Sunday round-up 8 September 2024
Who's a jolly good fellow? Bernie Sanders, Martin Freeman and Pink, it would seem; props to St Adrian of Nicomedia, and in the United Kingdom it is Accession Day
Streamers and a varying allocation of the bumps go today to author and playwright Michael Frayn (91), academic, former minister and inaugural head of the Number 10 Policy Unit Lord Donoughue (90), independent left-wing United States Senator for Vermont Bernie Sanders (83), broadcaster, writer and Tomorrow’s World stalwart Judith Hann (82), former Labour MP, chair of the Public Accounts Committee and recently introduced life peer Baroness Hodge of Barking (80), former Glasgow Labour MP and (my) chair of the Scottish Affairs Committee Ian Davidson (74), Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington and former shadow chancellor John McDonnell (73), singer-songwriter Aimee Mann (64), Australian billionaire (and fleeting fiancé of Mariah Carey) James Packer (57), Stiltskin frontman and one-time Phil Collins Genesis replacement Ray Wilson (56), actor Martin Freeman (53), media tycoon and heir Lachlan Murdoch (53), singer-songwriter, producer and actress Pink (45), distressingly annoying child actor and Home Improvement star Jonathan Taylor Thomas (43) and inexplicable celebrity Joe Sugg (33).
(I should for familial reasons say that it is my sister’s birthday on Tuesday. Happy birthday, sis. I shall conceal her age out of chivalry but she is considerably younger—yet vastly more grown up—than me.)
In former times we would have been distributing cake (or not) to non-Anglophone and probable bisexual King Richard I “Cœur de Lion” (1157), legendary French general Louis II de Bourbon, Prince of Condé (1621), Czech composer and folk enthusiast Antonín Dvořák (1841), disgruntled citizen and assassin of President James Garfield Charles J. Guiteau (1841), English war poet and journalist Siegfried Sassoon (1886), conservative leader and United States Senator for Ohio Robert A. Taft (1889), prime minister of South Africa and assassinated “father of apartheid” Hendrik Verwoerd (1901), English architect Denys Lasdun (1914), Goon, singer and professional Welshman Sir Harry Secombe (1921), Peyton Place author Grace Metalious (1924), actor, comedian, Princess Margaret enthusiast and another Goon Peter Sellers (1925), country music titan Patsy Cline (1932) and composer and former Master of the Queen’s Music Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (1934).
In 1504, the statue of David by Michelangelo was unveiled in front of the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence. It had been commissioned in 1501 by the Operai del Duomo, the overseers of the Office of Works for the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, and was originally intended to be placed on the roof at the east end of the Duomo. By the beginning of 1504, however, it became obvious that a Carrera marble statue which stood 17 feet tall and weighed eight and a half tons would be impossible to lift up to the roof. In brilliantly bureaucratic fashion, a committee of 30 was formed, including Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli, to decide on a suitable alternative location and considered no fewer than nine locations, though the three most favoured were in front of the Duomo, under the roof of the Loggia dei Lanzi in the Piazza della Signoria and in front of the Palazzo della Signoria, which was eventually chosen. It replaced Donatello’s bronze sculpture of Judith and Holofernes and stood in front of the palazzo until 1873, when it was moved to the Galleria dell’Accademia to protect it from damage. In 1910, a replica was placed in the statue’s original position, where it can still be seen.
On this day in 1761 in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace, George III, having acceded to the throne on the death of his grandfather George II only 11 months before, married Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a 17-year-old Protestant princess from northern Germany. She was not his first choice of consort. Two years before, he had been infatuated with Lady Sarah Lennox, the 15-year-old daughter of the late Duke of Richmond and Lennox, grandson of Charles II, but he was dissuaded from contemplating a match with a subject by his tutor (and later prime minister) the Earl of Bute. Queen Charlotte, as she became, had been given an indifferent education and had no interest in politics, but she and George enjoyed a very happy marriage until he began to be be plagued by mental instability, producing 15 children (nine sons and six daughters). When she died in 1818, they had been married for 57 years.
Today in 1900, a powerful hurricane hit the city of Galveston in Texas, with winds measured at over 100 miles per hour, a storm surge of 15 feet of water and nine inches of rain within 24 hours. Galveston, located on Galveston Island and Pelican Island on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, was a city of 38,000 and its highest point was less than nine feet above sea level, so the storm was devastating: it is estimated that 8,000 people were killed, 3,636 homes and 25 of the city’s 39 churches were destroyed and 10,000 people were left homeless. The damage to the city totalled $17 million (around $637 million today). The storm destroyed the bridges to the mainland and the telegraph wires, so news of Galveston’s virtual destruction took some time to reach the rest of the country. A group of messengers from who escaped on the ship Pherabe reached Texas City the following day and arrived at the telegraph office in Houston on 10 September. They sent a message to Governor Joseph D. Sayers of Texas and President William McKinley which read: “I have been deputized by the mayor and Citizen’s Committee of Galveston to inform you that the city of Galveston is in ruins.”
Eighty years ago, the first German V-2 guided ballistic missile struck London. It was launched by 485 Artillerie Abteilung in Wassenaar near The Hague in the Netherlands at 6.37 pm and landed in Staveley Road in Chiswick, near the junction with Burlington Lane. Three people were killed, including a three-year-old girl suffocated in her cot by the blast but otherwise unharmed, and 19 were injured, although the area had been partially evacuated. 11 houses were destroyed and the missile left a crater 30 feet in diameter. The explosion was heard six miles away in central London. The site is just over a mile from where I am sitting.
For the spiritually minded, today is the feast of St Adrian of Nicomedia, a member of the Herculian Guard under Emperor Galerius Maximian who converted to Christianity while presiding over the torture of a group of Christians and being impressed by their faith. He was then imprisoned and executed in Nicomedia in AD 306 and his body put on a fire to be burned, but a storm arose to put out the flames and his wife Natalia, also a saint, was able to recover one of his hands. St Adrian is invoked against plague and epilepsy, and is the patron of arms dealers, butchers, guards, soldiers and peacekeeping missions (which I suppose is a complicated Venn diagram).
Also commemorated today are Irish monk St Disibod (AD 619-AD 700), former pope and antagonist of Emperor Justinian II St Sergius I (AD 650-AD 701) and Frankish hermit and bishop St Corbinian (AD 670-AD 730), who commanded a bear to carry his baggage after it ate his pack mule. It is the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, otherwise “Marymas”, and consequently the national day of Andorra (the feast of Our Lady of Meritxell), Asturias (Our Lady of Covadonga) and Extremadura (Our Lady of Guadalupe).
Today is Victory Day in Malta, commemorating the end of the Great Siege by the Ottoman Empire (1565), the Siege of Valletta by the French (1800) and the Siege of Malta by the Axis powers during the Second World War (1943).
North Macedonia marks Independence Day, having separated from Yugoslavia in 1991 (although it declared itself “the Republic of Macedonia”, this was not internationally accepted because of a dispute with Greece and it was known as “former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” (FYROM) until 2019).
In the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth it is Accession Day, marking His Majesty The King’s accession to the throne in 2022.
We also mark International Literacy Day and World Physical Therapy Day, though not necessarily at the same time.
Factoids
Of the original 13 colonies which became the United States of America, only two still have the same capitals as they did under British rule, Massachusetts (Boston) and Maryland (Annapolis). The other 11 moved their capitals in the period between 1775 and 1820: Delaware (Newcastle/Dover), Georgia (Savannah/Augusta/Louisville/Milledgeville), New Hampshire (Portsmouth/Concord), New Jersey (Perth Amboy/Trenton), New York (New York City/Albany), North Carolina (New Bern/Raleigh), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia/Lancaster/Harrisburg) and South Carolina (Charleston/Columbia), Virginia (Williamsburg/Richmond). Connecticut and Rhode Island both experimented with rotating the seat of state government, before choosing Hartford and Providence respectively.
Four of the 50 states of the US are formally called commonwealths: Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia. (Kentucky was a county and then a district of Virginia from 1777 to 1792, when it attained statehood.) So too are Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands, unincorporated territories of the United States.
Since Queen Margrethe II of Denmark abdicated on 14 January 2024, there have been no female reigning monarchs. It is the first time in more than 200 years that this has been the case. On Thursday this week (5 September), Ngā Wai Hono i te Pō Pōtatau Te Wherowhero VIII was crowned as Queen of the Māori King Movement (Kīngitanga), but she is not a sovereign ruler. However, there are female heirs to the throne in Sweden (Crown Princess Victoria), Belgium (Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant), Spain (Leonor, Princess of Asturias) and the Netherlands (Catharina-Amalia, Princess of Orange).
If the government’s House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill, introduced this week, becomes law, there will be no hereditary members of the upper house for the first time in nearly 800 years, excepting its period of abolition between 1649 and 1660; though some peers were summoned to the Other House, the second chamber of the Second Protectorate Parliament of 1656-58, and there was a suggestion that the other house of the Third Protectorate Parliament be called the House of Lords. There are currently 92 hereditary peers, two of whom sit ex officio: the Earl Marshal (the Duke of Norfolk, by heredity) and the Lord Great Chamberlain (currently Lord Carrington, but the office is shared between three families on a very complicated system).
The longest serving member of the House of Lords is a Conservative hereditary peer, Lord Trefgarne. He inherited his title aged 19, when his father died, but could not take his seat in the Lords until he was 21, doing so on his birthday on 31 March 1962. He was a government whip from 1979 to 1981, then a minister at the Department of Trade, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department of Health and Social Security, the Ministry of Defence and the Department of Trade and Industry until 1990.
Not everything is hereditary. Lord Trefgarne is the second holder of the title and sits as a Conservative, but his father George Garro-Jones, who was ennobled by Clement Attlee in 1947, was Liberal MP for Hackney South 1924-29. He stepped down in 1929, joined the Labour Party and returned to the House of Commons as MP for Aberdeen North from 1935 to 1945. Garro-Jones, who changed his surname to Trefgarne by deed poll in 1954, was born in Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, the son of the Congregationalist minister of Zion’s Hill Chapel, Spittal. He rejoined the Liberal Party in 1958.
There are as yet no immediate plans to remove the Lords Spiritual, the 26 prelates of the Church of England who sit and vote in the House of Lords (though one see, Durham, is currently vacant). Their membership is slightly complex: the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York sit by virtue of their offices, as do the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester, while the remaining 21 are the longest serving diocesan bishops. The most senior of these currently is the Bishop of Worcester, Dr John Inge, who was summoned to Parliament in May 2012. The most junior, summoned last November, is the Bishop of Hereford, Richard Jackson.
Until the Dissolution of the Monasteries between 1536 and 1540, the Lords Spiritual comprised all of the archbishops and bishops of the English Church and some abbots and priors who had been granted the right by the pope to wear epsicopal insignia and were known as “mitred abbots”. Until their removal, they outnumbered the bishops among the Lords Spiritual, and the Lords Spiritual were more numerous than the Lords Temporal. In addition, the Prior of the Order of St John of Jerusalem was also a member of the House of Lords, awarded precedence before all lay barons, until the order was suppressed in 1540.
The globe is traditionally into four hemispheres: the Northern and Southern Hemispheres divided by the equator, and the Eastern and Western Hemispheres divided by the Prime Meridian. Only one continent is found in all four hemispheres: Africa.
It is an often-repeated “fact” that Istanbul is the only city in the world to be located across two continents (Europe and Asia). Arguably there are four others: Suez in Egypt is mostly located in Africa but has a small area in Asia; Magnitogorsk on the Ural River in Russia straddles Europe and Asia, the river being the traditional border, and the city’s motto is “the place where Europe and Asia meet”; Orenburg, 190 miles south-west along the Ural, also sits on the border between Europe and Asia; and Atyrau in Kazakhstan sits at the mouth of the Ural where it empties into the Caspian Sea.
“Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable” (John Berger)
“A Woman of No Importance”: BBC4 ran a series of tributes to (the 95-year-old bit very much not dead) Dame Patricia Routledge on Tuesday, and one of the highlights was this Alan Bennett-scripted monologue from 1982. It was commissioned by the BBC as part of a series of six television plays designed as a response to the cultural and critical challenge of Channel 4, which launched on 4 November that year, and was broadcast on 19 November. It set the pattern for Bennett’s later Talking Heads series of 1988, 1998 and 2020 and features Routledge as Peggy Schofield, a clerical worker whose life is constructed around a long-established routine. When she becomes ill and is taken to hospital, she struggles to cope without that routine and tries to recreate it in hospital. It is pitch-perfect British comedy-drama, wringing every laugh and sigh from the ordinariness of life, and Bennett’s ear for dialogue, earnest but whimsical and sometimes absurd, is unbearably acute. Routledge is heartbreakingly brilliant (enough to allow you to forget that Keeping Up Appearances ever happened).
“Amol Rajan Interviews: Tony Blair”: I’m not especially a fan of Amol Rajan, who has been one of the presenters of Today on Radio 4 since 2021, but he is on good form in this encounter with Sir Tony Blair. The former prime minister is questioned about his political career, his beliefs and philosphy and his views on the future, and it is striking to see how Blair is ageing. He is 71 now, obviously fit in physical terms, but his voice has lost a little power; at the same time, watching him being interviewed for 45 minutes, you can see that his brain is always working and he remains curious and passionate about public policy. It is deeply ironic that when he became leader of the Labour Party 30 years ago he was derided by his critics as young, insubstantial and obsessed only with presentation, yet now, if you set him alongside most contemporary front-rank politicians, he seems so much more thoughtful, serious of purpose, imaginative and conceptual. Blair was never a self-conscious intellectual, although he has just released a book entitled On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century, but his political instincts were often sharp and more perceptive than many people’s. He is clearly still restlessly inquisitive and interested.
“Russell Harty interviews Fred Dibnah”: this priceless 1980 encounter from Russell Harty’s eponymous chat show, which had recently transferred from ITV, is both a beautiful period piece and a number of object lessons. Dibnah, 42 at the time of the interview, had begun his working life as a joiner but then become a steeplejack and had found unexpected fame in 1978 when a regional BBC news crew had filmed him carrying out repairs to Bolton Town Hall. He was a thoughtful, reflective and witty man, mesmerised by engineering after seeing the steam engines which still powered Bolton’s textile mills in his childhood, and his gentle good humour and rich Lanky speech struck an extraordinary chord with television audiences. Dibnah is visibly anxious in this clip, immaculately turned out in a three-piece suit and fob watch, and his lighting a cigarette halfway through—on television!—is a notable example of you-couldn’t-get-away-with-it-now. Harty was a complex character: a grammar school boy from Blackburn who read English at Exeter College, Oxford, who taught at Giggleswick School in Yorkshire before finding himself in broadcasting. Cultured and erudite, he sometimes seemed uneasy on camera, occasionally brittle and sharp, but somehow he was a master of drawing people into conversation. This 11-minute clip is entertaining and nostalgic but also deceptively profound and ruminative: both men seem genuinely interested in what the other is saying.
“You Are, Are You Not, Russell Harty?”: a minor rabbit-hole detour, I admit, but this 1998 BBC profile of Russell Harty is insightful and revealing, with excellent talking heads—Alan Bennett, Michael Parkinson, Richard Whiteley, Humphrey Burton, John Needham, Gillian Reynolds—and some first-rate archive material of Harty. His interview with Grace Jones which degenerated into fisticuffs was, sadly, his defining image, but there are great encounters with Rowan Atkinson, Sir Ralph Richardson and Dirk Bogarde. One anecdote summed Harty up for me: after he saw Parkinson interview Dame Edith Evans, he wrote to him (in green ink) and declared “That was simply majestic, my dear; I couldn’t have done it, but you did.”
“The Rest Is Politics: Iraq: The Legacy”: I’m not sure how I ended up watching this episode of the Alastair Campbell/Rory Stewart podcast from March 2023, but I’m glad I did. They spend nearly two hours discussing the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and address a huge number of aspects—it’s very telling to hear Campbell, then the Downing Street director of communications, contrast his perspective with that of Stewart who was a diplomat working for the Coalition Provisional Authority. It’s clear that Campbell, who doesn’t do contrition, is still deeply affected by some of the events surrounding the invasion, and Stewart is right to chip away at his repeated assertions that he stood four-square behind Tony Blair because the prime minister was earnest in his belief in the war’s justification. I suspect few people will watch this and have their views on Iraq changed, but it is detailed, analytical and revealing.
“Sometimes I write better than I can” (Ernest Hemingway)
“The middlebrow trap”: I present this article by Janan Ganesh in The Financial Times because I find it utterly baffling. It seems to be arguing that high culture and low art are both valid and critically respectable but there is something vapid and worthless about the “middlebrow”. He euphemistically cites Elena Ferrante, Haruki Murakami, Patrick O’Brien and John le Carré, which are four ambitious targets, but compliments Oasis and proposes Noel Gallagher as the third most entertaining interviewee he has ever seen after Christopher Hitchens and Orson Welles. Ganesh also says that Oasis have stood the test of time while REM and Suede have not, which I would dispute, I think: “most instances of 1990s Smart Rock, most efforts to bridge raucous entertainment and high culture, are, if not bad as such, then of their time”. Poppycock. Still, one should read things with which one wholly disagrees. But this is loosely and poorly argued.
“Hitler Would Have Been Astonished”: in response to Tucker Carlson’s seemingly endless, tawdry and lackwitted interview with pseudo-historian Darryl Cooper, Professor Thomas Weber of the University of Aberdeen wrote this wry demolition for The Atlantic which takes apart Cooper’s flimsy arguments but looks at the motivation underlying this kind of sensationalism, both for Cooper and for Carlson and his relationship with the Republican Party. A short, sharp shock but a necessary corrective.
“The AfD is winning over Germany’s youth”: with the strong showing of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in elections for the Landtags in Thuringia and Saxony last weekend, there has been a lot of hand-wringing and head-scratching. (I wrote my own analysis for Washington DC’s The Hill.) This article from The Spectator by Lisa Haseldine looks at the way in which the AfD now attracts voters from all demographics in roughly equal measure and its message has begun to resonate with many young voters. This is a huge challenge for Germany’s “mainstream” parties and suggests that the AfD will not be easily shaken off or dismissed as an angry fringe movement.
“How to cause indecent exposure (of their minds) at the Harris-Trump debate”: ahead of the first presidential debate to pit Donald Trump against Vice-President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night, the brilliant George Will is even more mordant than usual in his Washington Post column, suggesting a series of questions which should be posed to each candidate. They are characteristically punchy and packed with erudition, and would leave only the shadow of each candidate burned on to the walls, but of course they won’t be. We can still dream, and imagine what might be.
“We are living in the Britain Keith Joseph created”: Professor Vernon Bogdanor has just published a study of six influential figures who never reached the highest offices, Making The Weather: Six Politicians Who Changed Modern Britain, and in this CapX piece he profiles one of the half-dozen, monetarist guru and Thatcherite archangel Sir Keith Joseph. He was a fascinating, complex, contradictory man, the privileged scion of a wealthy Jewish family—Harrow, Magdalen College, Oxford, prize fellow of All Souls—who was what passed for a Tory moderniser in the late 1950s and 1960s. At one point he was improbably framed as a British Jack Kennedy. After the fall of the Heath government in 1974, Joseph had a profound and wholehearted conversion to the Chicago School of economic thought and could scarcely stop confessing the error of his previous ways to anyone who would listen. But Bogdanor is right to perceive how far-reaching his influence has been: he “both trampled a kingdom down, the kingdom of statism inherited from the war years, and he also conquered a crown, helping to regenerate Britain on the basis of the tenets of economic liberalism”.
Gone—flitted away, taken the stars from the night and the sun from the day…
… to quote Lord Tennyson, gone, and a cloud in my heart. Ta-ra for now.