Sunday round-up 4 August 2024

Cake'n'candles for Barack Obama, Martin Jarvis, Jeff Gordon and Greta Gerwig (what a party) but sad times for Lizzie Borden's parents and the peace of Europe in 1914

Today we are handing out shop-bought sponge cake and supermarket-brand sparkling wine to former Labour cabinet minister Lord Cunningham of Felling (85), legendary thespian Martin Jarvis (83), Conservative minister, chief whip and select committee chair (and my former boss) Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (72), Irish folk singer and founding member of Clannad Moya Brennan (72), actor, director and screenwriter Billy Bob Thornton (69), 44th President of the United States Barack Obama (63), novelist Dennis Lehane (59), four-time NASCAR champion Jeff Gordon (53), Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (43), and actress, producer and screenwriter Greta Gerwig (41).

Celebrating elsewhere and avoiding the bumps are poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792), French designer and entrepreneur Louis Vuitton (1821), deviser of the famous diagram John Venn (1834), professional Scotsman Sir Harry Lauder (1870), horses-and-gin enthusiast Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (1900), jazz legend Louis Armstrong (1901), American racing driver and safety pioneer John Fitch (1917) and ubiquitous keyboard player and bassist Larry Knechtel (1940).

On this day in 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet under Admiral Sir George Rooke captured the small Spanish town of Gibraltar and accepted the surrender of the governor, Don Diego de Salinas. Three days later it was occupied by Austrian and Spanish troops loyal to the Habsburg claimant, Charles III, led by Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt. The forces of the Grand Alliance—the Holy Roman Empire, England and the Dutch Republic—had been looking for a naval base in the western Mediterranean but had failed to capture Cádiz in 1702 and Barcelona earlier in 1704. Most of the Spanish population of 5,000 left with the defeated garrison on 7 August and the town was quickly recognised as a vital strategic location by its English occupiers. Gibraltar was confirmed as a possession of the British crown under Article X of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) “to be held and enjoyed absolutely with all manner of right for ever, without any exception or impediment whatsoever”. So, if you’re listening, Spain: it’s ours, legally, and we’re keeping it. We’ve got the receipt.

Today in 1892, at around 11.10 am, Andrew and Abby Borden were found hacked to death with a hatchet at their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Abby had been struck at least 18 times in the head, while Andrew had suffered 10 or 11 blows, one of which had split his eye in two; his wounds were still bleeding and it was estimated he had been dead for only 10 or 15 minutes. Andrew’s daughter Lizzie, aged 32, was arrested for the murders of her father and stepmother but was acquitted at trial in New Bedford in June 1893, the jury taking 90 minutes to reach a verdict. Nevertheless, she was widely believed to have been the killer and was ostracised in Fall River, but she continued to live in the town until her death from pneumonia at the age of 66 in June 1927. Did she do it? Despite her insistence to the contrary, no more plausible suspect has ever been named. Say it with me: “Lizzie Borden took an axe/and gave her mother forty whacks/When she saw what she had done/she gave her father forty-one.”

In 1914, at 11.00 pm, the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, on the grounds of its invasion of Belgium. Germany had demanded right of passage for its army through Belgium two days before, which the Belgian government had refused on 3 August, at which point the British government had promised military support in the event of an invasion. At 6.00 am, the German minister in Brussels, Claus von Below-Saleske, gave the Belgian government a note informing it that, in the absence of safe passage, his country would take measures necessary to preserve its own security. The first German soldiers crossed the border at 8.02 am. At 2.00 pm, the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, sent a telegram to the Berlin government requesting assurances by 11.00 pm that it would respect the neutrality of Belgium as enshrined in the Treaty of London of 1839; this arrived at 6.00 pm. After explaining the situation to the House of Commons, at 9.05 pm, the prime minister, H.H. Asquith, summoned Grey and Viscount Haldane, the lord chancellor, to Downing Street for consultation; they were then joined by David Lloyd George, chancellor of the Exchequer, and home secretary Reginald McKenna. At 10.45 pm, King George V convened a tiny meeting of the Privy Council attended by only three other members: Earl Beauchamp, first commissioner of works; Viscount Allendale, a lord in waiting; and the Earl of Granard, master of the horse. When the government’s ultimatum to Germany expired at 11.00 pm and Big Ben sounded the hour, the crowd which had gathered outside began to cheer, and the king signed the declaration of war. He later wrote in his diary, “It is a terrible catastrophe but it is not our fault… please to God it may soon be over”.

Eighty years ago today, a group of uniformed policemen led by SS-Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer raided the Achterhuis, or “Secret Annex”, above the offices of pectin and spice manufacturer Opekta on the Prinsengracht in central Amsterdam. They may have been acting on a tip-off; in any event they found eight Jews who had been in hiding for two years: Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their son Peter; a German dentist named Fritz Pfeffer; and Otto and Edith Frank and their daughters Margot, 18, and Anne (15). They were taken to the headquarters of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA) for interrogation, then transferred to Westerbork transit camp two days later, where they were placed in the Punishment Barracks for hard labour. On 3 September, the Franks boarded what turned out to be the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. All the prisoners on the transport aged under 15 were sent to the gas chambers on arrival; Anne, who had turned 15 in June, was one of the youngest not murdered immediately. Men and women were separated, and Otto Frank never saw his family again. At the end of October, Margot and Anne were moved to Bergen-Belsen in Lower Saxony; their mother Edith was too ill to join them, and was selected for the gas chambers but narrowly escaped. She died on 6 January 1945 of disease and exhaustion. In February or March 1945, there was an outbreak of typhus at Bergen-Belsen: Margot died at the age of 19, and Anne died of the same disease a day or two later. She was 15 years and eight or nine months old. Soldiers of the British Army liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945, and found 13,000 unburied bodies and 60,000 prisoners, dying of typhus and other diseases at a rate of 500 a day. If you can bear it, you should listen to Richard Dimbleby’s report from the camp, broadcast on 19 April 1945.

If early Christian figures are your thing, boy, is it a good day for you. It is the feast of Catalan missionary and martyr St Felix of Girona (d AD 304), St Eusebius of Vercelli (AD 283-AD 371), who affirmed the divinity of Jesus against the Arian heresy, St Exuperius of Bayeux (d AD 405), first bishop of Bayeux in Normandy, and the great Anglo-Saxon monastic reformer St Æthelwold of Winchester (AD 904 - AD 984) who was bishop of Winchester for the last 20 years of his life.

In Barbados, Bermuda, Guyana, Jamaica, St Vincent and the Grenadines and Trinidad and Tobago, it is Emancipation Day, commemorating the commencement in 1834 of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which made substantial progress towards the ending of slavery in the British Empire.

At home, it is Yorkshire Day, for those who associate themselves with the county, and Minden Day, on which several units of the British Army commemorate the Anglo-British victory over the French at the Battle of Minden in 1759. Among those celebrating are the Royal Welsh, the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment and 3rd and 5th Battalions, the Rifles, all of whom are descended from regiments which fought at the battle.

Factoids

1. The world’s oldest diplomatic agreement still in force is said to be the Treaty of Windsor, originally concluded by England and Portugal on 9 May 1386. It was marked by the marriage of John I, King of Portugal, to Philippa of Lancaster, eldest child of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and was essentially an agreement of mutual support and defence. It was not repudiated or repealed even when England and Portugal were between 1585 and 1604, the latter having become a Habsburg possession when Henry I, the Cardinal-King, died without heirs on 31 January 1580. During the Second World War, in which Portugal remained officially neutral, the government of António de Oliveira Salazar accepted refugees from Gibraltar in Madeira, and Portugal offered the United Kingdom the use of naval facilities in the Azores during the Falklands conflict in 1982. But the Anglo-Portuguese alliance extends further back than the treaty itself, and there were celebrations to mark its 650th anniversary last year.

2. One of the authors of the brilliant 1066 And All That, R.J. Yeatman (1897-1968), was born and spent some of his childhood in Portugal. His father was a port merchant who managed the famous Taylor’s brand, which had become Taylor, Fladgate and Yeatman in 1838: Morgan Yeatman, a wine merchant from Dorchester, and John Fladgate, a London vintner, joined a partnership with the ageing Joseph Taylor to secure the future of the company. Yeatman died in 1849 and was succeeded by his son Morgan Yeatman Jr, who, 40 years later, left the leadership of the company to his two sons Harry Yeatman, father of author R.J. Yeatman, who was based in London, and Frank Yeatman who worked on site in Oporto. Frank “Smiler” Yeatman, a formidable port taster, died in 1950 and his son Dick Yeatman took charge until his own death in 1966. His widow passed her share to her nephew Alistair Robertson, who was replaced by his son-in-law Adrian Bridge, the current chairman and CEO, in 2000.

3. I am long out of the alcohol game now, but port was among my favourite drinks, and one of the most amazing things I have ever had was a bottle of Graham’s vintage port from my birth year of 1977, which was a very good year for port. However, you may or may not know that not every year produces vintage port. The decision on whether to declare a year to be a vintage is taken in the spring of the second year after the harvest, traditionally on St George’s Day (20 April). Each port house declares its own vintages, and there used to be three declarations or so every decade, although they are becoming more frequent. There were widely declared vintages in 2016 and 2017 but only a few declarations each year since.

4. There are reckoned to be just over 7,000 languages currently spoken globally, though most are used by tiny groups. Almost half the global population speak just 10 languages—English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian and Urdu—and nearly 2,900 languages are each spoken by fewer than a thousand people. Moreover, these endangered languages are disappearing at the rate of one every 40 days. The United Nations General Assembly has declared 2022-32 to be the International Decade of Indigenous Languages as part of an attempt to arrest that decline. Some languages are preserved in the most extraordinary ways. At the end of the 18th century, the Prussian geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt began a five-year trip to Spain’s possessions in America, and in the first months of 1800 he explored the course of the Orinoco river in the Captaincy General of Venezuela. Staying with the Guahibo people in an isolated village by the river, he was told of how, decades before, the local Carib people had fought to extinction another population called the Atures. Although the Atures had died out 10 years before Humboldt’s arrival, he was shown an elderly parrot which had belonged to them, and which none of his Guahibo hosts could understand. He understood the reason: the parrot was the last speaker of the Atures’ language, and so Humboldt phonetically transcribed about 40 words of its vocabulary. Unfortunately the meanings of the words are unknown. Partial success, Herr von Humboldt.

5. Although Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States (1901-09), was a famously athletic and energetic man, he had been a weak and sickly child, especially afflicted by severe bouts of asthma. In the 1860s, the disease was barely understood and there was no agreed effective treatment: doctors recommended staying by the sea or going up into the mountains for the clean, refreshing air, which is logical enough. Another tack, however, which was intended to slow and control his breathing, was to get the young boy to smoke cigars. This (I regret to discover, as a cigar-loving asthmatic) was not a successful treatment.

6. St Valentine, a 3rd century Italian priest and martyr, must be one of the saints whose name we use most but about whom we think in any depth the least, as he is chiefly recalled now for his feast day, 14 February. As well as being strongly associated with courtly and romantic love, he is also the patron saint of his home town of Terni in Umbria, epilepsy and beekeepers. You might idly wonder where he is buried, and thereby hangs a tail. At his martyrdom on around AD 269, his body was buried hastily by the Via Flaminia but then recovered by his friends a few nights later. 1,755 years later, however, it has become more complicated. The Basilica of Saint Mary in Cosmedin in Rome has a flower-crowned skull which is supposedly that of St Valentine, while the Church of St Antón in Madrid has since the late 18th century housed some remains in the form of bones and a(nother) skull. Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin has more relics of the saint and a small vessel tinged with his blood, a gift from Pope Gregory XVI which had previously been kept at the Church of St Hippolytus in Rome. In 2002, St Valentine’s shoulder blade was found in the Basilica of St Peter and St Paul in Prague, while more remains are supposedly buried beneath the Plague Column in Košice in Slovakia, and others are at the Church of St Nicholas in Nováky. The Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Chełmno, Poland, has a silver reliquary containing a fragment of St Valentine’s skull while yet more “remains” can be viewed in the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Savona. Other fragments are held by the Collegiate Church of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist in Roquemaure, St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, the Church of the Annunciation in Balzan in Malta, the Church of Metastasis of Virgin Mary in Mytilene, Blessed John Duns Scotus Church in Glasgow and the Church of the Immaculate Conception at Birmingham Oratory. How many of these are real? It’s impossible to say. We don’t even know for sure who St Valentine was, and there are at least 10 revered figures in church history with that name. Think of it as a form of spread betting.

7. The oldest extant pub, bar or tavern in Europe is Sean’s Bar in Athlone. The building itself dates from the 17th century, but the bar has been in operation continuously, so it is said, since AD 900 (presumably at first under another name).

8. Although there have been King’s (or Queen’s) Counsel since the beginning of the 17th century—the first was Sir Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban—Sir Keir Starmer is only the third ever to occupy the office of prime minister. His predecessors who have taken silk are Spencer Perceval (1809-12), the only prime minister ever to be assassinated, and the brilliant but eventually drink-sodden Liberal H.H. Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith (1908-16).

9. By contrast, of our 58 prime ministers since Robert Walpole, 35 have been Knights Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (KG), one (Sir Alec Douglas-Home) was a Knight Brethren of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle (KT), and two (the Earl of Aberdeen and the Earl of Rosebery) were both KG and KT, a very unusual pairing. Only 12 received or inherited no honour or peerage title, though three (Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak) may still do so.

10. Vice-President Kamala Harris now cannot be beaten for the Democratic nomination for president, having secured the support of 2,350 delegates in a virtual roll call ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later this month. She is neither the Democratic Party’s first female nominee (Hillary Clinton in 2016) nor its first black nominee (Barack Obama in 2008), but if she wins she will be a significant first in another way: since the party first fielded a presidential candidate in 1828 (Andrew Jackson, who won two terms), no Democratic president has been born in a western state. The only candidate from the West has been Adlai Stevenson, born in Los Angeles, who ran in 1952 and 1956. Barack Obama, of course, was born in Hawaii, outside the continental United States. Harris was born in Oakland, California.

“A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard” (Billy Wilder)

1. “A Storm Foretold”: Christoffer Guldbrandsen’s compelling 2023 profile of American political fixer Roger Stone is not an easy watch, because Stone is a grotesque with no redeeming features: sour, overbearing, vulgar, egotistical and morally empty. He has been an influential force in Republican politics since the early 1970s, but it is his long, complex, turbulent relationship with Donald Trump which forces him to the forefront of our minds. Stone essentially became part of the populist/nationalist right Trump-supporting network which realised that success could be had by detaching yourself wholly from truth and reality, and instead avidly creating and peddling a narrative which was perfectly tailored to your goals: smear internal opponents until they cease to be a threat, predict misconduct on the part of the other side (“Stop the Steal”), threaten violence but make it the responsibility of their fictional actions (“Days of Rage”) and raise the stakes as far as they will go.

2. “Official Secrets”: this 2019 based-on-a-true-story thriller caught my eye at the time because the firm I was working for had a minor role in promoting it and I first saw a screening of it at the late, lamented Hospital Club in Covent Garden. It tells the story of GCHQ analyst Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) who uncovered evidence of attempts by the United States to coerce fellow United Nations Security Council members to support a resolution on the invasion of Iraq. Gun passed the evidence to a friend in the anti-war movement who then relayed it to Martin Bright of The Observer (Matt Smith). Gun was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act 1989, but the prosecution was then halted at the trial stage, supposedly because the government worried it might expose the United Kingdom’s complicity in the coercion. The film is an effective, absorbing thriller with some fine performances: Knightley, not usually high up my list of actresses to watch, gives a sharp portrayal of Gun’s idealism, frustration, fear and defiance, Smith is on fine form (though not a dead ringer for Bright, whom I know a bit, like and very briefly worked with), Matthew Goode is outstanding as Observer foreign editor Peter Beaumont and Rhys Ifans is, well, Rhys Ifans turned up to 11 as the paper’s Washington correspondent Ed Vulliamy. Highly honourable mentions to Ralph Fiennes as Liberty’s Ben Emmerson and Jeremy Northam as director of public prosecutions Ken Macdonald. There is nothing surprising about the film, ably directed by Gavin Hood, and its message is self-consciously worthy, but it is well crafted, well acted and pacey. Definitely worth seeing.

3. “Atomic People”: a fascinating BBC documentary about the few surviving hibakusha, those who survived the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. No-one in Japan knew, when they woke up on 6 August, that by nightfall the world would have changed forever and that more than 60,000 residents of Hiroshima would be dead, some of them vaporised and leaving literally only their shadow behind. Tens of thousands more would die subsequently of the effects of the radiation, and the average age of the survivors now is 85, almost all of them only children when the bombs were dropped. Yet, you have to consider that no-one could have predicted that the explosion of Fat Man at 11.02 am Japanese time on 9 August, 1,650 feet above Nagasaki, would be the last use (so far) of a nuclear weapon in combat. Our luck has held these nearly 80 years, and the wartime phase of the nuclear age was only three days long. But the scale and destructive power of the bomb remains awesome and almost impossible to comprehend.

4. “Sir Laurence Olivier on the ‘Genius’ of Marlon Brando”: I fell down a bit of a Dick Cavett rabbit hole on YouTube this week, devouring content from his long-running talk show with a bewildering range of guests. Cavett is a strangely disarming host, wearing knowledge and research lightly, but this excerpt from January 1973, in which Olivier discusses the acting abilities of Brando, is fascinating. The two were very different actors, from different traditions and with different styles, and Olivier explains that he is wary of the word “genius” when applied to acting. But he is happy to attach it to Brando, whom he clearly regarded as an extraordinary talent. Joyful to watch a great actor talk so fluently and intelligently about acting as a craft and a profession as well as simply an expression of talent.

5. “The Civil War”: the American director Ken Burns turned 71 at the beginning of the week, which is as good an excuse as any to implore you, if you have not already done so, to watch his peerless 1990 epic documentary of the American Civil War. I have said time and again to anyone who will listen that this is perhaps the greatest television ever made, brilliantly and emotively told, impeccably researched, with a stellar cast of voice actors (Morgan Freeman, Jason Robards, Garrison Keillor, Arthur Miller, Sam Waterston, Julie Harris, Jeremy Irons, Studs Terkel) and underpinned by the sonorous, rolling narration of the great American historian David McCullough. You cannot understand the modern United States without understanding the Civil War, and this is the most monumental retelling of it. Start watching now, and watch it all. Oh, and the soundtrack is stunning, too. If you can get through this 3.28 without weeping, you are a better man than me.

“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library” (Jorge Luis Borges)

1. “The Right to Rule: Thirteen Years, Five Prime Ministers and the Implosion of the Tories”: this 2023 account by Ben Riley-Smith, political editor of The Daily Telegraph, is on the cusp of journalism and history and fits its niche perfectly. The research is extensive and formidable, the analysis sharp and the writing lively and immediate. In some ways, the coalition agreement of 2010 seems a lifetime ago but this is all still very recent, it’s just that we’ve packed so much into 15 years. One of the fascinating aspects is for how much of that period the Labour Party, willingly or not, almost stepped back from politics while the Conservatives fought first their Liberal Democrat partners and then each other. Riley-Smith’s treatment of Johnson’s three-year premiership is especially good. Perhaps the most striking lesson from the book is that nothing was inevitable: Cameron’s 2015 victory was unforeseen, Theresa May fell into the leadership unopposed after other candidates wilted, many thought Corbyn and the 2017 general election would be the end of the Labour Party as a serious political force, and Johnson, pre-Covid, was thinking in terms of a decade in power. And now we are where we are.

2. “Shade Will Make or Break American Cities”: I accept that an article about the provision of shade in urban areas is not at first glance a fascinating read, but this piece in The Atlantic by Emma Marris is unexpectedly gripping and profound. It is (currently) much more of an issue in the United States than here, but the basic idea of keeping people cool in cities matters every day. Marris notes the inevitable lead time needed for planting trees: “Shade structures can have their charm, but they aren’t as romantic or beautiful or complex as trees… but they can stop someone from passing out at a bus stop on the very same day they are installed.” Ultimately she argues that the urban environment will need trees and artificial shade, but it isn’t a binary choice. Something to think about that had barely impinged on my consciousness before.

3. “We need a national strategy to combat all forms of extremism”: an excellent and clear-eyed argument in The Spectator by my friend Ian Acheson, who draws on a deep well of experience in policing, criminal justice and counter-extremism to argue that the police must be as forthcoming as possible after tragedies like this week’s, so that misinformation and disinformation are not given the space to breathe. In recent days we have seen misdirection and exacerbation ranging from the mischievous to the dankly malign and we should condemn that but also cut it off at the knees: “a more agile, assertive, even-handed and transparent approach to the truth by the authorities is the only thing available to counter such propaganda”. Let us get on the front foot here.

4. “Two candidates, blithely campaigning on a treadmill to oblivion”: George Will, veteran columnist for The Washington Post and one of my favourite writers in US politics, points out that America’s national debt recently passed $35 trillion, yet no-one, let alone the candidates for the White House, made any mention of it. He castigates Trump and Harris as inherently unserious politicians, and laments that “the candidates will pass the time until Election Day pelting each other with insincerities”. Always essential reading.

5. “Our politicians risk sleepwalking into another global war”: I think Sir Max Hastings is a first-rate journalist and historian, hugely experienced and a profound thinker, but as he approaches 80 he seems to be sinking further and further into gloom. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. This essay in The Times picks up on the 110th anniversary of our declaration of war on imperial Germany (see above), and warns that the current geopolitical situation is so tense and incendiary that the West must be more vigilant than ever and avoid a conflict erupting into the open simply through inattention or a lack of will to stop it. He looks at Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and their respective territorial ambitions, the disintegration of the old liberal international order and the extraordinary propensity of our politicians to lose focus. “The Cambridge historian Christopher Clark called his 2012 study of the 1914 descent into war The Sleepwalkers. His title might aptly be applied to the rulers of today.” Grim and minatory but it should be read and absorbed.

Be well…

… as Garrison Keillor (above) said, do good work, and keep in touch.