Fundraising for Life? – Pat Seed

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Tobias Harper

A few years ago, I ended up in hospital for a couple of weeks after suffering from severe pain on the right hand side of my abdomen. At first my GP thought that the pain in my side might be gallstones (unusual for one of my age, sex and health); at hospital they first thought it might be a digestive problem; the initial ultrasound scan seemed to indicate a massive tumor on my liver; finally a CT scan showed that it was, in fact, a balloon-like swelling up of my adrenal glad because of internal bleeding.

Only through the use of a doughnut-shaped radiation emitter were the doctors able to work out what was going on. They could then treat the problem, which in the end involved a series of blood transfusions. CT scanners are basically highly complex, computerized x-ray machines, which take thousands of photographs in order to resolve as complete an image of the inside of a person’s body as they can. A powerful computer is needed to make sense of the images that the scanner produced.

Hospitals around the developed world now all have CT scanners. They are a necessary part of the modern diagnostic arsenal, along with the still more technically complex MRI machines, which jostle around the water molecules in bodies in order to create a three-dimensional picture of our innards. They are indispensable to treating cancer, the disease of the developed world. But at one time, such machines were extraordinarily expensive, and not widespread. In this window of time, when technical progress exceeded the ability of most hospitals to pay for it, the promise of a cure from a CT scanner was all the more alluring for its exoticness and cost.

Pat Seed was a journalist who lived near Manchester. In the late 1970s she was diagnosed with a form of cancer that was difficult to treat, and also to diagnose, without the new technology that had just emerged in the US. She thus threw herself into a major national fundraising campaign to buy a CT scanner for her local hospital. This proved more expensive than expected, because the hospital needed to build a new wing to house the machine. In an era when the British economy seemed to be stuck down a coal mine shaft, she raised the decidedly non-trivial sum of around a million pounds through her efforts, which included two books that mixed autobiography with a kind of inspirational Christian writing that sells well in its moment, but ages poorly.

To raise money for the scanner, she marshaled a large organization that used many different means to raise money. Television appearances and newspaper editorials furthered the cause. When she traveled down to London to receive from the Queen her MBE for service to the community a random stranger gave her a five-pound note, which she dutifully sent in to her organization the next day. She herself died not long after the machine was installed in her hospital, leaving behind what seems to have been a loving and constructive husband and family.

Today, Seed’s books linger in the databases of online booksellers for less than a dollar. Her fame, facilitated in part by coverage on television in an age when Britain only had a handful of channels, has disappeared. Today, one cause would find it difficult to get this kind of profile without endorsement by very famous celebrities. Even those are like so many biblical sparrows. What’s more, now the technology that seemed so remote, and that stimulated such an urgent, desperate and ultimately successful burst of fundraising, is now common. Such is the nature of health technology, but for some reason – perhaps because I went back and read her poorly-written but earnest memoirs – I find it deeply sad.

Source: Pat Seed, Another Day (London: Heinemann, 1983)

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The ‘Amicable Quaker’: Bill Williams

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Tobias Harper

Bill Williams was not a Quaker, nor was he a notably amiable person – in fact, what little we know about his life was characterized by uncertainty, angst and possibly depression. As the partially-educated bastard son of a clergyman, he was caught between social classes in the world of the 1870s, during which time he worked as a clerk at a coal mine in Yorkshire. The ‘Amiable [or Amicable] Quaker’ was, rather, his euphemism for sex, preserved in his diaries, which themselves were discovered in a derelict building over a century after he wrote them. It is a delightfully evocative term, and it seems a great shame that, of all the slang terms and figures of speech that have existed, this one failed to survive. In my opinion, it must be revived!

But back to Bill Williams himself. His diaries, which cover a period of less than a year, are fascinating because they show the struggle of a man who wants to live up to the values and imperatives of his society, yet is constantly held up by his human flaws. So many of the things that we (rightly or wrongly) tend to associate with Victorian English people – strict sexual morality, work discipline, obsession with being on time, self-improvement, protestant religiosity – played important parts in his life. Yet he is constantly failing to be on time, to work hard, to fulfill his promises to himself to pray and read improving books, or to be faithful to his girlfriend.

In one diary entry, after weeks of having to run from the room where he lodged to the coal mine because he overslept, and still arriving late, he went into town and bought an alarm clock (he recorded his income and the price of all he purchased). A few  days later, he overslept, and in anger broke the alarm clock. Another week, and he was heading back to town to get the clock fixed. Yet oversleeping remained a problem, and the mocking chalk messages on his office door from the mine manager continued, while the queues of miners waiting for their equipment grew.

Then there was his constant womanizing. In spite of his regularly stated determination to stay faithful to his charming, demure girlfriend Beck, who lived with her respectable parents in a town some distance away, he inevitably strayed. He contemplated seducing the daughter of his landlady (and may even have done so), he entertained various other young local women, as well as enjoying the company of some not-so-young. At one point, he recorded a bizarre sexual dream about his landlady, which ended in violence when her husband came into the room.  He described these episodes of flirting and more-than-flirting in a detached tone that could not conceal his underlying guilt, constantly reassuring his diary that, whatever he did, the women concerned ‘seemed not to mind’.

Towards the end of his surviving diaries this burden of guilt, always lurking behind his words, seemed to overwhelm the competing pressures of lust and ego, and the tone of the entries became both more religious and more distressed. The death of a friend and financial insecurity brought on by his mine moving to part-time hours added to his problems.

In the end, his discipline broke down to the extent that even his semi-regular diary ended, or was lost. It is unclear what happened to him – perhaps he emigrated to New Zealand, as he was constantly proposing to do? Did he move somewhere else in the country, to escape angry fathers and pregnant lovers? The editors of his diaries were unable to trace him, finding no sign of emigration or marriage. When I first came across them, I wondered whether they were some sort of fake concocted by a mischievous twentieth-century wag (presumably not the earnest local historians who edited the volume). They seemed too perfect, too racy, somehow. But if they are, then they are an extremely good fake, and even if Bill Williams was an invention, he should have been real, as should his delightful euphemism.

Source: William Williams, The Diary of a Working Man: 1872-1873, Bill Williams in the Forest of Dean (Far Thrupp, England: A. Sutton, 1994)

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The Chimney Sweep and the Gong: J. Brixley

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Tobias Harper

When I was nine or ten, we used to have typing lessons on a set of old computers that someone had donated to my school. Having already mastered the typing tutor program that the school used, I indulged myself by typing rapidly and giving myself airs in the login screen of the program. I recall specifically my teacher being amused (and, I hope, a little disgusted) by my appending the letters ‘OBE’ after my name on one machine.

Presumably I had picked up on the status that those letters conferred – while I did not know much about the Order of the British Empire, I intuited that ‘OBE’ conferred distinction, even a few years after New Zealand had adopted its own honours system, and was thus in the process of discarding the Order of the British Empire

OBE stands for ‘Officer of the British Empire’, which is the fourth (of five) ranks in the Order of the British Empire. Of course, this means that there has been and continues to be a great deal of confusion about the acronym. Many, perhaps most, people assume that OBE stands for the Order in general, when in fact those in the order can be MBEs, OBEs, CBEs, KBEs, DBEs or GBEs (Members, Officers, Commanders, Knights and Dames, or Knights/Dames Grand Cross).

When the Order was first founded in 1917, these ranks corresponded pretty much directly with the social class of the person honoured. Even today, you can pretty much predict what kind of honour someone will get by their profession and background. In 1917, junior officers, nurses and clerks who had done some valuable service could expect a MBE, while GBEs were reserved for wives of senior Ambassadors, or very prominent and famous statesmen, and so on. Working-class people were outside of this system. In order to accommodate them, the founders of the Order created a medal, which, while not actually conferring membership in the Order, was known as the Medal of the Order of the British Empire or, later, the British Empire Medal.

As a result, munitions workers, firemen, junior nurses and other worthy recipients who did not meet the level of social advancement required to become MBEs received a flood of BEMs in the post, along with citations from the King, in the closing years of the Great War. The problem, as you can probably tell, is that the terminology and the acronyms here were fundamentally confusing. Many people who were not as immersed in the arcane and complex details of the honours system, with all its hierarchies and implications for social precedence, were put in the position where they could easily misunderstand the nature of their honour.

One such man was J. Brixley, a chimney sweep in London in the 1920s, who had served with some kind of distinction as a fireman in the war. He received the BEM, and valued it greatly, saving the certificate that told him that he had received a medal in the ‘Order of the British Empire’. He also observed all around him various middle-class worthies who had been made Officers of the Order using the letters ‘OBE’ after their names – on the letterhead of a lawyer, perhaps, or the chair of the local rotary club – and thought that, perhaps, he too was in the Order of the British Empire, and thus entitled to use the postnominal letters. He thus put them next to his name on his cart.

This mistake did not go unnoticed. A newspaper article called attention to the ‘Sweep OBE’ and some anonymous defender of the social honour of the OBE sent the clipped article into the Treasury, who administered the honours system. Instead of dismissing this anonymous sneak as a triviality, the Treasury sent the local police inspector around to ask Brixley to remove the letters, since he was plainly not entitled to them.

Brixley obediently did so, explaining that he did not realize that he was not entitled to them. And the matter was settled, although similar cases cropped up throughout the 1920s and 30s. All were dealt with promptly and in a similar manner by the treasury and the police. It was not until the early 1940s that holders of the BEM could use postnominal letters at all, and even then it was BEM rather than OBE.

Fortunately the Treasury didn’t take my unwitting, arrogant little gestures on our school computers, over seventy years later, quite so seriously.

Source: Treasury Records, National Archives (UK)

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‘The Sherlock Holmes of India’ – Abdul Aziz

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Tobias Harper

In the first decade of the twentieth century, India was still under British rule. In practice, this meant that the huge collection of territories that made up the Raj were run by a massive bureaucracy: the Indian Civil Service. This was an innocuous-sounding name for a powerful, and in some ways deeply corrupt, entity. The evils and virtues of imperialism continue to be debated, and the story of British rule in India has been told many times in many ways, but I want to focus on one person who does not leap out from the pages of history books.

In the first decade of the twentieth century a white British woman traveling between Lahore and Multan to be married, was raped and murdered on board a train. The account that I found of this little tragedy did not record the date of the crime, nor the name of the woman (or of her attacker), and initially there was little hope of solving the mystery of her murder. Train crime was always difficult to solve. Trains in many ways lie at the heart of the problem of British imperialism in India – their introduction was embraced by the people as a form of mobility, even as it destroyed traditional economic structures, and helped facilitate the mass export of grain that would prompt decades of famine. Travel on them was anonymous, confused and noisy. But on this occasion the culprit (‘an Indian Christian’) was discovered quickly and efficiently by a young policeman from Gujrat. The murderer was executed.

This was but the start of Abdul Aziz’s distinguished career as a detective. Later on, he played important parts in preventing mutinies in the First World War, and then combating ‘terrorist outrages’ in the interwar period. It was said that he was the best detective in India, and he retired as something of a minor celebrity to both his colleagues and, according to a small obituary that I unearthed at the British Library, the general public. It was from colorful newspaper editors, no doubt, that he acquired the nickname: ‘The Sherlock Holmes of India’. According to his obituary:

Abdul Aziz was an ideal investigator, combining determination, tact, patience and integrity; qualities which made his rapid advancement inevitable. He was a man of quiet dignity whose unassuming demeanor made him popular with all his colleagues. He was known as the Sherlock Holmes of India since he worked out the most intricate and difficult cases which had defied solution.

I chose this story because, in the first place, I was enchanted by the idea of an Indian Sherlock Holmes. The very fact that he was called this has so many interesting echoes. ‘A brilliant Indian detective? Of course he is like Sherlock Holmes!’ The whole story also fits all to well with our present-day image of the British as obsessed orientalists – part of Aziz’s ability was getting to the heart of the mysteries of the orient, just as Holmes somehow penetrated the mysterious and scary (to fin-de-siecle Britons) depths of darkest London. Having an Indian Sherlock Holmes in this way made sense – it was the idea of rationality conquering enchantment coming full circle to from the great Imperial city, to the Empire, and back again.

The other uncertainty about this story is the political context descriptions of his work disguised. Perhaps this is clearer when placed alongside another obituary in the same file. This one praised an English police worker for his ability with local Indians, from whom he could readily extract confessions by tying them in a vermin-infested bag overnight. This practice showed how well he ‘understood’ the Indian mindset (in fact, the obituary suggested that Kipling’s Kim was based on this particularly policeman). To us, this is blatant torture, and such a confession would not hold up in a court in India or Britain today. There is a lot left unsaid in Aziz’s obituary. Were the ‘terrorist outrages’ also nationalist protests, part of a revolutionary movement against unjust political oppression? Who were Aziz’s colleagues, and who was the ‘public’ who praised his actions? Was this a European or an Indian public? These police were working in the service of a strange, savage (in its own, bureaucratic way) and ultimately unsustainable empire. Public order is always political, too.

Source: India Office Records, British Library

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‘Into Mountain Wilds – Spiritualists’ Strange Pilgrimage’ – John and Elizabeth Lawson

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Tobias Harper

On the 10th of January 1928, two New Zealand pilots, George Hood and John Robert Moncreiff, set out to try and cross the Tasman Sea in a Ryan B-1 Brougham monoplane, taking off from Sydney early in the morning. Their aim was to fly to Farewell Spit on the Western side of Cook Straight, the body of water that separates the North and South Islands of New Zealand. They failed, and the wreck of their plane was never found. But they are not the people I want to talk about today.

In the wake of this event (New Zealand’s first major aviation mystery!) many attempts were made to find the wreckage on land and sea, but by far the most unusual was that made by a couple to locate the wreckage by communicating with the spirit of Moncrieff. They were aided in this by living Maori guides and a host of local Maori spirits. Like any good spiritualist coterie, they had a whole set of regular ghostly visitors, who advised them in unclear terms that they knew where the wreckage was.

They struggled through the forest for months, and over this time Lawson’s diary entries became more disjointed (he wasn’t a very good writer to start with) and the stresses of living in difficult terrain took their toll. Bad weather, steep inclines and fading hope meant that their Maori guides became less enthusiastic, in spite of the fascination provided by their regular seances. The guides, ‘Keepa Tainguru and E. Wehikokre’, were both members of the Ratana Church, a new religious movement that European commentators often compared to spiritualism. Because of this, the Lawsons very much saw them as ‘the same as us’. In a way they were. Both spiritualism and the Ratana church were mocked in the mainstream and religious press. They were newcomers to the complex world of modern religion, and their activities were acceptable to neither secular sceptics nor established churches.

All through their mountainous peregrinations, John Lawson’s diaries remained positive. The spirits warned them, as their discovery supposedly drew closer, that they should be prepared for the horrible smell of the decaying corpses of the pilots, and one night they received further direction when: ‘While we were sitting outside of our tent we have seen the most beautiful star descending like the star of Bethlehem in the east’. After spending about a month in the bush, however, they had to return, exhausted of provisions and energy, from their pilgrimage.

Spiritualism has always been a strange phenomenon – but in some ways it appears stranger than it actually is. Claiming ancient roots, yet always very modern in its orientation, language and themes, its bizarre beliefs about the persistence and manifestation of ghosts have been accepted by some  very intelligent and critical people, including, most famously, Arthur Conan Doyle (who happens to be one of my favorite historical figures). His conversion to spiritualism was a tragedy, but it was comprehensible, in the curious mix of grief and dislocation after the death of his son in the First World War, and the scientific, modernist language of spiritualism that merged so well with his existing enthusiasms for physical culture and modern science and technology. Read the diaries or books of spiritualists from this era and you will see hundreds of references to spiritualism as analogous to radio technology, and many other references to cinema and aviation – the sexy new technologies of the interwar era. The very fact that the Lawson’s were hunting the wreckage of an aeroplane with the advice of ancient Maori spirits somehow makes perfect sense in this context.

In 1956, a member of a local Aero club spotted what he thought was the remains of a wreckage on the remote mountains near where John and Elizabeth spent their fruitless weeks. Lawson saved a clipping, and it sits with the rest of his diary from the trip in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. Even decades after the failure of his expedition, Lawson seemed to have found vindication in this purported glimpse. Faith endures, and makes people do crazy things. And for all the thousands of times spiritualism has been discredited, and for all we tend to mock it, people in more established faiths – including people whom I know – do things that are just as eccentric for the sake of their beliefs.

Source: Lawson Diaries, Alexander Turnbull Library

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‘The Most Interesting Woman in the World’ – Maude Royden

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Tobias Harper

In the mid-1920s the British feminist Maude Royden (1876-1956) was probably the most famous woman in the English-speaking world. She toured the United States, Australia and New Zealand, giving speeches on modern topics such as gender politics and sex to crowded theaters, town halls and churches.  Her books, such as Sex and Common Sense (1922) and Beauty and Religion (1923) stimulated discussion and controversy, and her radical religious and political positions, such as her pacifism and her advocacy for women priests in the Anglican Church, reached a wide audience of interested – sometimes shocked – people throughout Britain, the British Empire and the United States. Along with the likes of the Christabel Pankhurst and Eleanor Rathbone, she was one of the main British feminists of the interwar era.

Born in Liverpool with a hip problem that was treated poorly in her youth by medical experts who were less than competent, Royden limped throughout her life. Petite, with short, dark hair and a strong voice, she was able to command the attention of large audiences on her tours and at the London Guildhall non-denominational congregation that she led (her attempts to preach to a mixed-sex Anglican congregation were hindered by a local bishop who questioned the propriety of a women preaching). Eventually, she broke with other pacifists to support Britain’s participation in the Second World War, because she believed Nazism to be a greater evil than war.

Hers was an active life, and I can’t relate more than fraction of her works. What I want to talk about today has little to do with these. Behind her public reputation, fame and honor lurked a private, bittersweet struggle.  For most of her life,  she was in love with a married man. She met the Reverend Hudson Shaw in 1902 when he invited her to help him in his parish, and to live with him and his wife, Effie. A deep mutual love grew from the three years they spent together working on Anglican parish-y things, a love that was complicated by Effie, whom they both also loved. Effie was fragile, and in some ways Maude’s presence allowed Howard to share the emotional burden of supporting his wife.

Theirs was a passionate love, yet it was also faithful and, up to Effie’s death, entirely platonic. Maude’s autobiographical memoir of the relationship between the three people – A Threefold Cord (1947) – was controversial at the time because of its revelation of the depth and age of Maude and Howard’s love, and also for its sympathetic but honest portrayal of Effie’s mental instability and frigidity. It is an inspiring love story because somehow the two – no, three – people managed to remain true to each other and to themselves, defying both temptation and social convention about how people in that situation ought to behave, and how they ought to treat one another.

We are bombarded with images and messages about the impossibility of chastity, and tend to make assumption about relationships – historical and present-day – that two people who love one another cannot bear to go without sex. Unless there is something wrong with them. This is simply not the case. People’s ideals can hold in the face of emotion, and even if they were anachronistic, we should admire those who are able to live up to the ideals they expected from themselves. It is terribly sad that Maude and Howard could not be together for forty years, but that sadness is tinged with nobility. To me, their lives and struggles are all the more romantic for their staunchness and craziness in staying both together in a platonic, active friendship, yet apart from where they really wanted to be.

Effie died in 1944 and Howard and Maude married eight months later. The night of their marriage, Howard, aged eighty-five, almost died, his heart scarcely able to bear the joy of the realization of a relationship that had sustained him spiritually for so long. He died two months later. It would be base to speculate about the exact nature of what went on on their wedding night, but I do hope that after their decades of distant passion they found consummation at last that night.

Source: Maude Royden, A Threefold Cord (London: Gollancz, 1947)

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Introduction

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Tobias Harper

This blog is a place for stories about people from the past. These will not be biographies as such, but interesting vignettes or reflections about moments and relationships in people’s lives – dramatic, romantic, or mysterious. They are also (mostly) not well-known stories. There will be no spotlight on Churchill or Gandhi here. Instead, I want to look at people who may have been famous locally or at the time, but who have been largely forgotten by all but a few specialists or family members. They have left traces in archives, and maybe have had some specialist historians write about them in specific contexts. In some cases, the people whose stories I will tell are unremembered anywhere else on the internet. These are people who are worth knowing about, but who have been forgotten, or have never emerged into our historical consciousness.

So this isn’t really about grand historical problems. It’s about the human struggles of individuals in the past. At their best these stories hopefully will help me, and anyone who might read them, empathize and understand how people thought, acted and felt in the past, and to give depth to historical cultures and people.

About me: My name is Toby Harper and I’m a Phd student in modern British history.

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