Posted on by Rosalind Rawnsley

Learning from History – Herbart, Hayward and the Celebration Movement

ROSALIND RAWNSLEY recalls a visionary educationist

For centuries, a child’s mind was considered a tabula rasa on which the teacher would do his best to imprint a series of facts which with a bit of luck would give the pupil all the basic tools needed for him to make his future way in life – as the 19th/20th century English educationalist Professor Sir John Adams put it, dividing the ordinary consciousness from ‘mind within and the great world of facts outside’, 

…the teacher’s work is regarded as the shovelling in of as many of those outside facts as the mind can contain. The great shovel for this purpose is known as Observation; a word dear to the hearts of, ‘Teachers; Inspectors, School Superintendents; School Boards, Parents and Others interested.’1

In most cases, a basic grounding in the ‘3 Rs’, with, if they were lucky, a working knowledge of the Classics, was for centuries considered a sufficient education for those few boys who were fortunate enough to benefit from schooling of any kind. The vast majority of the population remained illiterate. 

Village School, by Jan Steen , circa 1670

As early as the early 17th century, there had been a few far-sighted philosophers with more advanced ideas on education. The best-known among them was the Czech, John Amos Comenius (1592-1670), who advocated among other innovations, pictorial textbooks written in native languages rather than only in Latin, teaching based on the introduction of gradual development from the simplest to more comprehensive concepts, lifelong-learning, focussing on logical thinking rather than rote learning, equal opportunities for poor children and education for women. 

With evident justification, Comenius is considered the father of modern education, but his was an exceptional voice crying in the wilderness.  It was not until the 18th century, with the dawn of the science of psychology, that educational innovation really began to gather pace in Europe, with the German States leading the way. But the child-centred, leisurely pace of education, first advocated by Pestalozzi and Froebel in the 18th century, and built upon by J.F. Herbart and his followers a century later, by which the child was guided by the teacher to uncover and develop his own innate understanding of the world and his place in it, could not last. With the exponential expansion of educational opportunities in the 21st century, with the invention of the microchip and the internet, space exploration and the vertiginous pace of advance in information technology in particular, this ‘Herbartian’ model has on the face of it had to be laid aside in favour of increasing specialisation. But Herbartianism, as applied through the work of the English educationalist, Frank Herbert Hayward has not been entirely superseded, and may still have a future.

J. F. Herbart, 1776-1841

Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) the German philosopher and early psychologist, is less well-known in the English-speaking world than Auguste Comte, his near contemporary, with whom he is sometimes compared. It is difficult to comprehend the reason for this neglect, given that for at least half a century after his death, as the founder of pedagogy as an academic discipline, Herbart’s philosophy of education was extremely influential.  It was widely studied and applied by prominent educationists not only in his native Germany, but also in England and in America where, as in Germany, Herbart Societies still flourish. 

Herbartianism, with all its faults, is a system; apparently the only educational system in existence which has at the same time a definite psychology; a vast and fairly coherent mass of literature, a considerable number of journals devoted to its cause; a series of great names – above all, the power of raising enthusiasm!2

Herbart’s philosophy of education can be perhaps labelled simplistically as idealist.  He begins with the concept of the mind or soul as a single, inert and homogeneous entity which becomes the battleground for the one set of forces which can have any effect upon it – the ideas. Ideas, once introduced to the soul, compete with each other for a place. 

John Adams, in his magisterial volume of essays The Herbartian Psychology Applied to Education, describes the Herbartian model of the soul as a dome, “the summit of which is the goal of the ambition of every self-respecting idea”3. The base of the dome marks the threshold between the conscious and the unconscious mind. Once an idea rises above that threshold, its first task, in order to consolidate its position in the dome, is to make useful acquaintances or connections, which together form what Herbart describes as an apperception mass. According to the Herbartian model, the whole of our intellectual life is spent in forming new apperception masses and in expanding old ones. Ideas which do not succeed in attracting others to form apperception masses, having for the time being lost the battle, will sink once again below the threshold of consciousness, where they will nonetheless remain until or unless called forth once again.

Herbart was born in Oldenburg in northern Germany in 1776.  Little is known about his early life, except that as a fragile child he was taught at home until the age of 12. Afterwards, he attended the local Gymnasium for six years, before going on to study under Fichte, who taught him to think logically, at the University of Jena. After Jena, Herbart moved to Switzerland as tutor to the children of the Governor of Interlaken.  Here he made the acquaintance of the Swiss educator Pestalozzi4 and through him became interested in educational reform.

This meeting, and his own experiences as a teacher, led Herbart during the following years to develop his own philosophy of education – first at the university of Göttingen, where he eventually became a lecturer, and later in Königsberg, where he moved in 1809 to take up the Chair of Philosophy earlier occupied by Kant. Here he established, and conducted for the next 24 years, an influential seminary of pedagogy. In 1833 he returned to Göttingen as Professor of Philosophy, where he remained in post until his death eight years later.

Herbart’s theories of education were taken up and developed in different ways by his followers, who likewise reinterpreted the philosophy of Herbart to suit their respective interpretations. ‘Herbartianism’ thus eventually became synonymous with a system of education, rather than with the original philosophy of Herbart himself. By the second half of the 19th century, Herbart’s doctrines had been so much changed that they would probably have been unrecognisable by their original author.

While Herbartianism had considerably less influence in England than in Germany and in America, it did nonetheless attract a following among influential English educationists following the 1870 Elementary Education Act. This established a framework for the compulsory education of children between the ages of five and twelve.  The direct result of this enactment was the construction and establishment countrywide of hundreds of new Elementary schools5 and it was not until the Education Act of 1891, the latest in a flurry of Education Acts passed during the twenty years after 1870,  that education was made free of charge to all pupils in Board and Church schools alike).

Among those educationists who took up the Herbartian torch were John Joseph Findlay6, John Adams7, and Catherine Dodd8 and Frank Herbert Hayward, all of whom were household names in the field of pedagogy well into the 1930s.

While students of the history of education would certainly be familiar with the first three, Hayward sank into obscurity very soon after his retirement and by the time of his death in 1954 he had more-or-less been forgotten. A pessimist by temperament, Hayward may not have forwarded his own cause as well as he might, had his personality been different; the title of his autobiography, An Educational Failure, published in 1938, encapsulated his self-doubt, and as is so often the case, he was taken at his own estimation. This neglect was nothing short of a tragedy in the field of moral education.

Frank Herbert Hayward was born in 1872 into a poor but industrious Nonconformist family in Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire. Highly motivated and of a studious disposition, he was to become in early adulthood a man of formidable energy and mental ability, rising to become a prolific writer and a highly respected (though controversial) educationist.

He attended various schools, mainly in Bristol, becoming a Pupil Teacher at Barton Hill in 1887, where he seems to have remained on the staff until 1895, when he gained a scholarship to University College, Bristol. From Bristol he gained by private study a B.A. from London University and went on to study for a Teacher’s Diploma at the College of Preceptors, where he gained a Special Certificate of Ability to Teach in 1899. During his studies for this diploma, he appears simultaneously to have studied privately for a B.Sc. in chemistry and geology, and for an M.A. in philosophy and economics.

In 1900 he was admitted as an Advanced Student at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, whence the following year (at some point evidently having acquired a working knowledge of German) he was given a grant by his College to study education at the University of Jena. Here he wrote The Critics of Herbartianism (1903) in which he gives a detailed critique of some 14 German commentaries on Herbart.    

That same year, he gained a D.Litt. from London University, his thesis being entitled The Ethics and Philosophy of Sidgwick ((Henry Sidgwick,1838-1900) English utilitarian philosopher and economist.  Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Cambridge 1883-1900. Author of The Methods of Ethics. Co-founder (1875) of Newnham College, University of Cambridge for women)) published in book form as The Ethical Philosophy of Sidgwick (1901). Meanwhile, he gained the Moral Science prize and a B.A. from Cambridge. These studies in Germany and at Cambridge seem to have awakened his interest in moral education and the precepts of Herbartianism in this field, which was thereafter to remain the principal focus of his working life. 

In 1902 he became Organising Teacher for Mid-Devon, published lectures on Herbartianism in Cambridge, while that year and the years immediately following, he gave lectures in Marburg in Germany. Later, he was appointed Assistant Inspector of Schools for the London County Council, where, rising to become Chief Inspector, he remained until his retirement in 1937. 

During the next 35 years he gave lectures on moral education in various parts of the country, published innumerable pamphlets and some 30 books, not only on educational topics, but also on matters as diverse as ‘Temperance’ and the ‘Power of the Press’. Biographies of Oliver Cromwell, Marcus Aurelius and Alfred the Great were well received by the press. Perhaps his greatest and most original contribution to moral education, however, was the Celebration Movement.

In his biography of Marcus Aurelius (1935) Hayward wrote:

I have been hunting during thirty years for a solution of what has notoriously been regarded as a certain “difficulty” in schools, as well as of certain cultural and civic “difficulties” allied to it… In the spirit of Comte, and indeed under his direct influence, I am an advocate; in schools and out of schools of Celebrations of Great Men as well as of Great Ideas and Great Institutions, in the hope that such Assembly Methods, with their mass emotion and broad impressions and an occasional touch of splendour, will be of help in these times of spiritual unsettlement and distress…9

Hayward’s period of greatest activity was likewise a period of flux in educational thinking.  Moral education and education for citizenship became more important than ever during this time of profound upheaval in all aspects of life following the conclusion of the Great War. Education had already been high on the government agenda during the closing years of the 19th century, and, following the flurry of major Education Acts in the years following 187610 by the outbreak of war in 1914 Britain did already have a basic educational system.  Nonetheless, for most of the population this did not extend beyond the Elementary age limit of 12.  By the end of the war, it had become all too apparent that education was more important than ever, not just for the children, but for the improvement of national morale as the country attempted to rebuild the structure of society and to create a ‘land fit for heroes’ from the ashes of conflict.

Hayward did not claim originality for the idea of the Celebration, tracing it back to Plato in The Laws, but the worked-out development and application to educational purposes was entirely his own.

The notion of celebrating ‘Empire Day’, inaugurated in 1907, had set Hayward thinking. He considered it “scrappy, faddy and narrowly propagandist”.  However, he thought, if it were to be celebrated as one of a group of five annual festivities (the others being ‘Home’, ‘City’, ‘Nation’, and ‘League of Nations’), it could be an excellent idea. Alone, there was a danger of Empire Day being nothing but a display of jingoism. On the other hand, under intelligent guidance, the school celebration of Empire Day might include, “impressive references to the ancient empires of the world as well as to those of later times”. The significance of the modern (British) Empire would be enhanced by being set in context. Taken alone, Hayward thought, there was also the danger that children who associated the word ‘Empire’ with a local music hall or cinema, would completely miss the point:

No adult can conceive of the mix-up in many children’s minds as they gather at the annual event and are given a flag to wave about.

The Empire Day concept, he considered, was too good and too original to be lost, but the way in which it was marked was very unsatisfactory. As he thought of it, it required an entirely “new spiritual start”. If the notion of a Celebration of Empire or Commonwealth was legitimate and attractive, Celebrations of the other four concepts, he considered, should be given equal weight. Looking back over his life in An Educational Failure, he regretted that this logic had not appealed to others in authority. Before the First World War, Herbartianism had risen from almost complete obscurity to a position of some prestige, with astonishing rapidity, particularly in England. Yet in the wake of the 1918 Education Act it went, at least nominally, swiftly into decline.

During the War, Hayward, like many others, had been giving considerable thought to ways in which education might be advanced once hostilities were over. Towards the end of the War, he circulated to educational journals and influential individuals a 10,000-word pamphlet, The Religious Difficulty in Schools – A Solution of an ‘Insoluble’ Problem.  However, like an earlier, more academic pamphlet directed to various members of the clergy; supporters of the controversial Education Bill and others; this received a lukewarm response.

A few encouraging letters came, indeed; from teachers (mainly women) and one or two from people of the literary and artistic type; attracted by the idea of a National School Liturgy. Hardly any came from the champions of “religious education”, “freedom of the teachers from religious tests” and other catch phrases of the last decade or two.11

It may be, he continued sarcastically,

…that the majestic brains of these gentlemen are still silently absorbing my suggestions and preparing a scheme of incomparable grandeur.  Great minds need time… 

It was therefore useless to bandy reproaches.  Hayward evidently had grandiose hopes for his proposals: “I undertake”, he wrote:

…to make the British nation fundamentally cultured on matters of Bible, literature, and music if I can get a few collaborators and the moderate use of official notepaper and stamps of any responsible educational body such as the Board of Education or the National Union of Teachers”12

Evidently not lacking in self-assurance, Hayward had, he continued, indicated the way to a solution of,

…the very honest problem of religious, civic, and aesthetic education that has been raised during the past half century…  

As if this were not enough, a further problem, which to his mind educationists had not considered at all, and one which would equally be addressed by his scheme, was that of the didactic approach to the Bible, literature and even music. There was a need to rescue, he felt, “the ear from its bondage to the eye”; educationists imagining that the Bible and Shakespeare and music should be taught through the medium of print, rather than being heard in live reading or performance.13

While these pamphlets may have received a disappointing response, the second document led Hayward to make the acquaintance of Arnold Freeman. Freeman was a Fabian, a philosopher, an educationist, a playwright, an Anthroposophist and founder of the Rudolf Steiner Sheffield Settlement for adult education. Freeman was, according to Hayward,

…one of the few men actively on the look-out for an educational contribution to the very threatening contemporary situation

This meeting proved to be momentous: it led to the joint production of a much-reviewed ‘manifesto’, published in The Spiritual Foundations of Reconstruction (1919) in which was set out for the first time the concept of the Celebration as a means of moral and civic instruction. Hayward had evidently had the idea at the back of his mind for some time before meeting Arnold Freeman, and it now became a fully worked-out tool for teaching moral values.

Hayward considered that as a disinterested educational practitioner who was not susceptible to political whims, he could bring an independent mind to bear on the solution of great problems. His earlier idea for an Empire Day Celebration had been suspected of partisanship. But nobody, he maintained could discover partisanship in the Celebration itself.  “What we can discover”, he wrote,

…is sound pedagogy; and the only criticism that can be proffered is that it is a solitary Celebration instead of being, as it should be; one among fifty others, each designed to impress the child with the greatness and the weakness of man, and to convey to his mind the social heritage of the race.14

Education was seen as a key element in the creation of ‘a land fit for heroes’, to compensate for the horrors of war and the terrible wastage of life lost in the fields of Flanders, while at the same time acting as a means of offering some reparation to those who had given their lives, and even more, to those who had survived.  Education for peace, and social and spiritual reconstruction were high on the agenda before, and in the years following, the Armistice.

How was this to be achieved became a burning question for educationists. Hayward and Freeman had written in the opening words of The Spiritual Foundations of Reconstruction:

The people of Great Britain desire fervently that the coming peace may bring a League of Nations and an Industrial and Social Order based upon Co-operation… If we are to reconstruct with understanding and imagination, we must have an electorate possessed of an intelligent grasp of the truth of things – of the workings of nature; of man’s history upon this planet; of social evolution…  There must be developed for the appreciation of this environment a widely-diffused reverence for Beauty.  Year upon year, and perhaps decade upon decade of after-war disorder and conflict can be avoided only if the minds of the people are filled with such ideals of national and international Citizenship as will assure unity and co-operation.15

This was to be achieved, they thought, through the schools. The very fact that it had been thought necessary to institute a national celebration of Empire Day, was in their opinion a tacit admission by the authorities that the concept of patriotism had not adequately been conveyed to pupils in either denominational or non-denominational schools, on the pretext that religious instruction included moral and civic education. This notion had been proved in practice to be erroneous since,

…if patriotism had been adequately and impressively taught in scriptural or theological lessons, there would have been no need of these celebrations! 

Following the first Empire Day celebration in 1907, the Feast of St. David had been marked since 1915 and the birthday of William Shakespeare since 1916. What for Hayward and Freeman had been “the most pregnant feature” of these celebrations had been the entirely new conception of educational method to which they bore witness.

Whether or not their originators realized the principle underlying them does not concern us.  It is none the less revolutionary. In its bleakest and most absolute form the principle is that:  THE CLASS TEACHING OF THE BIBLE, LITERATURE, MUSIC, HISTORY, AND CERTAIN OTHER SUBJECTS SHOULD BE LARGELY ABOLISHED IN FAVOUR OF A LITURGICAL CEREMONIAL. OR CELEBRATIONAL TREATMENT.  THESE SUBJECTS ARE NOT SO MUCH LEARNED AS ‘IMBIBED’16

Here the Herbartian principle of ‘apperception’ is invoked. Herbart believed that the mind was the sum-total of all ideas which entered into one’s conscious life, which grouped themselves into “apperceptive masses”. By assimilation (or apperception) new ideas could enter the mind through association with ideas already present. This principle could be applied to almost any arts subject – History, Morals and Religion could better be taught through Celebrations than by formal didactic methods.

The ‘revolutionary Scheme’ which Hayward and Freeman now proposed had already in part been formulated by Hayward himself. Writing in 1912, in his controversial book on educational administration (The Psychology of Educational Administration and Criticism) which he had written as a rebuttal of Edmond Holmes’ notorious Circular attacking elementary school education17 Hayward argued that what was lacking from moral and religious lessons in particular was an understanding of the necessity for appreciation.

The formulary for this new approach consisted of four Proposals, which Hayward had earlier outlined in a jointly-written letter to The Times Educational Supplement, the first of which, based on his earlier ideas, was eventually to form the nucleus of the Celebration Movement under his sole aegis18.

“PROPOSAL I [all capitals in original]

THERE SHOULD BE PREPARED A SYSTEM OF SCHOOL CELEBRATIONS, INTENDED AS IMPROVEMENTS ON THE EXISTENT EMPIRE DAY SHAKESPEARE DAY, AND ST. DAVID’S DAY CELEBRATIONS, AND AS VAST EXTENSIONS OF THE PRINCIPLE THEY EMBODY; THAT IS TO SAY, THERE SHOULD BE A NATIONAL SCHOOL LITURGY OF THE BIBLE, LITERATURE, MUSIC, AND CEREMONIAL.

Day after day, the child would hear the best portions of the Bible read impressively, as well as other splendid passages of poetry and prose. He would be familiarized with several hundred of the choicest pieces of music; once a week (say) he would witness or take part in a Celebration, ceremonial, or piece of pageantry in honour of a great personage (St. Paul, Alfred the Great, Joan of Arc, St. Francis, George Washington) or a great idea (The League of Nations, France, Agriculture, Science, Freedom).

PROPOSAL II

THE HUMDRUM DUTIES OF LIFE SHOULD BE EXPOUNDED BY THE TEACHER IN SPECIFIC MORAL AND CIVIC LESSONS, APART FROM THE LITURGY, BUT CONSTANTLY DRAWING ILLUSTRATION AND SUPPORT FROM THE LITURGY. DURING THESE LESSONS THE MAIN STRESS SHOULD BE ON THE REASON, WHEREAS IN THE LITURGY, REASON WOULD BE SUBORDINATE TO FEELING – TO “ADMIRATION, HOPE AND LOVE”.  Pro AND Con MATERIAL SHOULD BE OFFICIALLY SUPPLIED TO THE TEACHER FOR LESSON PURPOSES AND ALSO THE MOST UP-TO-DATE AND COMPLETE INFORMATION ON QUESTIONS OF HYGIENE, CIVICS, ETC. 

The teacher would be free to express personal opinions, but if they were controversial he would be expected to refer his pupils (particularly as they grew older) to pro and con documents provided for the purpose. These documents would be drawn up by a board of responsible educationists, every sect and party sending from time to time statements of its views.

PROPOSAL III

SCIENTIFIC CHARTS OF TIME, SPACE, AND HISTORY SHOULD BE STATUTORILY HUNG ON THE WALLS OF EVERY SCHOOL so that false views about the age of the earth, the existence of a material and spatial heaven “above the skies,” etc., could not obtain a fixed lodgement in children’s minds, and so that a definite and true time and space scheme could, on the other hand, receive a very fixed lodgement indeed.

PROPOSAL IV

REPRESENTATIVES OF ALL SECTS, PARTIES, PROFESSIONS, MOVEMENTS, ETC., AS WELL AS TEACHERS, SHOULD BE URGED TO GIVE ADDRESSES TO THE WHOLE SCHOOL AT THE TIMES SET APART FOR THIS IN THE LITURGICAL ARRANGEMENTS. Parents and “the public” should be specially invited to attend.”

During the recent war, the sinister influence of propaganda had been acutely recognised as a danger to democracy. It was therefore of vital importance that children should be educated to recognise that few issues are clear-cut. Future citizens trained to see both sides of every important hygienic, ethical and political question would thereafter be able to think for themselves and know how to get at the facts. The time charts advocated would give children a framework of space-and-time relationships which would familiarise them with the general scheme of things.

The rationale of the proposal, that children should listen daily to the finest music and literature and take part regularly in some sort of pageantry or ceremonial, would, it was felt, go a long way to rendering every child aesthetically sensitive – a more effective way of appealing to a child’s appreciation of Beauty than the lessons, dealing primarily and laboriously with technique, currently given.

The grandiose plan for a national liturgy of Celebrations – a sort of precursor of the National Curriculum – through which every child in the land would be offered the same experiences, would, the authors hoped, create a network of common culture-memories. Such a network would in turn help to bind the members of the population together, thus in turn combating the loneliness and isolation of a nation of individuals, a feeling exacerbated by the effects of the recent conflict. If adopted by schools of all classes, Hayward and Freeman’s proposals would, they averred, “bind the nation together by a thousand bonds of sympathy”, while at the same not destroying but intensifying whatever is valuable in sectional and individual effort”19

Although The Spiritual Foundations of Reconstruction was very well received by the press, the response from the teaching profession to the invitation to contribute their own suggestions was distinctly tepid. Hayward was understandably disappointed. In a letter to F.J. Gould, a secular humanist, follower of Comte and prominent educationist, who had reviewed the book with enthusiasm, he expressed his disappointment, but said that nonetheless he hoped to publish a first Book of Celebrations in the course of the year.

This volume duly appeared in 1920. It was reviewed in Nature as “a sound idea”, the writer considering that the suggestions made were wise and well thought out, and he was convinced that the methods suggested, “would grip in a way that nothing except the teacher’s personal influence has hitherto done”.20 He noted that the subjects dealt with were Shakespeare, the League of Nations, Democracy and St. Paul. Celebrations which had already appeared in The Spiritual Foundations of Reconstruction; to which were added Celebrations of,

…bards and seers; world conquerors, Samson, eugenics, temperance, commerce, summer, flying, Chaucer and Spenser.21

By the time the book was published the Celebration movement was beginning to gather momentum, but mainly through Hayward’s own promotional efforts through the London County Council Education Committee.

A second book of Celebrations, published the same year, expanded on the themes of the first, with the virtues of Work and Toleration, individual great men from history and from the recent past: Alfred the Great, Pasteur and Lister, Sir Philip Sidney, the artists Turner and Watts, The Musician, national Celebrations of Poland and Ireland (the latter in an attempt to alleviate the crisis following the 1918 uprising), Military Conflicts in Palestine, a revised Celebration for Empire Day, and finally, Political Parties, and School Leaving Day. 

No indication is given as to whether any of these Celebrations had actually been performed. However, The Journal of Education, reporting on a Summer School of Civics at High Wycombe noted that,

Dr. Hayward organised two of his school Ceremonials, one in honour of the city and the other to commemorate the League of Nations. These were carried out by the staff of the Summer School and proved impressive Celebrations  ((Journal of Education; September 1920, p.586))

In an interview with the present writer, Dr. Hayward’s son Frank observed that although the whole gamut of Celebrations eventually covered a great variety of topics, many of the early Celebrations were of a biographical nature, celebrating the lives of great men.  This he saw not just as a reflection of his father’s Herbartianism, but also because he was a Victorian projected into the 20th century, carrying with him the very Victorian characteristic of admiration for the great figures of history.

In a bid further to disseminate the concept, in 1926 Dr. Hayward launched a new quarterly journal, The Celebration Bulletin, which ran to 16 issues. Each contained several fully worked-out complete Celebrations, which could be staged by subscribers. In 1928, despite the rather discouraging response, Hayward published A New Book of Celebrations, reviewed in the Journal of Education:

On former occasions we have directed attention to Dr. Hayward’s idea of Celebrations, and to his very suggestive helps towards carrying the idea into practice… It is not difficult to detect the note of disillusionment and disappointment in Dr. Hayward’s preface. He has worked hard, and has received messages of approval from men so far apart in some ways as H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Dr. R.J. Campbell and Prof. J. Arthur Thomson. Yet his efforts, marked though they are by ability and sincerity, have so far not commanded wide success.22

Hayward had many other eminent admirers within the profession, including Sir John Adams.23 Yet Sir Michael Sadler24 who must have known of Hayward even if they were not personally acquainted, did not find it necessary to include his name in his 1927 encyclopaedic list of British educationists, pioneering teachers, educational philosophers and administrators, whose talents had made Great Britain the greatest exporter of educational ideas of the time25.

A fourth and final book of Celebrations was published in 1932, in which details were given of those which actually had been performed. Of the 28 listed, ranging from Old Testament figures, classical writers, Shakespeare, Schubert, Purcell, various European countries, and India; to The Nation (England), The Home and the virtues of Temperance and Work and Saving.  Of these, nine or ten had been performed once, Schubert twice and Virgil three times. 

Altogether, F.H. Hayward compiled around 100 Celebrations on different topics, putting a lifetime’s knowledge and expertise into their creation. It was extremely discouraging therefore for him that his radical ideas were never enthusiastically embraced by the teaching profession, or the world’s educational authorities and governments. The Celebration as a means of moral and spiritual education seemed to be ‘dead in the water’.

Or was it?

Hayward had unfortunately become obsessed with the Celebration as the most effective means of combining religious instruction, moral education, and the teaching of citizenship, and this may have been his ultimate undoing.  Teachers, war-weary, conservative in outlook and no doubt discouraged when the first post-Armistice euphoria gave way all too soon to the Great Depression, were perhaps not ready to embrace this revolutionary inter-disciplinary concept.

The claims of science, not least as advocated by Bertrand Russell26 to be pre-eminent in any educational system at the expense of the humanities, may have been a contributory factor in the decline of interest in overt Herbartianism and, in parallel, in F.H. Hayward. Pedagogy, largely under the influence of the advances in educational psychology, also moved on, gaining its own momentum.

Yet Herbartian ideas did not expire with the 1918 Education Act, but continued to permeate educational thinking, even perhaps to the present day. The sinking of overt Herbartianism below the level of consciousness in educational theory does not imply its extinction. In 1929, Cyril Norwood, Headmaster of Harrow School, though not specifically acknowledging the influence of Herbart, wrote that an education on which the cause of international peace could be most firmly based was “founded on practical Christianity, culture, and character”. 27.  Norwood was advocating, in other words, the cultivation of the Herbartian ‘circle of thought’ as the foundation of a moral education. 

Child-centred education has not been abandoned.  It was a key to teaching practices, particularly in the 1970s – developing children’s understanding of the world by investigating the outdoor environment through a cross-curricular approach28. It was only with the introduction of a more rigid structure through the ‘National Curriculum’ proposed by the 1988 Education Act that this ‘Herbartian’ approach to curriculum planning had, at least nominally, to be laid aside.  Every Government, of whatever political affiliation, has ever since the introduction of a National Curriculum if not from 1870 onwards, felt it incumbent upon them to tinker with the methods and content of education, in a manner which would no doubt have been anathema to Hayward.

Nonetheless, Herbart’s ideas and Hayward’s practical suggestions and theories continue to underpin educational praxis to this day, even if no longer in formal curriculum planning. The present writer, in collaboration with the Head Teacher and staff of a Shropshire primary school, during the late 1980s and early 1990s directed a series of major thematic interactive Festivals of the Arts and Sciences for young people, outside school hours, which could be considered as natural developments of Hayward’s ‘Celebrations’, and there were other examples elsewhere.

There are few comparable events today in schools, and certain aspects of Hayward’s theories feel outdated – which is rather ironic, considering that he conceived them as liberating and modernising. In 2021, history is more often contested than celebrated, morals, sociology and even the hard sciences are in a state of flux, while the concept of ‘Great Men’ is at odds with modern ‘diversity’ and egalitarian preoccupations. Yet still there must be a place for a model of education that uplifts even as it informs, and at the same time provides all-round thematic understanding rather than partisanship or uninspiring specialisation. Hayward, like Comenius in his day, seems for the moment to have been a voice crying in the wilderness, but perhaps his time too is yet to come.

  1. John Adams, The Herbartian Psychology Applied to Education, 1897, p. 135 [↩]
  2. F.H.Hayward, The Critics of Herbartianism, p.52 [↩]
  3. John Adams, The Herbartian Psychology Applied to Education, 1897, p.50 [↩]
  4. Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi, 1746-1827. Founded several educational institutions, in Germany and in the Francophone cantons of Switzerland, publishing several works on his principles, revolutionary at the time. Educational motto: ‘Learning by head, hand and heart.’ Through his work, illiteracy in 18th century Switzerland was almost completely overcome by 1830 [↩]
  5. Education did not become compulsory for all children until 1880 [↩]
  6. John Joseph Findlay 1860-1940 Scottish educationist, Sarah Fielden Professor of Education, Owens College, Manchester [↩]
  7. Sir John Adams 1857-1934, First Principal of UCL Institute of Education; Professor of Education at University of Glasgow, knighted 1925 for services to education. Author of The Herbartian Psychology Applied to Education [↩]
  8. Catherine Isabella Dodd 1860-1932 First woman on academic staff of Victoria University, Manchester as lecturer in Education. Principal of Cherwell Hall Teacher Training College, Oxford 1906. Author of several titles on education including Introduction to the Herbartian Principles of Teaching (1898) in England in the last years of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th [↩]
  9. Preface to Marcus Aurelius – A Saviour of Men, (1935) p.9 [↩]
  10. 1876 – Compulsory for all children to receive an education; 1880 – Attendance made compulsory from 5 – 10; 1891 – Elementary Education Act made primary education for all intents and purposes free, since the State would pay school fees up to 10s per head; 1893 – School leaving age raised to 11; 1899 – School leaving age raised to 12 and later to 13; 1902 – Balfour Act [↩]
  11. The Religious Difficulty in Schools, A Solution of an Insoluble Problem, The Literary Guide, 1917, also a pamphlet,  p.1 [↩]
  12. The Religious Difficulty in Schools, p.3 [↩]
  13. Ibid. p.4 [↩]
  14. The Psychology of Educational Administration and Criticism, p.504f. [↩]
  15. The Spiritual Foundations of Reconstruction, p.3f. [↩]
  16. Capitals in original [↩]
  17. E.G.A. Holmes, Chief Inspector of Elementary Schools in England , had in 1910 circulated a memorandum, not intended for publication, in which in the light of reports received from H.M. Inspectors of Schools, he is highly critical of elementary school teachers and local elementary school inspectors.  The majority of these, including F.H. Hayward, came from a working-class elementary school background and were ex-elementary school teachers.  The only local Inspectors who were really able to bring ‘freshness and originality” to their work, Holmes maintained, came from a public school and Oxbridge background.  The memorandum was leaked, and not surprisingly caused a furore. [↩]
  18. The Times Educational Supplement, August 1st 1916, p.104 [↩]
  19. The Spiritual Foundations of Reconstruction, p.15 [↩]
  20. Nature, Vol.CV No;2649, 5th August 1920, p.707 [↩]
  21. Ibid. [↩]
  22. Journal of Education & School World, May 1928, p.361 [↩]
  23. “The more I consider you and your educational work the more I regard you as a figure in the history of education rubbing shoulders with and rousing the writer’s wonder at the inability of your contemporaries to appreciate the value of your contribution…  The time will come when light will break… and you will be raised to the pedestal which is being silently prepared for you”, Sir John Adams, letter to Frank Herbert Hayward, 18th May 1933, quoted in An Educational Failure, p.152 [↩]
  24. Sir Michael Ernest Sadler, KCSI, CB, 1861 – 1943) English historian, educationalist and university administrator (Manchester) and Vice-Chancellor, University of Leeds [↩]
  25. J.H. Higginson (ed.) ‘The Educational Outlook’ in Selections from Michael Sadler, Studies in World Citizenship, p.150 ff. M.E. Sadler’s Presidential Address to the 16th Conference of Educational Associations, 1927 [↩]
  26. Vide B. Russell, On Education, p.27 ff. [↩]
  27. C. Norwood, The English Tradition of Education, p.187 [↩]
  28. Vide Colin Brown & John Turnock, Curriculum Design in the Two/Three Teacher School.  Curriculum, Vol.2 No.2 Autumn 1981 [↩]
Posted on by Stuart Millson · 1 Comment

The partition of Scotland

As the SNP again attempts to prise Scotland out of the UK, STUART MILLSON engages in a little counter-factual fantasy

Professor John Curtis of Strathclyde University, the country’s leading psephologist, had (within a few percentage points) been proved right. Ever since the announcement of a second independence referendum by Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, the polls consistently showed a reversal of the 55:45 result from 2014 – leading to the unthinkable, the secession of Scotland from the United Kingdom after more than 300 years of union.

And yet already a constitutional crisis of another and unexpected sort had engulfed the SNP, threatening to sour its victory. Despite the overall majority vote for Scotland to revert to its pre-1707 state, certain sections of the Scottish electorate had not moved from their 2014 position: with the Borders resolutely clinging to their 70 per cent support for the Union, and several conjoining areas of the Lowlands narrowly keeping the unionist vote just above 50%. The Orkney Islands had also voted to remain within the United Kingdom – the islands first declaring their loyalty to the UK during the 2014 referendum campaign, when a group emerged on social media, proclaiming that in the event of an SNP victory, a petition would be presented to the Government in Edinburgh to leave the new Scottish state and rejoin the United Kingdom. Scotland – to the dismay of the party which had long seen itself as representing the country incarnate – was split: a schism that could only be resolved by the creation of a new border, a situation not seen in the British Isles since the creation of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State in 1922.

The SNP’s position on independence, or what was presented as independence, had suffered considerably following the successful implementation in 2021 of a UK-wide Covid vaccine – Boris Johnson’s one true achievement during the pandemic (the effects of which were still being felt after the Scottish referendum). The First Minister’s earlier enthusiasm for Scotland to take its place as an “independent nation within Europe” had been readjusted somewhat, following the clumsy attempt by the European Commission to nationalise and control the manufacture and supply of Covid vaccines. Even to confirmed ‘Europeans’ and romantic Remainers, the actions of Brussels emphasised how little member-states could expect independence – especially in a Europe, which following the conclusion of the UK’s Brexit settlement, now saw itself as a ‘sovereign equal’, a state in itself.

The anxiety felt across the pro-Union areas of Scotland soon translated into a refusal to accept wholesale incorporation into the new system and state. The quiet, conservative Borders soon resounded with the cry to withhold council tax to the Scottish authorities; foreign news-crews made camp along the villages and towns of the Tweed valley, eager to interview farmers and freeholders, and Anglo-Scottish families who could not countenance living under what some described as ‘the Sinn Féin of Scotland’. (Despite its earliest, Scottish baronial conservatism, the SNP of the middle-2020s had evolved a strongly metropolitan ideological core, with one element – muzzled during the second referendum – espousing curbs on speech and thought, the abolition of the monarchy and perhaps the dispossession of the Royal Family from Balmoral.) A visceral dislike of the other point of view overcame Scottish politics: a breakdown of all consensus, a negation of all that Tony Blair had hoped to achieve in 1999 with his policy of devolution and the revival of a Scottish Parliament.

Scottish and Whitehall civil servants began to meet in Holyrood – a strange echo of their predecessors’ meeting in 1707, when a new country and flag were sewn together. Now, a country was being re-created, but one in which a limb of the original Union of Great Britain would survive. Within months a Royal Commission and a Commission of the Scottish Parliament had sketched a new Scottish border, based as accurately as could be on the votes cast in the referendum – pleasing some, disappointing many, dismaying, no doubt, most of the majority of Scots who had hoped at all costs to avoid another bad-tempered plebiscite. Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling would, it was thought, form the central part of the new Scotland, but the capital itself proved an impossible factor in the constitutional equation. As in 2014, Edinburgh had narrowly voted for UK membership: an embarrassing problem for the legislators of Holyrood.

With part of Scotland still in the United Kingdom, and the Orkney Islands granted a form of UK semi-autonomy (an Isle of Man of the North Sea), the United Kingdom survived, in wounded, chastened form. Boris Johnson’s ministers appeared, each day, with Union flags furled on platforms and arranged on bookcases for their announcements via Zoom – the Government keen to remind Nicola Sturgeon of the thousands of Scots in England and Commonwealth countries who belonged to the British family of nations. The independent Scotland, scarred by partition, nevertheless celebrated its new existence, although the European Commission had still not considered whether it would be allowed to rejoin the European Union. For the time being, the Bank of Scotland issued Scottish pound-notes, an arrangement supported by the broad shoulders of the UK Treasury, keen to show its goodwill. Sir Sean Connery’s image – his familiar form adorned in Highland dress – adorned the new banknotes, although a vociferous campaign by supporters of Alex Salmond to include the charismatic First Minister who resigned in 2014 was still underway.

It is not known if a third referendum will ever be held, to confirm, or disconfirm what came to pass with the remaking of the map of Great Britain – and the unexpected partition of Scotland.

Posted on by Mark Patton

From Jim Crow to George Floyd – a street view of US policing

MARK PATTON takes a personal view of the sad trajectory of US race relations

I was five. It was 1957. My recently divorced father had custody of me for the weekend. What I can recall from such a distant time, is that we had been traveling down a rural state road outside of Toledo, Ohio. It was late, I was sleepy and I had no idea of where we were headed to. Suddenly a white station wagon veered into the road from out of a farmer’s driveway. I woke up quickly as I careened into the dashboard and on to the floor as my father slammed the brakes of his faded navy blue, 1952, Chevy. The station wagon passed across the front of our car, then crashed into the rear quarter of another car that had been heading towards us in the opposite lane — instantly ejecting the operator of this vehicle out onto the roadway.

My father jumped out of our car, as did several other motorists. The station wagon then backed off the roadway to the front of the driveway it had come from. Two young men came out of it and leaned against the hood of their car. My father, as well as other witnesses to the accident, went to the aid of a man who had been injured by being catapulted onto the highway. He was sitting in the middle of the roadway and they attempted to get him up onto his feet. But this didn’t work. He kept falling back onto the ground. I later learned that both of his knees had been broken. There he sat, as my father went about collecting papers blowing about from a snapped open briefcase. I could see, from all of the headlights illuminating the scene, that the man was wearing a suit and he was a negro. I had been recently taught to call black people negroes, though coloured people was also acceptable.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol were soon on the scene, and the accident scene was further illuminated by the twirling red bubblegum lights on top of their cruisers. At this point my father reentered our car and attended to me. He felt that this was all a teachable moment for his young son. I gathered from his instruction that the black man was a businessman and an ambulance was on its way to help him to a hospital. My father then pointed to the two teenage farm boys, “See them?” I nodded compliantly, “They are drunk. Watch, the police will soon arrest them.” I then attentively watched the farm boys as they catcalled to the man sitting on the highway, shouting words that I had been taught never to use. The ambulance arrived, but it did not come for the black man. Instead, the ambulance crew persuaded the drunken farm boys to lie upon some stretchers and be carried into the back of the ambulance. Flummoxed, my father assured me that there was another ambulance coming for the man in the street. The police, who had been questioning the black businessman, now pulled him to his feet. Placing handcuffs on him, they loaded him into the back of one of their cruisers to take him off to jail. Shocked, my father went out to argue with them but was soon sent back to our car. Later on, he testified on behalf of the injured black man at his trial, but this did little good. The man received 90 days for reckless driving. To a boy of five, who hero-worshipped his dad, the most astonishing thing that had happened that night was how wrong my father was.
 

                                                                           ***                                                                     

By 1959 I was living in a newly constructed lower middleclass housing development south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It neighboured Wendel, a small mining town that had seen better days. From our small yellow brick house, you could see hilltop orchards, steep pasture for beef cattle and a mountainous slag dump that towered over all. Our slag dump view diminished over the years as it was excavated to make ‘red dog’ driveways. Everyone in our neighborhood had one of those driveways made from heated waste coal and shale tailings. Next to the repetitive brick homes, the orange, pink and metallic purple crushed stone made the neighbourhood more interesting, as did the people who were living in those homes. Most of the children with whom I played in the street had fathers who had been combat veterans in World War II. Mr. Fisher, who lived near us, was in two navy vessels that sank in the Pacific. Despite his ordeals of so frequently treading water, he was perhaps the nicest person in the neighbourhood. There were also several Jewish families on the road. Across from us was a Jewish engineer, his wife and four boys. He too had served in the navy and had seen combat. Next to his house was a Jewish family whose matriarch was a concentration camp survivor. She slept all the time due to depression, and her husband would come out and scold the local children for waking her as they played in the street. Oddly, next to their house lived a German family, the Graffins. The local story concerning Mr. Graffin was that he had deserted the German army by stealing a boat and rowing across a lake to Switzerland. Again, befitting the idiosyncratic nature of the mixing in this neighborhood, the Graffins were bookended on their other side by a pretty young Jewish woman. Her rather incomprehensible story was that at age three she was smuggled out of Germany in a wagon driven by her mother, disguised as a Gypsy. As she told it, they were stopped and interrogated by soldiers, but since they pretended to be Gypsies, they were allowed to cross. Somehow, they managed to squeak through the Germans, even though the Germans were in the habit of rounding up Romani as well as Jews.

Several houses up from her house was another Navy man. He was big, doughy and bald and always wore a white T-shirt, sleeve rolled up to house his Camel Cigarettes, and cutoffs. However, the main reason for this excessive display of flesh was not to be comfortable on a hot day. It was to proudly display all of his maritime sexual conquests. He was tattooed all over his legs and arms with Betty Boop-like women, each bearing a name under them. These women had been memorialized in an assembly line production on his skin, all very similar, more like stamps than tattoos. Perhaps during a bout of nostalgia, he had consumed enough beer to dump his savings on having the job done all at once? He was not shy.  Once while I was playing outside with his son, stepped out of his house, and upon my request, he lifted up his shirt and showed me the continuation of his love life, which lay beneath his T-shirt, inked there on his back and his chest for the duration of his life.

Our neighbourhood seemed to coexist rather well. Of course, there were occasional spats between children and housewives. There was no antagonism between ethnic groups, and the men got on quite well — finding time after their mill work to play a movable game of pinochle — going from one front door stoop to the next, up and down the street. However, two things happened to disrupt the quietude. The first was the night when the man at the top of the hill chased his wife down to the bottom of the hill. The chasing came to an end right in front of our house. I was in bed at the time and heard my playmates shouting,” Daddy! Daddy! Don’t shoot Mommy!” Then there was a bang. Daddy had arrived home earlier than expected from his nightshift, and found Mommy in bed with another man. This was my second encounter with law enforcement. The Westmoreland County Sheriff’s Department arrived, and once again, everything was lit up with flashing lights, this time. However, unlike the black man in the accident, Daddy wasn’t seriously prosecuted, if at all. Domestic bliss soon returned between Daddy and Mommy after the shooting. A few months later, as I was walking up the hill, I met Mommy coming down. I was very excited to see her. For a young boy back then, a bullet wound was about as neat a thing that you could have. So, I asked her if I could see it. There must have been some strange compulsion to lift clothing in this family, for she sheepishly complied, raising her skirt to her knee to display the scar.

About a year after the shooting, the second major local event took place. A Jewish engineer, directly across the street, had put his house on the market and sold it quickly. I remember the day the details of this sale got out. You could see all of the street’s menfolk congregating on the hill to the east of our house and also the hill to the west of our house. They soon came marching down from both directions and were very angry. Puzzled, my stepfather went out to find out what was going on. He too became angry. Then there was shouting for our neighbour across the street to come out and join them. He was very brave, for he did come out. Things became highly animated with cursing and shoving, but the demonstration ended almost as quickly as it had erupted. When my stepfather returned, he announced that our neighbour had sold his house to a mixed-race couple, and that property values were going to plummet, which did turn out to be the case.

Mrs. Brown, our new neighbour, was a huge white woman. She towered over all the men in the neighborhood. Her husband was a tall black man who owned and operated an eighteen-wheeler. They had only one child, a son, who also towered over a normal boy his age. Not long after their moving van pulled up, the Ku Klux Klan was summoned to help do something about the street’s ‘predicament’. One night, while the Brown family was enjoying an outing at the local drive-in theatre, the Klan showed up. They painted their garage door “N—-g—- Go Home, KKK”, and then they set up the traditional blazing fiery cross on their front lawn. When Mr. and Mrs. Brown drove into their driveway in their new shiny black Cadillac, stuffed full of their numerous children, they were quite shaken to see what had happened to their home. The sheriff’s department was called and they were puzzled as to the motivation for this crime. Why would a white family from Kentucky, by the name of Brown, be the object of the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan? Apparently, the Klan had gotten it wrong. They had attacked another Brown family house two streets up. After that, things quieted down. The Browns lived in their house for many decades till they passed away from old age. Mrs. Brown became the Sunday school teacher at the local Presbyterian church, and soon began complaining to my mother about my irreligiosity. The neighbourhood remained quiet for the next eight years we lived in it – and we did have a hard time selling our house.

                                                                              ***

I was 15 in 1967 and visiting my grandfather back in Toledo. At the time, I had a crush on the girl next door to his house. One day I worked up enough nerve to ask her out. To my surprise she said yes.  This was to be the first date for both of us. My grandfather volunteered to drive the two of us to a theatre in downtown Toledo to see the movie Doctor Zhivago. After the picture was over, he was out front in his station wagon waiting to return us home. Initially, it was an uneventful trip. However, as we passed through the black neighborhood on Dorr Street, traffic slowed to a crawl. We had no idea as to what the problem was and assumed that there was a bad accident up ahead. Through the smoke, we saw that there was some kind of road block. The date was July 24th, the evening when the black riots in Detroit spilled over into Toledo. The day before, the Detroit Police had arrested all of the patrons of an after-hours night club welcoming home some Vietnam War veterans. Eighty-four blacks were included in the arrests. The subsequent riot required Michigan’s governor to mobilize nine thousand National Guard. Over 10,000 people participated in this riot, which left 43 people dead. 
At the road block on Dorr Street, a mob of black men was surrounding cars as they tried to pass. Each vehicle was inspected and white men were being pulled out for a beating, before being allowed to move on. I thought we were all goners. We were stuck in line inching our way forward to receive a beating. When we got to where the barricade had been set up, my grandfather was told to roll down his window. A black man then poked his head through. He took a quick look at an old man in his mid-70s and a pair of 15 year-olds in the back seat, and elected not to hand out any beatings. We drove on.

                                                                               ***

Later that year, my family moved to Cape Cod. After graduating from high school in 1971, I became a member of the Research Vessel Chain. After leaving the Chain in 1973, I was offered a job as a summer police officer. I spent the next year pounding a beat and directing traffic. The political climate was similar to what we have today. Cars slowed down, as they passed me standing in the middle of an intersection – making pig noises, grunting, squealing, oinking, saying pig slowly and occasionally spitting. I had never dreamt of being a cop, but suddenly here I was in a blue suit carrying a gun and with one week’s training. I stayed on at the end of the summer as a provisional police officer. The next year, I enrolled in a degree program at Northeastern University’s College of Criminal Justice, graduating in 1979. I worked my way through school, not only as a cop, but also as a Federal fisheries enforcement officer.

Unfortunately, I was handed my degree during a recession when jobs were scarce. But fortunately, I had taken the Massachusetts Civil Service exam for patrolman back in 1978. The scores were slow to be announced. Consequently, I went to Texas and worked in the oil patch until of the results finally came out. What a strange exam. With police racism in mind, the Commonwealth sought to diversify the racial composition of the state’s police departments. To this end, it came up with an interesting multiple-choice exam. Many of the questions had two right answers. The questions were scored one way or another dependent upon which question the majority of minorities chose. However, this scheme didn’t work; not enough minorities had passed the exam, so the final score for passing was lowered to a 65.

By the late 1980s, the Falmouth Police Department was notified by the Massachusetts Civil Service Commission that it was out of compliance with their racial quotas for the composition of its staff. Officially, we had one black. He was my good friend, Percy Kennedy, who went to high school with me. Unofficially, and in reality, the department was close to one third black. The explanation for this was that when individual black officers took the civil service exam, they did not check the black ethnicity box but filled in a blank space entitled other. For them, the other was Cape Verdean. Cape Cod has a significant Cape Verdean population. They came as sailors or cranberry bog workers in the late 19th century. Being from African Islands off of Mauritania and Senegal, Massachusetts Civil Service had no category for them. So, they were not counted as being of African heritage. So, our black chief, of Cape Verdean ancestry, had to go out and recruit two official civil service blacks for our department to be in compliance. He sent the recruited cadets off to a Massachusetts Criminal Justice Training Council police academy. Upon graduating, they were assigned a training officer for three months of hands-on patrol training. Regrettably, one of the trainees was just not meant for the job. After two years of effort, she was still in training. Our chief became fed up, and fired her. This wasn’t an easy thing to do with both civil service protection and police union protection. But that was not the end of it; she turned around and sued our chief through the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination for discriminating against her due to the fact that she was black. We had a black officer suing a black chief for racial discrimination. She received a settlement. Law suits weren’t uncommon in the Falmouth Police Department, and the Town frequently gave plaintiffs $50,000 to go away. It was cheaper that way.

                                                                            ***

I was on duty the night Percy’s brother was shot to death by the Yarmouth Police Department. Percy was called out of his sector and sent to the nearby Cape town to identify his brother, Michael. Michael had been allegedly involved in a burglary. He was pursued by two units and lost control when his vehicle hit sand and skidded into a tree.  He was attempting to back out when the two officers who had been pursuing him approached his car on foot. During the inquest, it was articulated that the two white officers felt their lives were threatened — so they unloaded their revolvers into the car, reloaded and fired again.

I went to the police academy with one of these officers. He was a nice personable kid, who knew an awful lot about guns (maybe too much) and had been out of the academy for about a year when this shooting took place. Oddly, of the fourteen cadets in my class, two of my classmates had shot and killed someone during their first year on the road. No one else from this class shot anyone during the remaining years of their careers. Younger and freshly minted officers are the most aggressive. They have frequently had the ambition of joining a police force from an early age and have had a steady diet of police procedural movies and television series to fire their enthusiasm.

Young officers begin to take notice of the long, layered rap sheets with multiple felony convictions and no significant prison time. That’s when going to court becomes a farce.  It dawns on them that only the judges take the courtroom seriously. Police work becomes a job and ceases to be a calling. Most veteran cops have as a goal getting through their shift with the least amount of trouble. Confrontations, racial or otherwise, are the last thing they want during a patrol.

 Police see the best people at their worst and the worst people at their worst. Everyday contact with the meanest of our species eventually leaves its mark. Memories become choked, not with the names and events of great people and noble deeds but with the rap sheets of local felons and their crimes. Officers soon can recite criminal histories the way David Starkey can discuss the life stories of the monarchs of Britain. When the station dispatcher keys his radio microphone, blood pressure rises through all the department’s patrolling units. No one knows who is going to get the next call or what it will be. For those whose number isn’t called, there is relief. For those who receive a serious call, their minds race through possible scenarios and how they have dealt with similar events in the past, in hopes they will be up to the task.

                                                                         ***                                   

Two years after Officer Kennedy’s brother had been killed, I was on patrol in East Falmouth. The base station microphone was keyed and I got a radio call that kept my blood pressure up for some time. A Golden Gloves boxing champion, who happened to be a black man, was going door to door ringing doorbells and punching out whomever answered. The radio dispatcher said he had fled the scene in a car. He was to be regarded as highly dangerous. My colleagues began piping up on the radio about what a good boxer he was, and that I should be very careful.

I asked the dispatcher for the boxer’s home address and headed there to find him. His mother and sister greeted me at the door, stating he was not there. They asked if they could come with me to look for their relative. Today’s policy and procedures manuals would have forbidden taking civilians for a ride in pursuit of a criminal, but back then you had much more latitude for independent thought. I let the two women into the rear lockdown area of my cruiser. Only a few minutes had past when the station advised me that the man I was looking for was now attacking people at a local supermarket. As we pulled up, the boxer was punching out a tenacious store manager. I took the time to unlock the doors for my passengers, then ran towards him. At this time, an officer in a dispatched backup unit arrived. He did the same thing that I was doing, but then checked himself, and cheerily announced his name while extending his hand. He went down, one two, out cold, with a broken jaw.
I anticipated his throwing a punch. His eyes moved to the right and a right hook came my way. I moved just in time to receive a glancing blow to my head, but still managed to get behind him and place a sleeper hold on his neck. This was a version of what was recently applied to George Floyd – taught in police academies as a way of stopping blood flow to the brain and causing someone to pass out. It is not a choke hold. I had used that hold a lot, with blacks and whites, and it saved me from being the recipient of a beating on many an occasion. However, this time it wasn’t needed. His mother and sister had left my cruiser and were now staring at him in horror.  Suddenly the boxer appeared somewhat sane: “My ladies are here. You got me”. Now subdued, I handcuffed him and then had his ladies transported to the station. He relapsed into delusions as I transported him to the station’s prisoner drive-thru. It was a memorable ride. He was shouting about the devil, and yelling “Michael Kennedy”! Michael Kennedy, my friend Percy Kennedy’s brother. Back then, we had only a cage screen shielding the front seat from the back. The boxer took advantage of this and began spitting through the cage as he kicked at the front driver seat. I still can feel his saliva going down my back.

The shift commander was there to meet us in the drive-thru. He opened my cruiser’s back door and began talking to the boxer. They knew each other, and I could see that now a black officer was there, the raving lunatic went away and the boxer seemingly became normal and complacent.

I was told not to bother to book him but to drive him straight to the Taunton State Mental Hospital, about an hour away. The raving began as soon as I left. When I arrived at admissions, it was nearing 2 AM. The receptionist was in a sour mood. I was incredulous when she told me that, though beds were available, Cape Cod was assigned only five beds, which were all filled. I then had to return to the station, book my devil- talking prisoner, and place him in a cell. By 10 A.M. the next morning, he had been arraigned in court and released on bail.

                                                                            ***

Melvin Reine

For over three decades the Falmouth Police Department and the Town of Falmouth was terrorized by a short, spindly, Cape Verdean garbage contractor with snaps embedded in his scalp for the attachment of his toupee. Melvin Reine, the owner of Five Star Enterprises Garbage Collection, was not physically imposing, but willing to do anything to maintain people’s fear of him. They knew he’d run the risks, commit whatever crime it took to maintain control over the town. They also knew that no one seemed to care.  Melvin was from a large family living off a small strawberry farm. He did not come from money. But he did do a stint in prison, and when he came out he was loaded.
Shortly after I moved to Falmouth, there were a series of fires reported as being due to arson. Eventually, these fires were attributed to Melvin Reine. He was successfully prosecuted for them and did two years in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Cedar Junction. Not long after his release, he quarreled with his wife Wanda. She disappeared. No one has ever heard from her since then, including their two boys, which Reine raised. Around this time, Melvin had been frequenting the company of an 18-year-old girlfriend, Shirley Souza. Coincidentally, her boyfriend, 16-year old Jeffrey Flanagan, was found dead in a cranberry bog just across the street from Melvin’s house. Jeffrey had been executed while on his knees by someone using a twelve-gauge shotgun. Melvin was never charged with this murder. I have seen the initial police report; an auto accident investigation would have had more detail.

The fires started up again, but now mostly for insurance fraud. In 1977, a 17-year-old boy, Paul Alwardt, had been implicated in some of these arsons and was to testify against Melvin before the Barnstable County Grand Jury. Then, like Wanda, he went missing, and like Wanda was never heard from again.

In 1979, Patrolman John Busby was on his way to work when a station wagon operated by Melvin’s brother, John Reine, cut him off.  Shirley was in the passenger seat, and Melvin in the back with the window rolled down. A shotgun was again the choice of weapon. Busby was hit in the face, and his jaw was shattered. None of his assailants were ever arrested for this shooting, but Patrolman Busby was given a new identity and went into hiding for the next seven years.

I was not working for the department at this time, but pursing my degree. By October of 1980, I was again working for the Falmouth Police Department. Though I had not been there for the shooting of Officer Busby, I did talk to a lot of officers who were.  Most felt, as with the Flanagan murder, that there was no serious attempt to investigate the crime. One asserted that Melvin was never questioned, though he was considered a prime suspect for threatening John’s life during an altercation a few days before the ambush took place.

Emboldened by shooting a cop and getting away with it, Melvin got into the habit of lighting a match and saying, “I smell smoke”, whenever he was stopped by a cop for a motor vehicle violation. Though I never had the occasion to stop Melvin, I once stopped his son Todd for illegally driving a garbage truck with no plate or proper license. I hadn’t been out of my cruiser for more than five minutes when Melvin appeared out of the blue. Evidently his car had a police scanner, so he heard me radio the station that I was stopping his son. Now that he was conveniently on scene, I decided to cite him, as the owner of the company that had allowed these violations.

Oddly, as I cleared the scene, I couldn’t get the station on my radio. This wasn’t normal, especially for anyone who was in the process of citing Melvin Reine. Five-minute status checks were mandated for all motor vehicle stops. I kept calling in to say that I had cleared my stop, but there was absolute silence. I began to think that my cruiser radio had failed, when an officer in a neighboring unit responded to my radio traffic. He informed me that the desk officer had announced that he was going to the bathroom. I never had heard an officer make such a declaration on the air. Interestingly enough, this officer had recently volunteered to work the desk radio. His desire to get out of his cruiser and behind a desk was due to the fact that he had had a motor vehicle stop involving Melvin and felt his life might be in jeopardy.

That evening, I ignored regulations and did not file my report and citation concerning Melvin with our station’s court officer.  Instead, I and two other officers who had recently written similar citations for Melvin had our citations hand-carried to the court house by a State Police Captain. This State Police Captain was no fan of the garbage magnate, so made sure our paperwork wasn’t thrown in a convenient court waste basket.

Apparently, Melvin laboured under the misapprehension that the fix was in. He ignored the court house paperwork coming to him through the mail.  Three separate cases and he disregarded them all. Subsequently, the court issued an arrest warrant for him. This was the first time since his release from Cedar Junction that Melvin had been arrested. The flabbergasted Reine was arrested at his house, taken to the station and booked (snap-on toupee removed for photographic purposes) and then arraigned at the Barnstable County District Court.

By 1986, I was the head of a division of the department that was responsible for records, gun permit licensing and press releases. Since the statute of limitations was about to expire on the Busby shooting, I thought I might get the press to do a major story about it and the unsolved murders in hopes of getting some new information that might bring about a prosecution. The editor of the Cape Cod Times agreed to do the story and was taken to North Carolina, where John Busby was in hiding by the State Police. We did not have the chief of police’s consent to do this. We did it on the sly. Only a few people knew about it and they were all necessary to make it happen.

The Cape Cod Times did a full length front page Sunday exclusive. This was the first time that the paper had ever used a colour photo. A bearded John Busby (due to the destruction of his jaw) told the Times in detail about the day he was headed to work and shot in the face. However, the result of all of this effort was the silence of crickets. Nothing happened. No one came forward. However, I did get an angry call back from the editor of the paper. Before going down to North Carolina to interview John, he received a death threat concerning going forward with the upcoming interview. Then the tyres to his car were flattened while he was in his office. Someone had alerted Reine.

By July 1990, I was no longer working for the Falmouth Police Department. I had become the director of the Falmouth Department of Natural Resources. Now there wasn’t any reason for me to have contact with Melvin Reine and I was glad of this. For the next ten years, I heard little about him. Then, on the 27th of October 2000, Falmouth Police Department’s Detective Captain Roman Medeiros (younger brother of the missing Wanda Reine) called to discuss a landfill operation off of Old Barnstable Road. I had no idea that there was such a thing, so we went to the site. It was the old strawberry farm that Reine’s parents had willed to their children.  It was now surrounded by a ten-foot-high earthen berm, which totally masked the mounds of garbage within. We approached the land through a neighboring cranberry bog. When we crested the berm, I was amazed. There were acres of trash, a compound built for Melvin’s garbage trucks, and numerous thirty and one hundred cubic yard waste containers. It was such a flagrant violation of state laws that I felt sure that it must have been recently permitted and I just didn’t know about it. So, I pulled out my cellphone and started calling up officials. First, I called the Board of Health. The Board of Health refused to comment but told me to contact the Town’s engineering department. The Engineering staff would not comment due to their boss being away on vacation. The Building Department did comment, stating that the buildings there were for agricultural purposes, like a strawberry farm.

Soon, I learned that Melvin had been in a fight with his neighbour over the use of this land. The neighbour had called a group of town officials to complain. On the 28th of September, 2000, a mysterious 75-gallon drum of oil was dumped on this neighbour’s property. Of course, this criminal act was witnessed by good citizen Reine, who had promptly reported the spill. The Falmouth Fire Department, the Falmouth Health Department, and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection were alerted. Again, no one notified me. Officials assembled at the scene and received a vague description of the vehicle and perpetrator of this ecological disaster. However, there was no way around it; the assembled officials could plainly see the piles of trash on Reine’s property from the site of the oil spill. They decided to work with him. He could be polite and assuaging when he wanted to, and promised to clean it up…but didn’t. And no one did check back on him. As for the woman on whose land the oil was dumped, she was forced to hire an eco-cleanup firm at her own expense. In desperation, another neighbour called the police, who in turn got hold of me. A search warrant was obtained, which discovered a solid mass of garbage to a depth of fourteen feet. The Massachusetts State Police brought their corpse sniffing dogs to the site. No bodies were found.

I called the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, who permitted all of the state’s landfills. They had no permits for the landfill, so they opened an investigation. However, they soon became spooked and sent the hot potato off to the investigation off to the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Environmental Protection Division. I then arranged for several interviews between the AG’s office and Melvin’s two estranged sons in my office. Melvin’s sons were happy to fill them in. They were upset with their father because of a recent argument. After the argument, one of their houses caught fire.

My department then began developing a second case against Reine. Somehow, an industrial scale town dock from Martha’s Vineyard had been transported across Vineyard Sound, and dumped on private property. Guess who collected the disposal fee?

By now, you can imagine that Melvin was getting a bit peeved with us. Yes, death threats began coming in. A detective called me at home one Sunday to say that Melvin Reine was heard boasting that he was going to hire some boys in Boston to come down to put a man in greensix feet under. Melvin was supposed to have strong connections with the Boston Winter Hill Gang.

It should be noted that Whitey Bulger, the head of the Winter Hill Gang, was the brother of Billy Bulger, the then President of the Massachusetts Senate, and also an active informant for the F.B.I. He too was literally getting away with murder as the F.B.I. protected him from prosecution. This threat seemed plausible. I did ask the detective to put it in writing but he never found the time to do it. I found out about a second threat when an officer working a road detail stopped me and inquired about the death threats that were coming in concerning myself and a reporter with whom I was working. Apparently someone had called the Barnstable District Attorney’s Office Crime Prevention and Control Unit and made another threat. I called up the reporter, who told me that she had been recently warned by the District Attorney’s Office. Naturally I called up the District Attorney’s Crime Prevention and Control Unit and asked the state trooper who received the call why he hadn’t bothered to contact me? He said he’d forgotten. He played stupid, but did promise to write a report, which took him six months.

In 2002, all of the drama finally came to a head. A Ryder rental truck had parked in front of a kickboxing club in East Falmouth. The operator had foolishly parked in front of one of Melvin Reine’s dumpsters. When Melvin drove up to empty his dumpster, he became enraged. He expressed his displeasure by lifting the parked rental truck up and down with the lift tines on his garbage truck — slamming it down with each repetition. After his anger had passed, Melvin realized he might be charged with the assault on the truck. He and his lawyer went to the front desk of the Falmouth Police Department to discuss the matter.  The duty sergeant promptly placed him under arrest. The judge presiding over Melvin’s arraignment became alarmed over the defendant’s preoccupation with how hard the courtroom benches were and remanded to the Bridgewater State Mental Hospital for psychiatric evaluation, then off to the Taunton State Mental Hospital. This time they found a bed. Twelve years later, while being held as criminally insane, Melvin died of Pick’s Disease.

The saga continued. In 2005, Shirley was found shot to death, ambushed in her garage. Melvin’s two sons were under investigation for the crime. No one has yet been charged. Around the time of her murder there was this revelation in the Cape Cod Times:


In a 2003 police report, Reine family members say Falmouth police officer Arthur Monteiro, who died in 1990, provided Reine with information about Busby’s routine before the shooting. He also gave Reine updates about the department’s investigation into the shooting, according to the report, which consists of Falmouth and state police interviews with Melvin Reine’s sons, Todd and Melvin Reine Jr., and his brother, John Reine

Arthur Monteiro was called Monty. He was a large Cape Verdean officer, whose eyes had the puffiness of being in the ring. I was told that the reason he was initially hired was that officers were sick of fighting him and wanted him on their side. He was also a Golden Gloves champion and our Cape Verdean chief of police’s brother-in-law.

Falmouth Police Department pays tribute to one undeserving officer

On May 17th, 2020, a commemorative service was held at a newly created memorial garden in front of the Falmouth Police Department. This garden features four monuments celebrating officers who have been singled out for their “Honor”, “Integrity”, “Commitment” and “Dedication”. You can see how things have changed since the night of that accident, when I was five years old and seated in my father’s faded navy blue,1952, Chevy.

Posted on by Dermot O'Sullivan

Rathfarnham – ‘Big House’ borderlands

“Bottle Tower, Rathfarnham”, by Harry Kernoff, RHA (1940) – built 1742 as a famine relief scheme after 1740/1741’s “Year of the Slaughter”
DERMOT O’SULLIVAN shows the secret history of a Dublin suburb

In university I did a module on Irish Literature which included ‘Big House’ novels. When I first heard the term, I thought it was a generic description of all novels connected to big country houses, whether they be set in Ireland or not. I mistakenly assumed that Castle Rackrent and The Last September were only Irish examples of a genre that included Jane Eyre, some of Austen’s works, perhaps Portrait of a Lady too.

I quickly discovered that this was not the case, that Big House novels are uniquely Irish works of literature concerned with the big houses of the Irish landlords and (usually) their relationship with the surrounding peasantry and politics of the time. In Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, we follow the declining fortunes of an incompetent and abusive Anglo-Irish landowning family, the not-so-subtly named Rackrents. The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen focuses on the cultural ambiguity and divided loyalties of an Anglo-Irish family during the Irish War of Independence, as they both hobnob with the members of the British army and demonstrate their sympathy for and connection with the local Irish, including those who are fighting for independence.

Elizabeth Bowen, who wrote of the ambiguities of Anglo-Irishness

These books made me suddenly curious − not about the literary genre itself − but about the social and historical reality that lay behind these works. I became intensely aware of the fact that people had actually lived in big houses, and – more importantly to my mind – around them, ordinary people existing in relation to these houses and what they represented. This may seem mind-numbingly obvious: after all, Irish history and popular culture is chock-full of stories about landlords and their tenants. However, there is a difference between knowing something and knowing something in italics, as the saying goes. And in thinking about the Big House novel and the world it sprang from, I was knowing in italics, for the first time, this strange, strange corner of Irish history.

This excited me, but left me a little disheartened, feeling I’d missed out on something important. It seemed strange and inappropriate for an Irish person not to know anything about a uniquely Irish reality that had given rise to a whole genre of literature. I was not a 18th or 19th Century peasant, nor ever would be. Neither was I the scion of some blue blood family that still spent summers in their crumbling mansion somewhere in rural Offaly or Meath. It was not that I wanted to be either of these people – not at all – but I was hungry to know this part of my country’s history.

I do not know how long this feeling lasted, a number of weeks perhaps. And then one day, while strolling by the enormous chestnut tree in the shadow of the castle, I realised how ridiculous this sense of historical deprivation was. After all, I had actually grown up in the grounds of a Big House!

Rathfarnham Castle (Photo: southdublinhistory.ie)

Remarkably this had completely slipped my mind as I mulled over the Big House novel. Rathfarnham Castle was of course a landlord’s Big House – arguably from its construction by Adam Loftus in the late 1500s and definitely from its refurbishment in the 18th Century – and the house in which I grew up in Rathfarnham Wood estate had been built on an old patch of the demesne gardens. I had spent my childhood playing in the woodlands of this Big House, climbing the exotic trees, sitting on the ornamental stone lions that flank its main entrance, hearing stories about its ghosts (including that of a girl bricked up in its walls), driving past its former entry gates, one by the village and the other down by the Dodder some distance away. Our “village” – with its newsagents, charity shops, pubs and takeaways − was the village that grew up around and serviced this house and castle.

How exciting and bizarre to think that a once powerful family’s garden was now occupied by dozens and dozens of individual families, squatting commoners far below the social and economic status of the historic Loftuses, but who nonetheless lived in a state of technological sophistication that the Loftuses could only have dreamed of. I briefly imagined I caught a glimpse of how Henry – the 18th century owner − may have viewed the sleepy (soporifically so) middle class housing estate where I grew up: a strange cyberpunk colony of unlanded plebeians who lacked even a simple chambermaid and yet, as a matter of course, rode mechanical horses fed by internal fires, ate for breakfast the foreign fruits that only he could afford or access in his time, and flew across and between continents in a matter of hours while casually watching probe footage from nearby planets on their handheld library-cum-galleries.   

I’d not only grown up on a former landlord estate (which is obviously extremely common anywhere in Ireland or indeed Europe), but within a stone’s throw of the house itself (which is also quite common, if less so). And, to top it all off, this was so unremarkable to me that I’d completely forgotten about it to the point of feeling sorry for myself, when it should have been the first thing I thought of on reading Edgeworth or Bowen. This now seemed to me far more interesting than any Big House reality from centuries ago.    

This realisation of course made history alive and immediate for me. It was not the first time I’d taken an interest in local history, or in history in general, topics that I’d always felt drawn to. But it certainly added more texture and impetus to this curiosity.

I had always adored – and still do – the nature of Rathfarnham Wood. And it was curious to know that where I had picked up my love of the natural world had been in the decadent and overgrown gardens of some long-departed landowning family. There was (and to a lesser extent still is) a sort of natural gothic to Rathfarnham Wood, with its shattered ruins and superabundance of ivy. It’s no doubt a common aesthetic taste, but I am sure that my obsession with ruins and overgrowth, and – the jackpot – overgrown ruins, was influenced by growing up in an environment that abounded in them.

Archbishop Loftus, constructor (or reconstructor) of Rathfarnham Castle

A short history of Rathfarnham I read many years ago, shortly after the events recounted above, described the area as a “waste village” in the early 1580s when Adam Loftus took possession and began the construction (or reconstruction) of Rathfarnham Castle. This simple phrase – with its hints of violence and war − stirred my curiosity and led to another novel insight into Irish history for me. I went on to read more about how Rathfarnham had been the frequent victim of Gaelic plundering. I had vaguely known about the raids of the O’Byrnes and O’Tooles before, and I’d of course heard ad nauseam in school about the Pale, the small area of Ireland surrounding Dublin that was still under the control of the English Crown in the 1300s. But it was only reading about Rathfarnham on this occasion that these facts really hit home.

It now seemed remarkable to me that the Wicklow highlands, so close to the centre of English power in the country, had remained Irish for so long. It took 400 years for English power to reach the hills and mountains that I could see out the window of my childhood home – and a further 200 for that control to be complete and uncontested. That’s 600 years total, more than the time that has elapsed since significant numbers of Europeans first set foot in the Americas. What’s more, these highlands are clearly visible from the city centre, and with good traffic, just 30 minutes away by car. Even back in medieval times they could only have been a few hours march distant at most. This was fascinating – the fact that two worlds co-existed side by side for so many centuries, the fact that in medieval times guards on the walls of Dublin Castle could have looked south at the hills and known that there lay another country: different language, different culture, different law.

That Rathfarnham was to some degree a borderland between these two realities, and would have witnessed these raids, was utterly engrossing to me. And the realisation that the expression “Beyond the Pale” literally applied to my neighbourhood (which straddled the Pale in fact, my house being inside it), that I could see “beyond the Pale” out the window of my redbrick suburban home, this was the icing on the historical cake.

Ticknock Forest, all too near Rathfarnham

Rathfarnham is a middle-class suburb located on the southern extremity of Dublin city, where the land begins to crumple into green hills that eventually give onto the granite Wicklow uplands and their rolling moors and peaks. At first glance it is an entirely unremarkable district. And at closer glance it is still quite unremarkable: suburban housing estates, main roads, shopping centres and parks. That’s basically it.

The parks – such as Rathfarnham Wood mentioned above – are the keys to understanding the neighbourhood’s history, as most of them are not recently developed urban parks, but the remains of the demesne gardens of wealthy, almost exclusively Protestant landowners. From the time of the English Reformation until Ireland’s Independence in 1922, the country was divided from its colonial overlords by religion, in addition to political and cultural questions. In essence, Ireland was ruled by a wealthy, landowning Protestant elite, much like in Britain, except in Ireland the vast majority of the population was Catholic (and extremely impoverished). Being close to the seat of English power in Dublin, Rathfarnham was greatly sought after by members of this class, and so the suburb boasts a high density of their mansions, giving the area an uncommon level of historical continuity when compared to many other areas of the city.

But all that comes much later: the history of Rathfarnham begins thousands of years before even Catholicism – not to mentioned Anglicanism – were even dreamed of. In the suburb − and particularly in its hilly, rural sections − are many millennia-old megaliths: cairns, tombs, dolmens, all left scattered by peoples whose languages, cultures and beliefs are utterly lost to the great bog of history. A Neolithic passage tomb recently excavated on Montpellier Hill probably dates back more than 5,000 years. Flint lithics, a polished stone axe head and a bone pin were found at the site. Another passage tomb cairn known as Fairy Castle is not actually in Rathfarnham, but is visible from the area as a grey nipple on the rounded summit of Two Rock mountain. The portion of Rathfarnham’s history that we can speak about with any degree of certainty – less than 1,000 years – pales in comparison to these deep stretches of time.  

There is not much to say about Rathfarnham before the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in the 12th Century, but we can safely assume that this fertile country, close to the River Liffey and Ireland’s east coast, would have been inhabited. There were early Christian monasteries nearby, with one possibly being located on the site of the old churchyard in Rathfarnham village. From the founding of Viking Dublin in the 9th Century, there was probably extensive Scandinavian presence in the area. But it is only after the Anglo-Norman invasion that we begin to have a solid written record of Rathfarnham. Incidentally, Diarmaid Mac Murchadha – the Irish king who brought the Anglo-Normans to the island in order to try regain his lost kingdom – led the invaders through the Rathfarnham area on the final leg of their march to attack Dublin, the most prosperous settlement in Ireland at the time. Ironically, seeing as it would take the English settlers hundreds of years to subdue the Wicklow mountains, it was through these uplands that they first entered the Dublin region, choosing this difficult route in order to surprise the city’s defenders. So in one of those strange rhyming reversals of history, the hills that for several centuries afterwards would be a thorn in the side of English Dublin, the vulnerable southern flank of the Pale from which would descend raiders and armies; these very same hills that would become their nemesis in the centuries ahead, are what allowed the Anglo-Normans to invade and occupy the city of Dublin in the first place.

Just five years later in 1175, Rathfarnham was granted by Henry II to Walter the goldsmith (aurifaber). Then in 1199, Milo le Bret was given Rathfarnham and constructed a motte and bailey fort in the area. This marked the beginning of the Pale period of Rathfarnham’s history mentioned above, when the district’s position at the edge of Dublin, right on the foothills of the Wicklow mountains, made it a cultural and military borderland for centuries. The precarious situation of Rathfarnham (and all the Pale’s southern border) became much more severe in the 1300s when Europe-wide famine and the Black Death, among other factors, led to a weakening of English power in Ireland, subjecting Dublin’s hinterland to ever more frequent and vicious raids from the O’Byrne and O’Toole clans from the mountains. Violence also went in the other direction, with the medieval records of Dublin showing the levying of forces to carry out attacks on the Gaelic kingdoms.

This cultural fault line was plagued by violence for another 200 years. Only in the 1580s was the power of the Gaelic lords finally broken. It was at this time that Rathfarnham was described as a “waste village” and that the original Loftus − Adam – was granted the lands and built the Castle that still exists today. Adam Loftus was a Yorkshire clergyman who managed to secure extensive wealth while in colonial service in Ireland. As well as being the man who built Rathfarnham Castle, he was Archbishop of Dublin and the first provost of Trinity College Dublin, which he helped to found and which was named after his alma-mater in Cambridge. He had a reputation for being a self-serving opportunist and apparently opposed the foundation of Trinity College in St Patrick’s Cathedral as it would have deprived him of a lucrative source of income. In any case, the fortified house that he built – and the village that grew to serve it – has remained the central historical feature of Rathfarnham to this day. And, of course, it is in the lands of this castle that the red-brick 1980s housing estate that I grew up in would be built, almost exactly 400 years later.  

In 1600, in an act of nostalgic violence, the Wicklow clans, taking advantage of the Nine Years’ War, attacked the castle. Letters of Adam Loftus from the time lament the loss of his cattle, sheep and other goods to the raiders. During the Irish Confederate Wars and Cromwellian invasion of the 1640s the castle changed hands many times and was occupied by both Royalists and Roundheads. There is a tradition that Cromwell himself stayed in the castle but no one knows if this is true.  

Cromwellian agitprop – the English warrior slays the Irish dragon

After peace came to Ireland in the late 1600s, a “golden era” (at least for some) began in Rathfarnham. The 18th Century was the height of the power and influence of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, a period when wealthy Protestants (some recent arrivals from England, others not) consolidated their control over the island. These landlords owned vast estates across the entire country, while Catholics had their rights restricted under various, ever-changing Penal Laws. It was from this landowning class that came the writers Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Bowen, and it was from the social reality of this elite’s status in Irish society that came the Big House novel genre. In Rathfarnham this contrast would probably have been less fraught, as ordinary peasants living close to Dublin would have been less obviously impoverished and less obviously “Irish” than those elsewhere in the country.

In any case, it is at this time that were built most of the large, extant and historically relevant structures in Rathfarnham: Rathfarnham House, The Hermitage, the Church of Ireland church in the village, Eden House (now a pub), Marlay House, the Priory (later demolished) and other less extravagant homes.

Just as significant was the refurbishment by Lord Ely (Henry Loftus) of Rathfarnham Castle, which converted the 16th Century fortified house into a luxurious modern home, complete with rococo ceilings, painted glass windows and other decorative features. Perhaps most tellingly, the Castle’s windows were enlarged to a size that would have been unthinkable in the era of the Wicklow clans’ incursions. But this was a new era for Rathfarnham, when security was no longer a great concern.

Lord Ely’s Gate, formerly the main entrance to the Rathfarnham Castle demesne

Funnily enough, approximately 250 years later an “attack” by another group of outsiders – probably some drunken roughs from another area of the city that had gate-crashed a party nearby –would result in some of these windows being smashed and a return to a state of  high vigilance at the castle. Motion sensors and cameras were installed to defend the place, instead of the more traditional armed watchmen of centuries past.

With increased freedom for the majority of Irish following Catholic Emancipation in 1829, Rathfarnham underwent another interesting shift that mirrored the social and political changes taking place across the country. From this time until Irish independence in 1922, the big structures of Rathfarnham were increasingly occupied by Catholic institutions as the power of the Protestant Ascendancy began to wane. Rathfarnham House became the Loreto convent (where Mother Teresa of Calcutta trained). The Hermitage became St Enda’s School, or Scoil Éanna, a bilingual Catholic school under the direction of Pádraig Pearse, the man who later led the 1916 Rising, which though a military failure led to the conflict that eventually saw Ireland gain independence from Britain. And the Castle itself became a Jesuit college and retreat centre. During this period the Church of the Annunciation Catholic church was built, there having been only a small mass house before.

Rathfarnham’s final transformation (and probably its last for the foreseeable future) came in the mid to late 20th century, when Dublin’s suburban sprawl spread to what had been a populated but still largely rural district. Many housing estates were built, including the one I grew up in. Shopping centres, schools, pubs and other services sprung up to attend to the needs of the new inhabitants. And now that is what Rathfarnham is: an area of suburban housing estates scattered with old Ascendancy mansions, or perhaps an area of stately Ascendancy parklands now occupied by suburban homes. It all depends on your perspective.           

So where does this leave us? Ultimately, for most of its residents, with a suburb that they can live in and its local parks that they can jog in, or play football in, or drink in at night when they are still underage. Rathfarnham is a place that holds a lot of physical history: there are few places in the whole country with such a high density of old buildings and ruins, particularly from relatively recent times, but also from extremely distant eras. However, buildings do not have memory, people do, and in this way Rathfarnham is a paradox, as while many old structures have persisted through the ages here, its people have not. In recent decades, this has been due to the explosion of suburban growth: the residents of the housing estates of Rathfarnham are mostly not from the area and a huge number are not from Dublin at all. As such there is little of the folk memory and interrelations that exist in parts of rural Ireland. And none of the big houses are occupied by their original residents.

Before this, Rathfarnham had its cultural continuity disrupted by the Viking and Anglo-Norman invasions and subsequent settlement. One thinks of the late, great Tim Robinson’s exceptional books on the Aran Islands and Connemara (Stones of Aran – Pilgrimage, Stones of Aran – Labyrinth, and the Connemara Trilogy – Listening to the Wind, The Last Pool of Darkness and A Little Gaelic Kingdom) how − though these were disappearing even as he recorded them – names existed for individual rocks and hummocks in the land; and how there were folk tales and traditions associated with individual cliff faces and bogs and bays. In Rathfarnham, this is almost non-existent, and entirely so for the vast majority of residents these days. One thinks of the local names and stories and traditions that must have existed here over the centuries, in English more recently, and further back in the Irish language itself.

This cultural dislocation is perhaps illustrated most clearly in the name of the place: no one knows exactly where the name Rathfarnham comes from. All that is certain is that it originates in a time when Gaelic culture would have been ascendant in the area. The Irish Ráth Fearnáin is usually translated as Fearnán’s ringfort, but even this is debated. And, even assuming this is correct, no one knows who Fearnán was or – though there are educated guesses − exactly where his ráth lay. The English form obviously alters the last syllable to make it similar to British place names such as Birmingham or Nottingham. This would be like renaming Castledermot in county Kildare, “Castledertown.” And if we translate ráth loosely as “castle” (on the logic that both were the central defensive structures of their respective cultures), the strange disjunction of this cultural forgetting becomes even clearer, as it would mean that Rathfarnham Castle, the central point of the neighbourhood, can be construed as the tautological “The Castle of the Castle of Fearnán,” which makes zero sense, or all the sense in the world. Again, it all depends of your perspective.

Study for the Head of Samuel Beckett, by Louis de Broquy – the Anglo-Irish analyst of states of mind depicted like a Celtic warrior

Exploring the history of Rathfarnham (or anywhere perhaps) is akin to psychoanalysis, insofar as what is most interesting and revelatory is usually not the discovery of something completely unknown, but rather the coming to awareness of things that were clearly there all along. In the case of Ireland, one theme is the ambiguity of our attachment to the relics of a colonial past, animosity towards which – for lack of other things, much of our native culture having been destroyed – is a fundamental part of the country’s national identity. For all the reasons outlined above, Rathfarnham embodies this starkly, it being a seat of both Protestant ascendancy and nationalist revolution. With its completely obliterated Gaelic past, and its colonial history remaining only in the repurposed or ruined shells of old buildings, Rathfarnham is ultimately the unremarkable embodiment of a clash of cultures that began 850 years ago and which continues to this day.

Unremarkable as, in the final analysis, this story is repeated all over the island, and is simply another way of defining the idea of Ireland itself, whether one lives on the grounds of a literal Big House or not. And as much as battles and rebellions, this clash is equally well represented by a modern, health-conscious suburbanite jogging in an ornamental parkland planted by a colonial landlord long, long ago.

Posted on by Stuart Millson

Come back, Mrs. May – all is forgiven!

STUART MILLSON says the much-maligned Theresa had Brexit about right

The ousting of Boris Johnson’s close political adviser, Dominic Cummings – architect of the Vote Leave victory in 2016, and (at the time of writing) the continued impasse over a final Brexit deal, have brought our relations with the EU into sharp focus once again.

Since the referendum, a moment in our history which confirmed an end to one of the most significant parts of the post-war consensus – that Britain should root itself within a European sphere of influence – the defeated pro-Remain side in Britain has tried, time and again, to reverse, or dilute, the result. Their efforts reached a zenith during the days of Theresa May’s premiership: her Government’s small majority in the House of Commons (reinforced by Unionist votes, which in the end dematerialised) making it impossible to bring EU exit legislation successfully through its many stages.

Unable to enact the will of the people as expressed in the Vote Leave result, Mrs May’s position became untenable – the only way forward for Brexit being a bonfire of the vanities: a General Election which would sweep away the entrenched Remainish majority in the Commons – removing all those MPs who famously put their own eloquence and ideology before Brexit. And it should not be forgotten that one of those MPs, in those uneasy days, was none other than Boris Johnson: a figure who could be counted upon to vote against his Prime Minister and party. As one backbencher smirkingly remarked, it was indeed strange to see the Brexit purists marching through the same Division lobbies as the SNP and the second-referendum brigade, leaving Mrs. May with just the tatters of her policy.

Yet the former Prime Minister – whose instinct was always to strike a compromise – did set out with the highest hopes for Brexit – and a final settlement which whilst not, perhaps, embodying everything for which we Brexiteers had hoped, nonetheless set our country on a course of independence – but sustaining immediate economic contacts with the bloc to which we formerly belonged as a political member. Put very simply, Mrs. May’s idea was that United Kingdom should leave the political institutions of the European Union (institutions which no longer serve any European citizen) but remain within, or alongside, all the practical economic arrangements, which allow life to continue as normal: lorries and coaches driving on and off ferries or Eurotunnel services; goods and services freely flowing – and the English middle class still able to visit and settle in Normandy at the drop of a three-cornered hat. But more than that, Mrs. May – the pragmatist, the careful Whitehall moderator – saw her deal in more than just ‘foreign policy’ terms. For this Prime Minister, an heir to Chamberlainite ideals of a united, social-democratic, communitarian Tory Britain, her Brexit deal was a visionary attempt to honour the entire result of the referendum, in a fusion of moderate-Leave and moderate-Remain ideals. The result: social cohesion, acceptance, domestic harmony.

She reasoned as follows: the majority of Remain voters, though obviously believing that we should stay within the Euro-club, were by no means part of the much-mocked ‘Remainiac’ rump, which seemed – each day, to parade itself across the news bulletins, with Euro-banner demonstrations outside Parliament and yet more legal and parliamentary challenges to the Government’s legislation. (Readers will recall international businesswoman, Gina Miller and her offshore backers’ resolve to stop ministerial invocation of Article 50 – the EU treaty’s leaving mechanism – in the Supreme Court.)

Furthermore, went the thinking, that most ‘Remain’ supporters also tended to take the view that, (a) Britain had been a member of the European project for over 40 years, and (b) that much of our trade is conducted with our continental partners, so why ‘rock the boat’ – why unravel complicated arrangements beneficial to industries and workers, just for the sake of a political point? Sharing also, perhaps, the tabloids’ and Telegraph suspicion, or dislike of the ‘Brussels bureaucrats’ (rather than the European Community itself), the middle-of-the-road Remainers, nevertheless constituted a large segment of the British electorate – an electoral element Mrs May did not wish to alienate. If the May  Government could appeal to this part of middle-England, counting on their sense of fair play to respect the majority Brexit vote, then the extreme and influential pro-EU faction could be isolated – portrayed as anti-democrats whose instincts were simply unreasonable, even hostile to the nation-state, yet adulatory of foreign banners and bureaucrats.

With a consensus achieved, the country could then begin to repair the divisions which flared up and began to cast a gloomy atmosphere over Britain in the months following the referendum: Brexit would be generous and consensual – and pro-Europeans would still have some of the cultural links they craved. But the ideal – first propounded by Mrs May in her famous Chatham House speech, setting out the aim of a sovereign Britain linked to many international bodies – was not to be. With a Corbynite Labour Party (excited about another election) scenting fear – and blood – from its Tory opponents; and with a ‘Brexit party’ at work on the Tory backbenches, tripping up the Government at every opportunity, the consensus Prime Minister could no longer continue her mission.

As we survey the Brexit landscape at the end of our transition year to full independence, we might ponder the notion that Mrs. May did, in fact, get it right: with a path that would have steered us away from over-dependence upon either the United States or Europe – a sensible insurance policy, given the change of administration now underway in Washington and a less sympathetic view of Brexit from the new President-Elect. And with Britain now demoralised through Covid,  fragmenting at the edges, too, as devolved UK assemblies chart their own path through the crisis, Mrs. May’s hope for a re-uniting of people of goodwill – non-ideological Brexiteers and realistic Remainers – could have given us the cohesion required to take us on the next step of our national journey.

Posted on by Maurice George · 1 Comment

Has the National Trust lost its way?

MAURICE GEORGE fears the heritage institution is forgetting its origins and aims

The National Trust is 125 years old, has a membership approaching 10% of the population and exists to preserve things. How can such a body lose its way? To answer that question, we have to look at the context within which it operates and its sensitivity to current trends and fashionable ideas.

My perspective of the National Trust is based on my experience of visiting properties, reading the magazine, and press coverage when things go significantly right or wrong.  A matter of particular concern has been the publicly expressed disquiet among the volunteers, upon whom the Trust is implicitly dependent to be able to open its properties to the public. At one point in the last couple of years I was getting so annoyed at the way the Trust was being run that, had I not been a life member, I might have resigned my membership in protest. In my 60 years as a member of the Trust, membership has increased five-fold and with increasing emphasis on attracting yet more visitors to its properties, I have the impression that the Trust may be losing contact with its origin and fundamental purpose.

I have a special interest in the Lake District, where an essential element in the motivation for what became the National Trust, originated. My first visit to the Lakes as a teenager was for me, a Londoner, a life-changing experience and I have devoted much time since to exploring it and studying its history and culture.  For the past 25 years I have been an active supporter of the Armitt Collection held in the museum and library at Ambleside in the Lake District and for 11 years I was Chair of the Friends.  This year marks 100 years since the death of Canon Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley (one of the three co-founders of the National Trust – see https://brazen-head.org/2020/12/16/work-with-joy-rawnsley-ruskin-and-the-keswick-school-of-industrial-arts/) and I have spent the past two months helping to prepare an exhibition celebrating his work as ‘Defender of the Lakes’.

It was Rawnsley whom we have to thank for really starting the movement to protect the English Lake District for access and enjoyment by future generations and for enabling the creation of the National Trust. Others, including Wordsworth, had raised their voices against perceived threats, but to little effect. Most importantly, Rawnsley recognised that to succeed, his movement needed to be on a national basis and it was the coalescence of his vision and energy with the desire of Octavia Hill and Robert Hunter for a national organisation to protect open spaces that led to the foundation of the National Trust. This year is the 125th anniversary of that event and for the first 25 years of its existence, Rawnsley was the Trust’s honorary secretary.

The National Trust was set up originally to preserve the scenic value of open spaces and access to them for the inhabitants of over-crowded towns and cities. The preservation of buildings followed, with the realisation that there was also an architectural heritage that needed to be saved from neglect or destruction. The National Trust now represents around a tenth of the population of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is remarkable, that since the passing of the first National Trust Act in 1907, the governance of so large an organisation has only once been subject to significant public scrutiny, following the controversy in 1966 over the management of Enterprise Neptune, the coastal protection initiative.

Running the coastal project, which aimed to protect as much of the coastline as possible from development and loss of access, placed too much of a burden upon the existing management of the Trust and it was decided to appoint an appeals director.  Conrad Rawnsley, grandson of the founder, was, with some reluctance on the part of the Trust, engaged for the post and thus to run what he called Enterprise Neptune.  Rawnsley had radical views as to how the Trust as a whole should be run, and the organisation he set up engaged young people, a group somewhat neglected by the Trust. It also exposed the weakness in the Trust’s management to an extent that the tail (Enterprise Neptune) was wagging the dog. In an attempt to regain control of the situation, Rawnsley’s contract was terminated. At the next AGM, Rawnsley’s Reform Group failed to get any of their members elected to the Trust Council and he requisitioned an Extraordinary General Meeting, at which 4,000 members filled Church House, Westminster. My wife and I were active supporters of Rawnsley and the Neptune project and we were among the noisy hecklers who shouted down the chairman when he tried to use procedure to thwart the protest over Rawnsley’s dismissal. The Trust were forced to put a critical resolution to a poll of all members, who rejected it by a margin of two to one. At the next AGM, Rawnsley publicly tore up his membership card and walked out of the meeting.

As a result of this furore the Trust convened an advisory committee, chaired by an eminent accountant, Sir Henry Benson. The ensuing Report reviewed the constitution, organisation and responsibilities of the Trust and recommended changes, which were subsequently largely implemented. The major organisational change was for the management of properties to be devolved within a new regional organisation – a change that had been recommended in an earlier management review but not implemented.  There have been various reorganisations since the Benson Committee report but no objective review of the Trust’s purpose and function, despite the fact that the committee had recommended that the Trust should review its workings every ten years or so.  Is it perhaps now time for another such review?

There have been other moments of controversy in the life of the National Trust but nothing on the scale of the Neptune affair. However, recently we have seen significant adverse comment in newspaper articles and letters, concerning how the Trust is meeting its declared objectives and the extent to which it should pay attention to current trends of thinking. It is therefore timely to ask whether the National Trust may indeed have lost its way.

The current issue capturing the attention and evoking responses from Arts and Heritage organisations is the extent to which the profits from the slave trade enabled the philanthropy, from which we all benefit today. Attention to issues such as slavery may be inescapable, if we agree with the Director of the National Gallery that silence is construed as denial or disagreement. The fundamental issue here is the attainment of equality of opportunity for all groups in our society, and slavery is being used as an emotive element to gain popular support for the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. The enslavement of black Africans in America is the social focus, which has been carried forward to the present day, notwithstanding a civil war and the passage of time. If however we can detach ourselves from the American situation, and look at how societies have operated over several millennia, we have to acknowledge that slavery, in one form or another, has been an integral element of social organisation and, regretfully, still is, in the sex industry and other forms of exploitation.

However, to focus on one aspect of enslavement without reference to the wider historical perspective leads to self-indulgent attitudes of apology for the acts of our ancestors. Unfortunately, the National Trust and other cultural bodies have been drawn into seeking out historical connections to slavery, but we may ask what useful purpose does this form of navel-gazing actually serve? I believe it is an intellectual dead-end which simply diverts attention away from the object of preservation, into a discussion of the acts of our forbears, and the passing of judgement on their actions according to the standards of our own time.

Being wise after the event is prudent in respect of avoiding the repetition of potentially harmful errors, but for little else. Do we really want theoretically to punish swathes of royalty, chieftains, and religious leaders for acts of oppression, bigotry, or greed, carried out at a time when such actions were a normal aspect of society? We should surely always look forward to providing a better living environment for our successors and preserving for them the cultural wealth of our times.

Even before the current obsession with slavery, we had the Trust applying a common theme across all its properties. Examples were the emancipation of women and gay pride, which were a distortion of the perspective for viewing all those places. This was taken to extremes in some cases, for example with depictions of wartime conditions. Was it rational to store all the artworks and furniture in order to show a house in its wartime condition as the home of a bank, albeit the one of which the property’s owner was Chairman? For a whole year, anyone wishing to see any of the very fine artworks or to view the porcelain collection, the usual reasons for wanting to visit the house, was denied the opportunity to do so.

The Trust has also attracted criticism for amalgamating some of the Lake District farms bequeathed by Beatrix Potter, with the instruction that they should be maintained as she had left them. They also defeated a group of farmers seeking to purchase and maintain other Lake District farms in the traditional way. Hardwicke Rawnsley and Beatrix Potter sought to preserve land, traditional farming practice and Lakeland culture, and that should remain the objective of the National Trust today.

Rawnsley’s final book, published in the year of his death, was a valedictory tour of National Trust properties in the west of England. Only a quarter of these properties comprised buildings as well as open spaces.  How much has changed since then, and how wonderful are many of the buildings in the care of the Trust, but do we really understand the purpose of this national archive of natural and constructed beauty and interest? Moreover, the guardianship of properties that have not come into the ownership of the Trust but are deemed to be of value to the nation’s heritage, has passed from government department to public charitable support with English Heritage. All of these places attract visitors from overseas and contribute to export earnings, yet we have no overall cultural policy for this nation.  Culture matters too.

There is though some hope that common sense and rationality will ultimately prevail. The Director General has indicated that there will in future be more emphasis on the open spaces in the Trust’s care. However, she is thinking of closing some smaller properties to the public and presumably members too, and maybe in this electronic age, we will have to make do with virtual tours. She is also saying that the report on connections with slavery was an investigation and has opened the way for discussion on what should be done with its findings. There is clearly a need for a genuinely objective review of the status and function of the National Trust and what its future conservation policy should be. History is a mixture of fact and hindsight, but it is open to subjective analysis, from which this article is not exempt, but that should not be allowed to spoil the average day out at a Trust property.

Finally, here are some suggestions that might help to bring about some beneficial changes in National Trust policy. For domestic buildings, there should be a clear understanding that they represent an encapsulation of social, and often, architectural history, for the period when they came into Trust ownership. Their history should be presented in an accessible, scholarly, and unprejudiced way. Public buildings no longer fulfilling their original purpose may offer scope for exhibiting material not necessarily connected with that purpose, and which would not be easily accommodated in domestic properties, unless those properties have much unused space.

Open spaces should retain their original character wherever possible unless the pressure of public access demands changes, such as the strengthening of mountain paths to prevent more widespread damage. Grazing of upland areas should be commensurate with maintaining the character of the landscape as near to its original state as possible. Areas that were not wild when they came into the Trust’s care should remain as they were at that time, and not now be allowed to go wild. Traditional farming practice should be maintained, with as little change as possible even if uneconomic by current standards, since that practice is part of what is being preserved. Appropriate subsidy from within the Trust’s huge estate should not be an impossible burden. Tree planting and clearance should take account of the distant views that might be lost or restored. Preservation should be the driving force in decision-making.

The National Trust does not have a remit to modernise its properties in any way, other than providing satisfactory facilities for visitors. However, the use of digital aids supported by good scholarship should of course be employed to enhance the experience of visitors. At the same time, the historical perspective and the reason why properties came into the care of the Trust must not be forgotten or obscured by subjective contemporary ideas.

Posted on by Peter B. Gemma

Is there a future for ‘Trumpism’?

PETER B. GEMMA says ‘Trumpism’ was always more about attitude than ideas

The future of “Trumpism,” (geez, I hate that term on so many levels as you will find out), is really a two-part question: American politics with or without Donald Trump. The quick answer is of course, President Donald Trump (he still is as I write; and, no, after January I will not be saying “Biden? He’s not my President”, as the Clintonites have done for four years) will long have an impact on politics.

This writer has never had a legitimate job; political campaigns and issue advocacy is all I know. I read every word of political junk mail, hold my breath when campaign commercials come on, and I ingest the writings of commentators, no matter what the axe they may be grinding. One of my favorites is Andrew Sullivan, the British-born American author, blogger, and former editor of The New Republic. He is a left-wing pundit full of common sense. In his essay, “Trump Is Gone. Trumpism Just Arrived,”[1] Sullivan says it best:

His impact, however, is undeniable. Neoconservatism is over; globalization as some kind of conservative principle is over; a conservatism that allows for or looks away from unrestrained mass immigration is over. What was cemented in place this week is a new GOP, not unlike the new Tories in the UK. They’re nationalist, culturally conservative, geared toward the losers of capitalism as well as its winners, and mildly protectionist and isolationist. It is a natural response to the unintended consequences of neoliberalism’s success under a conservative banner. And it speaks in a language that working class Americans understand, devoid of the woke neologisms of the educated elite. It seems to me that this formula is a far more settled and electorally potent coalition than what we now see among the deeply divided Democrats.

Barry Goldwater on the campaign trail

A quick glance back: I do not have time to tell the story of 1964, when the conservative icon Barry Goldwater was defeated by Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, and whose most ardent supporters rallied to the cry, “26,000,000 Americans can’t be wrong!” They went on to create the Reagan era. Goldwater’s movement ain’t got nothin’ on what the Trump loyalists could do if they believe 74,000,000 Americans can’t be wrong.

Of course, it’s not that easy an equation, given the political/philosophical/social mish-mash of followers Trump attracted and the current wailing and gnashing of teeth about a ‘stolen’ election, but you get the drift: if we take our loses, learn some lessons, we can lurch forward.

Before we look at what might be next in politics, it’s time to address the what the current election fuss is all about. Did Trump really lose? After all, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to call into question Biden’s winning margin in swing states. In the final months of the campaign, the ground rules of the election changed in a way that helped Democrats and stymied Republicans. In Pennsylvania, where ballots received after the election were counted (not kosher in any previous election), 63% of the mail-in ballot requests came from Democrats, and 25% from Republicans. In North Carolina, 46 % of mail-in ballots were from Democrats, and just 20% were from Republicans. In a contest with an historic turnout, President-elect Joe Biden apparently topped President Donald Trump by nearly seven million votes, and 74 votes in the Electoral College, but his victory really was stitched together with narrow margins in a handful of states with . As National Public Radio pointed out,

just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College. Of course, Trump is no stranger to narrow victories. He won the 2016 election thanks to just under 80,000 combined votes in three of six key states [2]

Does the American democratic election process work? Yes. Is there a factor of fraud and honest mistakes in every count? Yes. Is a stolen election easy to prove? Not very often, and most likely in local races. Will the entire 2020 election results be overthrown? Nope.

The election-was-stolen-and-all-is-lost hysteria among some conservatives reminds this writer of the Obama birth certificate hoopla. Sure, there may have been some reasons to doubt Barack Hussein Obama was born in the United States, thus making him ineligible to serve, but time marched on. There certainly wasn’t enough solid legal evidence, so reality had to be faced. Once conservatives got out of the mode of ‘he’s not my President’ and hunkered down for guerilla warfare against the Democrats, Donald Trump sensed there was a movement to lead and he triumphed.

“Donald Trump sensed there was a movement to lead…”

What the hell happened?

Again, I turn to Andrew Sullivan:

This was far from the Biden landslide I had been dreaming about a few weeks back. It was rather the moment that the American people surgically removed an unhinged leader and re-endorsed the gist of his politics. It was the moment that Trump’s core message was seared into one of our major political parties for the foreseeable future, and realigned American politics.

Trump was deliberately bellicose and belligerent, eliciting cheers from his supporters for his chutzpah and gasps from everyone else, including swing voters.

NBC political analysts described the election happened this way:

Heading into the election, Democrats dreamed it would go something like Star Wars, with rebel forces blowing up the Death Star and celebrating in the streets as a blue wave swept them into power in Washington and state capitals across the country, but President-Elect Joe Biden’s victory ended up looking more like the horror movie Alien, with the last bedraggled survivor kicking the monster out the airlock and then drifting off to an uncertain fate in deep dark space. And wherever they ended up, there would probably be another alien…the results were brutal down the ballot for Democrats in ways that could haunt them for years [3]

So, what really happened? Trump lost. He pushed the envelope of civility and consistency off the edge. As conservative commentator Tucker Carlson tells it,

Donald Trump is a talker, a boaster, a booster, a compulsive self-promoter. At times, he’s a full-blown BS artist

The appearance of boldness and defiance was a two-edged sword, with one side, explainable as a self-made New York tough guy, but the other was a bit sharper: inconsistent, incompetent, and uncaring.

Trump did instigate a (nascent) movement, which is hard to assess this early, but something is shaking the ground. In an amazing showing, Trump supporters squared off against powerful special interests, from the media to Wall Street moguls, and they are still standing. About 98% of political contributions from internet companies this cycle went to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The CEOs of Asana, Twilio, and Netflix were among the biggest contributors, and they all targeted Democratic groups and candidates.

One interesting sidebar: the media’s censorship of negative stories about Joe Biden may have cost Trump the election, according to a poll published by the Media Research Center (MRC). Among those surveyed, one in six Biden voters said they would not have voted for the president-elect if they had been aware of one or more of negative news stories presented to them, the poll found. MRC’s poll, conducted by The Polling Company, asked voters about eight news stories that “the liberal news media had failed to cover properly,” a press release from MRC stated. “A shift of this magnitude would have changed the outcome in all six of the swing states won by Joe Biden,” the MRC determined.[4]

New York Post columnist Karol Marcowicz noted,

The big takeaway from the Trump years for conservatives should be that the era of politeness when dealing with an impossibly biased, and agenda-driven, legacy media has ended and should never return. Republicans in general, and conservatives in particular, had come to expect that they would never be treated fairly by the news media. To the legacy media, Republicans fell into two categories: Hitler or worse than Hitler. Republicans considered avoidance better than confrontation. Donald Trump didn’t. Supporters made Trump’s willingness to fight a key refrain. He does not take things in stride. He punches back. Even for conservatives who opposed him, such as me, it was fun to watch. He called out everything and everyone [5]

The Democrats were caught by surprise in November. After four long years of demonizing Donald Trump (and he made it soooo easy), they reached deep into their pockets to fund a blue wave: states were targeted to flip local legislatures; overturning the Republican majority in the Senate was a glorious crusade, and strengthening the edge Democrats held in the Congress was an easy win. Democrats ran the first billion-dollar presidential campaign, outraising Trump by about 60%. However …

  • In key U.S. Senate races, Democrats outspent Republicans: in Maine, it was $70 million to $24 million, but they lost by nine points; Republican majority leader Senator Mitch McConnell was re-elected in a landslide despite falling $40 million short of what his opponent raised; Republicans won the Alaska Senate seat although the Democrats spent twice as much money; and in North Carolina, the Democrat vs. Republican spending ratio was nearly three-to-one but they were defeated. The two Senate seats in Georgia are still in play in a run-off, however, historically Republicans are favored there.
  • Democrats now have the narrowest margin in the House of Representatives since World War II – not a single Republican incumbent, all tightly tied by their opponents to President Trump, was defeated. With their dramatic gains this year, the House is, by historical political measure, headed for a party flip in 2022.
  • The blue wave of 2018 left Democrats just a few seats away from a majority in a dozen state chambers. They lost across the board, with Republicans actually flipping control of two state legislatures in states that Biden won. Republicans will have control next year of 20 state governments that will collectively draw 188 new congressional districts, while the Democrats will control 73 districts; the number of Republican governors increased to a 27-23 margin.

The governing implications for Joe Biden and the Democrats are stark: getting any sort of partisan measure through the House will require near-unanimity inside their party, forcing negotiations with various factions of lawmakers resulting in fewer aspirational “messaging” bills and radical legislation. Meanwhile, an emboldened Republican minority will look to wreak havoc and magnify internal disputes ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

Trump lost, but did Trumpism win?

I don’t really know, but some people think so. Here’s Andrew Sullivan’s take:

This mass secret vote revealed that the New York Times’ woke narrative of America – the centuries-long suffocating oppression of minorities and women by cis white straight men – is simply a niche elite belief, invented in a bubble academy, and imposed by bullying, shaming and if possible, firing dissenters. Some of us who refused to cower can gain real satisfaction from knowing we were not mad, not evil, not bigots, and that a huge swathe of our fellow citizens agrees

J.D. Scholten, a promising but losing Democratic congressional candidate in Iowa, put it this way: “There’s something culturally that is working for Republicans and it’s definitely not for Democrats,” noting that his campaign message faulting Trump’s handling of the coronavirus didn’t resonate with voters. He called the election a “Trump tidal wave” in rural areas, places where Democrats had made some progress in the state in the 2018 midterm election: “We got smoked. There’s no sugarcoating it.”[6]

A Democrat campaign manager for a local candidate in Pennsylvania said,

There’s a significant difference between a referendum on a clown show, which is what we had at the top of the ticket, and embracing the values of the Democratic ticket…People bought into Joe Biden to stop the insanity in the White House. They did not suddenly become Democrats

So, the Democrats lost, Republicans did far better than expected, but did Trumpism as a movement win?

Peering through the smoke that follows the 2020 election battle, there seems to be a new coalition forging so perhaps it is true that there is a Trump movement, but it looks like people, not an “ism.”

Biden and Trump represent starkly different Americas, according to the Associated Press VoteCast survey of more than 110,000 voters in all 50 states. Trump voters in the survey were overwhelmingly white—about 86% nationally—compared with 62% of Biden voters. Only a fourth of Biden supporters come from small towns or rural areas. Nearly half of Trump voters live in those areas. More white women voted for President Donald Trump in 2020 (55%) compared to the 52% who voted for him in 2016, according to a New York Times exit poll. Trump solidified his base; he even pulled out more voters in New York City, where he cut his home ties and moved to Florida, than he did four years ago.

Biden was the beneficiary of a anyone-but-Trump constituency. Among Trump voters, 90% say they voted for the president, while just eight percent said they were voting against Biden. Among Democrats, only 56% said they were voting for Biden. Twenty-nine percent revealed they were voting against Trump, while a surprisingly high 15% were not sure.[7]

Andrew Sullivan dug into other statistics:

For the past five years, Democrats have been telling us that Trump and his supporters were white supremacists, that he was indeed the “First White President,” that all minorities were under assault by the modern day equivalent of the KKK. And yet, the GOP got the highest proportion of the minority vote since 1960!

Sullivan goes on to use another exclamation point:

Twenty-eight percent of the gay, lesbian and transgender population also went for Trump. The gay vote for Trump may have doubled! White women still voted for Trump by 55%. Among white women with no college education, arguably those most vulnerable to the predations of men [like Trump] gave him 60% support.

Sullivan could use another exclamation point: Trump increased support from Black voters by 50%, the largest share of that constituency any Republican has garnered in a half century! (He also carried a majority of the Native American vote.) The Democrats’ rejection among white, working-class voters (not poor people), particularly in rural areas and small towns, helped lead to their disappointments and a demographic description of a Trump movement.

Democrats have largely abandoned the working and middle class. Trump won three-quarters of the white working-class vote, down only slightly from 2016. He did best with those who work with their hands, in factories, the logistics industry and energy, notes a recent study by CityLab. Some 10,000 small businesses have closed because of Draconian edicts overwhelmingly put in place by Democrats. The residual effect, politically, has just begun.

Let me be clear at this point: Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump. The Democrats identified, motivated, and got out a record-breaking number of supporters, albeit on what seems to be an anti-Trump message. Indeed, Biden (according to exit polls) still won nearly three-quarters of nonwhite voters, a majority of union members, and a majority of those making under $100,000.

In politics and public policy debates, change happens mainly on the margin. Small riders – issue ornaments – to big bills, can make or break whole legislative agendas. Slight shifts in demographics and small inroads into key constituencies can change the outcome of an election and help define a movement. 

A postcard from the Spanish-American War, when Americans helped Cubans throw off Spanish rule

Currently, the face of Trumpism is not quite in focus. Donald Trump lost the presidency but showed Republicans a way to win the culture wars with working-class Hispanics by not talking to them as Hispanics. Trump earned 28% of Latino votes in 2016 and approximately 32% in 2020. Despite four years of being defined as a racist for his rhetoric and immigration policies, Trump improved his margins in 78 of the nation’s 100 majority-Hispanic counties.

“We can’t even fathom that there are a lot of Mexicans who love Donald Trump,” said Chuck Rocha, a Texas-raised Democratic strategist who runs Nuestro PAC, a super PAC focused on Latino outreach. “Biden won, and that’s great, but everything underneath Biden was a huge catastrophe.” Congressman Henry Cuellar (D-TX) explained the phenomenon this way: “What Trump did is understand the basic values of Hispanics.”

As Biden forces ran the usual Spanish-language ads, Donald Trump, Jr. visited a Hispanic Pentecostal church to campaign for his father – far more visible. A 2017 Pew Research study concluded,

Most Latinos see religion as a moral compass to guide their own political thinking, and they expect the same of their political leader [and] most Latinos view the pulpit as an appropriate place to address social and political issues. Latinos who are evangelicals are twice as likely as those who are Catholics to identify with the Republican Party [8]

The President launched “Evangelicals for Trump” in January by visiting El Rey Jesús Global, a megachurch in Miami led by Pastor Guillermo Maldonado.

Miami-Dade is Florida’s largest county with the largest Latino population. Trump lost there by almost 30 %age points in 2016. He lost it by just seven points in November. Florida Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who was defeated in her re-election bid, said the Democratic Party “thinks racial identity is how we vote.”

For years, Democrats expressed confidence that the country’s increasingly diverse, less-white electorate would give them an edge long-term over Republicans. Identity politics of the Democrats, “what’s in it for us,” lost. Trump’s version “it’s us versus them,” won.

“What’s in it for us” even took a beating in California where there is a majority-minority population: voters defeated an attempt to revoke a 1996 binding referendum that banned the use of race, national origin, or sex by state universities and other agencies. The left has spent almost a quarter-century trying to reverse that policy, but its latest attempt lost handily despite a 14-to-one margin in campaign spending.

There was a discernible (even remarkable) shift on the margins according to election results data, and the media elite are noticing. Axios CEO Jim VandeHei conceded,

The media remains fairly clueless about the America that exists outside of the big cities, where most political writers and editors live. The coverage missed badly the surge in Trump voters in places obvious (rural America) and less obvious (Hispanic-heavy border towns in Texas)

He chides his fellow elites too:

Let’s be honest: Many of us under-appreciated the appeal of Trump’s anti-socialism message and the backlash against the defund-the-police rhetoric on the left. The media (and many Democrats) are clueless about the needs, wants and trends of Hispanic voters. Top Latinos warned about overlooking and misreading the fastest-growing population in America, but most didn’t listen. Hispanics will shape huge chunks of America’s political future

The future of something called Trumpism is in the hands of grass roots Trump supporters, and they may have momentum as fissures between traditional liberal Democrats and far-left progressives are cracking. Writer and left-wing activist Lauren Martinchek notes,

There is no Donald Trump the boogeyman for them [mainstream Democrats] to hide behind anymore. Whether they like it or not, especially with Trump out of the way, the left is not through with the Democratic party. While the liberals go back to brunch, we’ll gladly be getting ready for primaries. We don’t have the time, nor the patience to sit here and listen while loyal liberal voters inevitably tell us to pipe down because midterms are on the way. You had 2020. We’ll take it from here [9]

The Democrats seem likely to give Trump (as a shadow President who doesn’t know how to whisper) the opportunity to represent a large portion of the American middle and working classes over the next four years. He will embolden his supporters to be active and, frankly, a pain in the ass for Democrats and Republicans. The Biden agenda will be tweaked, stymied, compromised, and come under fire by the left and right in Congress.[10] David Shor, a Democratic polling and data expert who advised liberal political action committees this cycle, observed,

It is mathematically almost impossible for our current coalition to wield electoral power…There’s a lot of people in the party who are uncomfortable with the implications of the idea that we really have to adopt a maximalist attempt to appeal to (white) working-class voters

These conditions look very promising for a Trumpism movement. Save for one thing: Donald Trump.

The real question is, what is Trumpism?

If you string together all the data and observations above, the answer looks like there is a movement afoot, a new coalition of voters that have the political elites worried. However, movements, especially those led by charismatic leaders, come and go.

Congressman Ron Paul’s Republican presidential crusades of 1992 and 1996 raised buckets of money, attracted thousands to rallies, and scored far better than pollsters predicted. Without Ron Paul as the active figurehead, they have become one influence within the Republican Party (I was a paid consultant for the Paul campaign in those races). Senator Bernie Sanders, Paul’s mirror image in the Democrat Party, started a movement via his campaigns of 2016 and 2020 which is having great impact on the political process – that movement may last beyond Sanders himself as new socialist firebrands arise, namely Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

It’s hard to define Trump’s following as a movement because there is no ideological definition of “Trumpism.” Trump wrote red-ink annual budgets. He’s no fiscal conservative but he converted the formerly tightwad Republicans into supporting more national debt. He is a progressive when it comes to gay rights and inclusion, something that doesn’t mix well with his ardent pro-life and Evangelical base. Trump tends to shy away from international military excursions, angst for the heart and soul of traditional Republican war hawks and their moneyed arms industry friends. What unites the wide variety of constituencies that was hammered together over the past four years is Donald Trump himself. His machismo attitude, anti-establishment rhetoric, and something for everyone agenda (ill-defined populism) added up to a remarkable political statement in 2020, albeit he lost the presidency. At any given time, Trump was a moderate, conservative, populist, nationalist, or almost any combination thereof.

The famous ‘King-Emperor’ meme

Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Unlike Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, whose names one can associate with a particular world vision, the thought of Donald Trump brings his style to mind: authoritarian, pugnacious, and contrarian, which in turn can be applied to positions on guns, immigration, foreign trade, etc. In fact, the Trump style, can at any time give emphasis to look nationalist, populist, or traditionally Republican in appearance. That inconsistency actually turned into a magnet because of Donald Trump playing Donald Trump; the glue to his particular coalition is in his blood.

Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University: noted,

Trump’s challenge to the establishmentarian worldview will resonate, even after the election. His willingness to stand up to China’s trade policies violated the interests of the corporate elite, tech, Hollywood, and the mainstream media, all of whom almost without exception backed his opponent

Donald Trump is an anti-establishment personality, but does not represent a philosophy or an ideology, the why of Trumpism. It isn’t even about the how Trumpism works, since Donald Trump’s way of business and government is chaotic.

I’m afraid the essence of Trumpism is Donald Trump. Most of his issues have been on the agenda of conservatives and Republicans for generations: a robust economy via low taxes, minimal government regulation; very shy of international entanglements, always uphold law and order. Those platforms made political conservatives moderately successful in recent years, with some emphasis or exemptions. Different shades of traditional issues, often itself shaded by political figureheads, actually define populist, nationalist, socialist, etc. What brought Republicans into the White House was the very personality of Donald Trump. His narrow loss in 2020 was remarkable in that the issues he originally campaigned on – seasoned by the way he actually served as President (and as perceived by the media) – resulted in 12 million more supporters (significant considering a small segment of Republicans had walked away.) They didn’t flock to the polls because we needed a strong China policy, or easier/cheaper ways to produce oil, or even the promise of a wall between Mexico and America, it was because Donald Trump was promising those things which brought out 74,000,000 voters.

As Pat Buchanan observed,

The American electorate failed to perform its designated role in the establishment’s morality play. Nor was it repudiated by the people if, by Trumpism, one means ‘America First’ nationalism, securing our borders, using tariffs to bring back our manufacturing base, bidding goodbye to globalism, staying out of unnecessary wars and swearing off ideological crusades [11] 

For better or worse, because of Donald Trump, there will have to be a personality attached to a platform so it can be interpreted as populist, nationalist, conservative, and moderate as needed (Joe Biden was the anti-personality personality attached to a neo-socialist platform doing the same thing). If not Donald Trump, then it will have to be a candidate whose technique and can give a shine of vibrant hues to the party platform. Trumpism without Trump will have to be a different “ism,” because the real legacy of Donald Trump isn’t a movement but a style.

[1] https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/trump-is-gone-trumpism-just-arrived-886?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMjY1MzM1NiwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTgwNzU2MjQsIl8iOiJLcHZ5KyIsImlhdCI6MTYwNDY5MjkwOSwiZXhwIjoxNjA0Njk2NTA5LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNjEzNzEiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.Q9Bk8TA9gYzVDURfGispo_RJS3fHe0dk8ARC08pX8kI&fbclid=IwAR2SFU–uwMdcWQKDT3uQr4HA9Noi-Mxo56IQ8XdZ0jfGWfliEAk0lEjqiE

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/02/940689086/narrow-wins-in-these-key-states-powered-biden-to-the-presidency

[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/huge-catastrophe-democrats-grapple-congressional-state-election-losses-n1248529

[4] https://dailycaller.com/2020/11/24/media-censoring-negative-joe-biden-news-cost-donald-trump-election-mrc-poll/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2360&pnespid=1OUzr.1EDAuNq3C.fd.dXHaG2bV_2iQ16vVkjhkM&fbclid=IwAR05JlsCqb2S7Z9cxo9MtJWevzOu9g67gmpWqycREqOH_32y8A–7DPqRn8

[5] www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/trumpisms-next-act

[6] “2020 Election Lesson: Trump’s Coalition Proved Durable,” byJoshua Jamerson, Julie Bykowicz, andChad Day, Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2020 

[7] www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2020/only_56_of_biden_voters_say_they_were_voting_for_biden

[8] https://www.pewforum.org/2007/04/25/changing-faiths-latinos-and-the-transformation-of-american-religion-2/

[9] https://medium.com/discourse/november-3rd-was-a-rejection-of-the-democratic-party-abcf543624bf

[10] Politically, what’s ahead does not frighten this writer. The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in a short statement to Congress, explained why a divided American government, with the three branches split among differing parties and ideologies, works best for the Republic: things move slowly, ensuring no radical transformation, alteration, or reversal that ultimately will not change the basic framework set out by the Founding Fathers (www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/antoninscaliaamericanexceptionalism.htm)

[11] https://buchanan.org/blog/trumpism-lives-on-142330

Posted on by Alexander Adams · 1 Comment

From iconoclasm to ruins

All paintings by the author
ALEXANDER ADAMS surveys the story of deliberate destruction

We are familiar with the folly and – from the Baroque period onward – the purposefully constructed ruin used to enhance the pathos of a place, most especially a view of a country estate. This would be a view that could be controlled, protected and secluded, reserved for the delectation of initiates, guests, devotees and – crudely – the owners of the land. For if wildness can be fabricated as easily as order, then ersatz history can also be generated to meet the expectations of the cultivated observer. The frisson of melancholy, the stimulation of imagination and the contentment of viewing destruction from a position of comfort are experiences the ruin can provide. Whether or not that ruin is ‘real’ is a matter of degree. After all, a building as a habitable residence and as a blasted ruin are separated by less than a human lifespan and can be produced through merely absence of funds or care. It can be cultivated by purposeful neglect as well as it can be forged by purposeful intent.  

Ruins as an aesthetic

The Romantic relic is generated through defacement plus time, one encountered in a time of tranquillity by a traveller, for it is the curious traveller or pilgrim who fully sees the artefacts in a way that inhabitants of the region cannot. Consider Piranesi’s views of Rome. Among the ruins – greatly enlarged by the artist – the Romans of the day continue their quotidian lives heedless of the grandeur their squalid lives animate. They cannibalise palaces and bath houses to build their meagre abodes. These Romans are portrayed in a way to contrast them with the nobility, purpose and polity of their Roman ancestors. Where the elder Romans were capable of epic achievements unmatched, the latter-day Romans can only rob and scavenge their ancestors’ ruins. Thus, the Romans of Piranesi’s day were little better than parasites or termites eroding their habitat to eek out their paltry existences. In Piranesi’s Rome, Man (brought low from his high estate) is no more or less than a mean function of Nature, like wind, rain or the roots of plants, destined to topple even the sturdiest of towers. Piranesi’s Romans are little different from animals which graze under the pinnacles of an abandoned cathedral spire. It is surely their very indifference which makes them animals; it is the traveller, pilgrim and connoisseur (one who can afford and appreciate the prints of an artist such as Piranesi) who is the moral being because he responds to art and comprehends history, thus elevating himself above the animals of the field and wood.

Note that tranquillity is prerequisite for the appreciation of nature and the ruin. Not only is measured contemplation in a time turbulence or movement impossible, but for a ruin to have stately gravity, erosion must be halted (or slowed) to a state where it is not perceptible to the mortal. For a ruin to have a timeless quality, time cannot be seen to be changing its subject visibly in “human time”. A sand castle being washed away by the waves is not noble. However, if the castle were large enough (or, conversely, the spectator small enough) and the waves slowed to a nearly imperceptible speed, then nobility would be achieved. Bears fighting is awe-inspiring; sparrows fighting is comic. Again, if those sparrows were large enough and fought more slowly, then they would inspire awe. The essential material conditions of sand castles and sparrows do not preclude grandeur; it is the framing of these beings that determines their emotional impact upon the viewer. It is our perception – not our comprehension or the material attributes of that which we contemplate – which imbues a subject with emotional weight and determines the amount of significance we attribute to it.

What separates the Romantic ruin from evidence of atrocity? How does shock and anger shade into estimable melancholy and detached contemplation? Time is surely one factor. When I painted the ruins of Berlin photographed in 1945, I was fascinated by their visual correlation to ruined abbeys and castles and yet the historical immediacy impinged upon my understanding of them. Captured photographically in 1945, they were too raw, too fresh, too soused in newly spilled blood to be Romantic. Did, I wondered, my translations of these images into paint take away their sting? When I painted from photographs of battlefields, I was unsure as to whether I was just playing in the mud of Flanders, turning soil, fetid water and shattered tree trunks into brush strokes that were dainty and earnest, slashed with élan or arbitrarily revised. Who was to say that I was not more selfish, cavalier and flippant than any Georgian poet or Victorian historian, considering my (comparably) much greater appreciation of the atrocities connected to these battle fields compared to any comprehension they might have had about the subjects of their contemplation?

Ignorance numbs. To the uninitiated, the crofters’ cottages of the Scottish Highlands have a tragic timelessness. Yet once one understands that crofters were sometimes forcibly evicted from their inherited homesteads, these buildings seem more a marker of political and socio-economic forces than simple tides of time. Lady Butler could take as her subject the Irish crofter departing her home for the final time as a contemporary subject, pointed in its political commentary. Over one century later, her painting and the ruined cottage carry emotional charges, if one has the basic information that allows the subject to become legible. The information needs to be recorded and imparted through conscious will.

Sometimes the landscape remembers for us. In dry summers, when water demand is high, the levels of a reservoir in mountainous North Wales sink low and, for a few days, the ruins of the village of Capel Celyn are revealed. The stone walls of houses and chapels are upright and dry under the hot sun, standing over pools of drying mud. Former residents can see the lost streets of their home village, lost when the valley was flooded in 1965 to provide the expanding thirsty conurbations of north-east England with potable water. Disgruntled Welsh nationalists paint anti-English slogans on the walls in white paint. No one paints on the slag heaps of the Rhondda Valley despoiled by miners; instead, their artificial outlines are abraded by foliage and erosion.

Sometimes we ourselves become ghosts – walking ruins. When a Cockney visits the back streets of Stepney to be surrounded by Bangladeshis and Somalis, is he any different from a Canarse Indian viewing the first palisades of Fort Amsterdam erected on the tip of Manhattan island? It is the visitor returning to his homeland who is the relic, the last fragment of the past washed up on a shore made newly unfamiliar. It is he who is out of time, like the Flying Dutchman drifting the oceans. He is the ruin, looked at by native eyes as a curiosity of history, a temporal aberration. In time, his mortal remains will mimic the ruin. His bones will imitate the exposed beams and the vacant eye sockets of his skull will be the glassless windows of the abandoned house. 

Decay is demonstrative of the passage of time. Time is difficult to measure visually, especially in a momentary encounter or a static record (a work of art or photograph), so visual evidence of decay – staining, erosion, cracking, weathering, lichen – forms the tangible mark of the passage of time. As for statues, we incorporate insults into their meaning. The hammer marks of statue defilers become the patina of our antiquities, absorbed into the meaning of the statue read backwards. A form of teleology, if you like. The statue was made to be defiled, lost, unearthed, traded and placed in an art museum for our momentary diversion. Art + time = pathos.

Buildings as their own memorials

This idea of decay spawning pathos is connected to the idea of a building as its own memorial. The building’s full potential is only realised in its ravaged, ruined form, when it can symbolise of the loss of a civilisation, religion or people. Only once it has served its first stage of utility can it enter its second stage of utility – as a former building.

When Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler discussed the grand architectural projects of the Third Reich, they referred to their projected buildings’ afterlife as ruins. Strange as it may seem for a regime which expressed a desire to last a thousand years (matching that of Rome), the planners of the regime had half an eye on the debris of their country as a failed civilisation, which was to manifest itself as ruins at which travellers would marvel. Thus, one component of the functionality of Nazi-created boulevards, memorials, triumphal arches, concert halls and ministries was to awe not only the inhabitants of Germania (as Berlin was to be called) but the inhabitants of the former Germania. For Speer and Hitler, the glories of Rome and Greece were a template for imperial greatness and architectural perfection. It therefore follows that for Nazi Germania to be the salutary example of cultural achievement it was intended to be, it had to be encountered in a defeated, fragmentary and partially erased by the people who would replace the German titans of old. The wonder and melancholy produced in contemplation of the ruin was a suitable spur to dreaming heroic figures of later ages who would strive to emulate their lost ancestors. A sensation of loss, temporal distance and incomplete comprehension were integral to the Romantic response to the ruin and for the architects of Nazi Germany.

It was this aspect that Anselm Kiefer admitted in his richly patinated giant paintings of Nazi buildings brought to ruin. The irony was that by the time Kiefer began his paintings in the late 1970s, the Nazi buildings had to be ruined in his imagination because the more significant Nazi buildings – especially the Neue Reichskanzlei – had been utterly erased. Kiefer had to consult publicity photographs of the buildings in pristine condition before he could summon the apocalyptic aftermath in his imagination. Generally, nothing so ambiguous or evocative as a state of ruin is permitted to Nazi buildings. They are either in use or completely erased. Exceptions are: coastal defences (abandoned, unusable and on liminal land), the Berlin and Vienna Flakturm (hugely expensive to dismantle) and the concentration and death camps (in a state of suspended animation, semi-preserved as historical reminders).     

Not one trace

Modern iconoclasts have no intention of allowing anything as material as ruins to survive. They call for the destruction of material they deem offensive, to be marked by open space or replaced with new icons of the religion of social justice. The warriors of social justice take an old-fashioned absolutist view of cultural material. Produced by the exploitation of ‘black bodies’, facilitated by ‘white colonialism’, set in service of Christianisation of foreign lands, the relics of the past are infused with the toxins of social injustice at an atomic level. The utterly unparalleled evil of white, European, colonialist, Christian, patriarchal systems of barbarism which sustained society and produced its monuments transferred its evil to the very matter of its manifestation.

The statue must be toppled, the plinth must be dismantled, the plaque must be removed, the street name must be erased, the books recording the subject’s deeds must be deaccessioned from every public library. Once the subject is eradicated, his ghost can take any form his detractors wish, unimpeded by material evidence. Just as the graves of holy men were opened during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to allow the smashing of bones, so today’s iconoclasts pursue their own forms of ritual shaming. Not only was the Bristol statue of Edward Colston toppled and submerged in June 2020, stained glass windows dedicated to him were dismantled, his name was removed from the concert hall and from the school founded in his name. The society commemorating his beneficence was dissolved. He was unpersoned during an orgy of revisionist righteousness, designed to allow Bristolians to forget, to rest easy now their historical debt had been paid.  

Perhaps these new zealots intuit from their atavistic instincts that when material remains exist they can accrue mystery, significance and power in the minds of men. Colston’s statue may be permitted to live on in a museum, but only in its damaged state, to be surrounded by demeaning contextualisation intended to perpetuate the public humiliation. It is a trophy. Perhaps in future, no evidence of the supposed miscreants of history will remain except as trophies in displays intended to subvert lasting glory into endless infamy in stocks of the public space. Damnatio memoriae, as the Romans would have recognised. There will be no ruins to linger among and no fallen colossi to contemplate. Will the masked rioters of Europe mimic the masked iconoclasts of ISIS in Nineveh by reducing statues to stones, stones to pebbles, stopping only when the no trace of the subject remains identifiable?

The fury of today’s destroyers comes from the fact that the sins they condemn (colonialism, racism, capitalism, ecological exploitation) are diffused into every particle of their life. Pennies that flow through their bank accounts are residues of slavery. Houses they live in contain bricks made by the exploited. In their pockets, they have iPhones with components of cobalt and cadmium, mined by slaves in Africa. Their clothes are made in conditions they themselves have called ‘sweatshop’. Their pension providers invest in tobacco, munitions, genetically modified crops, oil drilling, polluting airlines, ‘big pharma’ and all manner of enterprises which have yet to be condemned by the pure. The very substance of the rioters’ lives cries out with injustice. So, they target scapegoats. They deflect and they project. Snagged in a trap of irresolvable contradictions, they lash out and their fury is strategically directed by politicians, educators, lobbyists and agitators. The Christian destroys the pagan idol; the Muslim destroys the infidel’s false image; the warrior for social justice destroys the statue of his ancestor. Each seeks to expiate guilt and protect the next generation from encountering the false authority. Some leave ruins, others leave none.

Posted on by Edgar Breau

Canadian rock revisited

Derek Turner interviews Canadian rock titan EDGAR BREAU

Q. Canada’s musical heritage is as varied as its landscape – from the Celtic-and French-infused “music of the maritimes”, via Portia White, Oscar Peterson, Paul Anka, Neil Young, Steppenwolf, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, to M.O.R. mega-acts like Rush, Bryan Adams, Céline Dion, Michael Bublé, and Justin Bieber. But your musical roots draw from less familiar soil. Critics have detected influences ranging from English folk to psychedelia and “Krautrock”, and Soft Machine to Stockhausen and Velvet Underground. I assume you don’t ever apply labels to yourself! But do you have a kind of philosophy of music? What attracts you to a song? Does it have to be ‘meaningful’ as well as melodic and rhythmic? How would you describe your writing process?

A. I started out playing Gordon Lightfoot cover songs from his record Back Here on Earth. Well-constructed songs of place, person, and lived experience by one of the best. Next came Scottish songsmith Donovan Leitch, with his bluesy Celtic mix – a very subtle writer, lovely melodies and rich lyrical content. Bob Dylan’s symbolist lyrical experiments were also a big influence on me in my youth. Those two poles pretty well sum up what I look for in a song. When I first recorded in 1974 my songs sounded nothing like the above-mentioned songwriters. Only later would the early folk influences return.

My writing process now – I take various open tuning approaches, finger style. I sometimes will start off with a catchy, promising song title. “That was the Week that Was”, the satirical BBC program furnished me with one such. It suggested word play to me, and the story line developed gradually into a romantic week that was brief and seemingly of little consequence – “the drinks got to me” – but upon reflection something more powerful occurred and reflection fills the mind of the protagonist with poignant memories. I throw out reams of material on the way to something solid that I can work on and develop into a good song. Trial and error and a lot of revision.

A 1757 map of French Canada

Q. What music did you hear around you when you were growing up? Were your parents musical? What is your family background? What was 1970s Hamilton like to grow up in? To an outsider, it looks like a city both busy, and with some commitment to culture.

A. There was always music in the home. My father, who was an east coast Acadian from Chatham New Brunswick, played the mouth organ and sang old French songs he learned in his youth. His musical tastes ranged from accordionist Harry Hibbs, a traditional Newfoundlander, country singer Hank Snow, balladeer Jim Reeves, Strauss waltzes and some Italian opera. I have three older sisters who played and danced to Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Jerry Lewis, Ivory Joe Hunter 78s. Later on, the youngest of them, Maureen began buying girl-group 45s by the Chiffons, Supremes, Ronettes, Martha and the Vandellas, and many others. I watched American Bandstand with her. She brought the Rolling Stones’ records into the house as well. My mom loved all our records. My father was mostly contemptuous of it, except for Gordon Lightfoot.

My father came from a French/Catholic Acadian background which reached far back in our country’s history. Our most distant relative, Vincent Breau (Breaux, Brault) arrived in Canada from France in 1661 and became the ‘Adam’ of the entire line of descendants bearing his name. It could be said that the ‘Breaus’ were one of ten or twelve founding families of Acadia, a former French colony established in 1604 in the territory that now includes Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island in Canada. My grandfather worked in a saw mill, and built and played violins despite the missing digit caused by an accident at the mill. My great grandmother was said to be Mi’kmaq who are a First Nations people of the Northeastern Woodlands, indigenous to the Atlantic Provinces. I learned this later in life from a relative and have no reason to doubt it. My grandmother was also French Acadian. Dad was a decorated soldier  in the Carlton York regiment and saw action in the Italian campaign after a stay in the U.K. training and – if his stories can be believed – rabble rousing, carousing and having the time of his life. He was shot through the wrist in Italy, ending his active duty as a sniper. On return home he left ‘down east’ as he always called it looking for work in the Toronto/Hamilton area of Ontario. Many others came here from the Atlantic coast. Dad worked at the Westinghouse factory but when layoffs loomed relocated to Guelph Ontario to work in the penitentiary as a guard. His qualifications: he had singlehandedly guarded hundreds of Italian POWs with a machine gun. Certainly he didn’t have much of an education, working in lumberjack camps at age 16.

Ever the soldier, he found it hard to understand his eldest son’s nonchalance towards jobs and education. I considered myself rather as a poet, and a musician destined for great things. We clashed at times, to put it mildly and understandably.

My mother came from Welsh/Irish stock, strict Catholic. Some were clerics, nuns, missionaries, one in Darjeeling, India. Our home was literally full of people. At the height of it, as I entered adolescence there were 15, consisting of myself, six siblings, an aunt (actually my cousin, family secret), two foster children and four cousins. We ate in three shifts. I grew up listening to prison stories, the raw violence that occurred there – stories of prisoners in the ‘hole’ being hosed down after they did unspeakable things with their own excrement, razors in toothbrushes, brawls my dad was involved in, challenges the soldier would never back down from. I believe Blood Sweat and Tears vocalist, David Clayton Thomas, was incarcerated as a young man when my dad worked there. He references a certain guard, ‘the silent tough one’, in his memoirs and I wonder if it’s Mr. Breau. My brother, Michael took after dad but his way was an outlaw, wild and lawless road that ended up behind the bars my father looked at from the other side. Michael was as tough as nails, a legend in the east end of Hamilton, a beloved lone wolf who carved out his own way, and eventually made good in the renovation business.

Things were chaotic at times and I was beginning to come off the rails. In the summer of 1972 after reading Kerouac’s On The Road, I found a hitchhiking buddy, my own Neal Cassady, and thumbed across the country, having many adventures on the road. Like Kerouac, I was a mix of Catholic and bohemian, a conservative in some ways intellectually, but living and moving in more liberal and for a time decadent and – I dare say it – dabbling in the occult and avant-garde circles. He was French Quebeçois, I was part French Acadian. Both of us were anti communist.

My father was a socialist, in early days pro-communist, but later on he became a social conservative. He rejected the labour movement’s drift away from working-class economic issues into social issues and, eventually, identity politics.

Hamilton was a tough steel town when I was growing up there in the east end of the city where the steel mills were located. I hesitate to name the gangs, even today, that divided up the turf. Warfare it was. One learned to be wary and forever looking over your shoulder on the streets for potential menacing action. Later on, I would take karate lessons from two wonderful streetwise African-Canadian black belts originally from Detroit, who taught me respect and honour while honing my fighting skills. Shortly after attaining my brown belt I decided to leave the dojo, worried about breaking a hand or a finger, intent now to be a musician and absorbed in romantic interests. A loss of discipline no doubt…

Hamilton today

Q. How did you meet your bandmates? What was it about Pink Floyd’s Saucerful of Secrets that inspired Simply Saucer’s name? After all, your favourite Floyd member, Syd Barrett, had much less to do with that album than its predecessor. Was listening to prog rock and psychedelia a way to imaginatively remove yourself from an unpleasing reality?

A. I met my bandmate Paul Colilli at high school. He was fascinated by Sixties bands as they emerged and buying all the records he could get his hands on. Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Byrds, the Nazz, Canada’s Kensington Market. We became close friends and talked incessantly about music, literature and film. Paul was taking instructions in classical piano and eventually I began rehearsing with him at his parents’ home. We collaborated in naming the band and began looking for other musical adventurers.

He was of Italian-Canadian background with strict parents and they eventually steered him into post-secondary school education away from the rough bohemian influences. Late in 1973, my best friend left the band to pursue a degree and career as an academic and eventually became a modern renaissance man, the Dean of Italian Studies at Laurentia University. He was a world-renowned scholar known for his writings on Italian literature, culture and philosophy. He released a couple of albums later in life, describing his music as metaphysical ghost music. Sadly, Paul passed away in 2018 but not before recording new music with his old friends in Simply Saucer. A release is due in 2021 under the name Saucer73. See the link for more on Paul Colilli – https://aati.uark.edu/in-memoriam-paul-colilli-1952-2018/

I men another bandmate, David Byers, at a record store. His relatives in Holland had been sending him Dutch underground bands like Savage Rose, Wally Tax and the Outsiders, Supersister, and Group 1840. Dave had caught the Velvet Underground at a Toronto outdoor festival and immediately became a fan. I felt the same way about them and began patterning my vocals and guitar-playing after Lou Reed.

All of us were collecting records voraciously and would vie for bragging rights when we found obscure offerings, most of which would later become part of the rock canon, groups like The Seeds, The Stooges, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, The Thirteenth Floor Elevator, The Can, Faust. We held drunken rituals called Record Spinoffs where we would rate our latest ‘finds’ by criteria of “originality”, “obscurity” and there would be a winner at the end of the drinking bout crowned and celebrated.

Musically we began to jell, mainly playing improvisational pieces – long jams, psychedelic, erratic, angular – using electric guitars, audio generators, mini moogs, electrified flutes and saxophones. We had picked up a drummer by then, an eccentric fellow by the name of Neil de Merchant who had pop-jazz leanings. My foster brother, John, played synth under the moniker, “Ping”, and a high school friend Kevin Christoff rounded out the band.

At the time a coterie of us were engrossed in imaginative, fantasy fiction. The Lord of the Rings I had read in my high school days but now it was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, Arthur Edward Waite’s occultist biography of Louis Claude de St. Martin and his novel, The Quest of the Golden Stairs, as well the Rider Tarot deck he designed. There was E.R. Eddison’s Fish Dinner in Memison, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land and, most frightening of all, the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Incidentally I hadn’t read Lovecraft since those halcyon days but recently picked up a copy of Michel Houellebecq’s H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life – a penetrating disturbing essay, reassessing his works and was induced again to read The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness, both stories absolutely terrifying. Houllebecq writes

The twentieth century may come to be recognized as the golden age of epic and fantasy literature, once the morbid mists of feeble avant-gardes dissipate. It has already witnessed the emergence of Howard, Lovecraft and Tolkien – three radically different universes. Three pillars of dream literature, as despised by critics as they are loved by the public.

The fantasy writers filled my young man’s head with dreams of forbidden planets, arcane occult rituals, monster races of humanoids spawned in the mists of times, places sublime ‘at the back of the north wind’. Arthur Machem, Lord Dunsany, Poe, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, with a Catholic mystic or two thrown in for good measure. I lived in a strange enchanting world mentally and it began to spill over into the music of Simply Saucer.

Q. But then you reinvented yourselves as rawer rockers, with ‘She’s A Dog’ – a steel-town sounding, stripped-down song which seems strangely unrepresentative of your earlier, later, and even contemporary careers. Other songs from that period were much more ambitious, with synthesizers and theremins. Why did you choose that song? Was it a simple bid for commercial success? Wasn’t the Hamilton audience ‘ready’ for the other things you’d been doing? Julian Cope implies this, when he says you

conjured up a whole raft of imaginary Canuck ne’er-do-wells to travel with [you on your] extremely idiosyncratic musical travelogue

A. The responses to our live show in the early days of performing could be rather dramatic. We emptied out an arena in Carlton Place, Ontario; they just weren’t ready for our heavy metalloid music. Two fans braved it out to the end, showering us with praise. In Oakville, Ontario we were thrown off the stage, the drummer, literally thrown out of the club. Projectiles were hurled at us in St. Catherines. Professor Colilli, years later, declared that we were ‘deconstructing music’. Either that or just self-destructing!

Eventually we ended up in the studio where we recorded the studio side of Cyborgs Revisited (1974) at the home studio of Daniel and Bob Lanois in Ancaster, Ontario. Daniel would become, later on, just about the most famous record producer in the world. His client list is very impressive – U2, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Willy Nelson, Neil Young, Peter Gabriel, the Neville Brothers – the list is long. Back then, I remember him sitting cross legged on the studio floor with his hands over his ears bravely enduring our “heavy metalloid music”. The six songs we recorded would not see the light of day for another 15 years, all the major Canadian record labels rejecting our demo. The day would come, though, when critics would outdo themselves in superlatives trying to describe the sounds on Cyborgs Revisited – our posthumous slab of vinyl, mysterious gift of outsider music to the world.

All of the songs were composed in a dreary narrow storefront, with walls painted black. I lived and slept and ate there for a year, amplifiers, guitars and chords on the floor where I slept on a thin piece of sponge, the sounds of the street echoing in the background, hoods pulverizing their latest victim perhaps with a pool cue, knife, or once when the local gang ‘ladies’ stopped by brandishing a plank with nails in at aimed at the head of our cheeky new drummer. It was claustrophobic in there, and so what better to do than compose my songs of dystopic technology running rampage over the fields of fairy?

Such considerations as a job to provide food and clothing, I blithely ignored. My concerned mother sent care packages over to the hovel, concerned that I would starve. The local thieves took advantage of my naivete, stowing stolen Harley Davidsons at the back of the rehearsal space on one occasion… ”Would you mind keeping these here for us for a couple of days? Thanks man…” I had no idea.  

The gangs penetrated the inner sanctum now and again, threatening me with tyre irons, stealing guitars (alas), and demanding the band ‘play some Led Zeppelin’. One of them years later led a phalanx of motorcycle bad boy riders, some Hells Angels included, out of respect for their compatriot, brother Mike, to the graveyard where they hastily constituted an honour guard for my deceased father, the tough old prison guard whom they well respected. Later on in the church hall, George, we’ll call him, who had bitten off a rival’s ear and wore it around his neck as a talisman remarked that he remembered dropping acid outside our rehearsal space and then inspired by our music went out and “busted some heads”. I was flattered …

So yes, She’s A Dog was written for commercial success, and in fact England’s New Musical Express declared it “the pick hit single of the week” – a mix of the Kinks, Who and Velvet Underground, which suited me very well.

Q. Now, of course, Cyborgs Revisited is viewed as one of the great Canadian rock albums. But the songs on it were quite old by the time it was issued in 1989, and you had long ago reinvented yourself as a balladeer. You must have had mixed feelings at hearing those songs again, not to mention being expected to perform them.

A. Yes, absolutely it was difficult. I had abandoned the electric guitar by 1979 and invested in an acoustic guitar made by a soon-to-be internationally celebrated luthier by the name of Grit Laskin. I was enthralled by the American primitive guitar stylings of John Fahey and had crafted new songs with a more mature lyrical content. I was in the studio at the time Cyborgs Revisited was released, recording my first solo album. The critical reaction to Cyborgs Revisited right from the beginning was extremely positive and in some cases ecstatic. I felt very divided. The reviews poured in, and folks were calling Cyborgs Revisited one of the greatest Canadian rock albums ever made. There was shock that this music had come out of Canada. The record collectors salivated over it, stunned that the music had been hidden from the world since 1974.

Meanwhile, back at home my wife was very pregnant with our third child, fearful of my return to playing music, hysterical at the late hours I was keeping and my increasingly outside the mainstream political beliefs and their inclusion in my songs. “Think of your kids”, she would say. “We could be subject to an arson attack. What’s happening to you?” The centerpiece of my album, New Sacred Cow Blues, was rather reactionary in a revolutionary kind of way. The intent was to write a new kind of protest song, one not coming from a liberal progressive outlook but au contraire from a radical traditionalist perspective. The cannon was now on a swivel and pointing directly back at the smug and complacent ‘former’ counter culture that had become ossified, mainstream and as intolerant as the straight culture it had denigrated in the Sixties. My new anthem began with the words  “I’m serving notice, on a wooden door…” casting me as a modern Luther intent on dismantling the smug countercultural ‘verities’ that had gone unchallenged for so long, a reaffirmation of the medieval call to order and hierarchy. In short, it was a clarion call of battle for the soul of the West.

Under the strain of my own grandiose obsessions and my wife’s nervous projections of paranoia (which would eventually lead to a nervous breakdown), with inner divisions running wild in my psyche, I cracked, walked away from the studio and the music world and hunkered down for the next ten years, homeschooling my children and subscribing to radical traditionalist publications like Small Farmer’s Journal, Modern Age, University Bookman, the Chesterton Review, the Dawson Newsletter, Issues and Views (African American conservative entrepreneurs who introduced me to the economist Thomas Sowell’s libertarianism).

Inspired by Chesterton’s and Belloc’s politics of distributism and championing of a new Agrarianism, I made plans to move into the north country and live self-sufficiently, growing my own food, making cheese (I had already made a start on this), homeschooling my children, farming in the three-cows-and-an-acre tradition. I made inquiries about a century-old farmhouse in Tara, Ontario, but on the homefront things were starting to fall apart, and money was running out. I took a woodworking job and left my wife to school the kids. Soon after she completely broke down mentally and ended up at the psyche ward at the local hospital. The plan was put on hold and soon faded into the distance as crisis mounted year after year.

Q. The folk influences you and others have cited seem much more obvious in your modern work – in songs like ‘Patches of Blue’, ‘Martha’s Back’ or ‘Mount Idaho’. Articles about and interviews with you throw up English folk names, like Steeleye Span. But what about other folk traditions? Were you conscious of an Acadian, or more precisely Franco-Ontarian, inheritance, and did you listen to that vein of traditional music?

The Acadian flag

A. My father stressed the nobility of our French heritage, taught us French phrases, extolled the unparalleled military virtues of General de Gaulle (who remains a favourite). The Acadian side of the family were fun loving, uninhibited, opinionated, argumentative.

My father played his music, yes, but it wasn’t until his retirement that he delved deeply into the history of his family and learned in depth the tragedy of the Acadians – their dispersal and deportation from Acadia in 1755 when they refused to sign an oath of allegiance to the English crown. He immersed himself in their history and genealogies, nursing a grudge against the predatory English, drawing Acadian flags, writing poems of his lost homeland and inculcating in his children fervour for our lost heritage.

Q. Folk music is frequently associated with radical or at least liberal politics – probably inevitable given its emphasis on giving voice to the unheard and unlucky. But this is not today’s cultural kind of radicalism, with its abortion, BLM and transgender activism – but more about economic fairness. I ask because of your foray into politics in the late 1990s, when you stood for the Family Coalition Party in the Ontario provincial elections, on a socially conservative and even fiscally conservative platform. What brought that about?

A. I became interested in apologetics in the 1990s. John Henry Newman’s “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine” and his “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” were influential as were the high Anglican popular works by C.S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers. George Bernanos, Charles Peguy, Russell Kirk all influenced my thinking – the list is long.. After the band broke up in 1981, I began reading Solzhenityn’s three volume Gulag Archipelago. I’d sit in the corrugated iron shack on the coke oven battery, while my fellow workers got stoned and played cards, absorbed in the tortures, interrogations, the bone-numbing fear and the ever present bureaucracy heartlessly processing the prisoners. My father’s socialist and rosy view of the Soviet Union crumbled. Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ I began to see as symptomatic of our own culture’s dreamy abstractional drift towards totalitarianism. The woke social justice warriors, critical race theory, cancel culture are all modern manifestations of it in our own time.

I gave a talk on apologetics at church one evening, and a couple of the founders of the Family Coalition Party happened to be there. They approached me afterwards urging me to run in the upcoming provincial election. They must have been mightily impressed with my talk! The party was socially conservative, and much of their approach was based on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity – defined as an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Health savings accounts, diverse educational models like charter schools, home schooling were extolled by the party. I was already home schooling at that time. Government encouragement of small family farms and stewardship of the environment were a part of the platform.

My politics are localist, communitarian, distributist, ecology-mindful, freedom-oriented, based on the principle of subsidiarity. They are agrarian-centred, with an emphasis on the common good, the nation state over individual assertions of an atomistic, narrow, idiosyncratic, often times delusional, ‘identity’. I believe a society works best when there is a tension between liberals and conservatives. We need them both – iconoclasts who can smash up the dead ideas and debris of our imperfect past and the conservers of tradition, our lovely countryside, family farms, faith and yes our history.

Q. Why didn’t you carry your politics further? You lost that election, but most politicians lose their first elections. What do you make of Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservatives – and Canadian politics more generally?

A. I was asked to run again but declined. The shellacking I took in the polls had been rather bracing but that alone doesn’t account for my reluctance to run again as I’m by nature a strong-willed contrarian accustomed to living outside the mainstream, unbowed by a lack of popular support for my convictions. I ran a respectable campaign and learned much about the intricacies of our democratic process. There were tensions at home by that time that sidelined my nascent political career. Things were beginning to fall apart in my marriage.

Premier Doug Ford has shut down numerous small businesses due to the pandemic while allowing bigger franchises, such as Costco and Walmart, to continue to thrive. He’s promised to give the taxpayer the scientific data in support of his closures but has consistently failed to deliver on that promise. He sold out and betrayed the social conservatives he needed to win the nomination in the first place and since then has demonstrated his incompetence convincingly.

I supported Leslyn Lewis in the recent federal Conservative leadership race; although she lost a close contest, I believe she’s the future of the party. A Jamaican immigrant, she earned degrees from the University of Toronto, York University and Osgoode Hall Law school, and practiced law for 20 years starting her own firm. She specialized in corporate, real estate, immigration and energy law. She has a Masters degree in environmental studies, and would push back against political correctness. She agrees with Jordan Peterson that ‘gender expression’ and ‘gender identity’ should not be grounds for discrimination protection in the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act because she believes it would threaten people for using ‘incorrect speech’. A more ecological version of Maggie Thatcher, perhaps?

Right now the federal government under the ‘leadership’ of Justin Trudeau is spending the country into oblivion and pushing every politically correct woke dogma imaginable down the throats of the populace. A kind of soft totalitarianism begins to pervade our institutions, and cancel culture abounds. Our state broadcaster the CBC feels like a mere adjunct of the Liberal Party, while universities demonize views which just a decade ago were perfectly acceptable. Illiberal mover and shaker elites, buttressed by critical race theory, racialize every aspect of life, including mathematics. As identity becomes paramount in divvying out social justice, the poor remain on the sidelines; economic hardship takes a back seat to the latest favored “identity victim’. Trudeau’s election promise to bring safe water to every indigenous reserve has fallen by the wayside, his carbon reduction plans are an empty promise. He cowers before Communist China, failing to speak directly to them about the Canadian hostages they keep. Justin Trudeau is a mere shadow of his father and former Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

I applaud James Lindsay, the mathematician/philosopher, whose website, Public Discourses, systematically critiques Critical Race Theory and demonstrates that is not at all about social justice but about Marxist political power and dominance through the destruction of the liberal norms of political discourse. Indeed, it is at heart anti-democratic and totalitarian.

Q. What do you think of the contemporary Canadian musical scene – acts like Arcade Fire, July Talk, Deadmau5, and Drake? Which, if any of these, do you enjoy? If none of them, then who do you listen to mostly?

A. I know little of any of them other than Arcade Fire named one of their albums, Neon Bible, after the novel of the same name by the great Louisiana writer John Kennedy Toole who wrote the masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces. (I identify deeply with Ignatius Reilly sans the disgusting bodily functions.)

I find my music in out-of-the-way thrift storesand junk shops, and friends give them to me as gifts. Recent finds – a six record (vinyl) set by celebrated Polish harpsichordist, Wanda Landowska on RCA Victor 1958, called The Well Tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach. All of this for Canadian $3.50. Another is Sing Round the Year, 18 carols selected and composed by Welsh born composer, musician, singer and entertainer, Donald Swann – sung by him and the girls of Mayfield School, Putney and the boys of Westminster School. A real find that, for a total of 0.25 cents! One more – a record by the legendary Memphis-born blues singer, Alberta Hunter, an original soundtrack recording from the film Remember My Name. She recorded it at the age of 83 and it is smoking hot great. Picked it up used, for a mere pittance. You get the picture. I collect as always really finding whatever happens to show up. Books the same way. I’m not systematic or organized at all really. Whatever catches my fancy, and currently I’m reading Michel Houllebecq. Bed time reading are the Essays of Graham Greene.

Finally, Simply Saucer continues to thrive. We were a headlining act at the 2019 Goner Fest in Memphis Tennessee and have played NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Austin and many other American cities, and much of Canada. We were slated to tour California and much of the American west coast in 2020 but Covid had other plans. We are returning to the studio to record once again. I have wonderful bandmates of spectacular talent including original member Kevin Christoff on bass, Mike Trebilcock, formerly of the popular powerpop band the Killjoys on guitar, Colina Phillips, who as a session singer worked with Bruce Cockburn, Bryan Adams, Alice Cooper and many others, on backing vocals and synth and a youthful drum phenom, Brad Bridges. And finally, I’m an avid member of the Churchill Community Garden Association, a rank amateur amazed each year by the fecundity of my plot at harvest time.

Posted on by Greg Jinkerson

Worlds before Narnia – C S Lewis’s Heavens

GREG JINKERSON reminds us of C S Lewis’s Space Trilogy

Beyond his still-popular works of Christian apologetics, C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) may be most familiar as creator of The Chronicles of Narnia, the classic children series published in the 1950s, and since filmed several times. But long before Aslan and the Pevensies debuted in the first Narnia story The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Lewis was the demiurge of other fantastic worlds formed with adult readers in mind.

His first published novel was the Bunyanesque bildungsroman The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), where the pilgrim John encounters people like Mr. Enlightenment and Mother Kirk, and Lewis gives an impression of how such abstractions shaped his early intellectual development and later Christian faith. In between the Pilgrim and the Lion, Lewis devoted a deal of the WWII years to writing his Space Trilogy, about a man drawn into a cosmic moral conflict that comes to a head on earth. The series is a more mature expression of the allegorical seeds planted in his first novel, and an anticipation of many themes from Narnia – the combat between good and evil animating human characters and their angelic counterparts, miraculous trips and oracular bulletins from distant lands, and “unattained ideals…in the history of Man.”1

As in his Chronicles, Lewis spins a fairy tale replete with haunted houses, necromancy, enchanted groves and bewitched familiars. The interplanetary saga begins in Out of the Silent Planet (1938) where the hero Elwin Ransom – a philologist and a character Lewis once called “a fancy portrait of a man I know, but not of me,”2 – is abducted to Mars by a megalomaniacal physicist, Weston, and his sidekick Devine. (Incidentally, Ransom’s history shows that Lewis inserted plenty of his own experiences into the don, along with several traits of his Oxford friend and fellow author J. R. R. Tolkien.) Ransom’s adventures continue in Perelandra (1943) set on Lewis’ conception of the planet Venus, and winds up back on earth in That Hideous Strength (1945).

As the first book opens, Ransom has embarked alone on a long walking tour of the English countryside with a backpack – reminiscent of Christian with his heavy burden as seen by the Dreamer in The Pilgrim’s Progress. With a sabbatical before him and few obligations beyond his pleasures, he has failed to notify anyone of his plans or whereabouts, and isn’t expected home by anyone for many months. This anonymity makes him a ripe Everyman for the adventures ahead.

One night, finding that the inn where he had planned to stay is no longer lodging odd pedestrians, he knocks at the door of a secluded cottage in hopes of a bed. Overhearing violent shouts, Ransom stumbles onto the scene of an attempted kidnapping, where two men are struggling to subdue a young boy. Ransom intervenes and rescues the boy, becoming an unwitting substitute in the partners’ abduction scheme:

“The three combatants fell suddenly apart, the boy blubbering. ‘May I ask,’ said the thicker and taller of the two men, ‘who the devil you may be and what you are doing here?’… ‘My name is Ransom, if that is what you mean. And…’ ‘By Jove,’ said the slender man, ‘not Ransom who used to be at Wedenshaw?’ ‘I was at school at Wedenshaw,’ said Ransom. ‘I thought I knew you as soon as you spoke,’ said the slender man. ‘I’m Devine.”3

The first speaker, Weston, is Ransom’s arch enemy throughout the series, an ingenious physicist who immediately calls upon the devil; Devine, in his more easygoing approach to mischief, calls upon Jove. The former plans to use his spacecraft to colonize the galaxy in a quest to preserve the human race; the latter wants to plunder planets for their riches. The friends are a devilish pair, but Ransom’s weariness and his familiarity with Devine are enough to lure him into sheltering with them.

After being drugged, Ransom awakes in a spaceship and is first terrified and later exhilarated to realize his captors are carrying him to Mars, where they have already done reconnaissance on a previous voyage. Although they believe themselves to be bringing Ransom there as a sacrifice to the rulers of that planet, we find “the stars in their courses were fighting against Weston.”4 The allusion to the Book of Judges is a sign that Weston’s efforts are the inadvertent means of Ransom’s apotheosis – in spite of himself, Weston is delivering his enemy into a position of honour he himself covets.

Each book marks a stage in Ransom’s understanding of the Heavens – Lewis’ preferred term for outer space – and of the influence of extra-terrestrial creatures, many of whom become his friends. He meets for example angels, or eldila as they are known outside earth. The eldila are somewhat local to each planet and are ruled by archangels, or Oyeresu. The Oyarsa of Malacandra (Mars to earthlings) teaches Ransom that the solar system is an open field of angelic communication with just one Bermuda Triangle issuing no messages: the silent planet Thulcandra (Earth). In fact, the eldila of our planet have become sinister creatures. Upon meeting the Oyarsa, Ransom asks,

“Then you knew of our journey before we left Thulcandra?’

‘No. Thulcandra is the world we do not know. It alone is outside the heaven, and no message comes from it.’

Ransom was silent, but Oyarsa answered his unspoken questions.

It was not always so. Once we knew the Oyarsa of your world — he was brighter and greater than I — and then we did not call it Thulcandra. It is the longest of all stories and the bitterest. He became bent.5

In this accounting of Lucifer, Lewis invokes the medieval cosmology wherein “daemons are…creatures of a middle nature between gods and men – like Milton’s ‘Middle spirits’”6, and throws new light on the Fall of earthly life. “Through these intermediaries, and through them alone, we mortals have any intercourse with the gods.”7 Having lost contact with Earth, Oyarsa sent for a human ambassador to visit Malacandra and effect a rapprochement.

Ransom also encounters the native species of Malacandra: the seal-like hrossa, including a Friday to Ransom’s Crusoe named Hyoi – the amphibious pfifltriggi, artisans of the planet – and sorns, the mandarins of Malacandra. His odyssey even affords a glimpse of “the original of the Cyclops, a giant in a cave and a shepherd.”8 While on the planet, Ransom uses his philological training to master their universal language (which he terms Old Solar). All told, what had begun as a tour of England stretches light years afield before circling back to a thrilling and hectic voyage home.

Ransom’s gleanings in Malacandra are, naturally, not merely academic. By the time of Perelandra, Ransom has been communicating for several years with the Oyarsa about a new mission: stopping the Fall and its attendant curse from being inflicted upon Venus. Weston’s defeat on Mars has hardly discouraged his urge to rule new worlds, and he sets his sights on Perelandra as a consolation.

This second journey to a neighbouring planet has an uplifting effect upon Ransom, bringing him hitherto unknown sensations and even open new senses. His first breakfast on Perelandra is nothing short of psychedelic:

“The smells in the forest were beyond all that he had ever conceived. To say that they made him feel hungry and thirsty would be misleading; almost, they created a new kind of hunger and thirst, a longing that seemed to flow over from the body into the soul and which was a heaven to feel.”9

On Perelandra, and elsewhere in the heavens, Ransom’s body and soul meld in a peaceful anticipation of what might come; his desires awaken no fear about whether they will be fulfilled, for they are intrinsically pleasant. Indeed, fruit is a kind of superfluity:

“He picked one of them and turned it over and over. The rind was smooth and firm and seemed impossible to tear open. Then by accident one of his fingers punctured it and went through into coldness. After a moment’s hesitation he put the little aperture to his lips. He had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight…It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant.”10  

This is more a sacrament than a meal, and binds Ransom beatifically in a kind of symbiotic nourishment with the vegetation. The unspoiled environment of Perelandra yields up a world eminently edible and edifying.

Ransom also encounters the Venusian Eve, Tinidril, whom he must protect from Weston’s attempt to involve her in a second Fall on Perelandra. This Ransom successfully averts, and his beatific vision is fulfilled when Tinidril is safely united with the king of Perelandra.

In That Hideous Strength, Ransom joins the angelic ranks back on earth for a climactic battle in an English university town against a deranged cabal of academic and scientific elites in league with their own Satanic allies. One of these is Lord Feverstone, a nom de guerre for Devine from the first adventure. The final volume’s primary theme, which Lewis lays out persuasively in his essay “The Abolition of Man” as a companion to the novel, is a caution against a naïve programme of inhumane central planning which he feared would accompany advanced Scientism in world governments.

Ransom again plays a heroic part in the action, but this time he shares the stage with new allies—the sociologist Mark Studdock and his wife Jane, along with a reincarnation of the Arthurian Merlin and a menagerie of benevolent animals. Despite the worst efforts of the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) to impose a technocratic police state upon England, Ransom’s forces of good and the whole host of heaven fight and stop them.

After their victory, one of Ransom’s cohort makes a speech about what Ransom learned during his time on the prelapsarian Perelandra about the history of England:

“It all began,” he said,

when we discovered that the Arthurian story is mostly true history. There was a moment in the Sixth Century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded. Logres was our name for it – it will do as well as another. And then gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting…Something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven’t you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers: the home of Sidney – and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites? But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.11

Although certain critics have found the series to verge on the didactic – the science fiction author Brian Aldiss said as much in a friendly way12, and Lewis’ own Oxford colleague, the biologist J.B.S. Haldane said it in a far more strident mode in a review of That Hideous Strength13 – Lewis for his part disagreed. In discussing the plot of Perelandra, and Aldiss’ suggestion that Lewis had set out to write it in order to make a moral point, Lewis gave an emphatic disavowal while laying out his approach to story making:

Yes everyone thinks that. They are quite wrong…the story of this averted fall came in very conveniently. Of course it wouldn’t have been that particular story if I wasn’t interested in those particular ideas on other grounds. But that isn’t what I started from. I’ve never started from a message or a moral…the story itself should force its moral upon [the writer]. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.14

Notes

  1. Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis, Scribner, New York, 1938; p. 75
  2. Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories by C.S. Lewis, edited with a Preface by Walter Hooper, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1966; in “A Reply to Professor Haldane,” p. 78
  3. Out of the Silent Planet, p. 14
  4. Ibid., p. 127
  5. Ibid., pp. 119-120
  6. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C.S. Lewis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1964; p. 40
  7. Ibid., pp. 40-41
  8. Perelandra by C.S. Lewis, Scribner, New York, 1944; p. 40
  9. Ibid., p. 37
  10. Ibid. p. 37
  11. That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, Macmillan Publishing Co. New York, 1946, pp.368-369
  12. “Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories” in Unreal Estates, p. 87
  13. Ibid. in “A Reply to Professor Haldane,” p. 74, where Lewis mentions Haldane’s complaint that Lewis’ characters “are like slugs in an experimental cage who get a cabbage if they turn right and an electric shock if they turn left”
  14. Ibid. in “Unreal Estates”, p. 87