germany was willing to meet the president’s terms.

On this date in 1923, the League of Nations formally assigned two mandates for former territories of the collapsed Ottoman Empire. France became the mandatory power Syria and the Lebanon, while the United Kingdom assumed responsibility for the Mandate of Palestine. The notion of mandates was a relatively enlightened one, deliberately designed to contrast with the practice of colonialism: the mandatory power would merely act as a trustee until the territory was ready for self-government, after which a sovereign state would be established and the mandate would come to an end. (Of course, judging when a territory was “ready” for self-government had the potential to be contentious…) The mandates in former Ottoman possessions were Class A mandates, countries at “a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone”. The French mandate lasted until 24 October 1945, when the Republic of Lebanon and the Syrian Arab Republic became independent and joined the United Nations as founding members; the British mandate saw the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan created on 17 June 1946 and ended in Palestine on 14/15 May 1948 when the State of Israel declared independence and was invaded by Egypt. Of course all the difficulties have been sorted out now…

Today is Michaelmas, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels, which is also one of the quarter days of the legal, judicial and academic year in England, Wales and the Channel Islands. You will of course recall that the Archangel Michael is regarded as chief among all the angels, known in the Orthodox Church as “the Taxiarch” (a military term which now equates to brigadier general). We also remember St Hripsime (d. AD 290), a Roman virgin was was roasted alive for refusing the advances of King Tiridates III of Armenia; and St Theodota of Philippi (d. AD 318), a Greek prostitute who refused to offer a sacrifice to the pagan gods and was tortured, had her teeth pulled out and was stoned to death on the orders of the prefect of Thrace, Agrippa.

Readers in Paraguay will be celebrating Victory of Boquerón Day, commemorating the country’s victory over Bolivia at the Battle of Boquerón in 1932, the first major engagement of the Chaco War. Argentina is celebrating creativity and innovation on The Inventors’ Day, which marks the birthday of László Bíró (see above).

It is World Heart Day, so be kind to your arteries.

Factoids

1. Last week, as you will recall, was the anniversary of France introducing the Revolutionary calendar, an attempt to supplant the Gregorian calendar, which had in many countries replaced the Julian calendar. Caesar—the creator of the Julian calendar—undertook the process because the existing system of dates used in Rome was unwieldy and erratic: it comprised 355 days but an intercalary month was added from time to time by the high priests, the pontifices. By the mid-40s BC the calendar was growing increasingly badly aligned with the seasons. Caesar’s reforms came into effect in 45 BC, but the previous year, 46 BC, was, for those who followed the Roman state’s system, the longest year in history: to assist the process of realignment, Caesar had three extra months inserted so the year ended up lasting 445 days.

2. On Friday 18 April 1930, the script for the BBC’s 8.45 pm radio news broadcast was as follows: “Good evening. Today is Good Friday. There is no news.” There then followed 15 minutes of piano music, before the broadcast returned to a performance of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal at the Queen’s Hall in Langham Place: the BBC Symphony Orchestra was being conducted by Sir Henry Wood, with contralto Muriel Brunskill and Australian baritone Harold Williams.

3. The Queen’s Hall no longer exists. On the night of 10/11 May 1941, there was a heavy German air raid on London, in which several central London landmarks were hit including the chamber of the House of Commons, which was destroyed, Westminster Abbey and the British Museum. A single incendiary bomb hit the Queen’s Hall but the ensuing fire gutted it beyond repair. All that was salvaged was a bronze bust of Sir Henry Wood by sculptor Donald Gilbert. It is now housed in the Royal Academy of Music but taken to the Royal Albert Hall every year for the Proms, officially the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts. From their establishment in 1895 until that day in 1941, the Proms had been held in the Queen’s Hall, moving to the Royal Albert Hall until 1944, then (for safety) to Bedford Corn Exchange, before returning to the Royal Albert Hall, where they remain today.

4. It is easy to forget that the physical fabric of the House of Commons chamber is not yet 75 years old: after the bombing of 1941, it was rebuilt and eventually re-opened by King George VI on 26 October 1950. In 1943, a select committee was appointed to consider its reconstruction, but the prime minister, Winston Churchill, was adamant that it must be “restored in all essentials to its old form, convenience and dignity”, remaining rectangular rather than semi-circular, and “should not be big enough to contain all its Members at once without over-crowding and that there should be no question of every Member having a separate seat reserved for him”. It is broadly a recreation of the Victorian chamber designed by Sir Charles Barry and was overseen by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, whose previous work included Battersea Power Station, Liverpool Cathedral and the red telephone box. Fifty-six items of furniture and fittings were donated by the Commonwealth: Australia provided the Speaker’s Chair, the Table of the House was gifted by Canada with the three clerks’ chairs provided by South Africa, New Zealand gave new dispatch boxes, the division clock on the Table came from Northern Ireland and the chair for the Serjeant at Arms (which I can attest from many hours’ occupancy is very comfortable) was donated by Ceylon (Sri Lanka after 4 February 1948).

5. The accuracy of the Speaker’s Chair can be guaranteed: it is a copy of the chair in the Australian House of Representatives given by the UK branch of the Empire Parliamentary Association in May 1927 to mark the opening of the Provisional Parliament House in Canberra, which was itself a copy of the original Speaker’s Chair in the old Barry-designed House of Commons.

6. Depending on the chosen metric, the largest tyre manufacturer in the world is Lego. While the individual items are small, 700 million rubber tyres are produced each year, far more than more conventional rivals, though by revenue the largest company is Michelin, with annual sales of $30 billion. Close behind in second is Japanese giant Bridgestone, which also manufactures Firestone tyres.

7. Stretching a point slightly, the last shōgun of Japan could have shopped at the first Aldi store. Let me explain. Although theoretically nominated by the emperor, the shōguns (征夷大将軍 or sei-i taishōgun, “commander-in-chief of the expeditionary force against the barbarians”) were the military rulers of Japan from 1185 when Minamoto no Yoritomo established the Kamakura shogunate. In 1866, Tokugawa Yoshinobu became the 15th shōgun, but a revitalised imperial court was gaining sway and he stepped down in November 1867. However, Tokugawa would live until 22 November 1913. That same year, Anna, the mother of Karl and Theo Albrecht, founders of supermarket chain Aldi, opened a small grocery store in Schonnebeck, a suburb of Essen in the Kingdom of Prussia. Theo served an apprenticeship in the shop and the brothers took it over in July 1946 and founded Albrecht Diskont, which rapidly expanded and eventually became known as Aldi.

8. If you are over a certain age, or else have ever experienced Rickrolling, you will be familiar with the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 monster multiple No. 1 smash Never Gonna Give You Up. It was a cheap-and-cheerful affair, swiftly filmed with no frills, and the director was versatile young Englishman Simon West. Probably higher up his list of achievements is directing action thriller Con Air (1997), starring Nicolas Cage, John Cusack and John Malkovich.

9. The first British officer killed in the First World War was 24-year-old Lieutenant George Thompson. An Englishman born in Eshowe in Zululand, he served with a Scottish regiment (1st Battalion, The Royal Scots) but was killed in Togoland in west Africa while commanding Senegalese tirailleurs of the French Army’s Troupes Coloniales. Cosmopolitan doesn’t begin to describe it.

10. I don’t know a great deal about association football, but I’m aware that the goalkeeper is rarely the most lauded member of the team. The following goalkeepers all found greater fame away from o jogo bonito: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Portsmouth AFC), Niels Bohr (Akademisk Boldklub), Albert Camus (Racing Universitaire d’Alger), Luciano Pavarotti (Modena) and Julio Iglesias (Real Madrid).

“Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.” (Clive James)

1. “The Debate Continues”: the House of Commons chamber was reopened on 26 October 1950 after its destruction in a wartime air raid, and this BBC documentary, broadcast two days later, covers the occasion. It was almost a decade since the bombing which had gutted the old chamber, the Attlee government of the 1945 landslide was exhausted and ageing (and would be out of office in a year), some rationing was still in force, George VI’s health was already failing because of his heavy smoking (he would be dead inside 18 months) and Churchill, then 75, had already suffered his first stroke. One can understand why there was a feeling that a celebration of any kind was very welcome. A helpful reminder that the traditional setting in which our politicians ply their trade is not always as old as it wants you to think.

2. “Down These Mean Streets A Man Must Go: Raymond Chandler”: from 1969, an episode of the BBC’s Omnibus about the pioneering thriller writer (and improbable Dulwich College alumnus or “Old Alleynian”) who had died 10 years before. His seven novels featuring private investigator Philip Marlowe were the epitome of the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction: tough, fast-paced, outwardly sardonic but at their heart profoundly romantic. They reflected Chandler’s own nature of diffidence extending to shyness, concealed by a protective layer of occasionally abrupt coolness. Humphrey Bogart was pitch-perfect as Marlowe in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946), though James Garner, Elliott Gould and Robert Mitchum would also portray the detective. This is a slightly quirk documentary: Chandler disliked publicity so it relies heavily on readings of his remarks and correspondence. But it is atmospheric and illuminating.

3. “Parkinson: Maggie Smith, Kenneth Williams and Sir John Betjeman”: with the sad news of Dame Maggie Smith’s death coming on Friday, it’s very much worth watching this excerpt from Parkinson on 17 February 1973. Smith and her great friend Kenneth Williams are enormous fun as a pairing, and the latter was a superb anecdotalist. The highlight, however, is their recitation of Death in Leamington to the poem’s author, Sir John Betjeman, recently appointed poet laureate: it is a quirkily beautiful piece, brilliantly delivered, but savour too the genuine reverence with which Smith and Williams approach poem and poet, and the equally genuine emotion which Betjeman obviously derives from their appreciation. Very moving.

4. “Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again”: this comes with a health warning. An 89-minute documentary about the Nova Music Festival in the Negev Desert which was one of the targets of the Hamas terrorist attacks on 7 October 2023, this is very hard going. Mixing after-the-fact interviews with survivors and camera-phone footage of the events from the perspectives of the revellers and the terrorists, it shows the unfolding horror and brutality of what happened when a joyous celebration by young Israelis watching the sun come up on another day became a bloodbath. The unconcealed glee of the Hamas killers, savouring their murders, is devastating and horrifying to watch, like the worst excesses of the Einsatzgruppen translated to high-definition. All the way through, the same thought came back to me again and again: these young people who were terrorised, maimed, kidnapped and slaughtered went through those unspeakable, unimaginable horrors for one reason and one reason only. They were Jews. That was all, and that was everything. You should watch it. But it is not easy.

5. “The Falklands Play”: as it is Patricia Hodge’s birthday, here she is in one of her most compelling and absorbing roles as Margaret Thatcher in Ian Curteis’s dramatisation of the British government’s handling of the 1982 conflict in the South Atlantic. The play has a tortuous history: it was commissioned by the BBC in April 1983, a year after the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands, but rapidly put on hold because feelings about the war and the BBC’s treatment of it were still running high. Curteis started work again in 1985 and delivered a fourth draft of his script in April 1986, only for the BBC then to cancel filming because a general election was expected the following year. It was eventually produced for radio and television in April 2002, and is a superb, taut, even-handed portrayal of the prime minister and her closest advisers. Hodge is superb as Thatcher, determined, forthright but aware of her inexperience in international affairs and horribly conscious of the human cost of the conflict when it starts. James Fox (Lord Carrington), John Standing (Willie Whitelaw), Jeremy Child (Francis Pym) and Rupert Vansittart (Sir Robert Armstrong) are all on fine form, as is John Woodvine as chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Sir Terence Lewin. Robert Hardy puts in a typically bravura stint as UN ambassador Sir Anthony Parsons. Careful, nuanced and convincing.

“You can make anything by writing.” (C.S. Lewis)

1. “Mitt Romney Braces For Trump’s Retribution”: an intriguing piece from The Atlantic by McKay Coppins, who recently published a biography of the outgoing senator for Utah, Romney: A Reckoning. Romney is an interesting figure, a Mormon multimillionaire investment manager and co-founder of Bain Capital, whose father George was governor of Michigan 1963-69 and a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968. I first came across Mitt Romney when he was a moderate Republican governor of Massachusetts in the 2000s (I holidayed in New England every summer and delighted in reading The Boston Globe), and was intrigued by the way a rich business executive had come to run a reliably Democrat state. He sought his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, missing out to Senator John McCain of Arizona, then won it easily (against lacklustre opposition) in 2012 and chose Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chair of the House Budget Committee, as his running mate. Although opinion polls suggested a tight race, President Barack Obama won re-election by five million votes, 332-206 in the Electoral College, and Romney faded from public life for a while. He decided against another White House run in 2016 but two years later was elected to the United States Senate for Utah, home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. During his single term in the Senate, Romney, who recently turned 77, has emerged as one of the sternest critics of Donald Trump, and therefore one of the most hated demons for Trump supporters. Coppins describes Romney’s genuine anxiety that a re-elected President Trump might use the justice system to pursue those he deems as enemies, and sheds some light on the strange late-career flowering of an unusual politician who has seemed by turns ill-suited to his chosen vocation and too good to be true.

2. “Corporations are not destroying America”: a cheeringly pro-market blast by Eduardo Porter in The Washington Post, in which he takes on the Biden/Harris narrative that powerful corporations are distorting and throttling the American economy. He concedes that some corporate consolidation had decreased competition in some areas, but rejects the idea that monopolies have allowed businesses to increase prices exploitatively and that new entrants are being kept out of markets by existing giants. Moreover, he argues that some of the largest corporations like Google, Amazon and Facebook have gained their dominance primarily through outperforming competitors rather than using financial and market weight to crush them. “Antitrust enforcement is critical. But taking a wrecking ball to big business in the service of a rickety theory of harm will do everyday Americans no good.”

3. “The Caliphate and the Modern Middle East”: an off-the-beaten-track article from Law & Liberty by Turkish writer and journalist Mustafa Akyol, marking the centenary of the abolition of the Muslim caliphate by the first president of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. I read up on Atatürk before visiting Istanbul for the first time in 2012 and found him fascinating, a dynamic, nationalist, modernising figure who was absolutely certain that secularism was vital to the future of Turkey after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The dismantling of the caliphate was an integral part of that impulse, and the word “caliphate” now has strong connotations of Islamic extremism. Akyol points out, however, that the caliphate before 1924 (the Ottoman sultan being caliph) was often a force for moderation and toleration, and concludes: “the memory of the Ottoman Caliphate, if properly understood, can help Muslims today to correct some of the ideological missteps of the past hundred years, such as anti-Westernism and anti-semitism”. A fascinating study.

4. “How the Tories can win again”: inevitably there is a growth industry in “ways for the Conservative Party to improve its electoral fortunes” (and I am a contributor to the genre myself). This article by Johnny Leavesley in The Critic caught my eye partly because the author has clearly served his time in the trenches of the voluntary wing of the party, but also because it focuses on a constituency to which I had not given a great deal of thought, namely small businesses. Napoleon famously disparaged England as “a nation of shopkeepers” (une nation de boutiquiers), while Edward Heath’s steering of the Resale Prices Act 1964 on to the statute book as president of the Board of Trade, abolishing resale price maintenance, was felt by many to have cost the Conservative vital support among businesses and perhaps affected the outcome of that year’s general election. Leavesley points out that small businesses account for 99 per cent of businesses in the UK and they share an instinctive belief with Conservatives in “entrepreneurialism, hard work, good financial housekeeping, low taxes, light regulation and a small state”, and advocates offering them an associate status with the party for “lobbying, consultation and information” to encourage them to see the Conservatives as their natural allies and champions. He argues that it would benefit the party financially and “root their policies and culture in reality”. An interesting proposition for the next leader to consider.

5. “What can London learn from Glasgow’s approach to beating knife crime?”: from 2019 but still interesting and relevant, this article by Kirsty Lang in The Sunday Times explores how Glasgow tackled its appalling rates of gang-related knife crime, lowering the number of homicides by more than half in less than 15 years. Violence seemed hardwired into the sprawling 1950s council estates which had been built to house those moved out of the city centre’s slums, with endemic poverty, lack of opportunities, poor school attendance and domestic violence. Eventually “doctors, teachers, social workers, community activists, politicians and police officers came together to work on a courageous social experiment that would reduce the violence dramatically”. The approach balanced the threat of harsh policing measures with access to help with housing issues, rehabilitation for drug and alcohol abuse and opportunities for training and employment, and within two years “gang fighting had dropped by 73%, weapon possession by 85% and violent offending by 56%”. Lang identified the necessary components of the approach as adequate funding, co-ordination between law enforcement, education, social services and other state institutions and a degree of political bravery. Knife crime is still very much towards the top of the public agenda when it comes to law and order: this should be required reading at the Home Office and in City Hall.

Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance…

… as John Steinbeck wrote. Good-bye is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future. So, very firmly, farewell rather than good-bye. Or, to be Wodehousian, cheerio, good luck, pip-pip, toodle-oo.