Don’t call me Archibald!

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Tobias Harper

In March 1941 the President of the Royal Society, Henry Dale, dropped in on his friend and the secretary of the Society, A.V. Hill, to hint that he was planning on recommending Hill for a knighthood. With Dale’s recommendation, such an honour would be almost guaranteed, especially as knighthoods for a couple of previous secretaries of the society suggested a precedent (or maybe even the beginnings of a tradition).   Dale thought that his confidential conversation with Hill was a friendly (if a little improper) formality. He had already written to Winston Churchill to nominate Hill, whom he said occupied a ‘leading position among the distinguished scientific research workers of the present day’, and whose ‘reputation is probably as high in the United States of America, and in other foreign countries, as in Britain’.  A knighthood would be appropriate not only because of Hill’s eminence as a physiologist, but also in light of his ‘important’ and (inevitably) ‘confidential’ public services ‘in connexion with the present war’.  Even before the war had started, Hill had been involved in the development of radar and the rescue of refugee academics from Nazi Germany through the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning. A few decades previously, Dale was aware, Hill had already accepted an OBE for wartime scientific work in 1918 when he was more junior – if no less talented – in his profession. It seemed entirely reasonable that he would welcome further honours.

However, Dale had not realized that not only had this earlier award become something of an embarrassment for his friend, but also that a knighthood was wholly unacceptable from Hill’s point of view. The conversation, which Dale had hoped would bring pleasure, ended in awkwardness as Hill immediately rejected the idea of a knighthood. Lest his friend think his fervent reaction to the offer rude Hill quickly wrote to Dale to clarify his reasons. Hill recalled his OBE – won at the time of greatest public skepticism about the new Order of the British Empire – with something approaching shame. Even though his research was of direct importance to the prosecution of the First World War, he was guilty that he had not been suffering on the front lines with others of his generation (see Chapter one). He gave Dale two reasons for declining the knighthood. In terms of the good of the Royal Society, he argued that his receiving such a title would create an undesirable and unnecessary precedent of automatic knighthoods for secretaries of the Society, which would ‘better be kept for people in the Government Service. The prestige of the Royal Society does not depend on such things’.

More importantly he attested to a ‘deep-rooted personal dislike of the whole “honours” system’.  The system was bad for scientists ‘because it causes jealousy and a feeling that their contributions are not recognised in those who don’t get honours’.  Among their colleagues in the world of science, Hill suggested, knighthoods and the prestige they brought had become too important as markers of status and, consequently, promoted professional jealousy. The whole game of titles, this response implied, was below him (although he did not stress this point too much – Dale had accepted a knighthood almost ten years earlier). When he looked at his colleagues, with all their internal bickering and rivalry, Hill saw the knighthood as a cause of status anxiety rather than a form of public recognition that enriched the profession.

In his unpublished memoirs, Hill railed against what he perceived as the integration of the Royal Society into the government, and argued that the Society’s independence should be preserved, citing the automatic knighthoods for secretaries as an indication of this invidious integration with the ‘Establishment’.  In an honorific sense, as this chapter will show, this integration was catalyzed by the Second World War and the importance of scientific research to the conduct of the war. Hill also justified his rejection of a knighthood by quoting Thomas Huxley’s argument that ‘The sole order of nobility which, in my judgment, becomes a philosopher, is the rank which he holds in the estimation of his fellow-workers, who are the only competent judges in such matters.’   Faraday, Darwin, Shakespeare and George Trevelyan never adorned their names with the title ‘Sir’, and privately Hill relished the fact that he kept company with such luminaries.  This did not stop him from accepting the CH from the government, which did not carry a title (but which, if anything, aroused a greater sense of competition and jealousy than knighthoods because of its exclusivity) in 1946. His biographer suggested his reluctance for accepting a knighthood may have had something to do with his detestation for his given names, Archibald Vivian.  Being styled ‘Sir Archibald’ would have been frustrating for the man who wanted to be known as ‘Hill’.

Source: Henry Dale Papers, Royal Society Archives

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Constant Lambert’s Affairs

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Tobias Harper

Without being endowed with any sophisticated musical taste, I am nevertheless unusually fascinated by the lives of twentieth-century British composers and musicians. The love story between Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, for all the flaws of both men, is curiously affecting. Edward Elgar was an odd character in an interesting way, as was Vaughan Williams. All of the Beatles were pretty fascinating in their various different ways. There is something about the personal lives of musicians in history that fascinates me – maybe it is just that any historical group like this, given a morsel of attention, will reward that curiosity with resonant eccentricity. Yet I don’t find the lives of as many novelists or poets (art forms I understand better) quite so interesting.

Part of this is because the love affairs of these musicians often end up being fascinating. It is difficult enough that other peoples’ relationships are difficult to understand. How can we comprehend the complexes of jealousy, envy, love, lust, hope, disappointment and other emotions that drive the romances of ourselves, our friends and family, let alone historical figures? The little traces of their relationships are so tenuous, fragile and withdrawn. Even relatively well-known romances are inherently inscrutable. Such was the case with the famous ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn, and her less well-known lover, composer and conductor Constant Lambert.

When they began their relationship in 1937, this difference in fame was the other way around. Fonteyn was seventeen. Focused, quiet, shy (although not virginal), by 1937 she was quickly rising through the ranks of the Vic-Wells (later the Royal) Ballet company. While her feet were somehow ‘bad’, her poise, appearance and focus were exemplary, and her mentors were already seeing in her hope that Britain would finally produce a great ballerina. She lacked an extensive education, musical or otherwise.

In 1937 Constant Lambert was at a mature phase of his career: he had found a semi-secure job as the musical director of the Vic-Wells; he was producing new work; his 1934 book on the contemporary music scene, Music Ho, had been positively reviewed; and his masterpiece, The Rio Grande (first performed 1929) was popular and had been well-received. While his character is difficult to make out, mixing shyness, boisterousness and a profound disdain for fidelity, his friends agreed he was a musical genius. More than that, his knowledge of visual arts and literature was deep and profound enough to impress friends in those other arts. John Maynard Keynes said that he was possibly the most brilliant person he had ever met. Physically, a tendency towards drink and excess had made him decidedly bulky. Conducting a ballet version of the Rio Grande in 1937, he saw Fonteyn, the teenage ballerina, dance and was very taken with her.

Over the next few months he propositioned her relentlessly. According to later reports from her friends, she resisted for a while, but in not too much time they became lovers . Their relationship was to last for a number of years, years that included a dangerous incident in 1940 when the company became caught up in a retreat from the Nazi forces in Belgium. Their relationship was doubtless tempestuous, and the dance company was not a place for monogamy – according to many of the participants later in life, casual sex was common (although others denied this, pointing out that they were often too exhausted to indulge in complex love affairs).

Lambert helped develop and refine Fonteyn’s musical tastes: her biographers agree that he helped her develop a more intellectual understanding of music that was to help her throughout her career. Basically a child when they met, he was a teacher and a mentor to her as well as a lover – a dynamic that must be fraught with difficulty. For a time, at least, the inequality in experience, power, knowledge and age could have been overwhelming. She seems to have admired him greatly. But it was not a happy romance, in the end.

This was partly because Lambert was married. His wife, Florence (Flo) Kaye was the probably the daughter of a sailor from South-East Asia and a working-class London woman. They married when she was in her late teens, and they had met somewhat earlier. She was famously beautiful, but they had little in common, and their family life (their son, Kit Lambert, went on to manage The Who) was difficult. Money and alcohol compounded the existing lack of sympathy between them.   From the two examples here we can maybe speculate about Lambert’s taste in women: he seemed to like (very) young – one might almost say girlish – women, and was perhaps favorably inclined towards east Asian features (Fonteyn had been, on occasion, been mistaken as being of Chinese extraction).  The first part is slightly creepy – was it coincidence that he met both his major loves of the 1930s when they were in their early teens?

Creepy or not, his often-uneasy affair with Fonteyn ended at the same time as his marriage to Flo. Instead of marrying Fonteyn when his divorce came through, he immediately wedded artist Isabel Nicholas. Fonteyn was angry, and while they continued to have – by necessity – a professional relationship (and were perhaps still friends of a sort), their romance was definitely over. What was this romance? The affair seems to have affected them both in important ways, yet despite some of the sordid and not-so-sordid details surviving, so much of the emotional landscape of this curious pairing is lost.

Today, Fonteyn is remembered as the greatest English ballerina of the twentieth century. For all his genius, Lambert is a footnote. When writing about her own life later, Fonteyn edited out the relationship with Lambert – and the casual bohemianism of her early years in the ballet more generally. Her autobiography, a breathless, energetic, but heavily self-bowdlerized book, mentions Lambert only twice, in passing.

Source: Margot Fonteyn, Autobiography (London: W.H. Allen, 1975)

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The ‘Blue Room’ – Communicating through the Medium of Miss Pearl Judd

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Tobias Harper

Quite a few years ago now, I worked part-time for a few weeks for a television documentary company who needed a historical researcher for a specific project. The documentary was never made, so my research didn’t go anywhere, but the experience was interesting in many ways. It was a stark lesson in how the priorities of a privately-funded television documentary were far from those of academic historians. The environment was also strange to me. The open-plan office was far from the academic environments I was used to, with its casual, decidedly masculine atmosphere: among its primary decorations were posters of nude or scantily-clad women, their physical features glistening with a general sense of plasticity.

Next door was another media-related company called the ‘Blue Room’. I don’t know what went on in there, but it involved a lot of attractive young women auditioning for something. They sometimes passed through a corridor separated only by a glass wall from the office where we were working, eliciting various comments from my colleagues. I assumed it was some kind of modeling agency. But the comments of the full-time researcher – a middle-aged former journalist who was the owner of the nude posters – suggested activities that were, at the very least, risqué.

Unlike that of the company I was actually working for, this name stuck in my mind. This was in part because of its slightly sordid mysteriousness, but also because at the time I was doing research into another ‘Blue Room’ from the 1920s. This one was very different. Clive Chapman was a Dunedin, New Zealand-based house painter whose true calling, for at least a decade in the 1920s and 1930s was as a spiritualist investigator. A ‘self-taught scientist’ he oversaw a series of séances with his niece and research subject, a young woman named Pearl Judd. Chapman experienced visions of angels as a boy, the study of sounds and light ‘vibrations’ as an adult, and engaged in various other experiments with psychic phenomena. In 1922, during a period of ‘domestic trouble and mental strife’ he visited his mother’s home, where he used a ‘closely guarded’ secret method to investigate each of his female relatives (his grandmother, mother, sister and niece were present) for psychic gifts. In his niece, Judd, he found a young woman in whom the ‘power manifested itself to a remarkable extent’.

The two of them continued a series of experiments, claiming powers of levitation, disembodied voices and – the staple of all spiritualism in this era – regular contact with a cast of interesting dead people. In the Blue Room they conversed with the Arab sage Sahanei, the late film actress Martha Mansfield (who had died unpleasantly in a film fire, but who claimed to the séance that she had ‘felt no pain’), various relatives of the participants, and the mischievous and loving little girl ‘wee Betty’ along with a number of other colorful characters. All had distinctive voices and personalities. This was not an unusual collection of figures in a spiritualist séance: almost every medium had a wise old Arab/Egyptian, as well as dead celebrities and the inevitable sweet little girl. What strikes me about this case is not so much its (relatively few) unusual characteristics as the dynamics between the real people involved. Who were Pearl Judd, Clive Chapman and the unnamed other people who participated in these spiritualist ceremonies in Dunedin for over a decade? What did they think they were doing? Why did they do it?

The book in which the story of the Blue Room is told was written by Chapman and a more middle-class friend, ‘G.A.W.’ Pearl Judd, the central figure in all these antics, did not contribute directly. Historians have suggested that in this and earlier periods, spiritualism offered unusual opportunities for women to play central roles in religious activities because of its focus on mediums. Men tended to be the gentlemanly, scientific investigators, while the part of the sensitive, spiritual medium was taken by the woman. As always with spiritualists, I wonder how much each of the people really believed, and how much this was a case of either a clever young girl deceiving her earnest, romantic uncle. Or were the pair of them collaborating to fool their wider audience of gullible people, most of whom were of a higher class than they? Either way, Pearl Judd, as the figure at the center of this story, remains both the most interesting, and the most inaccessible and mysterious, figure in this episode.

Source: Clive Chapman, The Blue Room: Being the Absorbing Story of the Development of Voice-to-Voice Communication in Broad Light with Souls who have Passed into the Great Beyond (Auckland: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1927)

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Novel: Memoir: Biography

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Tobias Harper

Michael Barber’s Anthony Powell: A Life

Early last summer I re-read Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. It was as entertaining as I remembered it to be and, motivated both by curiosity and the sense that they might contain some legitimate research material, I plunged into Powell’s memoirs. These were interesting, because they showed just how much the life of Nicholas Jenkins in Dance mirrored Powell’s own experience. The memoir was full of incidents and stories that had been recycled in Powell’s novels in some form or another, especially from the Second World War period: many of the best and funniest anecdotes in the three wartime novels were taken almost directly from things that actually happened. Just recently, I followed these reading projects up by diving into Michael Barber’s biography of Powell. It was the least satisfying read.

Throughout the biography, readers find out about how different people or incidents may have influenced characters or stories in Dance and in Powell’s other novels. Barber is very familiar with Powell’s work, and includes some clever and subtle interpretations of it (although he indulges too often in unwarranted speculation). But there is less insight (especially for those who have read Powell’s memoirs) about the author’s life itself. As I read the biography, I constantly had the sense of déjà vu: not only did things happen in the same order as in Powell’s memoirs, which is entirely reasonable, but he also discussed the importance of other people exactly the same order as they appeared in the memoirs. And given how much of Powell’s autobiographical writing is devoted to talking about his friends and acquaintance, this means that the biography, too, seems to dwell more on the antics and personalities of Cyril Connelly, Constant Lambert, Evelyn Waugh or Eric Blair (whom Barber refers to as George Orwell more often than not) than those of Powell himself.

What did Powell believe? What were his politics? What did he think about Jews/other races/other classes/women? All these questions are answered, but answered unsatisfactorily (partly because Barber wants to protect Powell). They seem incidental rather than central to the narrative. Barber prefers recapitulation of Powell’s attitudes and views to actual analysis or critique. The first mention of Powell’s ‘Toryism’ is on page 46, where it is discussed (not really explained or introduced) then dropped after a few sentences on its wider social context. All this is interesting, but given that Powell himself was (Barber acknowledges) extremely cagey about his own beliefs – and his own personal life – Barber is extremely reluctant to spend a satisfactory amount of time excavating the person behind the Dance. These sections are unsystematic and make up only a small fraction of the book.

Barber’s biography of Powell is probably a good piece of work. It is scholarly, well-written, and even manages to capture hints of Powell’s own mischievousness in its style. But it isn’t the biography I wanted to read. It seemed like a distillation of Powell’s memoirs, which themselves read a little too much like a distillation of Dance. I wanted to read about Powell himself, not Powell as a model for Jenkins and his friends as a model for the cast of the novels. The fleeting glimpses of Powell’s character and attitudes are too fleeting, and the analysis eschews getting into these in favor of explicating the wider social context of the different periods in Powell’s life, and (more than anything else) the relationships between it and his novels. It is extremely frustrating.

One of my favorite things about Powell’s work is the contrast between narrator Nicholas Jenkins’ reticence about discussing details of his own personal life (balanced by the occasional tantalizing revelation) and his voyeuristic fascination with the details of the lives and personalities of the people around him. For me Jenkins, not Kenneth Widmerpool, X Trapnel or Pamela Flitton, is the most enigmatic character in the series. There are revelations about Powell in his own memoirs and in Barber’s biography, but the focus in both tends to default back to the interesting and famous characters Powell knew rather than Powell’s own convictions and personality. Ultimately, Barber treats Powell like the narrator, and not any other character, in Powell’s fiction, and in doing so misses an opportunity to offer something that goes far beyond what we already have in the memoirs and the novels.

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The ‘Eastern Effrontery’ of Sir Robert Ho Tung

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Tobias Harper

People give away money voluntarily for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they do it publicly, and sometimes they follow the advice that Jesus Christ is reputed to have given to always give secretly and discretely. I have always liked that (seemingly much-neglected in modern churches) particular bit of the gospel of Matthew, but at the same time people would not give so much were it not for the nebulous reward of status and fame. Charities around the world are dependent on what should ideally be a symbiotic relationship with celebrities and the rich. This has been the case for a long time, but can cause problems because inequalities in this relationship are difficult to measure or protest: a friend recently told me about a charity that was excited to be offered the services of two famous sportspeople for a fundraising event, only to find that the extra money generated was required to pay the men’s fees. Only the celebrities and their handlers profited, both in terms of status and money. Which is, frankly, disgusting.

A more systematic way of paying for the voluntary contributions of time-, fame- or money-rich citizens is to find some way of honoring their service to the state publicly. The British honours system has for a long time fulfilled this function: rich men and women give money to the state or to charities, and they receive knighthoods (regardless of their character or reputation). This can work pretty well, but it has also produced problems, especially on the geographical and racial margins of the honours system. During the 1930s, one of the leading philanthropists in Hong Kong was the Anglo-Chinese businessman Robert Ho Tung. It is impossible to know his full motivations for giving as much as he did. But the promise of honours certainly formed part of them.

Ho Tung was already a knight Bachelor (the most junior knighthood in the British system) when, in 1927, he petitioned political acquaintances and the British Colonial Office to award him a KBE or KCMG (Knight of the British Empire, and Knight of the Order of St Michael and St George) to complement his existing awards. His campaign for another knighthood was particularly interesting because he was so direct and explicit in his approach. Knowing that honours stemmed from charitable donations, he was quite explicit about his motives in giving money. Charity equaled knighthood, and, therefore, a knighthood was quantifiable. In one letter to a British Colonial Office official he suggested that donations amounting to tens of thousands of pounds to the YMCA and the Anglican Diocesan Girl’s school in Hong Kong warranted the award of one of the honours he desired. The Colonial Office was somewhat baffled by his confidence and honesty. The official, having been subject to a great deal of similar pressure from Ho Tung in the past, wrote to a colleague that ‘the Eastern tranquility of his effrontery is the only excuse, I think, for its Western application which as you know is really very difficult to resist without rudeness.’ Ho Tung’s ‘undiminished pertinacity’ continued, and this was not the last occasion on which he sent in his or his wife’s philanthropic record in the hope of attaining a specific honour. A later memo from the 1940s labeled him as a ‘collector of foreign decorations’. British civil servants (themselves, in their own way, often great collectors of decorations) were greatly annoyed at Ho Tung’s assertiveness in declaring that he deserved them, too.

On the one hand, this incident shows us some of the racial stereotypes entertained by members of the British foreign and home civil service at the time. But this was not just about race: they would have been similarly unhappy with an English tycoon who had made similar demands, although they would have used different language to describe him. While Ho Tung understood that it was through conspicuous and extensive donations that businessmen could receive honours, he was too explicit about this, breaking the unspoken code that donors had to be discreet and find ways of modestly letting officials know about their desire for knighthoods. Recipients of honours were supposed to be grateful for their rewards, and not dictate openly that they needed, or even wanted them. In Britain, businessmen or politicians who wanted a knighthood could carefully let an ally with the ear of the Prime Minister know about their desire, and it could be processed through unofficial conversations and secret meetings. It was harder for those on the other side of the world.

But in the end, the force of Ho Tung’s extensive and ongoing charitable donations eventually won out over his imprudent assertiveness and the Colonial Office’s racial double-standards: in 1955, a year before his death, his ‘pertinacity’ was finally rewarded with a KBE.

Source: Colonial Office Records, National Archives (UK)

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Daughter of Stalingrad – Evgenia Arefievna Pusireva and the Arctic Ocean

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Tobias Harper

Evelyn Waugh sarcastically named his ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy after the ‘Sword of Stalingrad’ that was given to the people of that city as a decoration for their endurance during the Second World War. The main character, Guy Crouchback, like Waugh himself, was unimpressed with this presentation. I have all sorts of problems with Evelyn Waugh, whose sharp, witty writing is undermined by his enduring affection for a feudal ideal that celebrates tradition, hierarchy, Catholicism and innate family quality. Doesn’t sound so bad? In doing so, he also directly denigrates things like the middle-class as a whole, colonials and any notion of equal opportunity. It isn’t surprising, then, that someone like myself – a New Zealander, with no aristocratic connections, who has been the beneficiary of a generous state education system – can find his writing as frustrating as it is, at times, hilarious. He’s also borderline misogynist, although maybe the main reason his scathing portraits of female characters come across that way is that he is nasty to everyone, but lacks insight into and empathy for women.

But in making fun of the Sword of Stalingrad he pointed directly at one of the Second World War’s stranger incongruities: the necessity of promoting an alliance with a dictator who was as bad as Hitler.  The Sword of Stalingrad was, however, not for Stalin but for the people of Russia, who endured far greater suffering than those of Britain. How do we measure suffering, or, for that matter, dictatorial nastiness? I don’t plan on answering that, but we can look at one Soviet citizen caught up in the unpleasantness of the war, and how she coped with it.

On 13 September 1942, the Soviet steamer S.S. Stalingrad was part of a convoy bound for a Russian port, carrying a cargo of munitions from Tyne in Northern England. U-408, a German submarine, attacked the convoy, and hit the Stalingrad amidships with a torpedo that sank the nine-year-old vessel within minutes. Twenty-one of the eighty-seven strong crew were killed, but the majority were saved by the convoy escorts. Evgenia Pusireva was among the survivors.

After floating for 45 minutes in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, mingled with the spilt fuel-oil of broken ships, Pusireva was rescued by a British minesweeper (a small warship), and from there to a larger British naval vessel ‘clad only’, as a later report remarked ‘in a blanket’. Now confined, without clothes, in the grey corridors of an alien ship filled with foreign men, she did not succumb to cold and exhaustion but rather rallied herself and her comrades. She could speak some English, and volunteered immediately to serve as an interpreter for the medical officer, and then organized five other women rescued from the Stalingrad to help out around their new domicile. As the internal British Foreign Office citation for her honorary MBE remarked, her calmness, dignity and work ethic were ‘an example to all on board, British and Russian’.

For a few years, Ms Pusireva and others like her collaborated in a global war, the alliances of which only become more complicated and troublesome the more we look back at them. She also ‘fought’ on a front that, from the British perspective, was one of the most dangerous and costly: being a British civilian sailor was more dangerous than serving in any of the military services, and the war irrevocably destroyed Britain’s previously dominant merchant marine. Russia’s civilian population, and their military forces, suffered higher casualties than Britain or the US, and matched China, Japan and Germany in terms of overall devastation (as judged subjectively by my standards – but how can we judge them any other way?). The ‘Sword of Stalingrad’ was for her, not for Stalin. But sadly, her name is not the one we associate with Russia during the Second World War.

Source: Foreign Office Records, National Archives (UK)

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The Perils of a National Church: A.C. Tait and St Paul’s Cathedral

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Tobias Harper

Regardless of whom you agree with in present debates about whether or not to participate in the eviction of protestors around St Paul’s Cathedral in London, what this controversy shows is how difficult it is for the modern Anglican church to find a genuinely prophetic and dynamic role in British society. Establishment, money and property are burdens as well as benefits of being an old religious body. The Anglican Church is so complicit in the financial structures, political structures and the commitments that owning expensive and ancient property entail that it is difficult for it to be the prophet and stand up for the margins in society, even if there are voices within it that call for action.

Half a year ago, I actually went to a service at St Paul’s. It was a nice service, with a suitably general and un-provocative sermon. It was held beneath the dome, with the bulk of the nave being fenced off for tourists, who paid some ridiculous sum (perhaps 20 pounds?) to enter the cathedral. Part of my desire to go to the service came from my indignation at the very idea that a church should charge an entry fee, but St Paul’s is careful about its market, and congregants were funneled out, and were not allowed to become tourists. I specifically wanted to go into the crypt to view a small chapel in which I had a particular intellectual and personal interest, but a verger told me that it was closed, and that I wouldn’t be allowed to go there anyway unless I were a paying tourist. This did not make me happy.

Archibald Campbell Tait was the Bishop of London from 1856-1868, and Archbishop of Canterbury from then until his death in 1882. His career success in holding two of the three most senior positions in the Church of England was tempered by almost continual personal tragedy. Struck down by rheumatic fever as a young man, he was sickly, and his wife and all of this children predeceased him. He was well-liked by Queen Victoria (his Scottish origins and amiable personality helped him on that front) but struggled to contain the various divergent strands in the Anglican church of his time.

However, I want to briefly describe an episode from his time as Bishop of London, which served as an attempt to reinvigorate the Anglican Church’s prophetic role in Britain. At the time, the church was facing the problem of urban growth and the need to create new parishes – a cumbersome process for an established church that was integrated with the government. Tait went out and preached in the open air in the more depressed areas of London, such as the docks where tens of thousands of workers jockeyed for jobs unloading the produce of a burgeoning empire. As the Bishop of London, he felt called to talk to all of his flock (which, since he was of broad inclinations, he interpreted as everyone in London) focusing on churches in poor areas. Although he was not an evangelical, he allowed those among his clergy to use theatres to do outreach to the masses, even though such a move was unconventional.

He also opened up Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s to the people. Previously, they had not been used for mass services except on state occasions, where they were closed but to the elites involved. Extraordinarily, these great churches were not used for services. When (after much resistance from the Cathedral chapter) he finally opened up St Paul’s to a service for the people as a whole, thousands of people crowded in; so many, in fact, that no-one could hear him preach in the huge space (interestingly, Westminster Abbey was much more open to holding services). Most of those who packed into the cathedral would have been people who could not yet vote, and had no say in the political process (a majority of adults in Britain were not entitled to vote until after 1918, and full adult suffrage had to wait until 1928). Yet in opening up the cathedral Tait made a statement about their place in a broad Anglican Church, and, therefore, in British society as a whole.

Have we come back to a situation where, once again, St Paul’s is open only to elites? Those with tourist cash and potential donors are, arguably, more important to the cathedral than pilgrims, seekers and the lost souls of London generally. Will the powers at the head of the church open it or close it, as social and economic change drives Britain towards a less comfortable, more divided and more desperate future?

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Piano in the Jungle: Len Edwards and Burma

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Tobias Harper

In 2000, Dame Vera Lynn was awarded the ‘Spirit of the Twentieth Century’ prize in a poll to pick the Briton who best exemplified this ‘spirit’. This seems like more of a compliment to Britain than it does to Vera Lynn. The latter is universally well-regarded, while the former… well, when I think of twentieth century Britain as having a ‘spirit’, many, sometimes contradictory, things spring to mind. Elitist, forgetful, dour, optimistic, pessimistic, fading. The Duke of Edinburgh seems more suitable: slightly intolerant, often offensive yet strangely likeable, a little bit racist, pompous, bent, old, and soon to die.

Vera Lynn, on the other hand, is kind of an amazing figure. She became the most popular singer during the Second World War in spite of politicians and senior BBC officials being broadly opposed to her popularity because her music was seen as maudlin and sentimental. Soldiers in the field needed strong, manly music! She jokes about this controversy in her autobiography, but I suspect that it was not quite so amusing at the time. At any rate, in 1943 she asked Basil Dean, the head of the ENSA – the Entertainment National Services Association, a body that organized entertainment for troops at home and overseas – where she could go to sing to soldiers and do the most good. Where were British soldiers neglected, and where was she most needed? The answer was, of course, Burma. Gamely, Lynn set out on what was her first trip outside of Western Europe.

She brought along her faithful accompanist, Len Edwards. He enjoyed the moderate extra incentive of her ENSA salary, which she gave to him to compensate for the ‘physical and professional hardships of the trip’ – Lynn herself did not need the extra ten pounds a week as badly as he did, presumably. Especially as her songs were the most popular in the British Empire at the time. I wasn’t able to find out much about him. He was not of sufficient status to get a Who’s Who entry, and (aside from a brief mention on one website) the internet is not kind to minor historical figures.

Lynn’s travelling troupe, like the soldiers they were entertaining, were plagued by bedbugs, bad food, intestinal difficulties, lack of hot water, high temperatures, and the occasional threat of Japanese artillery or bombs. Lynn insisted on visiting soldiers in hospital who had been unable to attend her concerts. The piano became more and more damaged, and no doubt less and less in tune – but this didn’t matter to the soldiers who had, in it and the voice of Lynn, a material sign of the fact that some people, at least, had not forgotten their corner of the war.

It’s hard not to make this story about how interesting (and, in some ways, wonderful) Lynn was, because Edwards is, and was, so anonymous. Lynn commented in her autobiography that the ENSA pay was ‘democratic’ – everyone got the same, no matter who they were – but memory and posterity are not. As a successful recording artist after as well as during the war, Lynn remains a public figure (helped by her good health and longevity). Edwards, who had an important part in the success of her sentimental tunes, has faded into a footnote.

Source: Vera Lynn, Some Sunny Day, My Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 2009)

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The Chatterley Trial and Anthony Powell

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Tobias Harper

Undergraduate classes and general histories of modern Britain invariably quote Philip Larkin’s famous lines: ‘Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixy-three/Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP’. The trial over whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was fit reading for a moral society was quite a circus, with a host of authors and critics being mustered in defense of the book, which even by then was beginning to look mediocre rather than brilliant.

I personally think it is an awful little novel. I’m not a fan of Lawrence. The dialogue and emotional reactions of the characters are unrealistic, the characters themselves lacking any sense of realism, and the book itself hypocritical in its use of euphemisms and innuendo when Lawrence himself pushed for clear speaking on matters of sex. But the trial was important, and has, as suggested above, become one of those useful cliches that always makes it into popular history.

Recently I came across a compelling account of the trial by an author who had been asked to possibly act as a witness, but was not called. However, Anthony Powell, writer of the epic, brilliant series A Dance to the Music of Time, did sit in, and recorded his observations, among which he observed a curious paradox. Noting that the proceedings themselves, with all the people in the courtroom talking seriously about things that they couldn’t quite say explicitly, were actually very funny, he observed:

The Prosecution was hindered from laughing at some of the patently absurd assertions [as to the literary merit and importance of the novel] of the Defence, because to show jocularity might have cast doubt on the alleged harmfulness of the novel; while the Defence was equally in no position to allow any laughter at the Prosecutions ineptitude of understanding, since the Defence’s intention was to prove the high seriousness of the book.

In that one sentence, Powell captures perfectly the worst of both sides of the argument. His memoirs themselves are fascinating, and I want to write something about them relative to Dance; however, I fear that it would be difficult to do justice to such an extraordinary work by a fascinating character in a short space. Suffice it to say, for now, that Powell’s memoirs are strangely different yet strikingly similar to the narrative told by the first-person narrator Nicholas Jenkins in the twelve-book series. The effect is a disorienting one, and I’m fairly sure that now Jenkins and Powell are blended in my mind to an irreversible degree.

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Defending the Honour of the Honours – Ernest Loftus

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Tobias Harper

I’ve already written about J. Brixley and his OBE woes, but made the mistake of saying that the person who dobbed Brixley in was anonymous. In fact, two men wrote in to the Home Office reporting Brixley. They were Norman Cockell OBE and J.C. Telford OBE, and were clearly keen to defend the honor and dignity of the Order of which they had been made Officers (both for services in the Ministry of Shipping during the First World War). They both had used the 1921 Burke’s Handbook to the Order of the British Empire as a reference guide, and had found that Brixley’s name was absent from this tome.

But Telford and Cockell’s efforts to protect the Order from people who didn’t belong in it paled in comparison to the Order’s most dedicated defender of the interwar period, Ernest Loftus. Loftus was, again, an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and Deputy Lieutenant for Essex, and who worked at the Barking Abbey School in Essex. Loftus first wrote in to the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood in August 1936, complaining about two people who ‘I believe, were awarded a Medal of the Order of the B.E. [who] are calling themselves O.B.E. and this is apt to bring the decoration of the O.B.E. itself into disrepute as these people are not the type to be awarded that Order’.  Loftus asked whether there was a list of members of the Order that he could consult. If there were none, he suggested, ‘it is obvious that there is no remedy for abuse of this nature without a lot of trouble’.  In reply, Loftus was asked whether he could give the names of the suspects, to which he replied that ‘The names of two people who pose as O.B.E.s to my knowledge are a Mrs. Wilkins who states she obtained the order as Miss L.F. Grasham in 1919 and a Mr. S.P. Carvell.’  Within a month, he also reported Mr A. Lipscombe for appearing in a newspaper cutting in which he was ‘given an order to which, apparently, he has no claim’. Loftus had done his research, and had been told by an informant that Lipscombe had been the recipient of a Medal of the Order as a member of the Barking Fire Brigade.  The clipping concerned was an announcement of the marriage of Lipscombe’s daughter.

Lengthy correspondence between Loftus and a Treasury official named Robert Knox followed. Frustrated by the abuse of inappropriate post-nominals, he suggested that those awarded the Medal of the Order needed to be told when they received their medal that it did not entitle them to any letters after their name.  He clearly saw this as a major problem which was ‘growing to serious dimensions’, and while he continued to feed names and information to Knox and the Central Chancery, he also suggested that they needed to take some broader action to crack down on people who had mistaken their status in the Order and in society in general.  In 1937, he sent four more cases, supported by clippings, of people allegedly inappropriately claiming to have received honours of various types.  Again he stressed the ‘confusion in the public mind [which] seems to arise from ignorance’ about what the letters OBE stood for.  While Knox said that he found himself ‘in much sympathy with your point of view’, he pointed out that in almost all the cases, it was press errors rather than arrogance or misrepresentation by the individuals concerned that had perpetuated the errors.

Such explanations did little to appease Loftus, who continued to send letters to Knox asserting the need for a change in terminology to avoid confusion.  He suggested that ‘Fellows’ or ‘Associates’ be used in place of Officer, probably not realizing that Associates was the initial suggested title for MBEs in the early stages of the development of the Order – Knox disagreed, arguing that this suggested ‘a Society of some kind rather than a great Order of Chivalry’.  When within a year Loftus sent yet another letter in to the Treasury about another of his neighbours who seemed to be misusing the infamous three letters, Knox was led to remark in a letter to Harold Stockey, the Secretary of the Order, that ‘It seems to be almost a point of honour among the neighbors of Colonel Loftus to describe themselves in this way.’  On establishing that this was, indeed, yet another case of the misuse of the post-nominals, Stockey replied dryly that ‘Loftus seems to have struck a very bad patch in his district’.  W.G. Day, the elderly, mostly deaf gentleman who was the culprit in this case was astonished to learn that he was misusing the letters, and in a personal interview with Knox was very apologetic. Knox was inclined to be tolerant and polite, because his own enquiries about the character of the Day indicated that the man was ‘intelligent and very helpful’.  Without this knowledge, Loftus was less tolerant, and continued to harass Knox with his own enquiries until he was informed of the outcome of Knox’s meeting with Day – he clearly feared that not enough was being done to resolve the ‘very bad patch’ of OBE misusers that plagued his existence.

Loftus’s campaign against the Essex imposters continued into 1938, but at this point he made something of a misstep by bringing two men to the attention of Knox who, he claimed, seemed to be medal holders who both, in fact, held ranks in the Order – one a member and one an officer.  In this instance, Loftus found their names and postnominals in the committee meeting minutes for the King George Hospital in Ilford, but he managed to misjudge their status, and although in his letter in reply to Knox he expressed himself ‘relieved’, his action must have been embarrassing. He closed his reply with the justificatory sentence: ‘But what a state of confusion reigns in this order!’

This was not the last time Loftus wrote to the Treasury, nor were the cases mentioned above the only ones of mistaken honorific identity that came to Knox’s desk. Many members of the Order of the British Empire around Britain and the empire were keen to stop others from impersonating their honour. Loftus was, however, the most persistent and prolix correspondent, which makes him particularly interesting, as his words did reveal something of his motivations and commitment to maintaining high standards and ensuring that the Order of the British Empire was untarnished by illegitimate use. As the deputy Lieutenant of his county, he had, if not actual responsibility, at very least a greater interest in the area of honours than the average citizen. As a former Colonel, the OBE was at the lower end of possible honours for those in his social position, which may have further motivated him to enforce and assert its importance as a marker of status. For him, these matters of honours were truly matters of honor (and of class).

Source: Treasury Records, National Archives (UK)

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