ALEX WOODCOCK-CLARKE says a noisy segment of the British population wants to extinguish fireworks
And God said, “Let there be light”: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good. God did more than that. He gave it to Man so Man could paint the night skies with stars and fountains of light to the music of thunder. Now it is the modern age, and God is dead. New voices arise from the void, querulous and offended, and what they say (and they are legion) is: “Let’s snuff out fireworks!”.
Is it me? Did I go mad? As I walked along the Bois de Boulogne did an anvil fall on my head in the manner of a Looney Toons cartoon? Is a large, statistically significant demographic of the British population truly mustering to eradicate joy? Has prevailing opinion really come down in favour of darkness and silence?
Transitory and brilliant is the history of fireworks. Though their origins are lost in the smoke of pre-history, the historian of chemistry, Professor J R Partington, notes they were known to the Chinese by the end of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1206-1368 AD) and used as “arrows of flying fire” at the siege of Kai-feng Fu. By the end of the 15th century, one mandarin scholar, Wan Hu of the middle Ming dynasty, devised a flying machine from two large kites, a wicker armchair and 47 large rockets so that he might escape troubled times and go and live on the Moon. His slaves ignited the blue touchpaper and retired. After the gigantic explosion, Wan Hu and his machine were never seen again. Some are sceptical Wan Hu’s lift-off ever took place (its first mention only came in the October 1909 edition of Scientific American) but in 1970 the International Astronomical Union named an ancient crater lunar crater after him. Fifty-two kilometres wide, it is as good a place as any to mark his landing or, considering its depth of five kilometres, impact.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, fireworks were bringing colour and fire to the Enlightenment all over Europe. Not of any historic importance themselves there was no historical figure which they did not throw into relief. Charles V, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, incorporated a regiment of fireworkers into his army to put on victory displays. Peter the Great of Russia initiated the tradition of setting off pyrotechnics at New Year’s Eve. In 1693, he put on a high fireworks scenario, cued by a 56 cannon salute, which included a fiery portrait of Hercules prying open the jaws of a lion while live dwarves, dressed as cherubs, “desported themselves madly” within the burning frame.
In France, Louis XIV instituted a tradition of firework displays in the garden of Versailles, some of which went on for five days at a time. The climax of one huge festival entitled, “The Pleasures of the Enchanted Island” culminated in a blazing battle between three sea monsters, which spread to the “Palace of Enchantment” and led to a volcanic cataract of fireworks which exploded the very island itself and blew the wigs off the Sun-King and 600 invited guests.
Of course, wherever there is excitement, there is danger. Fireworks have never been any exception. George Plympton, the editor of The Paris Review and a noted fireworks aficionado, cited Ralph Waldo Emerson: “As soon as there is life, there is danger” in recalling the immense pyrotechnical displays that took place in 1749 to mark the ending of the War of Austrian Succession. At one, in Paris, “there were forty killed and nearly three hundred wounded” when two competing clans of artificiers, one French and one Italian, “quarrelling for precedence in lighting the fire, both lighted at once and blew up the whole”.
Something similar happened on the same date in England. An enormous pyrotechnical machine was built in Green Park by the famous Italian fireworks designer, Gaetano Ruggieri. It was over 114 feet high and designed to be fired while Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, especially composed for the occasion, was debuted before George II and his retinue. On the night, the machine blew up prematurely causing Ruggieri to attack Charles Frederick, the English comptroller of the Woolwich Depot, with his sword; a man fell off the machine to his death; a boy tumbled from a tree, also fatally; another man toppled into a pond and drowned; a crowd gathering outside Buckingham House panicked and many bones were broken; people on the Surrey shore tried to escape on boats that were so in danger of being swamped their crews threw interlopers into the Thames in batches. The diarist Horace Walpole saw a young girl whose party dress was set on fire by a wayward rocket. “She would have been destroyed if some person had not the presence of mind to strip her clothes off immediately”. On the plus side, there were fewer casualties than it might have been expected since it transpired the Duke of Richmond had previously confiscated twenty-five tons of fireworks on the grounds of “public safety” (and used them at his own party three weeks later). At the end of the evening, Ruggieri was arrested and sent to the Tower.
Walpole’s verdict on the night?
Whatever you hear of the fireworks, that is short of the prettiest entertainment in the world, don’t believe it. I have never passed a more agreeable evening
Few places in the world gave fireworks as warm a welcome as in the British Isles. Alan St. Hill Brock, a member of the great Brock dynasty of British fireworkers (or, more properly, pyrotechnicians) speculates that it was Roger Bacon (1214-1294), a friar known also as a doctor mirabilis, was the actual (if dubious) inventor of gunpowder, as its written formula first appeared in his 1267 Opus Majus treatise. Certainly, one Mr. Guido Fawkes was a fan of British fireworks since the 3,400 pounds of explosive he smuggled into the House of Commons in 1605 were purchased from Pains, the Salisbury-based (and still operating) fireworks manufacturer.
Fireworks have painted the backdrop of British history throughout recent centuries, adding size and drama to the grand events like royal weddings or birthdays or jubilees, or great victories when we used to have them. The enormous extravaganza of 19 July 1919 commissioned from the Brocks fireworks family to celebrate the Treaty of Versailles was the largest show ever put on in the UK, perhaps even in the world. Prints and engravings of the time show the entirety of Hyde Park alive with rocketry, aerial bombs and hundreds of curlicue serpent shells. The finale alone was based on 2,000 rockets exploding in the air at the same instant.
What may be more recurrent in the national experience and perhaps more British are not the giant displays but the smaller, private experiences. Watching dad in the back garden trying to launch a two-inch rocket in the rain with a sodden box of matches. A line of school pals huddled together spelling rude words in the air with sparklers. The Scout pack watching through binoculars a display in the Co-Op carpark lit by the local vicar who has insisted on safety protocols that rival a guided missile test. Such fleeting moments that put the power of Zeus or Thor, all their fire and thunder, in your hands and the hands of people just like you – that’s the British experience. And it’s that experience that a new surge of anti-firework campaigners wish to extinguish.
2020 has seen a surge in resentment against the use and enjoyment of fireworks. Her Majesty’s Government has spent time and money this year reviewing nine live petitions submitted by members of the public to ban, limit, ration, restrict, weaken or otherwise squelch fireworks (out of 164 submitted). The one in 2019 received 753,000 signatures. The most recent one (which runs into 2021) already has 278,000 signatures, well over the threshold to trigger a parliamentary debate. This petition demands fireworks be strictly limited to state-licensed displays. “Better enforcement of existing law is insufficient”, the petitioners insist. Vulnerable people and animals must be protected from “the distress and anxiety caused by unexpected firework[s]”.
There was something approaching ecstasy amongst supporters of a ban when COVID restrictions led to the cancelling of 5th of November firework displays in London, Sussex, the Midlands, Manchester, Yorkshire, Devon and Newcastle, Perth and the Highlands. The renowned Skinningrove Bonfire, in North Yorkshire, which features complex Heath Robinson-type wooden structures like castles and pirate ships, was squelched. Further south in Lewes, East Sussex, Bonfire Night celebrations, which usually attracts 80,000 people, were abandoned, as were the riotous Tar Barrels celebrations at Ottery St Mary in Devon, a tradition dating back to the 17th century. It was the same story for the event at Kenilworth Castle, one of the most-anticipated fireworks displays in the Midlands.
And don’t think you can make up for the cancellation of the organised displays by setting off a few bottle rockets in the back garden. Devon and Somerset Fire Service, for example, reminded anyone caught in breach of lockdown rules on household mixing, even in their own garden, faced a fine starting at £200. If you were found to be the organiser of a gathering of more than 30 people, like a firework display for family and friends, the fine rockets up to £10,000. “Think about your neighbours, particularly older people or those who are self-isolating, pets and, of course, those of us in the emergency services”, says Paul Jennings, the assistant commissioner for fire safety at the London Fire Brigade, says. Yes, think about us. Us, the local bureaucrats, the safety enforcers, the fun police, your paid servants.
“Woohoo!” was the persistent and general reaction on the Facebook page of FAB (FireworkABatement) as news of each of these cancellations rolled in. FAB is not a very large activist group on the face of it, with only a little over than 20,000 supporters on its new media channels. It’s led by Julie Doorne, a fine-looking woman in late-middle age who runs a horse-related business. All she does, and does it very successfully, is exchange information about domestic firework horror stories with like-minded types and then watch them bounce back and forth, always amplifying, always gaining force across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like until they’re picked up by the local and national media. “Puppy was Literally Scared to Death from Cardiac Arrest Due to Fireworks” is one of hers from last year. It’s about an adorable 18-month old black lab, Molly, who heard a firework go off at local firework display, instantly had a heart attack and keeled over, stone dead. If that incident was not terrible enough, the accompanying FAB release adds: “Moreover, some animals also mistakenly eat the remnants of fireworks, and it often results [sic] to choking and death. Lastly, the fumes that fireworks emit might be poisonous to some animals”. This story then appeared unquestioned in Metro, the Independent and the Daily Record.
Ms. Doorne is not asking for much. She doesn’t want to ban all fireworks. Only those used by private individuals. And she doesn’t want to stop fireworks being used whenever we want. Just restrict them to November 5th, Diwali and some other official public holidays when they can be let off in council-sanitised environments.
Well, who cares what she thinks? And yet her campaign has now been adopted, almost point-for-point, by the billion-pound campaigning charity, the RSPCA. Both the Welsh and Scots governments have promised “urgent reviews” of existing laws. Children’s charities and those associated with the elderly and the military veterans are also falling into line. Slowly but surely, the big battalions of moral suasion are coming into line. If you think the humble whizz-bang, the sparkler and 800 years of history can stand against them, think again.
The inevitable consequence of welfare democracy is the dictatorship of “the vulnerable”. The poor, the sick, the stupid, the drama student, you know, chumps. Unlike other tyrannies, this one is babyishly impotent (power vests, of course, in its state-appointed or media self-appointed “carers”) in all respects except one. To wit, stamping on the fun of other people so long, of course, as the fun is utterly inconsequential, and the other people in question are not like themselves. So, after fox hunting, ready salted crisps and guffawing at the sex lives of celebrities, the next simple pleasure scheduled for cancellation maybe not this year, maybe not the next but very soon will be – bang! – fireworks.
MICHAEL WILDING remembers stirrings among the dead letters
The first piece of writing for which I got paid was an article in the local weekly paper. I was just 18, marking time between leaving school and going to university. The paper, Berrow’s Worcester Journal, claimed to be the oldest newspaper in the world, dating from the 17th century. My article, “Miserrimus: the story of a cathedral stone”, appeared on 1st April, 1960. To have an article called, to translate the Latin, ‘most wretched man’, and to have it appearing on April Fool’s day may not have been the most auspicious start to a literary career.
That tombstone in Worcester Cathedral with the single word inscription had prompted William Wordsworth to write a sonnet, “A Gravestone Upon The Floor in the Cloisters of Worcester Cathedral”, and it was this literary association that had prompted me to write my article. Having discovered the sonnet in Wordsworth’s collected poems, I went down to the cathedral and there indeed was the tombstone. I researched the unhappy man in some local histories and found he had been a 17th century clergyman, Thomas Morris, who refused to swear the oath of allegiance to William of Orange, the Dutch Protestant brought into England in 1688 to replace the deposed Catholic King James. As a consequence, Morris lost his living as a canon of the Cathedral and vicar of the parish of Claines – the parish in which I had grown up.
Wanting to be a writer I was eagerly looking for signs of any writers or writing associated with the provincial world I lived in. Could there be writers outside of London or Paris or other remote metropolises? Well, Wordsworth had visited my home town, presumably, and written that sonnet, so there might be hope. Maybe other writers had visited. To be a writer you need something to write about. Writing about local literary associations could provide some of the materials I needed.
My English master had given me a two volume book recording all of the documents associated with Shakespeare’s life, every known, surviving record of baptism, marriage and financial transactions. Two documents were listed as having been held in the Worcester Diocesan Records Office but their whereabouts were now unknown, according to the book. Shakespeare had been born in Stratford-upon-Avon which in 1582 was in the diocese of Worcester.
So I went down to the records office, housed in an old church near the cathedral, St Helen’s, and inquired whether the documents still existed. I was shown the card index catalogue, found the two items listed, and ordered them up from the archives. They came, not lost at all. But while I was down there, I came across two much more interesting documents. One was a licence for Wm Shaxpere to marry Annõ Whateley of Temple Grafton. The other issued the following day was a marriage licence bond for Willm Shagspere to marry Anne Hathwey of Stratford-upon-Avon with only one reading of the banns. Scholars still lack agreement on the meaning of the documents. Had Shakespeare been planning to marry Anne Whateley, but was then coerced into marrying Anne Hathaway? Or was Whateley just a misspelling of Hathaway? But could Temple Grafton be a clerical error for Stratford-upon-Avon? No record of the marriage taking place has been found.
My second article for the local paper, raising the various possibilities, duly appeared: “Did Shakespeare Ever Marry?”. A couple of weeks later the director of the Shakespeare Memorial Trust was reported in the same paper as warning,
Disregard any reports you may have read recently concerning William Shakespeare… Shakespeare was a very decent man, and you would have welcomed him, or at least his daughter, into your house
The archives were a fascinating resource for a writer or a historian. I spent many an hour there. There was a machine that used ultra-violet light to make the faded ink on old documents legible, which was the height of technology. But the main difficulty was reading 16th and 17th century handwriting styles, very different from the present day. A distinguished local historian had spent years transcribing the quarter sessions court records for publication, but when he died no one could read his handwriting, and they remained unpublished.
I had been recalling the archives and planning an article about them when I dropped into a Sydney charity shop to find something to read. Now that the University of Sydney library has emptied the stacks of half a million volumes and deposited them off-campus, it is hard to find much to read on the open shelves. Vinnies’ has more to offer. On this occasion I picked up a memoir, Open Secret, by Stella Rimington, the first woman director-general of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, and author of a number of spy novels I had enjoyed. Leafing through the pages I found that from mid-1959 to the end of 1961 she had been an assistant archivist in the Worcester County Record Office – the very years I used to haunt the place.
Ever since writing my column on conspiracies and paranoia for another weekly paper, Nation Review,in the late 1970s I had developed an unhealthy interest in spooks and surveillance. To think that I might have literally brushed shoulders with this female super-spook. Of course this was before she had joined MI5 – or so she wrote. But could you trust the words of the director of a spy agency? I tried in vain to remember if there had been any young lady who had tried to recruit me in the shadows of that old church. Or had I delivered some subversive views even at that age, had I blotted my copy-book as far back as then?
One of her recollections of those days chimes in with mine. She writes:
Some of our most frequent customers were the Mormons and their representatives. They were researching the ancestors of fellow Mormons, by searching for names, usually in the parish records. My understanding was that if the ancestors could be identified their names would be written down and they would be posthumously baptised so that their spirits would pass from wherever they were into the Mormon heaven
I remembered this bizarre behaviour of the Mormons. But by the time of my Nation Review column twenty years later, some of us had developed new theories about what the Mormons were up to. One of the alleged tricks of intelligence agencies, it was revealed in the 1960s, was to search through registers of births and deaths, find someone who had died young, and use their birth date to obtain documents in their name and create a false identity to be used by some spy going undercover. Were the Mormons in fact working for the CIA or FBI to fabricate legends for their undercover spies? Indeed, was the later-to-be director of MI5 doing something similar?
This theme of stealing identities from parish records cropped up again in my researches. Another local figure was Edward Kelly, the associate of Dr Dee (1). I published a book about Dee and Kelly 20 years ago, Raising Spirits, Making Gold and Swapping Lives: the True Adventures of Dr John Dee and Sir Edward Kelly. Since its publication, new material on Kelly had surfaced and I began updating it for a new edition. I was in touch with an American academic, Terry Burns, who with another American scholar, Vincent Bridges, had written a book about Kelly, An Alchemical Enigma. They both argued that the person who made gold at the Emperor Rudolf’s court was not the Edward Kelly born in Worcester, but some other figure who had adopted the identity of the Worcester man from the parish records. Naturally, I prefer to keep Kelly as the product of my own home town.
Terry Burns also drew my attention to a recently discovered document in a German archive. It is a letter from Sir Richard Bingham, Governor of Connaught, authenticating Kelly’s claim to be of noble Irish descent. Kelly had been thrown in gaol by the Emperor Rudolf and the letter may have been an attempt to get him rehabilitated. Bingham was a correspondent of Sir Francis Walsingham, who ran secret service operations for Queen Elizabeth. Kelly may well have been some sort of agent for Walsingham, though naturally it is impossible to find any unambiguous evidence for this. But the name Bingham resonates in this context.
Charlotte Bingham is a prolific contemporary novelist and I recently read her memoir MI5 and Me – a hilarious account of working for an intelligence agency. She got the job because her father, John Bingham, worked for MI6, where he was John le Carré’s boss and encouraged him to begin writing. A recent biography of Bingham, The Man Who Was Smiley, suggests he was a model for le Carré’s Smiley character. Bingham himself wrote crime and spy novels: he was also an Irish peer, the 7th Baron Clanmorris. Presumably he is a descendant of that 16th century Bingham of Ireland, a family familiar with espionage operations over generations – though I have yet to do the genealogical research to prove it.
The aura of espionage seems to permeate archival records. When I was researching The Paraguayan Experiment, my book about William Lane’s New Australia settlement (2), I tracked down a Confidential Memorandum to the British Foreign Office about the settlement by M. de C. Findlay, preserved in the Public Record Office at Kew. I found it suggestive that the British Foreign Office was keeping watch on New Australia. But it was not till 30 years later when reading Andrew Cook’s M. MI5’s First Spymaster that I came across M. de C. Findlay again and my suspicions about his role were confirmed:
I Manfeldt de Cardonnel Findlay, acknowledge to have received from Sir Edward Grey, Baronet, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the sum of twenty-five pounds (£25) for the purposes of His Majesty’s Foreign Secret Service, and I do hereby solemnly declare that the said sum has been disbursed faithfully and according to my best judgement for those purposes …
There were other materials about Lane in the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney. I was allowed into the rare book stacks at one point and by chance happened to notice a shelf of boxes containing the papers of Alf Conlon (3), who ran a mysterious research unit in Sydney’s Victoria Barracks in the Second World War, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, along with James McAuley (4) and Harold Stewart (5). A note was stuck onto the side of one of the boxes. “If anyone asks for these, say we do not have them” – though when I mentioned this to Conlon’s nephew he was sceptical that there might have been any secret service implications. “He probably wrote the note himself”, he said.
Editor’s Notes
Edward Kelly (or Kelley), 1555-1595, alchemist, ‘skryer’ to John Dee in their dialogues with spirits, knighted by the Emperor Rudolf and then gaoled, died while escaping from prison. Mentioned in Butler’s Hudibras. Dr John Dee, 1527-1608, adviser to Elizabeth I, alchemist, astrologer, and mathematician, often suspected of sorcery. See https://brazen-head.org/2020/10/18/john-dee-and-edward-kelly-through-a-glass-darkly/
William Lane, 1861-1917, British-born Australian journalist who founded the socialist settlements of New Australia and Colonia Cosme in Paraguay in 1893/4
Colonel Alfred Austin Joseph Conlon, 1908-1961, high-level Australian administrator and influential think-tanker
James Philip McAuley, 1917-1976, poet, co-instigator (with Harold Stewart) of the 1943-44 Ern Malley literary hoax, and co-founder in 1956 of the Australian magazine, Quadrant
Harold Frederick Stewart, 1916-1995, poet, Orientalist, and co-instigator of the Ern Malley literary hoax
MICHAEL WILDING is emeritus professor of English and Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. His essays on Clarke’s life and works are collected in Marcus Clarke: Novelist, Journalist and Bohemian, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2021; www.scholarly.info
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD recalls a brilliant, betrayed band
All rock musicians carry a strong potential for disaster. On top of their youth and volatility, already a toxic combination, they swim in the notoriously shark-infested waters of showbusiness. Add the proximity of mind-warping drugs, uncomplicated sex and other inducements, and, notwithstanding the example of a few carefully preserved vintage hotrods like the Rolling Stones, it’s possible to see how the spectacular rock-music flameout is the rule, and truly sustained creative or personal fulfillment the exception.
When coming to consider the list of such artists to have been undermined by their own management, the writer finds himself somewhat spoilt for choice. There was the particularly poignant case of Badfinger, for example. Despite being the first signing to the Beatles’ Apple label in 1968 and going on to enjoy four consecutive worldwide hit singles, the Anglo-Welsh combo spent much of their lives locked in a bitter and ultimately unwinnable feud with their New York-based manager Stan Polley, a man apparently only dimly familiar with the concept of paying his clients. Two of the four band members eventually committed suicide.
Badfinger’s contemporaries the Zombies were another case in point. In short order, the group from the north London suburbs scored three hit singles and released an LP, Odessey and Oracle (so spelt) now ranked in Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Albums of All Time, but who found their audiences understandably perplexed by the fact that two other bands, one hailing from Texas, the other from Michigan, had both appropriated the name ‘Zombies’ (the real band had never trademarked it) and were blithely touring the world playing the group’s original hits.
Or there was Tommy James, who along with his band the Shondells had no fewer than 14 Top 40 smashes between 1964-69, enjoying a vast mainstream success that extended – surely a first in these matters – to having the Vice President of the United States volunteer to write the liner notes to one of his albums. Perhaps the one flaw in James’s otherwise glittering success story was to have signed away his rights to one Morris Levy, a man AllMusic describes as “a notorious crook who swindled artists out of their owed royalties”, and who died in 1990, aged 62, shortly before he was due to report to prison after being convicted of extortion.
The above list is far from exhaustive, and readers may well have their own candidate or candidates in mind for inclusion. Somehow I’m always reminded on these occasions of Carlos Santana’s onetime colleague Marcus “The Magnificent” Malone, who ended up living under a bridge in suburban San Francisco, where, alerted by a local news station, Santana himself once came by to say hello. The reunion seems not to have done much for Malone’s fortunes, because not long afterwards he was critically injured by an unsecured tyre that flew off a car passing by his makeshift home, and today remains on life support in hospital.
But perhaps no group of musicians suffered the slings and arrows of misfortune, and more specifically of mismanagement, quite as grievously as the Bay Area-based quintet Moby Grape. Named after the punch-line of the absurdist joke about what’s purple and floats in the sea, the band covered the waterfront from folk, blues, country, jazz and pop, with an underlying sense that the five musicians might conceivably have been on terms of some familiarity with the world of hallucinatory drugs. Their 1967 single ‘Omaha’ is surely one of the great psychedelic rock songs of all time. To those both in and out of the music business enlightened by LSD, it seemed all human problems and divisions were issues, not of substance, but of perception. With acid, the theory went, humanity could “transcend its primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility”, to quote Terry Southern’s script for the 1968 cult sci-fi romp Barbarella, and, realising the oneness of all creation, proceed directly to utopia. Nowhere was this touching belief more ingrained than in the San Francisco of the mid- to late-1960s.
That there was indeed something unusual in the air can still be heard from many of the records of the period: Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, It’s A Beautiful Day’s eponymous first LP, and the Grateful Dead’s Anthem of the Sun, to name but three that in their different ways managed to be both joyful and serious, characterised by their tactical deployment of switched-on lyrics, a propulsive rhythm, and a general spirit of adventurous improvisation epitomised by the ‘cross-talk’ guitar work that led the way to the sort of extended instrumental exchange that stadium audiences still boogie to, echoing out among the plastic cups and soggy programmes, of a ‘Hotel California’ or ‘Layla’.
Even in this illustrious company, Moby Grape’s self-titled first album, released in June 1967, stands supreme as a Summer of Love artefact that manages to be distinctly of its time and yet still with the power to move us today. Far from being self-indulgently diffuse or free-form, the band members brought to their work a tight, if idiosyncratic, sense of structure and a well developed ear for melodic economy. In stark contrast to those of many of their peers, almost all of the band’s songs came in at less than three minutes. All five musicians – Jerry Miller, Skip Spence, Peter Lewis, Bob Mosley and Don Stevenson – sang, and no fewer than three of them played variations of lead guitar. The venerable music critic Geoffrey Parr described the ensuing confection as follows:
No rock and roll group has been able to use a front-line guitar trio as effectively as Moby Grape did on Moby Grape. Spence played a distinctive rhythm that really sticks out through the album. Lewis, meanwhile, was a very good player overall, and was excellent at finger-picking … And then there was Miller
equally adept at playing the string-shredding solo as he was an unobtrusive, bluesy rhythm, and still today regularly voted one of the great all-round masters of his craft; ask Eric Clapton what he thinks about the subject.
Parr concludes,
The way Moby Grape handled their parts and played together on the first album is like nothing else I’ve ever heard in my life … The guitars are like a collage of sound that makes perfect sense
What most strikes the modern listener to Moby Grape’s freshman LP is the sheer variety of the band’s wares. Nowadays we expect our commercially successful pop acts to tick one of the approved stylistic boxes and stick to it. The Grape, by contrast, always shunned the lure of the pigeonhole. As originally released, the band’s first record comprises 13 songs lasting a total of just 31 minutes. There are fast numbers like ‘Hey Grandma’ and ‘Omaha’ that come out of the gate sounding like a revved-up fusion of Hendrix and the Sex Pistols, with added Beach Boys harmonies, if you can imagine such a thing, and slow ones like the plaintive ‘8:05’ and the refined ‘Sitting by the Window’ that bear comparison to some of the all-time great busted-heart country ballads. Like a Swiss Army knife, Moby Grape provides different tools for different needs: there are times when headbanging mayhem comes in handy, and others when a certain introspection does the trick. It’s the evocation of these disparate moods, always executed with the greatest technical skill, and a refreshing absence of self-indulgent noodling – the band members give the clear impression that they were keenly aware at all times of where a song was heading – that gives the whole record its bite. You could do much worse than to buy a copy of it today.
Unfortunately, Moby Grape’s musical acumen was matched only by their truly tragicomic litany of personal misadventures. Their problems began even before the release of their first album, when their manager presented the young musicians with a contract that gave him, not them, ownership of the group’s name. In time this led to the expedient of the band releasing their records under an alias, among various other Spinal Tap-like indignities. For its part, the group’s record company seemed to go from zero to 80, as it were, without levelling out at 40 in between, in its marketing hype. Their decision to release no fewer than five of the band’s songs as singles on the same day was widely thought counterproductive. In due course, the members of Moby Grape became aware that the suits owned the rights to their songs, as well as to their name, and 30 years of intermittent legal wrangling ensued.
Meanwhile, a combination of bad advice, bad breaks and bad behaviour served to further undermine a band that we might otherwise think of today in broadly the same terms as a more musically adept version of the Eagles or Led Zeppelin. One regrettable episode saw Skip Spence forcibly removed from his New York hotel and transported to the criminal ward of a nearby psychiatric hospital. In the 1960s, the available treatment for such issues had barely progressed beyond that afforded the most pitiful inmates of a Victorian lunatic asylum. The prodigiously talented Spence lived most of the rest of his life in a series of mental institutions and died in 1999, aged 52.
Moby Grape’s bassist Bob Mosley also displayed emotional problems. In 1969 he quit the band and, in a notable career move, joined the US Marines. Discharged for medical reasons, he spent several years living on the streets. Peter Lewis (son of the Oscar-winning actress Loretta Young) developed an interest in metaphysics, moved to the upscale wine country of California’s Santa Ynez valley – familiar to viewers of the 2004 film Sideways – and still occasionally plays the guitar. Don Stevenson managed to continue in music while becoming national sales director of a Canadian luxury timeshare concern. Jerry Miller, for his part, returned to his native Pacific Northwest, and – I speak from at least brief personal acquaintance – remains the most natural, modest and unaffected of men, let alone of psychedelic-rock guitar gods, anywhere in the world. Collectively, the band is one of those cautionary tales in rock and roll about exceptional talent being squandered on poor choices (other people’s as much as their own, it should be noted) of which the biographer Jeff Tamarkin writes:
The Grape’s saga is one of lost potential, absurdly misguided decisions, bad breaks, blunders and excruciating heartbreak, all set to the tune of some of the greatest rock and roll ever … They could have had it all, but they ended up with nothing, or less
Except, of course, that’s not quite the end of the story. Despite seeming to have been on one long death march from the moment they released their incendiary first album, Moby Grape never truly disbanded in the formal sense of the word. A reunited version of the classic lineup performed for 40,000 fans in their spiritual home of San Francisco as recently as 2007, and the four surviving originals continue to play in various combinations, solo or collective, today.
Moby Grape may still mainly be thought of as precociously talented but commercially underperforming victims of callous management, satirically inept record company marketing and mutual poor judgement, but that’s at best only half the story. There is lasting greatness in several of their albums, but the first one is almost consistently great, and progressively so, an overall experience as thrilling as any that their particular brand of music can provide. I can’t imagine that anyone would listen to it now without at least reflecting on how great rock music’s promise was back in 1967, and how far it’s fallen.
FURTHER INFORMATION
Moby Grape’s self-titled first album is still widely available from all the usual outlets. For further information on the band’s guitarist Jerry Miller and his music, contact either Jo Johnson or Arne Nordwall at jerrysattic@turtlesociety.com
DAVID UPTON looks to the future of psychogeography
Artists, academics, eccentrics, the flippant, the deadly serious, those with a plan and those without one, cluster around psychogeography like politicians round a fake news story, anxious to use it for their own objectives, or just to have a good time. It was largely with the last option in mind that I set up a psychogeographical group, the Strand Strollers, in 2017. (I was doing an MA at King’s College in the Strand at the time, hence the name.)
Psychogeography is a term coined in the 1950s, probably by the Situationist International, a group of artists originating in France, or by the Letterists, a similar group. (Several people, such as Guy Debord, were members of both groups at different times.) Much has been written about what the word meant then and means, or should mean, now. In my view, the originality of the first psychogeographers was simple. They walked, and they invented a series of techniques for choosing and directing their own attention. These have been concisely described (1) as:
the dérive (a free urban exploration on foot, in which the practitioner allows herself to be guided by the city’s ambiances), the détournement (a kind of culture jamming avant la lettre, in which cultural products are subverted and weaponized as a means of ideological sabotage), and the construction of situations – temporary site-specific ‘performances’ that aimed to unify art and everyday life
The broad purpose of these techniques has been much discussed, but it seems to be to help yourself to see things with new eyes, to discover unseen patterns and inter-relationships.
Ever since then, small but significant numbers of people have been using these techniques, most often the dérive. They have been used by writers such as Iain Sinclair or Will Self, by occultists such as Julian Vayne, by Marxists and other political groups, by local groups campaigning for a specific purpose, by oral historians, by artists, and by people who just wanted to have an interesting walk with good company.
Close to the path of every psychogeographer as they walk lies the rabbit-hole of Theory, down which many fall. PhDs abound. Debord himself seems to have talked far more than he walked. Neologisms are coined, similarities exposed and rejected, philosophical and political positions staked out. There’s a relative mountain of literature, in the byways of the internet, on social media, and the web sites of individuals. As Tina Richardson, herself one of the leading and most interesting British theorists says, “the objectives for walking are over-determined”. (2)
The idea of the Strand Strollers was to walk, not to theorise. It became necessary after I attended the 4th World Conference of Psychogeography (4WCOP) in 2017 in Huddersfield. [3] We heard some talks and went on some fascinating walks, and I was hooked. I could find nothing comparable ‘down south’. So, shortly after starting at King’s, I put up a few ‘Strand Strollers’ flyers on college notice boards, spoke to people in the geography department and elsewhere, opened a Facebook group, and sat back to wait. About 40 people joined the Facebook group, quite quickly: they came from all over, with only a few from King’s. I had messages of support from other groups.
Planning our first dérive was a matter of choosing between many options. King’s is in one of the oldest parts of London, rich in associations past and present, busy, a mass of contradictions, and it was just – well, there. People temporarily not at home pay huge prices for theatre tickets, whilst people with no homes sleep in the Embankment Gardens or on the night buses. Nearby is one of the few surviving cabmen’s shelters in London, and an 18th century fake Roman Bath; underneath the Philosophy Faculty is an abandoned Tube station, where George Formby performed during the Blitz to raise morale. Students now come to King’s from countries all over the world, especially from those with a high Gini coefficient. It has a massively decorated Victorian chapel on stilts. It’s fashionable, there are some clever people there, and there are lots of authentically middle-class cafes.
We walked using some old maps of the area – dating from 1578, 1677, and the 19th century. A settled world was torn apart during the 19th century: Waterloo Bridge and its new approach roads were opened in 1817, completely changing traffic patterns on the river bank. By 1860, the second upheaval: the Victoria Embankment was built. The banks of the Thames once sloped down gently to the river, amidst a growing amount of raw sewage. So bad was the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858 that Parliament considered moving to Oxford, but instead built the Embankment, with a sewerage system and an underground railway below it, and a new road and some pleasant public gardens on top. For the first time the Thames had a wall, and became a place to promenade rather than to avoid.
As a result, the maps changed a lot. Some of the street shapes have survived. The road in front of the LSE is still there: but where the LSE stands now, politically unaware sheep once bleated. There are mysterious survivals: a long narrow flight of steps that no longer go down to the water’s edge, a traffic island with a huge church perched uncomfortably on it, its windows looking as though they have not been cleaned for a century or more. Walking, we found the remains of a lonely party; a man dreaming on a bus; people living their lives below pavement levels. Size of group: me plus one other. Not bad for a first attempt.
Our second dérive was very different. Commuting through Waterloo station, it occurred to me that everyone there was either rushing through (to reach a particular place as quickly as possible) or standing still (waiting to find out where to rush.) Could we use psychogeographic techniques to influence time? If we walked very slowly indeed (neither rushing nor standing still), would our perceptions alter?
Preliminary photographic reconnaissance convinced me they would. If you photograph people walking using a time exposure, they look very different. Feet stay briefly in one place, then move quickly to another for another brief stay. The feet show whilst the rest is a blur. Slow the exposure down even more, and faster walkers disappear altogether. It’s as though the speed with which the camera perceives alters what it perceives. Does this happen to humans also? If so, can we control what we experience by controlling our speed of seeing?
We billed this as ‘the world’s shortest dérive’. It was short in distance only, since a typical distance was about 70 yards, walked in 45 minutes. This translates to one short step every 30 seconds. Two other Strollers, both Italian, turned up at Waterloo station at the height of rush hour. We chose our short routes carefully, to avoid crossing major flows of human traffic, and set out on our journey into time.
However stupid you may feel at first, no-one else notices. Your rhythm is too slow for them to see you. They are all rushing to be somewhere by a deadline, or else they are standing still waiting for something to happen. The important thing is to keep walking, however slowly: then you are setting your own time, and not following anyone else’s.
You quickly begin to feel happy at the slow speed. Time ceases to be important. Boredom does not set in. On the contrary, you start to notice how the girders that support the station roof have not been painted for a long time, how a deflated Christmas balloon is still hanging from one of them. Waterloo is full of clocks, so timing your short steps is easy, just demanding enough to keep your mind from rambling.
People who are standing on the path you are trying to follow, move out of your way a long time before you reach them. You stop worrying about collision avoidance. Travellers on the concourse below trace out strange patterns, flowing off the concourse like water down a drain. Each of them is an individual consciousness with their own thoughts and experiences. The station is crackling with brainpower on the move. Someone down there has had the best day of their lives; someone else is depressed and fearful for the future. Most are thinking of where they want to be in an hour’s time. There is a constant flow, almost all in one direction, until the rush hour starts to weaken. You, however, are out of this, in your own time and space. It does not seem like 45 minutes have elapsed when you decide to stop.
My next experience was not with any Strand Strollers, though I did my muggle best to persuade someone else to come with me. Treadwells, a London esoteric bookshop, advertised a workshop on occult psychogeography, to teach “the art of transforming one’s experience of everyday world into something rich and strange”, promising “several occult methods for encountering the spirits of place, and a range of techniques for re-enchanting your own landscape”. I felt it my duty to go, albeit with some trepidation.
There were 15 of us, initially in the basement of Treadwells, some more nervous than others. Three of us were quasi-academics schooled in the Situationist/‘materialist’ strand (me included, I suppose) and at least three people seemed to have had no encounter with either psychogeography or occultism before. Two were training to be London Tour Guides. To my relief I found no wild-eyed sorcerers. I think there were a few sorcerers, but they were not wild-eyed. For the record, I should add that there were only passing references to psychedelic drugs, and none to Crowley, and no goats were sacrificed.
What struck me most of all was the similarities between what the occultist, Julian Vayne, was doing and what the Strand Strollers did. True, before our walk, we all lay on the floor for a short guided meditation. Then we held hands and performed a ritual invocation (if that’s the correct term – but this was just four synchronised breaths and what seemed very like saying grace before a meal.) As we started we were ‘smudged’ with incense. Then off we went for a walk round Russell Square and a few other places. Julian had a repertoire of techniques for distracting your vision: look for simulacra, or reflections, or edges; follow a particular colour. Walk in a physically different way, or carry an object, or make a noise as you walk.
Some of his more interesting techniques were designed to expand our sense of agency, of contributing to the place, rather than just being a passive spectator. For example, say hello to things, find ‘points of intervention’. We made a few slightly self-conscious gestures, like holding hands in a circle in a public park. Julian pointed out that making small changes can have a greater effect than you imagine, and emphasised that we should actively work on ourselves and our own perceptions:
be amazed at the magic of everyday. Pay enough attention that when the miraculous happens, you notice it
My worst mistake was to call a Strand Strollers’ dérive in February. Dutch psychogeographer Witold van Ratingen gave an inspiring talk to 4WCOP about a ‘smell walk’ – where you are led as much by your nose as anything else. Covent Garden, with its colonnades and arcades and its restaurants and shops, seemed to offer as many smells as anywhere else near to the Strand, so I picked a date and wrote it up on the Facebook group. After all, one of the few documented Situationist dérives was in les Halles, and Covent Garden, which also used to be a working wholesale market, is perhaps the London equivalent.
Despite this illustrious precedent, it turned out that I had picked the coldest night of the year, with a particularly heavy snow fall. No-one else was stupid enough to turn out. Secondly, I had not realised that smells do not seem to transmit through very cold air. Even if they did, no-one eats outside and restaurant doors are closed.
I turned the dérive into a solitary photographic expedition – that is, I took a few pictures and went home feeling foolish. Shortly thereafter, I got my MA from King’s and started further studies at Goldsmiths College, in New Cross. Partly because the second course was much more like hard work, and also because the New Cross area has few authentic middle-class cafes, I have not organised any dérives through the Strand Strollers since. However, once the position on COVID is clearer, I intend to start again.
Two issues have arisen over the last five to ten years, with associated technical developments, which may profoundly affect the practice of psychogeography in the future. First, psychogeography is all about going somewhere unexpected: but what do you do when you get there? Do you make ‘interventions’ as you walk? Do you expand your sense of agency?
Guy Debord envisaged creating ‘situations’ in places, but does not seem to have done so very often. As psychogeographers, we are more concerned to avoid polluting the environment, whether with plastic bottles or extraneous influences. We go there, we look, we absorb, and some of us go away and write about our experiences. As already discussed, Julian Vayne uses occult techniques to contribute to places (prayer, gestures, invocations). But trying to leave your mark, on the place or yourself, is a fringe activity in mainstream psychogeographic practice. You could argue that psychogeography is a technique for having a fresh, open encounter with life: whereas creating ‘situations’ involves at least one person imposing their will or preconceptions on others. If you use Google Maps to see what is nearby, for example, you will see local restaurants advertising. Ethically, it is perhaps wrong to alter places. Banksy’s art involves some great détournements, but what if I paint something crude on a beautiful building? People have very different ideas of what constitutes an improvement.
Julian Vayne invited us to form pairs, and then, in turn, for one person to blindfold the other and lead him carefully for a few steps before removing the blindfold. If you could find a different environment within a few paces (e.g. go from a green space to an enclosed court), you could achieve a real sense of surprise in your partner. This seems a more acceptable intervention: you do not alter the environment, and, although you work on your partner’s perceptions, you only do so using what is available.
Perhaps it was in this spirit that oral historian Simon Bradley gave some performances during dérives at the 4WCOP. Bradley is not primarily a psychogeographer: he is interested in the process as an adjunct to oral history. However, his PhD thesis [4] contains some interesting techniques and links for what he calls “displacement activities”.
Defining ‘deep mapping’ as “anything imaginable that can be associated with a place”, Bradley defines (4) displacement activities as
performances of deep mapping that operate through ‘juxtapositions and inter-weavings of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the factual and the fictional, the academic and aesthetic depth’ […] One-dimensional understandings of locality are détourned by combinations of oral history, sound art and theatrical intervention. A prime methodological directive of displacement activities is to unearth every possible level where displacements may be operating, finding and exploiting fissures occurring in monistic, fixed, representationalist, or metahistorical characterisations of place. Displacement activities are a form of opportunistic bricolage designed to extend co-presence and elicit response in an ongoing exchange within and between people, voices and sites
Bradley studied and enacted translocational mappings between two distant sites that refer to each other. The “Giotto tower” built in 1899 as a dust extraction chimney for a mill in Holbeck, Leeds, proved to be based on the original campanile in Florence, built in 1334-1359, partly by Giotto. Bradley conceptualised these related towers as a “wormhole” between the two sites, notionally allowing sounds or directions from the one to interact as part of a dérive in the other. (There’s an interesting piece of software, MAPfrappe, at http://mapfrappe.com/about.html; this allows you to view two maps, and will automatically overlay a route drawn on one map on to the other, in the same scale. So you could walk “around the Palazzo del Duomo” in Holbeck, or “around Globe Road Hunslet” in Florence.)
Locative technology allows you to “embed” sounds or words in the landscape: your smartphone can then play them when you are at a given GPS location. Bradley used this to embed one of his own sound pieces into the landscape. Embedding using GPS does not involve actually leaving anything there: it could be done by using a ‘pointer’ on Google Earth, as many businesses now do, or by writing code to respond to the coordinates. Augmented reality applications can be set to identify and respond to any distinctive shape. A well-publicised use of embedding is Pokémon Go, a game in which players find virtual characters at a real GPS location; these can be viewed on a screen and offer limited interaction as if they were really there. According to Wikipedia, by early 2019, the game had over a billion global downloads and grossed more than $4 billion in revenue.
I tried out Echoes (https://echoes.xyz/echoes-creative-apps), a partly free app which allows anyone to select areas bounded by GPS points, and link each area to a sound file. The ‘walk’ I tried simply played a sound file of ducks when I stood in a certain area. This was a very limited ‘walk’, but it’s clear that some sound artists are building geolocative practices around this app (for example Giovanna Iorio – https://explore.echoes.xyz/profiles/giovanna-iorio). There may be great possibilities here one day, as the technology improves and creators start to use it imaginatively.
Geomap is another piece of software which allows you to create tags on a Google Map, which you can click to take you to commentary, sound files, images or information. See, for example, A Different Lens by psychogeographer Sonia Overall and others. (https://cgeomap.eu/adifferentlens/) This enables you to walk around Margate calling up commentaries and thoughts.
A simpler and more temporary version is simply to use a QR code, say in the form of a sticker which is temporarily placed at a location. Using a barcode reader on your phone calls up a website. (see my own ‘artistic intervention’ on a memorial to the poet Blake, at https://www.codedwalls.com/wblake). The sticker is carefully placed not to cause damage, and will soon wash away.
I have reservations about many uses of geolocative technology: it is used by museums who want to guide me patronisingly through their collections, scripting a ‘high-quality’ standardised tourist experience that still leaves me enough time to visit the gift shop. This is known as “the experience economy” (5). Psychogeography should be about seeing new things for yourself, rather than seeing what an invisible organising voice wants you to see. But this technology is now available, and it’s up to us to use it in creative and improving ways.
A second set of technical developments involves communication between walkers. These technologies have been around for some time, but the COVID 2019 outbreak has brought them to psychogeography. The 2020 4WCOP, looking ahead to a summer of lockdown, looked for methods to conduct multi-person dérives remotely, linking people who were distant from each other.
I was able to try four of these over the conference weekend. In each case the participants walked alone, in different places, but were linked by social media. Most people were in the UK, but some took part from places as far apart as the US or India.
These dérives are a two-way flow of information. The organiser provides basic directions or ‘prompts’. These may be a direction to follow (e.g. ‘right’, ‘down’). They may be something to look for, or a general theme (“visions and dreams and imagining the future that we want”). It may also include other targets (“can you see evidence of extra-terrestrial influence? What can they teach us?”) or general guidance (“look for […] where beckons you in, or keeps you out”) In one case no guidance was offered; the premise of the walks was that you would go with a dog and let the dog lead you, comparing notes over social media (your account, not the dog’s.) The participants then post comments, images, thoughts, or sound recordings, just as they would chat during a physical walk.
Systems used vary. One was conducted on Twitter using a hashtag and the @name of the organiser. One was conducted on Whatsapp, though it also posted instructions to a blog and encouraged participants to share their thoughts on a Facebook group, and/or on Twitter with a tag and an @name for the group, as well as Whatsapp. One was solely on a Facebook group. The fourth involved signing up through EventBrite, which then provided basic instructions, and encouraged users to post photos on Flickr.
Once in and connected, I found it difficult to follow the conversations. Twitter cases, for instance, were conducted partly by replies to existing tweets and partly by new tweets. These are presented separately, and it is not easy to follow the exchanges chronologically or to see a discussion as a unit. The Whatsapp group was better, since everything is in chronological order on the same screen. However, this group, which is well-established and meets regularly, generated over 450 postings in a couple of hours. New to it, I found myself scrolling back and forward to find the prompts amidst the chatter, to see what I had to do next.
A group on Facebook was much smaller: it had 22 members, not all of whom seem to have taken part, and there were 20 postings, plus about a dozen comments made on individual postings.
The group that started on Eventbrite and ended up on Flickr produced about 200 images in an hour (eight of them my own). The images did not seem to be organised in any way, eg chronologically, and there were few comments. It would be possible to transform all of these sets of comments into a coherent narrative after the event, but this does not emerge obviously from the raw data.
I am still not sure to what extent participants who do not already know each other are united by these groups. I knew perhaps 5% of the other participants in these virtual dérives, even if only through speaking to them on the telephone or in virtual conferences. Some coherent conversations emerged, e.g. about the weather. (During one dérive, it was raining heavily in some parts of the UK, but not in others.) One feature I photographed and commented on attracted four comments, others were ‘liked’. However, I was far too busy to like or comment on what other people had done.
It took a while to get used to the etiquette of posting. The exchanges are polite and supportive, although largely solipsistic: this is what I saw, what I felt, what it made me think of. There is also, I think, an element of self-presentation in most of them. I was conscious in my own postings
of a need to conform with the ‘rules’, or at least to respond to the ‘prompts’ rather than be seen to have missed the point
to show photographs that presented my environment in certain ways, and make comments that seemed ‘interesting’.
As Bame and Boyd pointed out [6], in
our social media productions people actively construct identities, over time, influenced by the media, the broader contexts within which they use them, and their personal proclivities. People are strategic … and can be very aware of how they use these media
However, virtual or semi-virtual dérives will become more commonplace and the technology will improve, to offer some intriguing possibilities. This is something else the Strand Strollers may try out. One possibility may be to have a less intense dérive that lasts two or three days.
Thanks to geolocative and communications technologies, we may be facing a Copernican revolution in psychogeography, the biggest changes since that first evening Debord, Bernstein and Vaneigem may have spent in a wine bar near Les Halles, realising they had got something, but not at all clear what it was.
The Strand Strollers will be back on the streets shortly, with some new ideas and maybe new technology, but with a strong emphasis on walking rather than writing theory. We will haunt nice middle-class cafes and interesting London pubs, once they reopen. Feel free to join us on https://www.facebook.com/groups/1918925755026459
The 4th World Congress of Psychogeography, known to its friends as 4WCOP: see https://www.4wcop.org. I attended the 4WCOP in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. It is always the 4th Conference: next year’s will never be the 5th
A thorough account of how the word ‘experience’ is used in a marketing context, and elsewhere, is at Caru, A and Cova, B, 2003: “Revisiting consumption experience:A more humble but complete view of the concept”, in Marketing Theory, volume 3(2), available (behind a paywall) from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14705931030032004 , accessed November 2020
Nancy K. Baym & Danah boyd (2012) “Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction”, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56:3, 320-329, DOI: 10.1080/08838151.2012.705200: To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.705200 . Accessed November 2020
DAVID UPTON started his career in the UK Foreign Office, then left to build up, with some friends, a specialised management consultancy company, which organised crisis simulation exercises all over the world, for several of the world’s largest companies. Eventually it occurred to him that he had created far more ‘situations’ than Guy Debord ever did, and from there it was a short step to becoming a computational artist. He now uses small pieces of wire to pick the locks of the doors of perception, and seeks (legal and non-pharmacological) ‘technologies of the self’
KEN BELL enjoys an amusing and observant, if ultimately insubstantial, account of an eventful political period
The Diary of an MP’s Wife, Sasha Swire, Little, Brown, 544 pages, £8
A diarist needs a good eye for the little details that makes the reader feel that he is in the room where the events are happening. Sasha Swire has that diarist’s eye in good measure and uses it to full effect in The Diary of an MP’s Wife. Thus when meeting the Countess of Wessex, Lady Swire notes when the Countess talks about giving up her career in PR that there is “real regret in her eyes and sadness that this part of her life is gone and not allowed to return”. Meanwhile, Prince Edward, husband to the Countess, comes over as “over-excitable like a puppy”, which rather sums up his whole life when you think about it.
Along with her good eye for the small details, this authoress is also the mistress of the cutting, throwaway, dismissive comment, as she demonstrates on almost every page of the diary which covers the years 2010 to 2019 when her husband, Sir Hugo Swire, who is known as “H” throughout the volume, was in government. One of my favourites is her conclusion that Kate Middleton and her family displayed “middle-class dignity” during the 2011 royal wedding. Only the genuine upper-class can damn with faint praise like that.
Reading this volume, I was struck by how little there is about the great events of the period and how much is dedicated to sticking the boot in to people that Lady Swire does not like. The fact that most of them seem to be in the Conservatives, the party that her husband represented in the Commons, rather suggests that Harold Macmillan had it about right when he commented that a man’s political opponents are on the other side of the House, and his enemies are all around him on his side.
The greatest event covered by the diary must be the 2016 Brexit vote, but it is really only covered in passing. Having seemingly done very little during the campaign, Sir Hugo and Lady Swire decided to go to Scotland for a few days in the Highlands on polling day, and left on the sleeper train, thinking that victory was theirs. However, as the dawn rose and the news came through that victory had gone to the other side, Lady Swire dragged her husband out of his bed and they both returned to London to hold David Cameron’s hand. On the way back, one of the daughters rang up to cry that “old people and White Van Man have stolen her future”. Her mother, who presumably is aware of just how wealthy, privileged and connected the family is and that the little girl is in no danger of being reduced to taking in washing, has no sympathy and tells her that “she should have made more of her friends get out of bed and vote”.
Aside from paying back old scores, the diary really succeeds as an account of just how incestuous the Tory leadership crew is. This is the chumocracy in action, with people who are part of that magic circle getting a respectable naming and everyone else receiving a mocking nickname. So, David Cameron is referred to throughout as “DC” and Theresa May is dismissed as “Old Ma May.” George Osborne is “Boy George” in the diary, probably because he is only an honorary member of the magic circle, having been a day boy at his public school and his father being something in trade. I went to a secondary modern so all this is Greek to me, but it means something to this crowd.
It is not just that they all know each other, but they have been friends for years. So, Amber Rudd, who has now returned to well-deserved obscurity and will only merit footnotes in the histories that will be written of this time, seems to feature on far too many pages as if she is a really important person. Actually, she has been a friend of Sasha Swire since both were in their teens, and it shows in the diary in the sympathetic way she is portrayed and the amount of references to her.
This is all very much a book written by a member of the higher caste for other members of the caste who understand instinctively the cultural references. Thus, H goes to meet DC one Saturday morning in his casual attire and DC looks at his brown shoes, lifts an eyebrow and says, “Brown in town, Hugo?” To which Hugo replies that it is the weekend and he should not be in town but in the country, and so on and so forth.
There is nothing wrong with an authoress writing a book for her social set, and Sasha Swire is certainly a quite excellent writer with a fine turn of phrase who has crafted a work that it was a pleasure to read. The sad thing about her book is that it is unlikely to be referred to by future historians because the bulk of it is concerned with people who will be of interest only to the hardest of hardcore historians; thus it will date very quickly for the general reader.
KEN BELL is a Mancunian who fetched up in Mexico, and who now lives in shabby retirement in Edinburgh. He writes as a hobby in his twilight years; a fuller biography can be found at his Amazon author page
KEN BELL reads a useful analysis of what led to the 2016 vote
Brexitland, Maria Sobelewska and Robert Ford, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 408 pages, £11.99
Porfirio Díaz, the man who dominated Mexican politics for a generation until his downfall in 1910, once remarked that nothing ever happened in his country until it happened. What he meant was that there has always been an enormous time lag between cause and effect in Mexican politics, and in Brexitland, Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford show that the same is true of Britain.
In doing so, they have also managed to demolish the myth that is now an article of faith in Guardian-reading circles that nobody was bothered about the EU until a couple of years before the 2016 referendum. What the authors demonstrate rather well is that many issues that were of importance to the population were suppressed by the main political parties from just after the Second World War. Viewed in that light, Brexit is about more than just leaving the European Union; it is shorthand for a lot of long-standing factors that have led to a new political division in Britain.
Immigration, of course, is the most important factor and for that reason several chapters of Brexitland are devoted to it. Starting in 1948 when the great and the good created a nationality act which allowed Commonwealth citizens to settle freely in the UK, the aim was to tie the fully independent white Commonwealth states to their mother country and to create an Anglosphere long before that word was even coined. What nobody realised was that New Commonwealth people would take advantage of this liberalism, even though since most of their countries were not independent at that time they did not need this legislation. As Sobolewska and Ford point out, both parties supported immigration even when it became obvious that many of their traditional supporters did not.
The opposition to that policy, begun in places like Smethwick in 1964, continuing on via Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 and culminating, possibly, with Margaret Thatcher’s 1978 comment about people being afraid of being ‘swamped’ by new Commonwealth immigrants certainly helped the Tories acquire a reputation in the public mind as the party that was sounder on immigration than Labour. However, as Edward Heath proved when he decided to allow around 30,000 Ugandan Asians to enter the country, that soundness was often more in word than deed. As the country moved into the 21st century, with Labour allowing a major influx of eastern Europeans – many of them settling in areas that had no previous experience of immigration –people woke up to the fact that neither party was prepared to speak for them on that issue, so they began to support Nigel Farage and UKIP.
Other factors were in play, such as the growth of the university sector, which led to many inner city areas becoming home to students and graduates, who often made common cause with ethnic minorities to create a new voting core for Labour. That new core strategy was based on the gamble that the party’s traditional, collectivist, industrial working class voters would stay onside as they had nowhere else to go, but UKIP proved the flaw in that argument. As the authors also make clear, the new core was not as tribally loyal as the old one had been and was quite willing to dump Labour if they disagreed with particular party policies.
Out of all this churning, new identities were created, and a new political division was created. The referendum campaign, with its binary choice, forced people to choose one side or the other – and having made their choice they often found that they had more in common with people on their side of the referendum debate than they had with the parties with which they had once identified. Leading on from that, as the authors do, we can see that the referendum campaign made people aware of this new division, as well as helping to shape it. At the end of it, Britain had “two new tribes aware of who they were, what they stood for and what they opposed”.
A good example of this in action is not included in Brexitland, probably because it happened too late for inclusion. During the European election campaign in 2019, Featherstone Working Men’s Club (near Wakefield) played host to a Brexit Party rally. One of the main speakers was Anne Widdecombe, arguably one of Thatcher’s more ghoulish ministers, who was nicknamed “Doris Karloff” back in the day. The club’s members, men who had stood on the picket lines during the miners’ strike of 1984/85, cheered her to the echo, to the utter disgust of the Guardian.
The 2016 referendum was very much the victory of one identity, which was the geographically rooted, socially conservative, but often economically radical section of the population against the Metropolitan, white-collar graduate element. Although the authors do not quote Theresa May, she may have had a point when she spoke about people from somewhere clashing with people from nowhere. Brexitland is a heavyweight, academic text that should be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this new political alignment in Britain and how it came about.
KEN BELL is a Mancunian who fetched up in Mexico, and who now lives in shabby retirement in Edinburgh. He writes as a hobby in his twilight years; a fuller biography can be found at his Amazon author page
HELEN C. NEAVE recalls how she swapped scalpels for spades
Ten years ago, I put down my scalpel and took off my scrubs, hat and mask for the last time. After eight years as a consultant surgeon I was turning a corner I hadn’t really seen coming. Now at work, I’m more likely to be dressed in wellies and waterproofs and clutching a spade.
My surgical training was arduous and longer for me than for many colleagues, as I had completed it part time to allow me to look after my three children. I had also studied for a Masters in Postgraduate Education, and it was into the realms of quality management of postgraduate education that my first ‘redirection’ took me. My career took me to a senior leadership role in the NHS, overseeing education and training at a time when all parts of the NHS were undergoing restructure after restructure. After four years, it became impossible for me to do my job to the standard I wished to do it, so I took a deep breath, and left.
At around the time I saw my last patient, my husband and I had been getting increasingly concerned about the destruction we were witnessing in the natural world. So we decided to take action! We bought 26 acres of rough grazing land in Yorkshire with the intention of giving it back to Nature. Bounded on three sides by the river Nidd, it was prone to flooding, so wasn’t attractive to the arable farming neighbours – but it was perfect for us.
We left our land for a year or so to get to know it a little better – but in honesty, it was not much more than grass. So we planted 20,000 trees, with support from the Woodland Trust- and the trees brought magic! As soon as the trees had their first flowers, fruits and seeds, they attracted insects and birds, and then mammals and birds of prey arrived. We suddenly had a full ecosystem. When the young woodland reached six or seven years old, we were so thrilled that we decided to do it again, but bigger.
We decided to buy some more land, and continue giving space back to nature, but this time make it a business. When we saw Bank Woods, near Summerbridge in the Nidderdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, we knew we had found the perfect piece of land. It is 110 acres, with ancient woodland, unimproved upland, swift-flowing brooks and hay meadows. Once again, the first job was to get to know the land better, and we discovered that the land had been ‘benignly’ farmed. Seen on Google maps, it was much yellower than the chemically-induced bright green of neighbouring farms. This was ideal for our intentions. The ancient woodlands were wonderful, but with signs of over-browsing by deer, and fragmented into four blocks separated by fields. They contained an amazing abundance of wild flowers, including many ancient woodland indicator species.
We thought carefully, and sought advice about the best way to manage the land for biodiversity. We knew we wanted to plant more trees – but where should they go? We discovered that ‘red-listed’ ground nesting birds, lapwing and curlew were nesting in our upland grassy areas. We knew they would leave if there were too many trees from which predators could swoop on their eggs and chicks. We also appreciated that linking the ancient woodlands back together would provide more cover for the many woodland birds, foxes and hares we had seen. So, we created a much bigger continuous area for woodland wildlife. We had to invest in a deer fence to keep those cute but destructive animals out of our new woodland planting, and the ancient woodlands. The upper parts of the land, about 50 acres, we have left for (relatively small-scale) rewilding. We have a small herd of Belted Galloway cattle, and a recent addition of six Exmoor ponies – who, all together, are our conservation grazing team. Their style of grazing and disturbance of the soil has already allowed the return of many wildflowers not seen on that area while it was heavily grazed by sheep. Earlier this year, much to our delight, Bank Woods was designated as a Site of Importance for Nature Conservation.
We are painfully aware that not only is our planet facing a climate crisis, caused by human action, but we are also living through the sixth mass extinction, with 60% of wildlife lost since 1970. We therefore see it as a moral imperative to do everything in our power to address these two linked and devastating planetary emergencies. We have taken many smaller actions to create habitat and increase biodiversity. We have dug ponds, made leaky dams, put up bird boxes, and restored wildflower hay meadows.
All these actions cost money, and so we have established various income streams, all deeply connected to nature. We have an eco-friendly holiday cottage within our nature reserve, and allow guests exclusive access to our woodlands and meadows. We sell eco-friendly, plastic-free products. We offer tree dedications, and dedications of ponds and wildflower meadows. We also offer carbon offsetting through tree planting for individuals and businesses, including a popular subscription schemes. We have many business partners for whom we plant trees, and this has proved a wonderful way for them to attract new business, by sharing their ‘green’ credentials. Recently, we have formed a partnership with a company which has developed a method to combine the ashes from a cremation with growing compost, in which a tree can be planted. (Cremation ashes can otherwise be toxic.) The memorial tree can then be planted in our new memorial woodland.
In parallel to this rewilding of the land, I have experienced a personal rewilding! As a surgeon, my world was one of precision, urgent timescales, accurate planning, and predictable, managed outcomes. I gave one patient at a time my undivided attention. As a senior NHS clinical manager, I discovered that managing whole departments was much less precise than dealing with one patient at a time; timescales were slower, and outcomes more difficult to define. I now often have wind-swept hair with twigs in it, unlike the theatre cap or neat haircut demanded by my previous two careers. My work attire is wellies and waterproofs, instead of heels and a neat suit.
I have become accustomed to very long timescales. During my career as a surgeon, we sometimes had to rush a patient to theatre within minutes; in complete contrast, the timescales for my work now might be measured in years. If for some reason we don’t manage to visit one of our new woodlands for a few weeks, we know that no harm will come to it; nature will just get on with doing its thing; no theatre list, spread sheets or project plans required. We have had to let go of the feeling of needing to be in control; ultimately, Nature is in charge. The most obvious signs of this come with the weather – storms can easily fell the mature trees within our ancient woodlands, and this is something we embrace! A little bit of chaos and destruction brings about new life – a fallen tree will become a new home for countless invertebrates, and light newly let through to the woodland floor will encourage wildflowers.
I have never lost the urge to help people, and I know our ancient woodlands and meadows can do wonders for wellbeing. I have completed training to become a ‘Natural Mindfulness Guide’, and we will soon be starting a programme of workshops in which people come together in a group facilitated by a mental health counsellor to learn conservation and rural craft activities, for the benefit of their mental health.
The trajectory of my career reveals a steady growth in spheres of influence. As a consultant surgeon, I could obviously operate on only one patient at a time. As a senior NHS manager, my influence was much greater – by improving the training across my region I could improve the quality of care for thousands of patients. And now my work has an even bigger aim – trying to save the planet! I feel hugely fortunate to be able to help nature in this way. It feels like a homecoming – and the most important operation I have ever done.
HELEN C. NEAVE is a former surgeon and senior NHS manager, and co-founder of Make It Wild. www.makeitwild.co.uk Facebook: @makeitwilder Instagram: @makitwilduk Twitter: @makeitwilder
Nicholas J. Higham, Yale University Press, 2018, 380 pages
LIAM GUILAR marvels to see a sledgehammer being wielded against castles-in-the-air
People in Britain have been telling stories about an ‘Arthur’ since at least the 9th century, possibly earlier. In the Middle Ages, those stories include some of the finest literature ever produced in Europe, culminating in Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th century masterpiece.
Scholarly arguments over the existence of an historical King Arthur, a single figure as point of origin for these stories, are more recent. In the mid-20th century, the idea that there was an historical figure gained ground, but the high-water mark of scholarly attempts to argue the case had passed by the 1980s. Leslie Alcock (Arthur’s Britain) and John Morris (The Age of Arthur) were both respected academics, but both their books, especially the latter’s, received the kind of academic reception about which scholars must have nightmares.[i].
Despite repeated attempts by experts in the field of ‘post-Roman’ or ‘Dark Age’ or ‘Early Medieval’ British history to discredit the various candidates, and despite the lack of evidence to support any of them, the arguments rumble on. Nicholas Higham’s new book is an attempt to demolish the idea that there is an identifiable historical figure who is the real King Arthur. It seems doomed to fail. He is not the first scholar to announce that the historical Arthur did not exist. It’s unlikely he’ll be the last.
In 1977, David Dumville, one of the leading authorities on the sources for early medieval history in Britain, concluded an article that discussed the Welsh evidence for an historical King Arthur:
The fact of the matter is there is no historical evidence about Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books
In 2013 an equally exasperated Guy Halsall, an expert on early medieval history, wrote a book offering “a corrective to the shelves of pseudo-Historical ‘Arthurian’ nonsense available in practically every bookshop in Britain”, concluding,
No sane scholar will now argue that there is definitely a “King Arthur” figure in 5th– or 6th-century history about whom anything solid can be said
In 2018 Nicholas Higham, who specialises in what used to be called ‘The Dark Ages’, produced this encyclopedic refutation of the varied and various arguments for an ‘Historical King Arthur’. He lines up the contenders – the Sarmatian Arthur, the Greek Arthur, the list of nominees with names sounding like Arthur or those whose names sound nothing at all like Arthur – the ‘if this, then this, and then that means we’ve found Arthur’ arguments, and one by one he knocks them over.
Higham’s conclusion is that
[…] we can now agree to discount King Arthur as a ‘real’ figure of the past, leaving him and his deeds to the ‘smoke’ and ‘highland mist’ of make-believe and wishful thinking; it is there that he properly belongs
I distrust that first person plural which Higham is fond of using. Reading the book is like being bludgeoned, very thoroughly and very carefully. It should settle the argument. But it won’t. Even the blurb on the cover hedges its bets. Max Adams, identified as the author of In the Land of the Giants, is quoted: “Riveting…brings the historical Arthur to what may be his last decisive battle”. “May be” because, given the nature of the evidence, there is never going to be a final, irrefutable argument.
Candidates for the historical King Arthur have their partisans. But if the experts have become more wary, the field is still held by enthusiasts who fly on a combination of ill-informed speculation and wishful thinking. They simply cherry pick ‘information’ and don’t bother with the usual rules of evidence, source analysis, linguistics or logic. If anyone is arrogant enough to believe that lacking the skills and knowledge required to move through the tangle of evidence puts them in a position to argue with people who have spent their professional careers studying that evidence, then nothing is going to dent their self-confidence.
The question of Arthur’s existence hinges on a very limited number of sources, and the combination of skill, knowledge and training required to assess the reliability of those sources is very rare. There is a world of difference between ‘looking stuff up’ on the internet, or in the library, or in the museum, and doing research. The failure to understand that difference, which is becoming increasingly widespread, lies at the heart of the ‘Arthur Was Real and Eureka I’ve Found Him’ phenomenon.
A scene from John Boorman’s Excalibur
The scarcity and unreliability of the surviving written sources can be hard to grasp. Imagine if 1,000 years from now, you are tasked with writing the history of the Trump Presidency. Your only piece of evidence is a copy of a copy of something from a newspaper. The copy was made in 2320. There’s a name attached to it, but you know nothing else about the journalist. You don’t know which newspaper the text is from, nor do you know if it is from an editorial, factual report, opinion piece or work of fiction. You have no way of checking anything in it against other sources.
And if you think that reconstructing four years from such a fragment sounds difficult if not impossible, then spare a thought for the historian of the 5th and 6th centuries in Britain, who can put the only surviving piece of contemporary insular ‘narrative history’ on a couple of PowerPoint slides. That oldest surviving narrative, written by Gildas within living memory of the battle of, or at, Badon, does not mention anyone called Arthur[ii].
All the other surviving sources were written much later and they all need to be handled with care. The problem with the sources can be demonstrated with one example,
What may be Arthur’s earliest appearance in an insular text comes in a collection of eulogistic stanzas of early Welsh poetry collectively known as y Gododdin
While often referred to as ‘a poem’, Y Gododdin, as Higham rightly states, is a collection of verses commemorating a Northern British raid on the Saxons at Catreath. The raid was a complete disaster and the verses celebrate the men who died. The problem is that Y Gododdin only survives in a 13th century manuscript. The work is generally credited to Aneirin, who is said to have lived in the 6th century. It’s worth pausing to remember that the distance in time between ourselves and Shakespeare is less than this. How much of the material, if any, in the manuscript dates back to the 6th century is a matter of scholarly controversy. Obviously, the date of the ‘Arthur reference’ makes a huge difference to the value of that reference.
Higham is willing to accept an early date, and he quotes the relevant stanza in English. The last four lines read:
He used to bring black crows down in front of the wall
Of the fortified town – though he was not Arthur –
among men mighty in deeds
in front of the barrier of alder wood-Gorddur
Gorddur is the warrior’s name, and he is being praised for his ferocious deeds in battle, although ‘he was not Arthur’. That’s all there is.
The enthusiast says it’s obvious that here we have a reference to a famous Arthur, and this proves stories of King Arthur must have been circulating (off-stage) when this verse was written.
The sceptic asks for evidence that independent stories circulated about a real character called Arthur at the time this verse was composed. The enthusiast points to the poem. Aneirin must have been able to rely on his audience to know the stories, in order for the allusion to work. The allusion proves the existence of the stories and the stories guarantee the validity of the allusion. Dizzying?
Nor does it tell us anything about Arthur except it was a famous name. It doesn’t help us to identify an Arthur, or tell us when or where or if he lived.
A literate person with the necessary patience can follow Higham’s summary of the complicated problems of dating Y Gododdin in general, and of that line in particular. But there are very few people who can read the manuscript, or its facsimile, and the number of people on the planet who have the expertise to negotiate the dating arguments and evaluate the evidence for themselves probably wouldn’t fill a coach for a day trip to Catreath.
And therein lies the real problem. Early British, post-Roman history, is a highly specialized field, but Higham, as did Guy Halsall before him, bemoans the fact that in many ways the specialists have withdrawn from the debate:
Today most specialists distance themselves from the whole issue of Arthur’s reality, citing insufficient evidence to be able to judge his place in history and declaring themselves agnostic on the matter. But their silence leaves the history-reading public with insufficient guidance to the competing claims and without the specialist knowledge to judge between them effectively, for these are highly complex issues
Higham is critical of ‘agnostic’ scholars who refuse to be drawn into a conclusion on the subject. Ironically, Max Harris, whose comment is quoted on the cover of Higham’s book (see above), wrote, in his introduction to In the Land of the Giants:
And then there is Arthur. Historical references to this legendary Romano-British warlord are very few: a list of 12 battles; a great victory recorded at a place called Badon (perhaps Bath in Somerset) a death notice, a possible mention in a battle poem [iii]
This short reference to King Arthur continues with a classic piece of professional ‘agnosticism’: ‘Arthur may be, as many historians have argued, an irrelevance, a distraction’ (p.14). Adams also includes the ‘dates’ from the Annales Cambriae for the battles of both Badon and Camlann in the timeline of the Dark Ages he appends to the book (Adams, Appendix two, p. 429). That ‘may be’ that leaves the door open – just as the inclusion of the Annales Cambriae dates for Badon and Camlann in a timeline with verifiable dates gives them a spurious authenticity [iv].
For all the evidence Higham can marshal, (his bibliography runs for 23 pages of small print) there’s never a knockout punch. If Y Gododdin demonstrates the problems inherent in the evidence, Higham’s detailed discussion of the Historia Brittonum demonstrates why it’s not possible to close the argument.
The 56th ‘chapter’ of a document known as the Historia Brittonum (hereafter HB) is the crucial piece of evidence for enthusiast and scholar alike. HB chapter 56 contains a list of Arthur’s 12 battles. It’s the oldest surviving piece of extended writing about an Arthur. It names him as a victorious war leader against the Saxons.
‘Chapter’ might be misleading. It runs to 23 lines of continuous Latin prose in John Morris’ edition. Though written in Latin, compiled in the early 9th century and ascribed to ‘Nennius’, for most of us, our access to this strange text is through John Morris’ 1980 translation, which is not without its own problems[v].
Higham, like many before him, quotes the ‘chapter’ (p. 185). But I think that misrepresents the HB. The focus on chapter 56 allows people to treat this strange compilation as far more factual than it is. My own interest is in the earlier story of Vortigern (HB 31-49) who takes up much more of the HB than does Arthur. The Venerable Bede, writing at the beginning of the 7th century, following a hint in Gildas, had made Vortigern instrumental in the fall of Roman Britain. In the HB he has become an incestuous, bigamous, drunken fool in a bad folk tale about a beautiful princess. It is not history as understood in the 21st century. Ambrosius Aurelianus, who also appears as an historical character in both Bede and Gildas, has become a vatic child who was born without a father[vi], and St Germanus of Auxerre, who is perhaps the one person in this motley crew who can be established as undeniably historical, has become a spell-working magus who prays Vortigern to a fiery death in his tower[vii]. Reading the whole text does not inspire confidence in its factual accuracy[viii].
Higham, to his credit, takes on the whole of the HB and he’s very good on what it reveals about how different 9th-century attitudes to writing about the past are to our ideas of writing history. His chapter on the HB is worth the price of admission, even if you have no interest in ‘Arthurs’, although he has written about this, at length, before.
However, it’s not possible to dismiss the ‘Battle List’. It’s not enough to point out that no one has identified the battle sites with enough conviction to convince everyone else. (Guy Halsall reported one attempt to do so based on the names of modern pubs (Halsall, 2013, p. 154)); or that if the enemies are Saxons they seem to have been much further north much earlier than any other source suggests; or that the number 12 in a work riddled with biblical echoes seems more than a bit suspect and Arthur’s 12 battles mirror Patrick’s miracles as R.W. Hanning pointed out in 1966 (p. 120): or that some of the battles seem to have been fought by a leader who chose his battlefields because their place names rhymed: or that single handedly killing 960 enemies in a single charge sounds a tad unrealistic. Even with ten hours of daylight, how many deaths is that per minute, every minute, without a break for ten hours[ix]?
There’s more. At least three centuries have passed between the events described and the time of writing. Despite decades of attempts to find one, there is no evidence for an earlier source for the list. A lost poem is the best candidate, but then it would have to be a very strange poem and a list of rhyming battles might still be unconvincing. Anyone who claims that HB 56 is based on accurate oral transmission has to explain how, given that at least 14 generations have passed between writer and event, any oral story could be passed down without alteration. As a rule of thumb, students of oral history accept accuracy is possible in a story passed down for three generations: from your grandparents to you. Not, as Higham points out, a story passed down about your “great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents (give or take a generation either way)”.
Despite all this, the weight of evidence can only say: ‘it is highly unlikely that this is a reliable source’. Higham’s analysis of the way Nennius uses other names in the HB whom we know to be historical, leads him to the perfectly demonstrable conclusion that:
This was a scholarly community prepared to manipulate the distant past, shift individuals around and invent characters to make British history fit for purpose. They amended names to better suit their needs, misquoted from and rode roughshod over earlier testimony, fictionalized historical figures and made up others de novo. The harvesting of names from their original setting to be reused in a different context was commonplace
But he can’t prove this is what happened to Arthur. He can only suggest it is likely. He also claims that to understand the HB,
Our treatment of it must depend on understanding why it was written, where the author obtained his information, how he used what he had gleaned and the ways in which he expected his work to be understood
In his discussion of these features, he’s as guilty of speculation as anyone. Granted his speculation is much more well-informed, he’s still straying out of the world of facts. He is attempting to construct not only the context of a text that does not fit any modern genre, but its contemporary purpose and reception when there is no external evidence for these. Without knowing anything about the Real Author of this text, he’s going to draw conclusions about his intentions.
When Higham lists what can be inferred about the author from the text he’s constructing an Implied Author. It’s the reader’s idea of the author. We have no way of knowing who ‘Nennius’ was, let alone why he wrote what he did, if in fact he did write it. The ‘context’ of a written text is always a construct[x]. In the absence of corroborating evidence independent of the text, such a construct is never going to be the final word on the subject.
I’d back Higham’s informed speculation against most people’s, but there’s no escaping the fact it’s still speculation. He slides from qualified statements, ‘the prologue if accepted as original……in that case he is likely…’ (my italics) to declarative ones:
These were Latin texts written by churchmen tasked with repositioning the Britons within a tradition of European history that centered on Rome
It’s that ‘tasked’ that rings the alarm bells. His reading of the evidence supports his hypothesis, but there’s no way he can prove it.
Sir Bedivere casts Excalibur back into the lake
Higham does need to be applauded for his willingness to accept that medieval authors made stuff up. There’s a peculiar strand in medieval studies, both amongst professionals and enthusiastic amateurs, that works on the assumption that everything that interests us has a prior source. Put like that, it sounds ridiculous. But the unstated assumption is that fiction is a post-medieval invention. So, when Higham surveys the evidence and writes
Wace’s introduction of the Round Table to Arthurian literature was a practical solution to an imagined problem, which there is every likelihood he came up with himself
it’s one of the best moments in the book.
The Tudor invention of Arthur – the “Round Table” in Winchester Cathedral
Given that none of the evidence for an historical Arthur seems convincing, why the persistent arguments? I think people want to believe, and don’t understand or care that the existence of an historical figure, like Alfred the Great or Lady Godiva, is not a question of belief but of provable fact. The arguments over Arthur repeatedly illustrate one peculiarity of early British medieval history. Given the lack of sources for the 5th and 6th centuries in Britain, it’s almost impossible to prove someone didn’t exist. Therefore, says the ‘agnostic’, we have to accept the possibility he did.
Higham is strongly, justifiably against this. He quotes Bertrand Russell:
’Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than the business of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake.’ He illustrated the point by supposing the existence of a teapot in orbit around the sun that is too small to be visible through even the most powerful telescope. That this assertion cannot be disproved does not mean that it should be allowed to influence our thinking about the solar system. That way only chaos lies, for such speculations are infinite
Beyond a desire to believe, what reason is there to even entertain the idea of an historical Arthur? The answer to that probably lies in a bad metaphor which should have been dismissed the first time it was used. A long time ago someone advanced the argument that since ‘there is no smoke without fire’ there must be a factual, historical basis for the medieval stories about King Arthur. Higham returns to this metaphor in his final chapter and tries to replace it with another, but it’s time someone got rid of the habit of arguing based on inappropriate metaphors.
There may well be no smoke without a fire, but stories aren’t smoke. They are stories. The metaphor implies that all stories have some kind of factual basis. That’s demonstrably not true. If we throw out the inappropriate metaphor, there’s nothing left but wishful thinking.
Anachronistically-armoured knights feast with Arthur, who is in the Round Table
For all the detail, the knockout blow never arrives. Each chapter has its conclusion which sums up the case against the particular contender/argument, and then everything is summed up again in a concluding chapter. This makes the book laboured and repetitive. While the marshalling of scholarly argument is impressive, as the book progresses and Higham goes after some of the ‘fringe’ dwellers, it starts to sound brittle.
I admit to bemused admiration for Graham Phillips. He has made a career out of finding things Arthurian. He found the Grail. He found Camelot. He identified the ‘Real King Arthur’ as Owain Ddantgwyn using a chain of reasoning that was so circular it makes a spin cycle look linear. He has not let scholarly opposition or derision stop him. Give the man his dues: he’s held his line. Recently he claims to have found Arthur’s grave[xi]. The idea that Arthur’s 5th century grave can be found by reading Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th century text has so little to recommend it that it shouldn’t require pages of detailed refutation. It is a fine example of Russell’s orbiting teapot.
And despite what Higham has written about not being obliged to disprove the existence of orbiting teapots, he’s put himself in the position where he has to do so. If the purpose of the book is to educate the history-reading public, then he has to engage with Phillips’ argument. Reading his three-page explanation of the flaws in a portion of Phillips’ argument (pp. 264-267) is like watching someone trying to swat an annoying but mobile ant with a very large, very heavy hammer. It’s hard not to think that all this erudition could be put to a better use.
Despite all the knowledge, despite the careful explanations, despite the clear statement of intent, it is hard to assess how successful this book is. Who is its target audience? Higham claims,
The purpose of this book, is therefore, to set out the main arguments which are on offer, test each one against the sources on which it relies, and determine which, if any deserve support
But it’s difficult to avoid the feeling that the conclusions were written before the tests had been done.
Anyone interested in Arthurian studies, historical or literary, will benefit from reading the book. It’s an encyclopedic survey of the subject, written by an expert. It gathers together disparate information, and the Sarmatian, Nart and Greek chapters are a welcome summary of those diverse cases. But I wonder if Higham really thinks that someone inspired by the Clive Owens’ 2004 film King Arthur which was advertised as “The untold true story that inspired the legend”, is going to read his detailed, painstaking deconstruction of the argument that Lucius Artorius Castus was the original Arthur (pp 14-39)?
I suspect the people who need to read it probably won’t. And if they do, it probably won’t change their minds[xii]. The growing cult of the self-appointed expert means there is an increasing number of people who think access to the internet puts them in a position to discover what the experts have missed, and to challenge the experts’ arguments. We’ve seen this in the 2020 pandemic; it’s not confined to Arthurian studies.
For experts in the field, they’ve heard most of it before. They’ve read some of it in Higham’s earlier work, especially King Arthur: Myth making and History (Routledge, 2002). I suspect there will be those with recognized expertise in some of the more unusual fields that he has picked his way through who might object to the finer points in some of his arguments, but most of us won’t be in a position to follow the ensuing discussion, let alone play referee.
Those who don’t have the patience to read the book will stay happily deluded. Anyone who honestly thinks Arthur was an Ancient Greek Constellation before he had a career as a medieval king is not going to let the problems of transmission get in the way. Worse, as a contributing factor, there’s someone out there willing to publish your theory, or turn it into a documentary, because people like to watch the little amateur sticking it to the experts, even when the audience has no idea what’s at stake. It’s hard not to love a story that declares the Holy Grail has been discovered in an attic in Coventry, or Excalibur has been found[xiii]. Throw in the idea that there’s an academic conspiracy to hide the truth and there’s a small industry aimed at exploiting those who want to believe. Detailed arguments about manuscript dating, linguistic borrowings, or the problems of editing and dating early Welsh poetry simply do not make great television even if they are being presented by Michael Wood.
While the arguments over the historical Arthur are fascinating for all kinds of reasons, for many who are interested in the stories that accumulated around the name, it has always seemed an interesting irrelevance. Even if it were possible to identify a single person as the point of origin for all these disparate stories, and even if the proof were so convincing Higham publicly retracted everything he’s written here, ‘Arthur’ would be a brutal thug whose claim to fame was his ability to organize the slaughter of other violent thugs. He would have nothing in common with Malory’s Arthur except, perhaps, a shared name.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to those who read early versions of this essay, and in particular to Peter Hart whose painstaking proofreading saved me from serious embarrassment. All the remaining errors are mine
Works Cited
Adams, M (2015) In the Land of the Giants. Head of Zeus Ltd
Alcock, L (1971) Arthur’s Britain. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books
Dumville, D (1977) ‘Sub-Roman Britain-History and legend’. History 62:173-92
Halsall, G (2013) Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages. Oxford University Press
Hanning, R W (1966) The Vision of History in Early Britain. Columbia University Press
Morris, J (1973) The Age of Arthur. Weidenfield and Nicholson
Morris, J (ed.) (1980) Nennius – British History and The Welsh Annals. Philimore & Co
Author’s Notes
Despite the comprehensive mauling it received from the experts, Morris’ The Age of Arthur is still on sale, and if the comments on Goodreads are any indication, still encouraging the unwary to believe
2. Gildas The Ruin of Britain. (De Excidio et conquestu Britanniae)
3. Ironically, Higham’s book denies the ‘Historical’ status of everything Adams refers to here
4. The entry before the one for Badon reads: ‘Bishop Edur rests in Christ [i.e dies] he was 350 years old.’ It tends not to be quoted by those who want to believe in the reference to Badon. Higham’s discussion of the Annales is on pp. 222-225. They are included in Morris’ edition of Nennius
5. See Higham p. 178-9 for a discussion of the problems of ‘establishing the text’ in general and with Morris’ edition in particular
6. It’s typical of the HB that in chapter 41 the boy has no known father and in chapter 42 he does
7. The HB faithfully records that there are three stories circulating about Vortigern’s death, one of which involves the ground opening up to swallow him.
8. My own interest is in the way these stories developed, rather than any desire to sort fact from fiction. You can read about the development of Vortigern’s story across time, as well as those of Hengist’s daughter and St Germanus at: http://www.liamguilar.com/the-legendary-history
9. I once pointed this out and was told that Arthur would have been using Excalibur and ‘we all know’ Excalibur was an alien artefact
10. I thought this phrase was Peter Barry’s, from Literature in Context (Manchester University Press, 2012) but I can’t find it
12. The repeated use of ‘probably’ here is nothing more than a conventional stylistic avoidance of declarative statements in an attempt to appear undogmatic. If I were a betting man, I’d bet they won’t.
13. Amateur Sleuth traces ‘Holy Grail’. The Courier Mail, August 14, 1995 p.12
LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections, including the series A Man of Heart, Presentment of Englishry and The Fabled Third (Shearsman), set in post-Roman Britain. His most recent publication is a translation of the Mabinogion folk-tale How Culhwch Won Olwen (Shearsman, 2026)
SUSAN WATSON’swork has appeared in The Rialto, The Frogmore Papers, Brittle Star, The North and Long Poem Magazine. She has also contributed to anthologies, including A Room to Live In: A Kettle’s Yard Anthology (Salt Publishing), Herrings (Blue Door Press) and The Best New British and Irish Poets 2018 (Eyewear)
Reading The Rainbow
Fourteen, and my mother’s old Penguin edition
plucked from the crammed shelf like an apple,
not Sons and Lovers because I needed a heroine,
then the narrative surge drew me onwards and in,
and the hunger of needing to know.
what they lived through and what they lived by
aspiring grappling beyond unslaked
through the cramping repeating design of lace
and the shouting drilling the rigid lines of desks
yearning after the substance of churches and cathedrals
and emotional weather
It was not a dirty book.
Those wonderful stretches of time in the barn
while the cattle browsed hay and the crying stilled;
the harvest field in the moonlight,
binding the sheaves,
the lovers racing to meet one another.
Later on, it was different.
Floating more slowly through paragraphs of declamation,
struggling with their tensions.
It was like dipping a knotted thread
into a hot drench of copper sulphate
causing irritations and disruptions in the blue liquid
so that structures formed.
These Are the Things that Should Remain Unsaid
I saw her pale, cold form glide silent by me, dead to shame as to pity.
William Hazlitt : Liber Amoris
I read his Life, and too much light spills over and echoes off buildings
and here she comes gliding like a snake across High Holborn
past all the lawyers and accountants and hard edges.
The ghost of Hazlitt’s Sarah. She doesn’t know he watched her,
his lost thing. She never saw him. Male anger gorges.
They say she wasn’t beautiful.
And Nina Simone’s voice seeps in from the next room.
It’s late at night. She sings out from a place that’s high above a city,
notes like old rags and kitchen scourers soaked in bourbon.
Deep winter and dead cigarettes infuse the air.
The words are wide and shivering.
Far too much light.
I put the book down. But still the ghost is gliding like a snake
through that contemporary crowd, past all the black and tailored sharpness,
a vague pale object with blurred edges. The only possible road
is this one that he’s heavily retracing. I’ve read the ongoing bruise,
the way life carries on, past the end of the story. She died young.
This hurt will last for over two hundred years.
It will never wear down.
Note
‘Ce Que Dit la Bouche d’Ombre’ an extract from a much longer poem, Les Contemplations by Victor Hugo. It is recited by one of the characters in the Eric Rohmer film Conte D’Hiver. The English translation is my own. The following poem, ‘By Heart’, is in the voice of another character, the film’s main protagonist, as she listens.
From: Ce Que Dit la Bouche d’Ombre
Donc, une bête va, vient, rugit, hurle, mord;
Un arbre est là, dressant ses branches hérissées,
Une dalle s’effondre au milieu des chaussées
Que la charrette écrase et que l’hiver détruit,
Et, sous ces épaisseurs de matière et de nuit,
Arbre, bête, pavé, poids que rien ne soulève,
Dans cette profondeur terrible, une âme rêve!
Que fait-elle? Elle songe à Dieu!
*
In the Mouth of the Shadow
So, a beast prowls, pads, howls, bawls, bites;
A tree is there, tensing its bristling branches,
A slab of stone subsides into the pathway
That the cart breaks down and that the winter erodes,
And, beneath the thicknesses of matter and of night
Tree, beast, stone, dead weight that nothing uplifts,
In that terrible deep darkness, a soul dreams!
What is it doing? It dreams of God!
By Heart
In memory of Eric Rohmer (1920-2010)
Your room is full of books I haven’t read,
and here are unexpected guests who won’t stop talking,
talking, of superstitions, reincarnation, the Catholic faith
and miracles. I want a miracle.
If I say I love you,
you’ll curve over your shelves, leafing and leafing
through Shakespeare, Pascal, some marble figure,
to see if it’s written there. I blurt out something,
say I’m ignorant, the words uncultured and uncouth
crouch, coiled, inside that other one.
I want a miracle.
I know my tongue is raw.
Wanting is not enough. I need another word,
not need. The word I’m scrambling after
enfolds a dream within it, but overflows those banks,
SUSAN WATSON’s work has appeared in The Rialto, The Frogmore Papers, Brittle Star, The North and Long Poem Magazine. She has also contributed to anthologies, including A Room to Live In: A Kettle’s Yard Anthology (Salt Publishing), Herrings (Blue Door Press) and The Best New British and Irish Poets 2018 (Eyewear)
Luis Quintais was born in 1968 in Angola and studied in Lisbon. He moved to Coimbra in 1995, and is professor of anthropology at the University of Coimbra. He has an abiding interest in borders, the spaces that persist between cultures, and he writes about war, trauma and memory. Quintais’ first book of poems, A Imprecisa Melancolia, was published in 1995 and his poetry has since been translated into several other European languages (including Castilian, French, Italian, English, German, Croatian and Hungarian). Quintais has won several major poetry awards, including the 2004 Portuguese PEN Club Prize for Poetry and the Grande Prémio de Poesia 2017. All the translations here are of poems appearing in his book A Noite Imóvel, published in 2017 (Assyrian & Alvim).
In attempting to translate Quintais’ deeply engaged and starkly beautiful work, LESLEY SAUNDERS is drawing on her own experience as a writer of poetry: her sixth and most recent collection is Nominy-Dominy (Two Rivers Press 2018). Her English translations – including the poem that won the 2016 Stephen Spender award – of another renowned Portuguese poet, Maria Teresa Horta, were published in 2019 by Two Rivers Press, under the title Point of Honour.
Amphitheatre
All forms of violence are unforgivable,
he said, and the shadows fell across the table.
Also unforgivable is the silence that battens down faces.
A sound emerged, pre-empting meaning. History hallucinates,
he said, and something gave way among the fallen shadows.
I made a note, and the stare, my stare, skidded on the glass
of the amphitheatre, sought transparency. But it was winter,
winter there as well, winter forever, and the plane trees
Luis Quintais was born in 1968 in Angola and studied in Lisbon. He moved to Coimbra in 1995, and is professor of anthropology at the University of Coimbra. He has an abiding interest in borders, the spaces that persist between cultures, and he writes about war, trauma and memory. Quintais’ first book of poems, A Imprecisa Melancolia, was published in 1995 and his poetry has since been translated into several other European languages (including Castilian, French, Italian, English, German, Croatian and Hungarian). Quintais has won several major poetry awards, including the 2004 Portuguese PEN Club Prize for Poetry and the Grande Prémio de Poesia 2017. All the translations here are of poems appearing in his book A Noite Imóvel, published in 2017 (Assyrian & Alvim).
In attempting to translate Quintais’ deeply engaged and starkly beautiful work, I am drawing on my own experience as a writer of poetry: my sixth and most recent collection is Nominy-Dominy (Two Rivers Press 2018). My English translations – including the poem that won the 2016 Stephen Spender award – of another renowned Portuguese poet, Maria Teresa Horta, were published in 2019 by Two Rivers Press, under the title Point of Honour
