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In the 'Millennium Trilogy' by Stieg Larsson, all the novels begin with which two words? | The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium Series #1) by Stieg Larsson, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
By Stieg Larsson
Knopf Copyright © 2008 Stieg Larsson All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780307269751
A Friday in November
It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second birthday. When, as usual, the flower was delivered, he took off the wrapping paper and then picked up the telephone to call Detective Superintendent Morell who, when he retired, had moved to Lake Siljan in Dalarna. They were not only the same age, they had been born on the same day–which was something of an irony under the circumstances. The old policeman was sitting with his coffee, waiting, expecting the call.
“It arrived.”
“What is it this year?”
“I don’t know what kind it is. I’ll have to get someone to tell me what it is. It’s white.”
“No letter, I suppose.”
“Just the flower. The frame is the same kind as last year. One of those do-it-yourself ones.”
“Postmark?”
“Handwriting?”
“Same as always, all in capitals. Upright, neat lettering.”
With that, the subject was exhausted, and not another word was exchanged for almost a minute. The retired policeman leaned back in his kitchen chair and drew on his pipe. He knew he was no longer expected to come up with a pithy comment or any sharp question which would shed a new light on the case. Those days had long since passed, and the exchange between the two men seemed like a ritualattaching to a mystery which no-one else in the whole world had the least interest in unravelling.
The Latin name was Leptospermum (Myrtaceae) rubinette. It was a plant about ten centimetres high with small, heather-like foliage and a white flower with five petals about two centimetres across.
The plant was native to the Australian bush and uplands, where it was to be found among tussocks of grass. There it was called Desert Snow. Someone at the botanical gardens in Uppsala would later confirm that it was a plant seldom cultivated in Sweden. The botanist wrote in her report that it was related to the tea tree and that it was sometimes confused with its more common cousin Leptospermum scoparium, which grew in abundance in New Zealand. What distinguished them, she pointed out, was that rubinette had a small number of microscopic pink dots at the tips of the petals, giving the flower a faint pinkish tinge.
Rubinette was altogether an unpretentious flower. It had no known medicinal properties, and it could not induce hallucinatory experiences. It was neither edible, nor had a use in the manufacture of plant dyes. On the other hand, the aboriginal people of Australia regarded as sacred the region and the flora around Ayers Rock.
The botanist said that she herself had never seen one before, but after consulting her colleagues she was to report that attempts had been made to introduce the plant at a nursery in Göteborg, and that it might, of course, be cultivated by amateur botanists. It was difficult to grow in Sweden because it thrived in a dry climate and had to remain indoors half of the year. It would not thrive in calcareous soil and it had to be watered from below. It needed pampering.
The fact of its being so rare a flower ought to have made it easier to trace the source of this particular specimen, but in practice it was an impossible task. There was no registry to look it up in, no licences to explore. Anywhere from a handful to a few hundred enthusiasts could have had access to seeds or plants. And those could have changed hands between friends or been bought by mail order from anywhere in Europe, anywhere in the Antipodes.
But it was only one in the series of mystifying flowers that each year arrived by post on the first day of November. They were always beautiful and for the most part rare flowers, always pressed, mounted on watercolour paper in a simple frame measuring 15cm by 28cm.
The strange story of the flowers had never been reported in the press; only a very few people knew of it. Thirty years ago the regular arrival of the flower was the object of much scrutiny–at the National Forensic Laboratory, among fingerprint experts, graphologists, criminal investigators, and one or two relatives and friends of the recipient. Now the actors in the drama were but three: the elderly birthday boy, the retired police detective, and the person who had posted the flower. The first two at least had reached such an age that the group of interested parties would soon be further diminished.
The policeman was a hardened veteran. He would never forget his first case, in which he had had to take into custody a violent and appallingly drunk worker at an electrical substation before he caused others harm. During his career he had brought in poachers, wife beaters, con men, car thieves, and drunk drivers. He had dealt with burglars, drug dealers, rapists, and one deranged bomber. He had been involved in nine murder or manslaughter cases. In five of these the murderer had called the police himself and, full of remorse, confessed to having killed his wife or brother or some other relative. Two others were solved within a few days. Another required the assistance of the National Criminal Police and took two years.
The ninth case was solved to the police’s satisfaction, which is to say that they knew who the murderer was, but because the evidence was so insubstantial the public prosecutor decided not to proceed with the case. To the detective superintendent’s dismay, the statute of limitations eventually put an end to the matter. But all in all he could look back on an impressive career.
He was anything but pleased.
For the detective, the “Case of the Pressed Flowers” had been nagging at him for years–his last, unsolved and frustrating case. The situation was doubly absurd because after spending literally thousands of hours brooding, on duty and off, he could not say beyond doubt that a crime had indeed been committed.
The two men knew that whoever had mounted the flowers would have worn gloves, that there would be no fingerprints on the frame or the glass. The frame could have been bought in camera shops or stationery stores the world over. There was, quite simply, no lead to follow. Most often the parcel was posted in Stockholm, but three times from London, twice from Paris, twice from Copenhagen, once from Madrid, once from Bonn, and once from Pensacola, Florida. The detective superintendent had had to look it up in an atlas.
After putting down the telephone the eighty-two-year-old birthday boy sat for a long time looking at the pretty but meaningless flower whose name he did not yet know. Then he looked up at the wall above his desk. There hung forty-three pressed flowers in their frames. Four rows of ten, and one at the bottom with four. In the top row one was missing from the ninth slot. Desert Snow would be number forty-four.
Without warning he began to weep. He surprised himself with this sudden burst of emotion after almost forty years.
Friday, December 20
The trial was irretrievably over; everything that could be said had been said, but he had never doubted that he would lose. The written verdict was handed down at 10:00 on Friday morning, and all that remained was a summing up from the reporters waiting in the corridor outside the district court.
Carl Mikael Blomkvist saw them through the doorway and slowed his step. He had no wish to discuss the verdict, but questions were unavoidable, and he—of all people—knew that they had to be asked and answered. This is how it is to be a criminal, he thought. On the other side of the microphone. He straightened up and tried to smile. The reporters gave him friendly, almost embarrassed greetings.
"Let's see . . . Aftonbladet, Expressen, TT wire service, TV4, and . . . where are you from? . . . ah yes, Dagens Nyheter. I must be a celebrity," Blomkvist said.
"Give us a sound bite, Kalle Blomkvist." It was a reporter from one of the evening papers.
Blomkvist, hearing the nickname, forced himself as always not to roll his eyes. Once, when he was twenty-three and had just started his first summer job as a journalist, Blomkvist had chanced upon a gang which had pulled off five bank robberies over the past two years. There was no doubt that it was the same gang in every instance. Their trademark was to hold up two banks at a time with military precision. They wore masks from Disney World, so inevitably police logic dubbed them the Donald Duck Gang. The newspapers renamed them the Bear Gang, which sounded more sinister, more appropriate to the fact that on two occasions they had recklessly fired warning shots and threatened curious passersby.
Their sixth outing was at a bank in Östergötland at the height of the holiday season. A reporter from the local radio station happened to be in the bank at the time. As soon as the robbers were gone he went to a public telephone and dictated his story for live broadcast.
Blomkvist was spending several days with a girlfriend at her parents' summer cabin near Katrineholm. Exactly why he made the connection he could not explain, even to the police, but as he was listening to the news report he remembered a group of four men in a summer cabin a few hundred feet down the road. He had seen them playing badminton out in the yard: four blond, athletic types in shorts with their shirts off. They were obviously bodybuilders, and there had been something about them that had made him look twice—maybe it was because the game was being played in blazing sunshine with what he recognised as intensely focused energy.
There had been no good reason to suspect them of being the bank robbers, but nevertheless he had gone to a hill overlooking their cabin. It seemed empty. It was about forty minutes before a Volvo drove up and parked in the yard. The young men got out, in a hurry, and were each carrying a sports bag, so they might have been doing nothing more than coming back from a swim. But one of them returned to the car and took out from the boot something which he hurriedly covered with his jacket. Even from Blomkvist's relatively distant observation post he could tell that it was a good old AK4, the rifle that had been his constant companion for the year of his military service.
He called the police and that was the start of a three-day siege of the cabin, blanket coverage by the media, with Blomkvist in a front-row seat and collecting a gratifyingly large fee from an evening paper. The police set up their headquarters in a caravan in the garden of the cabin where Blomkvist was staying.
The fall of the Bear Gang gave him the star billing that launched him as a young journalist. The downside of his celebrity was that the other evening newspaper could not resist using the headline "Kalle Blomkvist solves the case." The tongue-in-cheek story was written by an older female columnist and contained references to the young detective in Astrid Lindgren's books for children. To make matters worse, the paper had run the story with a grainy photograph of Blomkvist with his mouth half open even as he raised an index finger to point.
It made no difference that Blomkvist had never in life used the name Carl. From that moment on, to his dismay, he was nicknamed Kalle Blomkvist by his peers—an epithet employed with taunting provocation, not unfriendly but not really friendly either. In spite of his respect for Astrid Lindgren—whose books he loved—he detested the nickname. It took him several years and far weightier journalistic successes before the nickname began to fade, but he still cringed if ever the name was used in his hearing.
Right now he achieved a placid smile and said to the reporter from the evening paper:
"Oh come on, think of something yourself. You usually do."
His tone was not unpleasant. They all knew each other, more or less, and Blomkvist's most vicious critics had not come that morning. One of the journalists there had at one time worked with him. And at a party some years ago he had nearly succeeded in picking up one of the reporters—the woman from She on TV4.
"You took a real hit in there today," said the one from Dagens Nyheter, clearly a young part-timer. "How does it feel?"
Despite the seriousness of the situation, neither Blomkvist nor the older journalists could help smiling. He exchanged glances with TV4. How does it feel? The half-witted sports reporter shoves his microphone in the face of the Breathless Athlete on the finishing line.
"I can only regret that the court did not come to a different conclusion," he said a bit stuffily.
"Three months in gaol and 150,000 kronor damages. That's pretty severe," said She from TV4.
"I'll survive."
"Are you going to apologise to Wennerström? Shake his hand?"
"I think not."
"So you still would say that he's a crook?" Dagens Nyheter.
The court had just ruled that Blomkvist had libelled and defamed the financier Hans-Erik Wennerström. The trial was over and he had no plans to appeal. So what would happen if he repeated his claim on the courthouse steps? Blomkvist decided that he did not want to find out.
"I thought I had good reason to publish the information that was in my possession. The court has ruled otherwise, and I must accept that the judicial process has taken its course. Those of us on the editorial staff will have to discuss the judgement before we decide what we're going to do. I have no more to add."
"But how did you come to forget that journalists actually have to back up their assertions?" She from TV4. Her expression was neutral, but Blomkvist thought he saw a hint of disappointed repudiation in her eyes.
The reporters on site, apart from the boy from Dagens Nyheter, were all veterans in the business. For them the answer to that question was beyond the conceivable. "I have nothing to add," he repeated, but when the others had accepted this TV4 stood him against the doors to the courthouse and asked her questions in front of the camera. She was kinder than he deserved, and there were enough clear answers to satisfy all the reporters still standing behind her. The story would be in the headlines but he reminded himself that they were not dealing with the media event of the year here. The reporters had what they needed and headed back to their respective newsrooms.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson Copyright © 2008 by Stieg Larsson. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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In which West Central African country was Ali Bongo Ondimba elected President in 2009? | The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: Book One Of The Millennium Trilogy, Book by Stieg Larsson (Mass Market Paperback) | chapters.indigo.ca
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Praise For This Book
Details & Specs
From the Publisher
Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared off the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family. There was no corpse, no witnesses, no evidence. But her uncle, Henrik, is convinced that she was murdered by someone from her own deeply dysfunctional family. Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist is hired to investiga...
Stieg Larsson (1954-2004) was the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Expo from 1999, and had previously worked at a major news agency for many years. He was one of the world’s leading experts on anti-democratic, right-wing extremist and Nazi organisations, and he was often consulted on that account. He passed away suddenly and unexpectedl...
other books by Stieg Larsson
Rated 5 out of 5 by Bob_Hunsley from catching title Fast read, totally enjoyable
Date published: 2011-05-19
Rated 5 out of 5 by Del_B from A book like no other Loved, loved, loved this trilogy! Sleepless nights just trying to finish this trilogy. Can't find any other of this calibre, except of course R. Ludlum's Bourne series. A very unique story and a formidable protagonist. Wish there were more books like these!
Date published: 2011-05-03
Rated 4 out of 5 by kimb from Good read Enjoys this. Kept my attention. Good character development. I'm looking forward to reading the next one in the series.
Date published: 2011-03-24
Rated 5 out of 5 by Halsi_Herbert from An addictive read! Stieg Larsson has an amazing ability to captivate you almost immediately. Not my usual genre, however I found it terribly hard to put down (and have yet to find someone to disagree with me). A must read for sure!!
Date published: 2011-03-21
Rated 5 out of 5 by Valerie_Woods from Had a hard time putting this one down! This was a great read. A little frightening at times though.
Date published: 2011-03-09
Rated 5 out of 5 by pandorachick from Great read!!! This is the first book of the popular Girl with the dragon tattoo series. It's a bit slow in the beginning, introduction of all the characters and the storyline, but after about 200 pages it gets really good. It's a good story and I highly recommend it. The series is truly a fast-paced and fun read, so it's well worth getting through the slow beginning.
Date published: 2011-03-07
Rated 4 out of 5 by Caitlin_Newton from Confusing at Times After numerous people recommended this novel, I decided to read it. I found that it was rather difficult to get into the story but after the first 200 pages it became easier because of the growing mysterious plot line . At times it was difficult to keep track of the different story lines and characters, so it is a slower read at times. Also because the book orgininated Sweden, the vocabulary was a bit hard to understand. Once I managed to get involved in the book I could not put it down. It is a very intelligently written book, and I can not wait to read the next one.
Date published: 2011-01-25
Rated 5 out of 5 by ilike_cheese from Absolutely great! In the book the girl with the dragon tattoo, a two storied novel that nicely binds and meshes into one, when Mikeal Blomkvist writer for the magazine millennium meets up with Lisbeth Salander to solve the mysterious disappearance of Harriet Vanger who disappeared when she was 16. Her dear uncle Henrik Vanger loved her dearly, although they were in a big dysfunctional family with many dark corners henrik and harriet were still very close untill that one day she went missing. Mikeal was sentence to pay Hans Erik Wennerstrom 150,000 kronor for accusing him for business scandals’ etc, Mikeal was convicted on 6 of 8 accounts and therefore was sentences to 3 months prison. Lisbeth on the other hand practically 4ft nothing young adult at the age of 24 jet black hair, multiple piercings and tattoos. The book compared to the movie the movie did not meet my expectations in character aspect, but character traits and personalities were dead on, the person playing Lisbeth was everything i expect for she was a little tall although the movie was amazing. The book on the other hand was also amazing i believe it was way better than the director’s version of the movie in my head it played perfectly in order and kept scenes but in the movie i think there was way too many cut out scenes that have been cut out like from the book when Lisbeth is standing in front a door in disguise and a women looks at her as if she seen her before, then Lisbeth paces back and forth in front of the door and sees a person punch in the code 1260 she walks in she sees a Milton security cam ignores it because she knows they only work when the alarm is set. She walks up the stairs sees another door uses the same code it opens and mutters to herself, sloppy, very sloppy. I like that because it is the being of when she shows how slick and smart she is dressing up and breaking in, that is just the beginning of her smarts and slickness
Date published: 2011-01-12
Rated 5 out of 5 by Lisa_Miller from Strength in women What a great character Lisbeth is. Strong, centered as to who she is, capable, independent. Very detailed are these books, but so exciting that I was actually having trouble reading other, lighter books afterwards. Have passed on the Trilogy to other friends and family members, who too are caught up in action. Excellent books.
Date published: 2011-01-03
Rated 2 out of 5 by Pauline from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo I should have followed my instincts and passed on reading this overly long book. It definitely would be a better book if it was shorter; so much of it seems repetitive and tedious. The only character I slightly like is Salander. She is a quirky girl who is deeply scarred by life and lives on the edge. She was the only reason I finished reading the book. Unfortunately I bought the whole set of three and will most likely let the other two sit on my shelf and get dusty. Though I have read that the second book is better than the first and there is more Salander in it.
Date published: 2010-12-31
Rated 4 out of 5 by Reader1 from "Very Good...Worth your Time" I had start the first one in the spring and now finished the entire trilogy. This one is my FAVE!!! it was the best and most interesting. I recommended this book to my coworker and she loved it. Great characters and twists. Although I figured out the ending. As all the other reviews have stated you will love Salander. The entire series does very in depth on what they wear, eat, buy and see. Very descriptive. I recommend this book to everyone. You don't have to read the 2nd and 3rd to be full satisfied with this novel. To be staisfied with the trilogy and characters you will want to read the entire series.
Date published: 2010-12-20
Rated 5 out of 5 by Patricia_Taylor from Wonderful trilogy! I am now reading the third book in Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy and loving every word. The books are big which I like, an interesting story which continues from one book to the next, great characters. I can't put the book(s) down. Just a wonderful read! My Christmas present to myself and for once all the talk about these books is true - they are really good.
Date published: 2010-12-03
Rated 4 out of 5 by Melissa_Carey from Really Good Winter Read This is a really good book. It keeps you entertained from beginning to end. The reason I recommend it for winter is because it's about the size of a dictionary. Well worth the read though.
Date published: 2010-11-29
Rated 5 out of 5 by Julia_Jones from An exciting, suspenseful pageturner After hearing so much about this book I was very curious to see whether it would live up to my expectations! Although I had heard great reviews, I had also heard that it began slowly and was graphic to the extreme. Now, having read the book, I can confirm that there is truth to what has been said about the graphic scenes. Yes, the book is extremely graphic - I was shocked, actually, by some of what I read. If you are easily disturbed by violence, you might have trouble reading certain sections of the novel. And while I didn't find the beginning of the novel too slow, I did have trouble understanding some of the references to the worlds of business and journalism. That being said, those minor issues did not detract very significantly from my enjoyment of the book over all. I found it to be exciting, suspenseful, fast-paced ... similar to the Da Vinci code in many ways, actually. Don't let the size of the book daunt you - once you start reading you will find it hard to stop (trust me, I know from several nights of staying up into the wee hours of the morning!). The plot was intriguing and had me totally absorbed in guessing what would happen next, trying desperately to piece together what had happened to Harriet Vanger right along with Blomkvist and Salander. But best of all, in my opinion, were the characters. Michael Blomkvist is a great protagonist, stubborn and determined to tackle any challenge he faces, and Lisbeth Salander ... well, I will just say that you will fall in love with this feisty heroine! All in all, a great read, and one that I would definitely recommend to any mature reader.
Date published: 2010-11-06
Rated 3 out of 5 by Vanessa_Persaud from 2 out of 3 aint bad... While the storyline has a Dan Brown feel to it, the prose is obviously lacking. Even translated, it is clear that Larsson is a non-fiction writer as the novel is weighed down by information. If you are looking for an adequately entertaining read and are curious about the hype, read this book. That being said, the second and third books of the Millennium trilogy take on a more developed voice with multi-dimensional character development. Reading this book is not prerequisite to understanding the next two, so if you had the choice of skipping this book or not, skip it.
Date published: 2010-10-24
Rated 4 out of 5 by Compassionate_Warrior from Trendy great read Well I finally finished the book! shewf!! I'm so glad I read the reviews because one of the reviewers warned that it starts off maddeningly slowly for the first third of the book building the foundation for the plot and they weren't joking! If it wasn't for that forewarning I would have given up. But after that things finally get going and the action begins. It kept me enthralled until the end. Though it's a great read I'm surprised at all the fuss on the book. I guess I shouldn't be so surprised as it appeals to our worldly cultural trends and obsessions of the moment, quirky fringe outsider main character (of which I myself can identify with being fringe—I'm certainly not an insider— though not quite like Salander), finance and sexual crimes, etc. After this, before I read the next in the series I need to refresh and air out my brain with something softer, gentler, kinder. Perhaps Louise Penny mysteries or The Sunday Philosophy Club or The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency or The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie or An Irish Country Doctor or Jan Karon's latest. Oh, the skies the limit!
Date published: 2010-10-23
Rated 5 out of 5 by Laurel_Schwab from Great Read I liked it - it was a great read. Light and intriguing.
Date published: 2010-10-20
Rated 5 out of 5 by Crista from Believe the hype! I picked this book up largely due to its continued best seller status, because of the hype, and because Daniel Craig has been cast in the leading role (a guilty pleasure!). The book was a very pleasant suprise. I thoroughly enjoyed the content, writing style and characters. The book was a page turner, beginning to end, and left me craving the sequel(s). Believe the hype and enjoy ~ this is one not to be missed!
Date published: 2010-10-12
Rated 5 out of 5 by Toni__Osborne from Very captivating Book1 in the “Millennium” trilogy The late Stieg Larsson deserves all the accolades and rewards posthumously bestowed upon him for writing such an engaging and engrossing novel. In my humble opinion it is a literary accomplishment that brought hours of enjoyment and definitely lived up to its hype. Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering and her body was never found. Her beloved uncle, the powerful industrialist Henrik Vager, is convinced that she has been killed by a member of his dysfunctional family. In an attempt to prove his suspicions, he hires the disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, a tattooed computer hacker, with major issues of her own, to investigate. In their search, the pair discover that Harriet’s disappearance may be linked to other grotesque murders and that the Vanger clan will go to any means to keep their dark and appalling family secrets hidden…. The first part of the novel is dedicated to the characters and setting of the two main plots, some may find this tactic to be long and dragging but I found it to be a useful progress to understanding where the mystery was leading. The first plot evolves around Harriet Vanger disappearance and in the second the reader is plunged into a financial intrigue involving the head of a Swedish corporation. The players are a cast of misfits brilliantly realised to be despicable and lacking ethical fortitude, some are asocial and smart, others complex and sympathetic and some are dramatic or totally disturbing. The character development is outstanding and the plots are so intense I found myself deeply engaged. This is a striking novel full of passion written with a prose that is bright and functional. I enjoyed this novel immensely and highly recommend it.
Date published: 2010-10-01
Rated 2 out of 5 by Jerika_Coleman from Don't buy the hype; I'm not finishing the series. I bought this book because it seems like everybody and their grandmother has read it and wanted to see what it was all about. And now that I've finished, I don't know what everybody is in love with. Yes, the first few chapters are extremely slow. But I pushed through. I admit, once it got to the heart of the novel, once Mikael starting working on the case, I was really into it. I kept trying to figure out who it was and what happened to Harriet and was excited to see where it all went. Once the actual killer is discovered, the book is ruined. It loses whatever spark it originally had. It was such a disappointment. And then, it keeps going. The last few chapters are just as boring as the first few, but these are even less unnecessary. As well, I completely don't get this obsession with Lisbeth Salander. How anyone can stand to read more than one book with her as a character, it boggles the mind. She's not interesting. She's not likable. She's Larsson's attempt at making someone other than a stock love-interest, like all his other female characters, but even she falls for Mikael. I cringed every time I had to read a scene with her in it. I won't be reading any more of the Millennium trilogy.
Date published: 2010-09-12
Rated 2 out of 5 by Erin_Abrams from so anti-climactic! The first 65 pages were boring as I was told by others that they would be. I got through them to start enjoying the book finally and then the ending made me think, "really? that's it?" Also, the last 100 pages or so were boring all over again.
Date published: 2010-09-04
Rated 3 out of 5 by Andrea_Clark-Groden from Too much hype Average read with solid suspense but found ending "washy"
Date published: 2010-09-01
Rated 2 out of 5 by Raina from sllloooow but worth it When I first started reading this book I didn't understand what the big deal was. It was the slowest book I've ever read in my life filled with business and legal jargon as well as cultural jokes and terms that aren't easy to figure out. I had almost given up hope thinking everyone just wanted to appear smart by reading it when it finally hit me like a train. It takes more than 2/3 of the book before it finally takes off with the plot and is more than just observations and jargon. When it does take off it really does take off however. There are a few plot points that are quite disturbing and unexpected. Overall it was worth trudging through. The last bit of the book was fantastic and the next book in the series is REALLY GOOD so you need to read this one to understand it. It's mostly boring, but stick with it because it will be worth it.
Date published: 2010-08-29
Rated 5 out of 5 by Stephen_Franchetto from The Most Compelling Book I've Read This is one of my favourite books of all time. The Millenium trilogy is an excellent work and Larsson is to be commended for his imagination, character development, and exhilarating plot! Once you get past the endless number of characters you will not be able to put the book down and will most likely end up reading the entire series in a short period of time. Honestly, I can't say enough about this book and this series. If you are at all hesitant, give it a try. The movie cannot do the book justice and once you have read it, you will be recommending it to all your friends.
Date published: 2010-08-26
Rated 4 out of 5 by Lisa_from_Nova_Scotia from Couldn't put it down A very dry writing style. I wasn't sure that the story could be sustained through such a long novel, but once I started, I couldn't put it down. I see now, what all the fuss is about. They are very different books than what is out there. Steig Larsson and his translator write in a style, which makes you feel as though you were present for many of these events -- Doesn't endear the reader to Sweden, though.
Date published: 2010-08-25
Rated 5 out of 5 by RenfrewSue from Lives up to the hype A really good read; once you get past the Swedish names and places. This is fast paced book with characters who you come to love despite their many flaws. I couldn't put it down. If you like fast paced mysteries, you'll really enjoy this.
Date published: 2010-08-18
Rated 3 out of 5 by Golden_Hawk_Girl from Didn't Live Up to the Hype! I'm not gonna lie - it was a task just to get to the 100 "thrilling" pages of the book. I think without Larsson here to help with the editing, they left quite a bit more in the final publication than they needed to. However, the translation was really well done - English audiences would forget they were reading something originally written in Sweden.
Date published: 2010-08-18
Rated 5 out of 5 by Lee from Fantastic! The first couple chapters are quite slow, but after those chapters things pick up and never stop. What made this book for me so interesting was how descriptive Stieg Larsson is with his plot and characters. I couldn't put it down. After hearing so much about this series, I was not disappointed. Highly recommended!
Date published: 2010-08-16
Rated 5 out of 5 by Penny_Kagai from INCREDIBLE I have to tell you the beginning was a little dry. But about 6 chapters in I couldn't put it down. I am incredibly impressed with this book. I have also read the second and it is just as good. Ending was not so hot but, hopefully the third will be great. Let's hope the family decides to publish the 4th...Can't WAIT!!
Date published: 2010-08-14
Rated 5 out of 5 by C.R.H from Keep reading... You won't be disapointed! I have to agree with the previous reviews, It took me a while to get into this book but once the financial introduction was over... I LOVED IT! I can't wait to read the rest of thr trilogy!
Date published: 2010-08-05
Rated 4 out of 5 by Lisa_Price from Great mystery!! When I first started reading the book the first few chapters are on the financial situation in Sweden,personally quite boring.But once you get through that part the book just keeps getting better. At the end I never suspected the plot twist. Great summer read!!!
Date published: 2010-08-02
Rated 4 out of 5 by Ex_Libris_Monica from Excellent suspense I really enjoyed it. It was a quick read, despite its about 800 pages. The action does not stop, and I liked the characters.
Date published: 2010-07-14
Rated 3 out of 5 by eatdrinkandbemary from Alright Unfortunately, I wasn't wowed by this book in the way that I hoped I would be. I had heard many raving reviews of it, and decided it *must* be a page-turner, so I took it with me when I sat on jury duty for one week. I had lots of people tell me they read it in days. I wasn't quite as enamoured with it, and ended up taking about 4 weeks to finish it. Mind you, the story is very interesting, and I did find myself trying to "solve" it as I went along. Maybe it was just a result of over-hype, but I just didn't see what all the excitement is about. I'm not in a rush to read the next two.... but I am sure I will!
Date published: 2010-07-10
Rated 4 out of 5 by Darth_Indurate from Good read that sputtered at the end My title says it all. The first 150 pages are background info on the main characters, and you get to see their flaws as much as their strengths. The fictional characters in this book are "real" people with (sometimes) unusual problems in their lives. The plot picks up as the lives of these characters begins to intertwine into a labyrinth of deception, betrayal and violence. To make things more exciting, the author strings us along at a leisurely pace which helps to create the growing tension on every page. Finally, at what I consider the climax of the book, you are "wowed" at the surprise turn the plot takes, and the novels ends with a satisfying conclusion. But wait. It doesn't. Larsson goes back to an earlier story thread, and spends the last hundred pages of the book making all the ends meet. While I get what he is doing, Larsson drags it on longer than necessary, and I skipped the last few pages of the book as it truly came to its close. Otherwise, a great read.
Date published: 2010-06-22
Rated 5 out of 5 by Allan_Eisner from Cannot Put Down A very well written book that develops off-beat characters that you actually care about. The pace is quick, but the full story unwinds in a deliciously slow fashion. Both protagonists are flawed, but interesting and the author leaves you always wanting more. Every time you think you have the story figured out there is another twist that leaves you gasping for more details.
Date published: 2010-06-16
Rated 5 out of 5 by Chico from Great Mystery This is a great book. This is my first mystery novel and what a great one to start off with. Stieg Larsson managed to involve so many characters and keep the reader not only interested but also on track with the story. With such a great number of people, places and scenarios a person would think the story would get a little confusing or bogged down. But no. Larsson constructed the story in such a way as to make every chapter interesting plus keep everything in order. The character development is first rate too. What a great novel. It's sad this great author passed away after writing his three novels. Who knows what other good books he could of written. The Literary world has lost a very good writer.
Date published: 2010-06-12
Rated 4 out of 5 by Gina_Robichaud from Solid Mystery-Suspense, 4 Stars out of 5! Mikael Blomkvist, early forties, a finacial journalist and part onwer of the magazine, Millennium, has just been convicted of libel against industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. He'd rather take the conviction and jail sentence than fork over the name of his source. To protect the magazine, he steps down. Lisbeth Salander, 24, has been a ward of the state since the age of thirteen. Under a guardian, her life is pretty much topsy-turvy. While a brilliant hacker with a photographic memory, she is emotionally shut down. Questions asked that she doesn't want to answer remain unanswered; she clams up. No one really knows her, and she's keeping it that way. Industrialist Henrik Vanger followed the trial, and had his lawyer hire a security firm to check into Mikael. He wants to hire him. Back in 1966, Vanger's niece, Harriet, disappeared without a trace and is feared dead. Obsessed, Vanger wants his niece, or her killer, found. Every year, since her disappearance, on his birthday, he receives a pressed and framed flower, just like Harriet used to give him. He believes he's being tormented, and he wants answers. Adding incentive, he promises Mikael dirt against Winnerstrom. Very reluctantly, Mikael agrees to a one-year contract, on the premise of ghostwriting Vanger's autobiography, which would help open doors to questions he needs answered. The Vanger family is very extensive, with several oddballs in the bunch. It takes a while to sort through who's who, and in the meantime, Mikael is going through every stitch of paper, every photograph, that was put together on Harriet, right down to police reports. He believes he's on a wild goose-chase, believing that, if the police weren't able to find anything, than neither would he. How very wrong he was. With bits of information, and old pictures found and located, Mikael begins piecing what happened to Harriet together. Later, with the help of Salander and her photographic memory and her computer skills, they break the case. Only, it's much worse than anyone could have imagined. And with a sweet added bonus to end the novel, and again, with the help of Salander, Mikael blows Winnerstrom and his illegal activities right out of the water. **A lengthy mystery with a happy ending... for some of the characters. Right from the beginning, I had a hard time with the relationship between Mikael and his partner, Erika. I could understand the long-time friendship, and I could understand the partnership with the magazine, but I really didn't understand their sexual relationship. His marriage fell apart because he couldn't stop sleeping with Erika, even though he loved his wife and daughter. She's married, and yet her husband is completely okay with it. Now, I'm happily married (10 years this July 1st and have been with my husband for 15 years), so maybe that's why I don't understand that aspect of their relationship? *shrug* Who knows? Despite her emotional hang-ups, I admired Lisbeth and wish I had her courage. She doesn't take anything lying down, and plots her revenges meticulously. She's brilliant in her strategies, a genius hacker who will find whatever it is you're trying to hide. I liked how Mikael treated Salander right from the beginning, never pushing for information she didn't want to give, but he explained the terms of what a true friendship is, and gave Salander the right to choose for herself if she was willing to accept Mikael's friendship. While I found the book slow-paced for about the first-half of the book (of 841 pages, that is a long first-half), I could understand that the author was setting up all the characters so that, like Mikael, you can fgure out who's who. It was needed, even though it was frustratingly slow. But by the second-half, the mystery, the action, the danger, started heating up, and I was actually surprised at who the "bad guy" was. I had my ideas on someone else, until information that Mikael and especially Lisbeth unearthed. I rooted for them both, was just as creeped out, just as fearful, just as disgusted as they were. Lisbeth ends up having to really examine her emotions, something she never did, and just when she "man's-up" and decides to lay it all out on the table for Mikael, at the very end of the last chapter, my heart broke for Lisbeth. I won't say what and spoil it for those who haven't read it yet. I'll simply state: Go get this book! It's a must-read!
Date published: 2010-06-10
Rated 5 out of 5 by Tom_Cummings from A Classic Larsson has come up with a classic. A really super story with two major threads. A cold case within the family saga of the Vanger family along with a corporate financial crime of major significance. The two, although not related are well threaded throughout the story. Inspite of the fact that one of the main characters, Salander is not introduced until mid "book" does not take from the story. In the end it is not clear in my mind whether Salander pirated the accounts of Wennerstrom or not, however I highly recommend reading the entire series.
Date published: 2010-05-31
Rated 4 out of 5 by HQ from It was good After the first few chapters, I wanted to give up on this book but I'm glad I didn't. After half way through, I couldn't put it down. Great suspense and mystery.
Date published: 2010-05-28
Rated 4 out of 5 by Forgotten_Realms_Queen from A wonderful Who Dunnit This book has been all the rage lately, and I can see why. Normally I am not into suspense or mystery books, but this one was able to catch my interest and keep me going through most of the book. Most of the characters are well developed, especially the main female Lisbeth Salander. A troubled and troubling young woman, Lisbeth is the top PI for a security firm with a photographic memory and her own moral compass. We see her evolve through the book, through both mundane and traumatic events, from a sullen young woman who is a veritable social outcast with no care for the rules or conventions of polite society into a woman who might be capable of redemption. The premise is that a disgraced financial reporter is called upon by an aging, wealthy business tycoon to look into the dissapearance and supposed murder of his neice over a decade ago. We follow the reporter Mickal for one year of his life as he looks into the past and trys to discover what happened to the young woman Harriet, and he makes some pretty gruesome discoveries about the family along the way while he befriends the young Lisbeth. Lisbeth was the best thing about this book for me though. I just love her character. Incredibly well written, its the type of book where even though you've hit a stale point story wise, the imagery and the writing style sustain you until the story picks up again. All in all a great read.
Date published: 2010-05-20
Rated 3 out of 5 by Naboo from Really wanted to like this more... I really wanted to like this book, for several reasons. First, the protagonist (a lefty journalist) resonated with me. Second, the idea that people in droves are reading a real novel (as opposed to the literary mashups and "revisionist" tales of classic authors that are clogging up the shelves) is exciting. But while I admit it's a page turner, there's a lot lacking in the book. It's usually a bad idea to see the movie version of a book before reading it, but I had a free pass to see the movie of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo before I had even started the book. While I was impressed with the movie ("enjoyed" is not quite the right word for a movie filled with so much brutality), seeing it first really illustrated what I found lacking in the novel. To start with, the movie whittles down the book to the core of the story, without the endless amount of exposition Stieg Larsson put in the novel. I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but the novel could have really used a judicious editor who would rein in Larsson, a former journalist with a tendency to tell (and tell, and tell...) rather than show. This is especialy true of Larsson's politics, with which I mostly agree but find are recounted endlesly at the expense of the story. (It takes until the halfway point of the 800-plus pages in the paperback edition before the protagonists actually meet!) What really becomes apparent when reading the novel after seing the movie, is the unbelievability of the protagonists. People have gone on about how "interesting" a character Salander is. I just don't understand this.Maybe it's because I'm tired of the exotic punk trope, but she comes across as paradoxically anti-social and self-righteous, a sort of female Johnny Rotten mixed with Dirty Harry (there's a combination!). (That the novel's characters seem to reflect her Manichean worldview, in which the bad guys are almost metaphysically evil, doesn't help things). She's also too good to be true: a hot bisexual with a photographic memory who can kick ass as well as hack any computer. Oh, and she falls in love with Mikael Blomkvist. Which brings me to the other problem with the story... Mikael Blomkvist is so clearly a stand-in for the author (a middle-aged reporter with left-leaning politics) that it gets almost embarrasing, especially when Salander falls for him, in spite of her whole life being essentially ruined by middle-aged men. This relationship was slightly unseemly in the movie, but it went by so fast it could be forgiven. In the book, you're allowed enough breathing room to consider this a little unlikely, to say the least. It sounds like I didn't like this book, but I am still giving it a positive review because the plot does its job to create suspense. But this is a rare occasion (The Godfather comes to mind) where I would almost say that seeing the movie would be better.
Date published: 2010-05-15
Rated 5 out of 5 by Avid_Er from The story never ends from beginning to end! This book is awesome! Never a dull moment!
Date published: 2010-04-26
Rated 4 out of 5 by dimplezx2 from Entertaining I have to say, when I started reading the book, the first couple of chapters I had trouble keeping up with all the character changes and everything. And the first part of the book drags on. Over all after I got into it I found myself unable to put it down. It is a novel that is thrilling, mysterious, logical and shocking. The author also provided suitable explanations and definitions throughout the book, so the terminology was easy to grasp. Also, I loved the character Salander. She's a mystery all unto her own. Can't wait to read the next one.
Date published: 2010-04-16
Rated 3 out of 5 by Denise_Hill-_MacDonald from Enjoyable The first quarter of this book was very boring and dragged on and on. There is a lot going on througout the book and sometimes it gets frustrating because it takes so long to come together and make any sense. I did enjoy reading it after the first few chapters were done. I was easy for me to figure out the mystery, although I didn't get a lot of the details right, but the side stories are what kept me interested. I absolutely love Salander, she is an amazing character and I love the way the author only lets out a little information about her at a time.
Date published: 2010-04-16
Rated 4 out of 5 by Gwen_Fernandes from Great Story I enjoyed the story line of this book. The mystery of the missing girl was very interesting. There were parts of the book that I found dragged on forever and I tended to skim through those sections, but overall, the story line was excellent. Looking forward to reading The Girl Who Played with Fire, next.
Date published: 2010-03-31
Rated 4 out of 5 by Colette from GREAT action book This is my first time reading a trilogy...SO it has to be great!!! It has everything a murder mystery,family saga and financial corruption. It starts with a 40 year old family mystery that brings together a journalist and a young fly by night woman with issues(the girl with the dragon tattoo)....but a great computer hacker. This book does have a surprise ending.It is a great mystery...can't wait for the second book.
Date published: 2010-03-16
Rated 5 out of 5 by Slightly_Devious from Hooked Why did Larsson have to die shortly after giving in his Millennium Trilogy? His first novel of the trilogy is a real page turner! An almost 40-year-old mystery is still taunting a man, despite the rest of his family having moved on many years ago. One last try must be made before he dies. How do you solve a mystery of a girl who vanished into thin air? Bring in a financial journalist of course, with the help of a loner hacker. This book had a great storyline that kept me guessing and characters that were never boring. If someone ever decides to make this into a movie franchise I am BEGGING them NOT to Americanize it. It would ruin everything in my opinion. UPDATE: Apparently this has already been made into a movie?! (I'm so slow!). Män som hatar kvinnor is the name of the film if you want to check the trailer out on youtube.
Date published: 2010-03-04
Rated 5 out of 5 by MGWG from Highly recommended Read this book on a recent vacation. A real page turner, couldn't put it down.
Date published: 2010-02-22
Rated 5 out of 5 by Drew_Blood from Great Mystery Here is the first in a trilogy regarding financial reporter Mickael Blomkvist and computer hacker/punk rocker Lisabeth Salander. Blomkvist is a recently convicted of libel for printing a baseless story about a swedish capitalist. Salander is a young women with mental issues and a guardianship order hanging over her head. Somehow, they are brought together to try and solve the 40 year old mystery of the disappearance a young girl who happens to be a member of a very old and powerful Swedish family not unlike the Kennedys. This story, althoug slow at the beginning, picked up in both the story and the action. The characters are both human and alive in this story. You really begin to feel for them, and even squirm when they find themselves in unwanted situations. It is a great read and I recommend that you read this. Buy it or borrow it. The second book is out and is in my TBR pile.
Date published: 2010-01-11
Rated 5 out of 5 by Polly from Couldn't put it down I really enjoyed this book. The characters had me hooked. I was reading until the wee hours of the morning and could not put it down.
Date published: 2009-12-30
Rated 5 out of 5 by Nico from Mystery at its best This book is addicting and engrossing. The beginning is slow but steady and my expectations were exceeded here. I was surprised how obsessed I became with this book. Blomkvist and Salander are fabulous character's you can easily get lost in. I lost sleep and read this book in two sittings. The girl with the dragon tattoo deserves all of the praise, and the hype. It is one of the best mysteries I have ever read. A true pleasure, it is easy to see Larsson’s journalist background here. The subject matter is well researched although the darker episodes can be difficult to get through. The authors own story is as intriguing, as the novel. It is easy to see where he came up with such skill for intrigue. This book is well worth it, and I would recommend this to anyone. Just try to read it when you can afford to lose some sleep, because you will become obsessed within a few pages.
Date published: 2009-11-25
Rated 1 out of 5 by Ginger_Blonde from Not for me. I found it boring and contrived. It needs editing. Because of the endorsement by Ondaatje I was expecting literature, which it ain't. Maybe it's high level within the pulp mystery category.
Date published: 2009-10-08
Rated 5 out of 5 by Irina_Stateikina from Thrilling Now, here is one thrilling narrative. Very different, very bizarre, very, if I may say so, foreign… When reading translated literature, I often wonder, what was lost in translation? May I mention, throughout this story, I did not wonder. Well written, well translated (it took me a while to realized that the book was not originally written in English) and definitely leaves you to want to read the sequel in this trilogy. Needless to say, the mystery behind the book’s manuscript contributes to the suspense.
Date published: 2009-10-01
Rated 4 out of 5 by Sara_Pinto from Absolutely Incredible! I read this book all 800 odd pages of it in two sittings. That's how much I enjoyed it. It was well written and exciting. There was something going on at every turn and there were new characters constantly popping up. Usually when a novelist does that the book becomes boring or too complicated to follow. This was not the case in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It was from start to finish great. Definutely go out and buy this book. For not only will you not be able to put it down but it's a book that you will have read again and again.
Date published: 2009-09-08
Rated 5 out of 5 by Kaitz12 from A plot full of twists and turns... I could go on and on about this book, raving about how truly fantastic it was. I have never read anything by Stieg Larsson, however I am so incredibly happy that I chose to pick up this book, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I have read a variety of books over the past year, however I have to say that this book is one of the best books that I have read in a very long time. Larsson has managed to write a complex novel full of twist and turns touching on some of the most controversial subjects out there today - abuse, molestation, murder, kidnapping, etc. This novel finds the perfect balance between innocence and corruption. Henrik Vanger has hired Mikeal Blomkvist to complete one of the most unthinkable tasks - discover who murgered Harriet Vanger over 40 years ago. Seems like an unthinkable task, but with the help of Lisbeth Salander - the girl who has the dragon tattoo - he is able to uncover a story that withholds many layers. This book is truly my number one pick this summer! Read... and enjoy!
Date published: 2009-08-18
Rated 5 out of 5 by Peekaroo from Riveting This novel was full of intrigue. I was unable to put this book down - a definite page turner. A surprise ending that will keep you guessing...a must-read! Oh, and you just will HAVE to come back for seconds (the second novel).
Date published: 2009-08-13
Rated 4 out of 5 by Tanja_Gehring from Great read for mystery lovers I thought this was a great mystery novel, that was also intelligently written. We passed it around during a 2 week family vacation, and everyone fell under its spell. Looking forward to book 2 & 3 (although I may pick them up in French which have available for years).
Date published: 2009-08-06
Rated 4 out of 5 by Dana from Brilliant book A middle-aged financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist has been sentenced to jail for slander. He is hired by Henrik Vanger, the retired CEO of a large family-owned conglomerate, to solve the mystery of his disappeared niece 40 years ago. She disappeared from the family island and now Vanger wants Blomkvist to investigate family and find out who is responsible for her death. The girl with the dragon tattoo is Lisbeth Salander, an investigator for Dragon Armansky. She is incredibly details oriented and very very good with computers. But she is asocial and a ward of the state even though grown and her finances are controlled by a trustee. Larsson has developed a story with a large number of characters, each with their own story. The Vanger family is immense and each had a motive to be involved in the mystery. Blomkvist is dogged in his following of a tidbit of a trail. He ends up hooking up with Salander who originally investigated him for Vanger. Blomkvist the humanist and Salnder the anti-social make a formible duo. Larsson has written a brilliant story about women as victims and their rise above it. I will be looking for the next book in the series.
Date published: 2009-07-24
Rated 4 out of 5 by London_Mabel from Good mystery This is a good mystery, though I'm not sure why it's become such a phenomena outside of Sweden--it could use some editing, especially at the end. But I did get swept up in the story, liked the characters, and enjoyed the change of scenery from English and American mysteries.
Date published: 2009-07-07
| i don't know |
'Equivalent VIII' by Carl Andre is in Tate Modern in London. It comprises 120 of which item? | The Burlington Magazine and the ‘Tate Bricks’ Controversy – The Burlington Magazine Index Blog
by barbarapezzini , posted in Art Market , Art Works , Art Writing
In 1972, the Tate Gallery bought for an ‘undeclared sum’ – although later revealed to be £2,297 – [1] the 1966 sculpture by Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII (also referred to here by its Tate catalogue reference T.1534). In April 1976, The Burlington Magazine published an editorial which questioned the Tate’s decision to buy the work [2] and placed the magazine at the centre of a complex and, at times, heated debate around the subject. The editorial prompted the Tate to demand a right to reply that would, eventually, be granted in the form of a five page article – long in comparison to most published in Burlington – written by Richard Morphet who was then Deputy Keeper of the Modern Collection at the Tate Gallery.[3]
Equivalent VIII (illustrated here) consists of 120 grey sand-lime fire bricks, arranged in a rectangle measuring 68.6cm by 229.2cm by 12.7cm deep. It was originally made as part of an installation of eight different configurations of the same number of bricks, to be arranged together on the floor of a single gallery space. Having been bought and exhibited as a separate work of art, an ‘outtake from Equivalents’[4] as the critic John A. Walker described it, Equivalent VIII was removed from the context of the complete work and thus detached from the ‘relational complexity’ of the original installation.
The Burlington editorial was itself prompted by an article by Colin Simpson in the Sunday Times newspaper [5], published two months previously on February 15th 1976, nearly four years after the purchase of the sculpture was made. Alistair Rider has suggested that the Sunday Times itself would not have picked up on the issue ‘had the art collector and critic, Douglas Cooper, not conducted a campaign to undermine the cultural authority of the Tate’ and drawn attention to the Tate Trustee’s latest Biannual Report of Acquisitions.[6]
In his article, Simpson talks the reader through some of what he deems to be the more controversial artists whose work had been named in the report of purchases. Although also listing Gilbert and George, Claes Oldenburg and Victor Burgin, the focus of the article is Carl Andre and his bricks; Simpson does not refer to the work by its title throughout the article. The inference made by Simpson is that the Tate had somehow been duped into buying the bricks, and the author reduces the artistic process to a ‘sudden’ decision to arrange 120 bricks ‘in a low pile on the floor of an art gallery, put a price tag of $12,000 dollars on them and wait for customers’.[7]
In the ensuing days, the story was taken up by numerous newspapers, perhaps most famously the Daily Mirror, the front page of which declared, ‘whichever way you look at Britain’s latest work of art… what a load of rubbish’.[8] This is not to suggest that the purchase was universally derided. Hugh Jenkins, Arts Minister at the time, argued that ‘the Trustees of the Tate have every right to spend a little on experimental art. I do not question their judgement.’[9] Although the Burlington editorial also claimed – disapprovingly, it should be noted – that Jenkins was said ‘to be enquiring into the purchase’ and discussing the matter with senior officials in his Department’.[10]
That the Burlington addressed the issue of Tate’s purchase of Equivalent VIII, a work of late-Modernist sculpture, at all was something of a surprise considering the Burlington’s orientation to art [being] strongly historical’. As Richard Morphet put it in his response to the editorial, it was ‘an astonishing item to find in this particular magazine.’[11]The Burlington editorial itself suggested that this particular art market story caused such consternation in the popular press ‘because it raised two issues that never fail with the public, the possibility that experts were being made fools of and that public money was being misspent.’[12]
However, the editorial went beyond simply repeating the complaints of the popular press and was certainly more than an ‘attack’ on the Tate. In fact, the author raised some pertinent and timely questions regarding the responsibilities of publicly funded art institutions and their activities in the market, as well as broader questions regarding expanding definitions of art (especially in relation to value, both aesthetic and monetary). Although, with hindsight, The Burlington Magazine appears to have been on the wrong side of the argument, in that posterity has proven the historical significance of Andre’s sculpture, it is certainly worth revisiting the controversy in order to reassess the role played by this magazine in the debate and the historical, and continuing, significance of the issues raised.
Richard Morphet opens his response to the editorial, published in the November 1976 issue of Burlington, with the accusation that, for a publication with such an historical perspective on art,
in its criticism of Tate policy historical considerations have been abandoned. No attempt is made to answer the question whether ‘Minimal’ art constitutes an important phase in the development of art and if so whether Carl Andre’s work… is among the most important produced within that phase (even though its significance extends well beyond the ‘Minimal’ field).[13]
The central issue raised in the editorial is
just how far a public Gallery, which must impose its own kind of order on what it acquires, can go to accommodate changing attitudes towards art. At what point, if any, does it have to draw the line?[14]
What may be considered of contemporary significance by the Tate’s board of trustees may not withstand the test of time and taste, and may not even be considered art at all by future observers.
In response to this concern, Morphet argues that no ‘attempt [is] made [by The Burlington Magazine] to consider whether it might not be regrettable if the Tate failed to acquire representative examples of any leading tendency in art while this was still possible at relatively low cost to the public purse or (in some cases) at all’[15]. He states that
the Andre will, in time, be generally accepted as among the important art of its period. This cannot yet be proved or disproved. But it can at least be said that the Burlington’s opposition to the purchase is consistent with this possibility.[16]
In support of this argument, and in lieu of the Burlington’s lack of historical contextualisation, Morphet locates Equivalent VIII firmly within a tradition that can be traced back to Constantin Brancusi’s endless column, via Frank Stella’s Black paintings, which emphasized ‘with a new directness both the physical structure of the whole art object (paint, canvas, stretcher) and the means of its execution’.[17] Morphet suggests that ‘both the mode of assembly and the scale of [these artists’] works so embody a sense of human proportion, naturalness and limpid clarity as to make these works positive statements of general relevance to society’.[18] Therefore, the centrality of mass to the meaning of Andre’s work further defends the necessity of Tate’s purchasing the work rather than simply collecting ‘full documentation[…] so that they can be reconstructed whenever the need arose’[19], as suggested in the Burlington editorial. These artists (Brancusi, Stella, Andre), Morphet argues, ‘were among the pioneers of an impulse which in the 1960s became so widespread as to be a major characteristic of the decade’s art’[20].
Thus the Tate’s new acquisition is framed not as ‘effective and showy work which may well be regarded in a few decades as trash’[21], but rather as a work which could already be placed firmly in the canon of late 20th Century Western art.
The Burlington editorial also takes issue with the Tate Gallery’s Director Sir Norman Reid’s argument that ‘anything that the Tate Trustees buy for the collection, they buy because… they are convinced that it is worthy to be included in the collection now’[22], suggesting that ‘neither he nor anyone else in recent weeks has succeeded in defending T.1534 as a work of art in its own right.’ The argument that the editorial’s author advances, quoting a letter to The Times, is that ‘the whole raison d’etre of the work, indeed its entire meaning, rests in being criticised.’ Andre’s sculpture, then, is discussed in similar terms to conceptual art, as a ‘work of art only in principle’. Therefore, ‘to go on talking about principles, without constantly relating them to actual examples, is a sure fire way of encouraging a form of academic art that is full of a corresponding amount of high and rather vague ideals unmatched in practice.’[23]
Morphet argues back that Andre’s bricks are far from art only in principle. He claims that ‘T. 1534 certainly gives rise to processes of thought and speculation about both art and life’ and that, in doing so ‘the multiplicity of these responses is an index of its vitality and complexity’.[24] The fact that ‘most good ‘Minimal’ and ‘Conceptual’ art, far from abandoning concern with direct, object-linked sensuous experience, actually extends its scope’, although ignored by the media ‘should be obvious to anyone who looks at such work without prejudice’.[25] The implication here, it seems, that the Burlington is as prejudicial about modern art, and therefore as unqualified to address it, as the popular media.
In further defense of Andre’s work as more than art only in principle’, and in response to the Burlington’s suggestion that the ‘purity’ of the original idea is lost anyway due to the fact that ‘T. 1534 is not the original brick sculpture that Carl Andre made in I966’[26], Morphet explains that
The type of brick employed in T.1534 was no less carefully selected than that employed in its first version, and unless made of this kind of brick, T.1534 does not exist. Thus physically, as well as an idea, it is, in its own right, an important work by Carl Andre.[27]
Morphet compounds his argument that the Burlington may not be best placed to cast judgment on what art works the Tate should be buying with its public funding when he refers to the suggestion in the editorial that its trustees
should be looking just as hard at painters working in a more academic tradition, like Seago or Cuneo, whose work is very popular, as at the latest avant garde productions.[28]
‘Whether people like Andre’s art or not’, he asserts, ‘few can deny that its role in the development of art is more important than that of Seago or Cuneo’, and there is insufficient money available ‘to enable the Tate to acquire… good examples of all the types of art that are being produced’. In these circumstances, he argues, ‘the Gallery considers its main task to be the acquisition of a range of work sufficient to demonstrate, through examples of high quality, those distinctive tendencies favoured by the Director and Trustees in the periods for which the Tate has responsibility, including the present’.[29]
Whether or not the Burlington Magazine was right to shift attention away from its traditional areas of expertise, its participation in the debate surrounding Equivalent VIII moved the discussion beyond the tabloid tone taken by the majority of the media, including the quality press. By raising the question of the Tate Gallery’s role in the spending of public money, the magazine facilitated a more balanced treatment of the issue, first through its own critical editorial, and then through Richard Morphet’s response.
At the heart of this debate is the question of the extent to which a publically funded organisation should be able to take calculated risks with public money. Although the Tate’s purchase of Andre’s sculpture has proven, with hindsight, to have been astute, the question remains pertinent, particularly as the United Kingdom gradually lifts itself out of another recession.
The art market is, of course, very different now than it was forty years ago, and whereas the publically funded galleries and museums were the major buyers of contemporary and recent art in the country at the time, arts funding has been heavily reduced, and the private sector has taken on much of that responsibility. Charles Saatchi and other private collector/dealers now take those risks as to what will be the valuable art of the future, and nobody is too concerned whether, with their own money, they pick a winner or not.
James A. Brown, May 2014
Illustrations:
Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, Firebricks, 120-unit rectangular solid, 2 high x 6 header x 10 stretcher, 2 1/2 x 4 1/2 x 9 (6.4 x 11.4 x 22.9) each, 5 x 27 x 90 1/8 (12.8 x 68.5 x 229) overall
Carl Andre in 1978. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORB
References:
Bailey, Martin ‘Revealed: secrets of the Tate Bricks’ The Art Newspaper, Issue 224 (May, 2011) published online 28 April 2011 [http://theartnewspaper.com/articles/Revealed%3A+secrets+of+the+Tate+bricks/23578]
The Burlington Magazine ‘T 1534. Untitled. 1966’ (editorial) The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 118, No. 877 (Apr., 1976), pp. 187-188
Daily Mail, 18 Feb 1976 from ‘Archive Journeys: The bricks controversy and ‘Save the Stubbs’ found at [http://www2.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/historyhtml/people_public.htm]
Mellor, Philip ‘What a Load of Rubbish: How the Tate dropped 120 bricks’ Daily Mirror (London, England), 16th Feb 1976 p.1
Morphet, Richard ‘Carl Andre’s Bricks’ The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 118, No. 884 (Nov., 1976), pp. 762-765+767
Rider, Alistair John (2005) Carl Andre: Sculptures, Politics, 1959-1976, PhD, The University of Leeds, p.12
Simpson, Colin ‘The Tate Drops a Costly Brick’ Sunday Times (London, England) Sunday, February 15, 1976; p. 53
Walker, John A. (1998), Art & Outrage: Provocation, Controversy and the Visual Arts Pluto Press p.76
Footnotes:
[1] Martin Bailey, ‘Revealed: secrets of the Tate Bricks’ The Art Newspaper, Issue 224 (May, 2011) published online 28 April 2011 [http://theartnewspaper.com/articles/Revealed%3A+secrets+of+the+Tate+bricks/23578]
[2] ‘T 1534. Untitled. 1966’ (editorial) The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 118, No. 877 (Apr., 1976), pp. 187-188
[3] Richard Morphet, ‘Carl Andre’s Bricks’ The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 118, No. 884 (Nov., 1976), pp. 762-765+767
[4] John A. Walker (1998), Art & Outrage: Provocation, Controversy and the Visual Arts Pluto Press p.76
[5] Colin Simpson ‘The Tate Drops a Costly Brick’ Sunday Times (London, England) Sunday, February 15, 1976; p. 53
[6] Alistair John Rider (2005) Carl Andre: Sculptures, Politics, 1959-1976, PhD, The University of Leeds, p.12. The Burlington editorial claimed that ‘the Sunday Times story had been engineered by a gleeful Douglas Cooper, who had lambasted the Tate and the bricks six weeks before in one of the regular articles that he writes for Books and Bookmen’. (Burlington, p.187) However, The Burlington Magazine’s editors were forced to print an apology in the July issue stating that Cooper had not, in fact mentioned Andre’s work in the article mentioned, or spoken to anybody at the Sunday Times on the matter.
[7] Op. Cit. Simpson p.53
[8] Philip Mellor ‘What a Load of Rubbish: How the Tate dropped 120 bricks’ Daily Mirror (London, England), 16th Feb 1976 p.1
[9] Daily Mail, 18th Feb 1976 from ‘Archive Journeys: The bricks controversy and ‘Save the Stubbs’ found at [http://www2.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/historyhtml/people_public.htm]
[10] Op. Cit. Burlington (Apr. 1976) p187
[11] Op. Cit. Morphet p.762
[12] Op. Cit. Burlington (Apr. 1976) p187
[13] Op. Cit. Morphet p.762
[14] Op. Cit. Burlington (Apr. 1976) p187
[15] Op. Cit. Morphet p.762
[16] ibid.
| fire bricks |
In 1840 Great Britain issued the first postage stamps. The 1d. (one penny) stamp was black. What colour was the 2d. stamp? | The Burlington Magazine and the ‘Tate Bricks’ Controversy – The Burlington Magazine Index Blog
by barbarapezzini , posted in Art Market , Art Works , Art Writing
In 1972, the Tate Gallery bought for an ‘undeclared sum’ – although later revealed to be £2,297 – [1] the 1966 sculpture by Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII (also referred to here by its Tate catalogue reference T.1534). In April 1976, The Burlington Magazine published an editorial which questioned the Tate’s decision to buy the work [2] and placed the magazine at the centre of a complex and, at times, heated debate around the subject. The editorial prompted the Tate to demand a right to reply that would, eventually, be granted in the form of a five page article – long in comparison to most published in Burlington – written by Richard Morphet who was then Deputy Keeper of the Modern Collection at the Tate Gallery.[3]
Equivalent VIII (illustrated here) consists of 120 grey sand-lime fire bricks, arranged in a rectangle measuring 68.6cm by 229.2cm by 12.7cm deep. It was originally made as part of an installation of eight different configurations of the same number of bricks, to be arranged together on the floor of a single gallery space. Having been bought and exhibited as a separate work of art, an ‘outtake from Equivalents’[4] as the critic John A. Walker described it, Equivalent VIII was removed from the context of the complete work and thus detached from the ‘relational complexity’ of the original installation.
The Burlington editorial was itself prompted by an article by Colin Simpson in the Sunday Times newspaper [5], published two months previously on February 15th 1976, nearly four years after the purchase of the sculpture was made. Alistair Rider has suggested that the Sunday Times itself would not have picked up on the issue ‘had the art collector and critic, Douglas Cooper, not conducted a campaign to undermine the cultural authority of the Tate’ and drawn attention to the Tate Trustee’s latest Biannual Report of Acquisitions.[6]
In his article, Simpson talks the reader through some of what he deems to be the more controversial artists whose work had been named in the report of purchases. Although also listing Gilbert and George, Claes Oldenburg and Victor Burgin, the focus of the article is Carl Andre and his bricks; Simpson does not refer to the work by its title throughout the article. The inference made by Simpson is that the Tate had somehow been duped into buying the bricks, and the author reduces the artistic process to a ‘sudden’ decision to arrange 120 bricks ‘in a low pile on the floor of an art gallery, put a price tag of $12,000 dollars on them and wait for customers’.[7]
In the ensuing days, the story was taken up by numerous newspapers, perhaps most famously the Daily Mirror, the front page of which declared, ‘whichever way you look at Britain’s latest work of art… what a load of rubbish’.[8] This is not to suggest that the purchase was universally derided. Hugh Jenkins, Arts Minister at the time, argued that ‘the Trustees of the Tate have every right to spend a little on experimental art. I do not question their judgement.’[9] Although the Burlington editorial also claimed – disapprovingly, it should be noted – that Jenkins was said ‘to be enquiring into the purchase’ and discussing the matter with senior officials in his Department’.[10]
That the Burlington addressed the issue of Tate’s purchase of Equivalent VIII, a work of late-Modernist sculpture, at all was something of a surprise considering the Burlington’s orientation to art [being] strongly historical’. As Richard Morphet put it in his response to the editorial, it was ‘an astonishing item to find in this particular magazine.’[11]The Burlington editorial itself suggested that this particular art market story caused such consternation in the popular press ‘because it raised two issues that never fail with the public, the possibility that experts were being made fools of and that public money was being misspent.’[12]
However, the editorial went beyond simply repeating the complaints of the popular press and was certainly more than an ‘attack’ on the Tate. In fact, the author raised some pertinent and timely questions regarding the responsibilities of publicly funded art institutions and their activities in the market, as well as broader questions regarding expanding definitions of art (especially in relation to value, both aesthetic and monetary). Although, with hindsight, The Burlington Magazine appears to have been on the wrong side of the argument, in that posterity has proven the historical significance of Andre’s sculpture, it is certainly worth revisiting the controversy in order to reassess the role played by this magazine in the debate and the historical, and continuing, significance of the issues raised.
Richard Morphet opens his response to the editorial, published in the November 1976 issue of Burlington, with the accusation that, for a publication with such an historical perspective on art,
in its criticism of Tate policy historical considerations have been abandoned. No attempt is made to answer the question whether ‘Minimal’ art constitutes an important phase in the development of art and if so whether Carl Andre’s work… is among the most important produced within that phase (even though its significance extends well beyond the ‘Minimal’ field).[13]
The central issue raised in the editorial is
just how far a public Gallery, which must impose its own kind of order on what it acquires, can go to accommodate changing attitudes towards art. At what point, if any, does it have to draw the line?[14]
What may be considered of contemporary significance by the Tate’s board of trustees may not withstand the test of time and taste, and may not even be considered art at all by future observers.
In response to this concern, Morphet argues that no ‘attempt [is] made [by The Burlington Magazine] to consider whether it might not be regrettable if the Tate failed to acquire representative examples of any leading tendency in art while this was still possible at relatively low cost to the public purse or (in some cases) at all’[15]. He states that
the Andre will, in time, be generally accepted as among the important art of its period. This cannot yet be proved or disproved. But it can at least be said that the Burlington’s opposition to the purchase is consistent with this possibility.[16]
In support of this argument, and in lieu of the Burlington’s lack of historical contextualisation, Morphet locates Equivalent VIII firmly within a tradition that can be traced back to Constantin Brancusi’s endless column, via Frank Stella’s Black paintings, which emphasized ‘with a new directness both the physical structure of the whole art object (paint, canvas, stretcher) and the means of its execution’.[17] Morphet suggests that ‘both the mode of assembly and the scale of [these artists’] works so embody a sense of human proportion, naturalness and limpid clarity as to make these works positive statements of general relevance to society’.[18] Therefore, the centrality of mass to the meaning of Andre’s work further defends the necessity of Tate’s purchasing the work rather than simply collecting ‘full documentation[…] so that they can be reconstructed whenever the need arose’[19], as suggested in the Burlington editorial. These artists (Brancusi, Stella, Andre), Morphet argues, ‘were among the pioneers of an impulse which in the 1960s became so widespread as to be a major characteristic of the decade’s art’[20].
Thus the Tate’s new acquisition is framed not as ‘effective and showy work which may well be regarded in a few decades as trash’[21], but rather as a work which could already be placed firmly in the canon of late 20th Century Western art.
The Burlington editorial also takes issue with the Tate Gallery’s Director Sir Norman Reid’s argument that ‘anything that the Tate Trustees buy for the collection, they buy because… they are convinced that it is worthy to be included in the collection now’[22], suggesting that ‘neither he nor anyone else in recent weeks has succeeded in defending T.1534 as a work of art in its own right.’ The argument that the editorial’s author advances, quoting a letter to The Times, is that ‘the whole raison d’etre of the work, indeed its entire meaning, rests in being criticised.’ Andre’s sculpture, then, is discussed in similar terms to conceptual art, as a ‘work of art only in principle’. Therefore, ‘to go on talking about principles, without constantly relating them to actual examples, is a sure fire way of encouraging a form of academic art that is full of a corresponding amount of high and rather vague ideals unmatched in practice.’[23]
Morphet argues back that Andre’s bricks are far from art only in principle. He claims that ‘T. 1534 certainly gives rise to processes of thought and speculation about both art and life’ and that, in doing so ‘the multiplicity of these responses is an index of its vitality and complexity’.[24] The fact that ‘most good ‘Minimal’ and ‘Conceptual’ art, far from abandoning concern with direct, object-linked sensuous experience, actually extends its scope’, although ignored by the media ‘should be obvious to anyone who looks at such work without prejudice’.[25] The implication here, it seems, that the Burlington is as prejudicial about modern art, and therefore as unqualified to address it, as the popular media.
In further defense of Andre’s work as more than art only in principle’, and in response to the Burlington’s suggestion that the ‘purity’ of the original idea is lost anyway due to the fact that ‘T. 1534 is not the original brick sculpture that Carl Andre made in I966’[26], Morphet explains that
The type of brick employed in T.1534 was no less carefully selected than that employed in its first version, and unless made of this kind of brick, T.1534 does not exist. Thus physically, as well as an idea, it is, in its own right, an important work by Carl Andre.[27]
Morphet compounds his argument that the Burlington may not be best placed to cast judgment on what art works the Tate should be buying with its public funding when he refers to the suggestion in the editorial that its trustees
should be looking just as hard at painters working in a more academic tradition, like Seago or Cuneo, whose work is very popular, as at the latest avant garde productions.[28]
‘Whether people like Andre’s art or not’, he asserts, ‘few can deny that its role in the development of art is more important than that of Seago or Cuneo’, and there is insufficient money available ‘to enable the Tate to acquire… good examples of all the types of art that are being produced’. In these circumstances, he argues, ‘the Gallery considers its main task to be the acquisition of a range of work sufficient to demonstrate, through examples of high quality, those distinctive tendencies favoured by the Director and Trustees in the periods for which the Tate has responsibility, including the present’.[29]
Whether or not the Burlington Magazine was right to shift attention away from its traditional areas of expertise, its participation in the debate surrounding Equivalent VIII moved the discussion beyond the tabloid tone taken by the majority of the media, including the quality press. By raising the question of the Tate Gallery’s role in the spending of public money, the magazine facilitated a more balanced treatment of the issue, first through its own critical editorial, and then through Richard Morphet’s response.
At the heart of this debate is the question of the extent to which a publically funded organisation should be able to take calculated risks with public money. Although the Tate’s purchase of Andre’s sculpture has proven, with hindsight, to have been astute, the question remains pertinent, particularly as the United Kingdom gradually lifts itself out of another recession.
The art market is, of course, very different now than it was forty years ago, and whereas the publically funded galleries and museums were the major buyers of contemporary and recent art in the country at the time, arts funding has been heavily reduced, and the private sector has taken on much of that responsibility. Charles Saatchi and other private collector/dealers now take those risks as to what will be the valuable art of the future, and nobody is too concerned whether, with their own money, they pick a winner or not.
James A. Brown, May 2014
Illustrations:
Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, Firebricks, 120-unit rectangular solid, 2 high x 6 header x 10 stretcher, 2 1/2 x 4 1/2 x 9 (6.4 x 11.4 x 22.9) each, 5 x 27 x 90 1/8 (12.8 x 68.5 x 229) overall
Carl Andre in 1978. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORB
References:
Bailey, Martin ‘Revealed: secrets of the Tate Bricks’ The Art Newspaper, Issue 224 (May, 2011) published online 28 April 2011 [http://theartnewspaper.com/articles/Revealed%3A+secrets+of+the+Tate+bricks/23578]
The Burlington Magazine ‘T 1534. Untitled. 1966’ (editorial) The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 118, No. 877 (Apr., 1976), pp. 187-188
Daily Mail, 18 Feb 1976 from ‘Archive Journeys: The bricks controversy and ‘Save the Stubbs’ found at [http://www2.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/historyhtml/people_public.htm]
Mellor, Philip ‘What a Load of Rubbish: How the Tate dropped 120 bricks’ Daily Mirror (London, England), 16th Feb 1976 p.1
Morphet, Richard ‘Carl Andre’s Bricks’ The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 118, No. 884 (Nov., 1976), pp. 762-765+767
Rider, Alistair John (2005) Carl Andre: Sculptures, Politics, 1959-1976, PhD, The University of Leeds, p.12
Simpson, Colin ‘The Tate Drops a Costly Brick’ Sunday Times (London, England) Sunday, February 15, 1976; p. 53
Walker, John A. (1998), Art & Outrage: Provocation, Controversy and the Visual Arts Pluto Press p.76
Footnotes:
[1] Martin Bailey, ‘Revealed: secrets of the Tate Bricks’ The Art Newspaper, Issue 224 (May, 2011) published online 28 April 2011 [http://theartnewspaper.com/articles/Revealed%3A+secrets+of+the+Tate+bricks/23578]
[2] ‘T 1534. Untitled. 1966’ (editorial) The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 118, No. 877 (Apr., 1976), pp. 187-188
[3] Richard Morphet, ‘Carl Andre’s Bricks’ The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 118, No. 884 (Nov., 1976), pp. 762-765+767
[4] John A. Walker (1998), Art & Outrage: Provocation, Controversy and the Visual Arts Pluto Press p.76
[5] Colin Simpson ‘The Tate Drops a Costly Brick’ Sunday Times (London, England) Sunday, February 15, 1976; p. 53
[6] Alistair John Rider (2005) Carl Andre: Sculptures, Politics, 1959-1976, PhD, The University of Leeds, p.12. The Burlington editorial claimed that ‘the Sunday Times story had been engineered by a gleeful Douglas Cooper, who had lambasted the Tate and the bricks six weeks before in one of the regular articles that he writes for Books and Bookmen’. (Burlington, p.187) However, The Burlington Magazine’s editors were forced to print an apology in the July issue stating that Cooper had not, in fact mentioned Andre’s work in the article mentioned, or spoken to anybody at the Sunday Times on the matter.
[7] Op. Cit. Simpson p.53
[8] Philip Mellor ‘What a Load of Rubbish: How the Tate dropped 120 bricks’ Daily Mirror (London, England), 16th Feb 1976 p.1
[9] Daily Mail, 18th Feb 1976 from ‘Archive Journeys: The bricks controversy and ‘Save the Stubbs’ found at [http://www2.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/historyhtml/people_public.htm]
[10] Op. Cit. Burlington (Apr. 1976) p187
[11] Op. Cit. Morphet p.762
[12] Op. Cit. Burlington (Apr. 1976) p187
[13] Op. Cit. Morphet p.762
[14] Op. Cit. Burlington (Apr. 1976) p187
[15] Op. Cit. Morphet p.762
[16] ibid.
| i don't know |
What name was given to the 57 constituencies with very small electorates, such as Old Sarum with two MP's for 11 electors, which were abolished by the 1832 Reform Act? | Reform Act 1832 | World Public Library - eBooks | Read eBooks online
The National Archives. "The Struggle for Democracy"
The Great Reform ActBBC Radio 4, In Our Time,
External links
Aidt, Toke S., and Raphaël Franck. "How to get the snowball rolling and extend the franchise: voting on the Great Reform Act of 1832." Public Choice 155.3-4 (2013): 229-250. online
Brock, Michael. (1973). The Great Reform Act. London: Hutchinson Press. online
Butler, J. R. M. (1914). The Passing of the Great Reform Bill. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
Cannon, John. (1973). Parliamentary Reform 1640–1832. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Christie, Ian R. (1962). Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics, 1760–1785. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Ertman, Thomas. "The Great Reform Act of 1832 and British Democratization." Comparative Political Studies 43.8-9 (2010): 1000-1022. online
Evans, Eric J. (1983). The Great Reform Act of 1832. London: Methuen and Co.
Foot, Paul (2005). The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Undermined. London: Viking.
Fraser, Antonia (2013). Perilous question : the drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832 London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Mandler, Peter. (1990). Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Morrison, Bruce. (2011) "Channeling the “Restless Spirit of Innovation”: Elite Concessions and Institutional Change in the British Reform Act of 1832." World Politics 63.04 (2011): 678-710. online
Newbould, Ian. (1990). Whiggery and Reform, 1830–1841: The Politics of Government. London: Macmillan.
O'Gorman, Frank. (1989). Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Phillips, John A. (1982). Electoral Behaviour in Unreformed England: Plumpers, Splitters, and Straights. Princeton: Princeton University Press .
Pearce, Edward. Reform!: the fight for the 1832 Reform Act (Random House, 2010)
Trevelyan, G. M. (1920). Lord Grey of the Reform Bill: Being the Life of Charles, Second Earl Grey. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
Vanden Bossche, Chris R. Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832-1867 (2014) excerpt and text search
Veitch, George Stead. (1913). The Genesis of Parliamentary Reform. London: Constable and Co.
Warham, Dror. (1995). Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whitfield, Bob. The Extension of the Franchise: 1832-1931 (Heinemann Advanced History, 2001), textbook
Wicks, Elizabeth (2006). The Evolution of a Constitution: Eight Key Moments in British Constitutional History. Oxford: Hart Pub., pp. 65–82.
Woodward, Sir E. Llewellyn. (1962). The Age of Reform, 1815–1870. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Further reading
Blackstone, Sir William . (1765–1769). Commentaries on the Laws of England. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gash, Norman . (1952). Politics in the Age of Peel: A Study in the Technique of Parliamentary Representation, 1830–1850. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
Lady Holland and Sarah Austin. (1855). A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith by his daughter, Lady Holland, with a Selection from his Letters edited by Mrs Sarah Austin. 2 vols. London: Brown, Green, and Longmans.
Marcus, Jane (ed.). (2001). Women's Source Library Vol.VIII: Suffrage and the Pankhursts. London: Routledge.
Phillips, John A., and Charles Wetherell. (1995). "The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Political Modernization of England". American Historical Review, vol. 100, pp. 411–436. in JSTOR
Rover, Constance. (1967). Women's Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain, 1866–1914. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Rudé, George. (1967). "English Rural and Urban Disturbances on the Eve of the First Reform Bill, 1830–1831". Past and Present, no. 37, pp. 87–102. in JSTOR
Smith, E. A. (1992). Reform or Revolution? A Diary of Reform in England, 1830-2. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton.
Thorne, R. G. (1986). The House of Commons: 1790–1820. London: Secker and Warburg.
Trevelyan, G. M. (1922). British History in the Nineteenth Century and After (1782–1901). London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
Bibliography
^ Representation of the People (Scotland) Act 1832 (2 & 3 Wm. IV, c. 65) and Representation of the People (Ireland) Act 1832 (2 & 3 Wm. IV, c. 88 )
^ Blackstone (1765), pp. 154–155.
^ Blackstone (1765), p. 110
^ Parliamentary Representation of English Boroughs in the Middle Ages by May McKisack, 1932.
^ The Elizabethan House of Commons – J E. Neale 1949 pages 133–134. Grampound was one of the 31 boroughs disenfranchised but was disenfranchised prior to the Reform Act in 1821.
^ Blackstone (1765), pp. 166–167.
^ Phillips and Wetherell (1995), p. 413.
^ Thorne (1986), vol. II, pp. 331, 435, 480.
^ May (1896), vol. I, pp. 321–322.
^ Thorne (1986), vol. II, p. 266.
^ Thorne (1986), vol. II, pp. 50, 369, 380.
^ London: R. Hunter.
^ London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green.
^ Bruce Mazlish (1988). James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century. Transaction Publishers. p. 86.
^ Rover (1967), p. 3. The rejection of the claims of certain women to be placed on the electoral roll was subsequently confirmed, in spite of the Interpretation Act 1850 (13 & 14 Vict. c. 21) which specified that the masculine gender should include the feminine unless otherwise provided, in Chorlton v. Lings [1868] 4CP 374. In the case of Regina v. Harrald [1872] 7QB 361 it was ruled that married women, otherwise qualified, could not vote in municipal elections. This decision made it clear that married women would be excluded from the operation of any Act enfranchising women for the parliamentary vote, unless special provision to the contrary was made.
^ May (1896), vol. I, p. 333.
^ Holland and Austin (1855), vol. II, pp. 214–215.
^ May (1896), vol. I, pp. 361–362.
^ May (1896), vol. I, p. 340.
^ May (1896), vol. I, p. 335.
^ Roderick Cavaliero (2002). Strangers in the Land: The Rise and Decline of the British Indian Empire. I.B.Tauris. p. 65.
^ Cannon (1973), cap. 1.
Universal suffrage
See also
Evans (1996) emphasises that the Reform Act "opened a door on a new political world". Although Grey's intentions were conservative, Evans says, and the 1832 Act gave the aristocracy an additional half-century's control of Parliament, the Act nevertheless did open constitutional questions for further development. Evans argues it was the 1832 Act, not the later reforms of 1867, 1884, or 1918, that were decisive in bringing representative democracy to Britain. Evans concludes the Reform Act marked the true beginning of the development of a recognisably modern political system.[64]
Historians have long pointed out that, in 1829–31, it was the Ultra-Tories or "Country Party" which pressed most strongly for Reform, regarding it as a means of weakening Wellington's ministry, which had disappointed them by granting Catholic emancipation and by its economic policies.[63]
Several historians credit the Reform Act 1832 with launching modern democracy in Britain. G. M. Trevelyan hails 1832 as the watershed moment at which "'the sovereignty of the people' had been established in fact, if not in law".[59] Sir Erskine May notes that "[the] reformed Parliament was, unquestionably, more liberal and progressive in its policy than the Parliaments of old; more vigorous and active; more susceptible to the influence of public opinion; and more secure in the confidence of the people", but admitted that "grave defects still remained to be considered".[60] Other historians have taken a far less laudatory view, arguing that genuine democracy began to arise only with the Second Reform Act in 1867, or perhaps even later. Norman Gash states that "it would be wrong to assume that the political scene in the succeeding generation differed essentially from that of the preceding one".[61] E. A. Smith proposes, in a similar vein, that "when the dust had settled, the political landscape looked much as it had done before.[62]
Assessment
There was considerable public agitation for further expansion of the electorate, however. In particular, the Chartist movement , which demanded universal suffrage for men, equally sized electoral districts, and voting by secret ballot , gained a widespread following. But the Tories were united against further reform, and the Liberal Party (successor to the Whigs) did not seek a general revision of the electoral system until 1852. The 1850s saw Lord John Russell introduce a number of reform bills to correct defects the first act had left unaddressed. However, no proposal was successful until 1867, when Parliament adopted the Second Reform Act .
During the ensuing years, Parliament adopted several more minor reforms. Acts of Parliament passed in 1835 and 1836 increased the number of polling places in each constituency, and reduced polling to a single day.[58] Parliament also passed several laws aimed at combatting corruption, including the Corrupt Practices Act 1854 , though these measures proved largely ineffectual. Neither party strove for further major reform; leading statesmen on both sides regarded the Reform Act as a final settlement.
Further reform
The Reform Act strengthened the House of Commons by reducing the number of nomination boroughs controlled by peers. Some aristocrats complained that, in the future, the government could compel them to pass any bill, simply by threatening to swamp the House of Lords with new peerages. The Duke of Wellington lamented: "If such projects can be carried into execution by a minister of the Crown with impunity, there is no doubt that the constitution of this House, and of this country, is at an end. [...] [T]here is absolutely an end put to the power and objects of deliberation in this House, and an end to all just and proper means of decision."[56] The subsequent history of Parliament, however, shows that the influence of the Lords was largely undiminished. They compelled the Commons to accept significant amendments to the Municipal Reform Bill in 1835, forced compromises on Jewish emancipation , and successfully resisted several other bills supported by the public.[57]
Although it did disenfranchise most rotten boroughs , a few remained, such as Totnes in Devon and Midhurst in Sussex. Also, bribery of voters remained a problem. As Sir Thomas Erskine May observed, "it was too soon evident, that as more votes had been created, more votes were to be sold".[55]
The Reform Act did very little to appease the working class, since voters were required to possess property worth £10, a substantial sum at the time. This split the alliance between the working class and the middle class, giving rise to the Chartist Movement .
Limitations
Krein examines the votes in the House and reports that the traditional landed interest "suffered very little" by the terms of the 1832 Act. They continued to dominate Commons, while losing a bit of their power to enact laws that focused on their more parochial interests. By contrast, Krein argues, the 1867 Reform Act caused serious erosion of their legislative power and the 1874 elections saw great landowners losing their county seats to the votes of tenant farmers in England and especially in Ireland.[54]
Most of the pocket boroughs abolished by the Reform Act belonged to the Tory Party. These losses were somewhat offset by the extension of the vote to tenants-at-will paying an annual rent of £50. This clause, proposed by the Tory Marquess of Chandos , was adopted in the House of Commons despite opposition from the Government. The tenants-at-will thereby enfranchised typically voted as instructed by their landlords, who in turn normally supported the Tory party.[53] This concession, together with the Whig Party's internal divisions and the difficulties faced by the nation's economy, allowed the Tories under Sir Robert Peel to make gains in the elections of 1835 and 1837 , and to retake the House of Commons in 1841 .
Tenant voters
Many major commercial and industrial cities became separate parliamentary boroughs under the Act. The new constituencies saw party conflicts inside the middle-class, and between the middle-class and working-class. Iwami looked at elections in the medium-sized borough of Halifax, 1832–1852, and reports that the party organizations, and the voters themselves, depended heavily on local social relationships and localized institutions. Having the vote encouraged many men to become much more active in the political, economic and social sphere.[52]
The size of the pre-Reform electorate is difficult to estimate. Voter registration was lacking, and many boroughs were rarely contested in elections. It is estimated that immediately before the 1832 Reform Act, 400,000 English subjects were entitled to vote, and that after passage, the number rose to 650,000, an increase of more than 60%.[51]
Local Conservative Associations began to educate citizens about the Party's platform and encouraged them to register to vote annually, as mandated by the Act. Press coverage of national politics in the local press was joined by in-depth reports on provincial politics in the national press. Grassroots Conservatives therefore saw themselves as part of a national political movement during the 1830s.[50]
Effects
The Reform Act itself did not affect constituencies in Scotland or Ireland. However, reforms there were carried out by the Scottish Reform Act and the Irish Reform Act . Scotland received eight additional seats, and Ireland received five; thus keeping the total number of seats in the House of Commons the same as it had been before the Act. While no constituencies were disfranchised in either of those countries, voter qualifications were standardised and the size of the electorate was expanded in both.
The Act also introduced a system of voter registration , to be administered by the overseers of the poor in every parish and township. It instituted a system of special courts to review disputes relating to voter qualifications. It also authorised the use of multiple polling places within the same constituency, and limited the duration of polling to two days. (Formerly, polls could remain open for up to forty days.)
The Act also extended the franchise. In county constituencies, in addition to forty-shilling freeholders, franchise rights were extended to owners of land in copyhold worth £10 and holders of long-term leases (more than sixty years) on land worth £10 and holders of medium-term leases (between twenty and sixty years) on land worth £50 and to tenants-at-will paying an annual rent of £50. In borough constituencies all male householders living in properties worth at least £10 a year were given the right to vote – a measure which introduced to all boroughs a standardised form of franchise for the first time. Existing borough electors retained a lifetime right to vote, however they had qualified, provided they were resident in the boroughs in which they were electors. In those boroughs which had freemen electors, voting rights were to be enjoyed by future freemen as well provided their freemanship was acquired through birth or apprenticeship and they too were resident.[49]
Extension of the franchise
Thus 65 new county seats and 65 new borough seats were created in England and Wales. The total number of English members fell by 17 and the number in Wales increased by four.[48] The boundaries of the new divisions and parliamentary boroughs were defined in a separate Act, the Parliamentary Boundaries Act 1832 .
26 English counties were divided into two divisions with each division being represented by two members.
8 English counties and 3 Welsh counties each received an additional representative.
Yorkshire, which was represented by four MPs before the Act was given an extra two MPs (so that each of its three ridings was represented by two MPs).
22 large towns were given two MPs.
Another 21 towns (of which two in Wales) were given one MP.
In their place the Act created 130 new seats in England and Wales:
Creation of new seats
The Reform Act's chief objective was the reduction of the number of nomination boroughs. There were 203 boroughs in England before the Act.[47] The 56 smallest of these, as measured by their housing stock and tax assessments, were completely abolished. The next 30 smallest boroughs each lost one of their two MPs. In addition Weymouth and Melcombe Regis's four members were reduced to two. Thus in total the Act abolished 143 borough seats in England (one of the boroughs to be completely abolished, Higham Ferrers , had only a single representative).
Poster issued by the Sheffield Typographical Society celebrating the passing of the Act.
Abolition of seats
Provisions
Results
The ensuing period became known as the "withhold supply (cut off funding to the government) until the House of Lords should acquiesce. Some demonstrations called for the abolition of the nobility, and some even of the monarchy.[45] In these circumstances, the Duke of Wellington had great difficulty in building support for his premiership, despite promising moderate reform. He was unable to form a government, leaving William IV with no choice but to recall Lord Grey. Eventually the King consented to fill the House of Lords with Whigs; however, without the knowledge of his cabinet, he circulated a letter among Tory peers, encouraging them to desist from further opposition, and warning them of the consequences of continuing. At this, enough opposition peers relented.[46] By abstaining from further votes, they allowed the legislation to pass in the House of Lords, and the Crown was not forced to create new peers. The bill finally received the Royal Assent on 7 June 1832, thereby becoming law.
Realizing that another rejection would not be politically feasible, opponents of reform decided to use amendments to change the bill's essential character: for example, they voted to delay consideration of clauses in the bill that disfranchised the rotten boroughs. The ministers believed that they were left with only one alternative: to create a large number of new peerages, swamping the House of Lords with pro-reform votes. But the prerogative of creating peerages rested with King William IV , who recoiled from so drastic a step and rejected the unanimous advice of his cabinet. Lord Grey then resigned, and the King invited the Duke of Wellington to form a new government.[43]
After the Reform Bill was rejected in the Lords, the House of Commons immediately passed a motion of confidence affirming their support for Lord Grey's administration. Because parliamentary rules prohibited the introduction of the same bill twice during the same session, the ministry advised the King to prorogue Parliament. As soon as the new session began in December 1831, the Third Reform Bill was brought forward. The bill was in a few respects different from its predecessors; it no longer proposed a reduction in the total membership of the House of Commons, and it reflected data collected during the census that had just been completed. The new version passed in the House of Commons by even larger majorities in March 1832; it was once again sent up to the House of Lords.[42]
George Hayter) headed the Whig ministry that ushered the Reform Bill through Parliament.
Third Reform Bill
Meanwhile, the political unions, which had hitherto been separate groups united only by a common goal, decided to form the National Political Union . Perceiving this group as a threat, the government issued a proclamation pursuant to the Corresponding Societies Act 1799 declaring such an association "unconstitutional and illegal", and commanding all loyal subjects to shun it. The leaders of the National Political Union ignored this proclamation, but leaders of the influential Birmingham branch decided to co-operate with the government by discouraging activities on a national level.[41]
When the Lords rejected the Reform Bill, public violence ensued. That very evening, riots broke out in Derby , where a mob attacked the city jail and freed several prisoners. In Nottingham , rioters set fire to Nottingham Castle (the home of the Duke of Newcastle) and attacked Wollaton Hall (the estate of Lord Middleton). The most significant disturbances occurred at Bristol , where rioters controlled the city for three days. The mob broke into prisons and destroyed several buildings, including the palace of the Bishop of Bristol , the mansion of the Lord Mayor of Bristol , and several private homes. Other places that saw violence included Dorset , Leicestershire, and Somerset .[40]
The Bill was then sent up to the House of Lords, a majority in which was known to be hostile to it. After the Whigs' decisive victory in the 1831 election, some speculated that opponents would abstain, rather than openly defy the public will. Indeed, when the Lords voted on the second reading of the bill after a memorable series of debates, many Tory peers did refrain from voting. However, the Lords Spiritual mustered in unusually large numbers, and of 22 present, 21 voted against the Bill. It failed by 41 votes.
The political and popular pressure for reform had grown so great that pro-reform Whigs won an overwhelming House of Commons majority in the general election of 1831 . The Whig party won almost all constituencies with genuine electorates, leaving the Tories with little more than the rotten boroughs. The Reform Bill was again brought before the House of Commons, which agreed to the second reading by a large majority in July. During the committee stage, opponents of the bill slowed its progress through tedious discussions of its details, but it was finally passed in September, by a margin of more than 100 votes.[39]
Second Reform Bill
On 22 March, the vote on the second reading attracted a record 608 members, including the non-voting Speaker (the previous record was 530 members). Despite the high attendance, the second reading was approved by only one vote, and further progress on the Reform Bill was difficult. During the committee stage, Isaac Gascoyne put forward a motion objecting to provisions of the bill that reduced the total number of seats in the House of Commons. This motion was carried, against the government's wishes, by nine votes. Thereafter, the ministry lost a vote on a procedural motion by 22 votes. As these divisions indicated that Parliament was against the Reform Bill, the ministry decided to request a dissolution and take its appeal to the people.[38]
Lord Grey's first announcement as Prime Minister was a pledge to carry out parliamentary reform. On 1 March 1831, Lord John Russell brought forward the Reform Bill in the House of Commons on the government's behalf. The bill disfranchised 60 of the smallest boroughs, and reduced the representation of 47 others. Some seats were completely abolished, while others were redistributed to the London suburbs, to large cities, to the counties, and to Scotland and Ireland. Furthermore, the bill standardised and expanded the borough franchise, increasing the size of the electorate (according to one estimate) by half a million voters.[37]
The Prime Minister's absolutist views proved extremely unpopular, even within his own party. Less than two weeks after Wellington made these remarks,[35] he was forced to resign after he was defeated in a motion of no confidence . Sydney Smith wrote, "Never was any administration so completely and so suddenly destroyed; and, I believe, entirely by the Duke's declaration, made, I suspect, in perfect ignorance of the state of public feeling and opinion."[36] Wellington was replaced by the Whig reformer Charles Grey , who had by this time the title of Earl Grey.
“
He was fully convinced that the country possessed, at the present moment, a legislature which answered all the good purposes of legislation,—and this to a greater degree than any legislature ever had answered, in any country whatever. He would go further, and say that the legislature and system of representation possessed the full and entire confidence of the country. [...] He would go still further, and say, that if at the present moment he had imposed upon him the duty of forming a legislature for any country [...] he did not mean to assert that he could form such a legislature as they possessed now, for the nature of man was incapable of reaching such excellence at once. [...] [A]s long as he held any station in the government of the country, he should always feel it his duty to resist [reform] measures, when proposed by others.
”
The Tories won a majority in the election, but the party remained divided, and support for the Prime Minister ( the Duke of Wellington ) was weak. When the Opposition raised the issue of reform in one of the first debates of the year, the Duke made a controversial defence of the existing system of government, recorded in the formal "third-party" language of the time:[34]
The death of general election was held. Electoral reform, which had been frequently discussed during the preceding parliamentary session, became a major campaign issue. Across the country, several pro-reform "political unions" were formed, made up of both middle and working class individuals. The most influential of these was the Birmingham Political Union , led by Thomas Attwood . These groups confined themselves to lawful means of supporting reform, such as petitioning and public oratory, and achieved a high level of public support.[33]
The Duke of Wellington , Tory Prime Minister (1828-30) strongly opposed reform measures.[32]
First Reform Bill
Passage of the Reform Act
Support for reform came from an unexpected source—a faction of the Tory Party—in 1829. The Tory government under Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington , responding to the danger of civil strife in largely Roman Catholic Ireland, drew up the Catholic Relief Act 1829 . This legislation repealed various laws that imposed political disabilities on Roman Catholics, in particular laws that prevented them from becoming members of Parliament. In response, disenchanted Tories who perceived a danger to the established religion came to favour parliamentary reform, in particular the enfranchisement of Manchester, Leeds, and other heavily Noncomformist cities in northern England.[31]
Since the House of Commons regularly rejected direct challenges to the system of representation by large majorities, supporters of reform had to content themselves with more modest measures. The Whig Lord John Russell brought forward one such measure in 1820, proposing the disfranchisement of the notoriously corrupt borough of Grampound in Cornwall. He suggested that the borough's two seats be transferred to the city of Leeds. Tories in the House of Lords agreed to the disfranchisement of the borough, but refused to accept the precedent of directly transferring its seats to an industrial city. Instead, they modified the proposal so that two further seats were given to Yorkshire , the county in which Leeds is situated. In this form, the bill passed both houses and became law. In 1828, Lord John Russell suggested that Parliament repeat the idea by abolishing the corrupt boroughs of Penryn and East Retford , and by transferring their seats to Manchester and Birmingham. This time, however, the House of Lords rejected his proposals. In 1830, Russell proposed another, similar scheme: the enfranchisement of Leeds, Manchester, and Birmingham, and the disfranchisement of the next three boroughs found guilty of corruption; again, the proposal was rejected.[30]
Reform during the 1820s
Despite such setbacks, popular pressure for reform remained strong. In 1819, a large pro-reform rally was held in Birmingham. Although the city was not entitled to any seats in the Commons, those gathered decided to elect Sir Charles Wolseley as Birmingham's "legislatorial representative". Following their example, reformers in Manchester held a similar meeting to elect a "legislatorial attorney". Between 20,000 and 60,000 (by different estimates) attended the event, many of them bearing signs such as "Equal Representation or Death". The protesters were ordered to disband; when they did not, the Manchester Yeomenry suppressed the meeting by force. Eleven people were killed and several hundred injured, the event later to become known as the Peterloo Massacre . In response, the government passed the Six Acts , measures designed to quell further political agitation. In particular, the Seditious Meetings Act prohibited groups of more than 50 people from assembling to discuss any political subject without prior permission from the sheriff or magistrate.[29]
Other notable pro-reform organisations included the Sir Francis Burdett, chairman of the London Hampden Club, proposed a resolution in favour of universal suffrage, equally sized electoral districts, and voting by secret ballot to the House of Commons, his motion found only one other supporter ( Lord Cochrane ) in the entire House.[28]
Support for parliamentary reform plummeted after the launch of the Society of the Friends of the People, included 28 MPs.[26] In 1793, Grey presented to the House of Commons a petition from the Friends of the People, outlining abuses of the system and demanding change. He did not propose any specific scheme of reform, but merely a motion that the House inquire into possible improvements. Parliament's reaction to the French Revolution was so negative, that even this request for an inquiry was rejected by a margin of almost 200 votes. Grey tried to raise the subject again in 1797, but the House again rebuffed him by a majority of over 150.[27]
Aftermath of the French Revolution
Pitt did not raise the issue again for the remainder of his term. [25] Following Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the issue of parliamentary reform lay dormant until it was revived in the 1760s by the Whig Prime Minister
During the 1640s, England endured a Thomas Rainsborough declared, "I think it's clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government." More conservative members disagreed, arguing instead that only individuals who owned land in the country should be allowed to vote. For example, Henry Ireton stated, "no man hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom ... that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom." The views of the conservative "Grandees" eventually won out. Oliver Cromwell , who became the leader of England after the abolition of the monarchy in 1649, refused to adopt universal suffrage; individuals were required to own property (real or personal) worth at least £200 in order to vote. He did nonetheless agree to some electoral reform; he disfranchised several small boroughs, granted representation to large towns such as Manchester and Leeds , and increased the number of members elected by populous counties. These reforms were all reversed, however, after Cromwell's death and the last parliament to be elected in the Commonwealth period in 1659 reverted to the electoral system as it had existed under Charles I.[22]
| Rotten and pocket boroughs |
On which major river does Bamako, the capital of Mali stand? | Voters' Limits by John Nelson by Martins Kreicis - issuu
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Voters’ Limits The Evolution of London’s Parliamentary Constituencies
John Nelson
Contents Page Foreword and Preface
4
Chapter 1 - Constituency evolution, an historical Overview
9
Chapter 2 - Middlesex Parliamentary Constituencies before 1885
29
Chapter 3 - Middlesex Parliamentary Constituencies 1885-1918
57
Chapter 4 - Metropolitan Essex Constituencies 1832-1918
131
Chapter 5 - Metropolitan Kent Constituencies 1832-1918
147
Chapter 6 - Metropolitan Surrey Constituencies 1832-1918
167
Chapter 7 - Middlesex Parliamentary Constituencies 1918- 1945
211
Chapter 8 - Metropolitan Essex Constituencies 1918 - 1945
269
Chapter 9 - Metropolitan Kent Constituencies 1918 – 1945
287
Chapter 10 - Metropolitan Surrey Constituencies 1918 – 1945
297
Chapter 11 - Middlesex Parliamentary Constituencies 1945 – 1974
327
Chapter 12 - Metropolitan Essex Constituencies 1945 – 1974
379
Chapter 13 - Metropolitan Kent Constituencies 1945 – 1974
395
Chapter 14 - Metropolitan Surrey Constituencies 1945 – 1974
411
Chapter 15 - Middlesex Parliamentary Constituencies 1974 onward
437
Chapter 16 - Metropolitan Essex Constituencies 1974 onward
483
Chapter 17 - Metropolitan Kent Constituencies 1974 onward
501
Chapter 18 - Metropolitan Surrey Constituencies 1974 onward
515
Chapter 19 - The hidden engines of evolution
537
Chapter 20 - Index of MPs and Constituencies, and Afterword
547
Foreword The Parliamentarians Frank Dobson MP
J
ohn Nelson’s book is all about the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies. That is very welcome because up to now our parliamentary system has been based on a sense of place. MPs don’t just represent voters. We represent the places where voters live and work, bring up families, make up local communities and look after their neighbours. My constituency of Holborn and St. Pancras has the largest population and the sixth most voters in the whole country. It ranges from Holborn and Covent Garden in the south, through King’s Cross, Camden Town, Kentish Town as far as Highgate in the north. It includes places called Chalk Farm, Primrose Hill, Oak Village, Elm Village, Jockey’s Fields, Hatton Garden and Saffron Hill. But don’t be fooled it’s really very urban, despite taking in most of Hampstead Heath and a slice of Regent’s Park. Although Holborn and St. Pancras is just one constituency the area it now covers used to be four constituencies and even in my own time as an MP it used to be two. So we have seen a lot of boundary changes. In the last but one boundary change I lost Gospel Oak Ward to Hampstead constituency represented by my good friend and world famous film star Glenda Jackson. Then in 2010 Gospel Oak came back to me. So I was canvassing there in the general election. A man came to the door and said he couldn’t vote for me. When I asked him why, he gave the immortal reply “cos you haven’t got two Oscars”. Glenda had comprehensively outclassed me. Most MPs believe there is something special about the place they represent. I certainly do. What an honour to represent Covent Garden where the Beggar’s Opera was set or Holborn and Camden Town where Dickens lived amongst the downtrodden and the lawyers, and other villains who people his books. Great Ormond Street and the University College Hospitals represent all that’s best in the NHS and I in turn try to represent them and the people who work there. The area now contains the greatest concentration of bio-medical research in Europe including my old friend John O’Keefe who has just got the Nobel Prize for Medicine. All that would have pleased Charles Darwin who lived here. John Betjeman, grew up in Highgate and Alan Bennett the greatest living Yorkshire man lives in Primrose Hill. The Working Men’s College and Birkbeck pioneered further education for people who had lost out. Bedford College and the Royal Free Hospital medical school pioneered higher education for women. Political figures as diverse as Karl Marx and Benjamin Disraeli lived here. The British AntiApartheid Movement was founded in my constituency. Jennie Lee who founded the Open University and her husband, Nye Bevan who founded the NHS lived here. What a place to try to represent – full of a huge variety of people who get along with one another despite their differences of race, religion, jobs, incomes, homes and interests. So I welcome John Nelson’s book with its emphasis on place, especially when the Tories wanted to push through changes in which equal numbers of electors were the only thing that mattered. They wanted anonymous agglomerations of electors – no sense of neighbourhood – no pride of place.
5 Sir George Young Sir George Young MP
T
he February 1974 General Election was my first and I was challenging the incumbent MP for Acton, Nigel Spearing. With a boundary change that included parts of Ealing, it became a Tory marginal rather than a Labour marginal. The background to that election was Ted Heath’s question “Who runs the country?” - to which the answer was no one, as we ended up with a hung parliament. The miners’ strike and power shortages had led to a difficult winter, made more difficult by threats from the IRA to disrupt the election. (After the election was over, the police delivered a large parcel to my constituency headquarters, declaring the contents to be harmless. And so they were - 20,000 leaflets explaining why folk should vote for my Party!) I scraped home, and Nigel Spearing was returned weeks later for a by-election in Newham. We remained firm friends, united by a commitment to cycling. Ealing Acton was an uncomfortable merger between Acton and Ealing. When the London Borough of Ealing was formed, Acton lost its Town Hall and the centre of gravity moved west from W3 to W5. There was resentment about this, and a belief that too much ratepayers money was spent in Ealing and not enough in Acton. This was followed by the loss of the Acton Gazette, absorbed into the Ealing Gazette, and the closure of the cottage hospital. But it was a marvellous constituency to represent - multi-cultural, rich in voluntary organisations, compact and therefore easy to move around, and only seven miles from Westminster, with opportunities to look after it during the week as well as at weekends. The majority grew from three figures to five. Boundary changes helped me win the seat, but boundary changes removed it. I survived the 1983 boundary changes, when a last minute decision gave me some good wards in Ealing, instead of a much more difficult redistribution. But in 1997 the seat was in effect abolished. It was divided into three, and each bit tacked on to seats occupied by my parliamentary neighbours. Although I was very sad at the time, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Had the seat survived, I would have lost in the Labour landslide on 1997; as it was I moved to North West Hampshire. You could not find two Tory seats more different. North West Hampshire is mono-cultural, rural with a Conservative majority of 18500, with low unemployment and good housing. But Ealing Acton was a good grounding and, despite the majority, I still look after it as if I had that 808 majority in October 1974.
9
Chapter 1- Evolution London’s Parliamentary Constituencies from 1265 to the present Day
T
his book traces the evolution, electoral geography and politics of Parliamentary constituencies in London’s Greater Metropolitan area. It does so by examining in detail the changes that have occurred, especially to constituency boundaries in the last two hundred years. It considers these in relation to the economic, demographic and social factors that brought them about as well as the political consequences. It also provides summary biographies of all London MPs since 1832. This overview provides the context in which the ancient counties of Middlesex, Essex, Kent and Surrey are individually considered in later chapters.
The Geographical Context The study considers the Greater London Council area (map shown above) that was established by the London Government Act of 1963. This map shows the former counties and local councils within them that formed the GLC. Parts of Hertfordshire were included in it too; and through the book these are described with Middlesex. The Staines, Sunbury and Potters Bar districts of Middlesex however are excluded from the study except where in times past they
10 The Geographical Context were associated with Parliamentary constituencies that also covered districts within the GLC. Parts of Essex, Kent and Surrey beyond the GLC are also considered where they too were linked with districts that form part of the GLC. Although today’s conurbation would be unrecognisable to past generations, as early as 1840 maps were describing the area within a fourteen-mile radius of Charing Cross as the ‘environs’ of the metropolis and over the next Century most of it grew to become what we now call Greater London. Over the years this hinterland may have varied in size and shape but inter-dependence between the so-called Home Counties and London always existed. For centuries Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent, Middlesex and Surrey were producers of agricultural products consumed by Londoners. Key highways like the Great North Road1 and Watling Street passed through many of their towns, whilst others led to important ports of embarkation in Essex and Kent. For several centuries wealthy Londoners had country homes within striking distance of the capital. As London expanded not only on the back of its status as the world’s greatest trading port but also as the capital city of Britain and its global Empire, so the Home Counties were brought increasingly within its orbit. When canals initially and then, more significantly in the case of London than other towns and cities, the railways arrived; they did much to stimulate the expansion of the metropolis. Modern communications – whether of road, rail or air – continue to play their part as the main stimuli to economic, industrial and residential growth. Their impact on London’s electoral arrangements and its politics has been immense. At various times in its history the local Government arrangements for London have been adjusted to recognize the physical and social realities of the metropolis. The historical and essentially Roman boundaries of the ancient walled City were what defined London until English monarchs made Westminster their home. Not only was there a physical separation of the City from nearby communities like Tower Hamlets, Westminster and Southwark, but that separation was also social and political. When Westminster developed it was as the seat of Government, separate from the City of London, which remained the centre of trade and commerce. The two were close but maintained a healthy distance; each was slightly wary of the other. Yet the City’s importance to England’s monarchs was never in doubt because therein lay much of the economic wealth and therefore the source of taxation.
This view from Lambeth Palace of the new Palace of Westminster with the Victoria Tower under construction was painted by an unknown artist . The new construction was necessary following a fire in 1834. The Houses of Parliament that we know today were built between 1843 and 1860.
© Palace of Westminster Collection www.parliament.uk/art
East of the City, the Tower Hamlets – literally the hamlets in the shadow of the Tower of London - owed their existence to the same commerce, but their populations toiled as the servants and labourers who sustained the trades that wealthy merchants owned. In every other important respect – socially, economically and politically - they were kept at a distance; and when London’s commercial and industrial success led to the social classes coming within close proximity of one another, the wealthier ones moved away. Aided first by toll roads, then by the railways, this process has been going on ever since. It continues today.
Although the River Thames was the main trading artery that brought about London’s great wealth it also acted as a physical barrier between the City and Southwark, which was nevertheless strategically important. It was the point on the old Roman road from Kent to Colchester where the river could first be crossed. It was itself an important trade and military route to the Cinque Ports as well as for Christian pilgrimage between London and Canterbury. Yet despite these advantages Southwark did not prosper in the same way as the City, being a place to which wealthier people might resort for pleasure, both legal and illicit, but for little else. It was surrounded by marshlands which made building difficult and was much more vulnerable to attack from the South. London therefore grew up north of the River Thames and to this day the metropolis is of greater mass there than it is in the south. 1 Originally Ermine Street, the road from London to Lincoln.
11 The Historical and Legislative Context The Historical and Legislative Context Over the Centuries from Simon de Montfort’s 1265 Parliament or the ‘model’ Parliament convened by Edward 1 in 1295; it is possible to trace the emergence of politically significant groups and places from the way in which Parliamentary representation developed. Initially Parliamentarians were selected from particular interest groups such as the Knights of the Shire Counties or the burgesses and freemen of the boroughs and ports. They remained as such over many centuries but after June 1832, when the Representation of the People Act (sometimes called the First Reform Act) was passed, leading to a General Election based on new constituencies and a new franchise; the representative nature of the House of Commons began to change. This was hastened in 1867 and 1884 by Acts that extended the franchise and re-distributed Parliamentary seats. Two other important pieces of Victorian legislation had an impact on elections. The Ballot Act (1872) introduced secret voting for the first time so that electors no longer needed to be quite so concerned about the influence of their landlord or employer. The General Election of 1874 was the first after the passing of this Act. Also significant was the 1883 Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act, which sought to eliminate bribery and corruption at election times by limiting the amount any candidate could spend on a campaign. This was first applied, together with the Representation of the Peoples Act 1884, in the General Election of 1885. The 1918 Representation of the People Act made a The First Reform Bill was given Royal Assent by King William IV, pictured here in a formal portrait by Samuel Lane dated between 1832 greater impact still on the electoral process by abolishing the and 1834. © Palace of Westminster Collection www.parliament.uk/art residency qualification for voting and enfranchising women over the age of thirty; though voting rights equal to those of men were not achieved until after the Equal Franchise Act of 1928. Until 1918 the property interests and residency qualifications of most electors remained the principal criteria by which male adults qualified to vote. From 1832 the notion of ‘place’ in representation (what we now term the Parliamentary constituency) began to change too. Although the nature of borough and county representation remained fundamentally the same as it had before, regard was paid to the realities of a changing society in the vanguard of the Industrial Revolution and global trade. So the list of borough constituencies was significantly changed to accommodate the interests of places like the northern industrial towns, though many of the older by now smaller boroughs remained. The Counties too were subject to a degree of redistribution with several being divided on a geographical basis. In the London area this applied to Essex, Kent and Surrey but not Middlesex which, although the most populous county next to Yorkshire, was the smallest geographically apart from Rutland. Further small changes were made to the county divisions in Essex, Kent and Surrey in 1867, but after 1884 there was a much more fundamental change to the nature of Parliamentary constituencies. Greater equalization of electorates irrespective of borough or county status was initiated, although anomalies remained as boundary changes failed to keep up with the enormous population expansion and distribution that occurred; particularly between 1885 and the end of the First World War in 1918. Change has continued ever since reflecting the ebb and flow of populations as they have been shaped by economic and social factors as well as World events, such as the impact of bombing that so badly scarred and damaged many parts of the capital, both physically and economically, in the Second World War. Franchise extensions have also been a factor, though in a sense not significantly affecting the drawing of boundaries since these have generally affected all constituencies in similar proportions. The most significant were the extension to all women over the age of 21 (given in 1928), and to all eligible people over the age of 18 (given in 1969). The creation of the Boundary Commission for England was the next major development in the history of London’s
12 Early Representation in London 1265-1832 representation. This, together with sister bodies covering other parts of the UK, was established by Act of Parliament in 19442. These basically set the ground rules by which constituencies were established and the timescales within which reviews should be undertaken. Subsequent legislation modified some of these rules and to the extent that they were significant in London, reference is made to them where appropriate. Recommendations were always subject to ratification by Parliament. Such ratification has not always been timely. The most recent legislation governing the drawing of constituencies was passed with amendment in January 2013. The amendment was significant because it meant that the number and shape of all Parliamentary constituencies would be unchanged at the next general election. This has to take place on 7th May 2015 unless a two thirds majority of MPs votes for an earlier dissolution. The amendment was contrary to the Government’s original intention to reduce the number of seats in the House of Commons from 650 to 600 at that election. However, the Labour Opposition’s amendment postponing the review was carried with the support of the Liberal Democrat partners in the Coalition and was therefore incorporated in the Electoral Registration and Administration Act that was passed on 31st January 2013. The Boundaries Commission for England had already undertaken a review which proposed a reduction of 4 seats to provide a total of 68 for Greater London. This would have maintained its share of English seats at 13.5%, and slightly increased its share of the total to 11.3%. These changes were effectively stalled, and even if the number of seats in future Parliaments were reduced to 600, the Boundary Commission would need to re-commence its review of individual constituencies on the basis of electoral registration as at 1st December 2015. Its report on the new statutory rules would not be produced until 2018.
Early Representation in Greater London (1265-1832) Parliaments
Essex
1295-1355 0 1355-1386 0 1386-1542 a 0 1542-1545 0 1545-1571 b 0 1571-1708 0 1708-1801 0 1801-1832 0 a 1386-15421 b 1545-15712
Middlesex
4 6 6 6 8 8 8 8
0 0 2 2 2 2 2 2
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
4 6 8 8 10 10 10 10
% of all English MPs 1.3% 2.4% 2.7% 2.7% 2.5% 2.2% 2.2% 2.2%
% of all MPs 1.3% 2.4% 2.7% 2.4% 2.2% 2.0% 1.8% 1.5%
(Source: “The House of Commons, 700 Years of British Tradition”)
1 In 1543 Henry VIII gave representation to Wales, which had been conquered in 1284. 2 Several market towns were enfranchised during this period.
The City of London was the only borough that was required to send elected MPs to De Montfort’s Parliament in 12653. Then, like other boroughs, it sent two burgesses to Parliament but in 1355 this number was increased to four; early evidence of the City’s exceptional importance. The timing may not have been without significance for, under Edward lll, England was engaged in War with France and taxes were needed to fund it. Southwark’s significance relative to other areas of London is shown by its inclusion as a Parliamentary borough from 1386 in the reign of Richard II (1295 according to Boundaries Commission), but Westminster was not enfranchised until 1547, in Henry VIII’s time. No other part of London was specifically represented except the County of Middlesex, which, in common with most other English Counties, returned two MPs from 1265 onwards. Measured as a proportion of all MPs London’s representation was not significant. Despite its economic importance and large population its representation languished at little more than two percent for around 350 years until the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 ; when as the number of seats north of the border was increased London’s proportion declined. Over the years the creation of new boroughs, some of them ‘rotten’4, and Welsh, Irish as well as Scottish Union with England, diluted London’s influence. There was even a period in the Sixteenth Century when the French boroughs of Calais and Tournai sent MPs to Parliament. When Ireland was embraced within the House of Commons in 1801, London’s representation fell proportionately to about 1.5%, its lowest levels since the days of Edward III. 2 The House of Commons (Redistribution of Seats) Act 3 Simon de Montfort summoned the first proper Parliament in the year 1265 sending out representatives to each county and to a select list of boroughs asking each to send two representatives.This was not the first Parliament in England but was the first in which the representatives were elected. (Source - David Boothroyd ‘United Kingdom Election Results’) 4 Rotten boroughs had few if any voters and one person or family ‘owned ‘the constituency. Elections rarely took place, with the owner choosing the MP.
13 Representation since 1832
A sketch of the first reformed House of Commons, painted by George Hayter in 1833. Although London’s representation increased from 10 to 24 MPs it still comprised only 3.7% of the total. This gradually increased to reach a high point of 119 in 1945, which was 18.6% of the total.
© Palace of Westminster Collection www.parliament.uk/art
Representation since 1832 London’s position improved only marginally after the First and Second Reform Acts: and despite a significant uplift in 1885 it was not until after the First World War that a truer reflection of London’s importance was seen. The Capital reached its maximum political potency in terms of its representation in 1945 when nearly one fifth of all seats in the Commons and a quarter of those in England were in London. Since the War there has been a steady reduction in the number of MPs representing London, and as a proportion of the House as a whole. By 2010 the number of MPs was below the absolute levels created after the Third Reform Act, and in proportional terms was significantly lower than the 1945 peak. Parliaments
Essex
1832-1868 1868-1885 1885-1910 1918-1945 1945 1950-1955 1955-1974 1974-1983 1983-1997 1997-2010 2010-date
2 2 5 13 18 15 15 14 14 12 11
14 18 48 53 61 52 52 43 37 34 33
6 6 19 28 29 25 26 22 20 17 17
2 4 6 9 12 13 13 13 13 11 11
24 30 78 103 119 105 106 92 84 74 72
% of all English MPs 5.2% 7.0% 16.9% 21.0% 22.9% 20.8% 20.9% 18.0% 16.3% 14.2% 13.8%
Source: Own research. Notes: 1. Spelthorne is included in Middlesex totals before 1955, and Barnet from 1945. 2. The last election in which the whole of Ireland was represented in the House of Commons was 1918.
% of all MPs 3.7% 4.9% 11.4% 14.4% 18.6% 16.8% 17.0% 14.6% 13.1% 11.4% 11.1%
14 Representation from 1832 to 1885
The map shows the constituencies within the present day GLA area as they were in 1832 before the great reforms to come. The effects of London’s burgeoning population can already be seen in the larger number of central area borough constituencies. Chelsea and Hackney were added in 1868 and a Surrey Mid County seat also appeared. In Essex Chingford transferred to Essex North Western. Larger scale county maps appear in Chapters 2-6
Representation from 1832 to 1868 The map shows very clearly the preponderance of constituencies in Middlesex and the cluster of borough seats around the central core on both sides of the Thames together with the expanses beyond that were still represented by County constituencies. Note the complete absence of borough seats in Essex. Note too the small area to the North that was in Hertfordshire. This was the Barnet Valley. The area of South Middlesex beyond the GLC boundary is Spelthorne and Sunbury, which are today in Surrey. In the first election conducted after the franchise qualifications were changed; the number of electors on the various registers in the area covered by what is now ‘Greater London’ is estimated to have been only 92,702 adult males. As a point of comparison the population of the same area in the census of 1831 was an estimated 3,347,501. So London’s electorate then was probably fewer than 2.8% of its total population. This was significantly worse than the proportion for the rest of England, which was an estimated 3.7%. In national terms London’s electorate was an estimated 14.7% of the total for England, which compared with its population share of 18.9%, meant that it was well below par in terms of enfranchisement as well. 5
Representation from 1868 to 1885 Changes in the representation of Greater London occurred when the 1867 Act established two new borough constituencies, one at Chelsea, and the other at Hackney. Both had become part of the London conurbation and contained electorates that were influential: Chelsea owing an affinity to Westminster, the Royal Court and Parliament 5 Source: F.H. McCalmont’s Parliamentary Poll Book of British Election Results, 1832-1918
25 General Election Results since 1832 London 1832-1865 1832 1835 1837 1841 1847 1852 1857 1865 Sub Total 1868-1880 1868 1874 1880 Sub Total 1885-1910 1885 1886 1892 1895 1900 1906 1910 Jan 1910 Dec Sub Total 1918-1935 1918 1922 1923 1924 1929 1931 1935 Sub Total 1945-1970 1945 1950 1951 1955 1959 1964 1966 1970 Sub Total 1974-1979 1974 Feb 1974 Oct 1979 1983 1987 1992 1997 2001 2005 2010 Sub Total Grand Total Percentage
National Other Total Government
51 65 52 68 68 27 45 41 417
25 11 23 8 8 46 29 29 179
0 0 1 0 0 3 2 5 11
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1
76 76 76 76 76 76 76 76 608
Liberal Conservative Conservative Conservative Conservative Liberal Liberal Liberal
249 393 313 411 402 156 272 271
319 192 272 177 183 399 274 272
0 0 3 0 2 31 40 42
102 85 82 82 83 84 84 85
77 82 53 72 47 90 68 489
18 3 13 4 2 3 1 44
5 16 36 36 54 9 34 190
3 2 1 1 0 1 0 8
103 103 103 103 103 103 103 721
Coalition Conservative Conservative Conservative Labour National National
523 397 258 412 260 522 429
36 62 158 40 59 32 21
58 142 191 151 287 52 154
90 14 8 12 9 5 11
27 51 53 55 61 49 37 49 382
0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 2
89 53 51 49 43 54 66 55 470
3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3
119 104 104 104 104 104 104 104 847
Labour Labour Conservative Conservative Conservative Labour Labour Conservative
200 298 321 345 365 304 253 336
12 9 6 6 6 9 12 6
393 315 295 277 258 317 364 288
23 3 3 2 1 0 1 6
42 41 50 56 58 48 11 13 21 28 368 1737 52.50
0 0 0 2 3 1 6 6 8 7 33 481 14.50
50 51 42 26 23 35 57 55 44 38 421 1092 33.00
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 13 0.00
92 92 92 84 84 84 74 74 74 73 823 3303
Labour Labour Conservative Conservative Conservative Conservative Labour Labour Labour Coalition
297 277 339 397 376 336 165 166 197 307
14 13 11 23 22 20 46 52 62 57
301 319 269 209 229 271 418 413 355 258
23 14 4 21 23 24 30 28 31 28
place, substantially changed the class composition and voting preferences of the electorate. The Conservatives were the major beneficiaries of these changes in London whilst Liberals tended to be elected in the less middle class, mainly industrialised parts of the metropolis. In the end the rise of the Labour Party to represent working class interests did for them there as well. The rise of the Labour Party in the 1920s, and especially after the Second World War, coincided with a much more even balance of the two major parties as between London and the country as a whole. It is clear from the table that since 1945 Labour has overall enjoyed the better of it in London. The exceptions were the mid 1950s and the Thatcher period between 1979 and 1992. A feature of more recent elections has been the strengthening of the Labour vote in parts of London which, from their inception as constituencies in their own right, could historically be relied upon to return Conservative MPs. These constituencies generally coincide with areas where ethnic minorities (often middle class) have provided significant numbers of electors. Harrow and Wembley are good examples. In both areas the proportion of white British has
26 The Future fallen to no more than about 40%. In Ealing and Redbridge the proportion is around 50%. Ethnic minorities have had a tendency to vote Labour in larger numbers than for other parties. However, parts of this electorate have occasionally swung against Labour when a particular issue (such as opposition to the Iraq War) has resonated with the minority communities who have voted to eject Labour MPs. Examples of this were Bethnal Green & Bow and Brent South in the 2005 General Election. In the first case George Galloway won the seat for the Respect Party and in the latter a Liberal Democrat did so having previously gained it at a by-election two years earlier at the height of the War. Over the entire period covered by this book it can be seen that the Conservatives have returned slightly over half of all MPs at all general elections. However, if we choose to describe the Liberal and Labour Parties as ‘progressive’ in contradistinction to the Tories, the overall position has actually been very close. Finally, there have been only three general elections when the results in London might have affected the national outcome. These have all been in recent times. In 1964 Labour won the general election by an overall majority of 4 seats, precisely the same as its advantage over other parties in London. In February 1974 Labour emerged from the election as the largest single party in terms of seats. Its advantage over the Conservatives was 4. In London its advantage was 8 seats. Most recently, in 2010 the Conservatives failed by 8 seats to secure the same number of seats as the Labour and Liberal Democrat Parties combined. In London their deficit was 17 seats, sufficient to affect not only the outcome of the election as a whole but of the subsequent Parliamentary vote on changing electoral boundaries in which Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined to defeat the Conservatives.
The Future In the immediate future the results of the Coalition Government’s plans to reduce the number of seats in the House of Commons have stalled and it is not clear how proposals to reduce the number of seats will materialise. For the foreseeable future the methods of voting and the concept of the single member constituency will survive. Nevertheless in taking stock of the past it is clear that a number of factors will come into play that are likely to affect the future distribution of seats and the extent to which they change hands, particularly as a result of demography. The forecast growth in the metropolitan populations of London does seem likely to enhance its representation relative to other parts of the country, though possibly not in relation to its South East hinterland. According to the Office of National Statistics future population growth in London is forecast to increase at a slightly higher rate than for the UK as a whole (9.6% against 8.6%); but at 11.2% the inner boroughs will significantly outstrip the outer boroughs which will rise at a much lower rate (8.5%). These changes will play their part in determining the number and distribution of seats in London. Another issue that could have an effect on the number of seats and their distribution (and thereby possibly the electoral outcome) is voter registration. The evidence from the Nineteenth Century is that restricting the size of the electorate tended to produce outcomes that we would today regard as either perverse or ‘undemocratic’. The over representation of some groups has at various points in time worked to the advantage of all parties on certain occasions, and to their disadvantage on others. For example, the earlier chapters of this book identify electorates in relation to populations during the Nineteenth Century and it is very clear that these resulted in outcomes that were unrepresentative of the populations if not the electorates. In several chapters in this book the extent to which boundary changes failed to match population trends is also very clear, in some instances quite dramatically. The 1945 Post War election in London was clearly fought on constituencies that were considerably out of date, but it was not the only general election fought in such circumstances. The progression to universal suffrage may in hindsight be seen as inexorable but in truth it took over a century to achieve and the amount of struggle involved was considerable. Despite this it is a fact that today there remain significant disparities between populations and voter registration. Because constituencies are determined on the basis of the numbers of people who register to vote it is a fact that some populations are under-represented. There has always been a problem of keeping electoral rolls up to date, and in certain places populations are itinerant if not nomadic. London is one of those places. The changes in economic migration, including within the UK and London in particular, seem likely to increase the difficulties of keeping electoral rolls as up to date as might be considered desirable. The number of eligible people who register to vote is actually the key determinant of constituency boundaries in the modern era. Population is, therefore, only one indicator of what could happen. The registration of voters already varies significantly between London Boroughs. Data produced by the London Elections Centre indicated that in 2010 across London as a whole 89.7% of the population aged 18 and over registered
32 Middlesex : Parliamentary Representation to supply London with Hertfordshire water. Gore Hundred covered the area of today’s boroughs of Brent and Harrow whilst Elthorne embraced Hillingdon and Southall. Further south lay the Isleworth Hundred, the smallest, comprising Hounslow including Brentford, whilst on the borders with Surrey and Buckinghamshire, Spelthorne Hundred included Staines, Twickenham, and Feltham.
Parliamentary Representation
The map shows the Middlesex County and Borough constituencies created by the First Reform Act, and which were contested in 1832. The rural character of Middlesex outside the London built-up area accounts for the large size of the County Constituency.
The importance of Middlesex in the economic and political life of the nation was not reflected in its early Parliamentary representation. The City of London was the only Middlesex borough summoned by the King to send MPs to the House of Commons in 1295. The City has been represented by a constituency that includes its name in every Parliament since. In 1295, just like any other English Parliamentary borough, it sent two burgesses, though in London’s case this number was increased to four in 1355, an indication of the importance that the City then had in the eyes of the monarchy. The timing was not without its significance. Under Edward lll England was engaged in War with France and taxes were needed to fund it. The fact that the City’s MPs numbered four until as late as the Parliament of 1880-85, after which it was reduced again to two, is indicative of its on-going actual as well as perceived importance. Westminster did not send MPs to the House of Commons until 1545, in Henry Vlll’s time, and no other part of London north of the Thames was specifically represented, except the County of Middlesex, which in common with most other English
33 Middlesex Constituencies: Westminster Counties returned two MPs from 1295 onwards. It was not until 1832 that other borough seats emerged, based on Tower Hamlets, Finsbury and Marylebone, so that Middlesex returned fourteen MPs, a near doubling of its previous representation. The Middlesex County constituency returned two MPs, with voters polling at Brentford (where the election result was also declared), Enfield, Hammersmith, Bedfont, Edgware, Mile End, Uxbridge and Kings Cross, or ‘within half a mile thereof’ as decreed by the legislation. At the 1832 General Election there were only 6,939 registered voters in the County constituency, making it the smallest by size of electorate compared with the Middlesex boroughs. In 1831 there were estimated to be 208,000 people living in the districts of Middlesex not covered by the borough constituencies. Areas of what we now call ‘inner London’ included in the Middlesex County constituency in 1832 were: Barons Court, Brompton, Chelsea, Earls Court, Fulham, Hammersmith, Holland Park, Kensal Green, Kensington, Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill, Shepherds Bush and Wormwood Scrubs. Westminster, with the City, formed a growing conurbation extending into Marylebone, Finsbury and Tower Hamlets. The main electorates were registered there, and the new borough constituencies of Finsbury, Tower Hamlets, Marylebone and Westminster returned two MPs each. The City of London kept four, retaining its position as the best represented constituency in terms of the number of MPs, if not relative to its population. Although it had the largest electorate, numbering 18,584 in 1832, of all the boroughs it had the smallest population (122,799 in 1831), evidence that the Act did not herald anything like the arrival of a democratic system. This was also indicated by the fact that Tower Hamlets, with a population of 359,864, had only 9,906 voters, 700 fewer than Westminster, which had a generally more affluent population of about 200,000. Even middle class Marylebone, with a population about 40,000 larger than Westminster, had 2,500 fewer electors. Finsbury was a shade more affluent, and with a population only slightly smaller than Marylebone’s, had 1,500 more registered voters. Westminster extended from Temple Bar, at the junction of Fleet St and the Strand, to Kensington Gore and Knightsbridge, and included: Belgravia, Buckingham Palace, Charing Cross, Covent Garden, Hyde Park, Mayfair, Millbank, Pimlico, St. James’, Victoria, and Whitehall. Finsbury was one of the first places outside the City of London to become an important borough in its own right. In 1832 the division’s population was 224,839 with 10,309 registered voters, but the shape of the constituency was much larger than the immediate area. In addition to Bunhill, Finsbury and Clerkenwell, it included: Bloomsbury, Holborn, The Westminster Borough Constituency in 1832. At the time the whole area was already built up, with Farringdon, Pentonville, Islington, the exception of the green spaces that still exist today. By the time the constituency was restructured in Holloway, Shacklewell, Dalston, 1885, Victoria and Charing Cross Stations had both been opened. and Stoke Newington. By 1868 it contained 31,759 voters and a population of 387,278. Named after the Fiennes family who owned land immediately north of the City, their Manor House of Finsbury was built beyond the Moorgate entrance to London. Much of the area was marshland and the ‘moor’ itself was drained in 1527, leading to further building. Finsbury Fields were used for archery practice in the 16th century, and at the time of the Fire of London in 1666 homeless Londoners camped there. In 1665 Bunhill Fields Cemetery was opened for nonconformists on a prehistoric burial site that became known as Bone Hill. Many famous people were buried there, including the authors John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe. The preacher and founder of Methodism, John Wesley, lived opposite the fields, on City Road. Finsbury Square was constructed nearby in 1777.
56
The Coming of the Railways 1: Camden Town, The London and Birmingham Railway 1837. The artist, J.C. Bourne captured this disruptive scene, where the new railway has cut a trench through the residential area of Camden Town on its way out of the new Euston Station, built on the New Road. The changes in the social fabric to follow were a major influence on the political scene, as suddenly electors became mobile.
The Coming of the Railways 2: The Uxbridge Road, Hanwell 1846. J.C. Bourne has captured the scene in Hanwell, on the Uxbridge Road, where citizens are about their business, and one of the new trains runs overhead on Brunel’s Great Western Railway. The allegory is lost to us today. The wonder then was to come across this massive engineering work in the middle of rural Middlesex. All was about to change.
57
Introduction
T
he 1884 Representation of the People Act had a huge impact in Middlesex. The former County and Borough constituencies were abolished and replaced by a total of 47, the largest enfranchisement of any area in Britain, and an increase of 29 MPs, each of whom represented a single geographically defined area, except for the City of London, which was represented by a pair. The constituencies were contested for the first time in 1885, when the impact on the political balance in the House of Commons was substantial. Not only did the number of MPs increase significantly, but the re-drawing of boundaries, especially in suburban areas where the right to vote was proportionately high due to the residency property qualifications, was beneficial to the Conservative Party, which staked out its ground as the defender of the rights and interests of such people. Nowhere in Britain was the scale of suburban expansion greater than in Middlesex. The table below shows the impact in terms of the numbers of Middlesex MPs returned to Parliament for each of the parties at General Elections between 1832 and 1910. Before the Second Reform Act the Liberals dominated; after it the Tories improved their representation, but after the Third Act they decisively supplanted the Liberals as the major Party. Despite the return of Liberal led Governments in five of the eight General Elections held after 1880, the Liberal Party only had a majority of seats in Middlesex once, in 1906. Its relative decline after 1880 is clear to see. After After 1st 2nd Election Reform Reform Act Act 18321868 Party 1865* C-LU 1 3 L 13 15 Lab 0 0 L/C-LU 12 12 majority Seats 14 18
After 3rd Reform Act 1874
1880
47
47
* These numbers are averages for all General Elections between 1832 and 1865 inclusive. Key: C = Conservative; L= Liberal; LU = Liberal Unionist; Lab = Labour; J = January, D= December
Central London Central London districts of the former county of Middlesex are defined as the City of London, Westminster, Marylebone and Paddington, all of which fall today within the boundaries of the City of London and the London Borough of Westminster. Before 1885 the number of MPs was eight, and this increased to nine following the Third Reform Act. The City of London (2 MPs) boundaries were officially described as containing the space within the boundaries of the City of London and the Inner and Middle Temple. Stretching along the Thames from the boundary with The Strand, east of the Royal Courts of Justice to Tower Hill, the City extended north to Charterhouse Street, which formed the boundary with Finsbury Central, and to Ropemaker Street in the vicinity of Finsbury Circus. Embraced within its ancient boundaries were all the famous City institutions including the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange, Lloyds, The Mansion House, Guildhall, St Paul’s Cathedral, The Old Bailey, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Leadenhall and Smithfield Markets. In 1885 the City was at the centre of global finance, banking, insurance and commerce, but was then also a residential
58
The City, Marylebone, Westminster and Paddington Constituencies in Pictures Top Right: Horseferry Road in the 1885 Abbey Constituency remains one of Westminster’s thoroughfares. This scene reminds us of its importance as a busy commercial centre for the community in the period. John Nelson Below, Left: Whitehall at Horse Guards in 1895. The boundary between Westminster Strand and Abbey Constituencies, crossed Whitehall at this point. © TfL from the London Transport Museum Collection
Above Right: The Strand in 1889, four years after Westminster, Strand Constituency was created. The busy street is of course populated entirely with horse-drawn vehicles. The output from so many horses was causing difficulty. © TfL from the London Transport Museum Collection Left: The City of London’s Guildhall has stood as its centre of administration since 1411. However, it is thought that a Guildhall existed on this site in the early Twelfth Century. Original Roman remains of an amphitheatre exist today beneath the Guildhall Yard and can be viewed in the basement of the adjacent Art Gallery. It is claimed that the system of government served as a model for the House of Commons. John Nelson
Right: A present-day view of palatial town houses for the ‘well to do’ in the Paddington South Constituency, created in 1885. Such houses were multi-storeyed to provide accommodation for servants above. Servants were not enfranchised even in 1885, unless they were male householders. Housing being built in the North Constituency was on a large scale, but the dwellings were much more modest. Over time this naturally created different political representation between different parts of the Borough of Paddington (now Westminster).
John Nelson
59
The City & Westminster Metropolitan Constituencies1885-1918 area despite many of its former inhabitants having moved away to surrounding suburbs. During the 1860s and 70s the City was refurbished with new infrastructure, including a modern sewage system that occasioned a drop in the resident population, whilst new suburbs like St Johns Wood became attractive to City merchants, and bankers, and the displaced working class moved to other areas such as Lisson Grove. The coming of the railways enabled people who worked in the City or who owned businesses there to commute longer distances, initially from The City of London Constituency in 1918 has now been the subject of massive railway building. Although the chaos of construction of the main line stations and the ‘cut and cover’ Metropolitan and District Lines places like Hampstead and was extreme, it swept away many slums, and the relief to the City streets was great. The subsequent tube later from further afield. As a lines, deep beneath the streets, did not disturb the surface much. These railways were made possible by consequence the population of the development of the electric train. In addition trams also appeared. All offered affordable travel and resulted in the decline in the City’s population. the City of London declined from 112,000 in 1861 to only about 50,000 twenty years later, just before the new electoral arrangements for the area were made. Despite its declining population, the constituency retained its previous boundaries, but its representation was halved to two MPs. The City’s population continued to decline, and six years after the two-member constituency was first contested in 1885 its population had fallen further to 37,705. By 1901 it was barely 27,000, and in 1911 it was below 20,000. This steep decline had little impact on voter registration, as the City had electors who, owning both businesses and second homes in the constituency, were entitled to vote there as well as in constituencies where they maintained their main homes. The population electoral disparity was in strong evidence elsewhere. Neighbouring Westminster was divided into three new constituencies with a combined population of 198,000, nearly 31,000 fewer than had lived in the former two-member division ten years earlier. By 1901 the number had fallen still further, to a little over 181,000 and ten years later was under 158,000. However, electorates increased initially as a result of franchise extensions. The combined electorates in 1906 were 28,731 compared with 24,990 in 1884, but declining populations eventually had an effect. At 28,173 the 1910 electorate was smaller than in 1906, though by proportionately much less than population decline would have caused. It is likely that the business vote had an impact similar to that in the City of London. These trends were a clear reflection of the suburban growth that occurred following the building of London’s surface and underground rail networks. There was also some population dispersal to the adjacent boroughs of Marylebone and Paddington despite which Westminster justified its additional seat on the basis of its relative population, indicating that it had been underrepresented before 1885. The Westminster Abbey constituency comprised the Abbey and St Margarets, the adjacent parish church in Parliament Square, together with the parish south of it known as St George’s, Westminster. Officially it was described as comprising the Westminster District, and the Close Collegiate Church of Peter. This meant that the districts within the new constituency’s boundaries were: Whitehall south of Horse Guards, the Palace of Westminster, the south side of St James’s Park, the area between Birdcage Walk and Vauxhall Bridge, plus a small encroachment a little further west towards Pimlico. The main roads that dissected the constituency were Victoria Street, and Horse Ferry Road, whilst Millbank and the River Thames opposite Lambeth provided its eastern border. An unusual feature was that the parish of St Margaret’s, Westminster comprised two separated sections. A detached portion that was part of the constituency lay further west covering Knightsbridge, Kensington Gore, and a part of Kensington Gardens, the rest of which was in the South Paddington division. Between the two separated parts of Westminster was St George Hanover Square, based on the single parish of that name. The northern boundary was Oxford Street close to Hanover Square, but short of Regents Street in the east, the constituency extended south to the Thames at Chelsea Bridge, then downstream to the border with Westminster Abbey. In between were Hyde Park, Mayfair, Belgravia, and Pimlico. It contained the London residences of many of the wealthiest people in the Land. The third seat was The Strand, which comprised principally the parishes of St James, St
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St Pancras, and Hampstead St Pancras old church, and the area remained largely agricultural for many centuries, serving as a market garden for London, but the 18th and 19th centuries saw the arrival of canals and then railways, many of which had their London termini there. These transformed Kings Cross and St Pancras into an urban area of slums and workmen’s lodgings, one of London’s poorest districts. Between Holborn and the Euston Road was St Pancras South, which officially comprised borough wards numbers seven and eight, areas of high population density, mainly lower quality housing facing London’s Northern railway termini. The constituency included the main part of London University and Coram’s Fields but the Kings Cross district (so named when a cross was erected in honour of King George IV) formed its main component, the railways providing huge employment in addition to that already available to local people in the City and nearby Holborn. The streets either side of the Euston Road (as the former New Road had become) housed thousands of essential London workers and their families. The Duke of Bedford considered the housing so bad that he erected gates and other barriers on the south side of Euston Road to protect his own estates from their disreputable effects. The London Housing Society built many flats, tenements and terraces, especially south of Kings Cross around the turn of the century. St Pancras West comprised borough wards numbers two, four and five covering the area between Euston station and Primrose Hill (both inclusive) including Mornington Crescent, Chalk Farm and the eastern fringes of Regents Park, while St Pancras East comprised wards three and six running northwest from Kings Cross and St Pancras stations towards Camden Town (incorporating its southern districts) and included St Pancras itself with Somers Town, infamous for its massive poverty and overcrowded conditions. It was also the area in which three of London’s major railway termini were built in the 19th century on land that in 1697 had been the London residence of the Lord Chancellor, Baron Somers of Evesham, a descendant of a Court Jester to Henry V111. After the New Road from Marylebone was constructed as a by-pass from the West to the City of London avoiding the congestion of Oxford Street and Holborn, Somers Town was developed for leased housing. However, the staged building of the railways represented a major opportunity for the landowners who had no compunction in evicting those who were in the way. Euston Station was built in 1837, Kings Cross in 1852 and St Pancras in 1868/9. It was the Midland Railway that caused most of the upheaval as its construction came after the housing had been built. Thousands of people were displaced and went to live in similarly overcrowded conditions in places like Islington. Another wave of dispossessions came in 1875 when more land was acquired to build the Somers Town Goods station. East of Regents Park on the estates of the Earl of Southampton some of London’s worst housing developed in Somers Town and Agar Town. In a publication of Charles Dickens in 1851 this area was described as “a disgrace to the metropolis”. Fortunately this shanty town was demolished in 1861 to make way for St Pancras Station. By the canal side at Somers Town arose the vast Imperial Company Gasworks, built in 1822. The canal and railways brought in timber and the construction trades had many centres of manufacture and distribution in later years, all giving employment to a hard pressed working class housed in slums and tenements. The terraces around Chalton and Ossulston Streets were so bad that they were demolished under the Housing of Working Classes Act of 1890. Matters started to be put to rights when some of the streets between Euston and St Pancras stations were built with new, high density, three storey houses. Somers Town gradually developed as a pleasant domicile for people working nearby. Many of the houses survive today, despite the battering they received during WW2. St Pancras North comprised ward one and covered northern districts of Camden Town and the area beyond including Kentish Town, which developed in the mid-19th century surrounding the lands occupied by the North London, Tottenham & Hampstead Junction, and Midland Railways, violating the fields around the old village. The journalist Emerson wrote at the time that Gospel Oak, which was also in the constituency, was becoming “covered with terraces and crescents; and Kentish Town is throwing out lines of bricks and mortar to meet its neighbours, Hampstead and Downshire Hill.” In 1866 the sanitary reformer James Hole commenting on Kentish Town, said: “The inhabitant whose memory can carry him back thirty years recalls pictures of rural beauty, suburban mansions and farmsteads, green fields, waving trees and clear streams where fish could live – where now can be seen only streets, factories and workshops, and a river or brook black as ink.” Camden Town had developed rapidly from about 1820 when the Regents Canal attracted industry and coal wharves. Dickens, who lived there for a while, captured its unfinished state in “Dombey and Son” in which he wrote “there were frowzy fields and cow houses, and dung hills, and dust heaps, and ditches, and gardens, and summer houses, and carpet-beating grounds….and backs of mean houses, and patches of wretched vegetation.”
Hampstead (1 seat) Hampstead, north of Marylebone and between St Pancras North and Hornsey beyond, was created a separate borough based on the parish of St John. The new constituency incorporated Belsize Park, Dartmouth Park, Finchley Road, Hampstead Village, Kenwood, Kilburn Grange Park, Swiss Cottage, West Hampstead and Waterlow Park. An ancient village with a distinctive history it is thought that Hampstead lands there were granted by King Ethelred (“The
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Middlesex Pictures: St Pancras, and Hampstead Constituencies
Top Left: Prince of Wales Road at Kentish Town West Station was the boundary between the St. Pancras North and West Constituencies in 1885. John Nelson Top Right: John Cobden’s statue opposite Mornington Crescent Tube Station. Camden High St and Eversholt St to the south formed the boundary between the East and West St Pancras constituencies. Left: Langland Gdns, Frognal, Hampstead Constituency 1885-1918 within 2 mins walk of the N. London Railway.
John Nelson
Above: From the 1840s onwards Goldington Street and Goldington Crescent, in the 1885 St Pancras East Constituency, were laid out with three-storey terraced houses, some of which have survived subsequent redevelopment and Second World War bombing. Although considered to be high-density housing at the time of construction the neighbourhood offered domicile for working people close to where jobs were. As the need for housing rose steadily, the area filled with more and more residences. Left: St Pancras, Euston Road (new) Parish Church in St Pancras South, was built between 1819-22, and designed by Henry and William Inwood in the Greek Revival style. If spiritual refreshment was required both this and the old parish churches were on hand to serve the close-packed residents.
Map background Š Google Maps
Photos by: Gordon Rushton, except as otherwise shown
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MPs for Hampstead, and the East End MPs for Hampstead From 1885 1888 1901 1905
at G B B B
To 1888 1901 1905 1918
Surname Holland Brodie-Hoare Milvain Fletcher
First Names Henry Thurston Edward Thomas John Samuel
Party Conservative Conservative Conservative Conservative
NOTE First returned at a B = By-election; G = General Election
1901. He was born in 1842 and died in 1911. Hoare was succeeded by Thomas Milvain (Conservative) , born in 1844 who was a Durham Grammar School and Trinity College Cambridge educated lawyer. He became a Middle Temple Barrister in 1869, was first elected as MP for Durham in 1885 but lost his seat in 1892 at which point he sought a return to the Commons, initially unsuccessfully at Maidstone in 1901 but subsequently successfully at Hampstead in 1902. He resigned his seat on being appointed Judge Advocate General in 1905, a post he occupied until 1915. He died the following year and was succeeded as Judge Advocate General by Sir Felix Cassel, MP for nearby St Pancras South (see above). Sir John Fletcher (Conservative) succeeded Milvain at the 1905 by-election necessitated by the latter’s appointment as a Judge. Also a barrister, he was the son of a Manchester merchant who was educated at Harrow School and Christ Church College Oxford where he graduated BA in 1864 and MA five years later. He was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1868. He retired from Parliament in 1918 and was created a Baronet in Herefordshire. Born in 1841 he died in 1924. The former Hackney and Tower Hamlets constituencies which represented the East End were substantially amended
The East End in 1885 generating 10 additional seats in four new Parliamentary boroughs, namely Bethnal Green, Hackney (which included Stoke Newington transferred from Finsbury), Shoreditch and Tower Hamlets. Thus in total 14 single member constituencies replaced two two-member seats. (See map opposite)
Bethnal Green (2 seats) Closest to Hackney and flanked by the Central constituency of that borough to the north and by Shoreditch (Haggerston) to the west, was the new Borough of Bethnal Green, based on the parish of St Matthew, created in 1743. Then it had a population of only about 15,000, mainly packed into the western end beyond Spitalfields but, like adjacent Stepney, developed rapidly after the Napoleonic Wars as a place dominated by small weavers’ houses with attic workrooms. By 1851 Bethnal Green was a burgeoning slum area with a population of 85,000. It remained unremittingly poor despite re-housing efforts made by commercial philanthropists like Angela Burdett-Coutts, the millionairess granddaughter of the founder of the famous Bank who, in the early 1860s, built four Gothic blocks at Bethnal Green with a resident superintendent policing a community of 600 people. A contemporary description of late Victorian Bethnal Green was provided by the banker and philanthropist William Cotton who wrote: “Its courts and alleys are almost countless, and overwhelming with men, women, boys, dogs, cats, pigeons and birds. Its children are ragged, brought up to hard living. Its men are mainly poor dock labourers, poor costermongers, poor silk weavers, clinging hopelessly to a withering craft; the lowest kind of thieves, with a sprinkling of toy makers, shoe makers and cheap cabinet makers. Its women are mainly hawkers, seamstresses, the coarsest order of prostitutes, and aged stall keepers.” The new Parliamentary borough was divided into two parts. Bethnal Green South West covered the cramped tenements north of Liverpool Street station and Spitalfields. Sandwiched between Shoreditch and Cambridge Heath Road it extended towards the Hackney Road on the west side covering the so-called “Weavers” district with its northeast corner being in the vicinity of today’s York Hall. Today’s Tower Hamlets Borough retains a Weavers ward for council elections. Bethnal Green North East circled the northern part of the South West constituency west of Cambridge Heath Road and south of Hackney Road, which formed the boundary with Hackney Central but also extended east of Cambridge Heath Road as far as Victoria Park (most of which was in Hackney South), either side of the Bethnal Green and Roman Roads. Its eastern boundary was on a north/south alignment through Victoria Park in the vicinity of the Lido whilst the Great Eastern Railway broadly delineated its southern boundary. Its principal electorates lived in Cambridge Heath and Bethnal Green.
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Map of the East End
The East End: Between 1885 and 1918 there were major changes taking place here, as once the railways came, the dock activity leapt ahead. Great manufactories expanded, as did the population. The change didn’t stop, and it continues today. Few if any thought then that containerisation would sweep away the ships, and the once humming dock area would be reborn as a world finance centre.
131
Early History
T
he Roman Emperor Claudius staged a successful invasion of Britain in 43 AD when most of Essex was part of the territory of the Catuvellauni, an Iron Age tribe who had their capital at Camulodunum (Colchester). In 60 AD Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni tribe, led a revolt against the Romans. Colchester was burnt to the ground and the inhabitants massacred. This was followed by a march on London which she sacked before heading north along Watling Street to confront the Roman northern legions. After the revolt had been suppressed, in 61 AD, Colchester was rebuilt as a showpiece town, named Colonia Victricensis or City of the Victorious, this time with substantial walls as defences. The London road to Colchester passed through Essex. Many of the present day communities within what is now Greater London were established along it, including Stratford, West Ham, Ilford and Romford. As the Romans withdrew their troops from the 4th century onwards, there was an increasing influence of Germanic peoples on aspects of life. Waves of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes settled, and Essex initially became the Kingdom of the “East Saxons”. A unified East Saxon Kingdom probably emerged in the late 6th century (500-600 AD) out of a series of smaller territories such as the Rodings and Dengie. In the seventh century the kingdom probably extended as far as Middlesex and Surrey but around 700, Middlesex, Surrey and London were lost to the neighbouring kingdom of Mercia, and though Essex remained an independent kingdom, around 820 it was incorporated into Wessex. The kingdom was administered through a series of royal villas with a correlation with major Roman sites, and it is likely that some of the communications network represented by the Roman roads survived. Following the Viking invasions of the Ninth Century Essex gradually fell under the influence of Dane Law and following the death of king Ethelred, Canute defeated King Edward II (Ironside) at Rochford to take control of the area in about 1020. The years following the Norman conquest saw the imposition of castles, as at Rayleigh and Castle Hedingham, and the 11th and 12th centuries saw the foundation of new towns, such as Braintree and Chelmsford founded by the Bishop of London in 1199 to capitalise on his manors’ positions on communication nodal points. Essex was then thickly wooded. The Royal Forest (remnants of which remain as Epping Forest) was not at all easy to penetrate. Communications were poor, and trade routes remained concentrated around the Roman road and the area’s waterways. However, after the signing of Magna Carta by King John, he was also forced to sign a Charter of Forests paving the way for clearances, which created an altogether more agricultural landscape and economy. Deforestation resulted in Essex becoming the largest connected open space of level ground in Britain, with many water courses feeding the largely arable lands supplying London’s markets. Nevertheless, the County’s southern areas along the Thames estuary and the Lea mouth, which formed the county boundary with Middlesex, remained marshy and unhealthy. Essex was strategically important to London, and when it became necessary to defend it from the North Sea a Fort was built at Tilbury. In 1588 Queen Elizabeth 1 reviewed an Army assembled there to repel the Spanish Armada. For administrative purposes the County historically was divided into twenty “Hundreds”, of which four covered parts that are now within the Greater London Authority. These were: Becontree, based on present day Ilford; Chafford, centred on Upminster; Waltham Abbey, north of Chingford, and the Liberty of Havering-Atte-Bower, centred on Romford. By the year 1700 it is estimated that the population of Essex was a little over 159,000 but a century later had risen to a quarter of a million and in 1831, just before the First Reform Act, the county’s population was recorded as 317,233.
132 Essex - Parliamentary Representation 1832-1885
Pigot’s map of 1840 shows the division of the County into two constituencies. Essex Southern is below the red line. It illustrates the county in relation to the developing metropolis to the west, and shows the first railway lines that would stimulate the growth of Metropolitan Essex within a few decades. At this early stage most development was taking place around Stratford and the Thames at Canning Town and Custom House.
Parliamentary Representation 1832-1885 Before 1832 Essex sent two MPs to the House of Commons, representing the whole County together, with three pairs of borough MPs representing: Colchester(from 1295); Maldon (from 1332), and Harwich (from 1640). None was within what we now define as the metropolitan area.
Essex Southern At the time of the First Reform Act in 1832, the part of Essex that today comprises five London Boroughs was still a largely rural and agricultural area, but the County’s representation was expanded by the creation of two separate geographical divisions. Greater London’s electorates were contained within the new two-member county seat of Essex Southern, which then also included the area around Chelmsford, the Thames Estuary, and the North Sea coast as far as the Blackwater River near Maldon. Election results were declared at Chelmsford, but Romford, Billericay, Epping, Rochford and Maldon were also polling places. The fact that only one of these (Romford) was within what we today call London, indicates how sparse was the population of that part of Essex as recently as the 1830s. At the first General Election, after the passing of the First Reform Act, there were only 4,488 registered voters in the constituency, which contained a population of just over 150,000. This was some 17,000 fewer than lived in Essex Northern, which had 5,163 electors. However, by 1861 the population of the Southern constituency had increased to nearly 214,000, and the 1868 electorate was 7,127. Essex Northern was divided into rural North East and North West constituencies following the Second Reform Act (1867), whilst Southern Essex began to develop both industrial and suburban characteristics. The place of election also changed from Chelmsford to Brentwood, reflecting the new demographic profile of the area. There was an oddity. North Woolwich on the north bank of the Thames, a detached part of the Kent parish of Woolwich, remained in the Greenwich constituency. The redrawing of boundaries affected Essex Southern very little, the main change being the transfer of Epping and Harlow areas to the North West division, which included the village of Chingford. The construction of docks, refineries, and sewer outflows along the Thames Estuary east of the River Lea coupled with the building of strong flood defences, meant that marshland areas were reclaimed and urban development
133 Essex : Parliamentary Representation 1832-1885 flourished. Further north, railway lines were constructed, the first of which was the Great Eastern, connecting London to Colchester, Ipswich, and Norwich. Stations were built in the London area at Stratford, Ilford, and Romford, where the development of the Essex suburbs began. By the 1880s, the population had increased further so that in the 1881 census, the constituency’s was only 4,000 short of 300,000, with an electorate that had risen to nearly 18,000. Essex Southern was a predominantly Conservative constituency throughout the period from 1832 to 1880 during which time there were twelve General Elections. Liberals were returned at only four. In 1868 the constituency’s two MPs were both Liberals and in 1832, 1847, and 1857, the Party returned one but during the whole period twenty Tories were elected (including a June 1836 by-election).
MPs for Essex Southern 1832 - 1885 Parliaments 1832-1837 1832-1835 1835-1865 1837-1847 1847-1852 1852-1857
at
G G G B G G
Dare Lennard Bramston Palmer Buxton Bowyer-Smijth
Robert Westley Hall Sir Thomas Barrett Thomas William George Sir Edward North Sir William
Conservative Liberal Conservative Conservative Liberal Conservative
1857-1859 1859-1865 1865-1868 1865-1868 1868-1874 1868-1874 1874-1885 1874-1885
G G G G G G G G
Wingfield Watlington Selwin-Ibbetson Gascoyne-Cecil Baker Johnston Baring Makins
Richard Baker John Watlington Perry Sir Henry John Lord Eustace Brownlow Henry Richard Baker Wingfield Andrew Thomas Charles Colonel William Thomas
Liberal Conservative Conservative Conservative Liberal Liberal Conservative Conservative
Notes: first returned at: B By-election, G General Election
The first two MPs for Essex South were Robert Westley Hall Dare (Conservative) and Sir Thomas Barrett Lennard (Liberal), both of whom were returned for the first time in 1832 but neither of who served for long. Lennard stood down at the 1835 election and although Dare once again topped the poll he died in 1837. Dare who lived at Cranbrook, Ilford, was born Robert Hall , the son of a proprietor of the West India Company, established in the seventeenth century to develop and protect British colonial trade to what became known as the West Indies. He assumed the additional name of Dare upon his marriage to a woman of that name. In politics he was opposed to free trade and taxation of most kinds. By contrast Lennard was a radical who favoured the abolition of slavery, though he was a wealthy man too, the son of Lord Dacre, a Tithe owner with large estates in the Irish County of Monaghan. He remained MP for Essex Southern until his death in 1837. At the 1835 election the Liberal candidate nominated to succeed Lennard was defeated by Thomas William Bramston (Conservative), albeit that he described himself as a Liberal Conservative, giving his support on critical motions to the government led by Lord Palmerston. He was born in 1796 and educated at All Souls College, Oxford where he obtained a BA in 1819, and an MA four years later. He lived at Skreens, west of Chelmsford, was a patron of two livings, and a Deputy-Lieutenant of Essex. Dare remained MP for thirty years, and retired in 1865. Following Dare’s death, George Palmer (Conservative), an East India trader, was elected at a by-election in 1836 and held his seat until 1847, when he retired. He had unsuccessfully contested the Durham borough seat of South Shields in 1832. A brother of a Governor of the Bank of England, he commanded a Corps of the Yeomanry, which he himself had raised. Politically his main interest was agricultural protection, and he was also actively involved in the founding of the National Lifeboat Institution, formed in 1824. He lived at Nazeing Park near Epping, and died in 1853. Sir Edward North Buxton (Liberal) was elected in 1847 but served only one term being defeated in 1852. From
147
Early History
K
ent’s history is heavily influenced by its proximity to London on the one hand and mainland Europe on the other. It was settled well before most other parts of England and has the oldest recorded place name in the British Isles. The Romans who landed at Ritchborough, Pegwell Bay in 54BC, called it ‘Cantium’; and the Saxons,’Cantguar-lantd’, which signified ‘the country of the inhabitants of Kent’. Some have said that the name derives from the word ‘Cainc’, being descriptive of a ‘country abounding in open downs’, which is a general characteristic of Kent. In the Domesday Book the place was written as ‘Chenth’, and the modern name and pronunciation came into common usage thereafter. Many of Kent’s coastal towns were significant either as commercial ports or in the defence of the realm. Dover, Hythe, New Romney and Sandwich were four of the original ‘Cinque Ports’ and ease of access by water to London led to the development of Chatham and Sheerness as dockland towns as early as 1488. In the 18th Century the growth of Margate and Ramsgate as seaside resorts was also encouraged by water transport even before the arrival of the railways cemented their importance. The River Thames was London’s vital artery and, forming as it did the northernmost boundary of Kent, the local economy in that part of the county owed much to the strategic importance of London in terms of its trade as well as militarily. This was especially true of Deptford, which grew as a naval shipbuilding town and Woolwich, established as a naval base by Henry VIII in 1510; these towns, together with intermediate Greenwich, all had Royal connections. Travelling from London to Kent the first habitation of any consequence beyond Southwark was the village of Deptford, which grew up at the point where the River Ravensbourne enters the Thames. The ancient parish of Deptford St Nicholas extended into Surrey in which county lay the district of Hatcham. In 1730 this was included in a new Deptford parish of St Pauls and with the coming of the railways became better known as New Cross. In 1845 Hatcham parish was separately created but with New Cross still straddling the Kent-Surrey border and it was not until the creation of the Parliamentary borough of Deptford in 1885 that the whole of the area came to be within metropolitan Kent. The village’s name meant literally, ‘deep ford’, and was recorded first in 1293. The River was the basis of the local economy but the pilgrims’ route between the capital and the cathedral at Canterbury, now called the Old Kent Road, also skirted the southern edge of Deptford and a town developed between these two arteries. Deptford Creek separated the town from Greenwich which, dating from 964 AD, meant literally ‘green port or harbour’. Together with nearby Blackheath dating from AD 1166, (meaning ‘dark-coloured open heath lands’) both developed because of their locations near the river. The whole area became quite fashionable, as it was easily accessible by boat. In AD 1086 the King built a Palace at Eltham, or ‘Elteham’, meaning ‘a river meadow frequented by swans’, south of the Old Kent Road and close to Blackheath. Suburban development in London was initially based on riverboat transport for city dwellers looking for country calm close to the town. Henry Vlll built Greenwich Palace, where his daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth I was born, and, later in his reign, the Royal Naval Hospital was located there too. Charles II initiated this as a riverside Palace in the 1660s, a building that is now part of the Naval History Museum. Yet Kent had no single natural urban centre but several towns of medium size. Many of them developed as important river crossings, like Tonbridge and Maidstone, for example, where the Medway was bridged, and trade routes developed to other towns and ports of importance such as the Sussex Cinque Ports of Rye, Winchelsea and Hastings. After Tunbridge Wells was founded as a spa resort in 1606 this too began to attract visitors from London. Travellers’ routes cut through parts of Kent close to London, such as Lewisham and Bromley, and as a result these began to develop viable economies themselves. Nevertheless the area now enclosed within the London Boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley, did not really begin to develop significantly until well into the 19th Century.
148 Kent - Parliamentary Representation 1832 -1885
The Greenwich Constituency boundary in 1835, showing the newly arrived railway from London Bridge Station. The whole area was open, except where marked on the map. The yellow tint indicates the extent of today’s built up area, with the parks and commons left white. The ease of communications led to rapid growth within the area, and the joining of the three communities marked of Deptford, Greenwich and Woolwich. The rest of metropolitan Kent, including Lewisham, Lee, Eltham and Plumstead depicted here, was in the Western Division of the County which extended beyond the Medway and as far as Romney Marsh. North Woolwich (now in Metropolitan Essex) was also in Western Kent.
Parliamentary Representation 1832-1885 1835 maps of London showed three relatively free-standing communities all of which were included in the new two member Parliamentary Borough of Greenwich which, with a total population close to 66,000, covered a wide band of Kent along the riverside from the Surrey boundary with Rotherhithe as far east as the canal separating the Royal Arsenal from Plumstead Marshes, taking in Deptford, the eastern part of New Cross, St Johns and Woolwich. However, it stopped short of Lewisham, Blackheath and Eltham, all of which were allocated to the Western Division of Kent. Neither did it include the western part of New Cross, or Hatcham as it was historically known, which were in the Surrey borough constituency of Lambeth. Woolwich itself was something of an oddity in that parts of two of its parishes (St Mary and St John the Evangelist) were on the north side of the Thames. They remained in Kent until 1899, when they were transferred to London, but stayed part of Woolwich borough until 1965. Despite the sizable population of the Greenwich constituency its electorate was a mere 2,714, although it has been estimated that a majority of the electorate were artisans, or working class voters, though this proportion may have decreased over the period after 1832 as pre-existing voters who enjoyed ancient voting rights that were protected by the Reform Act gradually diminished as a proportion of the total electoral population. The first community downstream from Rotherhithe in the new constituency was Deptford, with the density of its housing greatest between the river Thames and the line of the new London to Greenwich Railway which was then being constructed and which opened the following year. There too were the established Royal Dock Yards, mast pond and ‘Victualling’ Office of the Royal Navy and all the factors that were to lead to a massive increase in the economic development of the whole area were in place. The Surrey Docks, already opened at Rotherhithe on the Surrey side of the border from Deptford, together with the Surrey Canal, cutting under the Deptford Lower Road and linking close by to the Croydon canal; these, together with the new railway, provided the essential infrastructure that led to the development of modern Deptford, and which in 1889 was to be created a London borough in its own right. Its population in the 1841 census was 23,165. Greenwich itself was the base for the Billingsgate Fishing Fleet, famous for its whitebait and other catches, and was also developing strongly. By 1832 Greenwich Park together with the Royal Observatory, Hospital and Naval Asylum were well established and residential development was taking place towards Deptford, Woolwich and Blackheath. By early mid century Greenwich was well towards being absorbed into London’s built-up area. The 1841 population of the town was 29,755, greater than Deptford’s and 4,000 larger than Woolwich. In 1861 (a quarter of a century or more
149 Kent - Parliamentary Representation 1832 -1885
‘Pigot’s 1840 map of Kent. The red line separates the Eastern and Western Parliamentary divisions, with today’s metropolitan area in the far north west. Then it was barely attached to the growing metropolis.’
after the opening of the London and Greenwich Railway) the constituency’s population had risen to 139,436 and the electorate to 15,509 (in 1868). Twenty years later the equivalent figures in 1881 and 1884 were 206,651 and 22,863 respectively, indicating the massive development that occurred in this area of South East London. By the time that the original Greenwich constituency gave way to its successor seats in 1885 it covered three large built-up areas, based on its three towns. Historically local administration in the County of Kent had been divided into two units; the East was home to the Men of Kent and was run from Canterbury; the West was home to the Kentish Men and was run from Maidstone. Local government was originally administered through six ‘lathes’, or districts of Kent that themselves embraced a number of further divisions, or Hundreds. Western Kent comprised the ‘lathes’ of Aylesford and Sutton-at-Hone, and the Lower Division of the ‘lathe’ of Scray. All districts that are now part of London fell within four Hundreds of the lathe of Sutton-at-Hone, which overall extended south from the Thames to the Sussex border near Edenbridge and southeast to Swanscombe, which lies between Dartford and Gravesend. In 1814 the two separate geographical administrations of Kent were merged and Maidstone became the County town but when the first Parliamentary divisions of the County were established in 1832 they were still based on pre-1814 boundaries. In the 19th Century the Hundreds that constituted the area we now know as metropolitan Kent were Blackheath – comprising: Deptford, Greenwich, Woolwich, Lewisham, Beckenham, and Bromley; Little and Lessness – comprising: Plumstead, Erith and Crayford; and Ruxley – comprising: Bexley, Orpington, Chislehurst, West Wycombe, and Hayes. The Western Kent county constituency was geographically large. It extended from the boundary with Greenwich at Plumstead marshes down the Thames estuary and beyond the Medway as far as Gillingham and south to the Sussex border including the Weald and Isle of Oxney. Its main centres of population were the Medway towns, Maidstone, Tunbridge Wells, Sevenoaks, Erith, Dartford, Gravesend, Bromley and Lewisham. The election was held at Maidstone but there were six polling places, two of which were in what is the London area today; one at Bromley and another at Blackheath. The population of Western Kent, excluding Greenwich, was 178,000 in 1831, with an electorate registered in the following year’s General Election numbering 6,678. Yet within the next 30 years the population had increased to 348,000, despite the creation of a new Mid-Kent constituency that had reduced the geographical size of the Western Division, and made it much more aligned with the southeast London suburbs as we know them today. Despite its increased population, the electorate in 1868 had only risen to 8,828, evidence perhaps that the new residents were largely from the yet to be enfranchised labouring classes.
150 MPs for Metropolitan Kent and its politics MPs for Metropolitan Kent 1832 - 1885 From
at
Surname
First Names
1832 1832 1835 1837 1841 1851 1852 1852 1857 1857 1859 1859 1865 1868 1873 1880 1832 1832 1835 1838 1841 1845 1847 1852 1857 1857 1859 1859 1865 1868 1868 1878
G G G G G B G G G G B G G G B G G G G B G B G G B G G G G G G B
1835 1851 1837 1841 1852 1852 1857 1857 1859 1859 1873 1865 1868 1880 1885 1885 1841 1835 1838 1857 1845 1847 1852 1857 1859 1859 1868 1865 1868 1885 1878 1885
Dundas Barnard Angerstein Attwood Dundas Salomons Rolt Chambers Codrington Townsend Salomons Angerstein Bright Gladstone Boord De Worms Hodges Rider Geary Filmer Marsham Austen Hodges Smith Martin Whatman Holmesdale Filmer Dyke Mills Talbot Lewisham
John Whitley Deans, RN Edward George John Matthew Wolverley John Whitley Deans, RN David (Alderman) Peter Montague Sir William John (LtGen) John David (Alderman) William Sir Charles Tilston William Ewart Thomas William Baron Henry Thomas Law Thomas Sir William Richard Powlett Sir Edmund Viscount Thomas (Col) Thomas Law William Masters Charles Wykeham James Viscount Sir Edmund Sir William Hart Sir Charles Henry John Gilbert Viscount (William Heneage Legg)
Constituency
Party
Greenwich
Liberal Liberal Liberal Conservative Liberal Liberal Conservative Liberal Liberal Liberal Liberal Liberal Liberal Liberal Conservative Conservative Liberal Liberal Conservative Conservative Conservative Protectionist Liberal Conservative Liberal Liberal Conservative Conservative Conservative Conservative Conservative Conservative
Kent West
NOTE First returned at a B = By-election; G = General Election
The Politics of Metropolitan Kent between 1832 and 1885 The general pattern of politics nationally after the 1832 Act was for the boroughs to elect mainly Liberals and the Counties to return Tories and this is precisely what occurred in this part of Kent until the Second Act. Overall the Liberals performed much better than the Tories. In the 9 General Elections that were held in Greenwich from 1832 until 1865 the Liberals won both borough seats on 8 occasions. The Tories won only once, in 1837, when they also topped the poll but even then a Liberal was elected in second place. Overall in Greenwich 17 Liberals were returned and only one Conservative. Neither was there much excitement in the contested by-elections that were held during that period. Liberals won these at Greenwich in 1851, 1852, 1857 and 1859. By contrast, the Tories won both seats in the Western Kent division on four occasions, and topped the poll on three more, winning eleven MPs in all to seven for the Liberals. They topped the poll only twice, first in 1832, and again in 1857. On this second occasion the Liberal’s election was confirmation of what had previously taken place at a by-election. Shortly before the 1857 General Election one of two Tories returned at the previous poll in 1854 resigned, and on 16th February 1857 the Liberal candidate captured the seat, a result that was confirmed in April’s General Election when two Liberals were returned. After the Second Reform Act the franchise was further extended and the Conservatives did much better in this part of Kent. In the three General Elections that took place before the Third Reform Act, Western Kent returned two Tories on every occasion and Greenwich too became much more closely contested between the Parties. In 1868 the Liberals were returned for both seats but evidence of a pro-Tory mood emerged at a by-election which was held there
151 MPs for Greenwich on 2nd August 1873 following the death of one of the two Liberal MPs. The Tories gained the seat and retained it at the 1874 General Election when one Liberal was also elected but in the General Election after that, held in 1880, the Conservatives actually won both seats. The Western Kent constituency maintained its Tory traditions throughout including a by-election on 15th May 1878 which was uncontested by the Liberals following the resignation of one of a pair of sitting Tories. Two Conservatives were returned at the 1880 poll as well.
MPs for Greenwich
Sir John Dundas MP
Wikipedia
Captain John Whitley Deans Dundas RN (Liberal), later a Lord of the Admiralty, was one of the first two MPs elected for the naval constituency of Greenwich in 1832. He served twice as the MP, firstly until 1835 and then between 1841 and his retirement in 1852 to become commander of the British fleet in the Mediterranean. Born in 1785, he was the son of Dr. James Deans of Calcutta and assumed the names Whitley and Dundas on his first marriage, acquiring his wife’s family names. He rose to become Rear Admiral of the Red, Clerk of the Ordinance, and in 1846 a Lord of the Admiralty, a promotion that necessitated him fighting a by-election, which he did successfully. A patron of one living, he was a Deputy-Lieutenant of Berkshire and started out his political career as a Whig. In the pre-Reform General Election of 1831 he contested Queensborough unsuccessfully and after his first spell as Greenwich’s MP he contested Devizes unsuccessfully in 1835 before succeeding there at a by-election the following year. He sat until 1838 when he resigned to resume his naval career three years before being elected once again at Greenwich. He died in 1862.
Edward George Barnard (Liberal) sat with Dundas for most of his period as a Greenwich MP. He was elected with him in 1832 and only ceased to be an MP when he died in 1851. A ship builder, he was also the patron of one living and lived at Deptford Green. He was a political radical believing in the ballot and triennial Parliaments. Whilst Dundas was absent from the Greenwich Hustings, his place was taken by John Angerstein (Liberal), son of the celebrated Underwriter and founder of the Gallery that bore his name. John, who lived in St James Square, but who also had homes in Norfolk and Kent where he was the patron of two livings had, before the Reform Act was passed, paid for nomination as a Parliamentary candidate, though without success. In later years he was to become a supporter of reforms that abolished such privileges. He had contested Greenwich unsuccessfully at the 1832 election and, following his retirement from the same seat in 1837, he lost at Surrey East, a constituency to which he transferred his candidacy. He was never elected again and died in 1858. Angerstein was succeeded at Greenwich by Matthias Wolverley Attwood (Conservative) who took the seat at the 1837 General Election but only held it for one term, until 1841. Attwood’s father (also Matthias) was the MP for Whitehaven between 1832 and 1847 and so sat in the House with his son for fours years. Attwood senior had also previously sat as an MP in unreformed Parliaments for Callington (Cornwall) and Boroughbridge (West Riding of Yorkshire). The younger Attwood, who lived in Lombard Street, had contested Greenwich initially but unsuccessfully in 1835, and at the time of his defeat there in 1841 also sought election in three other constituencies at the same contest: at the City of London; Kinsale(Ireland); and at Sunderland (County Durham); all of them unsuccessful. He died in 1865. Alderman David Salomons (Liberal) succeeded Edward Barnard at a by-election after he died in 1851, but was quickly defeated at the subsequent General Election in 1852. However, he regained a seat at a by-election in 1859, following the resignation of John Townsend (elected in 1857). Salomons retained the seat until his death in 1873. Born in 1797, he lived near Hyde Park in London and also had a home at Broom Hill, Tunbridge Wells. He was the son of a City merchant and Underwriter and he too became a merchant though he was also admitted to the bar of the Middle Temple. From 1835-6 he was Sheriff of London; then from 1839-40 was High Sheriff of Kent. He was elected an Alderman of the City of London in 1847 and Lord Mayor in 1855 whilst serving also as a magistrate in Middlesex, Kent and Sussex. He was also a Commissioner of Lieutenancy for the City but had interests beyond the purely ceremonial, being the author of several books on a variety of subjects including the Corn Laws, Banking and Railways. When Salomons was defeated in 1852, he was replaced by Peter Rolt (Conservative), who retained the seat until 1857. He was born at Deptford in 1798, where he was the son of the clerk to the Surrey Dockyard Company,
153 MPs for Greenwich
King Charles’ Court in the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. In 1869 the Royal Naval College moved to Greenwich from Portsmouth whilst William Gladstone was the MP. This essentially naval constituency included the Arsenal and Dockyard at Woolwich, the Royal Naval College and the Dockyard at Deptford and naval activity was at its height from the British foreign policy feature of gunboat diplomacy. In 1882 Gladstone’s government ordered the naval bombardment of Alexandria. After the occupation of Egypt, Gladstone sold at a profit his Egyptian Government Stocks which were estimated at the time as 37% of his personal capital [Philip Mansel - writing in the Spectator 28.01.2012]. Gordon Rushton
The man who succeeded Angerstein at Greenwich in 1865 was Sir Charles Tilston Bright (Liberal), who lived at Lancaster Gate and also had a home in Victoria Street, Westminster. However, long before he inhabited these affluent addresses he was born in West Ham in 1832. He sat until 1868 when he retired and was a somewhat less radical Liberal than many of his colleagues. Whilst favouring an extended franchise he opposed the secret ballot. In 1860-1 he was Captain of the Surrey Volunteers. He died in 1888. The most famous MP to sit for Greenwich was William Ewart Gladstone (Liberal), the three times Prime Minister of Victoria’s Britain. His tenure as a local MP from 1868 to 1880 included a substantial period of his premiership from 1868 to 1874, and the subsequent six years when he was Leader of the Opposition. Gladstone was born in Liverpool in 1809 where his father, Sir John, was a wealthy merchant. His maternal grandfather was the Provost of Dingwall in Scotland and he was a devout Christian as well as a politician. He was educated at Eton College and Christ Church Oxford where he attained a Double First in 1831 and his MA three years later. In 1848 he was made Honorary DCL. A Deputy-Lieutenant of Wiltshire, he married the eldest daughter of Sir Stephen Glynne who owned the Harwarden Castle estate in Flintshire where Gladstone was to spend much of his life. He entered politics in 1832 at the first election following the First Reform Act but although he represented the Nottinghamshire town of Newark, this was still effectively a ‘nomination borough’ in the gift of the Duke of Newcastle. In those days Gladstone’s politics could be best described as anti - reform Tory and it was as such that he served as one of the town’s MPs until 1845. As was sometimes the custom in those days, he also contested Manchester in 1837, but unsuccessfully. He was appointed to his first Government post in 1834 when he was made a Lord of the Treasury (a whip) by Sir Robert Peel, two months after the Houses of Parliament burnt down and a month after King William IV dismissed Lord Melbourne’s Liberal Government when it had proposed reforms to the Church with which he disagreed. A year later Peel appointed him Under Secretary for the Colonies, though he held the post only between January and April when Peel was forced to resign in favour of Melbourne in the face of a Commons majority opposed to the Tories. Following the 1841 General Election Melbourne William Ewart Gladstone MP resigned in favour of Peel and Gladstone once more returned to office, this time Photographed by Mayall in 1861 when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and MP as Vice President of the Board of Trade a post he held until promoted to be for Oxford University. Wikipedia President in 1843. He also held the post of Master of the Mint and remained in
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MPs for Greenwich both jobs until he resigned in February 1845. He was a strong supporter of Peel’s approach to free trade and supported his Repeal of the Corn Laws, a measure that completely split the Tory Party. Although the split initially forced Peel to resign he was able to resume as Prime Minister within a matter of weeks when in December the Liberals and free trade Tories combined to form a Commons majority. Outraged by this turn of events, the Duke of Newcastle withdrew his support from Gladstone who, though no longer an MP, was nevertheless still appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies, a post he held between December 1845 and July 1846 when the Government resigned in the light of a Commons defeat on the Irish Coercion Bill, which was opposed by Irish Nationalists and Tories in a somewhat unholy alliance. In 1847 Gladstone sought another seat and was this time elected Conservative MP for Oxford University remaining out of office until 1852 when, following a General Election, a coalition of Liberals, Peelites and Irish Nationalists was formed under the leadership of the Earl of Aberdeen. Gladstone was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer; a position he continued to hold after Aberdeen’s Government fell in 1855 over a Commons defeat on a motion critical of ‘the condition of the Army before the battle of Sebastopol’. Palmerston reappointed him and he held the post until the Government lost the 1857 general election. Gladstone next resumed a ministerial career after the 1859 election, the year William Ewart Gladstone MP he was first elected as Rector of Edinburgh University, Painted by Sir John Everett Millais when he was once again appointed Chancellor of the © Palace of Westminster Collection www.parliament.uk/art Exchequer, this time by Lord Palmerston. This move essentially saw Gladstone move from the Tories to become a Liberal, a situation cemented when he allied himself for the first time to the question of electoral reform. He held the post until 1866 and for a year after the 1865 election, following which Earl Russell became Prime Minister, he was also Leader of the Commons. However, his switch of parties caused him to lose support in his University constituency and in 1865 he sought election for the county constituency of South Lancashire, which seat he held for three years. The Government fell in June 1866 when the Liberals split over electoral reform and a minority Tory Government took power under the Earl of Derby with Disraeli assuming the offices of State relinquished by Gladstone. However, the Tory Government did not survive the 1868 General Election that followed the passing of its own Reform Act and this time Gladstone became Prime Minister for the first time, coinciding with his election as a Greenwich MP. Gladstone’s first Administration was one of the great reforming Governments in modern British history, amongst other things passing the first Education Act enabling all children to receive a basic state education; the Ballot Act (introducing secret voting for the first time and thus going a long way to eliminate intimidation of voters); competitive examinations for entry into the civil service; the introduction of short-service enlistment into the Armed Forces and the abolition of the ability to purchase commissions; the Married Women’s Property Act acknowledging the principle that women may have property rights of their own; the University Test Act removing the requirement of religious tests for applicants to Oxford and Cambridge Universities; a Trade Union Act legalizing unions and recognising them for the first time as ‘friendly societies’; and the Licensing Acts regulating the opening hours of public houses. The latter caused riots in the Midlands during the 1874 general election which the Liberals lost heavily in the face of a resurgent Conservative Party under the leadership of Disraeli who famously described Gladstone’s Government in 1873 as being like a ‘range of exhausted volcanoes’. In Opposition Gladstone turned his attentions to academia becoming Professor of Ancient History at the Royal Academy in 1876, Rector of Glasgow University in 1877 and completing a major work on the poet Homer. He also wrote a pamphlet entitled ‘Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East’ which was a denunciation of Turkey’s rule in the area. He resigned the leadership of the Liberals in 1875 but was prevailed upon to return in 1880 when his Party was once again returned at a general election and Gladstone resumed the Prime Ministership. This time he relinquished his Greenwich seat, which must have eased the role of Prime Minister enormously, to fight two seats, one in Leeds
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Early History
S
urrey gets its name from Anglo-Saxon words that meant ‘the land south of the river’. Originally called ‘Suth-Rea’ it was part of a kingdom that included Sussex, belonging to the South Saxons. Certain Surrey towns and settlements have been of historical significance for many centuries past. Southwark was probably the most important and it may be fairly claimed that London owes its own position to the natural features of Southwark’s early landscape. The first London Bridge was probably built in the First Century AD connecting it with the City and being the first crossing place of the Thames, Roman Southwark grew rapidly. In Anglo Saxon times in the 10th Century it came to be known as ‘Suthriganawoerc’ meaning ‘fort of the men of Surrey’ and became the greatest traffic and trading centre in the country, known in Norman times as ‘Sudwerca’ meaning, ‘southern defensive work, or fort’. Other settlements had significant historical roots including Lambeth, now very much part of central London, but which in 1188 when the Archbishop of Canterbury built a Palace there, was a place cut off from London by the river and accessible mainly by boat or barge. Westminster, on the opposite bank, had yet to become the home of the Royal Court, let alone of the Houses of Parliament. Another upstream Thames settlement at Runnymede will be forever etched in the annals of English constitutional history as it was there that King John and the Barons signed the so-called Magna Carta, which some argue began the process of circumscribing the power and authority of the sovereign that was in time to lead to the rise of Parliamentary government in this country. Nearly three centuries after the monarchy had established the Court at Westminster opposite Lambeth, the Tudor King Henry Vll established a Palace upstream at Sheen, which he renamed Richmond after the town of which he was fond in Yorkshire, and whose name he had taken when a Prince. The Palace occasionally accommodated the whole Royal Court, most notably during an outbreak of the Plague in 1603, and subsequently in 1625 also. Southwark was traditionally the place with the largest population in Surrey with industries that attracted labour from far and wide. By the 15th century it had one of London’s largest immigrant populations. German, Dutch and Flemish craftspeople, excluded by the City of London on the basis that they were not members of a trade guild, settled in Southwark where their skills were put to good use in the leather industry. Southwark’s proximity to the river Thames led to strong links across the world. Emigration as well as immigration flourished. A local man captained the ‘Mayflower’, which carried the Pilgrim Fathers to America in 1620. As Southwark’s importance as a trading centre grew, ships carrying imports of tea from China, dairy produce from New Zealand and foods from British colonies were regular visitors to the Thames wharves. From the 16th to the 18th centuries as a result of immigration, its population tripled from ten to thirty thousand and there was plenty of activity going on in the borough. A bullring and bear pit as well as theatres and other amusements were to be found close to the riverside. By 1746 the river frontage between Bankside and Rotherhithe was pretty much fully built up and Southwark extended southwards to the Old Kent Road and included much of presentday Bermondsey. Southwark was by then the second largest urban area in England. The riverfront became increasingly important as overseas and domestic trade expanded. Landing places near the City were at a premium and new wharves and warehouses were built to accommodate the growing trade. Although Southwark was not powerful enough in the medieval period to achieve full Borough status, or in later years to repel the administrative control of the City of London; it nevertheless provided many of the elements for London that were crucial to its existence. In 1700 the population of Surrey was estimated to be about 150,000 with perhaps over 20% living in Southwark but just over a century later the county had grown to 278,000 due mainly to the growth of the borough and of Lambeth. It was during the industrial revolution that Southwark first developed as a great manufacturing centre. The area witnessed enormous diversification to encompass engineering, glass, leather, hat making, paper, gas, brewing, vinegar and even steam powered corn mills. Its development as a place for trade and manufacture was such that by 1831 it had grown to
168 Surrey History have approximately 100,000 inhabitants. The poor in overwhelming numbers, immigrants, criminals, prisons and popular entertainment were all important features of Southwark life. Their presence brought advances in social welfare, pioneering new forms of transport, leading edge manufacturing inventions and the vitality arising from a rich social and ethnic mix. Surrey’s population growth rate continued to accelerate and within the first thirty years of the Nineteenth Century rose by over 200,000 as London’s metropolis began to expand south of the Thames within the county, especially west of Southwark in Lambeth and Battersea. As the railways developed Surrey became more important as a county where wealthy people could live and travel to work in London. In fact the increasing urbanization of London stimulated a huge increase in Surrey’s population. Although initially this growth occurred in the boroughs of Southwark, Bermondsey, Camberwell, Lambeth, Battersea and Wandsworth, all of which became part of the London County Council when it was established in 1889. After the First World War most growth occurred within the area of the County that was transferred in 1965 to the Greater London Boroughs of Merton, Croydon, Sutton, Kingston and Richmond. It even began to spill over into the more rural areas and, despite the Green Belt restrictions imposed on house building around London after the Second World War, suburbia has moved outwards ever since.
Pigot’s map of 1840 shows the very small part of the County that has the bulk of the population. The Surrey bank of the Thames grew rapidly as part of London, and it was this area that developed many constituencies, whereas the ‘country’ areas of Surrey grew at a slower pace. In 1832 the county was divided into Eastern and Western parts indicated by the red line. In 1868 the Eastern Constituency was itself divided. The new Mid-Surrey Constituency is marked on its eastern border by the blue line.
Before the arrival of 19th Century local government, Surrey was divided into twelve Hundreds for administrative purposes. Five constituted eastern Surrey. Of the remainder, the western part, no element contained any slice of what we now describe as the London metropolitan area. The two most southeasterly ones of Reigate and Tandridge also fell outside it. However, the Brixton, Kingston and Wallington Hundreds covered an area virtually identical to that which is today contained within the London Boroughs of Southwark, Lambeth, Wandsworth, Croydon, Sutton, Merton and Kingston-on-Thames.
169 Parliamentary Representation 1832-1885
In 1832 the northern part of the County, near to London, held a large population. The arrival of the London & Greenwich Railway - London’s first railway line - heralded a more rapid spread of population. In 1832 the effect has not yet been felt. The Southwark & Lambeth Constituencies together had more than twice the number of electors than in the rest of Surrey, but in 30 years time all would have changed.
Parliamentary Representation According to ‘The House of Commons, 700 Years of British Tradition’, Southwark was first made a Parliamentary borough in the reign of Richard II in 1386, though the Boundaries Commission states that this occurred as early as 1295. It is certain, however, that the 1832 Representation of the People Act reconfirmed its status as a two-member Parliamentary borough constituency. The 1832 constituency boundaries contained a population of 134,117 and an electorate of 4,775. The original Parliamentary Borough was nothing like the shape of the present-day version. In those days the boundaries covered only Southwark, the Borough, Bermondsey and Rotherhithe. Neither Walworth nor Newington nor the Elephant & Castle were within the constituency’s boundaries. Camberwell, Peckham, and Dulwich were well beyond it.
The King’s Bench, Southwark depicted in 1830. This prison took its name from the King’s Bench court of law and was one of a number of penal institutions in Southwark at the time. Wikipedia
Until the early 19th Century Southwark (The Borough), and the river developments towards Deptford (in Kent), were the only significant places in South London, but an influx of immigrants from Ireland fled the potato famine of the 1840s to work on the new London and Greenwich Railway, and this started to open up the whole area. A map of 1835 shows the line of the new railway as ‘intended’. It opened between Bricklayers’ Arms and Deptford in 1836 and was London’s first. By then the Southwark borough already took up the entire riverside from Bankside towards Rotherhithe where the Surrey Docks had also recently been cut. The built-up area spread southwards through Newington to the New Kent Road, beyond which there was a substantial amount of Walworth already completed, with Camberwell just about included in its orbit. Still to develop was the area to the southeast of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe towards Peckham.
Cross’s New Plan of London of 1835 also shows that housing south of the river already extended along the Thames westward through Lambeth to the parish boundary with St Mary’s Battersea where, just beyond a small riverside settlement at Nine Elms, a New Town was being laid out along the Road to Wandsworth. Although Waterloo station was not yet built, the area of North Lambeth between Waterloo Bridge and Kennington Lane was already comprehensively
170 Metropolitan Surrey in Pictures - Southwark, Lambeth, Eastern and Mid-Surrey.
Top Left: The Church of St Saviour, standing at the southern end of London bridge became Southwark Cathedral in 1905. The building dates from 1220. Top Right: Opened in 1868 the Hop Exchange in Southwark Street received tons of hops from Kent, as this was a centre for the brewing industry during this period. Left: The original Lambeth suspension bridge was opened in 1860 and led to the rapid development of Lambeth in the mid 19th century. The old bridge was replaced in 1932.
Above: Kingston Bridge was opened by the Duchess of Clarence four years before the Surrey Eastern Constituency was created in 1832. It was commissioned by the Kingston Corporation, and linked Surrey with Middlesex. It replaced an earlier medieval timber bridge. Election results were announced at Kingston Guildhall for the Eastern Surrey Constituency from 1832, and for Mid-Surrey after 1867. The Thames was the boundary between the Surrey and Middlesex County Constituencies.
John Nelson
Left: Lambeth Palace is the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in 1832, it was placed in the new Lambeth Constituency. Standing facing the river Thames with the Palace of Westminster opposite at this time it was on the fringe of the built up area; by 1885 it had become surrounded by new buildings as Lambeth expanded southwards. All images Gordon Rushton, except where marked
171 Parliamentary Representation 1832-1885 developed and building in South Lambeth beyond the Oval (The home of Surrey County Cricket Club) was also under way towards Stockwell and Brixton. Growth was such that a new Lambeth borough constituency was established for the first time on a two-member basis in 1832. By this time it had a population of 154,613, which was bigger than Southwark’s although its electorate of 4,768 was virtually the same, indicating a less middle class socio-demographic profile. Lambeth was the 5th largest borough constituency in England and Southwark was the 7th. Lambeth extended south from Waterloo Bridge towards Brixton, which was not included, and east from Westminster Bridge as far as Peckham and Honor Oak, also taking in Kennington, Stockwell, Newington, Walworth, New Cross Gate (but not New Cross), Camberwell and East Dulwich. ‘Lamhytha’ meant a ‘landing place for lambs’ and somehow encapsulates Lambeth’s role as one of London’s ‘provider’ boroughs. It owed its development to the growing needs of the administrative, business and Lambeth Constituency in 1832 on the cusp of massive expansion, but still the largest constituency in population and electorate in Surrey. The Grand Surrey Canal moves the goods into and out of manufacturing Leviathan that London the Surrey Docks, but soon all this will change, with the coming of the railway. had become by the turn of the 18th Century. Although neighbouring Southwark outstripped it initially, when other river bridges were opened these stimulated rapid growth in Lambeth. The borough had no such connection until 1750 when Westminster Bridge was opened and until that time had been a resort for Londoners at play. Between Lambeth and Southwark were pleasure gardens, bear pits and bullrings. Amongst the most famous were the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in Kennington Lane close to what is now Vauxhall Bridge. The construction first of Westminster, then Vauxhall (in 1816) and Waterloo (in 1817) bridges, brought population development and, with the building there of the South Western Railways London Waterloo Terminus; future growth and development were assured. The Railway was opened The burning of the Houses of Parliament in 1834 as viewed from Lambeth between Nine Elms and Waterloo in 1848. © Palace of Westminster Collection www.parliament.uk/art The only other Parliamentary constituency in this part of the metropolitan area in 1832 was Surrey Eastern, a county seat that had a population of 110,869 not included within the two borough constituencies. At this stage places like Battersea were still villages and all but 86,000 of the total population of Surrey lived in its two London borough constituencies and the Hundreds of the Eastern county division. Within the latter the election was held at Croydon, which was also a polling place. The others were at Camberwell (for the Brixton Hundred which contained most of the voters) and Kingston.
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The Impact of the Boundary Review of 1917-18
M
iddlesex was greatly affected by revisions that took account of the major population changes that had occurred since 1885. Railways, including the London Underground, had encouraged the construction of housing estates on a scale that caused the inner London boroughs to lose population as the middle classes migrated to the new suburbs. There was a consequential reduction in the number of seats in Finsbury, Marylebone, Shoreditch and Tower Hamlets whilst the county areas gained seats. There were in total 53 seats in Middlesex, an increase of 5. The Inter-War period saw the Conservatives dominate Middlesex at five of the seven general elections held. Only in 1929 did they not hold a majority of all the seats contested, when Labour staged its best result winning almost half of the seats and going on to form a minority Government, as the largest Party in the House of Commons for the first time in history. The decline of the Liberal Party occurred immediately after the Great War when the number of seats they occupied was halved, compared with their pre-War average, and although they enjoyed a brief recovery at the 1923 Election, when they won seven seats, this proved to be a false dawn and by 1935 they were left with a solitary MP. Labour first established itself as a party at least equal to the Liberals in 1922, and thereafter secured at least 13 Middlesex MPs in every subsequent general election except 1931, when the Party suffered a debacle and was reduced to only three seats, the same as the Liberals. Party C and allies L Lab Ind C majority Total
Pre 1918 average 32/36 12/15 0 0 17/24 48
1918
46 6 0 1 39 53
44* 2 6 1 35 53
27 7 19 0 1 53
38 2 13 0 23 53
25 2 26 0 -3 53
47 3 3 0 41 53
35 1 17 0 17 53
Key: C = Conservative; L = Liberal; Lab = Labour; I = Independent *included 2 National Liberals
Central London City of London, Westminster, St Marylebone and Paddington (7 seats) Westminster and Marylebone each lost one of their 1885 divisions. The City of London was unchanged but in Westminster the former Strand division was sacrificed. A new Westminster, Abbey constituency extended from the border with the City in the east from Aldwych to Whitehall and via Soho and the West End to Oxford Circus. Officially the constituency comprised the wards of Charing Cross, Covent Garden, Great Marlborough, Pall Mall, Regent, St Anne, St John, St Margaret and Strand. Between Regents Street and the area just south of Knightsbridge lay Westminster, St George’s including Victoria and the Palace of Westminster itself. Its named wards were Conduit, Grosvenor, the Hamlet of Knightsbridge, Knightsbridge St George’s and Victoria. These contained Belgravia, Hyde Park, Kensington Gore, Knightsbridge, Mayfair, Millbank, Pimlico, Victoria and Westminster itself. Marylebone now comprised the whole borough with the amalgamation of the former East and West divisions. Queens Park, north of the Harrow Road, was transferred to Paddington North and Paddington South was slightly adjusted compared with 1885. The changes disadvantaged the Conservatives who had held all five seats at every General Election since 1885. Although they continued to win with large majorities after 1918 they did in effect suffer a reduction of two MPs through
212 Pictures of the City of London, Westminster, Marylebone, and Paddington
Top Left: Leadenhall Market in the City of London was originally a game and poultry market dating back to the 14th century. The current market, pictured here, was designed by Sir Horace Jones in 1881. The market is a reminder that the City was once a very different place, but at the time of the chapter, it was in transition to become the financial centre we know today. Jones also designed Billingsgate and Smithfield Markets. Gordon Rushton. Top Right: The Abbey Constituency was centred on the St Margaret’s Parish Church in Parliament Square, situated between the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey. John Nelson
Above: Marylebone Town Hall was built between 1914 and 1920 and stands in the Marylebone Road. It was designed by Sir Edwin Cooper. John Nelson Left: The Queen’s Park Estate, including Oliphant Street (The illustration is of No.97, the home of the Author’s Great Grandparents) was transferred from Chelsea to the Paddington North Constituency in 1918. It comprised mainly rented housing for the ‘respectable’ working classes. Isaac Merrifield, who lived in the house throughout the period of this chapter, was a typical resident of these dwellings. He worked for the Great Western Railway at the Bishop’s Bridge Road Goods depot nearby. The Queen’s Park Estate was built by the Artisans Labourers and General Dwellings Company in the last quarter of the 19th Century. Build in a Gothic Revival style, it included 2000 small houses, and was the estate where the first Queen’s Park Rangers footballers are said to have had their homes.
John Nelson
Right: Gerald Laing designed the striking dragon panels in Bank Underground Station, in 1994-5. The dragon is the symbol of the City of London and examples are found at all principal boundaries of the City. Gordon Rushton
213 Middlesex - Central London Maps
The population of London’s central districts started to decline in the early part of the 20th century, partly as improving transport enabled people to travel in and out. This affected the Parliamentary representation of the area. Westminster lost one of its 1885 constituencies, and Marylebone’s were combined. Paddington retained two constituencies, but in the process acquired the Queen’s Park estate, north of the Harrow Road from Chelsea. The same population trends occurred in the City of London, despite which it kept its two MPs and its traditional boundaries, which is why no separate map is shown. The relevant City constituency map is in Chapter 3, page 59.
214 General Election Results 1918-1945, MPs for the City of London Election Results in the Inter-war Period - by % majority Pre 1918
Constituency City of London Wesminster St. Georges Westminster Abbey St.Marylebone Paddington North Paddington South C L Other
1918
1xC 2xC C C 8 0 0
C100+ C100 C10 C100 7+ 0 0+
C62 C100 C25 C34 6 0 1
C100+ C33 C8 C43 7+ 0 0
C61 C47+ C13 C100 7++ 0 0
C48 C36 C2 C1007+ 0 0+
C100 C3+ C43 C71 7+ 0 0
C55+ C59 C25 C58 7+++ 0 0
100 = unopposed Key: C = Conservative; L = Liberal; Lab = Labour; + = Party that won seat at General Election held by-election in same Parliament; - = Party that won seat at General Election lost by-election to main opposition Party in same Parliament.
the changes that were made. Both Paddington seats had also been predominantly Tory before 1918 and they remained so afterwards, although Labour came within 2% of taking Paddington North in 1929.
MPs for City of London 1918-1945 From
To
National
Notes: First returned at: B By-election, G General Election
Sir Frederick Banbury (Conservative Unionist) was elected MP for the City in 1906 and his biographical details are in Chapter 3. In 1924 he was made Baron Banbury of Southam. At the by-election necessary to fill his place Sir Thomas Vansittart Bowater (Conservative), a paper magnate was elected and he held the seat until his death in 1938. Born in 1862, and educated in Manchester and Stourbridge, he was Chairman of the Bowater’s company until 1927. A notable City businessman, he was Sheriff of London in 1905, and Lord Mayor in 1913-14. He initially stood as an Independent Conservative in the City in 1922, but was finally elected as an official candidate in 1924. After his death in 1938 he was succeeded by Sir George Thomas Broadridge (Conservative), born in 1869, and himself a former Lord Mayor in 1936-7, the year before his election as MP. He held the seat until he was elevated to the Lords shortly after the 1945 General Election.
Sir Thomas Vansittart Bowater MP © National Portrait Gallery Bassano Ltd 1922
Arthur Balfour (Conservative), the former Conservative Prime Minister and Cabinet Minister in Lloyd-George’s Coalition, had first been elected at the City in 1906 and he retained his seat until his elevation to the Lords as an Earl in 1922. His biographical details are in Chapter 3.
At the 1922 by-election created by his elevation, his place in the Commons was taken by Edward Charles Grenfell (Conservative), who sat until 1935 when he too was elevated to the peerage as Lord St Just. Born in 1870 and educated
215 MPs for City of London, and Westminster at Harrow and Trinity Cambridge, both his father and grandfather were MPs before him. He was a partner in the City firm of merchant bankers, Morgan Grenfell, (established in 1838 and in 1922 still a family concern) and was a Director of the Bank of England for 35 years after 1905. He died in 1941. Grenfell’s place was taken by another City notable, Sir Alan Garrett Anderson (Conservative), the son of Dr. Elizabeth, the founder of the first women’s hospital in London. Born in 1877 and educated at Elstree, Eton and Trinity Oxford, he was a Director of the family firm of Anderson, Green and Company who owned the Orient shipping Line1. He immersed himself in business activities and was variously a Director of the Bank of England, the London Midland and Scottish Railway, and the Suez Canal. A Lieutenant of the City of London, he was awarded officer status in the French Legion of Honour, and after the First War was High Sheriff of the London County area, re-entering business life as President of the Chamber of Shipping in 1924/5. He never actually contested an election, being unopposed both at the by-election that brought him to the Commons in 1935, and at the General Election later that year. He resigned in 1940, and in 1941 took up the vitally important post of Controller of Railways at the Ministry of War Transport, a post he held until 1945. He died in 1952. The 1940 wartime by-election caused by Anderson’s resignation was fought by Sir Andrew Rae Duncan (National Party2), an erstwhile Conservative. Born in 1884, he too was a distinguished City businessman though he had a legal background and was educated at Irvine Academy and Glasgow University, as well as at Dalhousie in Canada. He made his name after the First World War as Coal Controller (191929), and then as Chairman of an Advisory Committee on Mines until 1927. He became a Director of Imperial Chemical Industries, the Dunlop Rubber Company, the North British Locomotive Company, and of Royal Exchange Assurance. He first tried his hand at politics standing as a Coalition Liberal at Glasgow, Cathcart in 1922, but was defeated. Between 1929 and 1940, when he entered Parliament, he was a Director of the Bank of England, and from 1935 was Executive Chairman of the Iron and Steel Federation3, a position he resumed in 1945. From 1927 to 1935 he was also Chairman of the Central Electricity Board, remaining a member until 19404. During the War he entered Government, initially as President of the Board of Trade (1940-1), and then served as Minister of Supply until 1945. He was High Sheriff of London in the year before his election to the House, and remained MP for the City until 1950 when he retired. He died two years later.
1945 Election Poster The People’s History Museum
MPs for Westminster 1918-1945 From
To
Anti Waste-Conservative Conservative Conservative Westminster St George’s
Conservative
Notes: First returned at: B By-election, G General Election 1 So named after the three - masted vessels and steam packets that operated initially to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa from 1868. After World War 1 their competitor P & O acquired 51% of the company though they did not acquire the whole until 1965. 2 He chose the National designation as he was brought into the House specifically as a businessman to assist with the war effort 3 The National Federation of Iron and Steel Manufacturers was formed in 1918 and in 1934, as a condition of substantial tariff protection for the British industry, the government caused the industry to form a stronger central association, the British Iron and Steel Federation (BISF). 4 The Electricity (Supply) Act 1926 created the Central Electricity Board to establish a ‘gridiron’ transmission system, linking the biggest and most efficient power stations throughout the country. Its successor body, the Central Electricity Generating Board, was wound up in 2001 following privatisation of the industry a few years earlier.
216 MPs for Westminster Abbey, and St Georges Westminster Abbey William Burdett-Coutts (Conservative), was the MP for the former Westminster division from 1885 to 1918, and was adopted for the new Abbey constituency after the War. He held the seat until his death in 1921 and his main biographical details are in Chapter 3. The resultant by-election was won by Brigadier-General John Sanctuary Nicholson (Conservative), who held the seat until he died. Son of the former MP for Petersfield in his native Hampshire, John Nicholson was born in 1863 and educated at Harrow School from where he went to Sandhurst Military Staff College, afterwards joining the 7th Hussars in 1884. From 1898 to 1900 he was Commandant-General of the South Africa Police, and became the Inspector-General of the same force three years later, ending his tour of duty in 1905. He contested the county division of Dorset Eastern in January 1910, and at a by-election later the same year, but was unsuccessful on both occasions. He also failed to secure election at Stafford in the December 1910 General Election. In the Great War he served in France, and in August 1921 contested the Westminster, Abbey constituency as an Anti Waste5 Conservative. He was re-elected in 1922 and 1923, but died before the General Election held in 1924. The ensuing by-election proved to be one of the most dramatic and controversial of the inter-War years. Winston Churchill had recently resigned from the Liberal Party and sought the Tory nomination, but was rebuffed and the nomination went to the deceased member’s nephew, Otho William Nicholson (Conservative), a distiller who had been a member of the LCC for three years and Mayor of Finsbury in 1923/4. Born in 1891, educated at Harrow and at Magdalene College Cambridge, he was a Lieutenant in the Rifle Brigade during the First World War. Churchill decided to fight anyway, and did so as an Independent Conservative. When the result was declared Nicholson had defeated him by a mere 43 votes, 0.1% of those cast. The turnout of 67% was the highest for any inter-War by-election and Nicholson held the seat until his resignation in 1939 when another by-election was held. He died in 1978. Sir Harold Webbe CBE (Conservative), was MP from 1939 until 1950 when he was adopted as Tory candidate for the new constituency of the Cities of London and Westminster, which he represented until his retirement in 1959. Born in 1885, Webbe was educated at King Edward’s School Birmingham and Queen’s College Cambridge, after which he became a teacher at Oundle and St Pauls, both well-known Public Schools. From 1910 to 1914 he was a Schools Inspector, and from 1916 to 1918 Deputy Director of the Ministry of Munitions’ Stores. In 1925 he was elected to the LCC, serving continuously until 1949, and was a member of both the Education and General Purposes Committees. From 1934 to 1945 he was the Leader of the Municipal Reform Party (effectively the Conservatives) on the LCC, a Deputy Lieutenant of London County and a director of several companies.
Westminster St Georges Walter Hume Long (Conservative), was a distinguished and long-serving Westminster MP before his adoption for the new Westminster St George’s constituency in 1918. His main biographical details are contained in Chapter 3 (Strand). In 1921 he was elevated to the peerage as Viscount Long of Wraxall, and the by-election that followed in 1921 was a strange affair.
Bassano Ltd 1921
It was won by a right wing candidate, James Malcolm Monteith Erskine (Anti-Waste League), who stood with the support of a substantial element of the local Conservative Association, whose official candidate, Sir Herbert Jessel, was defeated, arguably on the basis of anti-Semitic feeling in the constituency. At the 1922 General Election the Tories put up as their official candidate Leslie Wilson, a former Chief Whip, and when he too was defeated by the incumbent (standing this time as an Independent Conservative), the Party pragmatically accepted the inevitable. Erskine was subsequently adopted as the official candidate and was unopposed at the following two General Elections, in 1923 and 1924. Born in 1863, he was the son of Captain Daniel Erskine, a former Consul of Madeira, and was educated at Wellington College. He died in 1944. In 1929 the failing health of the then Secretary of State for War brought about a request for Erskine to stand down so that the Minister (the MP for Colchester since 1910) could occupy a seat that was close to Parliament. James Malcolm Monteith Erskine MP © National Portrait Gallery
5 The Anti Waste League was founded in 1921 by Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, but was abandoned later the same year.
217 MPs for Westminster St Georges, and St Marylebone
Sir Laming Worthington-Evans MP Wikipedia
Sir Alfred and Lady Diana Duff Cooper on their wedding day in 1919. Wikpedia
Sir Laming Worthington-Evans (Conservative), was adopted but the Tories were defeated nationally, and so he became an MP in Opposition. Worse still, he died within 20 months, and another by-election was held. Evans was a Solicitor who during the First World War was Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Munitions from 1916 to 1917 and the following year was made Minister of Blockade6 with the status of a Parliamentary Under-Secretary. He continued to serve in the Lloyd-George / Bonar Law Coalition Cabinet after the War initially as Pensions Minister from 1919 to 1921 and then as Secretary for War until the Coalition broke up in 1922. Following the Conservatives’ Election victory in 1922 he served as Post Master General for a year until the resignation of Baldwin and the formation of the first Labour Government in 1923. When that Government fell, WorthingtonEvans was once again appointed War Secretary after the 1924 General Election. The by-election that took place at Westminster St George’s in 1931 was also notable. Conservative politics at the time were marked by dissention amongst many on the right of the Party about Baldwin’s attitude towards the Empire, especially the status of India, and imperial trade. Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, owners of the Express and Mail Newspaper Groups respectively, allied themselves to the so-called Empire Free Trade Crusade, and sponsored a number of by-election candidates who were not the officially adopted Tory nominees. In February 1931 the result of the intervention of an Empire Crusader at a by-election in Islington East was that the official Tory candidate was forced into third place handing the seat to Labour.
The press barons persuaded Sir Ernest Petter, an industrialist, to stand at St George’s as an Independent Conservative in the cause of Imperial Free Trade, whilst the official candidate was Sir Alfred Duff Cooper (Conservative). After a high profile and bitter campaign he was comfortably returned at the by-election in October 1931, and served until his retirement in 1945. His first Ministerial appointment came in 1934, when he was appointed by Ramsey MacDonald to the post of First Secretary to the Treasury, and in 1935 was made War Minister by Stanley Baldwin. When Neville Chamberlain took over in 1937 he was appointed a Cabinet Minister for the first time, and became First Lord of the Admiralty, a crucial appointment in the years before the outbreak of the Second World War. However, Duff Cooper resigned in protest at the Munich Agreement in 1938, and became one of a minority of Tories along with Churchill who opposed the Government’s policy of appeasement towards Hitler. With the fall of the Chamberlain Government in 1940 he was made Minister of Information by Churchill, attending the War Cabinet, and in 1941 was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which office he occupied until November 1943. He died in 1954.
MPs for St Marylebone 1918-1945 From 1918 1922 1928 1932
G G B
Party Conservative Unionist Conservative Conservative Conservative/ Independent Conservative
Notes: First returned at: B By-election, G General Election
Prior to 1918 Sir Samuel Edward Scott (Conservative), had been the MP for the former Marylebone West division. He held the new St Marylebone seat until 1922 when he retired. His main biographical details are in Chapter 3. He was succeeded at the 1922 General Election by Sir Douglas McGarel Hogg (Conservative), the son of Quintin Hogg, founder of the Regent Street Polytechnic. Douglas was appointed Attorney General in Bonar Law’s Government, resuming the appointment after the collapse of the 1923 Labour Government and the 1924 General Election. He became Lord Chancellor in 1928 when he was elevated to the peerage as Viscount Hailsham. He served until the fall of the Government in 1929, but when the National Government was formed two years later he did not resume a Cabinet ranked position, though he was made Leader of the Conservatives in the Lords in 1930 and remained so until 1935. His 6 In 1916 the Contraband Department of the Foreign Office was renamed Ministry of Blockade. It provided a service of economic intelligence about enemy countries and enforced the policy of blockade.
218 MPs for St Marylebone, and Paddington former post of Lord Chancellor was given to Lord Sankey, a Labour turned National Labour politician. He was appointed to the War Office, which post he also held until 1935 when, following Baldwin’s re-appointment as Prime Minister, Hailsham once again resumed service as Lord Chancellor. He survived the change of Prime Minister from Baldwin to Chamberlain, and in March 1938 was made Lord Privy Seal. However, he resigned from the Government in October 1938 in protest over the appeasement policy and the Munich Agreement. He died in 1950. Hogg’s election in 1922 began a remarkable family association with the Conservative Party, the Marylebone constituency, the peerage, and the office of Lord Chancellor. Douglas Hogg’s son, Quintin was himself to play a high profile role in later 20th Century politics. He became MP for St Marylebone himself and also succeeded as Viscount Hailsham, though on one occasion he renounced that title in order to advance his chances of becoming the Leader of his Party and Prime Minister in succession to Harold Macmillan, only to fail in the quest. He resumed the title and he too was appointed Lord Chancellor, by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Douglas Hogg’s Doiuglas McGarel Hogg MP grandson, who shares his first name, also became an MP and a Minister in John Major’s © National Portrait Gallery George Beresford 1930 Conservative Government of the 1990s, though unlike his forbears was never an MP for Marylebone7. Douglas senior was born in 1863 the son of Quentin. Educated at Cheam School and Eton College he became a barrister, practising at Lincoln’s Inn after 1902 when he returned from the South Africa War, becoming a bencher in 1920. In that year he was appointed Attorney-General to the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, holding that post until his entry into Government in 1922. In 1934 Hogg was President of the MCC8, the Lords Headquarters of which were within his own Parliamentary constituency. The by-election created by Hogg’s elevation was won by Sir Rennell Rodd (Conservative), who served as MP for St Marylebone from 1928 until his death in 1932. A career diplomat, Rodd first entered the service in 1883, becoming Minister to Sweden in 1904, following which he was sent as Ambassador to Rome in 1908, remaining in that post for eleven years. In 1920 he was appointed to join a mission to Egypt and entered politics late in his life. In 1932 Rodd was succeeded at a by-election by Captain Alec Stratford Cunningham-Reid (Conservative), who, though standing as the Party’s official candidate, soon caused divisions within the constituency association, some members of which backed an Independent Conservative candidate at the by-election. Cunningham-Reid won but by a margin of less than 5%. In 1935 he lost official Party backing and so stood as an Independent Conservative in which capacity he was elected. Although he was given the Tory Whip this was withdrawn in 1942, when he sought to create a new political movement, and a year later Central Office disaffiliated the St Marylebone Conservative Association9. Normal service was resumed with a new candidate who defeated Cunningham-Reid in 1945. Born the son of the Reverend Arthur Cunningham-Reid in 1895, he was educated at Edinburgh University and Clare College Cambridge. He served in France from 1914 to 1918, initially as a sapper and then in the Royal Flying Corp, when he was awarded the DFC. In 1922 he was elected MP for Warrington and was briefly PPS to Sir John Baird when First Commissioner of Works. He lost his seat in 1923, but regained it in 1924 and worked as PPS at the Ministry of Transport for the duration of that Parliament. He unsuccessfully contested Southampton in 1929 and was out of the House for three years until his return at St Marylebone.
MPs for Paddington Paddington North Sir William George Perring (Conservative), who was born in 1866 and educated at St Pancras Wesleyan School, went on to become the head of house furnishers William Perring and Company10 and Managing Director of the Crossley Bedstead Company. He was President of the Paddington and Bayswater Chamber of Trade, the London and Suburban Retail Traders’ Federation, and later of the National Chamber of Trade. He joined Paddington Council where he became mayor in 1911/12, and he was also a London magistrate. He retired in 1929 and died in 1937. 7 Douglas Hogg was elected as MP for Grantham (Lincolnshire) in 1979 8 The Marylebone Cricket Club, which is regarded as the ‘spiritual’ home of the sport, was founded in 1787. 9 Churchill’s private papers list the three main objectives of the movement, as being to “stop the stream of inefficiency emerging from the Party Caucuses, to punish those in high places “as after Pearl Harbour, when they deserve it”, and to encourage MPs and Parliamentary candidates who subscribe to the programme and fight those who do not”. 10 Opened at 382 Harrow Road in 1892.
219 MPs for Paddington MPs for Paddington 1918-1945 From 1918 1929 1918
G G G
First Names Sir William George Brendan Sir Henry Percy Henry Douglas (Commodore) Ernest Augustus (Admiral)
Constituency Paddington North Paddington South
Party Conservative Conservative Conservative Conservative Empire Crusade /Conservative
Notes: First returned at: B By-election, G General Election
He was succeeded in 1929 by Brendan Bracken (Conservative), who was born in Sydney Australia in 1901 and educated there, but emigrated to Britain and became a journalist. He was a Director of the publishing company of Eyre and Spottiswoode, Chairman of the Union Corporation, and also of the Financial Times, editor of The Economist, and of a publication called The Banker. A prominent supporter of Winston Churchill’s policies towards the threat of Hitler, he became the new Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary in 1940, and the following year went into Government in succession to Duff Cooper as Minister of Information in the War Cabinet. When Churchill formed his provisional Government in 1945 Bracken was made First Lord of the Admiralty, but the Tories lost the General Election, and his seat with it. He was out of Parliament for five years, returning in 1950 for the new division of Bournemouth East and Christchurch, which seat he retained until his elevation to Viscount in 1952. From 1955 until his death in 1958 he was a Trustee of the National Gallery. Bracken House in Cannon Street was home to the Financial Times from the 1950s - 80s. The sundial above the door has the face of Winston Churchill at its centre. John Nelson
Paddington South Sir Henry Percy Harris (Conservative), was first elected as MP for Paddington South in January 1910. He retired in 1922 and died in 1941. His main biographical details are included in Chapter 3.
He was succeeded at the 1922 election by Commodore Henry Douglas King (Conservative), born in 1877 and a man with a naval career behind him at the time of his election. He was, however, a man of many parts who had started out in the merchant Navy in 1891, became a farmer eight years later and then trained as a barrister being called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1905. He first entered politics in 1910 when he was defeated in both elections that year when contesting the Liberal seat of Norfolk North. At the outbreak of the First World War he joined the Royal Navy organising the North Atlantic convoys and in 1918 was elected as the Independent MP for North Norfolk but rejoined the Tory Party the following year when he was briefly a Principal Private Secretary and actually became a Party Whip in 1921. In 1922 he was made a Junior Lord of the Treasury and after the election of the same year transferred to Paddington South when he was also appointed Aide de Camp to the King, George V, whom he served until 1925. From 1924 to 1928 he was Financial Secretary at the War Office and Secretary for Mines in 1928-9. Meanwhile in 1927 he had been made a Naval Commodore but sadly he was drowned in a shipwreck in 1930. The 1930 by-election that followed King’s demise was won by another Naval man, Vice-Admiral Ernest Augustus Taylor (Empire Crusade), who beat the official Conservative candidate, Sir Herbert Lidiard, by a margin of nearly 5% of the votes cast. The victory gave the Crusade campaign substantial momentum, and led to other by-election interest shortly afterwards at Islington East, and Westminster, St George’s. After 1931, however, Taylor took the Conservative whip, and remained MP until 1945 when he retired. He was born in 1876, and educated at Stubbingham and HMS Britannia. During the Prince of Wales’ Tour of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in 1919-20, he commanded HMS Renown, but retired and sought an entry into Parliament. Initially he was unsuccessful, contesting Woolwich East in 1923 and Finsbury in 1924,and became a member of Finsbury Borough Council in 1925, serving until 1928.
220 Middlesex - West London
West London Chelsea, Kensington, Hammersmith, Fulham and West Middlesex (16 seats) In West London there was a large increase from nine to sixteen seats. Three were unchanged, these being Chelsea, Kensington North and Kensington South. Details can be found in Chapter 3. However, in the wake of population expansion further west, the boroughs of Fulham and Hammersmith each gained a seat. Fulham East extended from Barons Court ward in the northeast of the borough, which included West Kensington, to the Sands End ward by the river Thames, and included the areas of Fulham around Lillie Road and Walham Green (Lillie and Walham wards). Fulham West extended south from Hammersmith Bridge to Putney Bridge and a little further downstream, incorporating Hurlingham ward, Fulham Palace Road and the district south of Hammersmith Broadway known as Margravine ward (Barons Court South). The Munster and Town wards, including Parsons Green, made up the rest of the constituency. Hammersmith South incorporated the area between Shepherds Bush and the Uxbridge Road in the north and Hammersmith Broadway in the south. Officially it comprised the three borough wards of River, Brook Green & St Matthews, and The Grove & Ravenscourt. Kensington Olympia fell within its borders. Hammersmith North extended south from Wormwood Scrubs to Shepherds Bush and incorporated five wards: St Stephen’s, Starch Green, Wormholt, and College Park & Latimer. Five of the seven new constituencies were in West Middlesex, which since 1885 had been represented by Brentford, Ealing, Uxbridge, and Harrow county seats. Acton, based entirely on the new municipal borough, which had formerly been in the Ealing seat, was created a constituency in its own right, reflecting the industrial and suburban development that was fast moving outwards from London. It had become a centre for laundries and factory employment, especially after the London County Council started building council estates, there and in Hammersmith; both places became known as ‘suburbs of production’. The Old Oak Estate is a good example of the LCC’s ‘cottage’ ideal for the council home. This estate was planned around an extension of the Central Line of the Underground, and East Acton station was finally opened in 1920. The new constituency incorporated all parts of Acton south of Perivale, including Bedfont Park, Hanger Lane, Old Oak Common, Park Royal, and Pitshanger. The Acton place name dates from about 1181 AD, and is a common one deriving from the Old English ‘Ac tun’, meaning either, “farmstead or village by the oak trees”, or “specialized farm where oak timber is worked.” One of the main thoroughfares in the area today is Old Oak Common Lane. The former Ealing county constituency was reduced in size, and became a borough seat that included the town and its immediate suburbs. Seven years later, in 1925, the Great West Road opened by King George V was dubbed ‘the golden mile’, as major factories quickly arrived to take advantage of a distribution system that also included the Western Avenue and North Circular Road. The Acton and Hammersmith council estates provided local labour for Ealing employers that included: Smith’s Crisps, Curry’s cycles and radios, Maclean’s toothpaste, Firestone tyres, Gillette razor blades, and Hoover electrical machines, all of which opened factories on the Great West Road. The constituency included: Castle Bar, Drayton Green, Ealing Common, Little Ealing, Horsenden, Northfields, Northolt, and Perivale. South and North of Ealing population changes also had their effect: Chiswick transferred from Ealing to the new constituency of Brentford & Chiswick, each now comprising an Urban District, and this subsequently created a unified borough in 1932. Brentford included Boston Manor, and Chiswick included Stamford Brook (West), Turnham Green, and Gunnersbury Park. Chiswick’s name derives from the Saxon ‘Ceswican’ and means, “a place where cheese is made”. Once a small riverside village on the Thames, it developed into a stylish London suburb after the railway opened there in 1849. By the late 19th Century, Underground stations had also opened at Turnham Green, and Brentford Road (Gunnersbury today). Bedford Park, first established in the mid-1870s, was England’s first self contained garden suburb. Horse trams began between Hammersmith and Kew Bridge in 1882, and were succeeded in 1901 by electric traction, both developments opening up Chiswick and Brentford as popular residential suburbs. To the south, two more constituencies were created from the former Brentford division. Twickenham comprised the Urban District (granted borough status in 1926), which included: Bushy Park, Hampton, St Margarets, Strawberry Hill, Teddington, and Whitton, together with Heston and Isleworth UD (which also included Cranford, Hounslow, Osterley Park, Syon Park and Spring Grove). “Tuicanhom” (AD 704) probably meant, “land in a river bend of a man called Twicca”. Today Twickenham is internationally recognised as the home of English Rugby Union. However, well before that it had developed as a fashionable retreat from Court life, and was a place where elegant country houses were established. Twickenham was the 18th century equivalent of Beverley Hills, popular with the foremost artists, and many poets and artists visited their patrons in the town.
221 Middlesex - West London & West Middlesex Map
Meanwhile Sunbury, Hampton and Teddington UDCs were included with Feltham in a new Spelthorne constituency with both Staines urban and rural districts, which then included Harlington. Its communities included Bedfont, Halliford, Hanworth, Harmondsworth, Kempton Park, Laleham, and Shepperton. Uxbridge acquired Southall-Norwood from Brentford, but lost the Staines area to Spelthorne. It was otherwise unaltered comprising Hayes, Ruislip, Norwood, Uxbridge and Yiewsley UDCs, and the Uxbridge RDC, which included Harefield, Ickenham, Hillingdon, and Cowley (which was dissolved in 1929 when it was combined with Uxbridge UDC). At the same time, West Drayton was transferred from Uxbridge RDC, and allied with Yiewsley to expand the UDC established in 1911. Other communities contained within the new Uxbridge seat were: Botwell, Dawley, Dormers Wells, Eastcoat, Hyde Green, Mount Pleasant, Northolt Park, Northwood, Ruislip, and Yeading.
222 Middlesex - West London in Pictures
Top Left: These Fulham Road shops, with flats above were built in 1906. In 1918 they were placed in the Fulham West Constituency. Still at the heart of this busy area today, the character change is exemplified by the use of the ground floor premises. All pictures John Nelson
Top Right: Fulham Town Hall was built in the 1890s. Election results for the East and West divisions were announced there. There are plans to transform the premises into a prestigious Fulham Road shopping Mall.
Middle Left: Church Road in the centre of Twickenham, is close to the River Thames. The expansion of this riverside suburb in the run up to the First World War justified the creation of a Constituency that has remained more or less intact ever since. Above: The Hoover factory on Western Avenue was built in the late 1930s, after the creation of the new Ealing Constituency. It was one of several places of new employment, much of which was concentrated in the north of the Borough, made accessible by Western Avenue and the North Circular Road, both opened in the 1920s. Left: Whitehall Road houses in Harrow-on-the-Hill typify the dwellings that sustained the substantial commuter expansion encouraged by the Metropolitan Railway which reached the town in 1880. All pictures John Nelson
269
Parliamentary Representation in the Inter-war Years 1918 - 1945
I
n 1918 there was another major redistribution of seats in metropolitan Essex as Parliamentary representation was adjusted to reflect the massive population expansion that had been taking place. A more equitable balance was struck and the number of seats increased from four to thirteen. West Ham was expanded to four and East Ham emerged from the former Romford constituency as a two-seat borough. Both developments reflected the move downstream of the London Docks promoting a population expansion at the expense of the neighbouring Tower Hamlets where Poplar and Whitechapel lost one seat each. Suburban and industrial developments generated several more seats. Romford spawned three more, one based on the town itself, another on Ilford, and a third contributing to Epping whilst the single Walthamstow constituency fragmented four ways. Leyton was split from Walthamstow and each borough was divided in two.
273 Politics between the wars, and General Election Results Politics Between the Wars The impact of these changes was to increase Labour’s representation. West Ham South was already established as a Labour seat and the creation of Silvertown and Plaistow doubled the Party’s strength immediately. Despite the national swings that occurred between 1918 and 1935 these two heavily unionised and radical docklands seats remained loyal to Labour throughout the period, including a by-election at Silvertown on 22nd February 1940 when, at the darkest hour of the Second World War, the Party secured a majority of 86% over an Independent. In accordance with the spirit of the times neither Conservatives nor Liberals contested the by-election. Labour had won the previous General Election in Silvertown by a margin of 62% and won again in 1945, when the seat was contested, by the even larger margin of 87%. West Ham North, on the other hand, which had always been more marginal as a single constituency, became split both politically aand geographically after the redistribution. Stratford was Labour in every Election except the very first in 1918 whilst Upton, which was less working class, returned slightly more Conservatives. Even there Labour won three General Elections, including 1935 as well as the two following which it formed minority Governments, in 1923 and 1929. Labour also enjoyed by-election success there on 14th May 1934 when it regained the seat having lost to the Tories in 1931. Its majority of 16% compared with 17% for the Conservatives previously; in 1935 the majority slipped to 6%. The creation of middle class seats based on Ilford and Epping gifted two MPs to the Conservatives. However, after the post War political shifts involving the Liberal Party had largely resolved themselves in Labour’s favour the heavily working class East Ham South seat moved in their favour whilst the more socially mixed East Ham North became marginal, initially between Liberal and Tory but subsequently between Labour and Conservative. Labour first won there in 1923 but the Tories regained it in 1924. However, on 29th April 1926 Labour won a by-election by the margin of 6% over the Tories who had enjoyed a majority of slightly less than 4% at the General Election. Labour retained the seat in 1929 by a margin of 7%.
Metropolitan Essex - General Election Results - 1918-1935 by % majority Constituency West Ham North
pre-1918
13
13
Key: C - Conservative; NL - National Liberal (allied with Con); L - Liberal; NLab - National Labour (allied with Con); Lab - Labour ; NDP - National Democratic Party: + by-election won by defending party; - lost by defending party. 100 = Unopposed ‡ two by-elections, one won, one lost
274 Essex - Politics between the wars & MPs for West Ham Despite the massive boundary changes affecting the Romford constituency itself, the ‘swing ‘nature of the seat was maintained after the First War. The growing middle class communities around Romford and Hornchurch were counterbalanced by working class communities in Barking and Dagenham so that the constituency was won by the Conservatives four times (including a National Liberal in 1922), once by the Liberals (in 1918) and twice by Labour (in 1929 and 1935). The winning of this seat by Labour in 1935 in a year when the Tories won comfortably on a national scale offers evidence that by then the expansion of Barking and Dagenham was having a disproportionate influence on the election outcome in the constituency. The 1918 changes also provided the Conservatives with two relatively safe seats in the shape of the adjoining Leyton West and Walthamstow East whilst Walthamstow West, a more working class suburb, was predominantly Labour. Leyton East, on the other hand, was marginal. Despite the radical nature of the re-distribution the results cannot be said to have rested primarily on the way the boundaries were drawn as each of the seats changed hands at least once during the period. The national mood clearly played a significant part in determining the outcome of elections. Only Walthamstow West remained much stronger for one Party than any other and that was Labour, who even held the seat in the debacle of 1931. However, the Labour whitewash of 1929 when the Party took all four seats in the area clearly signalled that, with the public mood in their favour, socially mixed constituencies such as these could be expected to return Labour as well as Conservative MPs. There were seven by-elections in the period. Conservatives won three, Labour three and Liberals one. Overall Labour won forty-five and the working class anti-socialist NDP two seats, whilst the Tories also secured forty-five plus one National Liberal. The Liberal Party, however, fared badly securing the return of only five. Three of these were won in the 1918 Election and another at a 1919 By-election. Only Walthamstow West fell to the Party at any other time and that was in 1924 when three-way politics reached its zenith, well illustrated in certain of the by-elections that occurred in the period.On 1st March 1919 a large swing took place at Leyton West where the Liberal candidate was returned by a margin of 15% over the Tories who in 1918 had recorded a 35% majority. At the 1922 General Election, however, the Tories were returned by a majority of 17% by which time Labour as well as the Liberals were splitting the non-Tory vote. By 1929 Labour was making the running and took the seat. Three by-elections took place at Ilford and the Tories won each of them comfortably. However, Labour and Liberal jockeyed for second place. On 25th September 1920 there was a 24% majority over Labour compared with 41% over a Liberal in 1918. On 23rd February 1928 the Tories won by a margin of 11% over the Liberals having won the same seat at the 1924 General Election with a 37% majority over Labour. In 1929 their majority fell to 9%, again over Labour. On 29th June 1937 the Tories recorded a winning margin of 22% as against 27% in 1935 by which time Labour was firmly established as the main opposition.
MPs for West Ham From
at
1924 1929 1931 1934
Gardner Holt Gardner Chotzner
Dr. Louis Sir Charles Ernest Leonard Thomas Edward Sir Ernest Edward Henry David Reginald (Capt) Benjamin Walter Herbert Paton (Major) Benjamin Walter Alfred James
Labour National Socialist Party/ Labour Labour
Conservative Labour Conservative Labour Conservative
NOTE First returned at a B = By-election; G = General Election
MPs for West Ham during this period were very typical of the politics of the time. The Labour MPs were all from a local government background in the borough and most were active trade unionists whilst Conservatives were either the products of the British Empire or of local businesses.
275 MPs for Plaistow, Silvertown, Stratford, and Upton Plaistow William James (Will) Thorne (Labour) was MP for the entire period. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 4
Silvertown John Joseph (Jack) Jones (Labour) was born at Nenagh in the Southern Irish County Tipperary in 1873 and educated there at Schools of the Christian Brothers. A building labourer he became a trade union organiser for the National Union of General and Municipal Workers in 1911 and got involved with politics. In 1906 he contested the Cornish borough constituency of Camborne for the Social Democratic Federation and in 1914 contested a by-election at nearby Poplar for the British Socialist Party. He was first elected to West Ham Borough Council in 1904 and was a member of the local Board of Guardians between 1908 and 1911. When he was elected Silvertown’s first MP in 1918 it was as a candidate for the British Socialist Party but, although he had contested that election against an official Labour candidate, he nevertheless took that Party’s whip in the Commons and remained a Labour MP until his death shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Dr. Louis Comyns (Labour), who succeeded Jack Jones in 1940, had been a local general practitioner in West Ham since 1932, and was also a member of the Borough Council. He was born in Glasgow in 1904 and qualified as a Doctor at Edinburgh University before moving to West Ham. Most of his activities were involved with the health service. He was Chairman of the Management Committee of a West Ham Hospital and a board member of others in the London area including Hammersmith, West London and St. Mark’s Hospitals and also sat on the North East Metropolitan Health Board. He resigned from the British Medical Association due to its opposition to the Labour Government’s proposals for the National Health Service. Following re-distribution of seats in 1950 he did not continue in the Commons but renewed his involvement with the Borough Council in 1954. He died in 1962.
Stratford Sir Charles Ernest Leonard Lyle (Conservative) was the first MP for Stratford and sat until 1922 when he was defeated. Born in 1882 and educated at Harrow and Trinity Hall Cambridge, he was a member of the Lyle family who, together with Tates, owned the largest sugar refining and canning business in Britain at that time. Canning Town was so named after the family business. Charles was the Company’s President and a Director of Lloyds Bank but lived mainly in Canford Cliffs near Bournemouth and was Chairman of the East Dorset Conservative Association, although he was chairman of the Queen Mary Hospital in the East End from 1916-23 and was also a West Ham magistrate. From 1920-21 he was briefly PPS to the Food Controller in the Coalition Government led by Lloyd-George and after his defeat in 1922 transferred to the Epping division in 1923. After only a year he resigned to concentrate on his business interests, although in his later years he did resume a Parliamentary career when he was elected unopposed in his home town of Bournemouth at a 1940 by-election. He held the seat until 1945 when he retired and was made Baron Lyle of Westbourne. He died in 1954. Thomas Edward Groves (Labour) was elected in 1922 and served continuously until he retired in 1945. Originally a lecturer in local government and economics, he was also a member of West Ham Council from 1919 and a local JP. He was born locally at Stratford in 1885 and educated at elementary school, the Carpenter’s Company Institute and at Ruskin College, Oxford. He was initially a barrister at Grays Inn but also acquired business interests as Chairman of three companies; the British Bank of Commerce, Aero Holdings Limited and Box and Co. He also claimed to be a fruit farmer. He was a Labour whip from 1931 to 1944 but failed to secure adoption as the Party’s candidate for the 1945 General Election at which point he decided to sponsor his son as an Independent. However, when his son withdrew, Groves decided to stand as an Independent himself and was defeated. He died in 1958.
Upton Sir Ernest Edward Wild (Conservative) was Upton’s MP from 1918 to 1922. He was born in Norwich in 1869 where he was educated at Norwich School before attending Jesus College, Cambridge and becoming a barrister. He was called to the Bar (Middle Temple) in 1893 and took silk in 1912. From 1897 to 1922 he was a Judge at the Norwich Guildhall Court of Record and prior to his election as MP for Upton contested Norwich twice, in 1904 and 1906, both unsuccessfully. He was also defeated at West Ham North on two occasions; once in December 1910 and again at a byelection in 1911. He was a member of the LCC from 1907 to 1910 and after his election at Upton, retired from politics in 1922 when he was appointed Recorder of the City of London and High Steward of Southwark. He served in both posts
276 MPs for Upton, and East Ham 100 = Unopposed until 1934. Outside the Law and politics he maintained an interest in poetry on which he delivered a number of lectures. Captain Henry David Reginald Margesson MC (Conservative) succeeded Wild in 1922 but was defeated the following year. Born in 1890 he was educated at Harrow School and Magdalene College Cambridge before becoming a Captain in the 11th Hussars. He entered politics in 1922 and was appointed PPS to Sir Montague Barlow, the Minister of Labour but both he and the Government lost in 1923. He sought another seat and in 1924 he was returned at Rugby, Warwickshire which seat he retained until 1942 when he was elevated to the House of Lords as Viscount Margesson. From 1924 he was an Assistant Government Whip, and a Junior Lord of the Treasury between 1926 and 1929 when his Party went into Opposition once more. On the creation of the National Government in 1931 he was re-instated as Junior Lord but after the Capt. Margesson MP who went on to great things, but General Election of the same year became Chief Government Whip not from a London seat. Wikipedia (Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury), a post he retained until May 1940 when he held it jointly after the Wartime Coalition was established. In December 1940 Churchill appointed him Secretary of State for War, a post he held until his elevation. In business he was a Director of the International Nickel Company and of Martins Bank. He died in 1965. Benjamin Walter Gardner (Labour) was born in 1865, educated at elementary school and became a waterside labourer in the docks. He worked with Keir Hardie, the father of the Labour Party, on the staff of a publication called ‘The Labour Leader’ and was a founder of the Independent Labour Party in West Ham. He was three times MP for Upton and contested the seat in every election between 1918 and 1935. He was first elected in 1923 only to be defeated a year later and, although returned again in 1929, was defeated in 1931. He was returned again at a by-election in 1934 following the resignation through ill health of the Tory MP, A.J. Chotzner. He held the seat until he retired in 1945. He was also a local JP and alderman on West Ham Council and died in 1948. Major Herbert Paton Holt MC (Conservative) was a Canadian born in Montreal in 1890 and educated at the St. Albans School and Canadian Royal Military Academy. In 1910 he entered the 3rd Dragoon Guards in which he became a Captain, retiring in 1920 to become a Director of Andrew Holt and Company, based in Montreal and the City of London. During the Great War he became a major and was awarded the Military Cross. He sat for Upton between 1924 and 1929 when he retired. He lived in Wiltshire where he became High Sheriff in 1935-6 and during the Second World War served as a Major in the Pioneer Corps in France in 1939-40. He died in 1971. Alfred James Chotzner (Conservative) won the seat from Gardner in 1931 but retired through ill health in 1934. Born in 1873, he was educated at Harrow and St. Johns Cambridge where he obtained a BA in 1895 and joined the Indian Civil Service rising to become a District Sessions Judge for East Bengal and Assam in 1909 and subsequently a High Court Judge in Calcutta between 1924 and 1928. Despite his health problems whilst briefly an MP, Chotzner lived another twenty four years and died in 1958.
MPs for East Ham From
at
The Impact of the Boundary Review of 1917-18
A
t the 1918 General Election there was an increase in Kent seats from six to nine, reflecting the massive population growth that had been taking place in the southeast suburbs of London, prompted by the railway boom of the late 19th Century. Although the Greenwich and Deptford constituency boundaries remained unchanged, in Woolwich and Lewisham the 1885 single member seats were each divided East and West creating two more in total. Further out Dartford and Sevenoaks constituencies remained (the latter becoming a non metropolitan county seat) but two new county seats were also created within what we now recognise as the Greater London area.
A huge expansion of population took place between the wars, and that can be seen by the grey shading showing the built up area in 1920. The yellow shading shows the extend of the built up area today. Further major growth took place in the housing boom during the period of this chapter.
288 Metropolitan Kent in Pictures Left: A view south, in the East Constituency, looking down on to Lewisham High Street in 1939, showing the busy streets - free of car traffic - with tramcar and motor bus along with heavy goods vehicles on what is the A21 Hastings Road. An electric train cruises towards the station in the background. Courtesy Greenwich University
Below: Catford Tram stand with customers waiting for the next service. The stop offered journeys to Lewisham, Forest Hill, the centre of London, Southend and Grove Park. Transport was frequent and cheap. Almost on the western border of the East Constituency the whole area was densely populated. © TfL from the London Transport Museum Collection
Below: Catford Bridge Station, on the Mid-Kent Line to Hayes divided the Lewisham East and West Constituencies. The line was electrified early in 1926; unlike lines in Middlesex, there was such brisk competition for traffic here with the tramways, that tube lines were kept at arms length by the intensive service. John Nelson
Above: This is a view from Westmoreland Road of houses for the new generation of home owners built in Sandford Road, in Bromley, after the Bromley Constituency was created in 1918. Before the First War 90% of people had rented their houses. Sandford Road is a very short walk from Bromley South station, and apart from some replacement building, remains the same today. Both: © TfL from the London Transport Museum Collection Left: Sevenoaks Road in Orpington, shown here in the 1920s, after it was transferred from Sevenoaks to the Chislehurst Constituency in 1918. The rather rural nature of the scene conceals the rapid change that the whole area was undergoing to be ‘Commuterland’, a process that continued throughout the Interwar years and after, transforming Orpington away from any suggestion of a rural idyll.
Metropolitan Kent - The Constituencies
289
Above Left & Above: The Labour Party made play of their manifesto commitment to good housing in election communications. In fact what was built didn’t quite conform to the idealised cartoon carried in the publicity, but the message was there. Above left is a 1930s ‘semi’ in Southwood Rd New Eltham (Woolwich West Constituency); a house in one of the large estates privately built by speculative builders. Mortgages were easy to obtain, and rates were low. Cartoon Peoples’ History Museum; photos John Nelson
Left: During the 1920s a large council house estate was built at Bellingham, within the Lewisham East Constituency. It was conveniently sited for Bellingham Station, and complemented the private housing developments that were also being built nearby. Between 1919 and 1939 central government provided subsidies for council house building totalling £208m.
Woolwich East covered the area from the town centre to Erith Marshes including Abbey Wood, Plumstead, Shooters Hill and Woolwich Arsenal whilst Woolwich West stretched south from the Thames dockyard area to New Eltham incorporating the town centre and its massively expanded suburbs surrounding Eltham Palace and Well Hall. It also included North Woolwich, a detached part of the parish on the Essex shore. Of the two constituencies the East Division was generally heavily working class while the West was more middle class in its social and demographic composition. These factors were to shape the political affiliations of the two seats. Lewisham East extended from Blackheath in the north via Lewisham town centre to Bellingham in the south and incorporated eastern districts of Catford (Rushey Green), together with Lee Green, Hither Green, Downham and Grove Park. After the constituency was established the LCC sponsored the construction of a new council estate at Downham, in Bellingham near Catford. This estate, begun in 1920, was eventually to provide homes for 35,000 people, mostly re-housed from inner London slums. It would in time bring about a change in the political complexion of Lewisham and a further increase in the number of seats. The Mid Kent Railway Line (between Lewisham and Hayes) formed the boundary that separated the East constituency from Lewisham West which extended from Ladywell in the north to Upper Sydenham in the southwest and incorporated the rest of Catford, Crofton Park, Forest Hill, Honour Oak and Lower Sydenham. Before 1918 both Lewisham and Woolwich adjoined respectively the Sevenoaks and Dartford county constituencies but the rapidly expanding London suburbs within these latter two divisions brought about the creation of two additional seats, one based on Bromley and the other on neighbouring Chislehurst. Despite its relatively late inclusion as a constituency in its own right, Bromley was an ancient town with a long history. The first positive mention came in a charter of 862AD in which King Ethelbert of Wessex, the Saxon King who controlled Kent at the time, granted the manor of Bromleag (“woodland clearing where broom grows”) to Dryhtwald, his minister. For centuries Bromley was first and foremost a market town but its importance was always greater than other places in the surrounding district, so much so that when the Western Kent Division was established as a constituency in 1832, Bromley was the polling place for voters across a wide area. The nearest alternative polling places were at Blackheath (between Lewisham and Greenwich) and Tonbridge. Bromley began to mushroom with the coming of the railways in 1858. In 1911 the locally born novelist H.G.Wells wrote of their impact on the town: “The roads came…the houses followed. People moved into
290 Metropolitan Kent - Election Results between the Wars them as soon as the roofs were on.” The new 1918 constituency covered the suburban area of Penge, which included Crystal Palace and Anerley, all transferred from the former Surrey county division of Wimbledon, together with Beckenham, and Bromley itself. It also included Bickley, Bromley Park, Coney Hall, Eden Park, Elmers End, Kelsey Park, and Shortlands. The adjacent and new Chislehurst constituency abutted Lewisham borough at Mottingham and circled Bromley from southeast to southwest. It included Bexley, Bexley Woods, Biggin Hill, Black Fen, Chelsfield, East Wickham, Elmstead Woods, Falconwood, Farnborough, Foots Cray, Green Street Green, Hayes, West Wickham, Keston, Lamorbey, Longlands, Mottingham, North Cray, Orpington, Petts Wood, Plaistow, Pratts Bottom, Sidcup, St. Mary Cray, St. Pauls Cray, Sundridge Park, Welling and Widmore. Chislehurst derives its name from its natural characteristics; “ceosil” meaning, “pebble”, and “hurst” meaning “a wood”, that is “a wood on a stony hill”. As a result of these changes the former Sevenoaks constituency became a Kent county seat covering no part of the London metropolitan area but, despite losing much of its suburban hinterland to the Chislehurst division, neighbouring Dartford remained a substantial constituency in its own right because the population was growing there too. The seat still incorporated Erith, Crayford and Bexleyheath but lost Northfleet to neighbouring Gravesend. It also included Barnehurst, Belvedere, Danson Park, Northumberland Heath, Slade Green, Thamesmead and West Heath.
Politics between the Wars General Election Results 1918-1935 by % majority Constituency Deptford Greenwich Woolwich Woolwich East Woolwich West Lewisham Lewisham East Lewisham West Bromley Chislehurst Dartford C/NL/NLab L Lab/NDP Total
Pre1918
C100 C100+ C26+ C54 L436+++ 1 2-+ 9++++
C29 C31 C12 C31 C6 7 0 2 9
C13 C2 C3 C11 Lab8 5 0 4 9
C27 C40 C23 C49 C2 7 0 2 9
C0.7 C23 C13+ C25 Lab19 5+ 0 4 9+
C34 C55 C67 C70 C11 8 0 1+ 9+
C11 C29+ C48 C47 C47+ 0 2+ 9++
C
C 6 0 0 6
Key: 100 = unopposed; C = Conservative; L = Liberal; Lab = Labour. + indicates seat retained at a by-election; - indicates seat lost at a by-election
The politics of Deptford changed little after 1918 with Labour’s pre-eminence re-asserted in that General Election with a majority of 17%. In the two years in which Labour managed to form a minority Government (1923 and 1929), Deptford recorded its two largest Labour majorities before the Second World War: 26% and 25% respectively. However, the tidal wave of opposition to Labour in the aftermath of the World recession that came in the wake of the Wall Street Crash in 1931 meant that the Party actually lost the seat to the Conservatives in the election of that year. The Tories won for the first time since 1900 and by a margin of 9%. The Party has not won there since. Greenwich had been a mainly Tory seat for the best part of the previous 50 years and the Party’s 1918 majority of 39% did little to suggest that by 1923 this would become a Labour seat for the first time. The decline of the working class Liberal vote was in all probability the main factor in this change but the Tories remained in strong contention, regaining the seat in 1924 before losing to Labour again in 1929, and then finally re-capturing the constituency in 1931 and going on to hold it until the end of the Second World War. In Woolwich the story was pretty much a “tale of two cities” but as so often in the case of politics, there was the occasional upset. The working class East division returned a Labour MP at General Elections throughout the period, even in the darkest days of 1931 when the Party also won a by-election. However, earlier, on 2nd March 1921, the Tory
297
The Impact of the Boundary Review of 1917-18
I
n 1918 there was another major redistribution of seats in Surrey; no part of the metropolitan area was completely unaffected by the changes. Nine additional constituencies were created, five in the LCC area and four in the Surrey county area of the metropolis where representation doubled. Roundly two seats were created for each one of the former single seat constituencies.
The LCC Area in Surrey
The boroughs of Bermondsey, Southwark, Camberwell, and Lambeth returned twelve MPs in 1885 and in 1918 this number was increased by one. The Rotherhithe constituency was unchanged whilst Bermondsey itself was renamed West Bermondsey. The former Newington Parliamentary Borough was absorbed by Southwark but the combined number of constituencies remained five. North Southwark, comprising the St Saviour’s District, Christchurch, St Michael’s and St Jude’s wards, replaced the former West division of the borough, and covered the area closest to the
327
Middlesex 1945 - 1974
I
n Middlesex eight new constituencies were formed in 1945 as part of a special post war review involving mainly those constituencies where populations had grown so much since 1918 that the electoral balance had become heavily distorted. No changes were made within the area of the LCC but in the outer suburbs new constituencies were created to accommodate vastly increased electorates in Hendon, Wembley, Harrow, Ealing and Hounslow. In addition the Hertfordshire Urban Districts of Barnet and East Barnet were created a new constituency covering suburbs that were later to be included in Greater London. These were stopgap measures and the Boundary Commission’s major post war review was not enacted until 1948 so that further changes were applied in 1950 at the second Election after the War when the increase that had occurred in 1945 was reversed.
The map depicts Middlesex constituencies created in 1945, 1950 and 1955, though not those eliminated by these changes. The number of seats in the LCC was reduced compared with 1945. New seats were created in Enfield, Barnet, Hendon, Harrow, Wembley, Ealing, and Heston, and in 1955 Feltham emerged. Comparison with 1945 may be made by reference to the map on page 18 and with 1918 on page 16.
There was an overall reduction from 60 to 51 seats in 1950 reflecting the declining population of the inner areas, brought about by several factors, not least the Wartime bombing and general drift of both industrial and residential
379
Metropolitan Essex 1945 - 1974
P
rior to the post-War General Election in 1945, the Boundaries Commission’s review of twenty exceptionally large constituencies in England affected suburban areas of Essex that had grown massively since 1918. Five new seats were created giving a 1945 total of eighteen, a figure that was reduced to fifteen in 1950 when a more thorough review had been undertaken.
The map depicts Essex constituencies created in 1950 and those that were modified in 1955. The number of seats in West Ham was halved compared with 1945, whilst new seats in the outer suburbs emerged at Barking, Dagenham, Hornchurch, and Woodford. Comparison with 1945 may be made by reference to the map on page 18 and with 1918 on page 16.
Once again Romford was at the centre of this expansion spawning three new seats. Between 1921 and 1938 the population of Hornchurch had increased by 335% and a new constituency of that name was created, based on the Urban District covering communities between Romford and the Thames, including Ardleigh Green, Corbets Tey, Cranham, Elm Park, Emerson Park, Hacton, Harold Wood, North Ockenden, Rainham, Squirrell’s Heath, Upminster and Wennington. Hornchurch had been a Parish Council in the Romford Rural District prior to 1926 when it became an Urban District in its own right. This was extended twice (in 1934 and 1936) to include the surrounding villages of Upminster, Rainham, Cranham and North Ockendon and became the largest Urban District in the country with a population estimated at
380 Metropolitan Essex -in pictures Left: 1950s terraced council houses along Parsloes Avenue (in the new Dagenham constituency) were within a short walk of the District Line, Dagenham Heathway station, and within easy communication for the Ford factory at Dagenham. The buildings were not originally designed for car ownership, and there has been improvisation. Only 50% of cars here are by Ford. Below: The affluent Gidea Park area in the Romford constituency sprang from a 1910 experiment to create the Romford Garden Suburb, an exhibition of town planning. The houses shown here built in the 1930s in Crossway, offer a pattern of quality making this an affluent and desirable area from the start. The close proximity of Gidea Park Station added to this.
Below: Barking gained municipal status in 1931. The Town Hall was completed in 1958, as the culmination of plans laid down in 1931. Construction was halted by WW2 but finished off for active use, which continues to this day. The area has been refurbished with an attractive pedestrian area in front of the building.
Above: Lodge Close houses (Hornchurch constituency) were built in the 1920s and 1930s, following the familiar pattern of urban expansion and sufficient to warrant the creation of the new constituency. This is an area just off the High Street and within walking distance of Hornchurch and Upminster Bridge, District Line stations. Left: The eastern arm of the Central Line and the Eastern Avenue towards Chelmsford both generated suburban development north of Ilford in the inter-war years. The South Constituency was and still is characterised by long streets of terraced suburban housing in the Seven Kings district. This is Elgin Road, close to the Great Eastern Railway line to Liverpool Street and the City.
All images John Nelson except where marked
381 Metropolitan Essex 1945 - 1974 134,140. The town’s name originated in 1233 and meant “church with horn-like gables”. Seats at Barking and Dagenham also appeared for the first time. The development of new council estates in response to slum clearance and bomb damage in the East End, coupled with the building of the huge car factory by Fords, meant that populations had increased rapidly. The Barking constituency extended south of Ilford to the Thames at Barking Reach and from Beckton on the western side of Barking Creek to the Dagenham Dock. It included Beckton, Becontree, Mayesbrook, Parsloes Park, Rippleside and Valence Park. The town’s name derives from the Anglo-Saxon “Berecingum” which meant “settlement of the family or followers of a man called Berica”. Barking Abbey was founded around 670 and stood for nearly nine hundred years until its dissolution in 1539. The parishes of Barking and Dagenham were part of the manor belonging to the Abbey. By 1086 the town’s name was “Berchinges”. It was a fishing village for many centuries giving its name in the early Eighteenth Century to the Barking Well Smack, a vessel that fished the Dogger Bank. Eventually it became a market gardening area and barges stacked with produce regularly travelled between the Town Quay and London during the 19th century taking vegetables to the markets. In return they carried night soil from London, slaughterhouse waste and dust from the dust yards as fertilizers. In early Victorian times new laws on pollution in Middlesex forced many factory owners to move to sites in nearby counties including Essex. In 1857 an artificial fertilizer and sulphuric acid factory was built at Creeksmouth in Barking, on the shores of the Thames. As its fishing industry collapsed new industries moved in. In 1866 the largest jute works in the world opened, making mail sacks. River transport by barges along the River Roding was unusually good and by 1900 Barking was attracting small factories to its riverside sites. Heavy industry and chemical plants opened and later oil refineries and storage buildings for hazardous waste. “Daeccanaam” was the AD 690 Saxon name of the place that is now known as Dagenham. It meant “homestead or village of a man called Deacca”. In 1945 the new Dagenham constituency extended from Markgate in the north via Chadwell Heath to the Thames between Dagenham Dock and Hornchurch Marshes. In between were Becontree Heath, Eastbrook, Goresbrook and Dagenham Heathway. In 1887 a barge builder called Samuel Williams built a new deep-water dock on the Thames but it failed to attract new business until 1929 when the Ford Motor Company began to build the largest motorcar factory in the world. Local labour was in plentiful supply as in 1921 the Becontree Estate, one of several major council estates, was built by the London County Council to provide improved housing for slum dwellers from central London. It took 18 years to complete but when finished it was bigger than many provincial towns. Between 1921 and 1931 alone the population of Dagenham grew from 9,127 to 89,362. The consequence of these changes was that the revised Romford constituency extended west to east from the boundary with Dagenham to Brentwood. Within today’s London boundary it included Collier Row, Gidea Park, Harold Hill, Havering Attebower, Noak Hill, Oldchurch and Rush Green. However, in 1955 the Brentwood Urban District was transferred to the new Billericay constituency so Romford contracted to an even more urban core. Elsewhere Epping retained Chingford but disgorged Wanstead and Woodford, which emerged as a new seat whilst Ilford was split in two. These developments reflected the growth of commuting populations living in affordable housing built around the Central Line of the London Underground and the Eastern Avenue built between Wanstead and Romford via Gants Hill. Woodford officially incorporated the Wanstead and Woodford UDC including Snaresbrook (all within Greater London today), Hainault and, until 1955, Chigwell (outside it). In that year Chigwell was taken into the Chelmsford constituency and North Hainault was transferred to Ilford North, which also embraced Aldborough, Barkingside, Clayhall, Fairlop, Gants Hill, Newbury Park, Redbridge and Seven Kings. Ilford South covered Clementswood (around the High Road), Cranbrook, Loxford, Mayfield, [Valentine’s] Park and Goodmayes. Chingford remained in Epping, most of which constituency lay outside the metropolitan area, however. In constituencies west of Woodford, as the population drifted outwards Leyton reverted to single representation in 1950. It included Cann Hall, Cathall, Lea Bridge, Leytonstone and Whipps Cross. Walthamstow East and West remained. The first included Hoe Street, Wood Street and Hale End (including Chapel End and Highams Park) whilst the latter incorporated three wards - High Street (including Lloyd Park), Higham Hill and St.James Street (including Blackhorse Road), A similar fall in population was experienced in West Ham. Industrial and port developments were moving further down the Thames Estuary and in 1950 West Ham reverted to two seats. West Ham North embraced the area north of the London to Tilbury Railway and was in effect a merger of the Stratford and Upton seats. It included Maryland, Forest Gate, Stratford including the Marsh, Upton Park and West Ham proper, whilst West Ham South,
382 General Election Results 1945-1970, and Politics after the Second World War which replaced the former Plaistow and Silvertown constituencies comprised Canning Town, Custom House, Plaistow, Silvertown and the Victoria Docks. The neighbouring East Ham North and East Ham South constituencies were unaltered. Details are in Chapter 8. Thus in metropolitan Essex there was a total of fifteen constituencies at the 1950 General Election, two more than had existed pre-War, though three less than in 1945. With only minor adjustments taking place in 1955 this was the pattern of representation that lasted up to and including the February 1974 General Election when further changes occurred.
Post War General Election Results 1945 to 1970 by % majority Constituency West Ham North Stratford Upton West Ham South Plaistow Silvertown East Ham North East Ham South Barking Dagenham Hornchurch Romford Ilford Ilford North Ilford South Woodford Epping Walthamstow East Walthamstow West Leyton Leyton East Leyton West Party Totals Conservative Labour Liberal Total
pre1945
6 9 0 15
Lab31 Lab30 1 17 0 18
Key: C = Conservative; Lab = Labour; + = Party that won seat at General Election held by-election in same Parliament; - = Party that won seat at General Election lost by-election to main opposition Party in same Parliament.
Politics in Metropolitan Essex The immediate impact of the 1945 changes was beneficial to Labour. The creation of Barking, Dagenham and Hornchurch handed the Party three additional seats whilst the swing against the Tories meant that they were able to secure another five – both Ilford seats, Romford, Epping and Walthamstow East – to add to the number of safe seats that they already held. Their tally rose to seventeen and Woodford, where the Wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the incumbent, was the only constituency won by the Conservatives. However, the reductions in Leyton and West Ham in1950 meant that Labour’s representation fell. On the basis of pre-War results it could be argued that Leyton represented a marginal rather than a Labour seat but there was no denying that the loss of seats in West Ham only damaged Labour. A swing o the Conservatives that also occurred in1950 switched four more seats from Labour to Tory in addition to the three that Labour lost through the reduction in the total number of seats. Romford, both Ilford seats and Epping all returned to the Conservatives but in 1955 the boundary changes that transferred Brentwood to Billericay returned Romford to Labour despite a national swing to the Conservatives. However, the same swing meant
383 MPs for West Ham that the Tories gained Hornchurch and Walthamstow East from Labour. Thereafter the same seats tended to change hands when there was a change of Government and in Labour’s 1966 landslide the Tories only won two seats, Ilford North and Woodford. Overall Labour outperformed the Tories in Metropolitan Essex in every General Election between 1945 and 1970. The only seat that remained solidly Conservative was Woodford. The Tories won forty contests compared with eightynine for Labour. During the period there were only six by-elections in the area but three of them were significant. The three that weren’t took place in the 1950s. On 3rd February 1954 a by-election at Ilford North resulted in an easy win for the Conservatives who recorded a 28% majority, 10% higher than in 1951. In 1955 the Party’s majority was 20%. On 1st March 1956 Labour won a convincing majority of 45% at Walthamstow West compared with 31% in 1955. However, by 1959 their support had waned and they recorded a 28% majority. On 30th May 1957 Labour won East Ham North with a majority of 27% compared with 18% in 1955. Again their popularity faltered and in1959 the majority fell to 14%. The three significant by-elections took place in the 1960s. On 21st January 1965 a landmark by-election took place at Leyton. The MP who had won the seat for Labour in 1964 with a majority of 17% was persuaded to stand down to enable Harold Wilson’s choice as Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon-Walker to win a seat in the Commons following his defeat at Smethwick where he had lost a relatively safe seat to a Tory who fought the election mainly on the issue of Commonwealth immigration. Walker lost the by-election by a margin of 0.5% to the Conservative candidate and had to wait until 1966 to re-take the seat, which he did with a majority of 18%, one percent higher than the 1964 general election result. Labour was re-elected nationally in 1966 with a much increased majority but shortly after the devaluation of sterling the Party began to lose support. On 21st September 1967 Labour lost a safe seat at Walthamstow West in a by-election. The Conservatives may have won by the slender margin of 0.4% but they overturned a 1966 majority of 36%. Labour recovered to win the seat in 1970 by a majority of 22% but still lost nationally, unable to pull back enough of the support they had lost in their last four years of Government. Less dramatic and more typical of the way the mood of the country was changing, was the loss of Walthamstow East in a by-election on 27th March 1969. Labour’s 1966 majority of 6% was overturned by the Conservatives who won by a margin of 27% going on to retain the seat in 1970 by a small but crucial margin of 2%.
MPs for West Ham From 1945
at G
West Ham South Stratford Upton West Ham North
Labour Labour Labour Labour
Notes: First returned at: B By-election, G General Election
West Ham’s two MPs for most of the period between 1945 and 1974 could not have been more different, one being a highly educated and eminent lawyer; the other man a boxer with an elementary education and a trade union background. Both men came from humble origins.
Silvertown Dr. Louis Comyns (Labour), who had been the MP since 1940 remained in the Commons until the 1950 redistribution when he retired. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 8.
Plaistow, West Ham South Sir (Frederick) Elwyn Jones (Labour) succeeded Will Thorne in 1945. Born on 24th October 1909 in Llanelli, Jones was educated at the local Grammar School in the Carmarthenshire town and then at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was President of the Union. He became a barrister at Grays Inn in 1935 and was a major in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War. At the end of the War in 1945-6 he joined the British War Crimes Executive
384 MPs for West Ham, and East Ham and was a Deputy Judge Advocate in the prosecuting team at the Nuremberg trials when senior Nazis were tried for their atrocities. During the term of the 1945-51 Labour Government he was PPS to the Attorney General whilst also occupying a judicial role as the Recorder of Merthyr Tydfil (1949). In 1950 he was elected as MP for West Ham South into which his Plaistow constituency was absorbed by the boundary changes. In 1953 he became a QC and Recorder of Swansea and from 1956-59 was a member of the Bar Council. From 1960-64 he was Recorder of Cardiff and for a time treasurer and a trustee of Amnesty but when Labour was returned to Government in 1964 he became Attorney – General, a post he held until 1970 when the Party went into Opposition once again. Meanwhile, in 1966 he had also been appointed Recorder of Kingston-on-Thames. When Harold Wilson became Prime Minister after the February 1974 election, Elwyn Jones, who had been returned as MP for the redrawn constituency of Newham South, was ennobled to become Lord Chancellor in the new Government, a post he held throughout the Wilson and Callaghan Governments until 1979. He died ten years later.
Lord Elwyn Jones
© National Portrait Gallery Lucinda Douglas-Menzies 1988
Stratford Henry Richard Nicholls (Labour) won Stratford in 1945 but when the seat was absorbed in 1950 he left Parliament. Born in 1893, he received an elementary school education and initially emigrated to Australia but returned to become a coach painter with the London North Eastern Railway and a union official at the company’s Stratford Works. From 1929-32 and then from 1942-62 he was a West Ham councillor. He died in 1962.
Upton, West Ham North
Arthur Lewis MP
Peoples History Museum Manchester
Arthur William John Lewis (Labour) who was born in 1917 and was educated at elementary school and the Borough Polytechnic, became an official of the General and Municipal Workers Union in 1938 before entering the Army in 1940, though two years later he was appointed a member of the Ministry of Labour Appeal Board, a post he held until the end of the War. He was elected MP for Upton in 1945; for West Ham North in 1950; and for Newham North West in February 1974; and retired from politics in 1983 after being de-selected by his local Labour Party for allegedly Trotskyite views and support for the IRA. He was an amateur boxer with a rumbustuous political style who remained a backbencher throughout his time in the Commons. He was a member of the Council of Europe after 1976 and a sometime chairman of the Eastern Regional Group of Labour MPs and of the London Party Executive Committee. Although he fought the 1983 election as an Independent Labour candidate, he lost. He died in 1998.
MPs for East Ham From
at
(Sir) Reg(inald) Ernest Alfred John Albert Edward
Constituency East Ham North East Ham South
Party Labour Co-operative Labour Labour Co-operative Labour Co-operative
Notes: First returned at: B By-election, G General Election
East Ham North
Percy Daines MP
Peoples History Museum Manchester
Percy Daines (Labour & Co-operative) took the seat from Sir John Mayhew, the Tory incumbent in 1945 and held the seat until his death in 1957. He was born in 1902 and received an elementary school education before joining the railways becoming a locomotive fireman. During the War he served with the Royal Engineers from 1940 but was invalided out. Daines was a member of Enfield council for a number of years and an active member of the Co-operative movement serving on its national executive committee. He was employed by the Co-operative Insurance Company and specialised in Social Insurance. He died in 1957.
395
Metropolitan Kent 1945 - 1974
T
he immediate post war review of boundaries in 1945 created two additional constituencies in Kent, both of them in the outer suburban area where population growth had been greatest. Orpington was formed mainly from parts of the former Chislehurst constituency but also contained elements of Dartford and Sevenoaks. Including Biggin Hill, Chelsfield, Farnborough, Green Street Green, Petts Wood, Pratts Bottom and St. Mary Cray, the new constituency also incorporated Swanley (a Kent town to this day) near Dartford. In 1950 Orpington’s electorate of 50,704 was 13% below the London average, though within a year the number had grown by nearly 2,500 as housing development in the area continued. The town’s name is corrupted from the original ‘Dorpentune’, partly British and partly Saxon, signifying ‘the village where the spring of water rises’; in this case the river Cray. Chislehurst was consequently reduced in size to extend from the border with Lewisham, southeast-wards to St. Pauls Cray. It included Blackfen, Elmstead Woods, Foots Cray, Lamorbey, Longlands, Mottingham, North Cray, Sidcup and St. Pauls Cray. Sidcup was its most populous district. Despite its reduced geography the constituency’s electorate was still 12% higher than the average for London so much so that between the General Elections of 1950 and 1951 alone, the number of people on the register increased by over 5,500 to reach a total of 70,906.
The map depicts Kent constituencies created in 1945, 1950 and 1955, including modifications in areas beyond today’s Greater London boundary. Beckenham, Orpington and Bexley were created in 1945, whilst Lewisham expanded from two to three seats in 1950. Erith & Crayford emerged in 1955, leaving Dartford outside Greater London. Comparison with 1945 may be made by reference to the map on page 18 and with 1918 on page 16.
396 Metropolitan Kent in pictures Left: Willett Way in well-to-do Petts Wood continues today, with an array of sumptuous automobiles and splendid houses, to demonstrate the affluent nature of this part of the 1945 Orpington Constituency. Petts Wood was created in the 1920s and building started from the station. It is in an ideal place for affluent commuters. Below: Bexley was created a new constituency in 1945 but was altered in 1955 with the creation of Erith & Crayford when it lost much of its Labour voting electorate. The water meadows of the River Cray divided the seat from the Chislehurst Constituency and are viewed here from the London bound platform of Bexley Station, familiar to its many, generally Conservative voting commuters.
Below: Beckenham was created a constituency in 1950 when it was carved out of Bromley. This sign stands proudly on the commuter town’s High Street, a stone’s throw from Beckenham Junction Station. The municipal borough had been created 15 years earlier.
Above: Equitable House in General Gordon Place, central Woolwich, in the Woolwich East constituency, was for many years the HQ of the famous Woolwich Building Society. Built in 1935 in the Art Deco style it lasted as HQ until 2002, when it was bought by Barclays. During the period of this chapter, job totals ran down in Woolwich, with the reduction of activity at the Arsenal. Gordon Rushton Left: Although Erith & Crayford was a Labour seat following its creation in 1955, it too was home to the commuting middle classes. Grasmere Road, Barnehurst is typical of the period and was close to Erith Road, a boundary with Bexley.
All pictures John Nelson, unless otherwise attributed.
397 Metropolitan Kent 1945 - 1974 A new seat was also created from the former Dartford constituency, which remained in its smaller format and included Belvedere, Crayford, Erith, Northumberland Heath, Slade Green and Thamesmead. The new Bexley constituency was geographically small covering the neighbourhoods of Bexleyheath and Bexley only, which included Barnehurst, Bexley Woods, Danson Park, East Wickham, Falconwood and Welling. By 1950 Bexley’s electorate was 63,429, some 9% higher than the London average. The name Bexley, which means the ‘clearing in the box wood’, first turned up in records in 814 when King Kenulph, the King of the Mercians, granted lands at Bexley to Wulfred, Archbishop of Canterbury. The review of constituencies undertaken in advance of the 1950 General Election brought further alterations. This time changes also affected the LCC boroughs of Deptford, Greenwich, Woolwich and Lewisham but the outer suburban constituencies were altered again, reflecting the substantial population changes taking place in the post War period. The changes brought about a further increase in the representation of the area when two additional seats were created; one in Lewisham and another in neighbouring Beckenham. There were no boundary changes in Greenwich, which retained its borough identity containing an electorate of 61,198 that was 5% larger than the average and which remained pretty stable until the mid 1960s when it began to fall. Despite reducing by about 7% between 1950 and 1970, Greenwich nevertheless retained a slightly above average London electorate throughout the period. Deptford too remained unaltered and with an electorate of around 55,000 was only 6% below the average for London at that time. However, the area suffered a gradual decline in its population throughout the 1950s and 1960s such that by 1970 the electorate had fallen by over 22%, even after the voting age had been reduced to 18. In neighbouring Woolwich there were some ward transfers from Woolwich West to East. Woolwich West (the more middle class constituency) was then in its heyday as a London suburb and lost the more industrial riverside area between the docks and Woolwich Common to working class Woolwich East. The West constituency comprised Eltham, New Eltham, Well Hall and the Woolwich Dockyard whilst East was made up of Abbeywood, Plumstead, Plumstead Marshes, Shooters Hill, Woolwich Arsenal, Woolwich Town centre and North Woolwich on the north bank of the Thames. After these transfers the two electorates were very similar in size at around 52,000 each but were approximately 10% smaller than the London average. Both constituencies were to remain unaltered until 1974 by which time one had declined whilst the other had continued to grow. Woolwich East experienced a fall of nearly 6% in its electorate between 1950 and 1970 but Woolwich West grew by nearly 10%. The diverging trends were in part related as people in the older parts of the borough sought the better housing on offer in the newer suburbs. Lewisham’s two seats increased to three as the population of the former East division increased. Lewisham North acquired the Blackheath, Ladywell, Park, Village and Lee wards from the former East constituency whereas Hither Green, Downham and Grove Park were placed in Lewisham South, which also gained Bellingham, Rushey Green and western parts of Catford from Lewisham West. In turn this seat retained Crofton Park, Forest Hill, Honour Oak Park, Beckenham Hill, Lower and Upper and Sydenham. The changes reflected a large increase in population that had occurred within the Lewisham borough during the 1920s and 30s; in particular the growth of council estates in Bellingham and Downham. Electorates between the three divisions were pretty evenly matched and remained so throughout the period from 1950 to1974. Lewisham South and West contained electorates of about 56,000 whilst Lewisham East was a couple of thousand fewer. Throughout the entire period no constituency electorate in Lewisham ever varied by more than 8% from the London average and in most cases the variation was within 5%. Lewisham West was almost exactly the same size as the overall London average in both 1964 and 1966. The new Beckenham constituency (literally the ‘ham’ or homestead on the ‘bec’, the river Ravensbourne) was created in 1950 out of the former Bromley division and extended from Penge, south-eastwards to Beckenham, Elmers End, Eden Park, Kelsey Park, Shortlands, West Wickham, Hayes and Coney Hall. With an electorate of nearly 74,000 it was, even then, 26% larger than the average London constituency, a position that actually worsened over the next couple of decades as Beckenham registered an increase in voters whilst other seats were in relative decline. By 1970 Beckenham’s electorate was over 77,000 and even allowing for the lowering of the age at which adults could vote, the constituency was by then 41% larger than the average. The neighbouring Bromley constituency remained but, following the creation of Beckenham, was smaller geographically extending south from Plaistow and Sundridge Park to Keston including also Bromley Town, Bromley Hill, Bromley Common, Widmore and Bickley. At that time Bromley’s electorate was not much greater than 47,000 (some
411
Metropolitan Surrey 1945 - 1974
B
etween 1921 and the outbreak of the Second World War there were significant movements in populations throughout metropolitan Surrey. All of the boroughs nearest the Thames declined with Bermondsey, Southwark and Camberwell experiencing the biggest losses of between 16% and 30%. Battersea and Lambeth suffered less but still declined by 6% and 15% respectively. Wartime bombings only made matters worse and of the inner boroughs only Wandsworth increased its population. In contrast there was remarkable growth in the suburbs. The biggest occurred in Carshalton, Sutton, Cheam and Surbiton where rates of increase varied between 150% and 300%. The Boundary Commission’s immediate post War Review created two additional constituencies - Sutton & Cheam and Carshalton. Other alterations were reserved until 1950.
The map depicts Surrey constituencies created in 1950 and those that were modified in 1955. The number of seats in Southwark and Lambeth was reduced compared with 1945. In Croydon a third seat was added in 1950 and the boundaries were changed in 1955. Surbiton was created from Kingston, leading to changes in the boundaries of Kingston and Wimbledon. Comparison with 1945 may be made by reference to the map on page 18 and with 1918 on page 16.
Sutton & Cheam was carved out of the former Epsom constituency of which it had formed the northern part since 1918. Sutton (meaning, “south farmstead or village”) originally belonged to the Benedictine Abbey of Chertsey, founded around the year 666, but after its dissolution the manor passed into the hands of absentee landowners. Although only
412 Metropolitan Surrey in pictures - 1945-1974 Left: Waverley Way in leafy Carshalton Beeches typifies the middle class composition of the Carshalton constituency following its separation from neighbouring Mitcham in 1945. Below: Although designated “The Beeches”, this 1960s council estate in London Road, Mitcham, comprised mostly Labour voters, fewer of whom were to be found in next door Carshalton. Although somewhat stark, for the time these flats were considered modern with all contemporary conveniences. Siting was excellent, next to the Wandle Valley, and only yards from a railway station that was eventually to transform into the successful Tramlink service 50 years on.
Below: These 1960s office blocks in Brighton Road, central Croydon, bear testament to the suburb’s success in working to becoming a business centre that hosted a major centre of clerical and technical employment in the post war period.
Above: Despite its mainly middle class electorates, Croydon was also home to industry and working class voters as evidenced here in Martin Crescent, Waddon Marsh, in the Croydon South constituency, Left: Every day commuters ‘do their stuff’, walking from their homes down to the station to catch the train to work. The process began 150 years ago and is still going strong, from dormitory suburbs, into London, and back in the evening, with leisure time at their domicile at weekends. Here commuters in the Streatham Constituency, line up on the platform edge of their local station waiting for the train. Wikipedia
All pictures John Nelson, unless otherwise attributed.
437
1974 - 1983: Greater London Authority Boundaries Fully Reflected in the Second Periodic Review
A
lthough the London Government Act of 1963 had established a new local government structure, it was not until the General Election of February 1974 that Parliamentary constituencies took these changes into account. These were proposed following the Second Periodic Review, undertaken by the Boundary Commission for England which made its recommendations to Parliament in 1969. As far as Middlesex was concerned this meant that it had ceased to exist as a local government entity, and its former councils were replaced by fifteen new London Boroughs and part of one other. The following table summarises the changes that occurred.
Old Council Areas in Middlesex City of London (Corporation) Marylebone, Paddington, Westminster (Boroughs) Chelsea, Kensington (Boroughs) Fulham, Hammersmith (Boroughs ) Acton, Ealing, Southall (Boroughs) Brentwood & Chiswick, Heston & Isleworth (Boroughs), Feltham (UDC) Twickenham (UDC) Staines UDC and Sunbury UDC Uxbridge, Hayes & Harlington, Ruislip-Northwood, Yiewsley & West Drayton (UDCs) Harrow (Borough) Wembley, Willesden (Boroughs) Finsbury, Islington (Boroughs) Holborn, St. Pancras, Hampstead Barnet , East Barnet, Friern Barnet (UDCs), Finchley, Hendon (Boroughs) Bethnal Green, Poplar, Stepney (Boroughs) Hackney, Shoreditch, Stoke Newington (Boroughs) Enfield, Edmonton, Southgate (Boroughs) Hornsey, Tottenham, Wood Green (Boroughs)
New Boroughs
City of London City of Westminster Kensington & Chelsea Hammersmith & Fulham Ealing
No change 3-way amalgamation 2-way amalgamation 2-way amalgamation 3-way amalgamation
Hounslow
3-way amalgamation also involving Surrey (see Ch18) Not in London
Hillingdon
4-way amalgamation
Harrow Brent Islington Camden
No change 2-way amalgamation 2-way amalgamation 3-way amalgamation 5-way amalgamation also involving Hertfordshire 3-way amalgamation 3-way amalgamation 3-way amalgamation 3-way amalgamation
Richmond
Barnet Tower Hamlets Hackney Enfield Haringey
As a result of the Review a big reduction in the inner London, former LCC Middlesex boroughs occurred. East and West Central London were affected the most, but seats were lost in the outer suburban areas as well. The new total of 43 Middlesex constituencies was 8 fewer than in 1955 and the lowest since before 1885.
443 Map of Middlesex, and Boundary changes - the Third Periodic Review 1983 - 1997
The map depicts Middlesex constituencies created in 1974, and those that were modified in 1983. The number of seats in Inner London was again reduced, compared with 1974. Seats were eliminated in Camden, Haringey, Hackney, Islington, and Westminster. In the suburbs Harrow (Cen) was lost, and there were minor ward transfers in Brent and Ealing. St Margarets in Twickenham was paired with Richmond in Surrey.
The area between Lancaster Gate and Langham Place north of the Bayswater Road and Oxford Street, and south of the Euston Road was transferred from St Marylebone to the City of London & Westminster South constituency. It combined three former Paddington wards: Bayswater, Hyde Park, and Lancaster Gate, with three from Marylebone: Baker Street (Marylebone proper), Bryanston (Square), and Cavendish (Square) including Fitzrovia and Harley Street, and nine from the former Cities of London and Westminster: the City itself (extending from the boundary with Tower Hamlets at Aldgate as far west as the Temple); St James’s (Strand and Westminster including Whitehall); West End (including Soho and Mayfair); Knightsbridge; Belgrave; Churchill and St George’s (Pimlico); Millbank, and Victoria (including the Houses of Parliament).
West London - Kensington, Chelsea, Hammersmith, Fulham; West Middlesex (Reduced from 19 to 18 seats) Harrow’s constituencies were the only ones in the entire area to be affected. Harrow Central was abolished, the borough reverting to its 1945 status of two constituencies. Harrow East acquired three wards from Central. These were Greenhill (formerly coupled with Harrow-on- the Hill); Wealdstone (formerly Wealdstone North), and Marlborough (Wealdstone South). The rest of the constituency was unchanged, comprising seven more wards: Canons (Brockley Hill and Canons Park, Stanmore); Stanmore Park (Stanmore proper); Wemborough (Stanmore South/Canons Park West); Stanmore South (Queensbury/Little Stanmore); Harrow Weald; Kenton East, and West. Harrow West incorporated the Ridgeway ward (Harrow West) from the former Central seat and retained other districts represented by Headstone North and South; Hatch End; Pinner West; Pinner (Harrow Garden Village); Rayners Lane; Roxbourne, and Roxeth (South Harrow). The only other alteration was a name change. Hammersmith North lost its orientation description and was renamed simply Hammersmith. Its boundaries were unaltered.
444 North East Middlesex in pictures 3 Left: This is a view of the busy Broadway at Wood Green. It was a constituency in its own right until 1983 when it was combined with Hornsey. With the Piccadilly Line Wood Green station at one end, it has Turnpike Lane at the other, as well as the electrified line into Kings Cross down the road. Wood Green is a bustling suburb.
Below: The flats seen here overlook the reservoirs at Stoke Newington. They are in the Hackney North & Stoke Newington constituency created in 1974 but are very close to the boundary with Tottenham
Below: Much of Edmonton’s terraced housing was replaced with flats in the 1970s, such as these at Edmonton Green
Above: Hoxton was in the borough of Shoreditch but when this was transferred to Hackney it found itself in the new Hackney South & Shoreditch constituency in which it has remained since 1974. These local authority built flats are typical of the area and are sandwiched between Hoxton Street and Kingsland Road. Left: These council flats in the Old Ford district of Tower Hamlets are close to the boundary at Hackney Wick and were placed in the Bethnal Green & Bow Constituency in 1974. Old Ford transferred to Bow and Poplar between 1983 and 1997 when it was restored to its original home. The houseboats also accommodate electors. All pictures John Nelson, unless otherwise attributed.
445 Boundary changes - the Third Periodic Review 1983 - 1997 North London (Reduced from 10 to 8 seats) In North London Camden and Islington Boroughs each lost a seat. Islington Central was merged with parts of the former North and South & Finsbury divisions. Islington North gained four wards southeast of Finsbury Park: Gillespie (Arsenal and Drayton Park); Highbury; Quadrant, and Mildmay (including the Canonbury Station area) from the former Central division. These were combined with existing electorates in Archway (Hillrise); Crouch Hill (Highview ward); Upper Holloway (Junction, St, George’s and Sussex wards); and Tollington ward, covering the area between Finsbury Park and Upper Hollway north of Seven Sisters Road. Islington South & Finsbury acquired the two Canonbury wards either side of Essex Road, and Hillmarton covering Lower Holloway. It retained all other former electorates in Lower Hollway around the Caldeonian Road (Holloway ward);Thornhill ward (Caledonian Road south); Barnsbury (including Pentonville); Upper Street (St Mary); Angel (St Peter); Bunhill Fields (including Golden Lane ), and Clerkenwell (Farringdon, Finsbury, and the Pentonville Road). In Camden the St Pancras North, South & Holborn and Hampstead constituencies were recast and renamed; three seats were reduced to two. The Highgate ward (Dartmouth Park) of the North division was transferred to Hampstead, which was renamed Hampstead & Highgate. This also comprised its existing wards of Belsize (Park): Kilburn (Finchley Road); Town, Frognal, and South End (Hampstead Village wards); Highgate (Kenwood with Waterlow Park); Priory (Kilburn Grange Park); Adelaide (South Hampstead); Swiss Cottage; and West End (West Hampstead).The remainder of both former St Pancras constituencies formed a new Holborn & St Pancras division that extended south from Gospel Oak to the City border. It incorporated Bloomsbury including London University and St Giles Circus; Camden Town’s Caversham and Camden wards; Chalk Farm with Primrose Hill; Corum Fields (Kings Cross ward): Euston (Somers Town ward); Gospel Oak; Hatton Garden (Holborn ward); Kentish Town (Castlehaven, Grafton and St John’s wards); Mornington Crescent (Regents Park ward); and St Pancras itself.
The East End and North East London (Reduced from 11 to 9 seats) Within Tower Hamlets there was no reduction, but the two seats were re-aligned on a north to south axis instead of east to west. Bethnal Green was paired with Stepney and Bow and with Poplar. Bethnal Green & Stepney acquired five wards from the former Bethnal Green & Bow constituency north of the Whitechapel Road - Spitalfields; Weavers and St Peter’s (Bethnal Green North East); St James’ (Cambridge Heath); and Holy Trinity (Globe Town). These were joined with four former Stepney & Poplar wards - St Katherine’s (including Wapping, the Tower of London and Aldgate); St Mary (Whitechapel); and Redcoat and St Dunstan’s (Stepney). The new Bow & Poplar constituency covered the remaining Tower Hamlets wards of Grove (Mile End); Park (Old Ford); Bow; Bromley and East India (Bromley by Bow); Blackwall (including Poplar, East and West India Docks); Lansbury (Bow Common); Millwall (The Isle of Dogs, Canary Wharf and Westferry); Limehouse and Shadwell including Ratcliffe. Lansbury ward was named after the former Labour Party Leader and MP for Bow & Bromley, George Lansbury, whose biographical details are in Chapter 3. In North East London, Hackney and Haringey each lost a seat. As had occurred in Harrow and Islington, the Central seat was abolished in Hackney. Five wards were transferred to the South seat and three to the North. Hackney South & Shoreditch acquired Schacklewell (Westdown ward); Homerton and Chatham (also Homerton); Kings Park (Clapton and the Marshes); and Hackney Wick from Central; which were placed with existing electorates in Dalston; De Beavoir (Town and Kingsland); Victoria (Park); Queensbridge; Haggerston; Moorfields; and Wenlock (Hoxton). Hackney North & Stoke Newington acquired the remaining wards of the former Central constituency – Rectory (Road) and East Down (Hackney Downs); and Leabridge (Lower Clapton). These were added to the existing electorates in Springfield (Upper Clapton/Stamford Hill East): incorporating Northfield (Stamford Hill West); Northwold; North Defoe; South Defoe (Stoke Newington); Clissold (Park); Brownswood (Finsbury Park), and New River (Lordship Park Manor). In Haringey Borough, Hornsey, Wood Green and Tottenham were merged and the number of MPs reduced by one. The new two-member status of the Borough saw it divided into western and eastern constituencies. The former was Hornsey & Wood Green which comprised twelve wards , incorporated four from Wood Green - Alexandra (Park); Bowes Park; Woodside (Park); and Noel Park – together with nine Hornsey wards - Central; Vale; and South (Hornsey proper); Muswell Hill; Fortis Green; Highgate and Archway (also Highgate); and Crouch End. The eastern Haringey constituency of Tottenham gained Harringay from Hornsea and three wards from Wood Green – Park and Coleraine (Northumberland Park); and White Hart Lane together with seven former Tottenham wards – West Green and Bruce Grove (both covering Bruce Grove); High Cross (Tottenham Hale); Green Lanes (Haringay); Tottenham Central; South Tottenham and Seven Sisters.
446 Boundary changes - the Fourth Periodic Review 1997 - 2010
The map depicts Middlesex constituencies created in 1997. The number of seats in Inner London was again reduced compared with 1983. Seats were eliminated in Barnet Borough, and through the merging of others in Ealing, Hammersmith, Kensington & Chelsea, Westminster, and Tower Hamlets. In this latter case, Poplar was merged with adjoining Canning Town in Newham (Essex). Elsewhere there were boundary changes only.
1997-2010: The Fourth Periodic Review The Boundary Commission next reported in February 1995 and its recommendations were implemented at the 1997 General Election. The impact was to reduce by three the number of MPs representing Middlesex constituencies. This time the rule that constituencies could not straddle more than one borough was changed which meant that a much broader review of boundaries was possible. Most constituencies were affected and the total number remaining was 34.
Central and West London - City of London, Westminster, Kensington, Chelsea, Hammersmith, Fulham; West Middlesex (Reduced from 20 to 18 seats) Several Central and West London constituencies were considered together. Kensington & Chelsea involved the amalgamation of some South Kensington wards with Chelsea, which lost its single place name designation for the first time since it was established in 1867. The new constituency comprised sixteen wards altogether. Holland and Norland (Holland Park); Pembridge (Notting Hill Gate); Campden and Queens Gate (Kensington proper) from Kensington were combined with the former Chelsea wards of Abingdon (Cromwell Road); Earls Court; Courtfield; Brompton; Church and Hans Town (South Kensington); Royal Hospital; Cheyne and South Stanley (Chelsea riverside); and North Stanley and Redcliffe (Kings Road). The remaining five North Kensington wards were amalgamated with eleven from the former Westminster North division. The resulting constituency was called Regents Park & Kensington North. Its Kensington wards were Avondale (Latimer Road); Colville; Golborne; Kelfield (Ladbroke Grove); and St Charles (Kensal Town) to which were added the Westminster wards of Queen’s Park; Harrow Road (Maida Hill); Maida Vale; Little Venice; and Westbourne [Park]. These wards embraced districts that included Latimer Road, Church Street (Lisson
515
1974 - 1983: Greater London Authority Boundaries Fully Reflected in the Second Periodic Review
I
n 1965 the outer suburban areas of London that were still in Surrey were finally transferred to Greater London. People living in various urban districts and boroughs of Surrey found themselves in one of Kingston, Sutton & Cheam, Croydon or Merton London Boroughs. Richmond was unique in that it also covered the former Middlesex districts of Twickenham and Teddington1. In the former LCC area boroughs were also amalgamated. It was a requirement for London constituencies to be established wholly within the boundaries of the new Boroughs which were newly constituted as shown below
Old Council Areas in Metropolitan Surrey Bermondsey, Camberwell, Southwark (Boroughs) Lambeth Borough; Streatham and eastern parts of Clapham from Wandsworth Borough Battersea, Wandsworth (Boroughs); except Streatham and parts of Clapham Barnes, Richmond, Twickenham (Boroughs) Wimbledon, Mitcham (Boroughs); Merton & Morden UDC Kingston, Surbiton; Malden & Coombe (Boroughs) Sutton & Cheam, Beddington & Wallington (Boroughs); Carshalton UDC Croydon Borough; Coulsdon & Purley UDC
New Boroughs
Richmond upon Thames Merton Kingston upon Thames
3-way amalgamation 3-way amalgamation 3-way amalgamation
Sutton
Croydon
2-way amalgamation
These changes were eventually felt on the constituency map in 1974 when the immediate overall effect was that the number of constituencies in Metropolitan Surrey was reduced by 3 from 25 to 22 , two in inner-London and one in the outer suburbs. The rationalisation of seats in the LCC area was brought about by falling electoral rolls whilst in the outer suburban area although Croydon’s representation was increased this was cancelled out by redistribution elsewhere, while Surrey East ceased to be a London constituency by giving up its metropolitan electorates altogether. Southwark & Lambeth (7 seats) Continuing economic decline affected Southwark. For example, a new breed of super tankers needed deeper docks than Bermondsey could offer and by 1970 they had closed. With their decline much of the food processing industry also moved away. The former Southwark and Bermondsey constituencies were mainly combined as Southwark, Bermondsey although the southern fringes of Newington were allocated to Southwark Peckham, which included the Elephant & Castle, Walworth, Denmark Hill, Camberwell and North Peckham. Southwark Dulwich included South Peckham, Nunhead, and all districts of Dulwich itself, as far south as the border with Crystal Palace. Lambeth borough retained four seats despite some redistribution that saw Brixton replaced by the more aptly named Lambeth Central. However, the apparent stability was in part due to the transfer of Streatham from Wandsworth to 1 Twickenham (now in Richmond Borough) and Spelthorne (now in Surrey) are considered in preceding Chapters of this book relating to Middlesex.
524 MPs for Southwark, and Lambeth Boroughs MPs for Southwark, and Lambeth Boroughs From 1974 1983 1983
at G B G
Date Date
Hill Umunna
Harry George Harriet Ruth Harriet Ruth Samuel Charles Gerald Francis (Dame) Tessa Jane John Denis (Dame) Tessa Jane Marcus (Lt-Colonel) John George Russell Stuart Kingsley (Catharine) Letitia ‘Kate’ (William) ‘Bill’ Jeremy Mansfield (Trevor) Keith Chuka
Constituency Southwark, Bermondsey Southwark & Bermondsey North Southwark & Bermondsey Bermondsey & Old Southwark Southwark, Peckham Camberwell & Peckham Southwark, Dulwich
Lambeth, Norwood Dulwich & West Norwood Lambeth Central Lambeth, Vauxhall
Streatham
Party Labour Liberal Liberal Liberal Liberal Labour Labour Labour Labour Conservative Labour Labour Labour Labour Labour Labour Labour Conservative Labour Labour
Notes: First returned at: B By-election, G General Election
Southwark, Bermondsey, Southwark & Bermondsey, North Southwark & Bermondsey Bermondsey & Old Southwark (Robert) ‘Bob’ Joseph Mellish (Labour) was Southwark & Bermondsey’s MP from 1974 to 1983 when he resigned on his appointment as Deputy Chairman of the Docklands Development Corporation. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 14. The by-election that followed Mellish’s resignation was one of the most notorious of modern political times. The local Labour Party was split between its traditional right wing, dockworker membership and the militant groups who won the day in the selection process, choosing a gay rights campaigner, Australian Peter Tatchell, to fight the seat. As a result of the split a traditional Labour nominee also stood in the election and for a while it seemed that Michael Foot, Labour’s leader might not endorse Tatchell’s candidacy. However, he did so and the election was conducted in a poisonous atmosphere, which made it ripe for an upset. The Liberal candidate won the seat with a record swing between parties of over 50%.
Simon Hughes’ Election poster in 1983 Peoples History Museum Manchester
The consequence was that Simon Hughes (Liberal) was elected. He was re-elected at successive general elections between 1983 and 2010, making him the longest serving Liberal Democrat during this period of electoral history. Hughes was born in Cheshire in 1951 and educated in Wales and Herefordshire, after which he attended Selwyn College, Cambridge where he obtained a law degree. He was called to the bar of the Middle Temple in 1974 and the following year undertook a course in European Studies at the College of Europe in Bruges. Working with the European Commission and Parliament he became a civil rights lawyer, returning to work in chambers in London, living in Southwark from 1980. Elected in 1983 he became a prominent spokesman for his Party and was a founder of the Liberal Democrats in 1988. He unsuccessfully contested the leadership
525 MPs for Southwark, Dulwich & West Norwood of the Party in 1999 against Charles Kennedy and in 2004 came third in the contest to be Mayor of London. In the same year he was elected President of his Party. The seat was renamed Southwark & Bermondsey in 1983, North Southwark & Bermondsey in 1997 and Bermondsey & Old Southwark in 2010. During the 2005 Parliament Hughes was ‘outed’ as being gay by a national newspaper in something of an ironical turn of events given the circumstances of his election back in 1983. In 2006, Tatchell (by then a member of the Green Party) publicly stated that it was ‘time to forgive the Liberal’s dirty tricks in Bermondsey’. However, he did revive memories of the infamous by-election alleging that ‘some of the (Liberal) male canvassers went around the constituency wearing lapel stickers emblazoned with the words ‘I’ve kissed Peter Tatchell’ in a blatant bid to win the homophobic vote’. He also said that ‘Simon’s election leaflets described him as ‘the straight choice’’.2 Mr Hughes was appointed Justice Minister in December 2013.
Southwark, Peckham, Camberwell & Peckham Harry George Lamborn (Labour) had initially been elected MP for Southwark at a by-election in 1972. He represented Southwark, Peckham until 1982 when he died. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 14. He was succeeded at a by-election by the civil rights activist Harriet Ruth Harman (Labour), who served continuously as the area’s MP, and was re-elected in 2010. From 1997 she sat for Camberwell & Peckham. She was born in 1950 and attended St. Paul’s Girls School and York University. Although from a privileged background (she was the daughter of a Harley Street consultant and niece of Lord Longford), she adopted a radical approach to politics and became a leading advocate of civil, including women’s, rights. She trained as a solicitor going on to work at the Brent Law Centre and for the National Council for Civil Liberties as its Legal Officer from 1978-82. Married to a top official of the Transport & General Workers’ Union (Jack Dromey)3, she was promoted to the front bench in 1984 and elected to the Labour Party National Executive Committee in 1993. When Labour was elected in 1997 she was appointed to the Cabinet as Social Services Secretary and Minister Harriet Harman MP for Women but remained for only a year when radical proposals for reforming the social Peoples History Museum security system were diluted. There was controversy that she had sent her children to a Manchester school in a nearby Conservative borough rather than to a school in her constituency. She was subsequently appointed as Solicitor-General in 2001. When John Prescott stood down as Deputy Prime Minister in 2007 Harman successfully contested the Deputy Leadership of the Labour Party and was appointed Leader of the House of Commons, Lord Privy Seal and Minister for Women in Gordon Brown’s Cabinet. Following Labour’s 2010 defeat she was Shadow to the Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg.
Southwark, Dulwich, Dulwich & West Norwood Samuel Charles Silkin (Labour) represented Dulwich from 1964 until 1983 when he retired. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 14. His seat was subsequently taken by Gerald Francis Bowden (Conservative), a barrister and chartered surveyor, who was born in 1935. Educated at Battersea Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford, he was called to the bar at Grays Inn but also attended the College of Estate Management in London. From 1972-83 he was the principal lecturer in Estate Management at the South Bank Polytechnic. He was GLC member for Dulwich from 1977-81, a co-opted member of the Inner London Education Authority (1981-5), and a Lieutenant Colonel in the Territorial Army. A member of Lloyd’s, he held no ministerial office but from 1990-2 was PPS to the Arts Geral Bowden MP Minister, Timothy Renton. He was defeated in 1992 and resumed a career with property Peoples History Museum Manchester management links. In 1994 he was appointed to the London Rent Assessment Panel and to the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal,also becoming President of the Appeals Tribunal on Building Regulations. In 1995 he became a member of the Council of the Royal Albert Hall. (Dame)Tessa Jane Jowell (Labour) was elected in 1992 having previously and unsuccessfully contested Ilford North at a 1978 by-election, and again at the subsequent general election a year later. She was born in 1947, the daughter of a hospital consultant, and was educated in Scotland at St. Margaret’s school Aberdeen, and at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. She went to Goldsmith’s College in London where she became politically active whilst being 2 Peter Tatchell Website 25th January 2006, ‘Celebrating 60 Years’ 3 MP for Birmingham, Erdington since 2010
526 MPs for Lambeth Borough
Tessa Jowell’s 1978 Election poster
Peoples History Museum Manchester
employed initially as a childcare officer between 1969 and 1971. From 1971 to 1986 she was a member of Camden Borough Council and from 1984-6 chaired the social services committee of the Association of Metropolitan Authorities. In the early part of this period she was also employed as a psychiatric social worker between 1971 and 1974, then from 1974 to 1986 was assistant director of MIND, the mental health charity. After her election in 1992 she was made a Labour whip in 1994 and the following year was selected in preference to the Norwood MP John Fraser to fight the newly merged Dulwich & West Norwood,which she represented from 1997. She joined the Government as Minister of State for Public Health in 1997 and from 1999-2001 served as Minister of State for Education and Employment in which role she was responsible for Welfare to Work and for Women (the latter in succession to Harriet Harman). She joined the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in 2001 and was re-appointed in 2005, leading Britain’s bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. Although appointed as Paymaster-General in 2008 she remained Minister for the London Olympics, and following Labour’s 2010 election defeat remained on its Board. She was made a Dame as a result of her contribution to this very successful event. In 2006 she separated from her husband, David Mills, after he was accused of accepting an illegal pay-off from the Italian Prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. A subsequent conviction was overturned. She left the Labour front bench following the end of London 2012. It was reported in 2013 that she had been re-united with her husband. The Guardian reported that she would stand down as an MP at the 2015 Election.
Lambeth, Norwood John Denis Fraser (Labour) represented Norwood from 1966 until the abolition of the seat in 1997 when he retired having failed to secure nomination for Dulwich & West Norwood. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 14.
Lambeth Central Lieutenant-Colonel Marcus Lipton (Labour) represented Lambeth Central from 1974 until his death in 1978 having previously represented Brixton since 1945. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 14. He was succeeded at a 1978 by-election by John Tilley (Labour) who represented the seat until 1983. Born in Derby in 1941 and from a local grammar school, he won a scholarship to study at Trinity College Cambridge, where he read History. He was initially a journalist with the Newcastle Journal in 1968 but two years later became the London based industrial correspondent of the Scotsman. He contested Kensington unsuccessfully at both 1974 elections but in the meantime was elected to Wandsworth Borough Council representing a Battersea ward in 1968 and in 1971 became Council Leader, a post he relinquished when he was elected an MP. He was an Opposition spokesman on home affairs between 1980 and 1982. Following the abolition of his seat, he was adopted to fight Southwark & Bermondsey in 1983 but was defeated by Simon Hughes and did not resume a political career although from 1983 to 1988 he was chief economic adviser to the London Borough of Hackney, and was active in the Co-operative Movement between 1998 and 2002. He died in 2005.
Lambeth, Vauxhall George Russell Strauss (Labour) who had first won the equivalent seat in 1929, retired in 1979. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 10. He was succeeded by Stuart Kinsley Holland (Labour) who represented the seat until 1989. Born in 1940, he was educated at Christ’s Hospital School, the University of Missouri, and at Balliol and St. Antony’s Colleges, Oxford. He earned his living as an academic working as a political economist at the University of Sussex. From 1966-7 he was an economist attached to the Cabinet Office and between 1967-8 personal assistant to Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister. Between 1971-2 he was a special adviser to the Commons Expenditure Committee when he was engaged as a consultant to the social affairs committee of the Council of Europe in 1973. He fulfilled a similar role at the Ministry of Overseas Development between 1974 and 1975. In 1977 he advised the OECD4, and the United Nations University from 1977-82. From
Stuart Holland’s 1979 Election leaflet
Peoples History Museum Manchester
4 The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was set up in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade in democratic countries.
527 MPs for Lambeth, and Wandsworth Boroughs 1984 he was a member of the Socialist International’s economic committee. He resigned in 1989 to pursue an academic and publishing career concentrating on trade issues. Amongst other activities he became visiting professor at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He was succeeded at a 1989 by-election by (Catharine) Letitia ‘Kate’ Hoey (Labour), who had previously fought and lost at Dulwich in 1983 and 1987. She had earlier been a Councillor on Hackney Borough Council (1978 - 1982), and in Southwark (1988 - 1989). She was imposed upon the local Labour Party whose preferred choice was a Nigerian-born activist and Haringey councillor. She was born into a Protestant Unionist family in Belfast in 1946 and was educated at the city’s Royal Academy, the Ulster College of Physical Education, and at the City of London College. She became a lecturer in physical education at Kingsway College from 1976-85 and took a particular interest in football. For a while she undertook a training role with the Arsenal football team as educational adviser (1985-9). After the 1997 Kate Hoey MP Peoples History Museum election she was appointed PPS to Frank Field MP when he was Minister of State at the Manchester Department of Social Security. From 1999-2001 she was Minister of Sport. An outspoken politician she had views sometimes at variance with mainstream party thinking. She held no appointment after the 2001 election. In 2005 she was elected chairman of the Countryside Alliance, which opposed the ban on fox-hunting brought in by a private member’s Bill. She also opposed London’s Olympic bid on the basis that Paris was more deserving. She was fiercely critical of the Speaker Michael Martin, at the height of the MPs’ expenses scandal, when she perceived him to be closing down open debate on the subject. She likened him to a football manager ‘who, out of loyalty to his team, indignantly attacks a referee’s decision. But Mr Speaker is not meant to be the manager. He’s meant to be the referee’.5
Lambeth, Streatham Sir (William) ‘Bill’ Jeremy Masefield Shelton (Conservative) was the MP from 1974 to 1992 when he was defeated. Before that he represented Clapham between 1970 and 1974. His biographical details are in Chapter 14. His place was taken in 1992 by (Trevor) Keith Hill (Labour) who was the political officer of the National Union of Railwaymen (subsequently the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers) from 1976. Born in Leicester in 1943, the son of a printer, he was educated at the City of Leicester Boys Grammar School and achieved a scholarship to Corpus Christi, Oxford. He completed a Diploma in Education at the University of Wales, and from 1966-74 taught politics at Leicester and Strathclyde Universities. Between 1974 and 1976 he was a research officer with the Labour Party’s Keith Hill MP international department, and worked as a political officer for the NUR6. Peoples History Museum Manchester When Labour was returned to Government in 1997 he was PPS to Hilary Armstrong, then an assistant whip, and in 1999 was appointed a Parliamentary Under-Secretary as Minister for Transport and for London. He was Deputy Chief Government whip (Treasurer of Her Majesty’s Household) from 2001-03, and Minister of State for Housing and Local Government between 2003 and 2005. After the 2005 election he was appointed PPS to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. He stood down in 2010 and has since worked in social housing.
Chuka UmunnaMP
© Chuka Ummmuna Website
Chuka Umunna (Labour), a Londoner born of Nigerian parents in 1978 and educated at schools in Streatham and Catford (the latter an independent school), the Universities of Manchester and Burgundy, and at Nottingham Law School, he became a lawyer working mainly in the area of employment protection. He was also a journalist, editing the on-line publication TMP, a multi-cultural political magazine and forum. He was elected in 2010 and, following the election of Ed Miliband to succeed Gordon Brown as leader of the Party, he was appointed initially as his PPS and was subsequently promoted in 2011 to the role of Shadow Business Secretary, opposite Twickenham MP Vince Cable.
MPs for Wandsworth Borough Battersea North Douglas Patrick Thomas Jay (Labour) was MP for Battersea North from 1946 to 1983. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 14. 5 House of Commons proceedings reported in the Daily Telegraph: 12th May 2009 6 National Union of Railwaymen, later the RMT (Rail and MaritimeTransport Workers)
528 MPs for Battersea, and Tooting MPs for Wandsworth Borough From 1974 1974 1979 1983 1987 1997 2010 1974 2005 1974 1979 1997 2005
at G G G G G G G G G G G G G
To 1983 1979 1983 1987 1997 Date Date 2005 Date 1979 1997 2005 Date
Surname Jay Perry Dubs Dubs Bowis Linton Ellison Cox Khan Jenkins Mellor Colman Greening
First Names Douglas Patrick Thomas Ernest George Alf(red) Alf(red) John Crocket (John) Martin Jane Elizabeth Thomas (Tom) Michael Sadiq Aman Hugh Gater David Tony Justine
Constituency Battersea North Battersea South Battersea
Tooting Putney
Party Labour Labour Labour Labour Conservative Labour Conservative Labour Labour Labour Conservative Labour Conservative
Notes: First returned at: B By-election, G General Election
Battersea South, Battersea Ernest George Perry (Labour) represented the seat from 1964 until his retirement in 1979. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 14. He was succeeded by Alf(red) Dubs (Labour) who was first elected as MP for Battersea South in 1979, and after it was merged with Battersea South in 1983, represented the new combined seat until he was defeated in 1987. He was a member of Westminster City Council between 1971-8 and chaired the Westminster Community Relations Council from 1972-7. Born in 1932 in Prague, then the capital of Czechoslovakia, he came to Britain when his parents escaped the Nazis and was educated at the London School of Economics where he obtained a BSc. He became a local government worker. In 1970 he unsuccessfully contested the City of London and Westminster seat and also failed at both 1974 elections in Hertfordshire South. From 1985-7 he was joint vice-chairman of the London group of Labour MPs and a front bench spokesman on Alf Dubs MP home affairs from 1983-7. In 1988 he was appointed director of the British Refugee Council and Peoples History Museum Manchester also of the Broadcasting Standards Council. He sought re-election at Battersea in 1992 but was again defeated, and two years later was made Lord Dubs of Battersea. From 1995 to 1997 he was Deputy Chairman of the Labour peers but when his Party won the general election he was appointed a junior Northern Ireland Minister in 1997, a post he vacated when the new Northern Ireland Assembly was initiated two years later as part of the Belfast Agreement. He was elected Chairman of the Labour group in the Lords in 2000. Four years later he was appointed chair of the Independent Code Panel of the Association of Energy Suppliers. John Crocket Bowis (Conservative) who gained the seat in 1987 was born in Brighton in 1945. He was educated at Tonbridge School and Brasenose College, Oxford University where he obtained an MA in 1966. He was the public affairs director of the British Insurance Brokers’ Association, and a local councillor in Kingston upon Thames from 1982 to 1986, where for the last two years he was Chairman of Education. After his election at Battersea he was PPS to the Secretary of State for Wales from 1989, and at the Department of Health between 1993 and 1996, and was briefly a transport minister responsible for Road Safety (1996-7). Following his defeat he was returned as a Member of the European Parliament for London in 1999 and held that position for ten years. He was subsequently elected chairman of the pro European Union Conservatives Europe Group. (John) Martin Linton (Labour) was elected in 1997. The son of a Church of England clergyman, he was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1944, but was educated at Limpsfield Primary School, Christ’s Hospital School, Lille and Oxford Universities, attending Pembroke College. He became a journalist working for the Daily Mail (1966-71), the Financial Times (1971), the Daily Star (1980-81), and The Guardian (1981-97). He worked for Labour Weekly, the Party’s newspaper between 1971 and 1979. He was appointed PPS to Baroness Blackstone, Minister for the Arts, in July 2001, and in June 2003 moved to become PPS to Peter Hain, Leader of the Commons. He was not re-appointed following Labour’s third consecutive election victory in 2005. Jane Elizabeth Ellison (Conservative) took the seat from Linton in 2010. She was born in Bradford in 1964 going
529 Essex - MPs for Tooting, and Putney on to read PPE at Oxford after which she joined the John Lewis Partnership. At the time of her adoption as the Tory candidate she was editor of the John Lewis House Magazine. A keen singer and season ticket holder at Tottenham Hotspur FC, she was twice a councillor in the London Borough of Barnet, and came a close second to Labour at Pendle (Lancashire) in the 2005 General Election. In 2013 she was appointed Under Secretary of State for Public Health.
Tooting Tom Michael Cox (Labour) won Wandsworth Central in 1970 and Tooting in 1974. He was re-elected at every subsequent election until he retired in 2005. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 14. He was succeeded by Sadiq Aman Khan (Labour) in 2005, who had been a Tooting ward councillor in Wandsworth since 1994 and Deputy Labour Leader until 2002. Khan was a civil liberties lawyer with Christian Khan, a practice that backed British detainees in Guantanamo Bay, a prison camp set up by the US Government on the Island of Cuba following the war in Afghanistan. He specialised in discrimination law and was an advisor to the National Black Police Association and the Metropolitan Black Police Association. He was born in St. George’s hospital, Tooting in 1970, the year that his predecessor was first elected. His father was a bus driver and the family lived in a council house in Earlsfield. He attended local primary schools (Wandle and Fircroft), before a secondary education at the Ernest Bevin School, after which he went to University and Law School. His first government appointment came in 2007 when he was made PPS to Jack Straw, then the Lord Privy Seal/Leader of the House of Commons, a post he held for only a matter of weeks before being appointed a government whip on June 28th. He occupied that post until October 2008 when he was made a government minister as Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government. In June 2009 he was appointed Minister of State at the Department for Transport in which role he led for the government in the Commons as deputy to Lord Adonis, the Secretary of State. He then became the first British Muslim to attend the Cabinet. A member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, he was the youngest member of Ed Miliband’s Shadow Cabinet in 2010. He was appointed Shadow Justice Secretary and in January 2013 was given additional responsibilities for London.
Putney Hugh Gater Jenkins (Labour) who was elected in 1964 held the seat until 1979 when he was defeated. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 14. He was beaten by David Mellor (Conservative), who represented the seat until he was defeated in 1997. Born in 1949, the son of a teacher, he was educated at Swanage Grammar School (Dorset) and at Christ’s College, Cambridge, after which he was called to the bar of the Middle Temple. He was appointed a Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Energy Department in 1981, then at the Home Office two years later, moving to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1987-8, to Health in 1988-9, and thence back to the Home Office in 1989-90, when he was appointed Arts Minister. Having worked for the election of John Major as Prime Minister, he was appointed to the Cabinet as Financial Secretary in 1990, and in 1992 became the first Secretary of State for National Heritage, a role that covered his own interests in activities as diverse as soccer, classical music and the national lottery, which he launched. He became embroiled in a scandal of a sexual nature involving an out-of-work actress and a Chelsea football kit, colourfully displayed by the tabloid press. He was forced out of the Government and embarked on a very successful alternative career as a broadcaster (including of Classical music), and a football pundit. He lost the seat in 1997.
Tony Colman MP
Peoples History Museum Manchester
Tony Colman (Labour) was the man who defeated Mellor in 1997 but who was himself defeated in 2005. Born in 1943 and educated at Paston Grammar School, North Walsham (Norfolk) from 1955 to 1961, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, from 1961 to 1964 when he embarked on a career in management. From 1964-69 he worked for Unilever (United Africa Company), and then until 1990 for The Burton (tailoring) Group where he was a Board Director and allegedly became a millionaire. From 1991 until 1997 he was Leader of the London Borough of Merton. He also chaired the London Research Centre (1994-97) and was a Director of the London Arts Board (1994-98). After Labour’s 1997 victory he was PPS to Adam Ingram MP, Minister of State at the Northern Ireland Office from 1998 to 1999, taking responsibility for setting up the transitional programme for the new Northern Ireland Assembly in 1998. Following his defeat in 2005 he became a Director of Africa Practice Ltd7 , and a member of the World Future Council, a charitable foundation with membership across all continents of the world providing ‘a voice for the rights of future generations’. In 2009 he commenced PhD studies at the University of East Anglia writing a dissertation on water management practices in Botswana.
7 A company advising investors and public sector bodies including governments on identifying opportunities and managing risk in Africa.
530 MPs for Merton Richmond, and Kingston Boroughs Justine Greening (Conservative) won Putney in 2005. Born in Rotherham in 1969, she was educated at a local comprehensive school before studying economics at Southampton University. She obtained an MBA from the London Business School and before her election was a Finance Manager with Centrica plc established following the privatisation programme of the Tory Government, and with the parent company of British Gas, OneTel (a telecommunications company), and several energy supply companies. She unsuccessfully fought Ealing, Acton & Shepherds Bush in 2001, and was also a local councillor in Epping Forest (Essex). After the 2010 election she was appointed to serve in the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government as Economic Secretary at the Treasury and in 2011 she was appointed Secretary of State for Transport following a series of moves occasioned by the enforced resignation of the Defence Secretary, Liam Fox. However, in 2012 following a mishandling by her department of a the procurement process for letting the West Coast Main Line train franchise, which she had defended, but which coincided with a Cabinet reshuffle occasioned by the resignation of another Cabinet Minister (the Government Chief Whip), she was transferred to the role of Secretary of State for International Development.
MPs for Merton, Richmond, and Kingston Boroughs From 1974
at G
Roger Stephen
Labour Conservative
Bruce (Dame) Angela Siobhain Sir Anthony Jeremy James Dr. (Jennifer) ‘Jenny’ Louise Susan Veronica Zac Norman Stewart Hughson Sir Nigel Thomas Loveridge Richard Ed(ward) Jonathan
Mitcham & Morden
Richmond Richmond & Barnes Richmond Park
Kingston-Upon-Thames Surbiton Kingston & Surbiton
Labour Conservative Labour Conservative Conservative Liberal Liberal Conservative Conservative Conservative Conservative Liberal
Notes: First returned at: B By-election, G General Election
Wimbledon Sir Robert Michael Oldfield Havers (Conservative) represented Wimbledon from 1970 until 1987. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 14. He was succeeded by Dr. Charles Goodson-Wickes (Conservative) who retained the seat until he was defeated in 1997. He was born in 1945 and educated at Charterhouse School, and at the Inner-Temple. From 1972 he served successively as a house physician at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, a Surgeon Captain in the Life Guards, a physician at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (City of London), and as a consulting doctor for BUPA, a private medical company, between 1977 and 1986. Between 1982 and 1987 he was chairman of the Asbestos Licensing Regulations Appeals Tribunal. In 1979 he stood unsuccessfully for Islington Central. During his period as the MP for Wimbledon he reenlisted in 1991 to serve as a surgeon with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel for the duration of the first Gulf War. He was also chairman of the British Field Sports Society, leading the opposition to C Goodson-Wickes a private members Bill aiming to ban fox hunting. That 1995 Bill was defeated, although subsequent MP to his leaving Parliament, legislation was passed. A company director of De La Rue (a printing Peoples History company), and adviser to many property and construction companies, he was appointed PPS to Sir Museum Manchester George Young, Environment Minister (1992-4), and then from 1994 worked in a similar role for Anthony Nelson at the Treasury. After his defeat he was initially chairman and then chief executive of the London Playing Fields Foundation, serving until 2007 and subsequently remained actively involved with several charities and businesses. Roger Casale (Labour) won the seat in the 1997 landslide and retained it in 2001. He was born locally at the Nelson Hospital in 1960 and after his school education at Hurstpierpoint College, a private boarding school near Brighton, took a degree at Brasenose College, Oxford, attended Maximillian University, Munich, and then took a Masters in
531 MPs for Merton, and Richmond Boroughs International Affairs at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. A multi-linguist, he became a University lecturer in European Studies. Between 2003 and 2005 he was PPS to a group of ministers at the Foreign Office. Stephen Hammond (Conservative) defeated Casale in 2005. Born in 1962 and educated in Southampton, where he attended King Edward VI School, after graduating in Economics from London University he embarked on a career in fund management and investment banking. His first major appointment was Director of the Equities division of Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, an investment bank in Roger Casale MP Peoples History Museum Manchester 1994, and in 1998 he joined Commerzbank Securities, Germany’s third largest private bank, being promoted to Director, Pan European Research in 2000. He joined the Conservative Party after leaving university and was chairman of Stevenage Conservatives for three years. In 1997 he contested North Warwickshire unsuccessfully, an outcome he subsequently also experienced at Wimbledon in 2001. In 2010 he was appointed PPS to Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary. He was also appointed by David Cameron as the Parliamentary link man with the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. From 2012 to 2014 he was Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Transport.
Mitcham and Morden Bruce Douglas-Mann (Labour) represented the seat from 1974 to 1982 when he changed parties, resigned the seat to fight a by-election, and lost standing for the SDP. He was previously MP for Kensington North and his principal biographical details are in Chapter 15. The 1982 by-election was won by (Dame) Angela Rumbold (Conservative), who retained the seat until her defeat in 1997. The Tories were to wait 26 years before they gained another seat at a by-election (Crewe & Nantwich 2008). Born Angela Jones in Bristol in 1932, she was the daughter of a famous physician. She attended the Perse School for Girls, Cambridge, and high schools in Notting Hill and Ealing, and subsequently obtained a degree from King’s College, London. She married a solicitor and raised a family of three children. She was a councillor in Kingston from 1974-83 and also Chairman of the National Association for Children in Hospital. At the interviews prior to her adoption as the Tory candidate for the by-election she was confronted by a notice above the bar in the Conservative Club which apparently read, ‘Ladies should not come to the bar unless accompanied by a man’.8 From 1982-5 she was PPS to the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, then from 1985-6 to the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at Department of the Environment. In 1986 she was appointed Minister of State at the Department of Education & Science, and Minister of State, Home Office in 1990. From 1992-5 she was Joint Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party and its vice chairman until the Party’s defeat in 1997. She died in 2010.
Siobhan McDonagh MP
Peoples History Museum Manchester
Siobhain McDonagh (Labour) was elected in 1997. She was born in the constituency in 1960 of Irish parentage, attending school in Tooting and the Holy Cross Catholic Girls School in New Malden before taking a politics degree at Essex University. Her first job was as a Clerical Officer in the Benefits office in Balham. She was then a benefit adviser for the Homeless Families Unit of Wandsworth Council and later worked as a development manager for the Battersea Churches Housing Trust, and became active in the field of welfare advice. In 1982 she was elected to Merton Council for her home ward of Colliers Wood, being the youngest local councillor in London at that time. In 1990 she was elected Chair of the Housing Committee. She unsuccessfully contested the Parliamentary constituency twice, in 1987 and 1992. Between 2007 and 2008 she was a government whip but was the only minister who failed to nominate Gordon Brown for the Party’s leadership election in September of that year and was sacked. In 2010 her mobile telephone was stolen from her car, and was ‘hacked’ by the Sun newspaper, from which she accepted damages in 2013.
Richmond, Richmond and Barnes, Richmond Park Sir Anthony Henry Fanshawe Royle (Conservative) was first elected in 1959 and held the seat until his retirement in 1983. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 14. Sir Jeremy James Hanley (Conservative) won Richmond & Barnes in 1983 and held it until 1997 when he was defeated defending the newly named Richmond Park constituency. He was born in 1945, the son of a comedian (Jimmy) and the actress Dinah Sheridan. He was educated at Rugby School and began an accounting career with Peat Marwick Mitchell & Company (KPMG) as an articled clerk in 1963. He qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1969 and joined The Financial Training Company, which trained aspiring Chartered Accountants from 18 of the top 20 United Kingdom accountancy firms. Starting there as a Lecturer in Law and Accountancy he rose to become Deputy Chairman, helping 8 Guardian Obituary, 21st June 2010
532 MPs for Richmond, and Kingston Boroughs the company achieve a stock market flotation. He also qualified as a Certified Accountant, and as a Chartered Secretary and Administrator in 1980. His other directorships before becoming a Government Minister included the Chairmanship of fund managers Nikko Fraser Green Ltd. After his election as an MP he was made PPS to the Minister for the Civil Service and the Arts, and then to the Secretary of State for the Environment (Chris Patten). In 1990 he was appointed Under Secretary of State at the Northern Ireland Office in John Major’s Government and three years later became Minister of State for the Armed Forces. In 1994 he was made Chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister without Portfolio, a role with Cabinet rank. It was not a successful period for the Party and he lost his job within two years reverting to the role of a Minister of State (at the Foreign Office). He lost his seat in 1997 and returned to accountancy and to several non executive Board directorships including the Arab British Chamber of Commerce for which he led a number of trade delegations to the Middle East and Asia. He was a Freeman of the City of London. Dr. (Jennifer) ‘Jenny’ Louise Tonge (Liberal Democrat) won the newly named Richmond Park in 1997 and held it until her retirement in 2005. She was born in Walsall in 1941 and attended Dudley Girls High School before going on to the University College Hospital, London where she qualified as a Doctor. From 1968 to 1978 she was in general practice also specialising in family planning, and from 1980-1985 was a senior medical officer responsible for women’s services in the NHS. From 1992 to 1996 she was a manager of community health services, all in the Richmond area. She first contested the Richmond & Barnes constituency in 1992, though unsuccessfully on that occasion. One of her Party’s most radical MPs, she was a front bench spokes person on a variety of topics until 2003 when she was dismissed from her International Development role following remarks she made from which it was construed that she condoned Palestinian suicide bombers. She retired in 2005 and was made a life peeress. Between 2009 and 2010 she was her Party’s spokesperson on Health in the House of Lords. Susan Veronica Kramer (Liberal Democrat) succeeded Jenny Tonge in 2005. Born in 1950 in Holborn, she was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School and won a scholarship to Oxford where she was only the second woman President of the Oxford Union. She made her career in finance as a Vice-President of Citibank Chicago, a leading international bank, and later, with her husband, set up a firm working on transport projects in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1997 she unsuccessfully contested Dulwich & West Norwood but was elected to the regional executive, and in 2001 became chair of Twickenham and Richmond Liberal Democrats. She contested the European elections in Baroness Kramer 1999 and in 2000 she was adopted to contest the new London mayoralty but was defeated. She ©Lib Dems Website was defeated for the Presidency of her Party in November 2010 and in 2011 was made a Life Peeress. Two years later she was appointed a Minister of State at the Department for Transport.
Zac Goldsmith MP ©Zac Goldsmith Website
(Frank Zacharias) ‘Zac’ Robin Goldsmith (Conservative), defeated Kramer in a closely contested election in 2010 prior to which he had been selected by an ‘open primary’ system of adoption whereby registered voters in the constituency were offered the choice of short listed candidates. Born in 1975, the Eton educated middle child of the billionaire Sir James Goldsmith, he was an environmentalist who placed himself on the ‘green’ wing of the Conservative Party. He edited Ecologist magazine between 1998 and 2007 a post to which he was appointed by his uncle, Edward Goldsmith, who had founded the publication.
Kingston – upon – Thames Norman Stewart Hughson Lamont (Conservative) who was first elected in 1972 represented the seat until its abolition in 1997. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 14.
Surbiton Sir Nigel Thomas Loveridge Fisher (Conservative) who was elected as the first MP for Surbiton in 1955 held the seat until 1983 when he retired. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 14. He was succeeded by Richard Tracey (Conservative), who held the seat until he was defeated in 1997. Born in 1943 and educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Stratford-on-Avon, he obtained a degree at Birmingham University before going to work for the BBC in 1966. In 1978 he set up his own public relations company. He was Sports Minister between 1985 and 1987. A Freeman of the City of London, Tracey was Chairman of the Wandsworth Conservative Party between 2003 and 2008. Locally he was President of The Kingston Amateur and of Kingston Rugby Club. In 2012 he was elected as an Assemblyman for Greater London representing Merton and Wandsworth.
Kingston and Surbiton Ed(ward) Jonathan Davey (Liberal Democrat) was elected in 1997. Born in 1965 in Mandfield (Nottinghamshire), Davey was orphaned by the age of fifteen. He attended Nottingham High School and Jesus College, Oxford where he was
533 MPs for Sutton and Croydon Boroughs awarded a First Class Honours Degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He then went straight into politics working for the Party between 1989 and 1993 becoming a Senior Economic adviser. During this period he also took an MSc at Birkbeck College, London, after which he moved into management consulting with a firm called Omega Partners, prior to his election in 1997. In opposition he was appointed to a variety of Shadow ministerial roles culminating in Shadow Foreign Secretary when Nick Clegg was elected Party Leader in 2007. Following the creation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government in 2010 he was appointed a Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, but following the February 2012 resignation of Chris Huhne the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, arising from a criminal prosecution, he was promoted to that role in the Cabinet.
MPs for Sutton and Croydon Boroughs From 1974 1976 1983 1997 1974 1992 1997 1974 1983 1992 1974 1981 1983 1992 1997 2012 1974 1992 1997 2005 2010
at G B G G G B G G G G G B G G G B G G G G G
To 1976 1983 1997 Date 1992 1997 Date 1983 1992 1997 1981 1983 1992 1997 2012 Date 1992 1997 2005 2010 Date
Surname Carr Forman Forman Brake Macfarlane Maitland Burstow Weatherill Weatherill Congdon Taylor Pitt Malins Wicks Wicks Reed Moore Beresford Davies Pelling Barwell
1974
Date
Ottaway
First Names (Leonard) Robert Francis Nigel Francis Nigel (Thomas) ‘Tom’ Anthony David Neil LadyOlga Paul Sir Bernard Sir Bernard David Leonard Roger George (William) ‘Bill’ Henry Humfrey Jonathon Malcolm Malcolm Steve Mark Ward John Edward Michael (Sir )(Alexander) Paul Geraint Andrew John Gavin Laurence (Major) (Sir) William Gibson Haigue Richard Geoffrey James
Constituency Carshalton Carshalton & Wallington Sutton & Cheam
Croydon North East
Croydon North Croydon Central
Croydon South
Party Conservative Conservative Conservative Liberal Conservative Conservative Liberal Conservative Speaker Conservative Conservative Liberal Conservative Labour Labour Labour Conservative Conservative Labour Conservative Conservative Conservative Conservative
NOTE First returned at a B = By-election; G =General Election
Carshalton, Carshalton and Wallington Leonard Robert Carr (Conservative) who had previously represented Mitcham since 1950 was elected for Carshalton in 1974 which he represented until 1976 when he was elevated to the House of Lords. His principal biographical details are in Chapter 14. Carr was succeeded in 1976 by Francis Nigel Forman (Conservative), a liberal Tory, who represented Carshalton until 1983, then the newly named Carshalton and Wallington until 1997 when he was defeated. He was born in the Indian town of Simla in 1943 and educated at Shrewsbury School, New College Oxford, and Harvard. He also obtained a doctorate at Sussex University and went to work for five years in the Conservative Research department. From 1979 – 83, he was PPS to Douglas Hurd at the Foreign and Colonial Office, and between 1979-83 to Nigel Lawson when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1992 he was briefly Under-Secretary for Higher Education in John Major’s government but resigned after six months for personal reasons. Despite standing down from ministerial duties he remained a backbencher and contested the seat in 1997 when his defeat was amongst the most noteworthy in that landmark general election. He lost the seat to (Thomas) ‘Tom’ Anthony Brake (Liberal Democrat), who was born in 1962 in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, but his family moved to France when he was eight and he was educated there at the Lycée International, Paris, returning to the UK and Imperial College, London where he gained a BSc (Hons) degree in Physics.
537
The hidden engines of Evolution
The hidden process of change
A
s cities evolved in order for skills and effort to be freely available to further commerce, it was necessary to offer reward, and the results of this benefitted everyone. London was established and grew for geographic reasons. It assumed the title of the biggest city in the world for decades. The whole time is was subject to many fundamental forces of change - in technology, sanitation, transportation, as well as in housing, commerce and the economy, bringing about substantial and rapid change, which had a marked effect on franchise. There are limits on city size, but the coming of the railways solved them. Between 1841 and 1911 the population grew by five million people. The spread of population to the suburbs together with the extension of the franchise drove massive changes in London’s Parliamentary constituencies that have been described in the preceding chapters. Clean drinking water and proper sanitation, prerequisites for a functioning city of size were provided after the Metropolis Water Act 1852 with Bazalgette’s sewerage works in Victorian times, and thus any constraints upon population growth were eliminated. The railways facilitated a steady outward movement of the more affluent. Better accommodations Popular Science Monthly in 1925 presented this vision of the future of city living to its readers. At that time such periodicals were much given to exotic excursions such as these. Perhaps this is not surprising given the activity of architectural visionaries such as Le Corbusier, from whom this vision undoubtedly springs. Yet the principles of this and other visions were based on the valid notion that steel-framed buildings and reinforced concrete would dominate big buildings of the future, and that big buildings would form the basis for city construction - and in that instance, the visionaries were correct. Other predictions, assumed to flow from the form of the buildings, have not emerged as shown. However, if this vision is placed in the context of today’s Canary Wharf, then the similarities are apparent. The aircraft landing field is present, but handling heavier than air machines requires a lot more space than was assumed 80 years ago, and it remains on the ground. Lighter than air machines disappeared after unfortunate experiences with R101 and LZ 129 Hindenburg - their return has so far proved to be elusive. Electric trains are present in strength: Crossrail, Docklands Light Railway and the Jubilee Line inhabit galleries below City streets. The motor cars shown appear all to be threewheelers - a technology that failed to gain a hold. Cars underground have problems with ventilation thus until the electric car they must inhabit city streets. Freight tubes did not appear, yet although the size of freight road vehicles earns them the title Juggernauts, well-ordered cities manage to make them almost invisible by regulating access. Spiral escalators never happened in the form intended, and simple considerations of the practicality of entry and exit show why. Mitsubishi has developed a practical spiral escalator, as a complex version of the simpler ‘moving stairway’, that revolutionised high buildings and underground railways. Elisha Otis had a handle on elevator/lift and escalator, both of which were ‘old hat’ and thus not shown.
538 The process of change: Docklands were established in desirable areas outside the populated area, at first to escape insanitary conditions, and later for space, the ‘views’ and the ‘airs’. Speculative builders were on the scene early in the Victorian era to offer affordable house prices in the suburbs which established commuting, thus the city’s working population could live in the outskirts, and later outside the area completely. Before the Reform Act of 1832 Parliament consisted of a small land and business owning elite, whose priorities were their own power and prosperity. Despite the rapid population growth, universal suffrage took another century to arrive. As the right to vote extended, so changes brought about by it took place. Much of the change in where voters lived was driven by commercial matters: the siting of industry, of offices, the growth of finance and accountancy, management, and ‘clerking’, the availability of suitable, affordable housing. Some of the changes were driven by events: World War 2 (WW2) destroyed industry and housing in equal measure. Some of the biggest changes have been driven by the emergence of new technologies: the increase in the size of ships, air travel, computers, the growth in car ownership, the decline of heavy industry and the emergence of e-commerce. Sometimes counter-intuitive, often with unanticipated consequences, the changes have always been mirrored in the political landscape. This has not always been a calm process, as political change has sometimes rendered it disputatious, but change continues. Some examples follow to highlight the hidden processes behind London’s political evolution.
Docklands London’s geographical advantage is its position on the River Thames with easy access to the sea, at the river’s first practical bridging point. Docks were gradually built along the river, spurred by the expansion in British trade. This called for a steadily rising workforce to load and unload the ships, and for industries set up to serve them: repair, building, chandlery, lighterage, tugs, and so one. The docks encouraged riverside locations for industries requiring imported raw materials and those dependent upon export trading, like: sugar refining, edible oils, and vehicle manufacture. The expanding City was served by gas works and electricity generating stations that required coal. The Port of London became for a while the key importing point for England. As ships expanded in size, powered by steam, new docks were constructed to handle the increasing trade. The Pool of London, India Docks, Surrey Docks, Victoria Dock, Albert Dock spread down the River as far as Greenwich. The workforce lived in constituencies such as Poplar South, Limehouse, Whitechapel, Canning Town, Silvertown, East Ham, Rotherhithe and Deptford created for the purpose. The owners, managers and clerks meanwhile migrated initially from the City to new suburbs such as Hackney, Islington and Lewisham. This typical Moor Line steamer is being manoeuvred in the Thames by tugs, just off the Surrey Docks in 1950. SS Avonmoor (7,268 grt) was built by Doxford Shipyard on the River Wear in 1943. The Newcastle based Moor Line was owned by Walter Runciman & Co, and later absorbed the Anchor Line. SS Avonmoor was sailing between London and Karachi. She lasted in service until 1959, was sold to China, and scrapped in 1968. Two Sun tugs are about to handle the vessel. Midships is Sun V1, built by Allsups in Preston in 1902; astern, is Sun II, built by Earles of Hull in 1909. Both tugs went for scrap in the 1960s as river traffic scaled back. In 1950 the Thames was very busy with shipping. The photographer took the photo from an excursion steamer sailing to Southend - something that could be done in 1950. It was an interesting trip, among such busy river traffic. Yet change was taking place right then. Ben Brooksbank - Wikipedia
The growth of the Docks, from trade with foreign lands, brought with it a wave of immigration that has varied throughout the years, and led to the establishment of many ethnic communities that enriched the East End of London. Some 100k people were directly employed in the Docks (though the number varied), with many more engaged in dependent industries, and these people had homes nearby, leading to the increases in population, and constituencies described in the chapters of this book. On the night of 7th September 1940, 348 German bombers, escorted by 617 fighters attacked London in the late afternoon. They dropped 1000 bombs; many of them were incendiary weapons that set fires that raged for a week, laying waste large areas of Dockland. Some 250 acres (100 hectares) were set on fire and during that bombing 448 people were killed. Major areas of employment were heavily damaged, and hundreds of dwellings were rendered uninhabitable. The
539 The process of change: Docklands extent of the damage was played down, as Prime Minster Churchill considered the Docks to be a tactical target, and preferable to the fierce destruction of RAF Fighter Command airfields (strategic targets) that had been taking place immediately beforehand. London was practically undefended during this air raid; subsequent raids were contested, and the RAF rose up to inflict heavy losses upon the Luftwaffe. However, the damage to the Docks, to the East End, and to London continued in subsequent raids. When the War ended in 1945 the biggest redistribution of Parliamentary seats in London since 1885 took place. Maps on Pages 18 and 20 show this well.
This well-known ‘doctored’ German propaganda photograph shows a Heinkel bomber cruising unmolested across the Surrey docks. The campaign wreaked havoc across the whole Dock estate, and across the large areas of housing adjacent. Britain got by via other ports, but London Docks were ruined. Wikipedia
The damage was so extensive, that business transferred to ports elsewhere. Ships grew in size and cargoes became containerised - a process stimulated by poor industrial relations within the docks, where cargos were still handled manually. The investment in handling containers was not made in the Port of London; instead Tilbury was developed, because the economics of ships called for vessels of such a size that they could no longer negotiate the tidal river Thames. Gradually, one by one, the docks fell silent. The whole area declined from its immediate post-War bustle to a state of dereliction by the mid-1970s. The population reduced sharply, and parliamentary constituencies were merged again in response to the loss of electors.
The large area of derelict land next to the Capital was not to be permitted for long. In 1981 the Thatcher Administration set in motion the regeneration of the entire vacant Docklands area, creating a massive commercial centre at Canary Wharf, and linking it with transport to other parts of London. Added to the Docklands Railway, described below, there was a new tube railway built - the Jubilee Line, an airport - London City Airport, and a high-speed, direct rail link - the Eurostar to Paris and Brussels. The commercial development was augmented with housing, and after London won the 2012 Olympic bid, the Olympic Village was constructed at Stratford in the West Ham Constituency. The 2012 Olympics were held there, leaving the wonderful legacy of the sporting venues, as well as the housing of the Village. The jobs generated now equal those lost by the disappeared Docks. All has come full-circle. Such is the process of change.
Above: In the course of a couple of decades the Docklands Light Railway has appeared to connect the old City of London with the massive new commercial centre at Canary Wharf. The railway has used old dock railway rights-ofway to link Stratford with Beckton, Silverton, Greenwich, and Lewisham with comprehensive connections that bring the whole estate together on both sides of the River Thames, no longer the social barrier of yesteryear. Left: the buildings at Canary Wharf rise skyward, housing up to 105k people who work there. This development, together with a new airport, an Olympic Village, a massive exhibition arena, and numerous splendid leisure facilities has restored the jobs level to that pre-War. At the same time there has been a real attempt to create housing for those that want it: new build, and in refurbished warehouse buildings. In addition there is a regular, rapid service of catamaran ferries (Clippers) on the river. This is true regeneration that has begun to reflect an increase in East End constituencies taking place in 2010 for the first time since 1885. Comparison between this picture and that on Page 537 is interesting - the visionaries of the 1920s were not so far short of the mark!
547
Index & Afterword
Index of MPs
MPs are listed Alphabetically. Page Numbers refer to where they are tabulated in the Book. Within the book biographies generally follow the tables of MPs. Some MPs are listed more than once either because they represented different constituencies at different times, or because they served across more than one time period covered by the chapters, or both. Surname, first name/s, then first entry and second entry (if relevant). Abbott Diane Julie 476 Adams David Morgan 256 Adams Harold Richard (Capt) 426 Adams William Augustus (Maj) 163 Adams William Thomas 343 Adamson Mrs Janet (Jennie) Laurel 292 401 Addison Dr Christopher L. 115 261 Admiral Sir Charles 173 Aird Sir John 69 Aitken Sir (John William Maxwell) 358 Albu Austen Harry 375 Alcock Thomas 173 Alden Sir Percy 129 265 Alexander Ernest Edward 283 Alexander Heidi 508 Alexander Maurice (Lt-Col) 308 Alhusen Augustus Henry Eden 113 Ali Rushanara 476 Allan Robert Alexander 329 Alsager Richard (Capt) 173 Ambrose William 82 Ammon Charles George 308 Anderson Sir Alan Garrett 214 Angerstein John 150 Angerstein William 150 Antrobus Sir Edmund 173 Applin RVK (Lt Col) 265 Arbuthnot James Norwich 495 Archer-Shee Sir Martin (Maj) 98 244 Arnold-Foster Hugh Oakley 206 Ashmead-Bartlett Ellis 228 Assheton Ralph 329 Astor Michael Langhorne (Capt) 433 Astor William Waldorf 228 Atkins Sir Humphrey Edward Gregory 430 Atkinson Norman 375 476 Attlee Clement Richard (Maj) 256 372 392 Attwood Matthew Wolverley 150 Austen Thomas (Col) 150 Austin-Walker John 510 512 Ayles Arthur Walter 345 350 Ayrton Acton 52 Bagallay Ernest Brixton 201 Baggallay Richard 173 Bailey Sir James 194 Baker Joseph Allen 98 Baker Kenneth Wilfred 329 345 Baker Richard Baker Wingfield 133 Balfour Charles Barrington 129 Balfour George Hampstead 248
Balfour Sir Arthur James Banbury Sir Frederick George Banbury Sir Frederick George Banes Major George Edward Banks Tony Baring Thomas Charles Barnard Edward George Barnes Alfred John Barnes Michael Barnes Mrs Rosemary (Rosie )Susan Barnett Nicolas Guy Barnett Sir Richard Whieldon (Maj) Barrow Sir Reuben Vincent Barter John Wilfred Bartley Sir George Barwell Gavin Laurence Batsford Brian Caldwell Cook Battley John Rose Baumann Arthur Anthony Peckham Baxter Sir Arthur Beverley Bayley Edward Thomas Beard Nigel Beauchamp Sir Bograve-Campbell Beauclerk Aubrey William (Maj) Beaufoy Mark Hanbury Bechervaise Albert Eric Becker Henry Thomas Alfred Beckett John Beech Francis William (Maj) Beit Sir Alfred Lane Bell Charles Bendall Vivian Walter Hough Benn John Williams Benn Sir Ion Hamilton (Capt) Benn William Wedgwood Bennett William Bentham Dr Ethel Beresford (Sir )(Alexander) Paul Beresford Lord Charles (Capt) Beresford Marcus (Lt-Col) Berry Sir Anthony George Beswick Frank Bethell Sir John Henry Bevan Stuart James Bevin Ernest Bhownaggree Sir Mancherjee Merwanjee Bidwell Sydney James Bigwood James Bing Geoffrey Henry Cecil (Maj) Bishop (Sir) (Frank)Patrick
63 214 63 194 214 142 491 63 133 150 276 384 348 510 401 510 95 241 194 345 101 533 345 426 194 265 375 194 512 282 173 201 392 322 308 292 241 42 495 118 163 292 118 314 244 533 67 163 173 375 476 350 142 276 241 314 401 111 345 460 81 98 388 352
Black Sir Cyril Wilson Blackman Bob Blades Sir (George) Rowland Epsom Blair Sir Reginald 118 Blaker Sir Reginald Boeteng Paul Yaw Bolton Thomas Henry Bonsor Henry Cosmo Orme Bonsor Sir Nicholas Cosmo Boord Thomas William Booth Hartley Borodale Viscount Borthwick Sir Algernon Borwick George Oldroyd (Maj) Bottomley (Sir) Peter Bottomley Horatio Boulnois Edmund Bousfield William R. Bowater Sir Thomas Vansittart Bowden Gerald Francis Bower Norman Adolph Henry Bowerman Charles William Bowis John Crocket Bowles George Frederic Stewart Bowles Sir Henry Ferryman Bowyer-Smijth Sir William Boyd-Carpenter John Archibald (Maj) Boyson Sir Rhodes Boyton Sir James Bracken Brendan Braddock Thomas Braithewaite Sir Albert Newby Brake (Thomas) ‘Tom’ Anthony Bramall Sir Ernest Ashley Bramston Thomas William Branch James Bray Angie Briant Frank Bright Sir Charles Tilston Bristowe Thomas Lynn Norwood Brittain Sir Harry Ernest Broad Francis Alfred Broadridge Sir George Thomas Brockway (Archibald) Fenner Brodie-Hoare Edward Brodrick William Brokenshire James Peter Brooke Peter Leonard Brooke Sir Henry Brooke Stopford William Wentworth
430 468 322 248 256 231 468 95 206 499 150 163 472 308 79 322 510 113 261 67 113 214 524 231 352 163 292 528 201 129 265 133 430 468 67 219 433 352 533 401 133 129 460 314 150 201 231 265 214 329 283 104 173 499 512 457 292 358 118
548 Index of MPs: Brookes - Edmonds Brookes Warwick Brougham William Southwark Brown Alan Grahame Brown Lynn Carol Brown Ronald William Bruce Sir Gainsford Bryce James (Professor) Buchan-Hepburn Patrick George Thomas Buck Karen Bucknell Sir Thomas Townsend Bull Bartle B. Bull Sir William James Bullus Wing Cdr (Sir) Eric Edward Bulwer Sir Henry Lytton Burdett Sir Francis Burdett-Coutts William Lehman Burgoyne Sir Alan Hughes (Lt-Col) Burney Charles Dennistoun (Cmdr) Burns John Elliott Burrowes David Burstow Paul Butler Charles Butler Dawn Petula Butler Herbert William Butler Joyce Shore Butt Sir Alfred Buxton Charles Buxton Ronald Carlile Buxton Sir Edward North Buxton Sydney Byng George Henry Charle Byrne Edmund Widdrington Cable Dr Vincent (Vince) Cadogan Sir Edward (Maj) Campbell John Gordon Drummond Campbell Sir Edward Taswell Campbell-Johnston Malcolm Carmarthen George Godolphin Osborne (Marquis of) Carr Leonard Robert Carr (William) Compton Carr Arthur Strettell Comyns Carr-Gomm Hubert William Culling (Capt) Carrington Matthew Hadrian Marshall Carter William Cartwright John Cameron Casale Roger Cassel Felix Cassels James Dale Causton Richard Knight Cave Sir George Cazalet-Keir Miss Thelma Cecil Lord Robert Challen Charles Challis Thomas Chamberlain Richard Chamberlain Ronald Arthur Chambers Montague Chambers Thomas Chancellor Henry George Chaplin Henry Chapman Sir Sydney Charles (Sir) Patrick Fleeming Charrington Spencer Chataway Sir Christopher John Chater Daniel 228 Chotzner Alfred James Church Archibald George (Major) Church Judith Churchill Lord Randolph
118 173 375 491 361 476 93 52 401 457 206 265 80 228 352 48 45 65 215 79 226 231 201 476 533 52 468 372 375 476 314 173 392 133 142 118 54 142 464 248 322 292 308 276 201 433 533 343 244 194 460 241 510 530 95 283 308 194 206 244 67 248 358 51 101 424 150 48 115 206 472 495 118 401 256 372 274 283 314 497 69
Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer 280 390 Clarke (Sir) William Gibson Haigue 436 533 (Major) Clarke Alan Kenneth Mackenzie 457 Clarke Charles Goddard 194 Clarke Frank Edward 292 Clarke Sir Edward George 63 173 Clarke Sir William Gibson Haigue 433 (Major) Clay Sir William 52 Cliffe Michael 361 Cluse William Sampson 244 361 Coates Sir Edward Feetham (Maj) 163 292 Coats Sir Stuart Auchincloss 206 322 Cobb Sir Cyril Stephen 228 Cochrane-Baillie Charles Wallace 95 Codrington Sir William John (Lt Gen) 150 Cohen Arthur 173 194 Cohen Harry Michael 493 Cohen Lionel Louis 69 Cohen Sir Benjamin Louis 101 Coldwells Francis Moses 201 Coleman Iain 460 Collins Sir Stephen 201 Collins Sir William Job 95 Collins Victor John 361 Colman Nigel Claudian Dalziel 314 Colman Tony 528 Colomb Sir John Charles Ready 118 Colvin Richard Beale (Brig-Gen) 280 Compton Lord Alwyne 81 Comyns Dr. Louis 274 383 Congdon David Leonard 533 Conway Derek 512 Cook Edward Rider 142 Cook Sir Frederick Lucas 201 Cooke Charles Wallwyn Radcliffe 194 Cooke James Douglas 228 Cooke Roger Gresham 348 Coope Octavius 54 81 Cooper Albert Edward 386 Cooper Alfred Duff 215 329 Cooper Dr. George Joseph 194 Cooper John 401 Corbet Freda Kunzlen 420 Corbyn Jeremy 472 Cornwall Sir Edwin Andrew 111 256 Cotton Harry Evan Auguste 98 Cotton William 42 Courtney Anthony Tosswill (Cdr) 352 Cowan Sir (William) Henry 244 Cox Irwin Edward Bainbridge 82 Cox Thomas (Tom) Michael 426 528 Cox William 51 Craddock Sir (George)Beresford 348 Crawford William 42 Crawfurd Horace Evelyn (Major) 282 Creasy Stella Judith 493 Cremer William Randal 115 Critchley Alfred Cecil 231 Crook Charles Williamson 276 Crooks William 163 292 Crowder (Frederick) Petre 350 464 Crowder Sir John Ellenborough 248 365 Cruddas Jon(athan) 497 Cryer John Robert 493 499 Cubitt George 206 Cunliffe-Lister Sir Philip Hendon 248 Cunningham George 361 472 Cunningham-Reid Alec Stratford (Capt) 217 Curran (Leslie) Charles 350
Curzon Francis Richard Henry Penn 314 (Viscount) Cust Henry John Cockayne 194 Daines Percy 384 Daisley Paul 468 Dalbiac Philip Hugh (Col) 194 Dalton (Edward) Hugh (John Neale) 308 Dalziel Sir Davison Alexander 201 314 Dare Robert Westley Hall 133 Darling Sir Charles John 163 Darvill Keith Ernest 499 Davey Ed(ward) Jonathan 530 Davies Bryan 476 Davies Dr Claude Nigel Brian 390 Davies Ernest Albert John 375 Davies Geraint 533 Davies Haydn 358 Davies Timothy 74 Davis Stanley Clinton 372 476 Davison Sir William Henry 226 341 Dawes James Arthur 194 308 Dawson Sir Philip 292 Day Harry (Col) 308 De Bois Nick 476 De Chair Somerset 329 De Forest LtCdr Maurice Arnold 142 (Baron) De Rothschild Baron Lionel 42 De Worms Baron Henry 150 Deakins Eric Petro 392 493 Dennison-Pender John Cuthbert 314 Dennison Despencer-Robertson James St. George 244 (Major) Dewar Sir Thomas Robert 118 Dickens James McCulloch York 401 Dickinson Sir Willoughby Hyett 95 Dicks Terence ‘Terry’ Patrick 464 Dilke Sir Charles 50 74 Dimsdale Sir Joseph Cockfield 63 Dismore Andrew 472 Diva-Aditya Niranjan Joseph ‘Nirj’ De 464 Silva Dixon-Hartland Sir Frederick 83 Dobson Frank 472 Dodds Norman Noel 401 Doland George Frederick (Lt-Col) 314 Donner Patrick William (Sq Ldr) 244 Doran Edward 265 Doughty Charles John Addison 433 Douglas Sir Francis Campbell Ross 314 426 Douglas-Mann Bruce Leslie Home 341 530 Doulton Frederick 173 Dowd Jim Patrick 508 Driberg Thomas Edward Neil 387 Du Cros Sir Arthur Philip 118 314 Dubs Alf(red) 528 Duggan Hubert John 231 Duke Sir James 42 Dumphreys John Molesworth Thomas 194 Duncan Francis (Col) 93 Duncan Sir Andrew Rae 214 329 Duncan Sir James Alexander (Capt) 226 Duncombe Thomas 51 Dundas John Whitley Deans, RN 150 Dunn Sir William Henry 194 Durbin Evan Frank Mottram 265 375 Dyke Sir William Hart 150 Dykes Hugh John Maxwell 352 468 Ebrington Viscount 48 Ede James Chuter 322 Edgar Clifford Blackburn 322 Edmonds Garnham 256
553 Index of Constituencies Acton - Lewisham North
Index of Parliamentary Constituencies
Constituencies are listed Alphabetically. In some cases Constituencies have more than one entry for ease of reference. Eg: Camberwell & Peckham also appears as Peckham (including Camberwell). Constituency name, then up to four page entries follow as relevant. Acton (including Ealing, Acton) Balham & Tooting Barking Barnet (incl Chipping Barnet) Barons Court Battersea Battersea North Battersea South Beckenham Bermondsey & Old Southwark Bermondsey (incl Southwark, ‘Berm) Bermondsey West Bethnal Green Bethnal Green & Bow Bethnal Green & Stepney Bethnal Green North East Bethnal Green South West Bexley Bexleyheath Bexleyheath & Crayford Bow & Bromley Bow & Poplar Brent Central Brent East Brent North Brent South Brentford Brentford & Chiswick Brentford & Isleworth Brixton Bromley & Chislehurst Bromley (alternatively Ravensbourne) Camberwell & Peckham Camberwell North Camberwell North West Carshalton Carshalton & Wallington Chelsea Chelsea & Fulham Chingford Chingford & Woodford Green Chipping Barnet Chislehurst Clapham Croydon Croydon Central Croydon East Croydon North Croydon North East Croydon North West Croydon South Croydon West Dagenham Dagenham & Rainham Dartford Deptford Dulwich Dulwich & West Norwood Ealing Ealing Central & Acton Ealing East Ealing North Ealing South Ealing West Ealing, Acton Ealing, Acton & Shepherds Bush Ealing, Southall East Ham East Ham North East Ham South Edmonton Eltham Enfield Enfield East Enfield North
220 299 381 355 335 187 299 299 397 519 415 297 368 442 445 104 104 397 501 504 109 445 450 440 440 440 75 220 439 416 505 289 416 184 299 413 518 40 449 483 485 440 290 189 191 517 413 301 415 415 302 413 381 489 161 159 185 519 75 449 335 335 335 335 439 447 439 485 272 272 254 503 127 370 442
335
442
448
Enfield West Enfield, Southgate Epping Epsom Erith & Crayford Erith & Thamesmead Essex Southeastern Essex Southern Feltham Feltham & Heston Finchley Finchley & Golders Green Finsbury (incl with Shoreditch) Finsbury Central Finsbury East Fulham (incl Hammersmith, Fulham) Fulham East Fulham West Greenwich Greenwich & Woolwich Hackney Hackney Central Hackney North Hackney North & Stoke Newington Hackney South Hackney South & Shoreditch Hammersmith Hammersmith & Fulham Hammersmith North Hammersmith South Hampstead Hampstead & Highgate Hampstead & Kilburn Harrow Harrow Central Harrow East Harrow West Hayes & Harlington Hendon Hendon North Hendon South Heston & Isleworth Holborn Holborn & St.Pancras Holborn & St.Pancras South Hornchurch Hornchurch & Upminster Hornsey Hornsey & Wood Green Ilford Ilford North Ilford South Islington Central Islington East Islington North Islington South Islington South & Finsbury Islington South West Islington West Kennington Kensington Kensington & Chelsea Kensington North (+ Regents Park) Kensington South Kent Western Kingston-upon-Thames Kingston-upon-Thames & Surbiton Lambeth Lambeth Central Lambeth North Lambeth, Vauxhall Lewisham Lewisham Deptford Lewisham East Lewisham North
370 442 135 192 398 503 135 132 336 439 239 448 33 85 85 75 220 220 148 504 39 107 107 368 107 442 75 447 220 220 87 445 450 76 336 336 336 336 239 355 355 335 84 445 355 379 489 125 445 272 381 381 440 89 89 89 440 357 91 187 439 446 73 73 149 190 520 171 517 187 416 161 503 289 397
448 272 302 501
555 Index of Constituencies with today’s Boroughs Baking & Dagenham - Ealing
Index of Parliamentary Constituencies within today’s Boroughs
Constituencies are listed Alphabetically within today’s London Boroughs. Where constituencies straddle two Boroughs they may be shown twice. The modern Borough name is followed by the constituency name, and then entries follow as relevant. Barking & Dagenham Barking & Dagenham Barking & Dagenham Barking & Dagenham Barnet Barnet Barnet Barnet Barnet Barnet Barnet Barnet Bexley Bexley Bexley Bexley Bexley Bexley Bexley Bexley Bexley Brent Brent Brent Brent Brent Brent Brent Brent Brent Brent Bromley Bromley Bromley Bromley Bromley Bromley Bromley Bromley Bromley Camden Camden Camden Camden Camden Camden Camden Camden Camden Camden Camden Camden City of London City of London City of London City of London Croydon Croydon Croydon Croydon Croydon Croydon Croydon Croydon Croydon Ealing Ealing Ealing Ealing Ealing Ealing Ealing Ealing Ealing Ealing
Barking Dagenham Dagenham & Rainham Essex Southern Barnet (including Chipping Barnet) Chipping Barnet Finchley Finchley & Golders Green Harrow Hendon Hendon North Hendon South Bexley Bexleyheath Bexleyheath & Crayford Dartford Erith & Crayford Erith & Thamesmead Kent Western Old Bexley & Sidcup Sidcup (also with Old Bexley) Brent Central Brent East Brent North Brent South Hampstead & Kilburn Harrow Wembley North Wembley South Willesden East Willesden West Beckenham Bromley & Chislehurst Bromley (alternatively Ravensbourne) Chislehurst Kent Western Lewisham West & Penge Orpington Ravensbourne (see Bromley) Sevenoaks Hampstead Hampstead & Highgate Hampstead & Kilburn Holborn Holborn & St.Pancras Holborn & St.Pancras South St.Pancras East St.Pancras North St.Pancras South (including Holborn) St.Pancras South East St.Pancras South West St.Pancras West The Cities of London & Westminster The City of London The City of London & Westminster The City of London & Westminster South Croydon Croydon Central Croydon East Croydon North Croydon North East Croydon North West Croydon South Croydon West Surrey East(ern) Acton (including Ealing, Acton) Ealing Ealing Central & Acton Ealing East Ealing North Ealing South Ealing West Ealing, Acton Ealing, Acton & Shepherds Bush Ealing, Southall
381 381 489 132 355 440 239 448 76 239 355 355 397 501 504 161 398 504 149 503 501 450 440 440 440 450 76 338 338 223 223 397 505 289 290 149 505 395 501 161 87 445 450 84 445 355 87 87 87 239 239 87 328 32 446 439 191 517 413 301 415 415 302 413 171 220 75 449 335 335 335 335 439 447 439
485 485
440 447 240 451 223 447 440 440 398
447 451 355
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With eight goals which Barcelona player was the leading scorer in the 2009-10 Champions League? | FC Barcelona individual records - FC Barcelona
FC BARCELONA
FC Barcelona Records (updated 20 August 2016)
The stadium scoreboard announces how Messi had equalled Cesar's goalscoring record for FC Barcelona
World
Only player to win the Ballon d’Or, FIFA World Player, Pichichi trophy and Golden Boot in same season: Leo Messi in season 2009/10.
Player with most Ballons d’Or won: Leo Messi with five (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2015).
Player with most Golden Boots: Leo Messi with three (2010, 2011 and 2012)
Youngest player to win three Ballons d’Or: on January 9 , 2012 Leo Messi got his third aged 24 years, 6 months and 17 days.
Only time ever that three player from the same team’s youth system were the nominees for the Ballon d’Or: Messi, Xavi and Iniesta were the candidates for Ballon d’Or 2010.
Record Ballons d’Or from same club: 11 (1 Suárez, 2 Cruyff, 1 Stoichkov, 1 Rivaldo, 1 Ronaldinho and 5 Messi).
Leading scorer over a season of official games: Leo Messi 73 in the 2011/12 season(50 in L a Liga, 14 in the Champions League, 3 in the Cup, 3 in the Spanish Super Cup, 1 in the European Super Cup and 2 in the World Club Cup).
Most goals in a calendar year: Leo Messi, with 96 goals in 2012. For Barça 84 goals and 12 for Argentina.
Most international goals in a calendar year: Leo Messi with 25 gols (13 in Champions League and for Argentina) in 2012, to equal Vivian John Woodward (25 goals in 1909).
Longest scoring run in La Liga: Messi, with 33 goals in 21 consecutive games in 2012/13.
Player with most appearances in European competitions: Xavi Hernandez (1998-2015), 173 matches.
Player with most appearances in European Cup / Champions League: Xavi Hernandez (1998-2015), with 157 games.
Highest goalscorer in Champions League history: Leo Messi, 77 goals in 99 games (tied with Cristiano Ronaldo (Real Madrid), 77 goals in 115 games)
Only player who has been leading scorer in the Champions League for four seasons on the run: Leo Messi from 2008/09 to 2011/12.
Top scorer most times in the Champions League: Leo Messi, fives seasons 2008/09, 2009/10, 2010/11, 2011/12 and 2014/15.
Leading scorer over a European league season since the start of the Golden Boot in 1966/67: Leo Messi 50 goals in 2011/12 season.
National
Player with most domestic and international titles: Andrés Iniesta and Leo Messi with 29 trophies (3 Club WOrld Cups, 4 Champions League, 3 European Super Cups, 8 Leagues, 4 Copas del Rey and 7 Spanish Super Cups).
Highest all-time scorer in La Liga: Leo Messi, 312 goals in 348 games.
Leading scorer in the second half of a league season:Leo Messi 28 in the 2011/12 season.
Only player to be the leading scorer and leader in assists over a season:Leo Messi 50 goals in the 2011/12 season and 15 assists (tied with Real Madrid’s Ozil).
Coach with most titles: Josep Guardiola, with 14 titles from 2008 through 2012 (2 Club World Cups, 2 Champions Leagues, 3 Ligas, 2 Copas del Rey, 2 European Super Cups and 3 Spanish Super Cups). Guardiola is level with Miguel Muñoz (Real Madrid), who won 14 titles from 1959 through 1974 (9 Ligas, 2 Cups, 2 European Cups and 1 Intercontinental Cup).
Absolute highest goalscorer in one season: Leo Messi, with 75 goals in the 2011/12 season (50 in the Liga, 14 in the Champions League, 3 in the Cop del Rey, 3 in the Spanish Super Cup, 1 in the European Super Cup, 2 in the Club World Cup and 2 in friendly matches).
Top goalscorer in a Liga game: Ladislao Kubala, seven goals in the match between FC Barcelona and Sporting Gijón (9-0) on February 10, 1952.
Club
Top goalscorer in history: Leo Messi with 485 goals in 516 games. He started his first team career in 2004 and his goal tally breaks down in the following way: 312 goals in La Liga, 83 in the Champions League, 39 in the Cup, 12 in the Spanish Super Cup, 3 in the European Super Cup, 5 in the Club World Cup, and 31 in friendly matches.
Top goalscorer in official competitions: Leo Messi (2004-...), with 454 goals (286 in the Liga, 83in the Champions League, 39 in the Copa del Rey, 12 in the Spanish Super Cup, 3 in the European Super Cup and 5 in the Club World Cup).
Top goalscorer in the Cup: Josep Samitier (1919-32), with 65 goals.
Longest goalscoring run in official competitions: Mariano Martín scored 21 goals in eleven games (8 in Liga and 3 in Cup) between February 14 and May 9, 1943.
Highest goalscorer in international competitions: Messi (2004 -...), with 91 goals (83 in the Champions League, 3 in the Spanish Supercup and 5 in the Clubs World Cup.
Top goalscorer in one game: Joan Gamper, 9 goals three times: Franco-Espanyol 0 v FC Barcelona 13, in the Copa Macaya (10-2-1901); Tarragona 0 v FC Barcelona 18, in the Copa Macaya (17 -3-1901); FC Barcelona 13 v Club X 0, in the Copa Barcelona (1-2-1903); Escolà, 9 goals in the game FC Barcelona 11 Real Unión Irún 1 (7-7-1935).
Top goalscorer in a game in Cup: Eulogio Martínez, seven goals in the game FC Barcelona 8 - At. Madrid 1 (1-5-1957), return leg of cup round of sixteen 1956-57.
Only players in the history of the club to score in six official competitions in a year: Pedro Rodríguez scored in 2009 in the Spanish Super Cup, European Supercup, Champions League, Liga, Copa del Rey and Clubs World Cup. Leo Messi scored in 2011 in the Spanish Super Cup, European Supercup, Champions League, Liga, Copa del Rey and World Club Cup.
Players with most goals at the halfway stage of La Liga: Messi with 22 goals halfway through Liga 2011/12 (19 match days), along with César in the Liga 1950/51 (15 match days).
FC Barcelona players who have been the La Liga top scorers: Mariano Martín (1942/43, 32 goals in 23 games), César Rodríguez (1948/49, 28 goals in 24 games), Cayetano Re (1964/65, 25 goals in 30 games), Carles Rexach (1970/71, 17 goals in 28 games), Hans Krankl (1978/79, 29 goals in 30 games), Enrique Castro, "Quini" (1980/81, 20 goals in 30 games), Enrique Castro "Quini" (1981/82, 26 goals in 32 games), Romario da Souza (1993/94, 30 goals in 33 games), Ronaldo (1996/97, 34 goals in 37 games), Samuel Eto'o ( 2005/06, 26 goals in 35 games), Leo Messi (2009/10, 34 goals in 35 games) and again in the 2011/12 season with 50 goals in 37 games, and again in the 2012/13 season with 46 goals in 32 games, Luis Suárez, (2015/16, 40 goals in 35 games).
FC Barcelona goalkeepers that have won the Zamora: Juan Zambudio Velasco (1947/48, 31 goals conceded in 26 games), Antoni Ramallets (1951/52, 40 goals conceded in 28 games), Antoni Ramallets (1955/56, 24 goals in 29 games), Antoni Ramallets (1956/57, 35 goals conceded in 29 games), Antoni Ramallets (1958/59, 22 goals conceded in 28 games), Antoni Ramallets (1959/60, 24 goals in 27 games) , Josep Manuel Pesudo (1965-66, 15 goals in 22 games), Salvador Sadurní (1968/69, 18 goals in 30 games), Miguel Reina (1972/73, 21 goals in 34 games), Salvador Sadurní (1973/74 , 22 goals in 30 games), Salvador Sadurní (1974/75, 19 goals in 24 games), Pedro María Artola (1977/78, 25 goals in 29 games), Francisco Javier González Urruticoechea (1983/84, 26 goals in 32 games), Andoni Zubizarreta (1986/87, 29 goals in 43 games), Víctor Valdés (2004/05, 25 goals in 35 games), Víctor Valdés (2008/09, 31 goals in 35 games), Víctor Valdés (2009 / 10, 24 goals in 38 games), Víctor Valdés (2010/11, 16 goals in 32 games) and again in the 2011/12 season (28 goals in 35 games).
Only times the Zamora and Pichichi trophies were both won in the : 2009/10 and 2011/12, with Víctor Valdés (Zamora) and Leo Messi (Pichichi)
Goalkeeper to have lasted the longest without conceding a goal from the start of a Liga season: Claudio Bravo, 754 minutes unbeaten in 2014-15 (clean sheets in eight opening matches and 34 mins of game nine)
First Barça player to be Liga top scorer three times: Leo Messi in 2009/10, 2011/12 and 2012/13
FC Barcelona players that have won the Ballon d’Or: Luis Suárez (1960), Johan Cruyff (1973 and 1974), Hristo Stoichkov (1994), Rivaldo (1999), Ronaldinho (2005) and Messi (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2015).
FC Barcelona players that have won the FIFA World Player: Romario da Souza (1994), Ronaldo (1996), Rivaldo (1999), Ronaldinho (2004 and 2005) and Messi (2009).
FC Barcelona players that have won the European Golden Shoe: Ronaldo (1996/97, 34 goals), Leo Messi (2009/10, 34 goals; 2011/12, 50 goals, 2012/13, 46 goals) and Luis Suárez (2015/16, 40 goals).
Goalkeeper with best average goals conceded in la Liga: Víctor Valdés in La Liga 2010/11 with an average of 0.50 goals (16 goals in 32 games). National record: Liaño (Deportivo) in la Liga 1993/94, with an average of 0.47 goals (18 goals in 38 games) and ) and Oblak (Atlético) in the league 2015/16, with an average of 0.47 gols (18 goals in 38 games).
Goalkeeper with most league games without conceding in the same season : Claudio Bravo with 23 games from 37 games in 2014/15 and Andoni Zubizarreta with 23 games in 44 games in 1986/87
Only FCB goalkeeper to ever score a goal: Was Ricardo Zamora, who on December 14, 1919 scored a penalty in the Catalonian Championship game Barça v Internacional (2-1).
Goalkeeper unbeaten for the most consecutive minutes in official competitions: Víctor Valdés, with 896 minutes without conceding a goal in the 2011/12 season
Goalkeeper with most minutes without conceding a goal in la Liga: Miguel Reina went 824 minutes without conceding a goal in la Liga in the season 1972-73 (from minute 53 of game 14 to minute 67 of game 23).
Player with most appearances: Xavi Hernández. 869 games (1998-2015)
Player with most appearances in official competitions: Xavi Hernández (1998-2015), with 767 games
Player with most appearances in Liga: Xavi Hernández. 505 games (1998-2015)
Player with most appearances in international competitions: Xavi Hernández, 178 games (1998-2015)
Youngest player to debut with the first team: Paulino Alcántara, 15 years, 4 months and 18 days. His debut was on February 25, 1912 in the game FC Barcelona 9 - Català 0 in the Catalonian Championship, and he scored three goals.
Most total years as manager: Jack Greenwell, 12 years (1913-1923 and 1931-1933)
Manager with best percentage of titles: Josep Guardiola, 14 titles from the 19 possible between 2008 and 2012.
Managers nominated for the FIFA Manager of the Year: Josep Guardiola in 2011 and Luis Enrique 2015.
Club schedule
| Lionel Messi |
Which character, who first appeared in 'Detective Comics' in 1948, has been played on TV in the 1960's by Frank Gorshin and John Astin and on film in 1995 by Jim Carrey? | Messi 3 goals from Spanish league's top scorer
Messi 3 goals from Spanish league's top scorer
JOSEPH WILSON (Associated Press)
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Barcelona's Lionel Messi, right, is faced by a wall of PSG defenders during the Champions League soccer match between PSG and Barcelona, at the Parc des Princes stadium, in Paris, Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2014. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)
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BARCELONA, Spain (AP) -- Lionel Messi is three goals away from equaling the Spanish league's all-time scoring record, a milestone that has stood untouched for almost 60 years.
Athletic Bilbao great Telmo Zarra scored 251 goals in 271 games from 1940-55.
Since netting his first goal for Barcelona in 2005, Messi has 248 goals in league play.
Saturday's match at Rayo Vallecano will be his 284th league appearance.
''Right now, I am not thinking about the record,'' Messi said on Thursday. ''But it will be nice to become the top scorer of one of the best leagues in the world. So many good players and scorers have played here. It will come when it is supposed to.''
Already Barcelona's all-time leading scorer, Messi holds the league's single-season scoring record of 50 in 2011-12.
The 27-year-old Messi scored his 402nd goal for club and country on Wednesday in Barcelona's 3-2 loss at Paris Saint-Germain, its first defeat in eight games this season. He has 360 goals for Barcelona and 42 for Argentina, which he led to the World Cup final in July.
Messi has five goals in six rounds this season to help Barcelona top the league standings. But his passing has been just as brilliant, especially in connection with Neymar . Four of Messi's six assists in the league have gone to the Brazil striker.
Messi said he has always liked looking for his teammates, but that new coach Luis Enrique's move to play all three forwards inside the area, instead of having two stay on the wing, has helped him link up with Neymar.
''I have a very good relationship with (Neymar),'' Messi said. ''He is a fabulous guy and we get along very well both on and off the pitch. We haven't known each other that long, but we have a very good relationship.''
Messi is also racing Real Madrid rival Cristiano Ronaldo to reach Raul Gonzalez's Champions League record of 71 goals. Messi has 68 while Ronaldo has 69, not counting another goal scored in the qualifying rounds.
But Messi denied he is involved in a personal duel with the player who took the world player of the year award from him last season, after Messi won it for an unprecedented four straight years.
''I don't compete with Cristiano at all. I just play my game and do my duty,'' Messi said.
''And I am not interested in competing with him or anybody else. I've said many times that individual awards are the less important ones for me. I hope to be able to play a great season and help my team achieve the goals we have set at the beginning of the season. And in a club such as Barcelona those goals are winning titles.''
Messi's titles with Barcelona include three Champions League trophies. Last season was the first time since 2006-07 that the club failed to win a major title.
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Which novelist whose original first names were Margaret Ann before she changed them, won the 2005 Orange Prize for the book 'We Need To Talk About Kevin'? | Twelve Writers on New and Recent Fiction | On the Seawall: A Literary Website by Ron Slate (GD)
Twelve Writers on New and Recent Fiction
April 11th, 2012
I asked a dozen prose fiction writers to comment briefly on new and recent titles. The Seawall has been hosting similar multi-poet features in the spring and fall since 2008, but this is the first such post focused on fiction (and also, this time, on a memoir). I’m grateful to the twelve writers who contributed these pieces out of their own generosity and desire to let the readership know about titles that have impressed, entertained and provoked them. -- RS
This feature includes:
Floyd Skloot on Waiting For Sunrise, a novel by William Boyd (Harper)
Terese Svoboda on From the Land of the Moon, a novel by Milena Agus (Europa Editions)
Stona Fitch on The Quiet Twin, a novel by Dan Vyleta (Bloomsbury)
Lawrence Douglas on My Prizes: An Accounting, a memoir by Thomas Bernhard (Knopf)
Shannon Cain on Drifting House, stories by Krys Lee (Penguin/Viking)
Mark Athitakis on The New Republic, a novel by Lionel Shriver (Harper Collins)
Laura Kasischke on The Nine Senses, prose poetry by Melissa Kwasny (Milkweed Editions)
Patricia Henley on Echolocation, a novel by Myfanwy Collins (Engine Books)
T. M. McNally on The Beginners, a novel by Rebecca Wolff (Riverhead Books)
Dan Pope on Lightning Rods, a novel by Helen DeWitt (New Directions)
Jane Delury on Forgotten Country, a novel by Catherine Chung (Riverhead Books)
Michael Guista on The Architect of Flowers, stories by William Lychack (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Floyd Skloot on Waiting For Sunrise, a novel by William Boyd (Harper)
At sixty, William Boyd belongs to an accomplished cohort of British male novelists that includes Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Louis de Bernières, Sebastian Faulks, Alan Hollinghurst, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and Graham Swift. Despite having won the Whitbread and Somerset Maugham Awards for A Good Man in Africa, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for An Ice-Cream War, the James Tate Black Memorial Prize for Brazzaville Beach, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Blue Afternoon, and the Costa Book Award for Restless, he hasn't received the same level of public acclaim as his honored, productive contemporaries.
Boyd's style is not as showy or exuberant as Amis's or Rushdie's, nor as taut and chilly as Ishiguro's, nor as self-consciously literary as Barnes' or McEwan's. He hasn't had the bestseller success that the others have had. But reading Boyd is a unique treat: he combines a delight in strong, genre-inflected plots with vigorous characterization and an almost astounded view of how quickly and badly lives can change. He is a connoisseur of intimate catastrophe, his intensely particularized characters caught by secret histories and thrown out of their neat, orderly daily worlds. So, to consider just the novels Boyd has published this century: in Ordinary Thunderstorms (2010) a chance restaurant encounter leads the main character into a series of worsening disasters; in Restless (2006) a daughter discovers that her mother had been recruited as a spy during World War II; in Any Human Heart (2003) a man's 85-year, Zelig/Forrest Gump-ish life is fraught with so many twists across so many countries and historical events that the narrative pattern resembles a yo-yo's; in Armadillo (2000), a mild-mannered insurance adjuster's client hangs himself and thereby shatters the main character's staid existence.
Sometimes, as in Armadillo> or Ordinary Thunderstorms, Boyd may seem to be going through the motions, hamstrung by his catastrophe-formula or too outlandish for his essentially realistic settings to be sustained. But when Boyd is working at his best, as he is in Restless, Any Human Heart, Brazzaville Beach, or The Blue Afternoon, he entertains with his narrative drive, engages with his vibrant characters, and provokes with his insights.
His eleventh novel, Waiting for Sunrise, is Boyd at his best. It is set in the years just before and during World War I, in England, France, and Austria. The main character is a young British actor named Lysander Rief, son of an even more renowned actor and an Austrian mother, and when the story begins Rief is putting his career and his engagement to actress Blanche Blondel on hold in order to travel to Vienna for psychoanalysis in hopes of being cured of anorgasmia -- the inability to achieve orgasm. In Dr. Bensimon's waiting room, Rief encounters two people who will profoundly alter his life: the sexually manipulative artist Hettie Bull, and the mysterious British diplomat Alwyn Munro.
Dr. Bensimon is a proponent of "Parallelism," a psychiatric approach to problems that seems ideally suited to an actor: "Let's say the world is in essence neutral -- flat, empty, bereft of meaning and significance. It's us, our imaginations, that make it vivid, fill it with colour, feeling, purpose and emotion. Once we understand this we can shape our world in any way we want." This allows Rief to substitute alternative scenarios for the ones he remembers, such as being caught by his mother in a sexually embarrassing moment, and that may be hindering his ability to climax. This helps him, but perhaps not as much as the unexpected, passionate, adulterous affair that develops with Hettie Bull.
When, after several weeks of intense intimacy, Rief is suddenly arrested for having raped Hettie, Boyd's plot kicks in and Rief's life seems no longer his own. With the help of Munro and Munro's colleagues, Rief is able to escape from Vienna. But, now back in England and back on stage, but now no longer engaged to Blanche, Rief finds himself in debt to his diplomatic saviors. This, once his country enters the war, leads to his new life as a spy (another excellent line for an actor) sent to discover the identity of someone who is providing the enemy with crucial information about British military operations.
When Hettie turns up in England, divorced, newly remarried, and eager to resume relations with Rief, the complexities in his life multiply. So do the uncertainties, as Rief must struggle to understand who Hettie really is, who Munro and his colleagues really are, who the traitor is and why he seems to be linked to Rief's mother, and what must be done to reclaim all he thought he knew about himself, his family, and the women in his life.
These uncertainties are the crux of the matter for Boyd, as always. In the journal he keeps at Dr. Bensimon's suggestion, Rief writes "I felt myself wantonly adrift -- seeing a few details but making no connection -- and also consumed with the feeling that invisible strings were being pulled by a person or persons unknown and that I was attached to their ends."
Waiting for Sunrise is filled with riches of observation about human behavior, as befits a tale of an actor/spy. Rief is both a brilliant watcher and a shapeshifter, gifted with capacities for flexible presentation of self. He notes: "Amazing the secrets we reveal about ourselves when we think we're not being observed. Amazing the secrets we reveal when we know we are."
I enjoyed this novel so fully that I went out and bought copies of the few early Boyd novels that I haven't yet read. I didn't do that when I finished the recent Amis, Barnes, Faulks, or Hollinghurst.
[Published April 12, 2012, 353 pages, $26.99 hardcover]
Floyd Skloot's most recent books are the poetry collection The Snow's Music (LSU, 2008), the memoir The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life, (Nebraska, 2008/11) and the short story collection Cream of Kohlrabi (Tupelo, 2011). His work has received three Pushcart Prizes, the PEN USA Literary Award, and been included in The Best American Essays, Best American Science Writing, Best Spiritual Writing, and Best Food Writing anthologies. You may access his website by clicking here.
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Terese Svoboda on From the Land of the Moon, a novella by Milena Agus (Europa Editions)
Oh, that Europe’s bestsellers would be ours! That most exciting of New York presses, Europa Editions, has translated the beautifully written and very Euro-popular, From the Land of the Moon by Milena Agus. This novella asks the simplest of questions -- Who is crazy when it comes to love? -- in a most sophisticated way. A granddaughter pokes through three generations of Sardinians to reveal her grandmother’s mysterious love life in a looping almost child-like point-of-view that reveals enormous sympathy for her forebear, and the pragmatism of Sardinian post-war culture.
“Grandmother talked…about the suitors who fled, yes, and about grandfather, who had loved her right away and married her, and the ladies looked at each other in embarrassment, as if to say it was glaringly obvious that he had married her to repay his debt to the family, but they were silent.”
Grandmother is terrified that people will discover she is mad for having “poetic ideas” such as thinking that the sea and the blue sky, and the “immensity you saw from the Bastioni — the ramparts — in the mistral” are the cause of such village smugness. She also has bouts of artistic intensity that must be redefined by the women of Cagliari:
“Maybe they thought that she was a little strange and wasn’t aware of things, certainly “su macchiori de sa musica e de su piano,” her madness for music and the piano, must have been pure madness to them, since they had a piano and never touched it; they placed doilies on it with vases of flowers and various other objects, while grandmother practically caressed it before she dusted and polished it, using her breath and a cloth she had bought just for that purpose.”
As a young girl, the grandmother sends passionate love poems to potential suitors, and her father beats her, “cursing the day they had sent her to elementary school, and she had learned to write.” Love is not the issue with her husband: she re-enacts brothel scenarios for him without feeling, and leaves coffee at the foot of his bed as if it were a bowl of water for a dog. She has given up love entirely by the time she meets the Veteran at a sanatorium where she’s being treated for gall stones.
“With him, she feels no embarrassment, not even if they peed together to get rid of the stones, and since her whole life she had been told she was like someone from the land of the moon, it seemed to her as if she had finally met someone from her own land, and that was the principal thing in life, which she never had.
When she decides to desert her family for him, nothing can stop her:
Never mind about the beach at the Poetto, a long desert of white dunes beside clear water that, no matter how far you walked, never got deep, while schools of fish swam between your legs. Never mind about summers in the blue-and-white striped bathing hut, the plates of malloreddus with tomato sauce and sausage after swimming. Never mind about her village, with the odor of hearth fires, of pork and lamb and the incense in church when they went to her sisters’ for holidays.”
But even as she struggles to break free, she regrets how she treats her husband, her family, and her village, she regrets the possible happiness they offer that she spurns.
“He was so happy with the purchase that he wanted grandmother to wear the new dress every day under her coat, and before they went out he’d make her twirl around, and he’d say, “It’s beautiful,” but he seemed to mean “You’re beautiful.”
And for this, too, grandmother never forgave herself. For having been unable to seize those words out of the air and be happy.”
Her confusion of feeling is handed down to the next generation, compelling her son to become a passionate musician, a man who is irresistible to a woman who discovers, long after they’re married, that her grandmother too wrote verses.
“Mamma had loved my father silently for a long time, she liked everything about him, even the fact that he was utterly in another world, and always had his sweaters on backward and never remembered what season it was and wore summer shirts until he caught bronchitis, and everyone said he was crazy.”
From the Land of the Moon is not a simple discovery of love amid the ruins: its peek-a-boo plot surprises to the very last word. Imbuing the text with strange Sardinian idioms, translator Ann Goldstein invokes a lively culture distant in time and place. Agus’ writing is exquisite, detailed and emotionally true. Her central subject, the compulsion to express oneself and why those who don’t have this compulsion fear it, is one so key to our human existence that Americans might want to explore it. “In every family,” writes Agus, “there’s someone who pays the tribute, so that the balance between order and disorder is maintained and the world doesn’t come to a halt.”
[Published December 28, 2010, 144 pages, $15.00 paperback]
Terese Svoboda's most recent novel is Bohemian Girl (U. of Nebraska Press).
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Stona Fitch on The Quiet Twin a novel by Dan Vyleta (Bloomsbury)
For instant resonance and built-inforeshadowing, nothing beats setting your novel in Mitteleuropa in the late 1930s. Every reader knows what’s about to happen and it’s not going to be good. The specter of WWII hangs above the action like an Iron Cross of Damocles. So many novels, genre and literary, have adopted this setting that it’s rare to find a book that manages to seize this time and reinvent it for its own purposes — as does The Quiet Twin. Its author, Dan Vyleta, pulls off an enviable coup — writing a novel that combines lush, beautiful language at the sentence level with the propulsive plot of a literary thriller.
At the heart of the novel are a series of murders, first a dog, then creatures of a supposedly higher order. The ambivalent Dr. Anton Beer becomes slowly ensnared in the whispered rumors and unstated fears that course through a dark, rambling apartment building near Vienna. Everyone seems to be watching everyone else, blurring the line between voyeurism and collaboration. Within the building live an inscrutable janitor, a dissolute mime named Otto, a shadowy professor named Speckstein, and Zuzka, the professor’s hyper-sexual teenage niece — who serves as Dr. Beer’s passeur to the darker corners of the apartment building.
Though there’s a large cast of truly damaged, strange characters, Vyleta doesn’t reduce them to freaks. Instead, they get respect and attention reminiscent of another quotidian apartment building packed with interlocking characters, this one in Paris — the brilliant Life, A User’s Manual by Georges Perec. Consider the elegance of this description of the drunken mime, who returns to his apartment to find that Beer has discovered the mime’s sister, Eva, paralyzed and rotting in bed:
“His hand rose, thumb and forefinger taking hold of his nose. He blew snot into his open palm, then wiped it on the seat of his trousers: a fluid gesture, untroubled by breeding. Next Beer knew, that same thumb and finger had come together once again and hung in the air rubbing one another, in a gesture as old as the gods. ‘How much?’”
Never has a farmer’s blow been so eloquently rendered.
The search for who is doing the killings drives the book and gives it the linear structure of a thriller, though Vyleta deftly switches perspectives to make the story much broader and multi-angled. As the hunt picks up urgency and new and terrible events transpire (most involving knives, the most personal of weapons), the book begins to read like Rear Window retold by Thomas Mann or Max Frisch. The suspense grows, compelling this reader to drop other more debatably “literary” books to devour a chapter of The Quiet Twin nightly.
But The Quiet Twin is no guilty pleasure. Vyleta captures the atmosphere of Europe during wartime deftly and with beautiful, strange language that avoids the clichés that dog less dimensional, less talented writers. Think Alan Furst crossed with Kafka or Hrabel. That Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees isn’t surprising. His writing has some of the fantastical realism, fatalistic humor, and wild, unhinged imagination that define a certain quadrant of post-war Czech literature. That this is only his second novel is truly remarkable.
In the ongoing debate of language vs. plot, there can never be a winner. Too many partisans, too many little axes to grind. But when both serve their complementary purposes in harmony, as they do in The Quiet Twin, then a book can deliver a full-immersion reading experience that reminds readers why books still work, and matter.
Vyletta takes well-trod wartime Vienna and makes it his own by creating an uncannily resonant rendering of places that exist only in his imagination (and then ours). The apartment building’s grim basement, the close rooms looking out on the courtyard, the under-stocked kitchens — they become so real that we feel as if we might live there, or perhaps, should the killer’s knife find us as it did the ill-fated dog and other victims — die there.
Ultimately, what is The Quiet Twin? A quiet, smart thriller with low-grade thrills? An historical novel where most of the history is personal? A literary work spiced with noir elements? Readers will have their own take on the precise (and superfluous) designation. But I suspect Vyleta’s unwillingness to stay completely within a specified genre — or artificially amp up the volume — might keep this completely engaging novel from reaching the broader audience it deserves.
[Published February 14, 2012, 375 pages, $16.00
Stona Fitch is a novelist (Senseless, Give + Take, and others) and founder of the renegade Concord Free Press.
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Recommended by Lawrence Douglas
Lawrence Douglas on My Prizes: An Accounting a memoir by Thomas Bernhard (Knopf)
Having never actually received any literary prizes, I can only begin to imagine the pain they must occasion. Thomas Bernhard, the great Austrian novelist, poet, and playwright who died in 1989, suffered no such imaginative challenge. Bernhard’s first novel, Frost (1963), received the prestigious Bremen Literature Prize, and over the next quarter-century, his work received just about every major literary accolade to be conferred upon a creative writer in the German-speaking world.
None of this recognition brought Bernhard much in the way of happiness; to the contrary, it often left him feeling as if “trampled … into [a] stinking pit from which there is no escape.” Those familiar with Bernhard will not find this surprising, as the writer was never the most cheerful of campers. If anomie and existential dread have become clichés of the modernist temper, Bernhard went one step further, describing life itself as an unremitting catastrophe. Certainly he knew his fair share of misery. Born out of wedlock, he never met his birth father — he took his life in 1940 — and struggled with his mother, who packed the teenager off to a National Socialist military academy. As an eighteen-year-old he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and given a bleak prognosis. Though he survived, his permanently weakened lungs kept him in and out of sanatoriums; he died of a lung infection at the relatively young age of 58.
The spirit of death is palpable in many of Bernhard’s works, though not as a menace—more as a companion, a familiar if not entirely welcome figure. Menace comes rather in the form of Bernhard’s fellow human beings—in their pettiness, narrow-mindedness, greed, stupidity, mendacity, and hypocrisy.
His novels and autobiographical writings invariably take the form of first-person harangues — breathless diatribes that go on for a couple of hundred pages and then end as abruptly as they began. Largely without plot or characters (they exist but largely as objects of the narrator’s loathing), the works are rescued and redeemed by the genius of Bernhard’s voice. Bernhard had musical gifts, only his weak lungs made a musical career impossible. Yet his writing is profoundly musical in the manner of the compositions of Philip Glass. Words and figures endlessly repeat with slight variations, gradually accumulating a density of meaning and an intensity of feeling. His sentences tend to be long — often a single sentence can stretch for over a page — but for all the seeming refusal to make concessions to the reader—no plot, no paragraphs, and nary a period in sight — Bernhard’s books are actually quite easy to read, happily free of the difficulties of, say, Beckett, who clearly exercised a powerful influence on the Austrian. The one auspicious affinity they share with Beckett’s is their hilarity; Bernhard’s humor, if at times overlooked by his reviewers, is one of the most distinctive qualities of his work, as it is expressed not in set pieces or in comic situations, but through his narrators’ extraordinary exaggerations of language.
Many of the misanthropic sentiments given fulsome and amusing voice by Bernhard’s narrators were clearly shared by their creator. To describe Bernhard as the enfant terrible of the Austrian literary scene doesn’t quite do justice to the ill will he managed to arouse in his native land, which he once memorably characterized as a “mindless, cultureless sewer.” Still, this didn’t stop his countrymen from heaping literary accolades upon him, a fact that only further piqued his contempt and self-loathing.
This is the story told in My Prizes, a collection of autobiographical sketches originally written in 1980 that remained unpublished during Bernhard’s life. It wasn’t until 2009, on the twentieth anniversary of the author’s death, that the manuscript was published in Germany; Knopf brought out this excellent English translation at the end of 2010.
Admittedly it is an odd volume. A memoir of Bernhard’s harrowing encounters with book prizes would seem designed for an audience of devotees — a tiny if fervent group in this country. At the same time, this slim handsome volume, which in a departure from Bernhard’s work, is divided into readily digestible chapters, none longer than twenty pages, provides a nice, accessible introduction to a writer still very much a boutique item on these shores.
The stories themselves, if lacking the concentrated power of Bernhard’s best novels, Concrete and The Woodcutters, manage to avoid the pitfalls of self-indulgence and instead brilliantly vocalize the interior of a touchy, humorous, self-castigating misanthropist. In 1967, Bernhard received the Austrian State Prize for literature. This was, Bernhard explains at great length, the “so-called Small State prize,” which a writer “receives only for a particular piece of work and for which he has to nominate himself” and not for the “so-called Large State prize, which is given for a so-called life’s work.” Bernhard discovers that unbeknownst to him, his brother had hand delivered Frost on the last day of submissions; to the writer’s chagrin it won:
“Secretly I was thinking that the jury was indulging itself in sheer effrontery in giving me the Small Prize when of course the only thing I felt absolutely prepared to accept, should the question arise, and it had already been raised, was the Big Prize and not the Small, that it must be giving my enemies on this jury a fiendish pleasure to knock me from my pedestal by throwing the Small Prize at my head.”
At the award ceremony, the Minster of Culture, Art, and Education, “a former Secretary of the Provincial Agricultural Department in Steiermark,” describes Frost as a “novel that takes place on an island in the South Seas” and Bernhard as a “foreigner born in Holland.”
Bernhard “quietly” delivers his acceptance speech, “a very calm text,” a “philosophical one, profound even”—only to be greeted with the following reaction:
“… the Minister leapt to his feet, bright red in the face, and hurled some incomprehensible curse word at my head….The entire mob in the hall, all people who were dependent on the Minister, who had grants or pensions and above all the so-called Cultural Senate, which probably attends every prize ceremony, all of them rushed after the Minister out of the hall and down the broad flight of stairs.”
Bernhard’s sense of sincere and innocent bewilderment at the inexplicable rage triggered by his words finds hilarious counterpoint when, towards the end of My Prizes, we come upon a reprint of the short “calm text”:
"Our era is feebleminded, the demonic in us a perpetual national prison in which the elements of stupidity and thoughtlessness have become a daily need … We have nothing to report except that we are pitiful …”
Bernhard was clearly a difficult man, prickly and rude. I’m not sure I would have relished sharing a meal with him. But as a literary companion he is a peculiar delight. In his misanthropy and self-loathing we hear a voice at once scathing, amusing and tender.
[Published November 23, 2010. 144 pages, $22.00 hardcover]
Lawrence Douglas is the author most recently of The Vices (Other Press), a finalist for the 2011 National Jewish Book Award. He teaches at Amherst College.
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Shannon Cain on Drifting House, stories by Krys Lee (Penguin/Viking)
The stories in Krys Lee’s Drifting House are spun around surprising and terrible events. Whether arising from unthinking, self-absorbed everyday acts of violence or extraordinary, life-shattering moments, these shocks, these gestures, these tragic acts are Lee’s daring and courageous terrain. Hers are not quiet stories; the characters here make unforgivable choices and do awful things. They commit murders and assaults, abandonments and humiliations, infidelities, suicides, incest and cruel silences. The characters in Drifting House behave badly because they’re insane, because they crave power, because they need protection, or because they’re crippled by fear and longing and love.
But although these stories unfailingly give us individuals with a complexity of personal and differing motivations, Drifting House remains a collection about a culture, a people, a nation. While each character here is screwed up in his or her tragically unique way, they share in common a struggle against and within a Korea that seems designed to work against their chances for happiness.
Some of the stories are set in America; others are set in the city of Seoul. The latter are infused with place, reliant upon it, returning to it again and again as means toward characterization, motivation, subtext. The Seoul stories exploit their setting to its fullest — and in Lee’s hands this exploitation translates into an invisible ubiquity; a gorgeous unobtrusiveness. Seoul becomes a place of weird displacement. Characters know the city intimately yet still feel disoriented; they have strange and sad adventures; in their misery they feel part of a community, a sad, comforting dissolution of self. In “The Salaryman,” an unemployed and now homeless worker finds his place among the disenfranchised of the city:
“Seoul Station may stink of urine and flesh and futility, the police may hound these subterranean arcade residents, the other city, but it keeps you warm, and this matters, for last night you woke up outside shivering with dew in your lashes. Now your back hugs the cold wall and drunk voices boom as you fish for your wallet with its family photos. But it has already been stolen. That’s when you realize you are no longer needed.”
There are no familiar characters here; Lee gives us none of the predictable problems often found in the literature of the immigrant experience and those living in the international shadow of the American Dream. While these characters do of course grapple with the impact of war, of escape from the mother country and of everyday American prejudice, their problems are not central to the stories but are rather the backdrop, the living conditions, the air to be breathed. The cultural perspective of the characters, the oppressions and the attitudes that keep them from happiness — is less a central subject than a gossamer thread that disappears subtly into the story’s weave, only to emerge later via shimmering detail and historical insight.
So while this is decidedly a book about the Korean and Korean-American experience, the problems of these characters are rarely problems of immigration or assimilation or bias or hatred but (more satisfyingly), problems of their own making. In “A Temporary Marriage,” a brutalized woman whose violent ex-husband divorced her and kidnapped her daughter turns out to be chillingly and helplessly complicit in her own victimization. In the story’s final gesture we are shown the ancient and uncontrollable nature of her suffering; that her pain is shared by generations of women who came before. We begin to see that even though these stories hold their characters fully responsible for the choices they’ve made, their options were limited from the start.
The despair in this collection is profound, bone-shaking, shuddering. A child of eleven leads his younger siblings on an unsurvivable trek across a snowy mountain range, believing the mother who abandoned them waits on the other side. An abused woman makes her way to America to find her kidnapped child and to confront her ex-husband, only to be instead confronted — and confounded — by her own role as a collaborator in her victimization. A girl comes home from school to find the gruesome outcome of her insane mother’s act of brutal violence, and in the aftermath finds herself crossing an unthinkable line with her father as a way toward a tragic mutual comfort.
These stories force the reader to consider whether given the limitations of our culture, our history and our national mistakes, we ever able to break free. In “The Believer,” a shocking tale that competes with the title story for the collection’s most courageous, it becomes finally clear that sharing even the most unbearable pain keeps us feeling less alone:
“But outside the window, Jenny thought, beyond the fun house décor and forced cheer of the Happy Meal box, someone was committing suicide, someone was grieving the murder of their son or daughter, someone was enduring God’s endless tests. The thought connected her to a vast web of strangers, and their confusion and hurt became hers.”
[Published February 2, 2012. 207 pages, $25.95 hardcover]
Shannon Cain’s story collection, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors (University of Pittsburgh, 2011) was awarded the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. She lives in Tucson.
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Mark Athitakis on The New Republic, a novel by Lionel Shriver (Harper Collins)
At 15, Margaret Ann Shriver changed her first name to Lionel because, she has said, a more manly name was a better fit for her tomboy personality. (“[My parents] thought it was a phase I was going through,” she told one interviewer. “I’m still in the phase.”) It was a fitting move for a writer who’s spent much of her career interested in split personalities and second selves. Her 1997 novel, Double Fault, follows a pair of dueling, hypercompetitive tennis players, and her 2003 breakthrough, We Need to Talk About Kevin, pits a well-intentioned mother against her demon-spawn child. Shriver’s studies of these divisions can be ingenious and nuanced: Her 2007 masterpiece, The Post-Birthday World, places her heroine on two alternating tracks, one pursuing an affair and the other remaining loyal to her husband. But she can be unapologetically unsubtle when she has a message to deliver. In her 2010 healthcare polemic, So Much for That, one man bucks the system and is rewarded with paradise on earth. Another obsesses over that system and winds up chopping off his genitals and blowing his head off. Life is a series of tough decisions; choose wisely.
Shriver’s nervy prose usually sells this binary perspective, elevates it from its obvious artifice. She writes with a clear eye, dark humor, and skeptical tone that make her the closest thing contemporary fiction has to Bill Hicks, a satirist as social realist. That’s right, I had a guy take a hatchet to his junk, you imagine her saying. Got a problem with that? The smirking style and the doppelgangers in her new novel, The New Republic, are in keeping with that attitude, though the book has had a harder time in the marketplace. As she writes in an introductory note, publishers balked after she finished the novel in 1998, worried that readers considered terrorism “Foreigners’ Boring Problem.” In the years after 9/11, a novel with the line “the ‘terrorists’ of today are the town-square monuments of tomorrow” didn’t stand a chance.
Today, an acclaimed film version of We Need to Talk About Kevin has raised Shriver’s profile, terrorism is Our Damn Problem, and the end-of-irony era has long since passed, so The New Republic gets to live. Its hero, Edgar Kellogg, has quit his job as a corporate lawyer to pursue a foundering freelance writing career, and in desperation he picks up work as a stringer for a USA Today-ish national newspaper. His destination is Barba, an “Iberian slagheap” south of Portugal where he’s assigned to suss out the truth about a terrorist group called Os Soldados Ousados de Barba (the SOBs for short), and figure out what happened to the beat’s previous reporter, Barrington Saddler. “Better History’s secretary than Philip Morris’s lawyer,” he tells an editor in an interview, though privately he thinks Barba is one of many “too-complicated-and-who-gives-a-fuck shit holes about which [he] refused to read.”
This setup has aged poorly. The idea of an writer landing a gig at national paper’s foreign bureau on the basis of a mere handful of clips would be mildly ridiculous in the mid- to late 90s; today, with most foreign bureaus shuttered, it’s pure fantasy. Shriver’s vision of terrorism resembles less Islamic radicalism than Irish republicanism; the SOBs and its semilegitimate political wing, O Crème de Barbear (referred to with the intentionally revolting term the Creamies) evoke the IRA and Sinn Fein. And even the most cynical, seen-it-all reporter would have a hard time embracing Shriver’s argument that the media perpetuates terrorism as a kind of act of job preservation. The New Republic is an artifact from a time when we could look at both journalism and terrorism more callously -- as if the former would always be there and the latter might affect us, but not too terribly much.
Yet personality crises never get old, and the novel’s strength is in Edgar’s character reinvention, his reckoning with second selves past and present. We’re reminded often that Kellogg was the stereotypical fat kid as child, until he obsessively pursued a fitness regimen upon which his sense of confidence hinges. It’s a shallow way to frame your sense of well being, and Edgar will slowly grow aware of that. But he also knows that perception is often reality: “[P]eople will exonerate sadists, braggarts, liars, and even slack-jawed morons before they’ll pardon eyesores. If you’re attractive, people need a reason to dislike you; if you’re ugly, people need a reason to like you. They don’t usually find one.”
However true or false that high-school-pecking-order vision of reality might be --- and Shriver doesn’t dismiss it outright --- it fuels Edgar’s parrying with the missing journalist. Though Saddler isn’t actually present for most of the novel, he’s a constant presence: Edgar lives in his old apartment with his cryptic notes and possessions, and the novel’s most affecting scenes pit the two against each other. Or, rather, they pit Edgar against himself, using an imagined Saddler to project the feelings he won’t admit to. Through Saddler, he can voice his obsession with a colleague’s wife, with his body, with the ego that’s pushed him into a byline-driven profession. “You think you’re irreverent, caustic --- slick, downtown, and better-not-cross-me,” Edgar-as-Saddler tells Edgar. “In truth, you’re an easily injured former fat boy looking for love.”
Even a satirist cracking wise about terrorism has to acknowledge the actual bloodshed it generates, and Shriver does so in the closing chapters. But she also approaches it grudgingly; the novel’s true climax has less to do with explosions and international politics than with Edgar’s Heart of Darkness-style discovery of the in-the-flesh Saddler. That meeting, more than anything he learns from his fellow journalists or Barban politicians, teaches him how shallow his true self is. “Given a choice, Edgar might rather revere a hero than be one,” she writes. We all pick alter egos, Shriver wants us to know---that’s not just the stuff of fiction. But we choose which ones we admire at our peril.
[Published March 27, 20112. 368 pages, $26.99 hardcover]
Mark Athitakis is a Washington, D.C.-based book reviewer whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Barnes & Noble Review, and many other publications. He serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and blogs at ”American Fiction Notes.”
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Laura Kasischke on The Nine Senses by Melissa Kwasny (Milkweed Editions)
“See how the morning light lies on the top planes of the venetian blinds. And the tree, whole and shining, in the spaces between. Through the cracks, look. A simile, its little hinge. Today’s story. The hour’s lesson …” (from “The Nine Senses”).
The Nine Senses is a book of paragraphs: seventy-one paragraphs, to be precise. But you have never read a paragraph before! You open the book thinking, naively, that you have read paragraphs before, and that you have some idea of what one will be. You think you know how long it takes to read a paragraph, and what it can and can’t contain. Even if it’s a prose poem, this paragraph, you think certain gestures will be made, and you will recognize the those gestures and read on, and you’ll still be yourself at the end of the paragraph. But Melissa Kwasny has written seventy-one paragraphs that remake the idea of what prose, contained on a page, can do. She has invented a magic paragraph, perhaps.
“Say you’ve been dealt the King Lear. The father with the rotting member. In the home you are not happy in, do you talk to god? Who holds your death as ransom. Who needs his wife …” (from “The Trumpet Place”).
It’s hard to tell you about this book without holding it up, and pointing at parts of it, saying, “Look how you start somewhere you’ve never been, wander into your own childhood bedroom, and leave ruined, remade, with wings.” Melissa Kwasny has accomplished, with her strange art, that which they say never can be: You’ve heard that we are born and die alone, parceled into our separate consciousnesses. But this poet has found a way to blow her own consciousness into yours.
“I heard it fall and then its shuffling in the unburned paper of the last fire. Do you have a story about a chimney and a bird? Because here I am in a forest, and it is just before dark …” (from “Talk to the Water Dipper”).
Through her musical questions, slippery shifts, crafty and crazed associations, she’s invented a mind machine. She has done what Owen Barfield speaks of in Poetic Diction — induced in the reader a ‘felt change of consciousness.’ I recently came upon a book called Get High Now (Without Drugs). It’s full of meditation games and suggestions for self-hypnosis. (They work.) Melissa Kwasny’s seventy-one paragraphs belong in this book for the hallucinogenic properties of its accumulated power.
“Bluff and double-bluff. We could make ourselves sick waiting for this place to open up to us. Polished by our childhoods. Bruises the waves leave. Shell: skinned knee, scraped marble. We know too much about process to get around it …” (from “Shell”).
That’s what this book is! A mind machine. Its seventy-one paragraphs are the moving parts of the machine. You can read this book cover to cover and take a journey in the traveling machine, or you can open it at any paragraph, any sentence in any paragraph, and be sucked into the spinning machine.
“Holy brothers, your dark leprosy is echoed in the sparrow-flecked fields of late November. Moleskin of the hillside. Yellowed velvet of the lawns. And the mill-stream, which I borrow from the poet Trakl …” (fropm “De Profundis”).
We have all been talking for so long about when and where a new turn in poetry will take place, and here it’s been on the shelf already for a year! Melissa Kwasny has invented the paragraph! You’ve never read one before.
[Published March 1, 2011. 96 pages, $16.00 paperback]
Laura Kasischke has published eight poetry collections and nine novels. Her latest poems in Space, In Chains (Copper Canyon) won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Her most recent novel is The Raising (Harper Perennial 2011. She teaches at the University of Michigan.
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Patricia Henley on Echolocation, a novel by Myfanwy Collins (Engine Books)
When I was a teenager living on a country road in Maryland, a girlfriend and I used to walk to a store about a mile away. The shoulder of the road was a thin strip of gravel and I would will the cars away from me, when there were cars. It felt remote. Maggie’s store was our destination, next to an apple packing plant. I don’t know if the store had a name beyond that. Maggie was the proprietor and she lived behind the store. The floors were worn wood. If we happened to arrive there mid-morning, we might see her tossing down the used coffee grounds and sweeping the floor with them, patiently, methodically. She kept on eye on all the youngsters who came in for jawbreakers and candy bars, determined to prevent them stealing. I think I bought my first pack of cigarettes there, in the day when such purchases were not regulated. I was aware that my girlfriend attracted certain glances from the men who sat on stools by the woodstove winter or summer. Glances that I did not attract. Glances Geneva in Echolocation attracted as girl. Echolocation brought all that back to me and more, as I entered fully into the world of Cheri and Geneva and Aunt Marie, in Aunt Marie’s little store in upstate New York, just “a breath away from the border crossing.”
There’s a familiarity about the store when it’s introduced.
“Cheri opened the door to the typical jingling of the bell. The sound that was safety and home, that was you are here and you cannot leave. And the smell of the store: Nilla Wafers softening in their boxes, Vicks Vapo-rub, stale beer.”
The young women who were raised together – both abandoned by parents and adopted by Aunt Marie like strays – are brought together by Aunt Marie’s imminent death from cancer. One thinks of Joan Chase’s During the Reign of the Queen of Persia and the aunt dying of cancer and the girl cousins growing up together. But Echolocation is no story of women finding unparalleled strength in each other or reconciling. It is country noir, á la Daniel Woodrell. It is what may happen when people are shaped too much by the wilderness that surrounds them and not enough by their passions in the larger, more civilized world.
Lest we get too cozy in the country store, Myfanwy Collins first dishes up a three-page opening chapter, one of the best instigating events for a novel I’ve read since Ian McEwan’s hot-air balloon mishap in Enduring Love. Geneva is pissed at her husband Clint; their marriage has soured; she’s sad that she’s betraying the land and her dowry by cutting down timber to sell for firewood; and her spunky centeredness is eroded by a blue feeling, a doomed feeling. She can’t figure it out. When she loses control of the chainsaw and severs her arm, you will cancel appointments and shut off your phone to find out what happens next.
There is a fairy tale quality to the ending of this first chapter:
“Regardless of everyone’s best intentions, the arm could not be saved. And so beautiful Geneva would henceforth be known as one-armed Geneva – still beautiful, but flawed. Clint felt so bad about his wife’s disfigurement and how, had he been a better man, he might have prevented it, that he went down the street to the funeral home, met with the undertaker, and picked out a top of the line casket, white, silver-handled, with pink silk interior.
“There was no viewing, but there was a small service at the graveyard, led by Father O’Connor. Geneva was there, dressed in black, mourning, and as they lowered the baby-sized casket that encased what was once her living arm, complete with the engagement ring and wedding band still on the finger, into the ground, Geneva dropped a shovel full of dirt on it, looked right at Clint, and said, ‘Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.’ Later she vowed that those would be the last words she ever said to him. Ever.”
In the Florida chapters, Collins manages quite deftly to meld the timelessness of that fairy tale quality to the present-day grit of Titty’s Bar & Grill and the Lazy Palms trailer park.
A sense of foreboding and the impossibility of easy reunions – the way hurt and abandonment can be permanent roadblocks to love – lace every chapter of this novel. Still, the mayhem that ensues is shocking. It is skillfully rendered and believable. All of the women, including Renee, Cheri’s mother who appears with a kidnapped baby, inch toward each other emotionally, while events outside their control keep chugging in their direction like a freight train.
The language and lyricism of Myfanwy Collins’ prose never takes over; it reveals her tenderness toward the characters and the land. She is skilled at the puzzle of plot; she is skilled at poetry. This novel is a fine debut, portending more to come.
[Published March 6, 2012. 204 pages, $14.95 paperback]
Patricia Henley is the author of a collection of stories, Other Heartbreaks (Engine Books, October 2011), and two novels, Hummingbird House and In the River Sweet. She has published three other collections of stories, two chapbooks of poetry, and numerous essays.
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T. M. McNally on The Beginners, a novel by Rebecca Wolff (Riverhead Books)
Or: what haunts us is imagination.
What a mysterious and beautiful novel this is. Ravishing, that’s the word I keep coming back to, premised on the thrill of recognition which comes from being known. Certainly the poet and novelist Rebecca Wolff knows what it means to know and to be known.
The terms herein? Gothic, and knowingly so. Ginger, fifteen, lives in the small town, Wick, which is on the way to Anywhere, Massachusetts; she hangs with her best (and older and racy and nubile) friend, Cherry; Ginger’s parents are grieving the loss of their first-born son, Ginger’s older brother, Jack (a freak teenage accident); and then the Strangers Come to Town — Raquel and Theo, a grown-up couple, indeterminate age, beautiful, sexual, and libertine in the way that physical beauty and youth uninhibited by social constraint so often seem to be. These strangers, Raquel and Theo, are, in a word, free.
And what is childhood if not bound with the fences staked by inexperience? This is not a novel about coming of age, that dreadful phrase, but rather about coming to be. Meanwhile, adventures ensue, and the eerie presence of ghosts abounds.
There is the ghost of Jack, the dead brother, whose loss to Ginger’s parents causes them to grieve while simultaneously neglecting their remaining daughter (too, our narrator is mindful that one person’s neglect is another person’s freedom). Thus Ginger is free to grow and to explore the influence of other lives in the town of Wick: among them, the dead, who were washed away by the filling of the town’s local reservoir; and the women of New England who were set on trial because they were, what, women? Among the living we have the perpetually hovering Mr. Penrose, her boss, and Randy Thibodeau, the bad boy who drives the motorcycle, and then there are the Mysterious Strangers. Ostensibly Raquel and Theo are graduate students doing research on the town’s history, though there are other versions, too, which mean to describe who and what they are: eccentric, electric, crazy, psychopathic, or, perhaps, just free. “This,” says either Raquel or Theo, our narrator is not certain, “is what it’s like to do what you want.”
The plot of this novel travels the border of childhood to adulthood, or a state of indeterminate agency to self-authorship, and as is true for all border landscapes, not everybody makes the crossing: the territory is fraught with danger and marked with graves. Ginger is fifteen, but our narrator is, we are reminded, near the cusp of her majority, and so we have a guide prescient enough to liken evil to “a floating contingency of being, like a hat that lands on one’s head.” Ginger, we understand early on, is a waitress at the Top Hat café, and thus are the novel’s terms established. The weather here is changing and she is growing up. And central to the events to follow is an articulation of ideas relating to power and its exchange, an exchange which will be repeatedly played out in the realm of the sexual.
Here is an early passage:
“At fifteen I still possessed a child’s native capacity for belief — some call it naïveté but I prefer to think of it as a positive attribute, a capability — and enjoyed a commensurate appetite for phenomena in which to believe. Another appetite that diminishes as we mature. Already, now, telling this story — though I have not yet achieved majority — the weight of adult accountability descends, and I assent to the banality of truth, to the scale’s discernible tipping on the side of whatever is the simplest explanation. The simplest explanation for any phenomenon is usually the correct one. The correct explanation is the simplest one. A ghost is a draft of cold air on the skin, a neuron-fueled shape in the dark hour of sleep. A mind reader is, at best, someone who pays closer attention to detail than most, who is wide open to suggestion. At worst, she is a con artist. A witch is a woman with an enemy or two. Is this simple enough to sustain us? I ask you.
In fact, The Beginners takes its title from a category of pornographic magazines, a catalogue of methodologies for “deflowering” young women, which Ginger thumbs through the pages of at work while filling time. Early in the novel, while confronting a figure of male authority, her boss, we watch Ginger dip her toe into the waters of sexual dynamics: “How he must hate himself,” she observes. “I thought then that the one in power in this position, the one closest to the mirror, the one who is entered, must be sure not to betray her innocence, her uncertainty, her obscure longings, or she would run the risk of sharing that humiliation, that powerlessness. She must be as impenetrable above as she is yielding below.”
Wolff is using the lens of sexuality here to locate agency. This pattern of yielding while asserting one’s power, of leveraging one’s vulnerability to gain leverage, or experience, that psychological judo that complicates balance, recurs thematically — leading our narrator finally to “an irreducible mixture of ultimate vulnerability and ultimate power.” It’s a destination made possible only by the events which lead to it. And certainly there is far more at work here in The Beginners than an initiation into the racy and the scandalous. Indeed, the novel’s title itself invokes T. S. Eliot’s observation from “East Coker” — “in my beginning is my end,” and vice versa — all of which begs the modernist question first inspired by the book of Ecclesiastes — what takes place in between? The act of perception, that is what separates a beginning from an end, an end from a beginning. The art of seeing makes life worth living.
Meanwhile, the novel’s poetics dwell not on the pedestrian (is brilliant Raquel a ghost, or crazy, or both?) but on the archetypal, the mythical and the psychological — on consciousness, and all of the implications of its various states. Throughout the story there are lying in wait the murky waters of the unconscious, typified narratively by the pull of the fresh-water reservoir in which the locals go skinny-dipping; there are the dark woods surrounding the town, and the attendant dangers which lurk inside all dark woods; there are the dim and brassy halls of the Wick Social Club, where the town’s Men of Standing gather to legislate and drink, as those with clubs (whack) often do; and then there is that peculiar matter of the self: the certain part of oneself, if one is brave enough to look within and find her, that is willing to devour the other. The self’s own ouroboros.
In this novel experience feeds experience, which allows for perception, and still the novel elides, hopscotching over whatever threatens to deflect the narrator’s aim. Just as the meaning of a given life does not necessarily rest in the events of the life one lives, so too the plot in this novel is far more large than, say, the gravestones in the cemetery to which these figures are mysteriously led. The story, I’m suggesting, is bigger than the story: and herein lies the key to its brilliance. The novel, Ginger’s story, is not about the meaning of what happens, but rather it is about how what happens lends itself to meaning, how the actual and dream-like both create and inhabit the self which lives, and how things mean whatever it is the self, in any given place and time, wills them to mean.
Wolff’s prose, unleashed by the range of her narrator’s relentlessly inquisitive mind, astounds. The novel is built on stanzas of rumination which dazzle by way of their -- to pinch from Italo Calvino -- Exactitude. Filtered through the wide eyes of a young girl, and propelled by an intellectually mature narrator with a blistering intelligence, the entire landscape of Wick is lit-up with a poetic light blinding in its insight. “In every instant lies a pattern,” Ginger says, “a code, from which every antecedent moment can be predicted.” It is this mindfulness of the novel’s own DNA which offers such a pattern of wholeness and beauty to the experience of reading it. As Raquel reminds, “Nothing like a sunset to bring two people together, is there?”
This is a ghost story in the very best sense: the parts of ourselves we never really do let go of, or let go of us; those parts of ourselves which haunt and, in so haunting, inspire. Think of the oak tree built right out of the acorn, and the acorn the mature tree can’t quite let go of. In my experience novels about childhood are never about childhood. About danger? Certainly. About mystery and the collusions of biology? You betcha. Still, as any poet knows, and some novelists, the origins of a story reside not in the setting, or the history, the facts of any matter; the origins of any story, rather, derive always from the voice which speaks — the soul’s breath, which gives that story shape and, however fleetingly, meaning.
A mid-book passage:
“I like the idea of auras: an organic by-product of living. A gentle, benevolent example of the baffling reserve of potentially real phenomena that we mostly cannot entertain as real, in order to live comfortably. Auras are organic, ghosts are supernatural, the mind is a combustion engine of perception, routinely creating and destroying and creating anew what matters—our hearths, our tongues. Who can dare to navigate these waters and still call herself a useful member of society? It takes all of your breath away. It cleanses your palate of its taste for that which is comfortable. Ordinary knowledge, ordinary society, ordinary love.
But if comfort is not your highest priority, then you might live as we did.”
In this light, then, I can’t help thinking that the real ghost in this beautiful story is the Ghost of Ginger’s Future Self — the fearless woman she is yet to become, that narrator off in the distance. And the narrator’s ghost? Given that we all have one? That would be Ginger the Younger, the fifteen-year-old girl scampering through the summer pages of this novel in her sneakers and shorts, crushing on the older, dangerous grownups, discovering that the imaginary castle which fills her childhood daydreams really is a mill, a factory, and in which she will begin to know and trust her first and most dangerous and primal self.
[Published June 30, 2011. 304 pages, $26.95/$16.00]
T. M. McNally is the author of six books of fiction, including the novel The Goat Bridge (University of Michigan, 2007). His rcollection of stories, The Gateway (Southern Methodist, 2007) was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
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Dan Pope on Lightning Rods, a novel by Helen DeWitt (New Directions)
Helen DeWitt’s novel Lightning Rods, her second book to follow The Last Samurai, runs on two engines.
The first is the premise, an utterly original bit of mischief. A failed vacuum cleaner salesman named Joe, Dewitt’s protagonist, comes up with an idea. To reduce sexual harassment claims in the workplace and increase (male) employee productivity, Joe offers a unique personnel plan to employers: on-site female prostitutes, which he calls “lightning rods.”
The way Joe sees it, “You invest in training. A man is bringing in $100 million of business. You leave him open to the danger of momentarily forgetting himself with a little $25,000 a year secretary?” For Joe, rather than risk lawsuits, it makes better sense for men to have “a way of siphoning off all that [sexual] hostility” at work, so they can “go back to the office and get on with the job.”
Joe pitches his idea to various corporate officials until a CEO takes him up on the idea. For reasons that make sense to Joe, the “lightning rods” must be disguised as ordinary secretaries to preserve their anonymity. In addition to typing, though, the women respond to calls two or three times per day to have sex with male employees in a handicap bathroom. The sex occurs in a convoluted fashion, so that neither party can see the other’s face. Specifically, the female, wholly naked, kneels on a sort of conveyor belt and is transported “ass backwards” through a hole in the wall into the bathroom. The male, waiting on the other side, is presented with her hindquarters. A dispenser provides “lube” and condoms.
As the action progresses, Joe tweaks this arrangement, adding a lever to raise or lower the platform, magazines for the women to read during the procedure, and various attire additions (short tight skirts in manmade leopard skin, PVC leggings). There are safeguards to protect the women in their job-performance. If the man tries to exceed the parameters of the sexual agreement, the woman can press a button that locks the man in the bathroom.
The premise is very funny and, of course, absurd, like all good satire.
The second engine which runs this novel is the narrative voice, and this is DeWitt’s real coup. The entire novel is presented in the bland, soul-killing language of corporate America, a combination of Human Resource-speak, sales mumbo-jumbo, and positive-thinking clichés. DeWitt never departs from this peculiar American idiom and never goes any deeper than the superficial observations of the ordinary corporate shill. This is a first as literary accomplishments go: an entire novel written in the clichéd idiom of the infomercial.
Here’s an excerpt:
“A good salesman pays attention to his instincts. Even if a product is selling, even if the customer appears satisfied, if you’re dissatisfied with some feature of the product sooner or later the public is going to catch up with you. Or, to put it another way, a competitor is going to come along who has ironed out that particular wrinkle. If you can get to that wrinkle first, while building on the brand loyalty you have hopefully established, you’re way ahead of the game.”
Joe is incapable of interpreting human impulse in terms other than business interaction. “One of the things that’s perennially fascinating about the world,” Joe observes, “is the way people sell things to themselves.” A few pages later, he notes, “One thing you soon realize in marketing is that there’s a lot that goes on in people that they themselves don’t necessarily understand.”
DeWitt mines this bland language for all its comic possibility. When a particular sexual encounter goes beyond what the woman expects, Joe tells her, “Remember Suzanne, we don’t know the whole story. For all you know the client may have just been taken to task by someone higher up in way that he perceived as humiliating … I’m not condoning what happened ... I’m just saying we have to see this in a wider context.”
Give DeWitt credit for boldness. She bucks the first rule of creative writing (avoid clichés at all cost!). Here, though, the reader accepts, and delights in, the relentless stream of generalities and empty platitudes because this is how Joe, our hero, thinks and speaks, just as a Valley Girl (if there is still such a thing) speaks in her particular debased lingo.
The problem, though, comes about a third into the novel, when DeWitt switches from Joe’s point of view to various other employees at the company – Lucille, Pete, Ed, Bill, etc. -- all of whom, regrettably, speak the same language as Joe. “Sometimes life forces you to learn things about yourself that you would rather not know,” thinks Ed. The voice never varies, and it soon becomes a bit, well, tedious. The other engine – the premise – falls flat in the end too, as DeWitt, instead of following that premise where it might lead, detours instead into a political subplot involving the FBI and further silliness about the invention of an adjustable-height toilet.
It seems as if DeWitt didn’t fully appreciate the brilliance of her premise and the uniqueness of her protagonist, to leave them behind so quickly. This raises the question of what sort of writer DeWitt is, and after two novels, I’m not sure I can offer any conclusions, other than to attest to her originality. She reportedly attempted to finish as many as fifty novels before completing The Last Samurai in 1998, and she has four or five more in the works at the moment. She is a fascinating novelist, and it will be interesting to see how she appears in her next book.
[Published October 5, 2011, 275 pages, $24.95 hardcover]
Dan Pope’s stories have been published recently in The Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, McSweeney’s, Postroad and other magazines. His novel is In the Cherry Tree (2003, Picador).
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Jane Delury on Forgotten Country, a novel by Catherine Chung (Riverhead Books)
Forgotten Country is a beautifully written, haunting novel. Its narrator, Janie, is a young woman who was born in Seoul and uprooted as a child to Michigan due to her father’s dissident activities. Janie grows up with two names (she’s Jeehyun in Korean), two languages, and two cultures. At the start of the novel, her sister, Hannah, has quit college and disappeared. The eldest child, Janie has always felt responsible for Hannah, having been warned by her grandmother that in every generation of her family, a sister dies. Yet it soon becomes clear that Hannah has chosen to cut ties with her family and to start a new life. Soon after, Janie and Hannah’s father is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Rather than do as her parents wish and tell Hannah about their father’s condition, Janie keeps the news to herself. Having made herself into an only child, she takes a leave from her studies in mathematics and goes with her parents to the countryside of South Korea, where her father undergoes experimental treatment.
Despite its opening premise of a disappearance, Forgotten Country defies the obvious question that such a plot could explore: what has happened to Hannah? Instead, the mysteries of circumstance are quickly resolved and the novel turns to more subtle ground, exploring the patterns of rejection and need that run through this family. Why can’t Janie forgive Hannah? Why does she so want her father’s approval? Once in Korea, Janie can’t avoid these questions, just as she can’t avoid what she learns about her parents’ pasts. A likeable but flawed narrator, Janie makes mistakes that she recognizes and others that she tries to convince herself are justified. She is endowed with enough insight to be reflective and enough of a sense for language to produce descriptions like this one: “The pond had changed since the afternoon: the dim evening light had turned the water greener, and the flowers around it seemed brighter. Scores of tiny silver fish were visible just beneath the surface of the water, and beneath them the heavy shadows of the large, dark fish.”
The novel flows exquisitely from the present narrative into the anecdotes and legends on which Janie and Hannah have been raised. A scene in which Janie Googles her father’s illness cedes to the story of the girl Simchung who sacrifices herself to the Dragon King to save her father’s life. Guided by the light of Janie’s imagination, the reader visits Korea under the Japanese Occupation and during the Korean War, and walks with Janie’s mother through the night to the DMZ. In her engaging voice, Janie explores what she knows and what she suspects as she attempts to understand her parents, her sister, and herself before her father dies. In college, she has studied knot theory “and learned that sometimes a knot is impossible to unravel without cutting it apart. Sometimes it can’t be undone. For my whole life my family had been so tightly bound that we had stifled each other just trying to breathe, just trying to go our own ways. I had worried I would never get free.”
Unlike so many novels that peter out as they go, Forgotten Country gets richer as it moves forward. The chapters in South Korea are often breathtaking in their evocation of physical and emotional landscape. But Chung doesn’t depend on easy cultural details to seduce her reader. Though we are brought to rice paddies and into the boughs of persimmon trees, this could be any family, anywhere, facing an end. There are revelations, yes, actions of the past whose consequences emerge in the present, but the novel’s best moments are quiet: two young sisters holding hands as they fall asleep, a father and daughter lying in the grass as below them, “trees gripped each other’s roots,” a mother standing in a doorway to greet her daughter. Forgotten Country is a novel that credits its reader with intelligence and depth, a gentle and compelling book.
[Published March 1, 2012, 304 pages, $26.95 hardcover]
Jane Delury’s fiction has appeared in The PEN/O.Henry Stories, Narrative, The Southern Review and other publications. She is on the faculty of the University of Baltimore’s MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts.
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Michael Guista on The Architect of Flowers, stories by William Lychack (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books)
One of my favorite essays as a youth was Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus,” the tale of the man condemned to rolling the ball up the hill--only to have it roll back down--for eternity. Such an absurd existence! Yet the essay ends, for those who don’t recall, with these words: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
I’d always read the ending in an optimistic way, each word weighted about the same: despite the absurdity, a man can have purpose and so find happiness. Yet others read it, given the context of Camus’ complete works, as this: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” What a difference emphasizing a word can make. I never felt the same after hearing that interpretation. Funny how the accent on a single word has the potential to swiftly change a person’s whole outlook on life.
I thought of Camus while reading Lychack’s work for a couple of reasons. For one, Lychack’s prose worries terribly about every word, its meaning, its sound, its fit into the rhythm of sentences and paragraphs. The other reason is that Lychack’s characters live, for the most part, in the condition of absurdity. There’s the lady in “Chickens” who buys two dozen chicks only to raise them and find later that all but one is a rooster. There’s the lady about to visit her dead husband’s grave who can’t stop thinking about the time he brought home an eel. The woman in the title story fabricates the death of her husband in order to reunite her family. There’s the inspirational writer in “Ghostwriter” who follows his boss’s orders to include in each story an “IPIG — I Prayed I Got — or ITIJ — I Trust in Jesus.” He follows a man who God has told to go to Peoria. Give up everything and go! He tells the ghostwriter,“It’s easy to obey and serve the Lord when you have security …. It’s quite easy when your insurance and rent are paid. But try giving away everything, putting yourself at stake for something in the world, because that is where faith and trust and believing begin.” The ghostwriter later thinks to himself, “and what in the end is the difference between Go to Peoria and WriteThe Book? Or Marry the girl? Or any of the countless passions that guide our days? What else carries us through our lives, gives us meaning, helps us make sense of the accidents that befall us? And when I think of it like this, I actually feel— or believe — that the best in us is utterly mad. The meaning of our lives, our purpose, everything we care about starts as a dim voice, a small urge driving us on to our own kinds of Peoria.”
Although writing a collection of short stories can seem quite absurd to most publishers and agents and, well, civilization, in the best of them one senses purpose throughout. There’s genuineness and a sense of mission in the form when done right. Lychack, recently a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, winner of the Sherwood Anderson award, and NEA recipient, never goes for fancy but rather gritty realism (except for in two quite well-written fables, which, to be honest with you, don’t fit so neatly into this collection for me, despite a diction consistent with the rest of the stories). Here’s the standard kind of Lychack imagery, in which he describes a dying dog: “The dog’s eyes are closed when you look — bits of straw on her nose, her teeth yellow, strands of snot on her tongue — nothing moving until you stand and kick the blood back into your legs, afternoon turning into evening, everything going grainy in the light.”
At times his prose turns dreamy-lyrical, as in the middle of his title story: “There once was a language of flowers. A handful of hawthorn for a safe journey home. Hyacinth for forgiveness. Ferns making everything sincere. And if she dawdled over zinnia this time—flower of maternal love—it was because each orange petal put her son on a train to her. A lifetime of lingering, but at least now it was hope—daisies and bluebells—that drew her through the rooms of the house, at least now it was some promise of happiness—crocus and dahlia—that pulled her up the stairs to her son’s room.” Yet no matter how violent or at times darkly funny or at other times sad the prose, I always feel an underlying meaningfulness and inevitability in his work; in every sentence of his book, I feel that this sentence needs to be in exactly this spot.
Some readers have found his plentiful use of fragments unsettling. Yet fragments have a purpose when done right. Two of his stories are written in second person. He never uses quotation marks around dialogue. Some of the works are more character studies than narratives. Occasionally he uses clichés (“On her deathbed, as she drew what were to be her last breaths on God’s green earth…”), but sometimes, I think, the cliché seems more real than the fresh metaphor (and much more real than the clever metaphor) Forget fancy. Forget following the rules (Thou shalt not write in second person!) There’s a direct simplicity to his writing that cuts to his characters’ cores: “We laugh—and everything rhymes with everything else—all of us remembering kids up in trees, a rabid coyote to shoot, and Bob driving up to the farm the night of the flood, telling us not to worry, put all our important papers on top of the fridge.”
Here’s an example of Lychack’s simplicity of understatement: “No one sets out to be a complete fuckup, as his father once told him. It just sort of happens, Michael.” At the end of “Stolepstad,” the book’s masterpiece, a policeman who in trying to do the right thing does exactly the wrong thing, thinks, “And in the silence, in the darkness, you stand like a thief on the lawn--stand watching this house for signs of life—wavering as you back gently away from the porch, away from the light of the windows, away until you’re gone at the edge of the woods, a piece of dark within the dark, Sheila arriving to that front door, eventually, this woman calling for something to come in out of the night.” Despite the bleakness facing most of these characters’ lives, there’s a glimmer of hope against the sadness; the prose, plain and deeply imagistic, rolls the giant ball back up the hill and looks down. It’s enough.
[Published March 23, 2011, 176 pages, $14.00 paperback]
Michael Guista’s story collection Brain Work(2005, Houghton Mifflin) won the Katherine Bakeless Nason award in fiction. His agent is currently pitching his new collection, Manhood.
| Lionel Shriver |
Which band, formed in 2001, includes Ana Matronic, Babydaddy and Jake Shears? | Lionel Shriver: "Big Brother" - The Diane Rehm Show
The Diane Rehm Show
Wednesday, Jun 12 2013 • 11 a.m. (ET)
Lionel Shriver: “Big Brother”
Discuss
Lionel Shriver is known for bringing a brutally honest perspective to current events in her newspaper columns and fiction. Her latest novel, “Big Brother,” examines our complex contemporary attitudes toward food and body size. It’s the story of a 40-year-old woman caught between a fitness freak husband and a morbidly obese brother. She must chose whether to risk her marriage or try to save her brother from eating himself to death. The author’s own brother died from weight-related complications four years ago. We talk about America’s preoccupation with food and how it affects all our relationships.
Guests
Lionel Shriver journalist and author. Her novels include “So Much for That,” “The Post-Birthday World” and the 2005 Orange Prize-winner, “We Need to Talk About Kevin.”
Read An Excerpt
Excerpted with permission from “Big Brother” by Lionel Shriver. Available from Harper. Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved.
Transcript
11:06:56
MS. DIANE REHMThanks for joining us. I'm Diane Rehm. Lionel Shriver dedicated her latest novel to her older brother, Greg. He died three years ago at the age of 55 from complications of obesity. The title of her novel is "Big Brother" and tackles America's fraught relationship with food.
11:07:21
MS. DIANE REHMThe book also raises questions about conflicted responsibilities we often feel about those we love. Lionel Shriver joins me in the studio. Please call us, 800-433-8850, join us in our conversation by email to [email protected], join us on Facebook or send us a tweet. Good morning to you.
11:07:51
MS. LIONEL SHRIVERGood morning Diane.
11:07:53
REHMI'm so glad you're here. I've read so much about you and certainly after reading this book titled "Big Brother" a novel I recognized that you wrote about your own big brother in a column. Tell us about him.
11:08:20
SHRIVERWell, my brother ended up getting quite large toward the end of his life but for most of his adulthood he was slender as could be. And as with so many people who end up getting heavy, his story was complicated, it wasn't simply he had an uncontrollable appetite for cupcakes.
11:08:44
SHRIVERHe had two severe accidents. He was beaten up by a baseball bat and then he was T-boned on his moped and both of those incidents nearly killed him. And that meant that he had restrictions on his mobility, he could hardly walk and on top of that he was a heavy smoker and he dragged this oxygen machine behind him all the time.
11:09:11
SHRIVERAnd it was heartbreaking because he was quite an accomplished person and I'd always admired him. He dropped out of school when he was 14 years old and he taught himself to become a sound engineer from just reading books and this was before the Internet. So it was hard to be an autodidact in those days. You had to go to the library or the bookstore.
11:09:38
SHRIVERAnd he ended up being Philip Glass's sound engineer when "Einstein on the Beach" went to New York. He toured through Europe with Harry Belafonte. So, you know, he's a really accomplished person.
11:09:55
REHMExactly.
11:09:55
SHRIVERAnd one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was I got frustrated by the way I could once he became quite heavy that when people saw him on the street or dealt with him socially when he went to a restaurant. All other people saw was some fat guy and I really resented it.
11:10:18
REHMYou resented it but how did he feel?
11:10:24
SHRIVERIt was hard to tell and it, in fact I get at this in the book, when someone is very heavy you don't talk about it. That's so weird, I mean it's the literal elephant in the room and there was only one conversation we ever had about the fact that he had grown so large.
11:10:44
REHMAnd we should say above 350?
11:10:48
REHMDefinitely close to 400?
11:10:51
SHRIVERClose to 400 by the time he died and we had a conversation in a restaurant and he gave me permission to address it because he just said at some point, "Hey, I know I'm fat." In fact I use that line in the book, I couldn't resist it. And that paved the way for me to say well, you know, have you ever say, considered gastric bypass surgery. But I would never have felt that I could bring that up without his giving me the okay.
11:11:26
REHMWere you close to him when you were children?
11:11:34
SHRIVERI was closer to my younger brother but I really admired my older brother and especially before my younger brother came along, my older brother was my protector. And he was always a symbol to me of the renegade, the outlaw in our family.
11:11:57
REHMBut his, he really was not the only catalyst for your writing this novel?
11:12:06
SHRIVERClearly not, in that, you know, obesity is not just a personal issue in our, in my particular family. It is a huge social issue and I'm always on the lookout in fiction for just those subjects that have profoundly personal dimension but also have ramifications in a social sense and perhaps even political sense.
11:12:28
REHMAnd of course you are so trim and fit, have you always been that way?
11:12:36
SHRIVERPretty much, actually I went through one experience when I was 17 years old of gaining weight and I didn't become a, you know, massive roly-poly.
11:12:45
REHMBut you ate lots of doughnuts?
11:12:47
REHMCupcakes.
11:12:49
SHRIVER...I took a trip to Britain with the wrong friend, if you will, and she was rather heavy and definitely sedentarily inclined. And so rather than go to a lot of museums we ended up sitting around in Hyde Park and eating pastries. And I never have lived this way, I'd always got a lot of exercise. I generally didn't eat a whole lot of sugar or eat a whole period.
11:13:15
SHRIVERSo this was a walk on the wild side as far as I was concerned. And I didn't realize I could gain weight because I'd always been active and had never really had a weight problem. So I didn't count calories and boy were there a lot of calories to count that summer.
11:13:32
REHMAnd when you got back home?
11:13:35
SHRIVERI came home and I got off the plane and my little brother said later, only after I'd dropped the weight, because again, you know, you don't say anything, "My God you got off the plane and you were fat." And I, that is my one experience and I got up to about, I think I was 124 which is definitely more than 20 pounds more than I weigh now.
11:13:57
SHRIVERAnd dropping that weight was awful and I, you know, oddly looking back on it I'm glad I had that experience because it helped to inform this book and it made me, you know, watchful for the rest of my life. Now, that did entail a loss of innocence and that much I regret.
11:14:22
SHRIVERI wish we could all go back to just eating when we're hungry and quitting when we're full and that seems to have gone the way of the horse and buggy.
11:14:33
REHMBecause there is so much food available?
11:14:39
SHRIVERI think that we are contending with the problem of plenty and we're not biologically cut out to deal with endless plenty. And in this way we should all just give ourselves a break because as animals we instinctively want to take advantage of resources that are available to use now because we are designed essentially to overeat when we can and then we can live off that fat during the lean months of winter.
11:15:10
SHRIVERUnfortunately the months of winter are, now have a Pizza Hut across the street. And I just don't think as animals we're cut out for this kind of constant availability and therefore the restraint that's required of us just walking down the street with all those muffins, it's unnatural. It has to be learned behavior.
11:15:34
REHMAnd don't forget the sofa in front of the television enticing us to every imaginable food out there, enticing us, really to get to the refrigerator and have another snack.
11:15:53
SHRIVEROne of the things that hit me when I came back to the United States a week ago, because I live in London most of the year, was the adverts on television. And how much of the advertising here is food and that's not the case in the UK. They have almost as bad an obesity problem as we do so it's not as if, you know, the Brits are skinny Minnie's.
11:16:21
SHRIVERBut the messages you're hit with over here are constant, you know, and, you know, eat, eat, eat Subway, eat pizza, eat, you know, all the images of food.
11:16:36
SHRIVERAnd drink and soda.
11:16:40
REHMWhich, you know, I think is going to be a problem for more and more and more people unless the country together really decides to do something about it. You saw how New York Mayor Bloomberg was chastised and rung over the coals because of what he's done.
11:17:07
REHMBut in any case I want to get back to "Big Brother" because the tension that this 40 year old woman has between her husband who's a fitness freak and her brother, who weighs more than 350 pounds, trying to figure out how she can help him.
11:17:34
SHRIVERI think one of the things that people who have a member of the family who becomes very heavy has to deal with is that sense of helplessness and while in my novel there's a midpoint where the brother Edison has been visiting for two months and it's a matter of either putting back on the plane to New York where he came from or do something.
11:18:03
SHRIVERMy narrator has to contend with whether or not to take him on. The truth of the matter is that for the most part we can't take each other on and in the novel she sets up an apartment with her brother and they go on this severe all liquid diet together and there's an element almost of fantasy there.
11:18:28
REHMLionel Shriver, her new novel is titled "Big Brother." I hope you'll join us, questions, comments, call us on 800-433-8850.
11:20:05
REHMAnd welcome back. Novelist and writer Lionel Shriver is with me. Her new book titled, "Big Brother." She is a journalist and author. Her novels include "So Much for That," "The Post-Birthday World," and the 2005 Orange Prize winner, "We Need to Talk About Kevin." It's as though, Lionel, you're writing about people who have really serious problems.
11:20:45
SHRIVERWell, don't we all? I mean, yeah, and that's just my way of saying that I write about real people. And there are plenty of people out there who have the same problems that my main character Edison has.
11:21:01
REHMHere is an email saying: 124 is fat. I know an anorexic, I would be considered heavy. Both of us can work out hard, we're both fit. It's people who emphasize body image who cause much of the stress that causes both problems. How do you respond to that?
11:21:31
SHRIVERI totally agree. I think that one of the problems is that we are taking this too seriously and I feel conflicted because, of course, what I should be doing is saying, oh, this is so important, you know, in order to sell my book. Read about this incredibly important issue. But I also think that we have all become body fascists and we over-interpret in terms of character and even in terms of moral standing what we weigh.
11:22:03
SHRIVERAnd I am sick of the way that we follow how much celebrities weigh. There are websites that follow what celebrities weigh and when they gain a little bit.
11:22:15
REHMAnd think about fashion models.
11:22:17
SHRIVEROh, it's ridiculous. And we see -- we judge not only other people in accordance with their figures, but we judge ourselves most severely. And, you know, there are people who are making themselves miserable on a daily basis just because they weigh, you know, five pounds more than they think they should.
11:22:38
REHMWhen you were younger, where were your parents?
11:22:46
SHRIVERIn our house. I mean, I think my parents did an excellent job in relation to diet and nutrition because it just wasn't a big deal. And, you know, we were told that we had to finish our plate before we got dessert. You know, it's from that generation. We always had to finish our vegetable. That was era that a lot of them would have been frozen. So maybe I would do that differently. But otherwise, we ate balanced meals. They were modestly portioned and we just didn't discuss it much.
11:23:25
REHMAnd did all the children eat pretty much the same way?
11:23:32
SHRIVERYes. And there was, you know, a modest weight fluctuation and my younger brother went through a period of being slightly pudgy but it was no big deal and he ended up growing out of it. And the fact that we didn't make a big deal of it, I think, was healthy.
11:23:50
REHMWhen you saw your brother gaining all this weight, did you try at any point to save him as your narrator tries to save her brother?
11:24:10
SHRIVERIn truth, no. And I don't think that I was in a position to save him. But I did have an interesting moment, which in some ways is the seminal moment for this novel. My brother had gone in the hospital. He was visiting my parents in New York and had a crisis caused by the fact that he didn't bring his sleep apnea machines and made him delirious when he work the next morning because the carbon dioxide builds up in your blood and make you really out of your mind.
11:24:47
SHRIVERHe'd been in the hospital for about eight days and it looked as if he was going to pull out. And because I was his health proxy, the doctor ended up having to deal with me in London and rang up and said that, well, it looks as if my brother is going to come out of this and we have to discuss what the next step is. So I said, you know, I gather your hospital is renowned its work with obese patients. Would you take my brother on?
11:25:18
SHRIVERWould he be a good candidate for, say, a gastric bypass? And the doctor said, actually he'd be an excellent candidate but there were two caveats. He would need someone to take care of him after the surgery and he would need somewhere to live in the New York area because my brother lived in North Carolina. And that was the moment because my husband and I have a house in Brooklyn and it has granny flat with a separate kitchenette and bathroom. And I thought, oh, my God.
11:25:52
REHMI can do this.
11:25:53
SHRIVERI could probably do this. Do I want to? I'm not so sure. Well two days later my brother took a sudden turn for the worse and he died. So I got out of it and the novel is in a way an exploration of what if. You know, what if my brother had survived and I took this project on? What would it be like?
11:26:21
REHMSo you really allowed yourself that full freedom to imagine what it would have been had you taken him on and what are some of the situations that come up in the novel.
11:26:43
SHRIVERWell, one of the things that the book explores is whether you can save someone from themselves, right? And I think it's one of those typical fictional questions that gets asked but not quite answered. The problem in the novel is that the brother decides to go on this (unintelligible) diet with his sister partly to please her and to win her away from her husband.
11:27:08
REHMWho is a fitness freak.
11:27:11
SHRIVERYes. And they're in a competition for her affections. This is in some ways a love triangle. It's not an erotic love triangle, but it's still a love triangle. And that's not quite the right reason to lose weight. It's -- there's not quite enough self-motivation, self-concern. So it's too much to do with the sister and that's a problem. And, you know, I'm highlighting. You have -- if you're going to successfully lose weight, you have to do it for your own reasons.
11:27:43
REHMExactly.
11:27:44
SHRIVERAnd not to please someone else. And that's why this whole saving someone doesn't really quite work, doesn't add up.
11:27:52
REHMWhat happens when this brother wants to get on a plane, wants to get into a car, out of a car. What are their situations?
11:28:03
SHRIVERWell, the physical nature of being very heavy, it makes everything arduous. It's difficult for Edison to get onto an airplane. When he does get on an airplane, he offends his fellow passengers because, of course, he takes too much space and he occupies the arm rest. You know, this has become a running problem on airplanes with people who are thin, resent fat people for taking up more space than they paid for.
11:28:38
SHRIVERIt's hard for him even to get in and out of a car. When he gets in the car he has to spool out the seatbelt to its maximum extent and, you know, there's a really unfortunate scene when he really hits bottom before going on the diet when he's been severely constipated and clogs up the toilet. And that's, you know, that's really humiliating for him. And I think that's one of the things that turns him and makes him voluble for Pandora's plan to go on this diet.
11:29:18
REHMWhy did you make Pandora, Edison's sister, a stepmother?
11:29:25
SHRIVERI have this idea of her as someone who is always second, you know? She's been second to her brother. She's the middle sister. She's been consciously modest and by design has wanted to have an ordinary life. She's moved from L.A. to the middle of the country where her grandparents were from in Iowa and it made sense to me that she had finally found love rather late in life, she wouldn't have had her own children but she would take on someone else's children.
11:29:59
SHRIVERThere's a generosity in her and a modesty that I thought was emblemized by that having willingly taken on other people's kids.
11:30:09
REHMAnd if both of them represents how torn she can be because she is a generous spirit.
11:30:23
SHRIVERYes. I mean, that's -- it's her generosity that explains her capacity to do what she does in the middle of the novel and sequester herself with her brother. But, you know, the trouble with being generous is you can't be generous with everyone at the same time. And so naturally she ends up deeply offending her husband and, in fact, at length putting that marriage at risk.
11:30:47
REHMHe is, that is her husband, is what? How could you characterize him beyond being a fitness freak?
11:31:00
SHRIVERWell, he's a control freak in general. I mean, I'm interested in the way that our relationships to food express larger character and matters. So that he is a furniture maker by trade and he makes those custom-made furniture that doesn't sell very well because it's too expensive. And so he's not satisfied professionally and he seeks out total control over his body as a substitute for other forms of success. And I think that's very commonplace.
11:31:34
REHMWhereas she has made a great deal of money with a business that's called Baby Monotonous. What's that all about?
11:31:45
SHRIVEROh, I had a lot of fun with it.
11:31:46
REHMI bet you did.
11:31:51
SHRIVERI wanted to invent a business that would be entertaining not only for the characters but also for the reader. And my narrator gave her husband a doll, a custom-made, handmade doll with a mechanism in it, like the pull string dolls that I would have grown up with the Chatty Cathy, only this one has recordings in it that make fun of his relationship to food and fitness. So it will say something like, I want dry toast. I want dry toast.
11:32:26
SHRIVERWell, her younger sister saw this doll and wanted one for herself to make fun of her boyfriend who never stops saying things like good to go and other fad-ish expression.
11:32:41
REHMSo custom-made.
11:32:42
SHRIVERThey are custom-made. So she starts this business because everybody wants one. And they are very expensive because you can imagine they're labor intensive but they become a national fad. And she ends up on the cover of magazines because she's a famous entrepreneur now, even New York magazine runs an article about her called Monotonous Manhattan because -- and they have Mayor Bloomberg dolls made up. And it's an accidental success because she never intended to become famous.
11:33:20
REHMThe novel is titled, "Big Brother" and Lionel Shriver is with me and you're listening to "The Diane Rehm Show." Tell me about the name Lionel. It was not your original name.
11:33:39
SHRIVERNo, though it has been my name for over 40 years. I changed my name with I was 15.
11:33:45
REHMAnd he liked the name Lionel?
11:34:36
SHRIVERYes, I think he does like it.
11:34:37
REHMI'm glad. Tell me how you felt about winning the Orange Prize.
11:34:44
SHRIVEROh, it was one of the best nights of my life and I have a feeling that even if I ever do win another prize, it won't be the same. I think it had to do with that first one. And I never won anything. I mean, the last time I won or win any prize was in second grade for writing an essay about the renovation of the school cafeteria. We really have to go back at the age of seven. And one of the things that made that moment mean so much to me, you know, you mentioned my husband, was my husband's reaction.
11:35:21
SHRIVERHe was at my side and the moment they announced it, I turned to him and I looked at his face. And it was such an expression of unambiguous delight, you know? And that's when I knew I had married the right man.
11:35:36
REHMAw, that's lovely. And yet you won it for a book that went through a great many publishers before finally found where it belonged.
11:35:50
SHRIVEROh, this is a typical authorial fairy tale and I would want other writers to take heart from it because it was a widely rejected manuscript.
11:36:00
REHMAnd we're talking about, "We Need to Talk About Kevin."
11:36:04
SHRIVERThat's right. And, you know, everyone hated it.
11:36:08
REHMThirty. Thirty publishers hated it.
11:36:13
SHRIVERAnd then it went on to become a best sellers. I had one of those, again, fairy tale moments running into an editor at a party a couple of years ago and he confessed that he was one of those people who had rejected Kevin and he's felt like an idiot ever since.
11:36:33
REHMBut there's one more consolation to that story in terms of your husband.
11:36:42
SHRIVERWell, the truth is that my agent who hated the book and rejected it and we split up, well, my husband and I have both divorced from the same woman because two years after they split up and I'd split up with my agent over this book, we found common ground and got married.
11:37:08
REHMI'm so glad. And I want to talk about "We Need to Talk About Kevin" after we come back from the break. And I'm sure many of our callers are going to want to talk about a whole array of issues, including food. I hope you'll stay with us.
11:40:05
REHMAnd welcome back. Lionel Shriver is with me. Her latest novel is titled "Big Brother." Going to open the phones and then we're going to hear her read. First, let's go to Kathleen in Chapel Hill, NC, you're on the air.
11:40:28
KATHLEENHi, thank you so much. I have a couple of quick comments...
11:40:30
KATHLEEN...I wondered if you could response to.
11:40:32
REHMOkay.
11:40:33
KATHLEENI work in a lot of areas that are designated food deserts and so although there seems to be a culture of plenty in the United States, there is a really serious correlation between hunger and access and obesity. And so that's one. And then also I know a lot of parents who get really freaked out with just the huge role chubbying up during toddlerhood and during pre-adolescents which, you know, seems to be a pretty normal preparation for a big growth spurt. And so I just wondered if you could maybe comment on both of those issues.
11:41:09
SHRIVERAs for the chubbying up, I like that expression, you know, I noted with my younger brother that when he gained a little bit of weight and it wasn't toddlerhood, but it was, I don't know, maybe he was 10 years old and nobody made a big deal out of it. I think that that was the right response. Parents are often making kids so self-conscious about what they eat that they become much more consumed with food.
11:41:41
SHRIVERAnd I think that's one the problems that we're all having that that putting food center stage, talking about it all the time as we're doing now, is in fact back-firing because it makes us think about it all the time and ultimately it means that we eat more of it.
11:41:58
REHMWell, but what is the answer here? I mean, is it a program on how or what is normal or what is beyond normal? I mean, what's the answer with all, as you said earlier, is advertisements, the availability, the walking down the street or turning on your television? What's the answer?
11:42:31
SHRIVERI'm not sure there is an answer. I know that when I walk down the street, I just don't feel that those things pertain to me. I just screen them out. And I think when you participate in fast food that you are more vulnerable. But if you just don't eat any of it, then it's like looking at trees, you know, it's just scenery. So that when I pass a Jack in the Box or something, I'm not fighting an attraction.
11:43:01
SHRIVERIt just doesn't happen for me.
11:43:03
REHMHere's an email from Karen in Cooper City, FL. She says: "Fat? Really? Is that a word you both enjoy using? Diane, I thought better of you. This is the most completely judgmental program I've ever heard. Humans are far different from animals. We enjoy the taste of food. Animals eat to live. According to all the judgments you've been passing, I'm a fat and offended person. I work for someone who is upset because she is getting fat.
11:43:48
REHMShe can't fit into a size 4. I would be happy to fit into a size 14, but I'm very happy to have lost enough weight to be down to a size 2x."
11:44:05
REHMSo?
11:44:09
SHRIVERI am totally sympathetic with the sensitivity to the word fat, which does now carry a lot of judgment with it. And one of the things I explore on this novel is the degree to which we judge people who are heavy in a way that is beyond, oh, you know, that's not healthy for you. All that business about health is just used as a cover to denounce you as somebody who has, you know, no sense of self-control, no self-respect.
11:44:40
SHRIVERI mean, we conclude all kinds of truly appalling things about people who are overweight. We assume, you know, that you're lazy, for example, whereas plenty of people who are carrying a few extra pounds work extremely hard. I am aggrieved, for example, that it's still widely practiced to discriminate against people in employment because they're heavy. And I think that heavy people face an enormous amount of prejudice.
11:45:15
REHMWould you read for us from your novel?
11:45:20
SHRIVERI've selected a section which is exploring my sense of confusion, why we take appearance to be the same thing as the self. And I really think we need to keep that distinction. My narrator is distressed by looking at photographs of herself, partly because they make her feel seen to other people in a way that most of the time she's not aware of.
11:46:00
SHRIVER"The fact that my clothing has been visually available to other people I do not find upsetting. The body is another matter. It is mine. I have found it useful, but it is an avatar. Given that most people presumably content with justice rattling disconnect between who they are to themselves and what they are to others, it's perplexing why we're still roundly obsessed with appearance.
11:46:28
SHRIVERHaving verified on our own accounts the feeble link between the who and the what, you'd think that from the age of three we'd have learned to look straight through the avatar as we do through a pane of glass. On the other hand, I sometimes suspected that my female employees who are lavishing $50 per week of their modest salaries on makeup had mastered the secret that eluded me most of the time and only intruded when I looked at snapshots.
11:46:56
SHRIVERLike it or not, you are that to other people. You may not recognize your heavy thighs, your cornflower eyes, but they do. And competent interface with the rest of the world involves manipulating that irrelevant, arbitrary not you image to the maximum extent, ergo if the makeup's application was skillfull, that 50 bucks could not have been better spent.
11:47:21
SHRIVERWhich brings us back to weight. Ever since Edison gave me cause to, I've made a study of this, the hierarchy of apprehensions when laying eyes on another person. Once a form emerges from the distance, it is clearly a human and not a lamp post. We now log one gender to size. This order of recognitions may be universal in my part of the world, though I do not believe size has always been number two.
11:47:48
SHRIVERYet these days I'm apt to register that a figure is slight or fat even before I pick up a nanosecond later that they are white, Hispanic or black, especially when the subject in question is on the large side. Many of us probably detect on the large side, even before determining large person of which sex. Accordingly, an eyewitness testimonies to the police, slim, average build, heavy set or some more refined variation thereof, features without fail.
11:48:17
SHRIVERIn fiction, authors who do not immediately identify roughly how much a character weighs are not doing their jobs and walk on thumbnails in short stories invariably begin something like, Allison, a tall skinny girl with freckles or Bob was affable, gregarious man whose enjoyment of imported British ales was beginning to announce itself in his waistline."
11:48:42
REHMLionel Shriver reading from her new novel, "Big Brother." Let's go to Birmingham, MI. Good morning, Sue, you're on the air.
11:48:56
SUEHi, good morning. I, first of all, have to applaud the woman who sent the email. I have had a personal experience with being fat, quite obese. And one of the things that happened with me is in the late '90s, early 2000s, my doctor prescribed phen phen. When I took it, it was the first time I ever felt full. So I don't believe that it's just fat people should stop eating when they're full. I think there's more to it than that.
11:49:29
SUEAnd the second thing I wanted to say is, I'm not considered as fat as before, due to the local hospital's liquid diet that was monitored every week. So I do think that there is some relevance in that. But I am very offended by this presentation.
11:49:48
SHRIVERI'm a little concerned that you're misinterpreting this presentation because, you know, I am worried that we have become so judgmental about figure and that we draw far too many conclusions on the basis of what someone weighs. I think that we are constantly confusing people's appearance with their value as people and their identity as people.
11:50:16
REHMExactly.
11:50:19
SHRIVERAnd that offends me. That's what I'm offended by, not people who are heavy. And I'm also impatient with the way that a lot of thin people end up using the health issue to cover up their own sense of disgust or fear. I think a lot of it is fear. I think a lot of thin people are terrified of becoming fat and then they project that fear onto heavy people. And, you know, I'm dismayed by how neurotic we've become about the whole issue.
11:50:55
SHRIVERSo essentially, I'm on your side.
11:50:58
REHMThanks for calling, Sue. To Lighthouse Point, FL. Good morning, Arla.
11:51:04
ARLAGood morning, Diane. Hi, Lionel. Actually, just a couple comments. I don't think it's a judgmental thing that's going on in the program. I do think there's a lot of reasons why people overeat, that it just can't be out of pure enjoyment because of the health-related issues and things that come from that. But my question is, I wonder if there has been data out there that looks at modified food and how it affects our satiety.
11:51:37
SHRIVERI'm not very familiar on studies on modified food. By modified food, what do you mean?
11:51:44
ARLAI mean that, for example, like potato chips. They say you can't just have one, that...
11:51:49
SHRIVERThere was a big article on this in the New York Times recently.
11:51:56
REHMRight, right.
11:51:57
SHRIVERAbout the way that they do all these focus groups to design flavors in such a way that they are maximally addictive. And it's, you know, yes, it's definitely a problem and the only solution to that one is to avoid those foods. And you have assume if you buy a bag of potato chips that they have been designed for you to finish the bag.
11:52:24
REHMTell us why you decided to write this story in 3x. I'm not going to give away any of the ending of the book. But clearly, it's made some reviewers angry.
11:52:46
SHRIVERYou mean the end of...
11:52:46
REHMYeah.
11:52:49
SHRIVERWell, of course, it's difficult to talk about because we don't want to spoil the ending. There was one logical ending to this book. You know, Edison loses and then gains it back again. And I just wasn't happy with that. I didn't like the negativity of that and the, you know, being so dark on the possibility of losing weight if that's what you want. So I needed a third way.
11:53:24
REHMAnd you found it. And you're listening to "The Diane Rehm Show." There was also lots of pushback about the book, "We Need to Talk About Kevin." What was that like for you?
11:53:40
SHRIVERWell, I got accused of being anti-motherhood.
11:53:42
REHMRight, right.
11:53:44
SHRIVERWhich is utterly absurd. I mean, it's just like being anti-human race, which I am some days but not all the time. And that was interesting. I got thrown into what had become something of a war between people who are parents and people who decided not to have any children. And both of those groups, being quite self-justifying. Their parents can't go backward, so of course it becomes very important to them that parenthood is a virtual requirement of the happy life.
11:54:17
SHRIVERAnd a lot of the people who chosen not to have children couldn't go back either because they had not had kids and couldn't any longer. And also we're very defensive. And so, you know, the discussion could grow quite shrill.
11:54:31
REHMAnd you, did you decide to have or have not?
11:54:38
SHRIVERBy the time I finished that novel which was, in some ways, an exploration of what frightened me about becoming a mother, I had decided that parenthood was probably not for me.
11:54:50
SHRIVERBut it wasn't meant to be prescriptive.
11:54:52
REHMYes.
11:54:52
SHRIVERRight? I mean, that's my choice and I wouldn't push it on anybody else. I think that I don't have the patience. You know, in some ways, I'm not quite nice enough a person, but I have enormous admiration for people who take on what has to be the most important job in the world.
11:55:09
REHMBut you were challenged. You were hit. You were -- people really got angry with you over that book and what subsequently became that movie.
11:55:26
SHRIVERWell, of course the movie is not neither to my credit nor is it my fault. But the book started a conversation which is in some ways still going. And that -- I'm glad that I was able to contribute to that conversation and act as a catalyst. I did find that there were a lot of readers who were incredibly grateful to see a representation of parenthood in a novel that wasn't all rose-tinted.
11:55:58
SHRIVERYou know, that got some of the frustrations and even the boredom of raising children which, you know, you're not really given permission to talk about.
11:56:07
REHMAnd in a sense, you've written another book about things that people are afraid to talk about.
11:56:16
SHRIVERWell, you know, the conversation that we've been having on this show, especially I thought was valuable to discuss that term fat.
11:56:24
REHMFat.
11:56:25
SHRIVERVery, very interesting, is a good example. I mean, I hope that when I write a novel and it finds an audience that it doesn't just inform and entertain in and of itself but it starts a conversation. I mean, I think this would be a good book group book. I think that while we ostensibly talk about weight issues a lot and it's all over the magazine and the newspapers, somehow we're not telling the truth.
11:56:50
SHRIVERAnd, you know, for example, I don't think we honestly address the degree to which we judge each other according to how much we weigh. And I think we confess exactly how much space we're allowing food and food issues to take up in our minds.
11:57:10
REHMFinal email from Barbara who says: "Tell your guest to get ready to license her doll idea. People are going to love it." Lionel Shriver, she's journalist and author. Her newest novel is titled "Big Brother." Really, really interesting to talk with you. Thank you.
11:57:36
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Which member of the Royal Family is known as 'Brian' in 'Private Eye'? | Private Eye (Magazine) - TV Tropes
Private Eye
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The very first edition, layout and cartooning by Willie Rushton .
"The best comedy is when you attack the strong, not the weak."
—Ian Hislop, editor.
A British fortnightly magazine
of current affairs and satirical humour, running since 1961. Founders included its first editor Richard Ingrams, and comedians Peter Cook and Willie Rushton , who had all been contemporaries at Shrewsbury School and later at Oxbridge .
It does a lot of investigative journalism and has been sued for libel a considerable number of times (it usually loses, and would have been bankrupted by the damages if not for donations from supporters and subscribers). Its editor, Ian Hislop (a team captain on Have I Got News for You ), even held the record for 'Most Sued Man in England' for a time. For many years it was verging on a point of pride how long it had been since they won a case. The first time Ian Hislop won a libel suit, the following issue was filled in celebratory manner with yet more libelous material, just because they knew they'd get away with it. note For those reading from outside the UK, it's important to point out that under English law it is possible for something to be both perfectly true and libelous, as it is up to the defendant to prove the truth of what he/she has said, and even then truth is not considered an absolute defense against libel. In the United States, the person bringing the suit has to prove that what was said is false, at least when the defendant is a newspaper or other media outlet (the standard for when the defendant is an individual varies from state to state , but the law of defamation as applied to the media is largely controlled by the Free Press Clause of the First Amendment to the federal Constitution and is thus consistent across states). Also, American law does consider the truth to be an absolute defense; moreover, in the United States, statements of opinion are also protected, and the definition of "opinion" is quite broad—even factually false statements can be "opinion" in the right context. The flip side of this is that getting an injunction to prevent something being published in the first place is rather harder in Britain - otherwise known as Publish and be damned. Or at least, it was, before the current fad for "super injunctions", where the target is not even allowed to say they have had an injunction put upon them, let alone talk about the original subject...
Regular Cartoons and Ongoing Parodies
"The Broonites", (defunct) which featured the Brown camp of the now former Labour government and who all spoke in exaggerated Scottish accents- even the English ones. This was done in the style of The Broons , a cartoon strip from The Sunday Post .
Contains an apparently deliberate example for comic effect of Just Plane Wrong . In the 1205 strip, Gordon Brown is put on a plane to Afghanistan to solve the government's popularity problems. The plane- an English Electric Lightning, long gone from RAF service.
This is possibly a bizarre example of the cartoonist having Shown Their Work . You see, the original cartoonist on The Broons- (Dudley D Watkins) spent the whole of World War Two drawing anything military in the same style as his earlier adventure comics: That is, straight out of World War One.
The Robber Baron cycle, a fictional series of operas detailing the life and crimes of Silvio, the Robber Baron, based on Silvio Berlusconi of Italy.
Radio Times: Classic Opera Buffooni, which opens with the Robber Baron Silvio cavorting in the Palazzo Fornicazione with a chorus of scantily clad nymphs who sing the chorus 'Money, Money, Money — We've come here for the Money'.
Prime Ministerial parodies: Reporting on governmental affairs in the style of something else. These generally take the form of either a personal diary/correspondence (particularly by the PM's spouse) or an internal missive at a fictional institution designed to parody the PM's style or policies.
"The New Coalition Academy" - in the style of a posh school's newsletter for David Cameron 's Tory-Lib Dem coalition. Cameron is the headmaster, while Nick Clegg is his deputy. Inspired by the Academies that were part of the Coalition's education policy . Following the 2015 General Election and Nick Clegg's departure from the Government, became the "Cameron Free School", with the Lib Dem bird poorly cut out of the previous logo (which combined it with the Conservative tree).
This basic style was continued when Theresa May replaced David Cameron as Prime Minister in 2016, but renamed "St. Theresa's Independent State Grammar School for Girls (and Boys)", due to her policies of reintroducing grammar schools, with a logo of a badge taped together featuring a pair of leopard-print kitten heels.
"Prime Ministerial Decrees"- Gordon Brown as a Stalin-style leader. Inspired by a comment by one of Brown's underlings that he had "Stalinist" tendencies in his leadership. It was also an excuse for the magazine to comment on the lack of an election as Prime Minster, either by his party or the United Kingdom.
"St. Albion's Parish News" - Tony Blair as a rural vicar of the sanctimonious yet "trendy" type (became a TV series as A Sermon from St Albion's). Inspired by Blair's slickness and known religiosity.
"The Secret Diary of John Major (aged 47¾)" - written in Adrian Mole style.
"Dear Bill" - Margaret Thatcher 's husband Denis writes to Bill Deedes, editor of the Daily Telegraph. Capitalised on Sir Denis' perceived alcoholism and actual friendship with Deedes.
"Heathco. Newsletter" - Edward Heath as MD of a failing business (a grocery, apparently, which was used to poke fun at then-Science and Education Secretary and grocer's daughter Maggie Thatcher). Its symbol was a yacht, because Heath was famously fond of sailing.
"Mrs. Wilson's Diary" - Harold Wilson 's wife writes in the style of BBC radio show Mrs. Dale's Diary. Inspired by the working-class image Wilson liked to put on, despite the very middle-class reality of his background.
"Dave Snooty and his New Pals"- David Cameron in the style of The Beano strip Lord Snooty. Boris Johnson features quite a bit (crossing over from the earlier Beano parody Boris The Menace ).
"The Adventures of Mr Millibean"- Replacing The Broon-ites, Ed Miliband and the Labour Shadow Cabinet in the style of the Mr. Bean cartoon spinoff. Itself replaced by Andy Capp -in-Ring, about Andy Burnham's bid for Labour leadership, then by a text piece which was simply "Jeremy Corbyn Writes" (after a brief experiment with a strip portraying Corbyn as Obi-Wan Kenobi ).
"From the Message Boards". Parody of online political venues and comments threads, populated by assorted rabid fascists , Single Issue Wonks , bloodthirsty vigilantes and unclassifiable nutters . Notable commenters are "Bogbrush" and "Sword of Truth." Alleged to have been inspired by The BBC 's "Have Your Say" discussion boards. Often suffers from being saner than the real thing .
Spiggy Topes and the Turds. A fictional band from The British Invasion , who are a very transparent parody of the The Beatles
"Celeb", made into a brief TV series, it involves a fading pop-star Gary Bloke and his wife, daughters ( Rosedrop Bunnypetal and Pixie Frou-frou ) and son Troy.
"Supermodels" - Parodies the current events in the fashion industry, all the models in this comic are drawn as a thin line for the body.
"It's Grim Up North London" - features a group of artsy-pretentious friends of the new age liberal type. Replaced a long-running strip The Gays that was drawing complaints over perceived homophobia. Readers of IGUNL suspect this strip is still "The Gays" with a slant on affluent arty Islington pretentiousness.
"Apparently"
"Scene And Heard", a regular cartoon journalism feature which depicts and quotes random members of the public attending some political or cultural event. Initially attracted some bemusement from readers who couldn't understand the idea of a non-gag cartoon.
"Pseuds Corner", a column which highlights particularly pompous and pretentious quotes from that week's media.
"Commentatorballs", which records ridiculous, accidentally suggestive, or just plain stupid quotes from the broadcast (and usually sports) media, usually caused by the low brain-to-mouth delay of spontaneous sports commentary. Originally named "Colemanballs" after the notoriously gaffe-prone sports commentator David Coleman, renamed after his death. A typical Colemanball, spoken by Alan Minter: "Sure there have been injuries and deaths in boxing - but none of them serious."
Extends to other fields when the material is abundant, such as "Warballs" regarding the War On Terror , and "50 Shades of Balls" for overuse of 50ShadesOfGrey references.
"The Book of (Insert Israeli leader name here)", which presents contemporary Middle Eastern events in the style of the King James Bible, and usually ends in "and so it was back to the square which is called one".
"Yobs" or "Yobbettes" when the story features females. A Strip which features (un)working class people behaving yobbishly .
Young British Artists: a satire on the works and attitudes of modern British artists. Typically featuring Damien Hirst , Tracey Emin and Carl Freedman .
Craig Brown's Diary: Spoof diary of politician or celebrity, usually based on the assumption that their private life is exactly like their public life (So Prince Charles spends all his time worrying about architecture, Barack Obama can only talk in inspirational speeches, and so on). Made into a Radio 4 series as The Lost Diaries.
E.J Thribb: A 17 1/2 year old crap poet. His poems are always "In Memoriam", always begin with "So, farewell then..." and are often bizarre and amusing. Sometimes his name is adapted into an Incredibly Lame Pun : after Ariel Sharon had a stroke, he signed off "E.J Thribbutz".
Gnome: a spoof editorial by the fictional proprieter Lord Gnome or his lackey E. Strobes. (Lord Gnome appeared in the 1993 TV special The Bore of the Year Awards, played by the Eye's real-life contributor and majority shareholder Peter Cook .) Also, "The Curse of Gnome", where they point out that people who've won libel cases against them generally come to a bad end.
Glenda Slagg: Spoof tabloid woman's columnist, whose articles are full of condemnation/praise for whoever the gossip magazines are talking about, usually switching from one to the other within a single column. Catchphrases "Aintchasickofim" and "Dontchaloveim".
Mary Ann Bighead: A particularly vicious send-up of Mary Ann Sieghart, a female lifestyle/politics/culture columnist who the magazine perceives to be arrogant. Frequent references to the spectacular achievements of her children, who are normally named "Brainella" or some other such variant, and the stupidity of politicians, her childrens' teachers and the reader.
Polly Filler: Spoof broadsheet woman's columnist, whose articles are about how difficult it is being an upper-middle class young mother, because you have to spend all day telling the au pair to do things. Also uses her column to plug the collected edition of her columns, the novel based on her columns and, most recently, the film based on the novel based on her columns.
"The Useless Simon", her husband, who she presents as lazy and loutish but who is actually implied to be a better (or at least, as good a) person than she is.
Steel
" - the pseudonym of...Seumas Milne).
A Taxi-Driver Writes: Straw Conservative . String 'em up, it's the only language they understand. Often found right across from Dave Spart, agreeing with him for entirely different reasons.
The Eye's Controversial New Columnist: An angry baby, who gives the important baby's eye view of current events (usually that the people involved are acting like, well, babies).
Dame Sylvie Krin: a saccharine-impregnated royal correspondent and author of fawning biographies and bad fiction about the royal family and other celebrities. Her "stories" usually feature a Purple Prose -esque, fawning and overly romantic description of celebrities going about their business exactly as they do in real life:
A story about Prince Charles: "Is mater abdicating?", thought Charles, displaying his renowned sensitivity.
A story about Rupert Murdoch: "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU LITTLE WOMBAT'S DONG?," said Rupert sagely.
Her name is also an Incredibly Lame Pun , on the shampoo brand Silvikrin.
Phil Space (and Distaff Counterpart Philippa Space): A generic Punny Name for any columnist, especially those writing an unimportant or redundant story. Occasionally readers across the world will find real examples of journalists called something similar and send them in.
Fond of the Unusual Euphemism and obscure nickname, sometimes for legal reasons, to the point that it can become unreadable to those not in the know . Most of these are derived from very obscure old political scandals.
Obscure Eye Terms
Pretty much every British newspaper has a well-known nickname that was given to them by the Eye. A lot of politicians and celebrities have also been given nicknames, usually derisive.
Nicknames
Baillie Vass = former Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home (after the Aberdeen Evening Expressnote Not The Scotsman , as commonly reported mixed up the captions for a photo of him with a photo of the titular castle)
It's all right not to have heard of him- he was only in office a year.
They revived the joke when Douglas-Home's nephew Charles became Editor of The Times in 1982, calling him "Charles Vass", and probably expected to continue with that joke for many years (after all, most of his predecessors had lasted at least a decade); however, Charles died young in 1985.
In fact, this nickname has gotten prevalent enough that The Other Wiki automatically redirects you to Douglas-Home's page if you type in Baillie Vass in the search bar.
Tony Blair was "The Dear Leader" (the title used by Kim Jong-il of North Korea) due to accusations of a messiah complex.
Although in his later years he was referred to as "the Vicar" due to a perceived similarity to trendy clergymen. He passed on the "Dear Leader" title to Gordon Brown.
The Daily Express is the "Daily Sexpress", due to its obsession with how EVIL! AND DISGUSTING! AND SICK! AND FOUL! this SICK FILTH is ( Full story and PICS page 94 .
The Daily Mail is occasionally referred to as the Daily Dacre (after its editor), the Daily Fail, or the Daily Hitler.
The Evening Standard is called "The Evening Boris" for its support of the current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.
The Daily Telegraph is sometimes referred to as "The Daily Hellograph", due to its perceived shift downmarket into celebrity fluff (Hello being a notoriously vapid British celebrity-gossip mag.)
CDC is referred to as "seedy C"
Wendi Deng is referred to as Wendi Dung.
Robert Maxwell was nicknamed "Cap'n Bob". This fell out of use when the magazine discovered the even better nickname (originally coined by Harold Wilson , no less) of "the bouncing Czech." Nowadays, he is almost never referred to without some mention of his criminal activity during his lifetime. This is because he sued Private Eye in libel for exposing it, won, and took £220,000 off them. His death and the subsequent revelations mean that the magazine is Vindicated by History and free to call the criminal Robert Maxwell, a thief and a criminal, a thieving criminal .
Mary Ann Sieghart is often called Mary Ann Bighead, due to a perceived use of her columns to boast about her lifestyle.
Max Hastings is always referred to as Hitler Hastings due to his obsession with the war. Either that or "The World's Worst Columnist."
Former Telegraph editor William Rees-Mogg is often called "Mystic Mogg" because of his tendency to make awfully bad predictions about the outcomes of elections. (Mitt Romney was to be President in 2008, Gordon Brown was to win the UK election in 2010, and Rick Santorum was his prediction for the US 2012 election.)
Ancient former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes is referred to as Bill Deedesh, mocking both his (very) advanced age and his fondness for the amber flow. A Running Gag on their part is that, whenever the magazine draws a historical parallel to modern events, the ancient newspaper (for instance, the Bethlehem Times) will be edited by Deedesh.
Piers Morgan is "Piers Moron", sometimes phrased as "Piers 'Morgan' Moron" as though Moron is his real name and Morgan the nickname.
Rupert Murdoch is "The Dirty Digger" (Digger = Australian) and Richard Desmond is "Dirty Des", both referencing their more unsavoury connections.
Notoriously terrible PFInote Private Finance Initiative, a scheme launched by Labour under Tony Blair by which some government functions such as building schools were outsourced to private companies company Capita are inevitably referred to as "Crapita".
Richard Branson is referred to as Beardie.
The Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, (DEFRA) is referred to as "Department for the Elimination of Farming and Rural Affairs". Its acronym is sometimes modified to DEFRO.
Margaret Beckett is referred to as Rosa Klebb for her disastrous tenure at the above and her complete lack of interest in the environment, food, or rural affairs.
The late Sir James Goldsmith, a frequent and vindictive litigant, was usually "Sir Jammy Fishpaste" and other similar names, such as "St. Jammy Fishfingers". The magazine considers some aspect of his activities to be objectionable. Similarly, his appearances sometimes end with him having to go and phone "John in Kenya", a reference to John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan (AKA Lord Lucan), who the Eye semi-seriously accused him of helping escape there after he killed his children's nanny.
Prime Minister Harold Wilson was always named as "Wislon".
The Financial Services Authority is invariably referred to as "The Fundamentally Supine Authority" in reference to its reluctance to act and its seemingly close relationship with the industry it is supposed to regulate, often contrasting its performance with the swift and draconian methods of its United States counterparts.
The Maily Telegraph" is a composite of The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail. Similarly, "The Stun" is a generic red top tabloid newspaper, like "The Sun" and "The Daily Star".
HM The Queen is referred to as Brenda. Prince Charles is Brian.
The Department for Transport (DfT) is usually referred as "DafT".
The Department of Trade and Industry was often the "Department of Timidity and Inaction".
Brighton is referred to as Skid Row -on-sea.
Transportation company FirstGroupnote They operate a lot of fairly barebones intercity bus services around the world—including Greyhound—as well as operating some train and tram services in Britain under contract is referred to as "Worst Group".
There are also features on the hypocrisy of the Fleet Street press ("Street of Shame") and a great section called "Rotten Boroughs" on local council misbehaviour, along with annual awards — such as for Tory bigots.
Despite editorial's distrust of the internet (believing the main message you should get from their website is "Buy the magazine" - Street of Shame having reported on the collapsing fortunes of far too many newspapers whose websites mean you don't need to buy the paper), there is a podcast , Page 94
, which reveals behind-the-scenes stuff about how the journalists research their stories and where the jokewriters get their ideas.
This work provides examples of:
The Eye itself sometimes receives them, typically from fans who threaten to cancel their subscription due to Dude, Not Funny! or They Changed It, Now It Sucks .
Transatlantic Equivalent : The second half of the Eye is similar to America's The Onion in content.
Trend Covers : The recent "Bookalikes" column is about this.
Unusual Euphemism : Has added several to the language, mostly deriving from weedy excuses or alibis given by politicians embroiled in scandals:
"Discussing Uganda" / "Ugandan discussions" = having sex
"Tired and emotional" = drunk
"Exotic cheroot" = cannabis
The Vicar : Tony Blair was presented as one in the 'Vicar of St Albion's' parody, inspired by a comparison that had been made by many in the media who had compared his style when making speeches to that of a trendy Anglican vicar giving a sermon. ( Hilarious in Hindsight , now that Blair is a Catholic.)
Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe : In the "Book of (Insert Current Israeli Leader Here)" segments and sometimes some of the Retraux newspaper segments which compare current events to historical ones.
(That's enough Tropes. Ed)
However, the truly unparalleled touch of genius about Private Eye is widely thought to be its famous (cont. p.94).
:: Indexes ::
| Charles, Prince of Wales |
Elizabeth of York, the mother of Henry VIII, was the daughter of which king? | The Trouble with Andrew | Vanity Fair
The Trouble with Andrew
Royals
The Trouble with Andrew
In the royal-wedding afterglow, Buckingham Palace still has a major P.R. problem: how to handle Prince Andrew, Britain’s trade ambassador and fourth in line to the throne. The prince’s dissolute lifestyle, links to unsavory foreign potentates, and friendship with the American registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are undercutting the Queen’s efforts to rehabilitate the monarchy. And while many blame Andrew’s problems on his perennially broke ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, Edward Klein discovers some insiders pointing to another woman—his mother herself.
by
Twitter
HEIR AND A SPARE Prince Andrew and Prince Charles arrive in a carriage at the Royal Ascot horse race, 2006. By David Hartley/Rex USA.
On a snowy Friday afternoon last February, Ed Perkins received an urgent phone call in his ground-floor office at Buckingham Palace. Perkins has the thankless task of serving as press secretary to the Queen’s wayward second son, His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, Duke of York. The female voice on the other end of the phone line belonged to Sian James, an assistant editor at The Mail on Sunday, a tabloid that’s been unsparing in its coverage of Andrew’s dissolute private life and dodgy friends.
“We’re planning to publish a story about the Duke of York,” James told Perkins, “and we’d like a comment from the Palace.”
Perkins listened in stunned silence as James unfolded a shocking tale. Her newspaper had obtained an interview with a young woman named Virginia Roberts, who claimed that the billionaire American money manager Jeffrey Epstein had trained her as an under-age prostitute and flown her to London in 2001, when she was just 17 years old, for the express purpose of spending time with Prince Andrew. Virginia, now a mother of three living in Australia, had waited a decade to break her silence, but the newspaper had evidence to support her story—flight logs from Epstein’s Boeing 727 and Gulfstream jet, and a photo showing Prince Andrew with his arm around Virginia’s bare midriff. Standing off to one side in the photo was Ghislaine Maxwell, 49, the stylish and well-connected daughter of the late, disgraced British newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell. According to Virginia, Ghislaine recruited her as Epstein’s “sex slave” when she was 15 years old and arranged for her to see Andrew three times, in London and New York and on Epstein’s private Caribbean island, Little Saint James. She said she’d been “sexually exploited by Epstein’s adult male peers, including royalty.” (Prince Andrew denied that he had had sexual contact with Roberts or any other of Epstein’s girls. Ghislaine Maxwell also denies the allegations and says that she plans to take legal action against a number of British newspapers.)
“Would you put all that in an e-mail, please?” said the unflappable Perkins. “It might take a few hours to get back to you.”
George Wayne Q&A: Sarah Ferguson (May 2000)
Marrying Prince Andrew (Sue Arnold, June 1986)
Later, Andrew moved into Royal Lodge, the late Queen Mother’s residence in Windsor Great Park, where he continued to live with his former wife and their daughters, Princess Beatrice, 22, and Princess Eugenie, 21. However, this has not put a crimp into Andrew’s sybaritic style. He’s been rumored to be romantically linked to more than a dozen women, including the American actress Angie Everhart and Amanda Staveley, a successful private-equity specialist to whom he proposed marriage.
The sordid connection to Jeffrey Epstein inflicted by far the greatest damage on the prince’s reputation. According to a sworn deposition by Juan Alessi, a former employee at Epstein’s Palm Beach estate, Andrew attended naked pool parties and was treated to massages by a harem of adolescent girls. At least three of the girls were questioned under oath about whether Andrew had had sexual contact with any of the masseuses. One of them, Sarah Kellen, refused to answer, citing her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. Another, Adriana Ross, was asked, “Has Prince Andrew ever been involved with underage minor females to your knowledge?” She reportedly replied, “I refuse to answer.” (Prince Andrew says he neither attended nor was aware of any naked pool parties.)
Inside the Firm
The plight of Prince Andrew, a once strikingly handsome man who has let himself go a bit to seed, made far less of an impression on audiences around the world than the royal wedding of the picture-perfect William and Kate, the future King and Queen of the United Kingdom. And yet, the story of how Andrew has managed to get away with such cringe-worthy behavior—and survive in his high-profile role as Britain’s trade ambassador—said more about the inner workings of the British monarchy than the estimated $40 million wedding extravaganza.
The story goes back to 1992, which Queen Elizabeth II called the annus horribilis, the year the marriages of Charles and Andrew broke down, Windsor Castle caught fire, and Fergie was photographed having her toes sucked. Ever since, the Queen has been at pains to ensure the survival of the monarchy in its current form. With that in mind, the then lord chamberlain, Lord Airlie, established a secretive discussion procedure called the Way Ahead Group, which is chaired by the Queen and consists of senior courtiers and senior working royals. (The working royals reportedly include the Queen and Prince Philip, Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward, Prince William, and Prince Harry .) The Way Ahead Group convenes twice a year, doesn’t keep minutes of its meetings, and deals only with such paramount issues as primogeniture, the feudal rule by which the Crown passes to the eldest male heir.
After its initial meeting in 1992, the group made several precedent-shattering decisions. The Queen and Prince Charles volunteered to pay taxes on the private income from their vast estates. The Queen agreed to reimburse the government for its annual Civil List grants—totaling almost $2.5 million—to five of her closest living relatives at the time: the Princess Royal (Anne), the Duke of York (Andrew), the Earl of Wessex (Edward), Princess Margaret, and Princess Alice, the Queen’s last surviving aunt. (Currently only the Queen and Prince Philip receive money from the Civil List.) Buckingham Palace was opened to visitors in order to raise money for $65.6 million in repairs to Windsor Castle. And the royal yacht Britannia, with its 19 officers and crew of 217, was later decommissioned and turned into a tourist attraction.
However, the Queen’s plans to rehabilitate the monarchy were upended by a series of events. The royal family was mortified when Major James Hewitt, a prominent polo player, spilled the beans about his long-running affair with Princess Diana. Even worse, Charles was heard in an intercepted cell-phone call telling his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, that he’d like to “live inside your trousers.” The Queen herself bungled things when she was slow to acknowledge the public grief over Princess Diana’s death—an attitude she reversed in order to appear as a more caring, in-touch monarch. As for Prince Andrew, his procession of girlfriends, starting with Koo Stark, who had appeared as an actress in a soft-porn film, further stained the family’s image. Only recently, one of his former girlfriends reportedly claimed that when she was alone with Andrew in the bedroom he liked to model her underwear as a joke.
As for the Queen’s irascible consort, Prince Philip, who turned 90 in June, he hasn’t done much to help his wife clear the way ahead. Philip’s almost irrational loathing of Sarah Ferguson led the Queen, who normally shows shrewder judgment, to cast Fergie out of the royal orbit without a penny after her divorce from Andrew, which guaranteed that Fergie would turn into a high-profile beggar and an embarrassment to the throne. What’s more, Philip tried to bully Andrew into kicking Fergie out of her residence at Royal Lodge—a demand that placed Andrew in the awkward position of having to choose between his overbearing father and his over-the-top ex-wife. He chose her. (Buckingham Palace would not comment on Prince Philip’s relationship with Andrew or his ex-wife.)
Fergie, who was not invited to the royal wedding, fled to Thailand, where, she later told Oprah, “the jungle embraced me.” She added, “I wanted to be there with my girls—to be getting them dressed and to go as a family.” She and Andrew were the last royals to have been married at Westminster Abbey, and Fergie kept in touch by telephone with her ex-husband during the ceremonies for William and Kate. “When Andrew went with the girls,” she recalled, “we were talking all morning, and he was saying, ‘It’s O.K. Just remember, we had such a good day. Our wedding was so perfect.’ … Because we’re such a unit together, he made me feel very part of the day on April the 29th.”
With a profligate former wife and two coming-of-age daughters to support, according to an insider, Andrew has complained that it’s hard to make do on a yearly stipend of $408,000. He also receives hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for travel expenses related to his job. His portrayal of himself as a poor relative helps explain why he and Fergie always seem to be grubbing for money, and why Fergie—with Andrew’s knowledge—recently sold her story to Oprah for a six-part reality series in which Beatrice and Eugenie join their mother in a teary airing of their woes.
“My understanding is that Prince Charles was less than happy that Andrew was given the role of trade envoy back in 2001 after he left the navy,” Robert Jobson, author of William & Kate: The Love Story and a royal commentator for NBC News, told me. “When Charles ascends the throne—which he will do despite all the talk to the contrary—he’d like the royal family to be streamlined; he wants a smaller, more cost-effective monarchy. Andrew has made a tremendous effort to keep Beatrice and Eugenie close to the Queen in order to assure their future as fully paid-up members of the Firm, as the royal family is called. In addition to their status as royal highnesses, Andrew has always wanted them to have around-the-clock security and the rank of working royals. But if Charles has his way, the girls will be thrown off the royal payroll and have to fend for themselves. Many of Andrew’s inexcusable actions—consorting with rich oligarchs in North Africa, the Mideast, and the former Soviet Union, and begging friends to bail out Fergie—have been done with his daughters’ welfare in mind.” (A Palace spokesman wouldn’t comment on Charles’s intentions with respect to the princesses.)
Should He Keep His Job?
‘The phone call from Sian James of The Mail on Sunday created a 36-hour maelstrom at Buckingham Palace,” a royal source told me. “At some point during those 36 hours, the Queen summoned the Duke of York to a meeting.”
According to several well-informed individuals, the Queen was not amused. She recognized that the Virginia Roberts story had the potential to overshadow the positive media lavished on the forthcoming wedding of William and Kate. The Queen asked Prince Andrew why he had consorted with someone like Jeffrey Epstein, whom the F.B.I. had reportedly linked to about 40 young women, most of them under-age. More to the point, the Queen demanded to know if her son had any more surprises up his sleeve.
“The duke assured his mother that he had no sexual relationship with Virginia Roberts or any of Jeffrey Epstein’s girls,” the source said. “The duke talked to the lawyers on the phone, and, with the approval of the duke and his office, the lawyers drew up a legal document that was meant as a shot across the bow of the press in Britain.” (Buckingham Palace wouldn’t comment on the meeting.)
British libel laws are among the most stringent in the world, so when The Mail on Sunday and other newspapers ran the story about Andrew’s rendezvous with Virginia Roberts in Ghislaine Maxwell’s London home, they carried strong disclaimers saying there was no suggestion of any sexual contact between Prince Andrew and Roberts. That, however, didn’t put an end to the furor in the press and the House of Commons, where it’s highly unusual to hear M.P.’s criticize the royal family. Chris Bryant, the Labour Party’s shadow justice minister, urged Prime Minister David Cameron to “dispense with the services” of the prince. Bryant declared, “It’s just unsustainable that he should remain as the public face of British industry abroad.”
At first, the prime minister appeared reluctant to throw Andrew a lifeline. Indeed, a government source was quoted as saying, “No one will shed any tears if he resigns.” When Andrew visited 10 Downing Street, Jon Cunliffe, the prime minister’s senior adviser on Europe and business, reportedly gave him a severe dressing-down. (A Palace spokesman denies this.)
But after Buckingham Palace weighed in, the government rallied around Andrew. A spokesman said that Cameron “fully supported” the prince in his job. Several prominent businessmen publicly praised Andrew’s role in promoting British industry. “He is of huge value,” Terry Hill, a chairman of Arup, an engineering-design firm, told me. “He’s knockout attractive to overseas clients.”
Most of Andrew’s friends knew better than to get involved in the royal mess. One who didn’t was Goga Ashkenazi, an exotic, publicity-seeking beauty from Kazakhstan, who is frequently photographed in barely-there couture outfits. Britain’s press has likened Ashkenazi to a James Bond girl, and last summer she threw a lavish party in St. Tropez called “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Invitations went out on a diamond-shaped card signed “Madame Goga.” According to one party-goer, “A lot of rude Russians showed up.”
Ashkenazi, who lives in a multi-million-dollar mansion in London’s Holland Park, brokered the sale of Andrew’s Sunninghill Park home to the father of her illegitimate child. Yet, despite her controversial reputation, Goga has made an appearance in the Queen’s box at Ascot and paraded Andrew around as the guest of honor at her lavish 30th-birthday party at Tyringham Hall, the Buckinghamshire country home of real-estate heir Anton Bilton and his wife, Lisa B, a model, singer, and actress. In an interview with the London Evening Standard, Goga said that after the Jeffrey Epstein story broke Andrew sent her a BlackBerry message asking, “Have you seen the papers?” and saying that he was “very, very upset” about the way he was being portrayed, and “very, very worried” that he would lose his job as Britain’s trade envoy.
Blabbing about the private feelings of a member of the royal family is still considered bad form in Britain, and Ashkenazi’s claim to have had a BlackBerry exchange with Andrew was dismissed by Buckingham Palace. But the damage was done. When Andrew showed up at an official event, a reporter who in the past might have been deferential asked him outright if he was “an embarrassment” to the royal family.
Andrew didn’t respond, but the answer seemed obvious, especially to his handlers in Buckingham Palace, who spotted more serious trouble ahead. Following Virginia Roberts’s allegations that she had been flown across state lines and international borders to commit the criminal act of prostitution, the F.B.I. set the wheels in motion to reopen its investigation of Jeffrey Epstein. As a result of a controversial plea bargain that Epstein struck with prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in southern Florida, he escaped more serious charges such as statutory rape, which could have sent him to jail for life. Instead, he served only 13 months in prison—most of that time on work furlough. If the F.B.I. decided to file new charges against Epstein, it seemed likely that Prince Andrew would be subpoenaed to testify in the United States.
With the prospect of even further humiliation to her and her son, the Queen decided to intervene by employing the most potent instrument at her command: royal symbolism. She summoned Andrew to Windsor Castle and in a private ceremony invested him with the insignia of a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, the highest possible honor for “personal service” to the Queen. From now on, Prince Andrew will be entitled to use the letters G.C.V.O. after his name and wear a red-white-and-blue sash complete with the order’s star-shaped insignia, made from sterling silver, silver gilt, and enamel.
Under the protection of the Queen, Prince Andrew was untouchable.
Spoiled but Loyal
Her subjects have a deep reverence for the Queen, who recently turned 85 and in 2012 will celebrate her 60th year on the throne, making her the second-longest-serving British monarch, after Queen Victoria. As things turned out, her symbolic intervention on Andrew’s behalf produced its desired effect. When I arrived in London, two weeks after Andrew’s investiture into the Royal Victorian Order, the British press had fallen all but silent about his murky connections. As for Buckingham Palace, which had been thrown into a state of frenzy by the Virginia Roberts story, it appeared to have regained the customary stiffness in its upper lip.
“The duke has a record of being loyal to his friends,” a royal source explained when I asked him about Andrew’s display of poor judgment. “Take his feelings for Sarah Ferguson. If you are a prince and you bring a woman into the royal life and, for whatever reasons, she’s spit out, you might have feelings of debt toward her. The duke feels that she’s been spattered and rejected. His close relationship with the Duchess of York is problematic, and there have been many problems over the last 5 to 10 years, all of which stem from the duchess. Some of the behavior of the duchess is inconsistent with being married to, or an ex-wife of, the duke. There’s no question but that Sarah’s been a financially self-destructive element in the duke’s life.”
A Buckingham Palace spokesman elaborated on this analysis of the prince’s personality. “The same kind of loyalty manifested itself last December, when the duke visited Epstein at his home in New York,” he told me. “Epstein was a friend of the duke’s for the best part of 20 years. It was the first time in four years that he’d seen Epstein. He now recognizes that the meeting in December was unwise.” A royal source added, “Don’t expect to see a photo of the two of them together.”
“Does that mean that Andrew has broken off all contact with Epstein?,” I asked.
“Hereinafter,” the source said, choosing his words with care, “we won’t see a photo.”
That seemed to leave open the possibility that Andrew intended to carry on his friendship with Epstein, but out of public view.
“I remember when Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein first became friends,” said someone who knows both men well. “Jeffrey had Andrew put on a pair of sweatpants for the first time in his life. He had him wear blue jeans for the first time. It was Jeffrey who taught Andrew how to relax.
“But the major reason Andrew hung out with Jeffrey was to get money for Sarah Ferguson,” this person continued. “Andrew feels responsible for Sarah. She walked away from their divorce with nothing, unlike Princess Diana, who got millions from Prince Charles. There have been newspaper reports that Sarah got £15,000 [$24,500] from Jeffrey, but I think that Sarah has actually received hundreds of thousands of dollars from him.” (Ferguson’s spokesman confirmed that she had received £15,000 from Epstein but wasn’t aware of any additional amount.)
“You have to understand that Andrew still loves Sarah,” the friend went on. “I was with Andrew and Sarah one day when they discussed getting remarried. At the time, Sarah didn’t want to remarry Andrew, because she thought she had a great career in America with Weight Watchers and books and all that. She thought her career would continue to support her expensive lifestyle, and she didn’t want to give all that up to become a boring royal again. Then, after Sarah’s American career collapsed, it was Andrew who didn’t want to remarry her. He told me, ‘Given Sarah’s weaknesses, she wouldn’t make an appropriate royal anymore.’ Also, for the sake of his daughters, Andrew didn’t want to cause a commotion at Buckingham Palace.
“After Jeffrey was convicted, I phoned Andrew and told him, ‘You cannot have a relationship with Jeffrey. You can’t do these things.’ And he said, ‘Stop giving me a hard time. You’re such a puritan.’ From there, our conversation descended into a screaming match, and finally Andrew said, ‘Leave me alone. Jeffrey’s my friend. Being loyal to your friends is a virtue. And I’m going to be loyal to him.’
“Andrew has a stubborn streak. He does stupid things out of hubris, to show that he can do them. If he likes someone, he’ll ignore the truth about that person. And that goes both for Jeffrey and Sarah. He thinks that he can power his way through everything. He’s an adored second son. His mother, the Queen, dotes on him, favors him above all her other children, and excuses his every foible.”
A framed photograph of Andrew in his naval uniform is prominently displayed on the Queen’s desk in her study at Buckingham Palace. Her undisguised affection for her second son stands in sharp contrast to her cool relationship with Prince Charles, with whom she never properly bonded when he was a child. Charles was born just after World War II, when Elizabeth was overwhelmed by her awesome new public responsibilities. She was frequently away on extended foreign trips, and when she was at home she deferred on family matters to her husband, Prince Philip, who was known to belittle their shy, sensitive son cruelly in public.
By the time Andrew was born, 12 years later, things were different. The Queen had gained a great deal of self-confidence, and she wanted to make up for the shortcomings in her parenting of Charles. Right after Andrew’s birth, she sent a note to her cousin Lady Mary Cambridge. “The baby is adorable,” she wrote. “All in all, he’s going to be terribly spoilt by all of us, I’m sure.”
The spoiling never stopped. “Whenever she hears that Andrew is in Buckingham Palace, she’ll send him a handwritten note, and he always goes to see her,” a former Palace aide told Geoffrey Levy and Richard Kay of the Daily Mail. “If he’s in jeans, he’ll change into a suit. And he always greets ‘Mummy’ in the same way—bowing from the neck, kissing her hand, and then kissing her on both cheeks. It’s a little ritual that she adores. Believe me, he can do no wrong.”
Like many spoiled younger sons, Andrew often comes across as arrogant, self-indulgent, and thoughtless of other people’s feelings. A classmate from his days at Gordonstoun—the school that Philip, Charles, and Andrew all attended—reportedly described the adult Andrew as “a man with a fat bottom who laughs at his own jokes.” At a recent lobster dinner, one of the guests turned to Andrew and said, “Sir, you’ve got the big one.” To which Andrew shot back, “How do you know?” and broke into peals of laughter.
The Ladies’ Man
His behavior toward women runs the gamut from boorish to oafish. A woman who attended a weekend party with him at a country house in Dorset recalled his clumsy manners. “I woke up on Saturday morning with a fire extinguisher pointed at my face, behind which was the face of the foolishly laughing prince,” she said. “I told him, ‘Go away!’ It turned out that he had gone to all the girls’ rooms.”
Another woman who knows Andrew well told The Times of London that he looks uncomfortable at parties unless he’s got a girl fawning over him. “[He is] pretty base in terms of women,” she said. “He is a boobs-and-bum man. There is nothing sophisticated about it. One minute you’re having your bum pinched, and the next minute he is reminding you he is Your Royal Highness.”
Since his divorce, Andrew’s most serious romance has been with Amanda Staveley. Andrew invited her to Buckingham Palace and Balmoral, the royal estate in Scotland. He called her “darling,” and she called him “babe.”
“He all but got down on bended knee to ask Amanda to marry him,” Richard Kay, the *Daily Mail’*s veteran royal writer, told me. “He clicked with Amanda. She’s a feisty girl, a strawberry blonde, and an extrovert. Andrew’s fascinated by money, and Amanda’s got plenty of that. She sounded out a lot of people, including me, about what life would be like as a member of the royal family, and she came as close as possible to saying yes. But to become the Duchess of York she’d have had to put herself in the background and give up her career, and she didn’t want to do that.”
There were reports that Fergie encouraged Andrew to marry Staveley. However, given the unconventional nature of Fergie’s relationship with her former husband, there is reason to doubt that. In fact, those who know Fergie wonder if she has sabotaged most of Andrew’s female relationships and would have found a way to scuttle the marriage if Amanda had accepted Andrew’s proposal. According to this line of reasoning, Fergie still exercises a powerful hold over Andrew and counts on her access to his sources of money.
“Andrew hired a team of accountants to investigate Fergie’s debts,” said a royal-watcher. “He paid off several million pounds’ worth of her debts at 25 English pence to the pound. Where did that money come from? Andrew certainly never had that kind of money. No one can prove it, but the assumption is that Fergie’s debts were quietly retired by the Queen.”
People who have spent time with Andrew’s daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, come away impressed by their warmth and unpretentious nature. “At a fashion show, I was sitting with Eugenie,” said Richard Dennen, a style writer for The Sunday Times, “and Charlotte Casiraghi, the daughter of Caroline of Monaco and the granddaughter of Grace Kelly, showed up, dressed in cool French chic. She introduced herself to Eugenie in the most impeccable French: ‘Hello, I am Charlotte.’ And Eugenie replied, ‘Hi, I’m Eug,’ which came out sounding like ‘Hi, I’m Huge.’ It was typical old-squire braying English, completely old school, and it was charming.”
But it was Beatrice, not the more extroverted Eugenie, who stood out at the royal wedding with her outré hat. (Beatrice would later auction the hat on eBay, raising $130,000 for charity.) No one knew whether Fergie had influenced Beatrice in her choice, but everyone agreed that Fergie—who has gone clubbing with Beatrice and Eugenie—exerts a great deal of control over her daughters’ lives. Both girls are said to be in awe of their mother and try to be like her.
When Beatrice was 17, she fell in love with a disreputable American by the name of Paolo Liuzzo. He was seven years older than Beatrice, but Andrew and Fergie encouraged the romance and invited Liuzzo to join the family on a vacation at the exclusive Swiss ski resort Verbier. It later turned out that Liuzzo had a rap sheet in America, including a manslaughter charge for taking part in a drunken scuffle that resulted in a man’s death. (Liuzzo eventually pleaded guilty to an assault-and-battery charge and received three years’ probation and 100 hours of community service.) Beatrice was heartbroken when the relationship ended and she had to return to Goldsmiths, which is part of the University of London.
“Beatrice was clearly embarrassed when it was revealed that Fergie took money to introduce an undercover reporter to Prince Andrew,” said someone who has been with the princess at charity balls and nightclubs. “A friend went to Royal Lodge to comfort Beatrice, who wouldn’t leave the house because she was so ashamed and didn’t want to have to deal with the press. The friend spent two nights with her while she cried.”
Andrew’s Future Outlook
During the weeks leading up to the royal wedding, the impact of Andrew’s problems on the future of the monarchy was the subject of much discussion in London. The festivities coincided with the most sweeping fiscal retrenchment in Britain since World War II, which forced the coalition government to cast a gimlet eye at the hefty bill for the royal family. In an era of record budget deficits, it didn’t help the royals’ case for people to read that Andrew had spent roughly $13 million refurbishing Royal Lodge and that, until recently, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie had 24-hour police protection at a yearly cost to taxpayers of $820,000.
Nor are average Britons keen to hear royals whine about being short of money. The Queen, who is reputed to be among the richest people in the world, with a net worth of about $20 billion, receives $60 million from the government to cover her expenses. Most of her fortune is tied up in priceless art treasures, jewels, and Crown Estates, none of which she can sell. According to Philip Beresford, who follows royal finances for The Sunday Times, the Queen has liquid assets of about $500 million—one-third in shares of blue-chip companies, one-third in revenue-producing properties at Sandringham and Balmoral, and one-third in racehorses and a stamp collection. Last year, the Queen paid the British treasury nearly $328 million in taxes. Plus, she has to come up with money to support all the minor royals staying in Kensington Palace.
Prince Charles’s financial situation resembles that of his mother, though on a reduced scale. As the steward of the Duchy of Cornwall, he gets an annual income of $26 million from great tracts of land in the southwest of England. But he can’t sell any of that property for profit. He donates about 60 percent of his income to charity, and another large chunk goes to pay taxes.
Recently, the hard-up British government decommissioned the country’s last operational aircraft carrier, the H.M.S. Ark Royal, leading The Wall Street Journal to proclaim in a front-page headline, SUN SETTING ON BRITISH POWER. It would be premature to say that the same is true for the British monarchy, though it, too, will have to adapt to the stringent economic realities of the 21st century.
That doesn’t mean, as some have suggested, that the monarchy is doomed to fade away or that there is a groundswell of support in Britain to replace it with a republic. On the contrary, a recent opinion poll showed that 76 percent of Britons are proud to live under a monarchy. But it does mean that the institution of the monarchy is in a state of flux at a critical moment. Both Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh are advanced in years and may not be able to carry on their responsibilities much longer.
At her 1953 coronation, Elizabeth swore an oath to serve God and her subjects, and she shows no desire to abdicate the throne, now or ever. There are signs, however, that she has begun to retreat from public life. She has turned over many of her royal duties to Charles, sending him on foreign trips in her stead and allowing him to confer knighthoods. Last Christmas she reportedly invited Prince William to sit in on his first meeting of the Way Ahead Group, preparing him for the day he becomes King.
Like his mother, Princess Diana, William has a knack for connecting with ordinary people, a quality his father conspicuously lacks. “William is a key player in the future monarchy,” said a source who has studied the matter closely. “He’s going to help direct how things will happen. The popularity of William and Kate is very important. It’s the oxygen the monarchy needs for survival.”
A substantial number of Britons are in favor of Charles’s stepping aside in William’s favor after the Queen dies. But tampering with the succession to the throne would precipitate a constitutional crisis. It would require an act of Parliament plus the passage of legislation by all the Commonwealth governments, neither of which is likely to happen. What’s more, it is well known in royal circles that Camilla is keen to become the first commoner Queen and that Charles is eager to gratify her wish.
“What’s far more likely to happen,” said the royal-watcher Robert Jobson, “is that there will be a seamless change of power in the monarchy, a gradual shift away from the Queen. Charles’s influence will gain, as will William’s. During the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, Charles and William will be like shadow kings.”
Charles turns 63 in November, and given the longevity of the Windsor line, he may have a long wait to ascend the throne. But assuming he outlives his mother, he will become King. He has made no secret of the fact that he intends to make significant changes in the monarchy. To begin with, he’s determined to be seen as the representative of a more inclusive society. He has stated that he will be the Defender of the Faiths—plural—not simply the Church of England, which would be a monumental departure from nearly 500 years of tradition. He also wants a thriftier, pared-down monarchy, which is not so open to criticism.
All of this is bad news for Prince Andrew. Up till now, Andrew and his daughters have lived a charmed life. To please her favorite son, Queen Elizabeth has taken Beatrice and Eugenie under her wing and given them a place of honor on the balcony of Buckingham Palace during state occasions. Over the objections of her husband, the Queen has indulged Andrew’s wish to live under the same roof as his ex-wife, and she has turned a blind eye to his improper behavior.
But the time is nearing when Prince Charles will take a more significant role in running the affairs of the British monarchy. And as Queen Elizabeth’s power wanes and Charles’s power grows, Andrew is likely to find himself out of a job and out of luck.
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On which material is the Hereford Mappa Mundi drawn? | BBC - A History of the World - Object : Mappa Mundi
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Drawn a single sheet of vellum, the Mappa Mundi reflects the medieval church with Jerusalem at the centre of the worldThe Hereford Mappa Mundi is an outstanding treasure of the medieval world recording how thirteenth-century scholars interpreted the world in spiritual as well as geographical terms. It bears the name of its author 'Richard of Haldingham or Lafford' (Holdingham and Sleaford in Lincolnshire) and was created around 1300.
Drawn on a single sheet of vellum (calf skin) measuring 1.58 x 1.33 meters, it tapers towards the top with a rounded apex. The geographical material of the map is contained within a circle measuring 52" in diameter and reflects the thinking of the medieval church with Jerusalem at the centre of the world.
Superimposed onto the continents are around 500 drawings of the history of humankind and the marvels of the natural world, including some 420 cities and towns, 15 Biblical events, 33 plants, animals, birds and strange creatures, 32 images of the peoples of the world and 8 pictures from classical mythology.
Drawn a single sheet of vellum, the Mappa Mundi reflects the medieval church with Jerusalem at the centre of the world
| Vellum |
Which Russian Tsar, known as 'The Liberator', was assassinated in March 1881? | Making a Mappamundi: The Hereford Map Scott D. Westrem
Chart 1. Principal Sources and Analogues for Information on the Hereford Map
(listed chronologically)
��� The Bible; quoted and cited in one legend, underlies some 20 others
��� Pliny, Naturalis historia (a.d. 79 [unfinished]); definitive source for 12 legends
��� Antonini Augusti itineraria provinciarum et maritimum [The Antonine Itinerary] (c. 211-217, with later revisions); likely source for 100-150 toponyms
��� Solinus, Collectanea rerum memorabilium (c. 230/240); definitive source for 53 legends
��� St. Jerome, De situ et nominibus locorum hebraicorum liber (390); definitive source for 1 legend, likely source for many others
��� Julius Honorius, Cosmographia Iulii Caesaris (c.� 312/400); definitive source for 6 legends
��� Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (c. 410/439); definitive source for 6 legends
��� Paulus Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos libri vii (c. 418); definitive source for 6 legends; likely source for at least 33 others
��� Isidore of Seville, De natura rerum (612-613); definitive source for 11 legends
��� Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive Originum libri xx (636 [unfinished]); definitive source for 35 legends
��� Aethicus Ister, The Cosmography (late 7th/early 8th century); definitive source (much revised and abstracted) for 16 legends
��� Others:� Adamnan, De locis sanctis (c. 700 [1 legend]); Paul the Deacon, Historia Langobardum (late 8th century [1 legend]); Hugh of St. Victor, Descriptio mappe mundi (c. 1130 [2 legends, perhaps 3 others]); the French translation of The Letter of Prester John (c. 1200 [2 legends])
��� Roger of Howden (?), Expositio mappe mundi (c. 1190); 437 (of 1,091) legends appear verbatim or nearly so in this work, with another 50 indirect matches; of 484 itemized data-bits in EMM, 401 are found verbatim or nearly so on the Map.� The two known manuscript copies are fragmentary; internal references suggest that the original version contained sections on Iberia, the British Isles, and islands in the Black and Mediterranean Seas, which are not covered in the surviving text.
����� The range of information is also impressive.� Chart 2 presents an overview of the various kinds of data on the Map.� This chart is based on my division of the terrestrial landmass on the Map into five basic units; in addition,� 31 legends are found in the peripheral areas of the vellum outside the circle of the earth (sectional divisions are highlighted on Fig. 2).� In this division Asia occupies the top half, Europe the lower-left quadrant, and Africa the lower-right quadrant; separate categories exist for the Euxine�or Black Sea�and Mediterranean islands, spread across the middle of the Map and forming a kind of radius bar in the lower half, and for a corridor of monstrous people or humanoids along the right edge of the Map, but not figured specifically as Africans.11 � The numbers record how many legends have a particular cartographical topic as their principal subject.� A few legends combine topics, identifying a river or a kingdom, for example, that is more directly related to a theological or historical matter.� In such cases, the geographical feature is regarded as secondary, and it is included in the number recorded between parentheses on the second line in each box.12 � Percentages run across along every row (for categories) except for the right-most column, in which they run vertically (for overall totals).
Fig. 2. Sectional divisions of the earth employed on Chart 2 (and in Westrem, The Hereford Map.)
����� The chart may enable us to see the world in a more analogous way to that in which its makers envisioned it.� Asia is notable for its ethnic groups and animals; it is the arena for almost all the scenes of religious�and most of those of historical�consequence.� Europe, by contrast, is largely reduced to physical geography:� it has as many kingdoms and provinces as vast Asia, and almost twice as many cities (more than half the cities in the world, and three-fifths of its rivers, are found in Europe, reflecting its commercial and civic character).� Most of the legends in Africa identify regions or towns; the lengthiest legends are measurements of various distances and come from passages in ancient sources that debate whether or not Africa was large enough to be thought one of the earth�s principal �parts.�� Islands are by and large named with no further attention to them, and the corridor of strange humans, unsurprisingly, is largely a collection of (pseudo-)ethnographic information.� Scholars who consider the Hereford Map a gigantic Bible story�or even a lesson in Classical history�however, should note the very small percentage of legends that take these subjects as their principal themes.
����� The likelihood that a cartographer�or even a team of mapmakers�sat with a collection of ten or fifteen manuscripts around them and recorded various passages on a huge piece of calf skin laid before them has seemed an unrealistic way to imagine the assembly of data that come from so many sources and range so widely in content as we see on the Hereford Map.� Historians of cartography have conjectured that surviving and lost maps of this kind must have been copied from each other or some, probably French, prototype, although how and in what format this prototype circulated has been uncertain because no one has ever located a �smoking gun.�� Aware that navigational charts with extremely �accurate� representations of the east Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Black Sea coastlines were being drawn from at least the late 1100s, at the same time that mappaemundi were representing a more schematized earth, they have also taken it somewhat for granted that these two images of geographical reality came from different�indeed, in the estimation of some, intellectually quite opposed�circles.13
����� Just what kind of source they may have used has been detected by Patrick Gautier Dalch�, one of the most brilliant and innovative historians of medieval culture in the world today, who has found two manuscript copies of a text entitled Expositio mappe mundi (hereafter referred to as �EMM�).14 � If it is not the recipe for making a mappamundi, EMM is certainly a careful record of the content of an existing one (so careful, in fact, that even if it was originally composed only as a descriptio, it could have been used to produce another).� The text is in essence a collection of 484 data items, which range from detailed reports about Asian locations to simple toponyms listed according to their location along coastlines or rivers.� (The text as we have it today breaks off mid-word in both manuscripts, and the original is likely to have had around 200 additional itemized names.)� That cartographers did indeed employ EMM (or a text very like it) is proved by the inscriptions on the Hereford Map, where more than 400 of these 484 existing data items appear verbatim or nearly so.15
����� EMM is a spatially specific, instructive manual about the appearance of a world map; its language approaches that of a rudimentary science, as the citations recorded on Charts 3 and 4 indicate.� A map �legend� is a titulus; many toponyms are noted to be �opposite� (contra) others; some are specifically noted to �span� rivers, appear �to the south of� something else, or be �above,� �after,� or �below� a different city, mountain, or island.� Some territories are �demarcated� (distinguuntur) by lines.� A design �depicted� (pingitur) near a legend is briefly, exactly described.� Regions of the earth are divided into sections and treated separately.� Thus, the writer observes that the Danube has sixty tributaries, �of which we shall place twelve on the map�; each of the dozen is identified, working from west to east (source to mouth), with key adjacent cities located, usually along one (or at a confluence) of the rivers.16 � This locational and imagistic exactitude is evident in the passages quoted in Chart 3, in the left column, in which the author of EMM describes precisely the placement of six islands along the upper-left (northeast) rim of the earth.� A comparison of the text of, and instructions for layout in, EMM with the legends and design of the Hereford Map on Fig. 3 reveals their exact correspondence.17
Fig. 3. The upper-left corner of the Hereford Map, showing north and east Asia (compare to the contents on Chart 3). Along the edge of the earth, from lower-left to upper right, are the "islands" with the evil offspring of Cain (walled off from the rest of civilization by Alexander the Great [�141]), "enormous Albatia (�89), the Phanesii with the huge ears (�880, the twin Eones islands (�35-36, described in �39), and the Hippopodes (�37).
����� The places described here are in the northeast, where the writer of EMM in effect tells the mapmaker to begin production.� Here a walled-up population awaits the call of Antichrist, islanders live off of bird eggs, and a race of people use their gargantuan ears like overcoats.� All this may confirm the opinion of some readers of medieval geographies and maps that they are expressions of superstition, na�vete, and gullibility.� One century ago, the prominent English historian C. Raymond Beazley disdained to include a discussion of the Hereford Map into his nearly 2,000-page Dawn of Modern Geography, calling it a �monstrosity of complete futility.�18 � Chart 3 and its corresponding Map section display what was for him a basis for that conclusion.� But the data assembled on Chart 2 suggest that the Hereford Map�and an analogue like EMM�are much more sophisticated.
����� They are so for at least three reasons.� In order to appreciate the fuller picture of the relationship between EMM and the Hereford Map, one may wish to take a brief look at their discrepancies.� As has already been noted, at least 80% of the manuscript text re-appears essentially verbatim on the Map, whereas only about 40% of the Map�s content derives from the EMM.� A considerable portion of this difference would most probably be made up if we had access to the original version of EMM, which almost certainly included another 200 entries for place-names in western Europe and the Mediterranean.19 � EMM and the Hereford Map correspond most consistently along seacoasts:� except in Europe (where rivers and adjacent cities are exactly described), internal land areas are largely missing from EMM, which includes no mention of a region, city, mountain, or river essentially between the Indus and the Jordan.� Africa south of the Mediterranean coast is unknown as well.� On the Hereford Map, these areas are home to a variety of animals and humans.� Quite a few of these are peculiar in shape or behavior (like the huge-eared Phanesii and the ruthless kin of Cain noted in Chart 3), and they are often located near the edges of the terrestrial landmass.� This is as true of Europe as of other regions:� Sweden is evidently inhabited by monkey-people (it is labelled �Simea� and its population is represented by a gorilla-like creature seated on the ground).� Rather than ascribe this to subconscious marginalization of strange people�the psychological spin some scholars have put on this spatial display�or to �medieval ignorance,� we may do better to look for an explanation in science.20
����� According to medieval zonal theory, the spherical earth was divided into three uninhabitable and two mutually inaccessible but habitable �bands� of territory; this promoted a medical understanding of elemental and bodily �humors� that led to a kind of meteorological determinism.� As one approached the edges of the earth�s landmass and encountered increasing cold and aridity or heat and moisture, one inevitably came across people who looked or behaved in extreme ways.� The idea is discussed especially in geographies written during the 1200s, such as Thomas of Cantimpr�s Liber de natura rerum (1237/1240).� A growing interest in the effect of climate on human and animal populations during the thirteenth century may explain some gaps in EMM, which was probably written during the previous century.21
����� Comparing EMM to the Hereford Map�this time noting striking parallels�may alert us to a second kind of sophistication.� What quite irritated Beazley and other historians of cartography about mappaemundi was their general lack of scale:� space is not apportioned on the vellum surface in a fashion relatively consistent with space in the �real� world.� This is most apparent in the delineation of coastlines, made even more problematic to the modern eye by placing the known landmass into a circular rather than a rectangular frame.� (It is also evident in other ways:� the Holy Land is half the size of all of Europe, perhaps a reflection of its historical importance to the Christian West, and thus its amplitude is moral rather than geographical.)� Chart 4 (and the related Fig. 1), however, call attention to a remarkable degree of accuracy in the relationship of toponyms�for cities, rivers, and mountains�both in EMM and in Hereford Map legends.� On the Asia Minor littoral, for example, one passage in EMM links 39 place-names in a running series, 23 of which are found in Chart 4 (and visible, in almost exactly parallel order, on Fig. 1).22 � Moreover, the parallel is �correct,� reflecting the actual locations of these places in modern Turkey.� This same accurate parallelism in strings of toponyms can be found along the coasts of Greece, Italy, and north Africa, as well as on the banks of most of the 89 rivers in Europe on the Hereford Map.
����� The third kind of sophistication requires a better understanding of the history of EMM as a text.� In the introduction to his edition of it, Gautier Dalch� convincingly argues that although the two known manuscripts were copied in Germany during the mid-fifteenth century�and thus EMM as we have it today post-dates the production of the Hereford Map by some 150 years�the work itself was most likely composed in England, probably Yorkshire, in the later twelfth century, very likely based on an earlier prototype but much improved by the author�s personal experience and knowledge.� That author was probably in the entourage of Richard I (Lionheart) on the Third Crusade (1188-1192), and he may have been Roger of Howden, the Yorkshire cleric and counselor who chronicled this event.� Roger was, in any event, almost certainly responsible for the two other treatises bound together with EMM in both manuscripts, De viis maris and Liber nautarum, works of practical navigation from the late-twelfth century that were used in connection with sea charts.� This is a stunning discovery because in this Gautier Dalch� demonstrates the falseness of the opposition traditionally thought to have existed between the makers of mappaemundi and navigational charts, an opposition usually cast as a stark division between na�ve monks applying a Christian overlay to an outdated Greco-Roman model and savvy traders (merchants and/or pilots) laying the groundwork for �modern� cartography in innovative marine maps.� The two different cartographical styles interested, and in some cases at least were evidently being produced by, the same individuals; in both cases, this occurred in a highly methodical way.� Thus the only thing really monstrous about the Hereford Map, perhaps, is the way it and its making have been misunderstood and expected to conform to modern taste.
1�� Citations from and references to the Hereford Map come from my study, The Hereford Map.� A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Commentary, History of the Representation of Space in Text and Image 1 (Turnhout:� Brepols, 2001).� Map legends (identified by the symbol �) are discussed individually in connection with related designs.� The Map�s precise length (measuring along the animal�s spine) is 1,587 millimeters; its width varies, being 1,292 millimeters at the base of the triangular head (near the top); 1,325 millimeters across the middle (in effect the depicted earth�s diameter); and 1,335 millimeters across the bottom.� It thus has a length of 5 feet 2 3/8 inches and ranges from around 4 feet 2 5/8 inches to 4 feet 4 inches across, with a �diameter� of 4 feet 3 11/16 inches.� The skin was trimmed on all sides, with the loss of some painted surface at the left extreme; around 50 millimeters (2 inches) of vellum has probably been cut away (Westrem, p. xv, n. 1).� On biblical evidence for Jerusalem�s centrality in the earth�s landmass, see Psalms 73 [74]: 12 and Ezekiel 5:5.
2�� The most significant of these specific analyses links the horseman to Thomas of Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford (1275-1282), and his successful lawsuit regarding hunting rights against Earl Gilbert of Gloucester in 1277-1278; see Valerie I. J. Flint, �The Hereford Map:� Its Author(s), Two Scenes and a Border,� Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 8 (1998), p.19-44.� On other studies, see P. D. A. Harvey, Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map (Toronto:� University of Toronto Press, 1996) and Westrem, The Hereford Map, p. xxi-xxv and nn. 18-28, as well as the commentary to �6-15 and the bibliography for secondary sources (p. lii-lvii).
3�� Some scholarly studies treat as �conventional� a map of the world placed in the context of a scene with Jesus Christ.� In fact, such a juxtaposition is known from only five mappaemundi:� the Hereford Map, the Ebstorf Map (see n. 4, below), the Psalter Map (London, British Library, MS Additional 28681, fol. 9r), the very fragmentary Duchy of Cornwall Map. (London, Duchy of Cornwall Office), and the Lambeth Map (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 371, fol. 9v).� All four date from between approximately 1240 and 1300.� The only published notice of the Lambeth Map is in my essay �Geography and Travel,� A Companion to Chaucer. Ed. Peter Brown (Oxford:� Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 195-217 (at p. 206-09 and Fig. 12.1). Other exemplars combining theological design and geography may of course be lost.
4�� For bibliographical information on these and other (including lost) cartographical exemplars, see Westrem, The Hereford Map, p. xv-xvii and nn. 3-7.
5�� On Flint�s article, see n. 2, above.� Barber and Harvey�s edited volume of essays based on lectures delivered at Hereford Cathedral (27 June-1 July 1999), The Hereford Mappa Mundi:� Proceedings of the Mappa Mundi Conference, 1999, is forthcoming from the British Library.� On the Map�s origins, its frame, and usage, see Westrem, The Hereford Map, p. xix-xxv and nn. 12-30.� The conservator Christopher Clarkson drew my attention to the gouge in the Map�s former frame.
6�� My work on the Map has been much advanced by the great generosity of the Dean and Chapter of Hereford and the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust; Canon John Tiller, Chancellor and Master of the Library; Joan Williams, Librarian; and (especially) Dominic Harbour, Education and Marketing Manager (formerly Curator or Keeper) at the Cathedral.� I am grateful for the Dean and Chapter�s permission to reprint here images of the Map made from transparencies produced in January 2001 by Gordon W. Taylor, MBE, LRPS, FIBMS.
7�� Some details about the vellum come from a presentation (for Cathedral staff) on 10 January 2001 by Wim Visscher of William Cowley Parchment Works in England.� The Map was intricately mounted to a wooden frame in 1948, and it has since been impossible to ascertain whether the Map�s thickness at the edges is constant and if there is any text or design on the reverse (hair) side.� Parkes and Morgan presented a �technical survey� of the Map at the Hereford Mappa Mundi Conference, and their findings (based on dated manuscripts and datable imagery from 1290s) are being published in the proceedings volume by Barber and Harvey (see n. 5, above).� See also Westrem, The Hereford Map, p. xviii-xix and n. 10.
8�� I am writing an article on the usage of a figure with concentric circles to represent a sphere before the landmark publication in 1435 of Leone Battista Alberti�s De pictura, in which the technique of perspectival design was linked to a theory advocating painting as an imitation of reality (Filippo Brunelleschi had employed this technique in executing architectural views of Florence on two panels around 1420.� A locus classicus in design terms for the medieval point of view is in Isidore of Seville�s Etymologies, in a summary coverage of geometrical figures, the text of which is written in such a way as to require a diagrammatic representation (III.xii); many surviving manuscripts (which total in the hundreds) show an exact correspondence between the sketch of a sphere here (two concentric circles) and the outline of the world in a mappamundi often drawn near the beginning of Isidore�s discussion of geography (XIV.ii).
9�� Flint, �The Hereford Map,� p. 23 (see n. 2, above).
10�� For bibliographical information for editions and translations of the source texts, see Westrem, The Hereford Map, p. xxviii-xxxvii and nn. 43-59.
11�� More detailed analysis of these data can be found in my �Lessons from Legends on the Hereford Mappa Mundi,� Hereford Mappa Mundi Conference proceedings volume being edited by Barber and Harvey (see n. 5, above).� Treating islands separately from the earth�s three �parts� follows the organizational style adopted by Isidore of Seville, Honorius Augustodunensis, and other medieval geographical authorities.
12�� For example, in the Garden of Eden, at the top of the earth�s circle, the Four Rivers of Paradise are identified as they are named in Genesis 2:11-14.� These four legends (�66-69) are included among the 23 that relate principally to �Concepts/Ideas/Names Associated with Biblical/Christian History� in Asia; they are numbered among the seven secondary references to �Names of Rivers� in Asia.� Similarly three legends in Asia that identify regions visited or conquered by Alexander the Great (�62, 86, 115) are counted among the six �Concepts/Ideas/Names Associated with �Secular� History� in Asia and, secondarily, among the six �Names of Land Areas.�
13�� On the origins of mappaemundi, see G. R. Crone, The World Map by Richard of Haldingham in Hereford Cathedral, circa a.d. 1285. Reproductions of Early Manuscript Maps 3 (London:� Royal Geographical Society, 1954), p. 16-17.� On navigational charts and portolani dating to the later 1100s (one century earlier than has been generally thought), see Patrick Gautier Dalch�. Carte marine et portulan au XIIe si�cle:� Le Liber de existencia riveriarum et forma maris nostri Mediterranei. Pise, circa 1200. Collection de l��cole fran�aise de Rome 203 (Rome:� �cole fran�aise de Rome, 1995).
14�� �D�crire le monde et situer les lieux au XIIe si�cle:� L�Expositio mappe mundi et la g�n�alogie de la mappemonde de Hereford.� M�langes de l��cole fran�aise de Rome.� Antiquit�-Moyen �ge 112[1]. Rome:� �cole fran�aise de Rome, [forthcoming].� The two known copies are Paris, Biblioth�que Nationale de France, MS lat. 3123 (fols. 126r-131v); and Valenciennes, Biblioth�que Municipale, MS 344 (fols. 52va-56va); both have a German provenance.� I am most grateful to M. Gautier Dalch� (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and �cole Pratique des Hautes �tudes [IVe Section], Paris) for permitting me to use his scrupulous edition of EMM, with a learned introduction, here and in my book.
15�� Missing from EMM are Iberia, Britain, and islands in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, where 214 legends are found on the Hereford Map.� That these areas were included in the original is strongly suggested by the occasional location of one place �opposite� a city or island in these missing territories.
16�� Danubius oritur ab orientali parte Reni fluminis sub quadam ecclesia, et progressus ad orientem, . . . colligens hinc et inde flumina lx cum quibus se in Ponticum sinum vii ostiis precipitat.� Quorum xii tantum in mappa ponimus�; Gautier Dalch�, �D�crire le monde� (III.137).
17�� So closely do the texts correspond that a phrase missing in EMM (I.21) owing to an eye-slip, or homoeoteleutou, can be restored based on the Map�s legend (�141), and a lexical absurdity on the Map (�39) can be corrected using the text of EMM (I.44).� More details are found in these passages in Gautier Dalch�, �D�crire le monde�; and Westrem, The Hereford Map.
18�� According to Beazley, in his comprehensive work, �a bare allusion to the monstrosities of Hereford and Ebstorf should suffice�; The Dawn of Modern Geography (3 vols. London, 1897-1906; rpt. New York:� Peter Smith, 1949), p. 3:528.� In a similar vein the Map�s earliest serious students, the Anglican clerics W. L. Bevan and H. W. Phillott, wrote that it shows a �rejection of all that savoured of scientific geography, . . . servile adherence to antiquated geographical treatises, . . . anachronism, . . . and the sore lack of all critical and even grammatical accuracy�; Medi�val Geography.� An Essay in Illustration of the Hereford Mappa Mundi (London and Hereford, 1873; rpt. Amsterdam: Meridian, 1969), p. 1-2.
19�� See n. 15, above.
20�� Other explanations for the presence of certain regions and peoples on a Map made in the late 1200s where no such detail is found in a text probably written in the late 1100s include Mongol incursions in central Europe during the mid-thirteenth century, vastly expanded trade (with Europeans dealing directly with east Asians, rather than being forced to operate through Arab intermediaries), a revival and re-direction of evangelistic interest, and the move to compile �scientific� encyclopedias (with the summa as an intellectual goal).� Almost nowhere does a Map legend take a moral point of view about human peculiarity; one goes to some length to offer a sensible explanation�known from no other source, including EMM�for the Essedonian habit of eating one�e parents after they die (�212).
21�� Zonal theory was first articulated by the Greeks probably by the fifth century B.C. (most likely by Parmenides [fl. 480 B.C.]); Macrobius discussed the issue in his famous Latin Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (c. A.D. 400), a text that was often attended during the Middle Ages by diagrammatic �maps� illustrating the concept.� See also David Woodward. �Medieval Mappaemundi.� Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward, vol. 1 of The History of Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 300.� On Thomas of Cantimpr�, see Liber de natura rerum. Ed. Helmut Boese, (Berlin:� de Gruyter, 1973) p. 5, 102-74 (Prol. and Book 4 [�De animalibus quadrupedibus�]).
22�� Gautier Dalch�, �D�crire le monde,� I.90-128.� The passage begins �In Asya minori maritime ciuitates:� contra Patmos Eraclea.�� A new coastline section (in modern Syria and Lebanon) begins after �Laodicia� with the words �Inde usque ad montem Libanum hee maritime ciuitates� (I.129).
23�� The �standard� Latin forms of these place-names and the modern English equivalents are those recorded in the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, ed. Richard J. A. Talbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), which I employ throughout my book, but with the caution that in dealing with the manuscript culture of medieval Europe, it is misleading and anachronistic to speak of �standard� or �correct� spellings, especially of geographical words.
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In which US state is the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railway? | Official Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad Train
A memorable 1880s experience!
All Aboard!
Durango, Colorado was founded by the Denver & Rio Grande Railway in 1879. The railroad arrived in Durango on August 5, 1881 and construction on the line to Silverton began in the fall of the same year. By July of 1882, the tracks to Silverton were completed, and the train began hauling both freight and passengers.
The line was constructed to haul silver & gold ore from Southwest Colorado's San Juan Mountains, but passengers soon realized it was the view that was truly precious.
This historic train has been in continuous operation between Durango and Silverton since 1882, carrying passengers behind vintage steam locomotives and rolling stock indigenous to the line. It is a family-friendly ride sure to create memories that will last a lifetime while offering a view of Colorado's mountain splendor inaccessible by highway. Relive the sights and sounds of yesteryear for a spectacular journey on board the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad.
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Durango Railroad
Durango Colorado offers a glimpse into the past of American railroading. Durango owes its very existence to the booming railroad empires of the late 1800s. Durango was founded in 1879 by the Denver and Rio Grande to serve as a hub for the San Juan extension. This city on the banks of the snow-fed Animas River came to life in 1881 when the Denver and Rio Grande railroad’s first tracks were laid there.
The tracks of the San Juan extension are narrow gauge. These tracks are three feet apart compared to the standard gauge distance of 4’ 8.5”. The narrow gauge San Juan extension was envisioned by General William J. Palmer, engineer and head of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. The narrower rails allowed the railroad to take tighter turns and take up less space, ideal for the mountainous terrain of the San Juan range.
July 2016
Railroad Construction
Narrow gauge or not, these lines through the San Juan range presented a daunting engineering challenge, and the Durango to Silverton Branch was the most ambitious of all. The rewards of carving a rail line 46 miles through the Animas Valley to Silverton were fantastic, though. Silverton promised “silver by the ton” and the only way to move all of that silver ore to smelters and refineries in Durango was by train. It was a risk that Palmer felt confident in taking. But he wasn’t so sure if the railroad’s board of directors would be willing to share that risk.
Always a problem-solver, Palmer decided that the best way to proceed would be to keep his Silverton Branch a secret. No photographs of his new line would be allowed until it was completed in 1882. Palmer was wise to keep his project under wraps. Images of the narrow gauge line snaking along a canyon wall, perched 200 feet above the river below might have been cause for concern about Palmer’s sanity. But Palmer’s lifetime of experience in railroading and training in engineering gave him the confidence to push forward with his Silverton Branch. The Silverton Branch was completed in July of 1882, only 11 months since the rail lines first reached Durango.
D&SNG RR Historic Engines
In continuous operation since 1882, The Silverton Branch today is a lasting remnant of the Denver and Rio Grande. Although the Denver and Rio Grande is long gone, the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad preserves the memory of that Rocky Mountain railroad empire. Most of the equipment on the railroad is original, with a few reproductions, such as the Silver Vista observation coach. The locomotives used for excursions are all coal-fired iron horses from 1923-1925. D&SNGRR owns three K-28 class steam engines and four K-36 class engines. The railroad also maintains five diesel powered engines for general switching duties. In addition to these engines, three more engines from the turn of the century are on display. One C-16 and two K-37 class engines are static display engines. The engines get their start on the day early. Early morning visitors to the railroad’s roundhouse can watch the engines emerge and turn on the 65 foot turntable bridge.
Passenger Cars
The D&SNGRR has an impressive rolling stock collection of nearly 50 railcars. The oldest, General Palmer’s personal coach, dates to 1878. The 2006 reproduction of the Denver and Rio Grande’s observation coach “Silver Vista” inspired the second glass-roofed coach built from scratch in 2013, the “Knight Sky.” Visit the website to see all the classes…Presidential, First Class, Deluxe Class and Standard Class.
Durango Railroad
A round trip on the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge takes about eight hours. Numerous special excursions and themed trips keep the journey as exciting as the scenery. Some passengers take advantage of the train’s pass through the San Juan National forest to enjoy backpacking camping trips or just day hikes, returning with the train as it passes through. The train’s boxcars store luggage and equipment just as in the heyday of passenger rail lines. The biggest draw for the rail line is the scenery and the engineering marvels of the rail line as it passes through the Animas river gorge. The stunning features of the railroad are what allowed it to survive while others failed. The narrow gauge lines of the San Juan first experienced financial trouble when silver no longer backed every dollar in the U.S. treasury. The cost of mining and refining soon outweighed the market value, so the old lines were slowly abandoned.
The narrow gauge carried various cargo during the years before it became a sightseers attraction. The creation of nearby Mesa Verde national park was a major contributor to the upsurge in visitors hoping to enjoy an excursion on the Silverton Branch. World War I and the Flu Pandemic of 1918 threatened the railroad, as did a major flood in 1911. During World War II, the government appropriated narrow gauge railcars to service in Alaska. Uranium ore was mined from Silverton and hauled on the Silverton Branch where it was refined at the abandoned American smelter south of Durango. Armed guards accompanied the train as it hauled the mineral essential to ending World War II and starting the atomic age. Oil and gas discoveries helped keep the railroad’s freight line profitable, but the main source of income remained passenger leisure travel.
Hollywood and Durango Railroad
Later, the rail line gained popularity as a location for motion pictures. The 1967 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a better known production filmed on location at the Durango and Silverton line.
Durango Railfanning
In 1969, the line was listed by the National Park Service as National Historic Landmark and was awarded as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. In that same year, the Denver and Rio Grande abandoned the tracks that linked the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge to the rest of the United States rail system. Since then, the preservation of the line has depended on the sightseers who visit Durango to experience the old west. The line begain hauling gold and silver ore, but now it carries priceless memories for visitors to spend with friends and family traveling with the iron horses of the old west.
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Which country is the setting for Alexander McCall Smith's series of novels 'The No 1. Ladies' Detective Agency'? | The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series #1) by Alexander McCall Smith, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®
Overview
THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY - Book 1
Fans around the world adore the best-selling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series and its proprietor, Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s premier lady detective. In this charming series, Mma Ramotswe—with help from her loyal associate, Grace Makutsi—navigates her cases and her personal life with wisdom, good humor, and the occasional cup of tea.
This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith’s widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to “help people with problems in their lives.” Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing eleven-year-old boy, who may have been snatched by witchdoctors.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency received two Booker Judges’ Special Recommendations and was voted one of the International Books of the Year and the Millennium by the Times Literary Supplement.
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CHAPTER ONE
The Daddy
Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill. These were its assets: a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter. Then there was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe--the only lady private detective in Botswana--brewed redbush tea. And three mugs--one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need? Detective agencies rely on human intuition and intelligence, both of which Mma Ramotswe had in abundance. No inventory would ever include those, of course.
But there was also the view, which again could appear on no inventory. How could any such list describe what one saw when one looked out from Mma Ramotswe's door? To the front, an acacia tree, the thorn tree which dots the wide edges of the Kalahari; the great white thorns, a warning; the olive-grey leaves, by contrast, so delicate. In its branches, in the late afternoon, or in the cool of the early morning, one might see a Go-Away Bird, or hear it, rather. And beyond the acacia, over the dusty road, the roofs of the town under a cover of trees and scrub bush; on the horizon, in a blue shimmer of heat, the hills, like improbable, overgrown termite mounds.
Everybody called her Mma Ramotswe, although if people had wanted to be formal, they would have addressed her as Mme Mma Ramotswe. This is the right thing for a person of stature, but which she had never used of herself. So it was always Mma Ramotswe, rather than Precious Ramotswe, a name which very few people employed.
She was a good detective, and a good woman. A good woman in a good country, one might say. She loved her country, Botswana, which is a place of peace, and she loved Africa, for all its trials. I am not ashamed to be called an African patriot, said Mma Ramotswe. I love all the people whom God made, but I especially know how to love the people who live in this place. They are my people, my brothers and sisters. It is my duty to help them to solve the mysteries in their lives. That is what I am called to do.
In idle moments, when there were no pressing matters to be dealt with, and when everybody seemed to be sleepy from the heat, she would sit under her acacia tree. It was a dusty place to sit, and the chickens would occasionally come and peck about her feet, but it was a place which seemed to encourage thought. It was here that Mma Ramotswe would contemplate some of the issues which, in everyday life, may so easily be pushed to one side.
Everything, thought Mma Ramotswe, has been something before. Here I am, the only lady private detective in the whole of Botswana, sitting in front of my detective agency. But only a few years ago there was no detective agency, and before that, before there were even any buildings here, there were just the acacia trees, and the riverbed in the distance, and the Kalahari over there, so close.
In those days there was no Botswana even, just the Bechuanaland Protectorate, and before that again there was Khama's Country, and lions with the dry wind in their manes. But look at it now: a detective agency, right here in Gaborone, with me, the fat lady detective, sitting outside and thinking these thoughts about how what is one thing today becomes quite another thing tomorrow.
Mma Ramotswe set up the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency with the proceeds of the sale of her father's cattle. He had owned a big herd, and had no other children; so every single beast, all one hundred and eighty of them, including the white Brahmin bulls whose grandparents he had bred himself, went to her. The cattle were moved from the cattle post, back to Mochudi where they waited, in the dust, under the eyes of the chattering herd boys, until the livestock agent came.
They fetched a good price, as there had been heavy rains that year, and the grass had been lush. Had it been the year before, when most of that southern part of Africa had been wracked by drought, it would have been a different matter. People had dithered then, wanting to hold on to their cattle, as without your cattle you were naked; others, feeling more desperate, sold, because the rains had failed year after year and they had seen the animals become thinner and thinner. Mma Ramotswe was pleased that her father's illness had prevented his making any decision, as now the price had gone up and those who had held on were well rewarded.
"I want you to have your own business," he said to her on his death bed. "You'll get a good price for the cattle now. Sell them and buy a business. A butchery maybe. A bottle store. Whatever you like."
She held her father's hand and looked into the eyes of the man she loved beyond all others, her Daddy, her wise Daddy, whose lungs had been filled with dust in those mines and who had scrimped and saved to make life good for her.
It was difficult to talk through her tears, but she managed to say: "I'm going to set up a detective agency. Down in Gaborone. It will be the best one in Botswana. The No. 1 Agency."
For a moment her father's eyes opened wide and it seemed as if he was struggling to speak.
"But . . . but . . ."
But he died before he could say anything more, and Mma Ramotswe fell on his chest and wept for all the dignity, love and suffering that died with him.
She had a sign painted in bright colours, which was then set up just off the Lobatse Road, on the edge of town, pointing to the small building she had purchased: the no. 1 ladies' detective agency. for all confidential matters and enquiries. satisfaction guaranteed for all parties. under personal management.
There was considerable public interest in the setting up of her agency. There was an interview on Radio Botswana, in which she thought she was rather rudely pressed to reveal her qualifications, and a rather more satisfactory article in The Botswana News, which drew attention to the fact that she was the only lady private detective in the country. This article was cut out, copied, and placed prominently on a small board beside the front door of the agency.
After a slow start, she was rather surprised to find that her services were in considerable demand. She was consulted about missing husbands, about the creditworthiness of potential business partners, and about suspected fraud by employees. In almost every case, she was able to come up with at least some information for the client; when she could not, she waived her fee, which meant that virtually nobody who consulted her was dissatisfied. People in Botswana liked to talk, she discovered, and the mere mention of the fact that she was a private detective would let loose a positive outpouring of information on all sorts of subjects. It flattered people, she concluded, to be approached by a private detective, and this effectively loosened their tongues. This happened with Happy Bapetsi, one of her earlier clients. Poor Happy! To have lost your daddy and then found him, and then lost him again . . .
"I used to have a happy life," said Happy Bapetsi. "A very happy life. Then this thing happened, and I can't say that any- more."
Mma Ramotswe watched her client as she sipped her bush tea. Everything you wanted to know about a person was written in the face, she believed. It's not that she believed that the shape of the head was what counted--even if there were many who still clung to that belief; it was more a question of taking care to scrutinise the lines and the general look. And the eyes, of course; they were very important. The eyes allowed you to see right into a person, to penetrate their very essence, and that was why people with something to hide wore sunglasses indoors. They were the ones you had to watch very carefully.
Now this Happy Bapetsi was intelligent; that was immediately apparent. She also had few worries--this was shown by the fact that there were no lines on her face, other than smile lines of course. So it was man trouble, thought Mma Ramotswe. Some man has turned up and spoilt everything, destroying her happiness with his bad behaviour.
"Let me tell you a little about myself first," said Happy Bapetsi. "I come from Maun, you see, right up on the Okavango. My mother had a small shop and I lived with her in the house at the back. We had lots of chickens and we were very happy.
"My mother told me that my Daddy had left a long time ago, when I was still a little baby. He had gone off to work in Bulawayo and he had never come back. Somebody had written to us--another Motswana living there--to say that he thought that my Daddy was dead, but he wasn't sure. He said that he had gone to see somebody at Mpilo Hospital one day and as he was walking along a corridor he saw them wheeling somebody out on a stretcher and that the dead person on the stretcher looked remarkably like my Daddy. But he couldn't be certain.
"So we decided that he was probably dead, but my mother did not mind a great deal because she had never really liked him very much. And of course I couldn't even remember him, so it did not make much difference to me.
"I went to school in Maun at a place run by some Catholic missionaries. One of them discovered that I could do arithmetic rather well and he spent a lot of time helping me. He said that he had never met a girl who could count so well.
"I suppose it was very odd. I could see a group of figures and I would just remember it. Then I would find that I had added the figures in my head, even without thinking about it. It just came very easily--I didn't have to work at it at all.
"I did very well in my exams and at the end of the day I went off to Gaborone and learned how to be a bookkeeper. Again it was very simple for me; I could look at a whole sheet of figures and understand it immediately. Then, the next day, I could remember every figure exactly and write them all down if I needed to.
"I got a job in the bank and I was given promotion after promotion. Now I am the No. 1 subaccountant and I don't think I can go any further because all the men are worried that I'll make them look stupid. But I don't mind. I get very good pay and I can finish all my work by three in the afternoon, sometimes earlier. I go shopping after that. I have a nice house with four rooms and I am very happy. To have all that by the time you are thirty-eight is good enough, I think."
Mma Ramotswe smiled. "That is all very interesting. You're right. You've done well."
"I'm very lucky," said Happy Bapetsi. "But then this thing happened. My Daddy arrived at the house."
Mma Ramotswe drew in her breath. She had not expected this; she had thought it would be a boyfriend problem. Fathers were a different matter altogether.
"He just knocked on the door," said Happy Bapetsi. "It was a Saturday afternoon and I was taking a rest on my bed when I heard his knocking. I got up, went to the door, and there was this man, about sixty or so, standing there with his hat in his hands. He told me that he was my Daddy, and that he had been living in Bulawayo for a long time but was now back in Botswana and had come to see me.
"You can understand how shocked I was. I had to sit down, or I think I would have fainted. In the meantime, he spoke. He told me my mother's name, which was correct, and he said that he was sorry that he hadn't been in touch before. Then he asked if he could stay in one of the spare rooms, as he had nowhere else to go.
"I said that of course he could. In a way I was very excited to see my Daddy and I thought that it would be good to be able to make up for all those lost years and to have him staying with me, particularly since my poor mother died. So I made a bed for him in one of the rooms and cooked him a large meal of steak and potatoes, which he ate very quickly. Then he asked for more.
"That was about three months ago. Since then, he has been living in that room and I have been doing all the work for him. I make his breakfast, cook him some lunch, which I leave in the kitchen, and then make his supper at night. I buy him one bottle of beer a day and have also bought him some new clothes and a pair of good shoes. All he does is sit in his chair outside the front door and tell me what to do for him next."
"Many men are like that," interrupted Mma Ramotswe.
Happy Bapetsi nodded. "This one is especially like that. He has not washed a single cooking pot since he arrived and I have been getting very tired running after him. He also spends a lot of my money on vitamin pills and biltong.
"I would not resent this, you know, except for one thing. I do not think that he is my real Daddy. I have no way of proving this, but I think that this man is an impostor and that he heard about our family from my real Daddy before he died and is now just pretending. I think he is a man who has been looking for a retirement home and who is very pleased because he has found a good one."
Mma Ramotswe found herself staring in frank wonderment at Happy Bapetsi. There was no doubt but that she was telling the truth; what astonished her was the effrontery, the sheer, naked effrontery of men. How dare this person come and impose on this helpful, happy person! What a piece of chicanery, of fraud! What a piece of outright theft in fact!
"Can you help me?" asked Happy Bapetsi. "Can you find out whether this man is really my Daddy? If he is, then I will be a dutiful daughter and put up with him. If he is not, then I should prefer for him to go somewhere else."
Mma Ramotswe did not hesitate. "I'll find out," she said. "It may take me a day or two, but I'll find out!"
Of course, it was easier said than done. There were blood tests these days, but she doubted very much whether this person would agree to that. No, she would have to try something more subtle, something that would show beyond any argument whether he was the Daddy or not. She stopped in her line of thought. Yes! There was something biblical about this story. What, she thought, would Solomon have done?
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Which female singer released the album 'Rated R' in 2009? | Alexander McCall Smith - Interview | BookPage
Alexander McCall Smith
New series, new setting for the ever-popular Alexander McCall Smith
BookPage interview by Trisha Ping
Alexander McCall Smith is one of the world's most beloved authors—his No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books, which inspired an HBO series, have sold more than 20 million copies, and most of his 60-plus novels have become bestsellers. Though they're set in disparate locales, Smith's works are linked by their gentle humor and generous spirit. His latest book, Corduroy Mansions, depends on the chaos that can arise when many people simply go about the job of living their lives in a small pocket within a larger city—London. It was first published as a serial—in print, and via podcast—by the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph newspaper and has just been released in the U.S. McCall Smith took a moment to speak to BookPage about the appeal of writing series and where he gets his sense of humor.
Writing series (at last count you have five on the go now) is your bread and butter. What is the allure to writing continuing series rather than stand-alone fiction? Do you ever feel overwhelmed by all of your creations?
I love getting back to the same characters. Going back to a series is like meeting an old friend. Sometimes, though, I feel that I have rather many fictional characters milling about me—but I don't lose any sleep over it!
In some sense Corduroy Mansions feels very English and almost like a print version of such British staples as the long-running soap Coronation Street. Were you at all influenced by that show (or any other)?
I don't think that I have been influenced by any television show. Soap operas, of course, are simply long-running stories—sagas, I suppose. I think that the idea of people leading fairly intimate lives in the middle of a great city is an intriguing one—I often think about that when I am in a large city and see people conducting their lives as if they were in a village—meeting neighbours, taking an interest in local issues and so on. We create such spaces for ourselves in the middle of these large conurbations.
Corduroy Mansions is the first in a new series set in London. How is writing about it different than writing about Edinburgh or Botswana? What made you choose London as the setting for this story?
I wrote this for the Daily Telegraph, which has a large circulation in England. I thought that it would be interesting for my English readers to have a story set in London.
A lot of the fun of your books is the humor you put into them. Are there other writers whose sense of humor you admire?
I very much admire the English humorous writer, E.F. Benson (the Mapp and Lucia novels). Barbara Pym was very funny, in an understated sort of way. David Sedaris is wickedly amusing.
Philosophy plays a part in much of your work—there's a great scene in Corduroy Mansions where a character speculates on Freud as applied to the banking crisis. Do you often find yourself applying a philosophical outlook to everyday life?
I suppose that I do. Philosophy should be about everyday life as well as about more theoretical issues.
You’ve published serial fiction, short story collections, children’s books and even academic texts on law and ethics. Is there any genre you haven’t tackled yet that you’d love to have a go at?
No, I don't think so. Mind you, now that you come to mention it, I suppose that it would be interesting to tackle a stage play. Yes, now let's think . . .
Corduroy Mansions was first released as weekly serial online, much as the works of Charles Dickens and other Victorian writers were. What made you decide to write a new series in this way?
I have always been aware that Dickens used this method of publishing, but I don't think that is what inspired me. I was more inspired, I suppose, by Armistead Maupin, who revived this form of novel with his Tales of the City. In fact, it was a meeting with Armistead in San Francisco, at a party at Amy Tan's house, that gave me the idea. I am most grateful to him for that inspiration! My first newspaper novel was Scotland Street—now coming up for its sixth year. I started this new series because I enjoyed the form so much.
With the ever-increasing popularity of the internet and ebooks, several notable authors have taken to releasing their books for free online. To some extent Corduroy Mansions is an expansion on this concept. What were your motivations in releasing the book online for free first?
It was the newspaper's idea. I was very pleased that we would reach a new audience. I also liked the idea of a daily conversation with my readers.
>One of your most popular works is The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. Given that those novels always involve a dash of mystery, they must involve some degree of plotting. Did you find that in writing this way your writing became more flexible and spontaneous? To what extent was plot influenced by reader reactions?
Corduory Mansions just evolved as I wrote it. I had no idea of the plot beforehand—other than a general idea of who the characters would be. I responded to readers as I went along. The internet made it possible for this response to be quite quick.
When it comes to publication rates, few authors are as prodigious as you! How do you manage to write so unceasingly? Do you ever worry you might one day find your creative well has run dry?
I hope it won't! I very much enjoy what I do, and I suppose that helps.
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Which king gave Royal Assent to the Parliament Act which asserted the supremacy of the House of Commons, by reducing the delaying powers of the House of Lords to two years, later amended to one year in 1949? | House of Lords - Constitution - Seventh Report
House of Lords
Select Committee on Constitution Seventh Report
APPENDIX 1: THE PARLIAMENT ACTS, BY PROFESSOR RODNEY BRAZIER
Introduction
1. This paper is my response to the Committee's request for an analysis, based on existing materials, of the genesis, main provisions, and use of the Parliament Acts. The Committee wished the paper to embrace any conventions or practices governing the use of the Acts, any legal limits on what may be done under them, and recent proposals for reform of the Acts. The Committee wanted the arguments about the validity of the Parliament Act 1949 to be touched on. The Committee did not want a heavily-referenced paper.
The origins of the Acts[ 6 ]
2. Until 1911 the two Houses had equal legislative power. Legislation could only pass if it was approved by each House. The Lords' veto over the legislative wishes of the increasingly more representative Commons remained in place. If the House of Lords declined to pass any bill approved by the House of Commons, and in the absence of compromise or of one House backing down, there was only one constitutional mechanism available to overcome the Lords' resistance. This was for the Sovereign to be advised to create enough new peers to give the Government a majority in the upper House. Such advice was indeed last tendered in 1832, when King William IV was advised to create peers in order to secure the passage of the Great Reform Bill. The House of Lords gave way and allowed the bill to pass, thus making such creations unnecessary. That general position of co-equal authority had been qualified in one respect before 1911 by non-legal rules. By constitutional convention, and according to the privileges claimed by the Commons since the seventeenth century, bills dealing with taxation or expenditure could not be amended by the Lords, although peers claimed the right to reject such bills outright.
3. But that constitutional settlement was to be thrown over in the early years of the twentieth century. The House of Lords remained hereditary and permanently controlled by the Conservative Party. Yet the House of Commons had been made more representative of the electorate through extensions of the franchise. And in 1906 the Liberals won a landslide General Election victory on a programme which promised major social legislation, much of which was anathema to most peers. The House of Lords rejected some of the Liberal Government's reform bills, and in 1909, in its greatest act of defiance, the Lords rejected the Finance Bill which embodied Lloyd George's "People's Budget". In response the House of Commons passed a resolution which condemned that action as "...a breach of the Constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons..." The Liberals won a General Election in January 1910, and as a result the House of Lords most reluctantly passed the Finance Bill. Asquith's Government had decided to settle the more general point about the relative legislative powers of the two Houses by changing the law, but could only persuade the House of Lords to accept the resulting Parliament Bill after a second General Election in 1910 (which the Government again won) and the subsequent publication of a guarantee from King George V that, if necessary, he would create enough Liberal peers to overcome the resistance of the House of Lords to the bill. Faced with the choice of the loss of its daily control of the upper House, or a reduction in its legislative powers, peers opted for the trimming of its power as the lesser of two evils. The Parliament Act 1911passed, it should be noted, by both Houses before receiving Royal Assentwas the outcome of that long constitutional crisis.
4. The Parliament Act 1911 made no attempt to change the composition of the House of Lords, although the preamble stated the intention "to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of a hereditary basis," but added (rather plaintively) that "such substitution cannot be immediately brought into operation." The 1911 Act changed the law in three main respects. It stripped the House of Lords of most of its power over money bills. It changed the absolute veto enjoyed by that House over most bills into a power to delay the passage of such bills for up to two years, spread over three parliamentary sessions, after which they would pass into law without the approval of the House of Lords. And the maximum life of Parliament was reduced from seven years to five.
5. No further statutory changes were made to the House of Lords for almost four decades after 1911. The Parliament Act was used soon after its enactment to override peers' opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of Wales and to home rule for Ireland, the statutory results being the Welsh Church Act 1914 and the Government of Ireland Act 1914. But the election of another radical administration with a large Commons majority in 1945the first since 1906was to expose a hidden strength for peers in the 1911 Act. The ability of the House of Lords to delay a bill for two years effectively gave that House a veto over Government legislation in the penultimate and final years of a five-year Parliament. A Government would have to pass contentious legislation through the Commons by the end of Parliament's third year to ensure that the 1911 Act could be used, if necessary, to secure its enactment. No Government with a major programme of controversial bills could operate within a three-year parliamentary cycle, and indeed the Labour Government wished to bring forward iron and steel nationalisation later in the 1945 Parliament. A Parliament Bill was introduced late in 1947 and was passed by the House of Commons, designed to reduce the permitted Lords' delay to one year spread over two sessions. All-party talks on reform were initiated, but failed. The House of Lords then rejected the Parliament Bill by a large majority. After it had again been passed by the House of Commons and rejected by the House of Lords in the following two sessions the bill was presented for Royal Assent under the provisions of the 1911 Parliament Act.
6. The Parliament Act 1949 itself was not to be relied on until, ironically, a Conservative Government was to use it to secure the passage of the War Crimes Act 1991. Subsequently the 1949 Act was to be used by the present Government to secure the enactment of the European Parliamentary Elections Act 1999, the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000, and the Hunting Act 2004.
INTRODUCTION
7. It is convenient to analyse the law in the Parliament Acts by looking at the position of the two Houses in relation to three types of legislation, and by concentrating on the powers of the House of Lords over them. In doing so it can be seen that the Parliament Acts give the House of Lords different powers in relation to those three groups, which may be labelled the House of Lords' veto powers, money bill powers, and delaying powers. For the moment the legal argument that the Parliament Act 1949 is invalid will be left aside.
VETO POWERS
8. The first group of powers consists of a ragbag in which are retained the pre-1911 prerogatives of the Lords. They concern five types of legislation.
9. First, the House of Lords still has a veto over any bill which is introduced into Parliament in the House of Lords. This is simply because the Parliament Act 1911 can only come into operation in relation to a bill "...passed by the House of Commons..."(1911 Act, sections 1(1), 2(1)). Only if the House of Commons has first put its representative authority behind a measure can the rules in the 1911 Act come into play. Government business managers have to bear this point in mind when planning the route for legislation. Secondly, the consent of the House of Lords remains necessary for any bill to extend the maximum life of Parliament beyond the five years substituted in the Septennial Act 1715 by the Parliament Act 1911 (section 7). That veto is expressly retained by the 1911 Act (section 2(1)). The ability of the House of Lords to ensure that General Elections take place at least every five years is of great theoretical importance, but of course no occasion has arisen in which its use has had to be contemplated: the extension of Parliament's life in the two world wars was done with all-party agreement. Thirdly, the House of Lords still has a veto over a provisional order confirmation bill. This is an express reservation in the 1911 Act (section 5): such a bill is excluded from the expression "public bill" as used in that Act. It was never likely that such a bill would cause conflict between the two Houses. Indeed, Asquith's Government never intended provisional order confirmation bills to be included in the Parliament Act procedure, and caused what became section 5 of the 1911 Act to be added because opinion was divided over whether such bills are or private in nature. Fourthly, the consent of the Lords is still needed for a local and personal bill, simply because the 1911 Act refers only to bills (1911 Act, sections 1(2), 2(1), 5). Once again, such bills would not be politically divisive. Finally, the House of Lords possesses still a veto over subordinate legislation, again because the Parliament Act 1911 refers, and can only apply, to public bills Such a veto has only been used three timesin 1968 (to reject the Southern Rhodesia (United Nations Sanctions) Order, and twice in 2000 (to reject subordinate legislation relating to the Greater London Authority)and in each case the legislation was passed by the Lords at the second time of asking.
MONEY BILLS
10. It was over money bills that the most drastic curtailing of the Lords' powers was effected by the Parliament Act 1911understandably so, given that it was the rejection of a Finance bill which provoked the original crisis. In essence, the most that the House of Lords can do to a money bill to which it objects is to delay its passage for a month, after which it will be presented for Royal Assent despite the failure of the House of Lords to pass it.
11. The Parliament Act 1911 provides (section 1(1)) that if a money bill, having been passed by the Commons, is sent to the Lords at least one month before the end of a session, and it is not passed by the Lords without amendment within one month after it is sent up, the bill shall (unless the Commons directs to the contrary) be presented for Royal Assent. The House of Lords may amend a money bill, provided it is passed within one month, but the Commons is not obliged to consider such amendments. The statutory definition of a money bill is closely drawn in the 1911 Act (section 1(2), as amended by the National Loans Act 1968, section 1(5)). Indeed, most annual Finance bills are outside that definition. In summary, a money bill is one which relates only to the following central government matters: taxation; the imposition of charges on the Consolidated Fund, the National Loans Fund, or on money provided by Parliament; supply; the appropriation of money, or loans. A bill which includes any other matters will not be a money bill. It is for the Speaker of the House of Commons to decide whether in his or her opinion a bill contains only money bill provisions, and if that is the Speaker's opinion there shall be endorsed on the bill a certificate signed by the Speaker that it is a money bill. Before giving such a certificate the Speaker must consult, if practicable, two members of the Chairman's Panel (section 1(3)). Such a certificate shall be conclusive for all purposes, and shall not be questioned in any court of law (section 3).
DELAYING POWERS
12. The original Parliament Act is nearly a hundred years old. Section 2, which governs the delaying powers, is the most important in practice. Two of its subsections (sections 2(1), (4)) each consists of a single sentence, one of 180 words, and the other of 248 words. The language of section 2 is, unsurprisingly, not exactly pellucid. It is possible to extract from section 2 (as amended by the 1949 Act) six basic rules. These permit the House of Lords to delay the passage of a bill, but also ensure that the will of the House of Commons will prevail in the end. The term "public bill" embraces any bill, whether a government or private Member's bill, but with the exceptions already noted.
13. First, if the Commons passes a public bill (other than a money bill or one to extend the life of Parliament) in two successive sessions (whether of the same Parliament or not), and the House of Lords rejects it in both of them, then on that second rejection the bill shall be presented for Royal Assent (1911 Act, section 2(1), as amended by the 1949 Act). A bill is deemed to be rejected if it is not passed by the Lords either without amendment or with such amendments only as may be agreed to by both Houses (section 2(3)). Rejection can therefore result from the Lords declining to give it a second reading (as with the European Parliamentary Elections Bill 1998-1999), or by adding an amendment delaying the second reading by six months (as with the War Crimes Bill 1990-1991), or by amending the bill adversely to the wishes of the Commons and so delaying its passage that the end of the session is imminent (as with the Hunting Bill 2003-2004).
14. Secondly, such a bill must be sent up to the Lords at least one month before the end of each of those sessions (section 2(1)).
15. Thirdly, one year must elapse between the date of the Commons second reading of the bill in the first session and the date on which it passes the Commons in the second session (section 2(1)). That delay is designed to give the Government and Commons time to think again about the measure, but also to provide for a maximum period of enforced delay. Taking the second and third rules together, the House of Lords is able to delay a bill into the subsequent session and until not less than thirteen months have elapsed from the date of the second reading in the Commons in the first session. That period results from the requirement that one year must elapse, and that a bill must be sent to the Lords at least one month before the end of the second session. The thirteenth month must elapse before the bill can go for Royal Assent to guarantee that one month does, indeed, pass before the session ends.[ 8 ]
16. Fourthly, the bills rejected by the Lords must be identical, or contain only such alterations as are certified by the Speaker to be necessary owing to the time which has elapsed since the date of the first bill, or to represent any amendments made by the Lords in the preceding session. Any amendments so certified and accepted by the Commons shall be inserted in the bill as presented for Royal Assent (section 2(4)). Thus the bill sent to the Lords in the second session must be identical to the bill which was sent to the Lords in the first session, not as initially presented in the Commons.
17. Fifthly, when such a bill is presented for Royal Assent there must be endorsed on it a certificate signed by the Speaker confirming that the provisions of section 2 of the 1911 Act have been duly complied with (section 2(2)). Such a certificate shall be conclusive for all purposes, and shall not be questioned in any court of law (section 3). That provision is designed to prevent any challenge to the validity of an Act passed under the Parliament Acts on grounds of procedural defects. It is clear that if the provisions of the Acts have been complied with the Speaker has no option but to give the certificate.
18. Finally, the Commons may, on the passage of such a bill in the second session, suggest further amendments without inserting them in the bill itself. The Lords must consider them and, if they are accepted, they may be treated as amendments made by the Lords and agreed to by the Commons. That procedure will not affect the operation of the Parliament Acts if the bill is rejected by the Lords (section 2(4)). The procedure was used, for example, over what became the Hunting Act 2004.[ 9 ]
WORDS OF ENACTMENT
19. A bill which is presented for Royal Assent under the Parliament Acts bears special words of enactment (1911 Act, section 4(1) as amended by the 1949 Act). Any alteration of a bill to give effect to those words of enactment does not constitute an amendment to the bill (section 4(2)).
Invoking the Acts[ 10 ]
21. It is often said that it is the Government that invokes the Parliament Acts against a recalcitrant House of Lords. That is true in the sense that the Government largely controls the organisation of business in the House of Commons and can, therefore, reintroduce in that House any bill which has been rejected by the House of Lords in the previous session. The Government can be said to set in motion a train of events which, if certified by the Speaker as completed, can cause a disputed bill to receive Royal Assent under the Parliament Acts.
22. The Parliament Act 1911 was relied on twice while Asquith's Government was in power, in order to secure the enactment of the Welsh Church Act 1914 and the Government of Ireland Act 1914. The 1911 Act was used only once under the 1945 Labour Government, to amend that Act itself through the passage of the Parliament Act 1949. The House of Lords otherwise avoided legislative deadlock with Attlee's Government by the self-denying ordinance known since as the Salisbury convention, under which any bill which had appeared in a Government's election manifesto would be accepted in the end because it could be taken to have the approval of the people.[ 11 ] The 1964 and the 1974 Labour Governments faced a more assertive House of Lords, but no legislation was actually presented for Royal Assent under the Parliament Acts during those Administrations.
23. The assumption that the Parliament Acts would be used only by Liberal or Labour Governments against a Conservative-dominated House of Lords was displaced in 1990 when the Lords rejected the War Crimes Bill on second reading. The bill sought to authorise retrospectively the prosecution in Britain of alleged war crimes committed in Germany or in German-occupied territory during the Second World War by persons who had subsequently become British citizens. The bill had been carried in the Commons on a free vote. The Lords rejected it again during the following session by adding an amendment delaying second reading by six months, and the Parliament Acts were used to pass it as the War Crimes Act 1991. The measure had not featured in the Conservatives' manifesto at the 1987 General Election.
24. The present Government has relied on the Parliament Acts three times. The European Parliamentary Elections Bill provided for a closed party list system for such elections. The bill passed the Commons in 1998, but Conservatives in both Houses preferred an open list system, arguing that there had been no manifesto commitment to a closed system, and the House of Lords insisted on amendments to insert their preferred method. After the Commons had disagreed with the Lords amendments four times the Government reintroduced the bill in the following session and it passed under the Parliament Acts, receiving Royal Assent in 1999. The Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill, designed inter alia to equalise the age of consent for homosexual and heterosexual acts, was introduced into the Commons late in 1998. No such measure had featured in the Labour Party's manifesto: it was a response to a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights. The bill passed that House on a free vote; it was rejected in the Lords, also on a free vote, on a motion delaying a second reading for six months. The bill was reintroduced in and passed the Commons in the following session, incorporating, as permitted, certain amendments which had been added to the original bill in the Commons. The Lords added further amendments unacceptable to the Government, and it became clear that the House of Lords would not pass the bill in that session. The bill was presented for Royal Assent under the Parliament Acts as the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000. Finally, the Hunting Act 2004 received Royal Assent under the Acts just before the prorogation of Parliament in 2004. The Hunting Bill 2002-2003 had received its second reading in the House of Commons on a free vote in December 2002, as had been promised by the Government in its manifesto. The bill completed all its Commons stages in July 2003, providing for a ban on the hunting of wild mammals with dogs, and was sent to the Lords. The bill was still in Committee of the Whole House at the end of that session, so that it fell and was accordingly rejected for Parliament Act purposes. An identical bill was introduced in the 2003-2004 session, and again passed the Commons on a free vote. It was sent to the Lords in September 2004 along with suggested amendments (on which see above, para. 18). Agreement between the two Houses proved impossible during the customary game of "ping-pong", and just before prorogation in November 2004 the Speaker certified that the provisions of the Parliament Acts had been satisfied and the Hunting Bill received Royal Assent.
Principles guiding the use of the Acts
25. When a Government threatens that the Parliament Acts will be invoked the Opposition usually claims that it would be inappropriatesometimes even unconstitutionalto do so in the particular case. Are there any principles which help to justify the use of the legal powers contained in the Parliament Acts?
26. The 1911 Act itself gives very little guidance as to its appropriate use. The long title merely says that it is "An Act to make provision with respect to the powers of the House of Lords in relation to those of the House of Commons, and to limit the duration of Parliament." The preamble recites that "...it is expedient that provision should be made for regulating the relations between the two Houses of Parliament...", and that "...it is expedient to make provision...for restricting the existing powers of the House of Lords." The Act is thus presented as a regulatory mechanism between the powers of the two Houses, while reducing the then existing powers of the House of Lords.
27. All seven statutes that have been passed under the 1911 Act can be said to be constitutional in character, or at least to have constitutional aspects to them. But the word "constitutional" is very elastic in the British context, and this observation is of limited helpfulness. In any event, the Welsh Church Act 1914, the Government of Ireland Act 1914, the Parliament Act 1949, and the European Parliamentary Elections Act 1999 are all clearly constitutional. By stretching the word to include any measure which concerns human rightsas many public bills willthen the War Crimes Act 1991, the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000, and the Hunting Act 2004 could all be covered by the word. The case for so characterising the Hunting Act includes, for example, the argument that it affects the right of enjoyment of property, protected by Article 1 of the First Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights. It is possible, of course, that a court will hold that the Act does not breach that right. The use of the Parliament Acts was threatened over the Temperance (Scotland) Bill 1913, the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Amendment) Bill 1975-1976, and the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Bill 1976-1977. It could be argued, in the same very broad sense, that they were constitutional in nature. At best it might be deduced that the use of the Parliament Acts is easier to justify, as a matter of precedent, if a disputed bill can be included in a wide definition of the constitutional.
28. Clearly, a Government wishing to get its legislation under the Parliament Acts if necessary will have a stronger hand politically and perhaps morally if that legislation had been foreshadowed in its General Election manifesto. But the precedents do not establish manifesto authority as a necessary prerequisite for the use of the Parliament Acts. Manifestos in their modern form were only issued at the 1922 General Election and at subsequent elections. Asquith had, however, clearly foreshadowed the Parliament Bill in both of his personal election addresses in 1910 (but there was no such mention for Welsh Church disestablishment or Irish home rule). Labour's 1945 manifesto spoke only in general terms of not tolerating "obstruction of the people's will by the House of Lords," which is a mention of sorts for a Parliament Bill. The War Crimes Bill was not in the Conservatives' manifesto in 1987, and the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill did not feature in Labour's 1997 manifesto. While reference to a bill to ban fox-hunting was made in Labour's 2001 manifesto, the only commitment was to enable Parliament to reach a conclusion about it on a free vote. There is, therefore, no constitutional convention or consistent practice to the effect that the approval of the electorate must be obtained for a measure before the Parliament Acts can be invoked.
29. Nor can it be said that on the basis of past practice a bill may be carried aptly without the Lords' consent only if it is one to which the Government formally shows its commitment by making it part of the Government's programme. Free votes were held on the War Crimes Act, the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act, and the Hunting Act, although it was understood that the Government wished those measures to pass.
30. Governments do not accept that there are limitations on the kind of legislation which may properly be passed under the Parliament Acts. Ministers have tended to rely on the simple point that if there is a legislative disagreement between the two Houses and if no compromise is possible, then the wishes of the elected House must prevail in the end.[ 12 ] Ministers may play down any suggestion of constitutional crisis, and characterise the Parliament Acts as a means of resolving legislative deadlocks.[ 13 ] Given what the Parliament Act 1911 says about itself in its long title and preamble, that is a perfectly sustainable position to take. Perhaps the fact that so few Acts have reached the statute book by the use of the Parliament Acts shows that compromises are reached, that Governments have been slow to rely on those statutes, and that the House of Lords sees little point in fighting in the last ditch all legislation with which it profoundly disagrees when the Commons can gets its way in any case.
31. In summary, the statutes passed under the Parliament Acts can (not very helpfully) all be characterised as being constitutional, making the passage of such legislation easier to justify in future under the Parliament Acts because to do so would be in line with broad precedent. But there is no acceptance that only constitutional bills can be subject to those Acts. The Parliament Acts regulate the relations between the two Houses, and it will usually be a matter for political argument whether it is apt that those Acts should be relied on in a particular case. There are, therefore, no constitutional conventions or practices which guide the use of the Parliament Acts.
The validity of the Parliament Act 1949
32. A full examination of whether the Parliament Act 1949 is a valid statute will be conducted by the courts as part of the current legal actions being brought by the Countryside Alliance. The Committee only sought a sketch of the arguments in this paper.
33. There is no doubt that the Parliament Act 1911 is a valid statute. It was passed by both Houses and received Royal Assent. But some constitutional lawyers have doubted the validity of the 1949 Act, and Lord Donaldson of Lymington has twice introduced a bill designed among other things to settle such doubts. Other constitutional lawyers (including me) are satisfied that the Parliament Act 1949 is, indeed, valid.[ 14 ] The issue can only be resolved by litigation or legislation.
34. The validity of the 1949 Act was first doubted by Professor H.W.R. (later Sir William) Wade in 1955, and subsequent support was given by Professors Hood Phillips and Graham Zellick. The gist of the objection to the Act is as follows:
(i) When enacting legislation under the 1911 Act the House of Commons and the Sovereign act as delegates of the Queen (or King) in Parliamentthat is, as delegates of the Commons, Lords, and the Sovereign. Legislation passed under the 1911 Act is therefore delegated legislation;
(ii) There is a general legal principle that a delegate cannot enlarge his own power: that can only be done by the delegating authority itself;
(iii) But the Commons and the Crown, although only delegates, purported to enlarge their own authority in 1949. The Commons and the Crown sought to amend their constituent Act, the 1911 statute, by reducing the Lords' period of delay prescribed under that Act, and thereby increase their own. That is something which only the King in Parliament itself could have done;
(iv) Accordingly, the Parliament Act 1949 is not an Act of Parliament at all, and consequently measures passed under it are of doubtful validity.
35. By contrast, other constitutional lawyers, such as Professors S. A. de Smith and Rodney Brazier, and Anthony Bradley and Keith Ewing, believe that the 1949 Act is valid. The essence of their argument is as follows:
(a) The Queen in Parliament has the power, recognised at common law, to enact primary legislation;
(b) The Queen in Parliament can provide for alternative and simpler methods of enacting primary legislation for particular purposes. In doing so, the Queen in Parliament redefines itself for those specified purpose;
(c) That has actually been done, by providing that a Regent can be substituted for an incapacitated Sovereign and can give Royal Assent (Regency Act 1937), and that the Commons and the Sovereign can enact primary legislation, in effect leaving out the House of Lords (Parliament Act 1911);
(d) In such a redefinition, no question of delegation arises: rather, a redefined Parliament passes primary (and wholly valid) legislation under the specified, alternative procedure; and
(e) In any case, where the "delegation" argument has been raised in the context of colonial legislatures the courts have been reluctant to apply it to legislatures.
36. It will be for the courts to decide in the current litigation whether the Speaker's certificate, given under the Parliament Act 1911, is any bar to proceedings which challenge the validity of the 1949 Act. It has been held judicially that statutes which seek to provide that an order or certificate shall be conclusive evidence do not protect from judicial inquiry an order or certificate which was beyond the power of the maker to make.
37. The present Government has rejected the argument that the Parliament Act 1949 is in any way invalid. It did so both during parliamentary consideration of Lord Donaldson's Bill, and during the debates on what became the Hunting Act 2004. The High Court came to the view at the first stage of the Countryside Alliance's action,[ 15 ] but an appeal is being made from that decision.
38. If the Parliament Act 1949 is, indeed, an Act of Parliament, then in law the House of Commons could pass and obtain Royal Assent for any bill under the Parliament Acts. It might be one to remove the remaining veto powers of the House of Lords, or even (more radically but perhaps fancifully) to abolish the House of Lords itself. As a matter of law there is nothing which could not be done under and within the terms of the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949.
Proposals for reform
39. The Wakeham Commission[ 16 ] was of the view that the current balance of powers between the two Houses was "about right and should not be radically disturbed", and it thought that the Lords' delaying powers, as described in the Parliament Acts, should continue (Recommendations 2, 3). The subsequent Joint Select Committee on House of Lords Reform[ 17 ] also thought that there was no need to alter the Parliament Acts. Although the Wakeham Commission recognised certain "technical weaknesses" in the Parliament Acts, the Commission thought that they had given rise to no real difficulty in practice and recommended against tackling them unless wider substantive changes to the House of Lords were proposed (Report, p. 36). Those technical weaknesses in the Acts noted by Wakeham included the lack of any statutory definition of the changes to a bill which are necessary owing to the effluxion of time, and the conundrum that a bill can be presented for Royal Assent at the end of the second session, but that it is impossible to get Royal Assent once the session has ended. The Commission also noted that the Acts can only be invoked for bills which start in the Commons, but rejected change to that rule unless the Acts were to be subjected to a radical overhaul (Report, p. 38). The Commission's views were subject to the continued observance of two important conventionsthat Government business is considered within a reasonable time, and that the principles underlying the Salisbury convention be maintained (Report, pp. 39-40).
40. The Wakeham Commission did, however, recommend that the two Houses consider whether the present informal conciliation procedures could be replaced by the establishment of a Joint Committee (Report, pp. 40-41). The Commission also suggested that the Parliament Acts be amended so that those Acts could only be amended in future with the agreement of both Houses (Recommendation 19). The Commission thought that the ability to use the Parliament Act to amend that Act, as was done in 1949, was a weakness which should be ended in order to protect the current balance of power between the two Houses and to guarantee that it could only be altered in future with the agreement of both Houses. That could be done by a simple amendment to section 2(1) of the 1911 Act (Recommendation 5.15). The Commission also recommended that the House of Lords' veto over subordinate legislation should be replaced by a power to delay it for three months (Recommendation 41).
41. By contrast, a Working Party which reported to the Labour Peers Group in 2004 called for a new Parliament Act as part of a package of reforms of the House of Lords.[ 18 ] The report argued that there is a case for modernising the language of the 1911 Act so as to make it more clearly understood, and to deal with a number of technical difficulties. The report supported the principle of the House of Lords having a delaying power. The report noted the "dense and technical structure" of the 1911 Act, which "is cumbersome in the extreme...", "and far from readily understood by peers, MPs or the public" (Report, p. 9). The report also supported the idea of a new Joint Committee to try to resolve legislative disagreements, and advocated extending the Parliament Act machinery to bills initiated in the Lords. It also supported the Wakeham recommendation to strengthen the Lords' veto over any bill to extend Parliament's life by requiring the assent of both Houses to any further reform of the Parliament Acts.
42. The general view is, therefore, that the relative legislative powers of the two Houses, as reflected in the Parliament Acts, is broadly satisfactory. A number of matters, however, remain for further consideration at some stage. They include possible changes to extend the Parliament Acts to bills starting in the Lords, to give the Lords a veto over any further changes to the Parliament Acts, to create formal reconciliation machinery, to deal with certain technical difficulties, and to modernise and make more comprehensible the rules in the 1911 Act.
43. To those suggestions from official bodies might be added the question of whether conventions might be sought to identify the types of bill which could aptly be passed under the Parliament Acts, and whether only measures envisaged in a General Election manifesto could qualify for such treatment. Legislation approved by both Houses could also settle once and for all any question about the validity of the Parliament Act 1949, if that issue remained a live one at the conclusion of the current litigation.
Summary of conclusions
44. The main conclusions of this survey may be summarised as follows:
(a) The Parliament Act 1911 was designed to regulate the legislative relations between the two Houses as a direct result of the constitutional crisis of 1909-1911. The Parliament Act 1949 was enacted so as to reduce the House of Lords' effective veto over legislation during the last two years of a five-year Parliament (see paras. 2-6 above);
(b) The Parliament Acts give the House of Lords the power to veto five types of legislation (see para. 9); the Acts severely limit the Lords' powers over Money bills (paras. 10-11); they permit the Lords to delay other bills for 13 months (paras. 12-18). The wording of the crucial section 2 of the 1911 Act is not pellucid (para. 12), but the delaying power can be analysed as involving six statutory rules (paras. 13-18);
(c) Statutes have been passed under the Parliament Acts seven times. Only once has this happened under a Conservative Government; the present Government has relied on the Acts three times (paras. 21-24);
(d) The appropriateness of the use of the Acts in a particular case comes down to political argument. There are no constitutional conventions or consistent practices which guide the use of the Acts:
(i) The Acts themselves give very little guidance about the kinds of bill which might appropriately be passed under them (para. 26);
(ii) On a very broad definition of the word "constitutional", all of the seven statutes passed under the Acts can be characterised as being constitutional in nature or having constitutional aspects to them (para. 27);
(iii) Governments have, however, asserted that there is no limit on the type of bill which could aptly be passed under the Parliament Acts, and rely on the general justification that if there is legislative deadlock between the two Houses over any public bill the wishes of the elected House must prevail over the unelected House (para. 30);
(iv) There are precedents for invoking the Acts over measures (1) which did not feature in a Government's General Election manifesto, as well as others which did, and (2) which had been passed on free votes in the Commons, and which therefore could not be said to be as much part of a Government's legislative programme as bills which are whipped by the Government (paras. 28-29);
(e) There are legal arguments which divide constitutional lawyers about the validity of the Parliament Act 1949 (paras. 34-36). Those arguments could only be settled by legislation or litigation; the Countryside Alliance is conducting such litigation (para. 32). On the assumption that the 1949 Act is valid then as a matter of law there is nothing that could not be done under and within the provisions of the Parliament Acts (para. 38);
(f) Both the Wakeham Commission and the Joint Select Committee on House of Lords Reform have expressed broad satisfaction with the Parliament Acts, although suggestions for change were made by the Wakeham Commission. Reform has been urged by a Working Group which reported to the Labour Peers Group in 2004 (paras. 39-41);
(g) Several matters have been identified in this survey as matters for consideration if statutory changes to the Parliament Acts were to be contemplated (paras. 42-43).
December 2004
| George V |
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Table of contents
The Houses of Lancaster and York
The House of Tudor
The House of Stuart and the Commonwealth
The House of Hanover
The Houses of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Windsor
Part II: Present System
The Constitution and Government of the United Kingdom
Part I: Political History
William I
The course of English political, legal and cultural history was changed in 1066, when William, Duke of Normandy (also called William the Conqueror) successfully invaded the nation and displaced the Saxon king, Harold II.
In 1066 King Edward, also called St Edward the Confessor, died. His cousin, the Duke of Normandy, claimed that the childless King had named him heir during a visit to France, and that the other claimant to the throne, Harold Godwinson, had pledged to support William when he was shipwrecked in Normandy. The veracity of this tale, however, is doubtful, and Harold took the crown upon King Edward's death. William, however, invaded England in September, and defeated (and killed) Harold at the famous Battle of Hastings in October.
William II
In 1087, King William I died, and divided his lands and riches between his three sons. The eldest, Robert, became Duke of Normandy; the second, William, became King of England; the youngest, Henry, received silver. Henry, however, eventually came to possess all of his father's dominions. William II died without children, so Henry became King. Henry later invaded Normandy, imprisoned his brother, and took over the Duchy of Normandy.
Henry I, Stephen and Matilda
Henry, whose sons had predeceased him, took an unprecedented step: naming a woman as his heir. He declared that his daughter Matilda would be the next Queen. However, Matilda's claim was disputed by Stephen, a grandson of William I in the female line. After Henry I died in 1135, Stephen usurped the throne, but he was defeated and imprisoned by Matilda in 1141. Later, however, Matilda was defeated, and Stephen took the throne.
Matilda, however, was not completely defeated. She escaped from Stephen's army, and her own son, Henry Plantagenet, led a military expedition against Stephen. Stephen was forced to agree to name Henry as his heir, and when Stephen died in 1154, Henry took the throne, commencing the Plantagenet dynasty.
Henry II
With the death of King Stephen, Henry Plantagenet took the throne as King Henry II. He already had control over the duchy of Normandy; he had also inherited Anjou from his father Geoffrey. Furthermore, he acquired many territories from his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry thus had a vast territory when he came to the throne; as King of England, he took over Ireland.
Henry II made other remarkable achievements in England. He established courts throughout England and introduced trial by jury. Furthermore, he reduced the power of ecclesiastical courts. The Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord High Chancellor, Thomas à Becket, opposed the King's attempt to take power from the Church. At a confrontation between the two in 1170, Henry II famously said, "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" Four of his knights took him literally, and in December murdered Becket.
Henry, however, did not have good relations with his sons. In 1170, his eldest son Henry was crowned, and is known as Henry the Young King. In 1173, the Young King and his brothers revolted against Henry II, planning to dethrone him and leave the Young King as the sole ruler in England. In 1174, the revolt failed, and all of the brothers surrendered. Later, in 1189, Henry II's third son, Richard, attacked and defeated him. Henry II died days after his defeat, and Richard, nicknamed "the Lionheart," became King.
Richard I
Richard the Lionheart is often portrayed as a hero, but he did not do much for England. In fact, he spent almost all of his time outside the nation, and did not even find it necessary to learn English. He is most famous for his fighting in the Crusades, a holy war seeking to assert Christian dominance over Jerusalem.
John
Richard's successor was his brother, John Allin. Henry II had granted John the lands of Ireland, so when John came to the throne, the titles Lord of Ireland and King of England were united. However, though Ireland became a dominion of the Crown, several lands on the Continent, including most of Normandy, were lost during John's reign.
King John was very unpopular with the nation's magnates, the barons, whom he taxed. A particularly resented tax was the scutage, a penalty paid by barons who failed to supply the King with military resources. In 1215, after John had been defeated in France, several barons rebelled. Later in that year, John compromised and signed the Magna Carta, or Great Charter. It guaranteed political liberties and provided for a church free from domination by the monarchy. These liberties and privileges, however, were not extended to the common man; rather, they were granted to the barons. Nonetheless, the document is immensely significant in English constitutional history as it is a major indication of a limitation on the power of the Crown.
King John, however, broke the provisions of the Charter later, claiming that he agreed to it under duress. In the next year, when he was retreating from a French invasion, John lost England's most valuable treasures - the Crown Jewels - in a marsh known as The Wash. His mental and physical health deteriorated, and he later died from dysentery.
Henry III
John was succeeded by his son, Henry, who was only nine years old. Henry III, despite a reign that lasted over half a century, is not a particularly memorable or noteworthy monarch. Nonetheless, a very significant political development occurred during Henry III's reign. In 1258, one of Henry's opponents, Simon de Montfort, called a Parliament, the forerunner of the modern institution. It, however, bears little resemblance to the modern body, as it had little power.
Simon de Montfort, who was married to Henry III's sister, defeated and imprisoned his brother-in-law in 1264. He was originally supported by Henry's son Edward, but the latter later returned to his father's side. Edward defeated de Montfort in 1265 at the Battle of Evesham and restored Henry III. In 1270, the ageing Henry gave up most of power to his son; two years later, he died, and Edward succeeded to the throne.
Edward I
Edward I was the monarch who brought the entire British Isles under English domination. In order to raise money in the war against the rebellious Wales, Edward instituted a tax on Jewish moneylenders. The tax, however, was too high for the moneylenders, who eventually became too poor to pay. Edward accused them of disloyalty and abolished the right of Jews to lend money. He also ordered that all Jews wear a yellow star on their clothing; that idea was later adopted by Adolf Hitler in Germany. Edward also executed hundreds of Jews, and in 1290 banished all of them from England.
In 1291, the Scottish nobility agreed to submit to Edward. When Queen Margaret I died, the nobles allowed Edward to choose between the rival claimants to the throne. Edward installed the weak John Balliol as monarch, and easily dominated Scotland. The Scots, however, rebelled. Edward I executed the chief dissenter, William Wallace, further antagonising Scotland.
Edward II
When Edward I died in 1307, his son Edward became King. Edward II abandoned his father's ambitions to conquer Scotland. Furthermore, he recalled several men his father had banished. The barons, however, rebelled against Edward. In 1312, Edward agreed to hand over power to a committee of barons known as "ordainers." These ordainers removed the power of representatives of commoners to advise the monarch on new laws, and concentrated all power in the nobility. Meanwhile, Robert the Bruce was slowly reconquering Scotland. In 1314, Robert's forces defeated England's in battle, and Robert gained control over most of Scotland.
In 1321, the ordainers banished a baron allied with the King, Hugh le Despencer, along with his son. In 1322, Edward reacted by recalling them and attacking the barons. He executed the leader of the ordainers, the Earl of Lancaster, and permitted the Despencers to rule England. The Despencers declared that all statutes created by the ordainers were invalid, and that thereafter, no law would be valid unless it had received the assent of the Commons, representatives of the commoners of England. However, the Despencers became corrupt, causing them to be very unpopular, even with Edward's own wife, Isabella. In 1325, Isabella went to France, and in 1326, she returned, allied with Roger Mortimer, one of the barons Edward had defeated. The two killed the Despencers and forced Edward to resign his crown to his son, also named Edward. Edward II was imprisoned and later killed.
Edward III
Since Edward III was a child, Isabella and Roger Mortimer ruled England in his stead. When Edward III became eighteen, however, he had Mortimer executed and banished his mother from court. In 1328, when Charles IV, Isabella's father and King of France, died, Edward claimed France, suggesting that the kingdom should pass to him through his mother. His claim was opposed by Philip VI, who claimed that the throne could only pass in the male line. Edward declared war on Philip, setting off the Hundred Years' War. The British claim to the French throne was not abandoned until the nineteenth century.
Richard II
Richard II succeeded his grandfather, Edward III, in 1377. Richard II was only about ten years old when coming to the throne. Even as an adult, Richard II was a rather weak king. In 1399, he was deposed by his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, and probably murdered the next year.
Henry IV
Henry of Bolingbroke deposed his weak cousin, Richard II, in 1399. Henry IV's reign was marked by widespread rebellion. These were put down thanks to the great military skill of the Henry IV's son, the future King Henry V. Henry IV died in 1413 while plagued by a severe skin disease (possibly leprosy).
Henry V
Henry V's reign was markedly different from his father's in that it involved little domestic turmoil. Overseas, Henry V's armies won several important victories in France. In 1415, the English defeated the French King Charles VI decisively at the Battle of Agincourt. About 100 English soldiers were killed, along with about 5000 Frenchmen.
For the next two years, Henry V conducted delicate diplomacy to improve England's chances of conquering France. He negotiated with the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, who agreed to end the German alliance with France. In 1417, the war was renewed; by 1419, English troops were about to take Paris. The parties agreed to a treaty whereby Henry V was named heir of France. Henry V, however, died before he could succeed to the French throne, which therefore remained in the hands of the Frenchmen.
Henry VI and Edward IV
Figure 3-1: Edward IV (left) and the future Edward V (centre)
Henry VI succeeded to the throne while still an infant. His uncles, the Dukes of Bedford and Gloucester, both functioned as Regents. During his reign, many French territories won during the Hundred Years War were lost.
Henry VI's reign was interrupted by Edward IV's due to the War of the Roses. Henry VI was a member of the House of Lancaster, while Edward IV was from the House of York. The former House descended from Henry of Bolingbroke, the fourth son of King Edward III; the latter House descended from Edmund of Langley, Edward III's fifth son.
In 1461, the Lancastrians lost to the Yorkists at the Battle of Towton. The Yorkist claimant, Edward IV, ascended to the throne, with the support of the powerful nobleman Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, known by the nickname Warwick the Kingmaker. In 1464, Lancastrian revolts were put down. In 1469, however, Warwick the Kingmaker switched his allegiance, and in 1470, Henry VI was restored to the throne. The exiled Edward, however, soon returned and defeated Henry's forces. At the Battle of Tewkesbury, the remaining Lancastrians were defeated; Henry VI was also murdered.
Edward V and Richard III
Edward IV was succeeded by his twelve year-old son in 1483. Edward IV's brother, Richard, was made guardian of Edward V and his brother, also named Richard. The young King's uncle usurped the throne and had Parliament declare the two brothers illegitimate. The two princes were then imprisoned in the Tower of London, where they might have been killed (their fate, however, is not certain).
In 1485, Richard III faced Henry Tudor, the Lancastrian claimant, at the Battle of Bosworth Field, during which Richard became the last English monarch to be killed during battle. Henry came to power as Henry VII, establishing the Tudor Dynasty.
Henry VII
Henry VII was one of the most successful monarchs in British history. He was the Lancastrian claimant to the throne and lived in France so as to remain safe from the designs of the Yorkist Kings. At the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, he defeated and killed the Yorkist Richard III. His claim was weak due to questions relating to the legitimacy of certain births, but he was nonetheless awarded the throne.
Henry reformed the nation's taxation system and refilled the nation's treasury, which had been bankrupted by the fiscal irresponsibility of his predecessors. He also made peace with France so that the resources of the nation would not be spent trying to regain territories won during the Hundred Years' War. Henry also created marital alliances with Spain and Scotland. Henry's son, Arthur, married Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. Furthermore, Henry's daughter Margaret married James IV, King of Scots.
When Henry's son Arthur died, he wished to protect the Anglo-Spanish alliance. Therefore, he obtained a dispensation from Pope Julius II allowing Henry's son, also named Henry, to marry Catherine. (Papal permission was necessary since Henry was marrying his brother's widow.) Upon Henry VII's death, Henry took the throne as Henry VIII.
Henry VIII
King Henry VIII is often remembered for his multiple marriages. In his quest to obtain a male heir to the throne, Henry married six different times. His first marriage, as noted above, was to his brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon. That marriage occurred in 1509 and was scarred by several tragedies involving their children. The couple's first child was stillborn, their second lived for just 52 days, the third pregnancy ended as a miscarriage and the product of the fourth pregnancy died soon after birth. In 1516, the couple had a daughter, named Mary, followed by another miscarriage. Henry was growing impatient with his wife and eagerly sought a male heir.
Henry sought to annul his marriage to Catherine. Ecclesiastic law permitted a man to marry his brother's widow only if the previous marriage had not been consummated. Catherine had informed the Pope that her marriage was non-consummate, so the Pope agreed to grant a dispensation allowing her to marry Henry. Now, however, Henry alleged that Catherine had lied, thereby rendering her marriage to him invalid. In 1533, an Act of Parliament annulled his marriage to Catherine, enabling him to marry Anne Boleyn. It was felt by many, however, that the Church, and not Parliament, could govern marriages. Henry had asked Pope Clement VII to issue a divorce several times. Under pressure from Catherine's nephew, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the Pope refused. Parliament therefore passed an Act denying appeals to Rome from certain decisions of English Archbishops. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, annulled Henry's marriage to Catherine. In response, the Pope excommunicated Henry. Soon, the Church of England separated from the Roman Catholic Church. In 1534, all appeals to Rome from the decisions of the English clergy were stopped. An Act of Parliament passed in 1536 confirmed the King's position as Supreme Head of the Church of England, thereby ending any ceremonial influence that the Pope still had.
Anne Boleyn, meanwhile, was Henry's Queen, and the only surviving child from the marriage to Catherine, Mary, was declared illegitimate. Anne's first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1533. The next three pregnancies, however, all resulted in stillbirth or miscarriage. A dissatisfied Henry accused Anne of using witchcraft to entice him to marry her and to have five men enter into adulterous affairs with her. Furthermore, Anne was accused of treason because she had supposedly committed adultery while she was Queen. Anne's marriage to Henry VIII was annulled and she was executed at the Tower of London in 1536.
Within two weeks of Anne's death, Henry married Jane Seymour. In 1537, Jane produced the male heir that Henry had long desired. The boy was named Edward and would later succeed Henry to the throne. Meanwhile, his half-sister Elizabeth was declared illegitimate. Shortly after the birth of the child, Jane died. Jane was followed as Queen by Anne of Cleeves, whom Henry married in 1540. Anne was the daughter of John III, Duke of Cleeves. Henry did not actually see Anne until shortly before their marriage; the relationship was contracted to establish an alliance between Henry and the Duke of Cleeves, a major Protestant leader. After Anne married him, Henry found her physically displeasing and unattractive. Shortly thereafter, the marriage was annulled on the grounds that Anne had previously been engaged to the Duke of Lorraine. After her divorce, Anne was treated well. She was given the title of Princess and allowed to live in Hever Castle, the former home of Anne Boleyn's family.
Henry VIII's next marriage was to Catherine Howard, an Englishwoman of noble birth. In 1542, she was charged and convicted of high treason after having admitted to being engaged in an adulterous affair. In 1543, Henry contracted his final marriage, wedding Catherine Parr. The marriage lasted for the remainder of Henry's life, which ended in 1547.
Edward VI and Lady Jane Grey
When Edward VI, son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, came to the throne, he was just ten years old. His uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset served as Lord Protector while the King was a minor. Several nobles attempted to take over Somerset's role. John Dudley, 1st Earl of Warwick was successful; he was later created Duke of Northumberland.
Edward VI was the first Protestant King of England. His father had broken away from the Roman Catholic Church but had not yet embraced Protestantism. Edward, however, was brought up Protestant. He sought to exclude his Catholic half-sister Mary from the line of succession. As he was dying at the age of fifteen, he made a document barring his half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth from the throne. He named the Lady Jane Grey, daughter-in-law of the Duke of Northumberland, his successor. Her claim to the throne was through her mother, who was a granddaughter of King Henry VII. Jane was proclaimed Queen upon Edward's death in 1553, but she served for only nine days before being deposed by Mary. Mary enjoyed far more popular support; the public also sympathised with the way her mother, Catherine of Aragon, had been treated. Jane was soon executed. She was seventeen years old at the time.
Mary I
Mary was deeply opposed to her father's break from the Church in Rome. She sought to reverse reforms instituted by her Protestant half-brother. Mary even resorted to violence in her attempt to restore Catholicism, earning her the nickname Bloody Mary. She executed several Protestants, including the former Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, on charges of heresy.
In 1554, Mary married the Catholic King of Spain, Philip II. The marriage was unpopular in England, even with Catholic subjects. The couple were unable to produce a child before Mary's death from cancer in 1558.
Elizabeth I
Mary's successor, her half-sister Elizabeth, was one of the most successful and popular British monarchs. The Elizabethan era was associated with cultural development and the expansion of English territory through colonialism.
After coming to power, Elizabeth quickly reversed many of Mary's policies. Elizabeth reinstated the Church of England and had Parliament pass the Act of Supremacy, which confirmed the Sovereign's position as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The Act also forced public and clerical officers to take the Oath of Supremacy recognising the Sovereign's position. Elizabeth, however, did practice limited toleration towards Catholics.
After Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, Elizabeth ended her policy of religious toleration. One of Elizabeth's chief Catholic enemies was the Queen of Scotland, Mary. Since Elizabeth neither married nor bore any children, her cousin Mary was a possible heir to the English throne. Another possible heir was Lady Jane Grey's sister, Catherine. However, when Lady Catherine Grey died in 1568, Elizabeth was forced to consider that Catholic Mary was the most likely heir. Mary, however, had earlier been deposed by Scottish nobles, putting her infant son James on the throne. Mary had fled to England, hoping Elizabeth would aid her efforts to regain the Scottish throne, but Elizabeth reconsidered after learning of the "Ridolfi Plot", a scheme to assassinate Elizabeth and put the Roman Catholic Mary on the English throne. In 1572, Parliament passed a bill to exclude Mary from the line of succession, but Elizabeth refused to grant Royal Assent to it. Eventually, however, Mary proved to be too much of a liability due to her constant involvement in plots to murder Elizabeth. In 1587, she was executed after having been convicted of being involved in one such plot.
Following Mary's execution, Philip II (widower of Mary I of England) sent a fleet of Spanish ships known as the Armada to invade England. England had supported a Protestant rebellion in the Netherlands and was seen as a threat to Catholicism. Furthermore, England had interfered with Spanish shipping and trade. Using Mary's execution as an excuse, Philip II obtained the Pope's authority to depose Elizabeth. In 1588, the Spanish Armada set sail for England. Harmed by bad weather, the Armada was defeated by Elizabeth's naval leaders, including Sir Francis Drake and the Lord Howard of Effingham.
Towards the end of her life, Elizabeth still failed to name an heir. When she died, she was ironically succeeded by the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, James. James was already James VI, King of Scots; he became James I of England in 1603 and established the rule of the Stuart dynasty.
James I
James I of England
With the death of Elizabeth in 1603, the Crowns of England and Scotland united under James I. In 1567, when he was just a year old, James' mother Mary was forced to abdicate, and James became King James VI. Despite his mother's Catholicism, James was brought up as a Protestant.
One of James' first acts as King was to conclude English involvement in the Eighty Years' War, also called the Dutch Revolt. Elizabeth had supported the Protestant Dutch rebels, providing one cause for Philip II's attack. In 1604, James signed the Treaty of London, thereby making peace with Spain.
James had significant difficulty with the English Parliamentary structure. As King of Scots, he had not been accustomed to criticism from the Parliament. James firmly believed in the Divine Right of Kings—the right of Kings to rule that supposedly came from God—so he did not easily react to critics in Parliament. Under English law, however, it was impossible for the King to levy taxes without Parliament's consent, so he had to tolerate Parliament for some time.
King James died in 1625 and was succeeded by his son Charles.
Charles I
King Charles ruled at a time when Europe was moving toward domination by absolute monarchs. The French ruler, Louis XIV, epitomised this absolutism. Charles, sharing his father's belief in the Divine Right of Kings, also moved toward absolutist policies.
Charles conflicted with Parliament over the issue of the Huguenots, French Protestants. Louis XIV had begun a persecution of the Huguenots; Charles sent an expedition to La Rochelle to provide aid to the Protestant residents. The effort, however, was disastrous, prompting Parliament to further criticise him. In 1628, the House of Commons issued the Petition of Right, which demanded that Charles cease his use of arbitrary power. Charles had persecuted individuals using the Court of the Star Chamber, a secret court that could impose any penalty, even torture, except for death. Charles had also imprisoned individuals without a trial and denied them the right to the writ of habeas corpus. The Petition of Right, however, was not successful; in 1629, Charles dissolved Parliament. He ruled alone for the next eleven years, which is sometimes referred to as the eleven years of tyranny or personal rule. Since Parliamentary approval was required to impose taxes, Charles had grave difficulty in keeping the government functional. Charles imposed several taxes himself; these were widely seen as unlawful.
During these eleven years, Charles began instituting religious reforms in Scotland, moving it towards the English model. He attempted to impose the Anglican Prayer Book on Scottish churches, leading to riots and violence. In 1638, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland abolished the office of bishop and established Presbyterianism (an ecclesiastic system without clerical officers such as bishops and archbishops). Charles sent his armies to Scotland, but was quickly forced to end the conflict, known as the First Bishops' War, because of a lack of funding. Charles granted Scotland certain parliamentary and ecclesiastic freedoms in 1639.
In 1640, Charles finally called a Parliament to authorise additional taxation. Since the Parliament was dissolved within weeks of its summoning, it was known as the Short Parliament. Charles then sent a new military expedition to Scotland to fight the Second Bishops' War. Again, the Royal forces were defeated. Charles then summoned Parliament again, this Parliament becoming known as the Long Parliament, in order to raise funds for making reparations to the Scots.
Tension between Charles and Parliament increased dramatically. Charles agreed to abolish the hated Star Chamber, but he refused to give up control of the army. In 1641, Charles entered the House of Commons with armed guards in order to arrest his Parliamentary enemies. They had already fled, however, and Parliament took the breach of their premises very seriously. (Since Charles, no English monarch has sought to set foot in the House of Commons.)
The unsafe monarch moved the Royal court to Oxford. Royal forces controlled north and west England, while Parliament controlled south and east England. A Civil War broke out, but was indecisive until 1644, when Parliamentary forces clearly gained the upper hand. In 1646, Charles was forced to escape to Scotland, but the Scottish army delivered him to Parliament in 1647. Charles was then imprisoned. Charles negotiated with the Scottish army, declaring that if it restored him to power, he would implement the Scottish Presbyterian ecclesiastic model in England. In 1648, the Scots invaded England, but were defeated.
The House of Commons began to pass laws without the consent of either the Sovereign or the House of Lords, but many MPs still wished to come to terms with the king. Members of the army, however, felt that Charles had gone too far by sideing with the Scots against England and were determined to have him brought to trial. In December 1648 an army regiment, Colonel Pride's, used force to bar entry into the House of Commons, only allowing MPs who would support the army to remain. These MPs, the Rump Parliament, established a commission of 135 to try Charles for treason. Charles, an ardent believer in the Divine Right of Kings, refused to accept the jurisdiction of any court over him. Therefore, he was by default considered guilty of high treason and was executed on January 30, 1649.
Oliver and Richard Cromwell
At first, Oliver Cromwell ruled along with the republican Parliament, the state being known as the Commonwealth of England. After Charles' execution, however, Parliament became disunited. In 1653, he suspended Parliament, and as Charles had done earlier, began several years of rule as a dictator. Later, Parliament was recalled, and in 1657 offered to make Cromwell the King. Since he faced opposition from his own senior military officers, Cromwell declined. Instead, he was made a Lord Protector, even being installed on the former King's throne. He was a King in all but name.
Cromwell died in 1658 and was succeeded by his son Richard, an extremely poor politician. Richard Cromwell was not interested in his position and abdicated quickly. The Protectorate was ended and the Commonwealth restored. Anarchy was the result. Quickly, Parliament chose to reestablish the monarchy by inviting Charles I's son to take the throne as Charles II.
Charles II
During the rule of Oliver Cromwell, Charles II remained King in Scotland. After an unsuccessful challenge to Cromwell's rule, Charles escaped to Europe. In 1660, when England was in anarchy, Charles issued the Declaration of Breda, outlining his conditions for returning to the Throne. The Long Parliament, which had been convened in 1640, finally dissolved itself. A new Parliament, called the Convention Parliament, was elected; it was far more favourable to the Royalty than the Long Parliament. In May 1660, the Convention Parliament that Charles had been the lawful King of England since the death of his father in 1649. Charles soon arrived in London and was restored to actual power. Charles granted a general pardon to most of Cromwell's supporters. Those who had directly participated in his father's execution, however, were either executed or imprisoned for life. Cromwell himself suffered a posthumous execution: his body was exhumed, hung, drawn and quartered, his head cut off and displayed from a pole and the remainder of his body thrown into a common pit. The posthumous execution took place on the anniversary of Charles I's death.
Charles also dissolved the Convention Parliament. The next Parliament, called the Cavalier Parliament was soon elected. The Cavalier Parliament lasted for seventeen years without an election before being dissolved. During its long tenure, the Cavalier Parliament enacted several important laws, including many that suppressed religious dissent. The Act of Uniformity required the use of the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer in all Church services. The Conventicle Act prohibited religious assemblies of more than five members except under the Church of England. The Five Mile Act banned non-members of the Church of England from living in towns with a Royal Charter, instead forcing them into the country. In 1672, Charles mitigated these laws with the Royal Declaration of Indulgence, which provided for religious toleration. Parliament, however, suspected him of Catholicism and forced him to withdraw the Declaration. In 1673, Parliament passed the Test Act, which required civil servants to swear an oath against Catholicism.
Parliament's suspicions did turn out to be accurate. As Charles II lay dying in 1685, he converted to Catholicism. Charles did not have a single legitimate child, though he did have, while living in Europe, several illegitimate ones (over 300 by some estimates). He was succeeded, therefore, by his younger brother James, an open Catholic.
James II
James II (James VII in Scotland) was an extremely controversial monarch due to his Catholicism. Soon after he took power, a Protestant illegitimate son of Charles II, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, proclaimed himself King. James II defeated him within a few days and had him executed.
James made himself highly unpopular by appointing Catholic officials, especially in Ireland. Later, he established a standing army in peacetime, alarming many Protestants. Rebellion, however, did not occur because people trusted James' daughter Mary, a Protestant. In 1688, however, James produced a son, who was brought up Catholic. Since Mary's place in the line of succession was lowered, and a Catholic Dynasty in England seemed ineveitable, the "Immortal Seven"—the Duke of Devonshire, the Earl of Danby, the Earl of Shrewsbury, the Viscount Lumley, the Bishop of London, Edward Russell and Henry Sidney—conspired to replace James and his son with Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange. In 1688, William and Mary invaded England and James fled the country. The revolution was hailed as the Glorious Revolution or the Bloodless Revolution. Though the latter term was inaccurate, the revolution was not as violent as the War of the Roses or the English Civil War.
William and Mary
Parliament wished then to make Mary the sole Queen. She, however, refused and demanded that she be made co-Sovereign with her husband. In 1689, the Parliament of England declared in the English Bill of Rights, one of the most significant constitutional documents in British history, that James' flight constituted an abdication of the throne and that the throne should go jointly to William (William III) and Mary (Mary II). The Bill of Rights also required that the Sovereign cannot deny certain rights, such as freedom of speech in Parliament, freedom from taxation without Parliament's consent and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. In Scotland, the Estates General passed a similar Act, called the Claim of Right, which also made William and Mary joint rulers. In Ireland, power had to be won in battle. In 1690, the English won the Battle of the Boyne, thereby establishing William and Mary's rule over the entire British Isles.
For the early part of the reign, Mary administered the Government while William controlled the military. Unpopularly, William appointed people from his native Holland as officers in the English army and Royal Navy. Furthermore, he used English military resources to protect the Netherlands. In 1694, after the death of Queen Mary from smallpox, William continued to rule as the sole Sovereign.
Since William and Mary did not have children, William's heir was Anne, who had seventeen pregnancies, most of which ended in stillbirth. In 1700, Anne's last surviving child, William, died at the age of eleven. Parliament was faced with a succession crisis, because after Anne, many in the line of succession were Catholic. Therefore, in 1701, the Act of Settlement was passed, allowing Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dowager of Hanover (a German state), and her Protestant heirs, to succeed if Anne had no further children. Sophia's claim stemmed from her great-grandfather, James I. Several lines that were more senior to Sophia's were bypassed under the act. Some of these had questionable legitimacy, while others were Catholic. The Act of Settlement also banned non-Protestants and those who married Catholics from the throne.
In 1702, William died, and his sister-in-law Anne became Queen.
Anne
Even following the passage of the Act of Settlement, Protestant succession to the throne was insecure in Scotland. In 1703, the Scottish Parliament, the Estates, passed a bill that required that, if Anne died without children, the Estates could appoint any Protestant descendant of Scottish monarchs as the King. The individual appointed could not be the same person who would, under the Act of Settlement, succeed to the English crown unless several economic conditions were met. The Queen's Commissioner refused Royal Assent on her behalf. The Scottish Estates then threatened to withdraw Scottish troops from the Queen's armies, which were then engaged in the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe and Queen Anne's War in North America. The Estates also threatened to refuse to levy taxes, so Anne relented and agreed to grant Royal Assent to the bill, which became the Act of Security.
The English Parliament feared the separation of the Crowns which had been united since the death of Elizabeth I. They therefore attempted to coerce Scotland, passing the Alien Act in 1705. The Alien Act provided for cutting off trade between England and Scotland. Scotland was already suffering from the failure of the Darién Scheme, a disastrous and expensive attempt to establish Scottish colonies in America. Scotland quickly began to negotiate union with England. In 1707, the Act of Union was passed, despite mass protest in Scotland, by Parliament and the Scottish Estates. The Act combined England and Scotland into one Kingdom of Great Britain, terminated the Parliament and Estates, and replaced them with one Parliament of Great Britain. Scotland was entitled to elect a certain number of members of the House of Commons. Furthermore, it was permitted to send sixteen of its peers to sit along with all English peers in the House of Lords. The Act guaranteed Scotland the right to retain its distinct legal system. The Church of Scotland was also guaranteed independence from political interference. Ireland remained a separate country, though still governed by the British Sovereign.
Anne is often remembered as the last British monarch to deny Royal Assent to a bill, which she did in 1707 to a militia bill. Due to her poor health, made worse by her failed pregnancies, her government was run through her ministers. She died in 1714, to be succeeded by George, Elector of Hanover, whose mother Sophia had died a few weeks earlier.
George I
King George I
George, Duke and Elector of Hanover became King George I in 1714. His claim was opposed by the Jacobites, supporters of the deposed King James II. Since James II had died, his claim was taken over by his son, James Francis Edward Stewart, the "Old Pretender." In 1715, there was a Jacobite rebellion, but an ill James could not lead it. By the time he recovered, it was too late, and the rebellion was supressed.
King George was not deeply involved in British politics; instead, he concentrated on matters in his home, Germany. The King could not even speak English, earning the ridicule of many of his subjects. George, furthermore, spent much time in his native land of Hanover. Meanwhile, a ministerial system developed in Great Britain. George appointed Sir Robert Walpole as First Lord of the Treasury. Walpole was George's most powerful minister, but he was not termed "Prime Minister"; that term came into use in later years. Walpole's tenure began in 1721; other ministers held office at his, rather than the King's, pleasure. George's lack of involvement in politics contributed greatly to the development of the modern British political system.
George died in 1727 from a stroke while in Germany. He was succeeded by his son, who ruled as George II.
George II
George II was naturalised as a British citizen in 1705; his reign began in 1727. Like his father, George transferred political power to Sir Robert Walpole, who served until 1742. Walpole was succeeded by Spencer Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington, who served until 1743, and then by Henry Pelham, who served until his death in 1754. During Pelham's service, the nation experienced a second Jacobite Rebellion, which was almost successful in putting Bonnie Prince Charlie—son of the Old Pretender, himself called the Young Pretender—on the throne. The rebellion began in 1745 and was ended in 1746 when the King's forces defeated the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden, the last battle ever to be fought on British soil.
Before George II's death in 1760, he was served by two other Prime Ministers: Henry Pelham's elder brother the Duke of Newcastle, and the Duke of Devonshire. George II's eldest son, Frederick, had predeceased him, so George was succeeded by his grandson, also named George.
George III
George III attempted to reverse the trend that his Hanoverian predecessors had set by reducing the influence of the Prime Minister. He appointed a variety of different people as his Prime Minister, on the basis of favouritism rather than ability. The Whig Party of Robert Walpole declared George an autocrat and compared him to Charles I.
George III's reign is notable for many important international events. In 1763, Great Britain defeated France in the Seven Years' War, a global war that also involved Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands and was fought in Europe, America and India. As a result of the Treaty of Paris, New France (the French territory in North America, including Quebec and land east of the Mississippi) was ceded to Britain, as was Spanish Florida. Spain, however, took New Orleans and Louisiana, the vast French territory on the west of the Mississippi. Great Britain came to be recognised as the world's pre-eminent colonial power, displacing France. The nation, however, was left deeply in debt. To overcome it, British colonies in America were taxed, much to their distaste. Eventually, Britain lost its American colonies during the American War of Independence, which lasted from 1776 to 1783. Elsewhere, however, the British Empire continued to expand. In India, the British East India Company took control of many small nation-states nominally headed by their own princes. The island of Australia was also occupied, and Canada's population increased with the number of British Loyalists who left the newly formed United States of America.
In 1801, Parliament passed the Act of Union, uniting Great Britain and Ireland into the United Kingdom. Ireland was allowed to elect 100 Members of Parliament to the House of Commons and 22 representative peers to the House of Lords. The Act originally provided for the removal of restrictions from Roman Catholics, but George III refused to agree to the proposal, arguing that doing so would violate his oath to maintain Protestantism.
George was the last British monarch to claim the Kingdom of France. He was persuaded to abandon the meaningless claim dating to the Plantagenet days in 1801 by the French ruler Napoleon.
In 1811, George III, who had previously suffered bouts of madness, went permanantly insane. His son George ruled the country as Prince Regent, and became George IV when the King died in 1820.
George IV
George IV is often remembered as an unwise and extravagant monarch. During his Regency, London was redesigned, and funding for the arts was increased. As King, George was unable to govern effectively; he was overweight, possibly addicted to a form of opium and showing signs of his father's mental disease. While he ruled, George's ministers were once again able to regain the power that they had lost during his father's reign.
George opposed several popular social reforms. As his father, he refused to lift several restrictions on Roman Catholics. Upon his death in 1830, his younger brother began to reign as William IV.
William IV
Early in William's reign, British politics was reformed by the Reform Act of 1832. At the time, the House of Commons was a disorganised and undemocratic body, unlike the modern House. The nation included several rotten boroughs, which historically had the right to elect members of Parliament, but actually had very few residents. The rotten borough of Old Sarum, for instance, had seven voters, but could elect two MPs. An even more extreme example is of Dunwich, which could also elect two MPs despite having no residents, the entire borough having been eroded away into the North Sea. Other boroughs were called pocket boroughs because they were "in the pocket" of a wealthy landowner, whose son was normally elected to the seat. At the same time, entire cities such as Westminster (with about 20,000 voters) still had just two MPs.
The House of Commons agreed to the Reform Bill, but it was rejected by the House of Lords, whose members controlled several pocket boroughs. The Tory Party, furthermore, opposed the bill actively. William IV agreed with his Prime Minister, the Earl Grey, to flood the House of Lords with pro-reform members by creating fifty new peerages; when the time came, he backed down. The Earl Grey and his Whig Party government then resigned, but returned to power when William finally agreed to co-operate. The Reform Act of 1832 gave urban areas increased political power, but allowed aristocrats to retain effective control of the rural areas. Over fifty rotten boroughs were abolished, while the representation of some other boroughs was reduced from two MPs to one. Though members of the middle class were granted the right to vote, the Reform Act did not do much to expand the electorate, which amounted after passage to just three percent of the population.
In 1834, William became the last British monarch to appoint a Prime Minister who did not have the confidence of Parliament. He replaced the Whig Prime Minister, the Viscount Melbourne, with a Tory, Sir Robert Peel. Peel, however, had a minority in the House of Commons, so he resigned in 1835, and Melbourne returned to power.
In 1837, William died and was succeeded on the British throne by his niece Victoria, who was just eighteen years old at the time. The union of the Crowns of Britain and Hanover was then dissolved, since Salic Law, which applied in Hanover, only allowed males to rule. Therefore, Hanover passed to William's brother Ernest.
Victoria
Queen Victoria
A few years after taking power, Victoria married a German Prince, Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who was given the title of Prince Consort. Albert originally wished to actively govern the United Kingdom, but he acquiesced to his wife's requests to the contrary. The extremely happy marriage ended with Albert's death in 1861, following which Victoria entered a period of semi-mourning that would last for the rest of her reign. She was often called the Widow of Windsor, after Windsor Castle, a Royal home.
In 1867, Parliament passed another Reform Act. Like its predecessor, the Reform Act of 1832, true electoral reform was not achieved; the property qualifications limited the electorate to about eight percent of the population. Therafter, power was held by two Prime Ministers—Benjamin Disraeli (a Tory and a favourite of Victoria) and William Ewart Gladstone (a Liberal whom Victoria disliked)—from 1868 to 1885. In 1876, Disraeli convinced Victoria to take the title of Empress of India.
Many of Victoria's daughters married into European Royal Houses, giving her the nickname Grandmother of Europe. All of the current European monarchs descend from Victoria.
Victoria died in 1901, holding the record for longest serving British Sovereign. She was succeeded by her son Edward, who became King Edward VII. Edward was deemed to belong not to his mother's House of Hanover, but instead to his father's dynasty, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
Edward VII
Edward VII was the oldest person in British history to become King, beginning his reign at the age of fifty-nine. He participated actively in foreign affairs, visiting France in 1903. The visit led to the Entente Cordiale (Friendly Understanding), an informal agreement between France and the United Kingdom marking the end of centuries of Anglo-French rivalry. In the case of Germany, however, Edward VII exacerbated rivalry through his bad relations with his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Towards the end of his life, Edward was faced with a constitutional crisis when the Liberal Government, led by Herbert Henry Asquith, proposed the People's Budget. The Budget reformed the tax system by creating a land tax, which would adversely affect the aristocratic class. The Conservative landowning majority in the House of Lords broke convention by rejecting the budget. They argued that the Commons themselves had broken a convention by attacking the wealth of the Lords. Before the problem could be resolved, Edward VII died in 1910, allowing his son, George, to ascend to the throne.
George V
After George became King, the constitutional crisis was resolved after the Liberal Government resigned and Parliament was dissolved. The Liberals were reelected, in part due to the unpopularity of the House of Lords, and used the election as a mandate to force their Budget through, almost too late to save the nation's financial system from ruin.
The Lords paid a price for their opposition to the Liberals, who in the commons passed the Parliament Bill, which provided that a bill could be submitted for the King's Assent if the Commons passed it in three consecutive sessions, even if the Lords rejected it. The time would later be reduced to two sessions in 1949. When the House of Lords refused to pass the Parliament Bill, Prime Minister Asquith asked George V to create 250 new Liberal peers to erase the Conservative majority. George agreed, but the Lords acquiesced and passed the bill quickly.
World War I occurred during George's reign. Due to the family's German connections, the Royalty began to become unpopular; George's cousin, Wilhelm II, was especially despised. In 1917, to appease the public, George changed the Royal House's name from the German-sounding Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the more English Windsor.
In 1922, most of Ireland left the United Kingdom to form the Irish Free State following the Irish Civil War. The Irish Free State retained the British monarch as a Sovereign, but functioned as a Dominion of the Crown, with its own Government and Legislature. Six counties in the Irish province of Ulster remained in the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. In 1927, the name of the country was changed from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
George V died in 1936 and was succeeded by his son, who ruled as Edward VIII.
Edward VIII
Edward VIII became King in January of 1936 and abdicated in December. His reign was controversial because of his desire to marry the American Wallis Simpson. Simpson was already divorced once; she divorced her second husband so she could marry King Edward. A problem, however, existed because Edward was the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which prohibited remarriage after divorce. The Government advised him that he could not marry while he was King, so he indicated a desire to abdicate and marry Simpson. The abdication was not unilateral, as the Act of Settlement provided that the Crown go to the heir of Sophia, Electress of Hanover, regardless of that person's willingness to rule. Therefore, Parliament had to pass a special Act in order to permit Edward to abdicate, which he did.
Edward's brother, Albert Frederick Arthur George, became King. He chose to rule as George VI to create a link in the public's mind between him and the previous Kings of the same name during a time of crisis. Edward, meanwhile, was made Duke of Windsor and the issue of his marriage to Simpson were excluded from the line of succession.
George VI
When George took power in 1936, the popularity of the Royal Family had been damaged by the abdication crisis. It was, however, restored when George and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, led the nation and boosted morale during World War II. During the war, Britain was led by one of its most famous Prime Ministers, Sir Winston Churchill.
Following the War, the United Kingdom began to lose several of its overseas possessions. In 1947, India became independent and George lost the title of Emperor of India. Until 1950, however, he remained King of India while a constitution was being written. George was also the last King of Ireland; the Irish established a republic in 1949.
George died in 1952 from lung cancer. His daughter Elizabeth succeeded him.
Elizabeth II
During Elizabeth's reign, there have been several important constitutional developments. A notable one occurred in 1963, when Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan resigned. There was no clear leader of the Conservative Party, but many favoured Richard Austen Butler, the Deputy Prime Minister. Harold Macmillan advised the Queen, however, that senior politicians in the party preferred Alec Douglas-Home, 14th Earl of Home. Elizabeth accepted the advice and appointed the Earl of Home to the office of Prime Minister, marking the last time a member of the House of Lords would be so appointed. Home, taking advantage of the Peerage Act passed in 1963, "disclaimed" his peerage. A Conservative member of the House of Commons vacated his seat, allowing Home to contest the by-election for that constituency and become a member of the House of Commons.
There have also been many recent constitutional developments in the nation. The office of Prime Minister increased greatly in power under the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (the "Iron Lady") and the Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. Under Blair, many of Parliament's lawmaking functions were devolved to local administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In 1999, the House of Lords Act was passed, removing the automatic right of hereditary peers to sit in the House.
Elizabeth II continues to reign; her heir is Charles, Prince of Wales.
Part II: Present System
Unlike most other sovereign states, the United Kingdom does not possess a document expressing itself to be the nation's fundamental or highest law. Instead, the British constitution is found in a number of sources. Because of this, the British constitution is often said to be an unwritten constitution; however, many parts of the constitution are indeed in written form, so it would be more accurate to refer to the body of the British constitution as an uncodified constitution.
The British constitution is spread across a number of sources:
6. Statements made in books considered to have particular authority
Note that not all of these sources form part of the law of the land, and so the British constitution encompasses a wider variety of rules, etc. than that of (say) the United States.
Many important elements of the British constitution are to be found in Acts of Parliament. In contrast with many other countries, legislation affecting the constitution is not subject to any special procedure, and is passed using the same procedures as for ordinary legislation.
The most important statute law still in force and affecting the constitution includes the following:
The Habeas Corpus Act 1679
The Bill of Rights (1689)
The Claim of Right (1689)
The Act of Settlement (1701)
The Acts of Union (1707)
The Septennial Act 1715
The Northern Ireland Act 1998
The House of Lords Act 1999
The Civil Contingencies Act 2004
The Constitutional Reform Act 2005
The Government of Wales Act 2006
2. Royal prerogative
Certain powers pre-dating the establishment of the present parliamentary system are still formally retained by the Queen. In practice almost all of these powers are exercised only on the decision of Ministers of the Crown (the Cabinet). These powers, known as the royal prerogative, include the following:
The appointment and dismissal of government ministers
The summoning, opening, prorogation, and dissolution of Parliament
The assenting to legislation
The power to declare war, and to deploy the armed forces
The power to conduct relations with foreign states, including the recognition of states or governments, and the making of treaties
The issuing of passports
3. Constitutional conventions
Conventions are customs that operate as rules considered to bind the actions of the Queen or the Government. Conventions are not part of the law, but nevertheless are often considered to be just as fundamental to the structure and working of the constitution as the contents of any statute. Indeed, statute law affecting the constitution is often written in such a way that the existence of certain conventions is taken for granted, and some conventions are so fundamental that many people are unaware that they are in fact "unwritten" rules.
Examples of the more important constitutional conventions include:
The Queen does not direct government policy, and leaves all decision-making to her Cabinet
Cabinet members are bound by the principle of collective responsibility; ministers who feel themselves unable to publicly support or defend the policy of the Government are expected to resign
The Government is headed by a Prime Minister, appointed by the Queen from the House of Commons
The Prime Minister is usually expected to be the leader of the political party with the most MPs (members of the House of Commons)
When a Prime Minister's political party loses a general election (i.e. obtains less seats in the House of Commons than a rival party), he or she is expected to resign
Government ministers are usually expected to be drawn entirely from the two Houses of Parliament, and most important office-holders are expected to be MPs
A government that is unable to obtain the passage through Parliament of important legislation, including the annual Appropriation and Finance Acts, is expected to resign
The (unelected) House of Lords does not obstruct the passage of legislation stated in the government party's election manifesto to be fundamental policy
The Speaker of the House of Commons is expected to be impartial, even though originally elected as the representative of a political party
4. Common law
The common law is that part of the law which does not rest on statute. Instead, it is the accumulation of specific judicial decisions set by senior courts as precedents binding on lesser courts.
Certain parts of the common law are also what is known as trite law: examples of this include the fact that the United Kingdom is a monarchy, and the fact that brothers take precedence over sisters in the succession to the throne.
5. EU Treaties
As a member state of the European Union, the United Kingdom is bound by EU law.
6. Authoritative statements
Certain published works are usually considered to have particular authority. In the first half of the twentieth century this was the case with A V Dicey's Law of the Constitution, being cited with approval in judicial decisions. A particularly important work is Erskine May, which sets out the procedures and customs of the House of Commons. Other important sources include certain ministerial statements.
However, none of these works have legal authority; at best, they are merely persuasive.
The Sovereign
The role of head of state in the United Kingdom is held by the Sovereign; the present Sovereign is Queen Elizabeth II.
Succession to the throne
As a hereditary monarchy, the rules for succession to the throne are established by common law, as modified by statute.
In accordance with the Act of Settlement (1701), on the death of the Sovereign he or she is succeeded by his or her "heir of the body"; this operates in accordance with the principle of male-preference primogeniture. If the Sovereign has only one child, that child succeeds. If there are more than one children, then the order of succession is determined first by sex, and then by age. The oldest son always succeeds, even if he has a sister who is older than him.
If the Sovereign dies childless ("without issue") then the order of succession is applied to their siblings: the oldest surviving brother then succeeds, even if he has a sister who is older than him. If the Sovereign's siblings have died before he or she died, then the order of succession works through the sons and daughters of the next oldest deceased brother, and so on.
Only legitimate children are able to succeed. The Royal Marriages Act 1772 operates to restrict the capacity for a potential heir to marry without the Sovereign's approval: all descendants of King George II, other than women who have married into foreign families, are required to obtain the Sovereign's consent before marrying, unless they can otherwise obtain approval from both Houses of Parliament.
The Bill of Rights (1689) and Act of Settlement require all heirs to be descendants of Sophia, Electress of Hanover (d. 1714), and impose further requirements that an heir be a Protestant, that they may never have married a Roman Catholic, and that they be in full communion with the Church of England. Heirs not meeting these conditions are skipped over as if "naturally dead".
The role of the Sovereign beyond the United Kingdom
As Sovereign in right of the United Kingdom, the Sovereign is also head of state in the "Crown dependencies" of Jersey, Guernsey (and its dependencies), and the Isle of Man. While the external relations of these islands is dealt with by the United Kingdom, however, they do not form part of the United Kingdom itself, and have their own constitutional arrangements.
Similarly, the United Kingdom has sovereignty over various territories around the world, known as the British overseas territories. As such, the Sovereign is also head of state in these territories, although again these do not form part of the United Kingdom itself, and have their own constitutional arrangements.
The British Sovereign is also the Sovereign of certain other Commonwealth Realms: Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu. Each of these nations is a separate monarchy; the Sovereign therefore holds sixteen different crowns. In each nation, the Sovereign is represented by a Governor-General, who generally stands in relation to the local government in the same relation as the Sovereign does to the British government.
Finally, the Sovereign has the title Head of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is a body of nations mostly made up of former colonial dependencies of the United Kingdom. The role of Head of the Commonwealth is a personal role of the present Queen, Elizabeth II, and is not formally attached to the monarchy itself (although the present Queen's father, King George VI, also held the title). The role is purely a ceremonial one.
Royal Family
While the members of the Sovereign's family do not have any role in government, they do exercise ceremonial functions on his or her behalf.
A male Sovereign has the title "King", while a female Sovereign is the "Queen". The wife of a King is also known as a Queen; however, the husband of a female Sovereign has no specific title.
By convention, the Sovereign's eldest son is created "Prince of Wales" and "Earl of Chester" while still a boy; he also automatically gains the title of "Duke of Cornwall". Also by convention, the Sovereign's sons receive a peerage either upon reaching the age of twenty-one, or upon marrying.
The style of Prince or Princess extends to the children of the Sovereign, the children of the sons of the Sovereign, and the eldest son of the eldest son of the Prince of Wales. Furthermore, wives of Princes are styled Princesses, though husbands of Princesses do not automatically become Princes.
Parliament
Parliament is the supreme law-making body in the United Kingdom. It is made up of two Houses of Parliament, namely the House of Commons and the House of Lords, as well as the Sovereign. The Sovereign's involvement in the life and working of Parliament is purely formal.
In constitutional theory, Parliament in its strictest sense is sometimes referred to as the Queen-in-Parliament; this contrasts with the more ordinary use of the term "Parliament", meaning just the two Houses of Parliament. Within the British constitutional framework, the Queen-in-Parliament is supreme ("sovereign"), able to make, alter, or repeal any law at will.
Both Houses of Parliament meet at the Palace of Westminster.
Parliaments and Sessions
As with most legislatures, Parliament does not continue in perpetual existence. Typically, the "life" of a Parliament is around four years.
Parliament is initially summoned by the Sovereign. This now always occurs after there has been a general election. Once assembled, and a Speaker has been chosen by the House of Commons, Parliament is formally opened by the Sovereign. The business of the two Houses is arranged into sessions, which usually last a year (running from around October or November each calendar year). However, there is usually a long recess during the summer months, when business is temporarily suspended.
The opening of each parliamentary session is conducted in accordance with a great deal of traditional ceremony. The Sovereign takes his or her seat on the throne situated in the chamber of the House of Lords, and the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod (one of that House's officers) is commanded to summon the House of Commons. When Black Rod reaches the door of the Commons, it is slammed shut in his face, to symbolise the right of the Commons to debate without royal interference. Black Rod then solemnly knocks on the door with his staff of office; on the third knock, the door is opened, and he is permitted to enter and deliver his message. MPs then proceed from the Commons to the House of Lords, to hear the Speech from the Throne, more commonly known as the Queen's Speech. The Speech outlines the Government's legislative proposals for the session; while worded as if it's the Sovereign's own policy, the Speech is in fact entirely drafted by Government ministers.
Each session is ended by a prorogation. The Commons are formally summoned to the House of Lords, where another formal Speech is read out, summing up the work of the two Houses of Parliament over the course of the session. In practice the Sovereign no longer attends for the prorogation; Lords Commissioners are appointed to perform the task, and one of their number also reads out the Speech.
By law, each Parliament must come to an end no later than five years from its commencement; this is known as dissolution. The dissolution is made by royal proclamation. The summoning, proroguing, and dissolving of Parliament are powers exercised by the Sovereign under the royal prerogative. They are exercised in accordance with the "advice" of the Prime Minister. Because a dissolution is necessary in order to trigger a general election, the Prime Minister was effectively able to choose to hold elections at a time that seems the most advantageous to his or her political party.
After the 2010 General Election the Fixed Term Parliament Act was passed in response to the neccessity of a coalition Government. The result of the election meant no party had an overall majority of MP's seats. The incumbant Government failed in their attempts to form a coalition when the two main opposition parties formed a formal coalition and entered Government. Due to the First Past the Post electoral system, the need for coalitions has been extremely rare, and the expectation was that it may be volatile and unstable. To reduce the associated risks of another election the Fixed Term Parliament Act was drafted to ensure a Government would have every opportunity to last a duration of five years.
Although the duration of Parliament has been restricted to five years since 1911, legislation was passed during both World Wars to extend the life of the existing Parliament; this meant that the Parliament summoned in 1935 eventually continued in existence for around ten years, until 1945.
House of Commons
Composition
While sometimes described as the "lower house", the House of Commons is by far the most important of the two Houses of Parliament. Members of the House of Commons are known as Members of Parliament, or MPs.
The entire United Kingdom is subdivided into constituencies, each of which returns one MP to sit in the House of Commons. There are presently 650 constituencies, however the exact number fluctuates over time as the boundaries of constituencies are periodically reviewed by Boundaries Commissions set up for each part of the UK. Constituencies are intended to have roughly equal numbers of voters, but in practice the smallest and largest constituencies can have a significant difference in size.
At each general election all seats in the House of Commons become vacant. If a seat becomes vacant during the life of a Parliament (i.e. between general elections), then a by-election is held for that constituency. The election for each constituency is by secret ballot conducted according to the First-Past-the-Post system: the candidate with the most votes is returned as MP.
Qualifications of voters
A person must be aged at least eighteen in order to vote.
The following nationalities are entitled to vote at parliamentary elections:
British citizens
citizens of the Republic of Ireland
citizens of Commonwealth countries
Irish and Commonwealth citizens must have been resident in the United Kingdom. British citizens who are resident abroad are only able to vote if they had been resident in the United Kingdom within the previous 15 years.
Certain categories of people are unable to vote:
the Sovereign
members of certain specific public bodies, and holders of certain specific statutory offices
members of the armed forces
judges
Resignation as an MP
Since the 17th century, the House of Commons has asserted that MPs may not resign. However, in practice members are able to resign by the legal fiction of appointment as Crown Steward and Bailiff of the three Chiltern Hundreds of Stoke, Desborough, and Burnham, or as Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead. Neither of these offices carries any duties, but have been preserved in force so that those appointed to them automatically lose their seats in the House of Commons as having accepted an office of profit under the Crown.
Speakership and procedure
The House of Commons is presided over by the Speaker. There are also three Deputy Speakers, with the titles of Chairman of Ways and Means, First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means, and Second Chairman of Ways and Means.
The Speaker and his or her deputies are elected at the commencement of a Parliament, and serve until its dissolution. Following a general election, the Father of the House (the member with the longest unbroken service in the House, who is not also a Minister of the Crown) takes the chair. If the Speaker from the previous Parliament has been returned as a member of the new Parliament, and intends to continue in office, then the House votes on a motion that the member take the chair as Speaker. Otherwise, or if the motion for his or her re-election fails, then members vote by secret ballot in several rounds; after each round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. The election ends when one member secures a majority of votes in a particular round. Thereafter, the Speaker-elect leads the House of Commons to the House of Lords, where the Lords Commissioners (five Lords representing the Sovereign) officially declare the Royal Approbation (approval) of the Speaker, who immediately takes office. The Speaker traditionally lays claim to all of the House's privileges, including freedom of speech in debate, which the Lords Commissioners then confirm on behalf of the Sovereign.
If a Speaker should choose to resign from his post during the course of Parliament, then he must preside over the election of his successor. The new election is otherwise conducted in the same manner as at the beginning of a Parliament. The new Speaker-elect receives the Royal Approbation from Lords Commissioners; however, the ceremonial assertion of the rights of the Commons is not repeated.
The Speaker is expected to act impartially. He or she is an important figure within the House of Commons, controlling the flow of debate by selecting which members get to speak in debates, and by ensuring that the customs and procedures of the House are complied with. The Speaker and his deputies do not generally speak during debates, nor vote at divisions.
The Speaker also exercises disciplinary powers. He or she may order any member to resume his or her seat if they consistently contribute irrelevant or repetitive remarks during a debate. An individual who has disregarded the Speaker's call to sit down may be requested to leave the House; if the request is declined, then the Speaker may "name" the member. The House then votes on whether to suspend the member in question for a certain number of days, or even, in the case of repeated breaches, for the remainder of the session. In the most serious cases, the House may vote to expel a member. In the case of grave disorder, the Speaker may adjourn the House without a vote.
The House votes on all questions by voice first. The Speaker asks all those in favour of the proposition to say "Aye," and those opposed to say "No". The Speaker then assesses the result, saying "I think the Ayes have it" or "I think the Noes have it", as appropriate. Only if a member challenges the Speaker's opinion is a division, or formal count, called. During a division, members file into two separate lobbies on either side of the Commons chamber. As they exit each lobby, clerks and tellers count the votes and record the names. The result is then announced by the Speaker. In the event of a tied vote, the Speaker (or other occupant of the Chair) has a casting vote; however, conventions exist that the Speaker would cast a vote to maintain the status quo. In effect moving bills on to further scrutiny, but not pass a bill into law.
House of Lords
Composition
Generally speaking, membership of the House of Lords is by appointment for life. However, up until 1999, hereditary peers were also members of the Lords; when this right was abolished, a compromise measure allowed them to elect ninety of their number to continue as members.
Certain office-holders are also ex officio members of the House of Lords:
the Earl Marshal
the Archbishop of York
the Bishops of London, Durham, and Winchester
The Earl Marshal and Lord Great Chamberlain are mostly ceremonial offices. In addition to the three ex officio bishops, the 21 longest-serving diocesan bishops also sit in the Lords.
The general qualifications for sitting and voting in the Lords are:
to have reached the age of 21
to be a British citizen, or a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, or a citizen of a Commonwealth country
to not have been convicted of treason
to not have been declared insane
Speakership and procedure
The Lord Speaker is elected by the House. Until recently his or her duties were carried out by the Lord Chancellor, a Minister of the Crown.
In contrast with the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Lord Speaker has a relatively minor role, since the House of Lords is generally self-governing: the House itself decides upon points of order and other such matters. The seat used by the Lord Speaker is known as the Woolsack.
Similar to the House of Commons, the Lords also vote by voice first. The Lord Speaker (or whoever else is presiding) puts the question, with those in favour saying "Content," and those opposed saying "Not-Content." If the Lord Speaker's assessment of the result is challenged, a division follows, with members voting in the appropriate lobby just as is done in the Commons. The officer presiding may vote from his or her place in the chamber rather than from a lobby. In the case of a tie, the result depends on what type of motion is before the House. A motion that a bill be advanced to the next stage or passed is always decided in the positive, while amendments to bills or other motions are decided in the negative, if there is an equality of votes.
Acts of Parliament
Legislation passed by Parliament is in the form of an Act of Parliament.
A draft law is known as a Bill. A bill passes into law provided that it has either been passed by both Houses of Parliament, or the provisions of the Parliament Acts have been complied with; and provided it has received the Royal Assent.
A bill must pass through several stages in both of the two Houses. A bill is "read" three times in each House. The First Reading for Public Bills is almost always a formality. The Second Reading is a debate on the merits of the general principles behind the bill. Next follow the Committee and Report stages. The Third Reading is a vote upon the bill as a whole, as amended during the Committee and Report stages. Once the House into which the bill was first introduced has finished with it, the bill is then introduced into the other House. Any amendments by the second House then have to be agreed to by the first before the bill can proceed.
Bills are classified as either Government Bills or as Private Members' Bills. Ministers of the Crown introduce Government Bills; private members introduce Private Members' Bills.
Bills are also classified as Public, Private, Personal or Hybrid. Public bills create laws applied generally (for instance, reforming the nation's electoral system). Private bills affect a specific named company, person or other entity (for instance, authorising major constructions on specific named public lands). Personal bills are private bills that confer specific rights to specific named individuals (for example by granting the right to marry a person one would not normally be allowed to wed). Hybrid bills are public bills that directly and specially affect private interests.
Public Bills
A Public Bill's First Reading is usually a mere formality, allowing its title to be entered in the Journals and for its text to be printed by the House's authority.
After two weeks, one of the bill's supporters moves "that the bill be now read a second time". At the second reading debate, the bill's general characteristics and underlying principles, rather than the particulars, are discussed. If the vote on the Second Reading fails, the bill dies. It is, however, very rare for a Government bill to be defeated at the Second Reading; such a defeat signifies a major loss.
In the House of Commons, following the Second Reading, various procedural resolutions may need to be passed. If the bill seeks to levy or increase a tax or charge, then a Ways and Means Resolution has to be passed. If it involves significant expenditure of public funds, then a Money Resolution is necessary. Finally, the government may proceed with a Programme Motion or an Allocation of Time Motion. A Programme Motion outlines a timetable for further debate on the bill and is normally passed without debate. An Allocation of Time Motion, commonly called the Guillotine, limits time available for debate. Normally, a Programme motion is agreed to by both parties while an Allocation of Time Motion becomes necessary if the Opposition does not wish to cooperate with the Government. In the House of Lords, there are no Guillotines or other motions that limit the time available for debate.
Next, the bill can be committed to a committee. In the House of Commons, the bill may be sent to the Committee of the Whole House, a Standing Committee, a Special Standing Committee or a Select Committee. The Committee of the Whole House is a committee that includes all members of the House and meets in the regular chamber. The Speaker is normally not present during the meetings; a Deputy Speaker normally takes the chair. The procedure is used for parts of the annual Finance Bill and for bills of major constitutional importance. More often, the bill is committed to a Standing Committee. Though the name may suggest otherwise, the membership of Standing Committees is temporary. There can be from sixteen to fifty members; the strength of parties in the committee is proportional to their strengths in the whole House. It is possible for a bill to go to a Special Standing Committee, which is like a Standing Committee except that it may take evidence and conduct hearings; the procedure has not been used in several years. Finally, the bill may be sent to a Select Committee. Select Committees are permanent bodies charged with the oversight of a particular Government department. This last procedure is rarely used; the quinquennial Armed Forces Bill, however, is always referred to the Defence Select Committee.
In the House of Lords, the Bill is committed to the Committee of the Whole House, a Public Bill Committee, a Special Public Bill Committee, a Select Committee or a Grand Committee. The most common committee used is the Committee of the Whole House. Sometimes, the bill is sent to a Public Bill Committee of twelve to sixteen members (plus the Chairman of Committees) or to a Special Public Bill Committee of nine or ten members. These committees correspond in function to the Commons Standing and Special Standing Committees, but are less often utilised. Select Committees may also be used, like in the Commons, though it is rare for this to be done. The Grand Committee procedure is the only one unique to the House of Lords. The procedure is reserved for non-controversial bills that must be passed quickly; a proposal to amend the bill is defeated if a single member votes against it.
In both Houses, the committee used considers the bill clause-by-clause and may make amendments. Thereafter, the bill proceeds to the Consideration or Report Stage. This stage occurs on the Floor of the House and offers it an opportunity to further amend the bill. While the committee is bound to consider every single clause of the bill, the House need only debate those clauses which members seek to amend.
Following the Report Stage, the motion that the bill be now read a third time is considered. In the House of Commons, there is a short debate followed by a vote; no further amendments are permitted. If the motion passes, then the Bill is considered passed. In the Lords, however, amendments may be moved. Following the vote on the third reading, there must be a separate vote on passage.
After one House has passed a bill, it is sent to the other for its consideration. Assuming both Houses have passed a bill, differences between their separate versions must be reconciled. Each House may accept or reject amendments made by the other House, or offer other amendments in lieu. If one House has rejected an amendment, the other House may nevertheless insist upon it. If a House insists upon an amendment that the other rejects, then the bill is lost unless the procedure set out in the Parliament Acts is complied with.
Once a bill has passed by both Houses, or has been certified by the Speaker of the Commons as having passed the House of Commons in conformity with the Parliament Acts, the bill is finally submitted to the Sovereign for Royal Assent. Since 1708, no Sovereign has failed to grant Royal Assent to a bill. Assent may be given by the Sovereign in person, but is usually given in the form of letters patent read out in each of the Houses; in the House of Lords the Clerk announces the Norman French formula "La Reyne le Veult", and the Bill thereupon becomes an Act of Parliament. In 1708 the formula used for the Scottish Militia Bill was "La Reyne s'avisera" (however, this was on ministerial advice).
In theory the Sovereign has the right to either withhold or reserve the assent, however this right is not exercised. If assent were withheld, then the bill would fail. If assent were reserved, then formally a final decision on the bill has been put off until a later time; if Assent were not given before prorogation of the session, then the bill would fail.
Private, Personal and Hybrid Bills
In the nineteenth century several hundred private Acts were passed each year, dealing with such matters as the alteration of local authority powers, the setting up or alteration of turnpike trusts, etc. A series of reforms has eliminated the necessity for much of this legislation, meaning that only a handful of private Acts are now passed each year.
A private bill is initiated when an individual petitions Parliament for its passage. After the petition is received, it is officially gazetted so that other interested parties may support or contest it. Counter-petitions objecting to the passage of the bill may also be received. To be able to file such a petition, the bill must "directly and specially" affect the individual. If those supporting the bill disagree that such an effect exist, then the matter is resolved by the Court of Referees, a group of senior Members of Parliament.
The bill then proceeds through the same stages as public bills. Generally, no debate is held on the Floor during the Second Reading unless a Member of Parliament files a "blocking motion". It is possible for a party whose petition was denied by the Court of Referees to instead lobby a Member to object to the bill on the Floor. After the bill is read a second time, it is sent to one of two committees: the Opposed Bill Committee if there are petitions against the bill, or the Unopposed Bill Committee if there aren't. After taking evidence, the committee may return a finding of Case Proved or Case Not Proved. In the latter case, the bill is considered rejected, but in the former case, amendments to the bill may be considered. After consideration, third reading and passage, the bill is sent to the other House, which follows the same procedure. If necessary, the bill may have to face two different Opposed Bill Committees. After differences between the Houses are resolved, the bill is submitted for Royal Assent.
Personal bills relate to the "estate, property, status, or style" or other personal affairs of an individual. By convention, these bills are brought first in the House of Lords, where it is referred to a Personal Bill Committee before being read a "first" time. The Committee may make amendments or even reject the bill outright. If the bill is reported to the House, then it follows the same procedure as any other private bill, including going through an Unopposed or Opposed Bill Committee in both Houses. A special case involves bills that seek to enable marriages between those who are within a "prohibited degree of affinity or cosanguinity". In those cases, the bill is not discussed on the Floor and is sent at the committee stage to a Select Committee that includes the Chairman of Committees, a bishop and two lay members.
Hybrid bills are public bills that have a special effect on a private interest. Prior to the second reading of any public bill, it must be submitted to the Clerk, who determines if any of the House's rules have been violated. If the Clerk finds that the bill does have such an effect on a private interest, then it is sent to the Examiners, a body which then may report to the House that the bill does or does not affect private interests. If the latter, then it proceeds just like a public bill, but if the former, then it is treated as hybrid. The first and second readings are just as for public bills, but at the committee stage, if petitions have been filed against the bill, it is sent to a Select Committee, but the Committee does not have the same powers of rejection as Private Bill Committees. After the Committee reports, the bill is recommitted to another committee as if it were a public bill. Thereafter, the stages are the same as for a public bill, though, in the other chamber, the bill may have to be considered once more by a Select Committee.
Supremacy of the House of Commons
Under the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949, the House of Commons is essentially the pre-eminent chamber in Parliament. If the Lords fail to pass a bill (by rejecting it outright, insisting on amendments disagreed to by the Commons, or by failing to vote on it), and the bill has been passed by the Commons in two consecutive sessions, then the bill may be presented for Royal Assent unless the House of Commons otherwise directs, and provided that the bill was introduced in the Lords at least one month before the end of each session. However, twelve months must have passed between the Second Reading in the first session, and the final vote on passage in the second one. Also, the bill passed by the Commons in each session must be identical, except to take into account the passage of time since the bill was first proposed.
The effect of the procedure set out in the Parliament Acts is that the House of Lords may delay a bill for at least thirteen months, but would ultimately be unable to overturn the concerted will of the House of Commons. However, this procedure does not apply in the case of private or personal bills, nor to bills seeking to extend the life of Parliament beyond five years.
Under the Parliament Acts, a special procedure applies to "money bills". A bill is considered a money bill if the Speaker certifies that it relates solely to national taxation or to the expenditure of public funds. The Speaker's decision is final and cannot be overturned. Following passage by the House of Commons, the bill can be considered by the House of Lords for not longer than one month. If the Lords have not passed the bill within that time, it is submitted for Royal Assent regardless. Any amendments made by the House of Lords are ignored unless accepted by the House of Commons.
In addition to the Parliament Acts, tradition and conventions limit the House of Lords. It is the privilege of the House of Commons to levy taxes and authorise expenditure of public funds. The House of Lords cannot introduce bills to do either; furthermore, they are barred from amending supply bills (bills appropriating money to expenditure). In some cases, however, the House of Lords can circumvent the rule by inserting a Privilege Amendment into a bill they have originated. The Amendment reads:
Nothing in this Act shall impose any charge on the people or on public funds, or vary the amount or incidence of or otherwise alter any such charge in any manner, or affect the assessment, levying, administration or application of any money raised by any such charge.
The House of Commons then amend the bill by removing the above clause. Therefore, the privilege of the Commons is not violated as they, not the Lords, have approved the tax or public expenditure.
Delegated legislation
Many Acts of Parliament authorise the use of Statutory Instruments (SIs) as a more flexible method of setting out and amending the precise details for new arrangements, such as rules and regulations. This delegated power is given either to the Queen in Council, a Minister of the Crown, or to other named office holders. An Act may empower the Government to make a Statutory Instrument and lay it before both Houses, the SI to take legal effect if approved by a simple vote in each House; or in other cases, if neither House objects within a set time. In theory, Parliament does not lose control over such statutory instruments when delegating the power to make them, while being saved the necessity to debate and vote upon even quite trivial changes, unless members wish to raise objections.
English Votes For English Laws
During the creation of the Devolved Administrations of Scotland and Wales, the idea of an English Parliament or Regional Assemblies were discussed but ultimately not implemented. This created an issue where the UK Parliament is acting as a de facto English Parliament on matters devolved to the national assemblies. MPs from all regions were free to debate and vote on issues which did not effect their constituencies or constituents.
The Conservative Government of 2015 decided to address the issue in a controversial manner. Instead of bringing a bill to the Parliament, they proposed changes to the Statutory Instruments (SIs). Any bill brought before the Commons which is adjudged by the Speaker to only effect English Constituencies (or in some limited cases England and Wales) can have a ”double majority” rule imposed. In short, all MPs are allowed to debate and vote, but for a vote to be won both a count of votes of all MPs and a vote for English only MPs must be won.
Privilege
Each House has a body of rights that it asserts, or which are conferred by statute, with the aim of being allowed to carry out its duties without interference. For example, members of both Houses have freedom of speech during parliamentary debates; what they have said cannot be questioned in any place outside Parliament, and so a speech made in Parliament cannot constitute slander. These rights are collectively referred to as Parliamentary Privilege.
Both Houses claim to determine their own privileges, and are acknowledged by the courts as having the authority to control their own proceedings, as well as to discipline members abusing the rules. Furthermore, each House is the sole judge of the qualifications of its members. Collectively, each House has the right of access to the Sovereign. Individually, members must be left free to attend Parliament. Therefore, the police are regularly ordered to maintain free access in the neighbouring streets, and members cannot be called on to serve on a jury or be subpoenaed as a witness while Parliament is in session. (Arrest for crime is still possible, but the relevant House must be notified of the same.) Parliament has the power to punish contempt of Parliament, that is, violation of the privileges and rules of a House. Any decisions made in this regard are final and are cannot be appealed to any court. The usual modern penalty for contempt is a reprimand, or brief imprisonment in the precincts of the House, but historically large fines have been imposed.
Structure
Her Majesty's Government is the executive political authority for the United Kingdom as a whole. At its heart is the Cabinet, a grouping of senior Ministers of the Crown, headed by the Prime Minister. Members of the Government are political appointees, and are usually drawn from one of the two Houses of Parliament. In addition to the heads of the Departments of State (most of whom carry the title of Secretary of State), the Government also includes junior ministers (who bear the title of Under Secretary of State, Minister of State, or Parliamentary Secretary), whips (responsible for enforcing party discipline within the two Houses), and Parliamentary Private Secretaries (political assistants to ministers).
When the Sovereign is the King, the Government is referred to as His Majesty's Government; likewise, when there are joint Sovereigns, the Government is known as Their Majesties' Government.
Prime Minister
The Prime Minister (or "PM") is the head of the Government. Since the early twentieth century the Prime Minister has held the office of First Lord of the Treasury, and in recent decades has also held the office of Minister for the Civil Service.
The Prime Minister is asked to form a Government by the Sovereign. Usually this occurs after a general election has altered the balance of party political power within the House of Commons. The Prime Minister is expected to have the confidence of the House of Commons; this usually means that he or she is the leader of the political party holding the majority of the seats in the Commons. Since at least the 1920s the Prime Minister himself is also expected to be a Member of Parliament (i.e. member of the House of Commons). The Prime Minister retains office until he or she dies or resigns, or until someone else is appointed; this means that even when expecting to be defeated at a general election, the Prime Minister remains formally in power until his or her rival is returned as an MP and asked in turn to form a Government.
By convention, the Prime Minister and his or her Government is expected to resign if losing a vote in the House of Commons that has been asserted in advance by the Government as a matter of confidence; for example, if major legislation is rejected. The same applies if the Government is defeated by an actual Commons vote of "no confidence". An alternative option for the Prime Minister in either of these circumstances is to ask the Sovereign for a dissolution of Parliament, in effect allowing the electorate itself to approve or disapprove of the Prime Minister's policy. A request for dissolution is usually granted; however, in certain circumstances the request may be refused, in which case the Prime Minister would again be expected to resign.
The existence and basis of appointment of the office is a matter of constitutional convention rather than of law. Because of this, there are no formal qualifications for the office. However, a small number of Acts of Parliament do make reference to the Prime Minister, and since the 1930s office has carried a salary in its own right.
The Prime Minister is often an extremely powerful figure within the political system; the office has been said by some to be an "elected dictatorship", and some Prime Ministers have been accused of being "presidential". A weak Prime Minister may be forced out of office (i.e. forced to resign) by his or her own party, particularly if there is an alternative figure within the party seen as a better choice.
Cabinet and other ministers
Membership of the Cabinet is not defined by law, and is only loosely bound by convention. The Prime Minister and (if there is one) the Deputy Prime Minister are always members, as are the three most senior ministerial heads of Departments of State: the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (commonly known as the Foreign Secretary), the Chancellor of the Exchequer (i.e. the minister responsible for finance), and the Secretary of State for the Home Department (commonly known as the Home Secretary). Most of the other heads of departments are usually members of the Cabinet, as well as a small number of junior ministers.
Ministers of the Crown are formally appointed by the Sovereign upon the "advice" of the Prime Minister. Ministers are bound by the convention of collective responsibility, by which they are expected to publicly support or defend the policy of the Government, or else resign. They are also bound by the less clearly defined convention of individual responsibility, by which they are responsible to Parliament for the acts of their department. Ministers are often called upon to resign who either by their own actions, or by those of their department, are perceived in some manner to have failed in their duty; however, it usually takes sustained criticism over a period of time for both a minister to feel compelled to resign, and for the Prime Minister to accept that resignation. Occasionally a minister offers his or her resignation, but the Prime Minister retains them in office.
Parliamentary Private Secretaries are also bound by the principle of collective responsibility, even though they hold no ministerial responsibility and take no part in the formation of policy; the position is seen as an initial stepping-stone towards being offered ministerial office.
Privy Council
Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council is a ceremonial body of advisors to the Sovereign. The Privy Council is used as a mechanism for maintaining ministerial responsibility for the actions of the Crown; for example, royal proclamations are approved by the Privy Council before they are issued. All senior members of the Government are appointed to be Privy Counsellors, as well as certain senior members of the Royal Family, leaders of the main political parties, the archbishops and senior bishops of the Church of England, and certain senior judges.
The Privy Council is headed by the Lord President of the Council, a ministerial office usually held by a member of the Cabinet. By convention the Lord President is also either the Leader of the House of Commons, or the Leader of the House of Lords, with responsibility for directing and negotiating the course of business in the respective House.
Meetings of the Privy Council are usually extremely short, and are rarely attended by more than a bare minimum of Privy Counsellors.
Structure
The United Kingdom is made up of three separate legal jurisdictions, each with a separate laws and hierarchy of courts: England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.
England and Wales
England and Wales is a common law jurisdiction.
Lower courts
The lowest court in England and Wales is the Magistrates' Court. Magistrates, also known as Justices of the Peace, are laypersons appointed by the Sovereign. The court hears "summary" offences (punishable by six months or less in prison). When hearing such cases, three magistrates sit together as a panel without a jury. In some metropolitan areas, such as London, there are no magistrates; instead, summary cases are tried by a single District Judge who is trained in law.
Serious criminal cases are tried before a Crown Court with a judge and a jury of twelve. The accused may also choose to have certain summary offences referred from the magistrates' court to the Crown Court, in order for their case to be tried before a jury; the Crown Court also hears appeals from magistrates' courts. Though the Crown Court is constituted as a single body for the whole of England and Wales, it sits permanently at multiple places throughout its area of jurisdiction.
The counterpart to the Crown and Magistrates' Courts in the civil justice system is the County Court. There are over 200 County Courts throughout England and Wales.
High Court
The High Court of England and Wales takes appeals from the County Court, and also has an original jurisdiction in certain matters.
The High Court is constituted into three divisions: the Family Division, the Chancery Division, and the Queen's Bench Division.
The Family Division is presided over by the President of the Family Division, and hears cases involving family matters such as matrimonial breakdown, child custody and welfare, and adoption.
The Chancery Division is presided over by the Chancellor of the High Court (formerly known as the Vice-Chancellor), and hears cases involving land, companies, bankruptcy, and probate.
The Queen's Bench Division is presided over by the President of the Queen's Bench Division, and hears cases involving torts (civil wrongs). The Queen's Bench Division also includes four subordinate courts: the Admiralty Court (dealing with shipping), the Commercial Court (dealing with insurance, banking, and commerce), the Technology and Construction Court (dealing with complex technological matters), and the Administrative Court (exercising judicial review over the actions of local government). The Queen's Bench Division also has oversight of the lower courts.
Court of Appeal
Above the High Court in civil cases, and the Crown Court in criminal cases, is the Court of Appeal, headed by the Master of the Rolls, and including 35 Lords Justices of Appeal as well as other judges.
The Court of Appeal is divided into a Civil Division (presided over by the Master of the Rolls) and a Criminal Division (presided over by the Lord Chief Justice). Generally speaking, appeals may only be heard "by leave"; that is, with the permission of the either the Court of Appeal or the judge whose decision is being contested. In some cases, it is possible to "leapfrog" the High Court and bring a case directly from a County Court.
Together, the Crown Court, the High Court, and Court of Appeal constitute the Senior Courts (formerly known as the Supreme Court of Judicature). Thus, since they are theoretically one body, it is possible for judges of one court to sit in other courts. Appeals from the Senior Courts go to the Supreme Court; it is also possible to leapfrog from the High Court, but not from the Crown Court. Normally, leave to appeal to the Supreme Court is not granted unless the case is of great legal or constitutional importance.
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland's system is based on that used in England and Wales, with a similar hierarchy of magistrates' court, the Crown Court (for criminal trials), county courts (for civil trials), the High Court, and the Court of Appeal.
Appeals from Northern Ireland lie to the Supreme Court.
Scotland
In contrast with the rest of the United Kingdom, Scotland uses a mixture of common law and civil law. Its court system was developed independently of that in England. The Act of Union (1707) guarantees the continuance of Scotland's different legal system.
Lower courts
Summary jurisdiction is exercised by Justice of the Peace Courts, held either by three Justices of the Peace (lay magistrates) sitting together, or by a Justice of the Peace sitting with a legally qualified clerk. As in England and Wales, professional judges may sit in certain metropolitan areas.
Above the Justice of the Peace Courts are the Sheriff Courts, of which there are around 50. Sheriff Courts hear both criminal and civil cases, and are held before a judge known as a Sheriff, and have a jury of fifteen people. Sheriff Courts are grouped into six different Sheriffdoms, headed by a Sheriff Principal who hears appeals from cases not decided by a jury.
High Court of Justiciary
The highest criminal court in Scotland is the High Court of Justiciary. The judges of the court are also the judges of the Court of Session (see below); as High Court judges they are known as Lords Commissioners of Justiciary. The head of the court is the Lord Justice-General (also the Lord President of the Court of Session), with a deputy known as the Lord Justice Clerk (who holds the same office in the Court of Session). Altogether the High Court has up to 32 individual judges.
The High Court has exclusive jurisdiction in serious crimes, such as murder or drug trafficking, in which case a single judge sits with a jury of fifteen. The High Court also hears appeals from Justice of the Peace Courts, and hears appeals in criminal cases from Sheriff Courts.
Appeals against decisions by a High Court judge in criminal cases are heard by either two (in appeals against sentences) or three (in appeals against conviction) High Court judges. No appeal lies beyond the High Court.
Court of Session
The highest civil court in Scotland is the Court of Session. Its judges also sit as judges of the High Court of Justiciary (see above); as Court of Session judges they are known as Lords and Ladies of Council and Session, or Senators of the College of Justice. The Court is headed by the Lord President, with a Lord Justice Clerk as deputy. Altogether the Court of Session has up to 32 individual judges.
The Court of Session is divided into the Outer House (made up of nineteen judges), and the Inner House (made up of the remaining judges). The Outer House has original jurisdiction, while the Inner House has appellate jurisdiction. The Inner House is further divided into the First and Second Divisions, headed by the Lord President and Lord Justice Clerk respectively. Sometimes, when many cases are before the court, an Extra Division may be appointed. Each Division may sit as a panel hearing an appeal from the Sheriff Court or from the Outer House.
Appeals from the Court of Session lie to the Supreme Court.
Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom is the ultimate court of appeal in all civil matters, as well as in criminal cases (other than from Scotland), and also has original jurisdiction in devolution cases.
The Supreme Court has replaced the jurisdiction previously exercised by the House of Lords in the latter's now-abolished judicial capacity. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom is not to be confused with the Supreme Court of Judicature, the name formerly held by (a) the Senior Courts, in England and Wales, and (b) the Court of Judicature, in Northern Ireland.
The Supreme Court is headed by a President, who has a Deputy President. There are a further ten puisne judges.
Judicial Committee of the Privy Council
The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council formerly held original jurisdiction in the United Kingdom in devolution cases, and continues to hold appellate jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical courts of the Church of England. Appeals to the Privy Council as a court of last resort also lie from the Crown dependencies, the British overseas territories, and from certain Commonwealth countries.
Membership of the Judicial Committee is made up of Justices of the Supreme Court, Privy Counsellors who are or were Lord Justices of Appeal in either England and Wales or Northern Ireland, members of the Inner House of Scotland's Court of Session, and selected senior judges from certain other Commonwealth countries. Members retire at the age of 75.
Appeals to Her Majesty in Council are referred to the Judicial Committee, which formally reports to the Queen in Council, who in turn formally confirms the report. By agreement, appeals from certain Commonwealth countries lie directly to the Judicial Committee itself.
The Queen-in-Council also considers appeals from the disciplinary committees of certain medical bodies such as the Royal College of Surgeons. Also, cases against the Church Commissioners (who administer the Church of England's property estates) may be considered. Appeals may be heard from certain ecclesiastic courts (the Court of Arches in Canterbury, and the Chancery Court in York) in cases that do not involve Church doctrine. Appeals may also be heard from certain dormant courts, including Prize Courts (which hear cases relating to the capture of enemy ships at sea, and the ownership of property seized from captured ships) and the Court of Admiralty of the Cinque Ports. Finally, the Queen-in-Council determines if an individual is qualified to be elected to the House of Commons under the House of Commons Disqualification Act.
ECHR and ECJ
In addition to the above domestic courts, there are two further courts which can be said to exercise a jurisdiction over the United Kingdom.
The European Court of Human Rights deals with cases concerning alleged infringements of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The European Court of Justice deals with cases concerning alleged infringements of European Union law.
Devolution
Devolution refers to the transfer of administrative, executive, or legislative authority to new institutions operating only within a defined part of the United Kingdom. Devolved institutions have been created for Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales.
Devolution differs from federalism in formally being a unilateral process that can be reversed at will; formal sovereignty is still retained at the centre. Thus, while the US Congress cannot reduce the powers of a state legislature, Parliament has the legal capacity to even go so far as to abolish the devolved legislatures.
Devolution in Wales was originally restricted to the executive/administrative sphere, whereas in Scotland and Northern Ireland devolution extended to wide powers to pass laws.
Scotland
The Scottish legislative authority is the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Parliament is a unicameral body composed of 129 members (called Members of Scottish Parliament, or MSPs) elected for fixed four-year terms. Each of 73 members is elected by a constituency. The remaining are elected by eight regions, with each region electing seven members. Each voter has one constituency vote—cast for a single individual—and one regional vote—cast either for a party or for an independent candidate. Regional members are allocated in such a way as to permit a party's share of the regional vote to be proportional to its share of seats in the Scottish Parliament.
The Scottish Government is the executive authority of Scotland; it is led by the First Minister. Other members of the Scottish Cabinet are generally given the title of Minister. The First Minister must retain the confidence of the Scottish Parliament to remain in power.
Scotland has responsibility over several major areas, including taxation, criminal justice, health, education, transport, the environment, sport, culture and local government. The Parliament at Westminster, however, retains authority over a certain number of reserved matters. Reserved matters include foreign affairs, defence, immigration, social security and welfare, employment, and general economic and fiscal policy.
Wales
The National Assembly for Wales is the Welsh legislative authority. It is, like the Scottish Parliament, a unicameral body; it also uses a similar electoral system. Forty of its sixty members are chosen from single-member constituencies, while the remaining twenty are regional members. (There are five regions.) The Welsh Government is led by the First Minister and includes other Ministers, who must retain the confidence of the Assembly.
The third Welsh Assembly can legislate using a system called "Assembly Measures". This system is a lower form of Primary Legislation similar to Acts of Parliament. They can be used to repeal laws, create provision and amend laws. The difference with "Assembly Measures" and "Acts of the Assembly" is that Measures do not have a bulk of powers with them, each Measure will come with a LCO, or Legislative Competency Order, which transfers powers from the UK Parliament to the Welsh Assembly Government. Devolution in Wales has changed a lot since 1999.
In order for the National Assembly to have full legislative powers, they will need to trigger a referendum through both the Assembly and both houses of the United Kingdom parliament. Once done, Wales will for the first time ever, will be able to legislate and make their own Acts. (To be known as Acts of the Assembly, or Acts of the National Assembly for Wales). In early 2011, a referendum held in Wales approved the transfer of full legislative competence to the National Assembly in all devolved matters.
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland was the first part of the United Kingdom to gain devolution, in 1921. However, it has had a troubled history since then, caused by conflict between the main Unionist and Nationalist communities. Because of this historical background, the present system of devolution requires power to be shared between political parties representing the different communities, and there are complex procedural checks in place to ensure cross-community support for legislation and executive action.
The Northern Ireland Assembly comprises 108 members elected to represent 18 six-member constituencies.
The Executive (government) is made up of members from the largest parties in the Assembly, with ministerial portfolios allocated in proportion to party strengths. The Executive is headed jointly by a First Minister and Deputy First Minister, who are jointly elected by the Assembly.
The Assembly's legislative powers are broad, and are similar to those of the Scottish Parliament (with the notable exception of taxation). The transfer from the United Kingdom's central government of responsibility for the criminal justice system has been highly contentious, and has only recently been carried out.
General Elections
Members of the House of Commons are elected in General Elections. General Elections are called by the Prime Minister. General Elections are held at least once every five years. The maximum term that a parliament can exist before a new election interrupts it is defined by parliament. Currently, the Parliament Act states that five years is the maximum length.
Local Elections
From 2007 Scotland will use Single Transferable Vote to elect all of its local councillors. England and Wales use first past the post or multiple-member first past the post for local elections. Northern Ireland uses STV for its local elections.
European Elections
Members of the European Parliament for Northern Ireland are elected using Single Transferable Vote (STV). MEPs for England, Scotland and Wales are elected using the D'Hondt method.
Part III: Appendices
License
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Version 1.3, 3 November 2008 Copyright (C) 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc. < http://fsf.org/ >
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0. PREAMBLE
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With 302, cricketer Mahela Jayawardene was the leading run scorer in the 2010 ICC World Twenty20. What is his nationality? | Mahela Jayawardene to quit T20 internationals after World T20 | Cricket | ESPN Cricinfo
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Mahela Jayawardene is one of only six batsmen to have scored a century in all three formats © AFP
Mahela Jayawardene , the former Sri Lanka captain, will retire from Twenty20 internationals at the end of the World T20. The news came a day after his team-mate, Kumar Sangakkara, announced the tournament will be his last in the format as well.
"The rationale behind retirement is pretty much the same as Sanga's," Jayawardene told Wisden India. "When it is clear that I can't see myself playing in the next ICC World T20, there wasn't much point in me occupying a spot. It makes more sense for a youngster to come into the mix and establish himself."
Jayawardene, 36, has played 49 T20Is to date, and is his nation's leading run-scorer in the format, having hit 1335 runs at 31.78, with a strike rate of 134.17. A technical purist for much of his career, Jayawardene introduced new strokes and an innovative outlook to his game to become arguably Sri Lanka's best T20 batsman. He had not played the reverse sweep for the first 10 years of his international career, but the shot is now among his most productive in limited-overs cricket.
"While I enjoy all formats of the game, and Test cricket is certainly the pinnacle for any player, the journey in Twenty20 cricket has been fascinating," Jayawardene said. "In many ways it helped me get back to my roots, to bat like I used to when I was a schoolboy, for the sheer love of playing attacking shots and expressing myself with full freedom."
Jayawardene is also revered among Sri Lanka's finest captains, and his record at the helm of the T20 side lays out his tactical prowess. In 19 matches under Jayawardene, Sri Lanka won 12, lost six and tied one. He had the reins during Sri Lanka's march to the 2012 World T20 final, having hit a crucial 42 on a Premadasa dustbowl in the semi-final, to propel his team there.
That his retirement came 18 years to the day since Sri Lanka won the World Cup, did not escape Jayawardene. Having lost two World T20 finals, he hoped his swansong would capture something of that 1996 spirit. "That was a big day for Sri Lankan cricket and no one at home will ever forget it. Every year we look back on that date with joy," he said. "Hopefully we can do something special here in this tournament as well. We always come into big tournaments such as this one with a view to showing the world what Sri Lanka is capable of. We take great pride in our performances and it's no different here in Bangladesh."
Jayawardene has taken more catches in international cricket than any other fielder, with 14 of those having come in T20s. He has one T20 century against Zimbabwe in Guyana, making him one of six batsmen to have hit a hundred in all three formats.
Jayawardene also shares a second-wicket partnership record with Sangakkara, having made 166 together against West Indies in 2010. Like Sangakkara, Jayawardene is expected to continue playing franchise-based domestic T20. While T20 retirement is the first step toward winding down his international career, he has indicated the 2015 ODI World Cup remains a goal, and that he will play Tests as long as form, fitness and motivation allow.
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.
| Sri Lanka |
The Clore Gallery at Tate Britain in London contains work by which British artist (1775-1821)? | Cricket Greatest Player of All Time
4
Highest Wicket Takers
The goal of a cricket bowler is to take as many wickets as possible with minimal runs taken, so what better way to rank the best test bowlers than by listing the total number of wickets taken. The greatest ever cricket bowler ( vote ) will probably come from this list, though there are other considerations such as the number of matches played and the conditions played under and the quality of the opposition. The table below was created in July 2011, and none of this list are currently playing. Based purely on wickets taken, Muralitharan is the greatest, though he has had the advantage over Warne of playing more often on spin-friendly wickets.
all time greatest index of sports
Old Comments
comment from Hemanth Kumar Achilles (July 2012)
YES BRADMAN IS GREATEST PLAYER ... WHERE SACHIN IS GOD OF CRICKET. HERE I AM COMPARING BOTH OF THEM
1).PRESSURE
Tendulkar plays under huge pressure. 1 billion+ people expecting you to perform in each and every match. To perform consistently well for 20 years as per expectations is just Brilliant! Bradman never had such pressure in his whole career apart from bodyline series and in his last innings against England.
2).FITNESS
Bradman played 52 tests in 20 years whereas Sachin has played 162 tests in 20 years. In Bradman's time not many matches were played. Players easily got 7-8 days of gap in between 2 tests of a series. In one year only 4-5 tests were played. There were no one dayers. Nowadays there are too much of ODI's. Once a series starts, you don't get any chance to take rest. 5 ODI get completed in 12-13 days and as soon as ODI series is over, the Test series starts and between tests only 3 days of gap
3).POSITION OF BATTING
Bradman usually came at no.3 or no.4 and mostly when the score were 176 for 1 or 217 for 2. No pressure!! Just play the natural game and dominated the bowling. Unlike Sachin, Bradman had some really good openers from the start of his career. Woodfull & Ponsford had career average of 45+, Sachin usually came at no.4 & mostly when India lost both the openers with the scoreboard reading something 20-2!!! And then this best batsman of all time rescues the team. In Onedayers Sachin opens and starts blazing guns from the beginning and then steady in middle overs and again all guns blazing in last 10 overs. And at 37, if you are still able to do after playing 20 years, then it's surely a remarkable thing !
4).OPPOSTION
Bradman played mostly against England and he got used to that bowling thats why scored over 5000 runs with an average of around 92. One series against each minnows [India, South Africa and West Indies were new in cricket that time] and scored heavily against them. Never played in Indian Sub-Continent against Indian spinners. Playing at Indian pitches is never been easy for any batsman. Now days Australian thinks Ricky Ponting is the best batsman after Bradman from Australia. Look his record in India! Sachin's average in Australia is above 54. A batsman is perfect when he scores against really class bowlings. Excluding Larwood Bradman never played any quality bowlers. (and the other 2 were CV Grimmett & RR Lindwall, who belong to his own country) He never played against a bowler who bowls something like 160kmph+ on hard fast pitch where batsman hardly gets a chance to think of what should be played, whereas Sachin played against Ambrose-Walsh-Bishop, Wasim-Waqar-Akhtar, McGrath-Lee-Gilespie, Donald-Pollock, Warne-Murli and many more. The swing was unknown during that time, Sachin has to play reverse swing, which was no one could even imagined.
5).TECHNOLOGY
In Bradman's time it was not easy to pick one's weakness just standing at slips or point. That's why Jardine had to use the theory of bowling on chest height to stop Bradman from scoring runs. Its true that then there was no such equipment like helmet, arm-guards to save you but then apart from Bodyline series there were no such instance where batsmen had to really save themselves from truly fast bowling. Interestingly, though Sachin plays few shots in the air when he tries to play drives on rising delivery (thanks to Today's technology) and many captain tried to get his wicket at the early part of his innings, Nasser Hussain tried something different to get his wicket, by not letting him to score freely against his bowlers (though Sachin still had the second best strike rate after Sehwag in that series for India).
True that the average of 99.94 is considered to be top achievement in any sport statistically, however Cricket is not just a game of averages. There are many other things which should be consider like the standard of playing cricket. Nowadays so much of technology is used so that you can take out weak areas of a particular player. The standard of fielding is just too good. The Media hype and pressure is so much. Lots of cricket played, scoring in every part of the world. Sachin not only plays role in batting but also in many other areas like Sachin can spin the bowl like Shane Warne, Sachin is never afraid of taking responsibilities. Tendulkar took the ball from Azhar and Kapil in Hero Cup Semifinal and bowled the last over and did not let South Africa to score 6 runs to win the match. Just imagine if those runs were scored. Public and Media of India would have definitely gone after the little master. And if that's not enough he is partially playing a role of mentor/coach of Indian Cricket Team.
Finally, its unfair to compare the two batsmen of different era but then it would also be unfair to call Sir Don as the greatest batsmen of 'all times'.
comment from Dan Maloney (Jan 2012)
What I find staggering is that there are people who regard Sachin Tendulkar as a greater batsman than Don Bradman. Of course, since India has over 1 billion people, Indians tend to swamp websites with posts that almost deify Tendulkar. The problem is, most of these posters have absolutely no idea about the history of Test cricket.
Here are some hard truths that Tendulkar worshippers will have to stomach. These are historical facts, and can be researched with ease.
Batting technology. When the Don played cricket, he didn't have the luxury of choosing from the bats that Tendulkar did. The 'sweet spot' on the Don's bat may have been about the size of a golf ball, and it wasn't as thick and heavy as the bats that Tendulkar is renowned for using during his career. What this means is that Tendulkar had a bat that was much more powerful, less chance of mis-hitting the ball, and a 'sweet spot' that covers at least half the bat itself. Bradman had to use the equivalent of a baseball bat to Tendulkar's massive tree-sized bat.
Pitches. The pitches when the Don played weren't covered when it rained. The weather could turn the pitch from a batting paradise to a bowler's dream in the course of a session. With the lack of knowledge on proper curation of pitches back then, the strip would be covered in cracks, and wear down with ease over the first two days. Tendulkar has played most of his career on the batting paradise pitches that India have always produced.
Bowling standards. According to the fawning Tendulkar fans, bowlers were slower and didn't really spin the ball much and were generally so bad that they effectively stood and lobbed the ball in the air in the batsman's direction. This is far from reality. During the Don's time, the majority of bowlers he faced were professionals, so they practiced and cricket was their job. The fact that some of these bowlers were brutally quick, dangerous, beguiling and talented gets lost because of the belief that modern bowlers bowl faster, and spend hours watching batsmen on tape. But batsmen now watch the same amount of footage of bowlers. The Don was often facing a bowler he had never seen in his life. And if you don't believe me, simply look up the statistical averages of the bowlers that Bradman faced. Bill O'Reilly, an Australian leg-spinner whom the Don claimed was the best bowler he ever faced, averaged just over 16 in his First-Class career. Modern day spinners that are very talented struggle to keep their averages under 30.
Bradman's genius. The Don averaged 99.94 in a sport where averaging above 45 is phenomenal. Now, he batted 80 times in Test cricket. Since 1877, when the First Test was ever played, the Don's performance as a batsman is 64% better than the second best average. A study recently showed that one way to quantify who the best sportsperson of all-time is merely requires that each of the top candidates are compared with the best performers in their OWN sport's history. Bradman's 64% better than his closest rival is so far above any other sportspersons' percentage, that, as an example, when you think that Michael Jordan is considered the greatest basketballer of all-time, with the highest scoring average in NBA history at just over 33 points per game, would need to average above 45 points per game. Staggering.
World War Two. When the Don was at his peak, WWII halted Test cricket for 8 years. Just as the ultimate batsman was reaching his prime, war broke out. He lost 8 years of his career, when he was in his prime. If WWII hadn't occurred and Bradman was allowed to perform during those 8 years, his statistics would be so far beyond compare that this discussion wouldn't have occurred. He came back in 1946 as a 38 year old, and retired in 1948. In Bradman's career, he scored a century at a rate of less than 3 innings played. He scored over 970 runs in a series (unbroken), 12 double centuries (unbroken), and every time he went in to bat and got to 50, his batting average ballooned to 186. So, when Bradman made 50 runs in an innings, on average he would make 186 runs in that innings.
To break it all down and show just how good Bradman was, I simply need to relay the story of Bodyline. In 1932-33, the English, led by Douglas Jardine, implemented a dangerous and ruthless strategy that was based purely on stopping Don Bradman from scoring at will. Placing 8 fieldsmen within 3-5 meters of Bradman's leg-side, Jardine put on his fastest bowlers with one aim only: hit the batsman. The leader of this brutal pace attack worked as a miner, and, as such, he had the perfect physique to bowl FAST. Harold Larwood was his name, and he and his fellow paceman bowled vicious bouncers and short balls at the batsman's body, forcing him to either get severely injured by standing there and getting hit, or use his bat to fend off the ball, which would inevitably land in one of the 8 fielders hands for a catch.
So furious were the Australians at this dirty and unsportsmanlike conduct, and so arrogant were the English that they were inflamed at being called cheats, that the two nations were thinking of possible political retribution, in terms of trade embargoes, and even worse, military action.
Athletic genius is timeless. If Bradman was born at the same time as Tendulkar, I strongly believe that he'd be past his 100th 100. Way past.
replies:
Dan maloney listen "I dont want to comment on your comparison of great little master the god sachin with so called great sir don bradman whatever, because god cannot be compared with humans. Now I think you got your ans & if you still dont accept this reality, then I cannot do much about that. Thank you & yes good morning its 6 o clock wake up out of your dream (from Saurabh patil, Feb 2013)
Well said Dan, I am sure even the respected Sachin would like to see an end to the hyperbolic nonsense that comes out of India with these discussions. Bradman is the greatest of all time, Sachin the greatest of this generation. (Although, I would like to make case for Ricky ... But another time) (from Ben, Dec 2012)
Dan Maloney, well stated! Your facts are precise. The other things forgotten is Bradman was seriously ill during his career, life threateningly so. He also did not have helmet protection, thigh pad, arm guards & his gloves were hand bound! Statistically, if these Bradman devaluers were balanced, he averaged between 85-95 in Sydney Grade & State Cricket within Australia, which would have been the strongest in the world as well. No fluke. I found an amazing article which you might want to read which gives an incredible insight into Bradman's incredible ability, achievements & talents. Only Ricky Ponting in his golden 2002-2006 run came close to nearing Bradman's 52 Test aggregate & average. Sachin is well down the list, even his current peers were higher! BTW, at his peak, Don Bradman averaged nearly 150 per innings. Give the guy his just dues. Tendulkar has even scored a Test Triple Century, Bradman scored 2, plus a 299 & a little matter of 309 runs in a day & a 452no in a Shield match within Australia. The guys the greatest batsman of ALL Time. He would've been an awesome 1 day cricketer, if he didn't have to work as well & had better health, cricket conditions, equipment & training etc!, (from Graeme, June 2012)
It think is shahid afridi (from Mohammad ibrahim, Apr 2013)
deeply i say Don is the best as u said if kallis Amla do get chance as if sachin...they would have done a shooting run race than all...sachin is a good classic hard working batsman but not god.....Ricky ponting is better he used to bat in any alien pitch and fire his centuary (from waasiq, Apr 2013)
Well, some people are saying that sachin tendulkar had started his career so early than 'kallis, ponting,lara, sangakara etc. thats why he has scored more runs than these players. I want to tell all of you that he had not started his career early but he had learned and understand the cricket so quickly in time. where your players just had been trying to learned on that time. Only genius can do this. (from Hitesh, Apr 2013)
My favorite cricketer of all time is M.S. DHONI .i love ms dhoni and his helicopter short .he is a great indian captain forever.i also like adam gilchrist but dhoni is no. 1. in battin dhoni is soo good specially in ipl he hit helicopter short in i.p.l it was agreat experience. (from vipul sharma, Mar 2013)
Every Body know the greatest records of SACHIN TONDULKAR then why we discuss about who is better (from Jeet, Mar 2013)
Inzamam.ul.haq also a great player he 10000 runs (from m.ali, Mar 2013)
I think afridi is very inteligent batsman but so;;; (from bilal liaqat, Mar 2013)
Hahaha ... Sachin is been compared to bradman!! If bradman had faced bowlers like akram ,mushtiyaq,akthar at the age of 16 ,he would have topped the list for getting more no of duck outs. He is a batsman who can only score in aus .!but sachins avg is 50+ in almost all the countries and more over sachin even had the capacity to Bowl...so one can easily judge whose better !!! (from Sri vatsa, Mar 2013)
don't forget kumar sangakkara he equal with sachin & lara to reach 10000 runs in 195 innings with avg of over 56. unfortunately he is a late comer. so he can't play test matches as much as sachin , kallis, ponting. but he is also a greatest test batsman in world (from vilan, Mar 2013)
Sachin Tendulkar is a greater cricketer than Shahid Afridi, but just barely (from Bert, Mar 2013)
i think records jawab dete hai k kon best hai, sachin tendulkar(bharat ratna) (from mohit michael, Mar 2013)
i think afridi is good for 2011 world cup bowling
THE NEW WALL IS PUJARA. BUT ALL KNOWN SACHIN IS THE BEST EVER (from SUMAN, Mar 2013)
if Kallis had began as early as Tendulkar, the latter would, without a doubt, be eclipsed by Kallis. Becoming a great batsman and being consistent at it requires a lot of devotion in the nets. Bowling requires just a much commitment. With that being said, Kaliis is both a great batsman and bowler and that should tell you of someone who has mastered the game completely and has maintained this mastery over the course of his career. I won't even begin to talk about fielding - everyone knows Kallis has "bucket-like hands". Take nothing away from Sachin because he is a great batsman, but if he'd share his time with bowling then it is almost certain that his batting skill will decline. A good example of this is when Sachin was made captain of the test team and his good performances dwindled in dramatic fashion. Too much responsibility is too much for him. Kallis on the other divides his time between bowling and batting and he still maintains a higher average than Tendulkar and he is just as good if not a couple of notches above him and he also reached 10 000 test runs in less matches. This should tell you something. Tendulkar has been largely favoured by a very early start to his career and this is one of the major reasons why he holds the records he does. He is one of the greatest batsmen but the title of the greatest cricketer ever belongs to Kallis - a complete cricketer. PS: Watch out for Amla and Devilliers. (from Mokoena, Mar 2013)
sachin, bradman, lara, sobers, kallis, gavaskar, all are great stars. but the list was incomplete without the man who changed the phase of test cricket,iam saying about VIRENDER SEHWAG (from shafeek, Feb 2013)
Sanath jayasuriya all the way,firstly because he was a dangerous opener who combined power and precision to his shots and secondly can score sixes to any part of the ground using his bottom hand and finally 300 plus wickets which is also a great achievement (from adhil ashraff, Feb 2013)
Arjuna ranatunga was very easily the best batsman the world has ever seen (from john waugh, Feb 2013)
mohamed hafeez and misbah ul haq the gretest player nomber 1 this tow (from usman, Feb 2013)
If I am asked who is the greatest batsman I witnessed at my time, I would say Sachin Tendulkar. But as a player, JACQUES KALLIS always. He is the best composed player and the greatest ever too. (from Shaswat, Feb 2013)
India is loser.Australia is better than India. my favorite cricketer is chirs Gayle.and bowler is wasim akram and shaib akhtar. iam Pakistani not Indian,nor Australian.i love Pakistani cricketers and bowlers. (from alifaisal, Feb 2013)
This article is the worst i've ever seen. Totally one sided view. Typically biased indian view. (from Werner, Feb 2013)
I cnt belive this a list of grt player of cricket where "GOD OF CRICKET", is mising (from Kaustav, Feb 2013)
I'd put Tendulkar ahead of Bradman.India's tour of S.A (2010-11) is part of my evidence. S.A's pace attack is undoubtably the best,and yet Sacho conquered it.S.Warne is 1 of the greatest spinners ever,but even in his backyard,Sacho has a good record. Under enormous pressure from almost everywhere, Sacho is ever brilliant.I wouldn't ask for more!
javed miadad and imran khan is the besttttttt (from amna, Feb 2013)
Wasim Akram and Izmam ul Haq are greatest players of all time (from Zubair Juggun, Feb 2013)
i like shoaib akhter and abdul razaq thats boths r very good player and winning player (from m wasim, Feb 2013)
I think Sachin is the god of cricket and none of all cricketers could not break his records (from Yuvraj bhardwaj, Feb 2013)
Afridi is best because he hit the longest and highest six in world . the empire ask who will hit this six he will got 12 runs afridi hit that six (from za, Feb 2013)
I think Number .1 is sachin, next DHONI. (from Alwyn saudi aramco, kolalgiri, Feb 2013)
Shaid afridi is the best imran khan heros i am from pakistan (from ahmad sajid, Feb 2013)
If asked to pick the best team with all the above mentioned players available, I would without a doubt put Kalis's name down first, and the pick the rest or the team around him. Sachin is no doubt a great batsman as well as a decent fielder and the same goes for a lot of the others mentioned above, and Murili and co are truly great bowlers, but Kalis is as good a batsman as all these guys as well as possibly the greatest slip fielder of all time and at the tender age of 37 is still ranked inside the top 25 bowlers in the world. Cricket is a team sport and like all other sports it is about winning. Batsmen like Lara, Sachin and ponting are all great, but they are interchangeable; no one would be unhappy to have any of the above batsmen in their team regardless of order. In their prime it would be a coin toss as to who out of the three would score better on any given day, but Kalis on the other hand is definitely not interchangeable. There is no one in cricket right now or arguably ever that brings as much to the table as Jacques Kalis does. He is as good a batsmen as the above mentioned guys, a better fielder(at worst just as good a fielder) and is no contest the best bowler of the lot. I am South African so there is some bias, but I maintain if winning cricket games is the goal then Kalis is without doubt my MVP. Greatest batsman ever is a tough one, but an average of 99 is ridiculous ad hard to ignore. But then again no one is going to say damn I got Sachin instead of Bradmon/Kalis/Lara. (from S, Feb 2013)
why is Barry Richards not shown in top ten batting averages? I know he only played 4 tests but he averages about 72 (I think). You show other players who only played a handful of games. (from Bloomski, Feb 2013)
Sachin is best ever because under the pressure of million fans he play best no one do this .no big height no musles but he do he plays worlds best bowlers ever and bat best .whole world love you sachin please play sachin more you can play you are heart of indian cricket fans (from Shanti dev dixit, Feb 2013)
Adam Gilchrist - Greatest wicket keeper batsman of all time (from Bijith Tom, Feb 2013)
Surely Jaqcues Kallis is the greatest cricketer ever I don't knw what u other guys are smoking, first look at the stats before u open ur big mouths. Surely a person with an a batting average over 57, just under 12000 runs and taking over 285 wickets surely there's something wrong with u guys 2 think sachin tendulkar is beta but hey india has way more pppl than south africa so nt surprised at all (from Andrew, Feb 2013)
KALLIS, KALLIS , KALLIS (from Clay, Feb 2013)
I think some pakistani players are missing from above list ... ZARA SOCHYEE . . (from Zohaib Ali, Feb 2013)
There's nthhing to fight about when Jacques Kallis is there ... A Complete
Cricketer..COMPLETE CRICKETER
The greatest cricketer of all time was W.G.Grace. He virtually invented modern batting techniques, dominated the game for decades and was in large measure responsible for the huge public following cricket enjoyed until fifty years after his death and still enjoys to a slightly lesser degree. It is pointless to compare his averages as he played on atrocious pitches for most of his career but he set just about every record in his day. Nobodt since has been of comparable staure in or importance to the game.
Statistics don't lie because it cant lie!!! I luv the great aussies and it frustates me to admit it and not be biased but the greatest cricket player overall of all time is ... JACQUES KALLIS!!! You just cant admit it like almost me!!! (from Adam Starr, Feb 2013)
In india for sachin ,it is said that ... baap baap hota he or beta beta ... in English .. father is always a father and son is always a son ... so sachin is better then don .. (from Sunil Kumar, Feb 2013)
I agree, that Sachin is one of the greatest cricketers in the history but But among those greatest cricketers Don. Bradman is best one. (from Asif, Feb 2013)
There's one rule that I always think of whenever this discussion is brought up. LBW. Much of Bradman's career, you could not be given lbw if the ball pitched anywhere outside the line of the stumps. Unlike now when it's possible to pitch outside off, hit in front, and be given out. Whenever I think about that I wonder just HOW many runs Sachin, Lara and Ponting would have made. In the first instance Tendulker isn't even the best of his generation. Lara got to 10 000 runs in less matches AND innings than Tendulker. Tendulker just had better staying power and started earlier. That aside. This argument can never truly be proven. The fact is, the generational gap, technology, pitches, and the science the game has become makes this an impossible comparison. Bradman was simply the best of his Era. And no one should say who is, and who isn't, the greatest of all time unless they can recreate the big bang. (from Luke, Jan 2013)
Sachin is great batsman because he almost play in pressure and make century. At the time of don there were no quality spinner and fast bowlers. (from Sunil, Jan 2013)
BRIAN LARA greatest of all batsmen along side viv Richards and sachin they are GODS
Sachin is the best after Alastair cook. he is da epicness (from Tom Roberts, Jan 2013)
In my opinion he is the greatest player who takes retirement and majority of people says, '' He should not have left cricket at this time. He could play more of cricket. '' He is the greatest player who not only scores in the field, but also in the heart of the people, whom people love to watch as he plays, who gets out and people just switch the tv off. He is the best cricketer who is constant & stands against all the odds and performs. He is the best cricketer for whom cricket is not a job, but his life, his country's pride. He is SACHIN RAMESH TENDULKAR, THE GOD OF CRICKET. (from Rajendra Kumar Naik, Jan 2013)
Sachin is only the complete and all time greatest player. in don bradman's time there is no contest beetween the batsman and bolwer. are you ever watching don when he was playing cricket? i think all you answer no. so what i know it is very difficult to play agnaist the spiner then the fast bolwer, special in test cricket, bradman never face quality spiner in his cricket life. and he is not playing a single ODI. and he was not feel the pressure of your fan following.b'cz in that time in a test match hardly u see more people comes to watch. As a indian I'm not saying SACHIN is all time great. as a cricketer i m saying Sachin is only the complete batsman in cricket history. in a interview Wasim Akram Said that Sachin struggle against medium pacers but he forget Sachin dominating all the bowler they have in 2003 world cup match IND v PAK because they have medium pacer like Razzaq Yarafat Waqur and himself and again in 2011 world cup semifinal. then i ask all of you r u forget that match in sarjha, that in England, that in South Africa, that in Pakistan, that in New zeal and, that in west indies,that in Sri lanka, that in Bangladesh, that in Toronto, that in allover India, Every country who play cricket, there Sachin score runs whether it is ODI or TEST. and also in the Biggest T20 League in world IPL Every time he goes to ground he scores Runs, he has 30 Thousands Plus International Runs Playing 3 formats of the game it is not possible for everyone beside SACHIN. yes SIR DON BRADMAN is all time greatest for you. but forme he was Nothing for our Generation We grow up watching 3achin first kids that love to watch him,then boys we learn his technique, then young star wish to play like him in International, now man watch to see the god playing. After retirement every ground all over the world will miss the short around straight cover mid wicket every part of the ground. so only i can say 3achin Thanks you for Give us that in your cricket life. (from DEV, Jan 2013)
sir Sachin tendulkar no one like him he is the only one player in the world who can dominated all bowler in 80s,90s 20s,21,century he is god of cricketer (from samrat, Jan 2013)
rahul dravid and laxman should have a place in the list he deserve it (from krishnakishore, Jan 2013)
Jacques Kallis is the greatest cricketer the world has ever seen. This year he will be second in the all time run scorers and tons with a far better ave than tendulkar and anyone else in the top 10. Then to top it of he has taken 287 wickets which no one else in the top 10 has done. A better slip fielder you won't find either. And that's just test cricket. Odi's is the same. No one in the top ten batsmen where bowlers and had taken even close to a hundred wickets. He is almost at 300. And again his ave is the best. You people need to check the statistics. They speak for itself. (from Jaco, Jan 2013)
It's most unwise to compare Sachin because we cant say how Sachin can play in bradman's situations and vice versa. But modern cricket Sachin is the best. If we are forced to choose only one between Bradman and Sachin Even though I am big fan of Sachin I feel safe to choose Bradman as best (from saketh, Jan 2013)
in my opinion kallis is the greatest batsman of all time ... he is also the greatest all rounder of all time. in test cricket he has the highest average of his era ... he has scored more than 13000 runs and taken 285 test wickets not to mention he is 3 rd on the most catches list(excl wicket keeper) and will prob top the list before he retires. (from waseem, Jan 2013)
I compare Lara best then J.Kallis, 3achin and R.Ponting as a Test Player.. (from Sdkk, Jan 2013)
i think saeed anwer and lara is best bastman in the world because both are match wining player (from yasirfarooq, Jan 2013)
We neither see who was the don brodman nor watch his cricket, anyone in the world not better cricketer than SACHIN RAMES TENDULKAR. Sachind is the god of cricket. East or west Sachin is the best. (from Pravin bhagat, Jan 2013)
wasim akram is the best and javid miandad
Don "radman is evergreen cricketer in world. But he played in only test matches. 3achin is great batsman in test and odl. So 3achin is best batsman after Don. (from Prakash, Jan 2013)
Who would you rather have in your team, tendulkar or kallis? Kallis- average of over 57, better than tendulkar. Reached 13000 runs in fewer games than tendulkar. 283 test wickets and 189 catches. Enough said (from chris tyndale, Jan 2013)
i think kallis is the greatest cricketer of all time, look at his career, more than 13000 runs in test cricket and also got approximately 300 wickets. (from umer, Jan 2013)
Guys let's b honest king kallis is the greatest of them all almost 300 test wicket nd over 13000 nd he had done that in fewer match than the so called lil maestro (from t man, Jan 2013)
SOURAV GANGULY IS ONE & ONLY SUCCESSFUL PLAYER COM FIGHTER WHO PROVED HIMSELF AGAINST UNEXPRESSIVE TREMENDOUS MENTAL PRESSURE ... HE PLAYED CRICKET FOR INDIA FROM HIS SOUL OF HEART THAT MIGHT HAVE EVER SEEN!! AFTER SACHIN WE HAVE TO REMEMBER SOURAV GANGULY FOR INDIA ODI CRICKET HISTORY!!!! (from CHINMOY, Jan 20130
don is no doubt is great player but Sachin is the only all time don of cricket ... (from PRAFUL BOPCHE, Jan 2013)
I don't know why all comparing this silly things ha? one thing the great people or cricketers prodused by only one contry that is Australia. they only have that capacity to produce this kind of huge great cricketers. now debate is over. so ... ha ha ha (from Ashishkumar, Jan 2013)
Cricketers cannot be compared . . Because of the time difference (from ZZz, Jan 2013)
Sachin is a greatest cricketer of the world. BUT SACHIN KO ABHI RETIREMENT NAHI LANAA CHIEA THA. (from parveen mehra, Jan 2013)
if bradman score easily in that era then why the other batsmen of that era score even at an average of 70. bradman is name of genius.truly world greatest player ever. (from bakar, Jan 2013)
i think both sachin and bradman were great at their time as conditions and circumstances were different for them. (from sunny, Jan 2013)
I'd put bradman as number one due to his impact on cricket but I reckon kallis is better then tendu lake because whilst getting 10,000 test runs he also got 200 wickets. (from Bob, Jan 2013)
i think shahid afridi holds many records.he is the very dangerous all time in history of cricket
It's rather pointless to debate the greatest batsman of all time with rabid Tendulkar supporters. The rest of the world acknowledges that Bradman was a statistical outlier (look up the term) and without doubt the most successful cricket batsman ever. Tendulkar, along with Viv Richards, Victor Trumper, Jack Hobbs and a few others, of course belong in the argument for number two but realistically there is no argument for number one (Unless you look really hard and try to make the facts fit your own view point). Bradman was a once in a lifetime player (perhaps several lifetimes), Tendulkar was the best (or maybe even second best - did someone say Brian Lara?) of his generation. (from Big Stan, Jan 2013)
durrrrrrr lanat sachin tandukar pe hahaha (from malik, Jan 2013)
great people come from God like sachin lara viv kallis. (from dan, Jan 2013)
where is Sanath Jayasuriya. Changer of the style of ODI game (from Udaya, Jan 2013)
It's Micheal Clarke now (from jake, Dec 2012)
lara is the greatest batsman of all time and i ll give u the reason. sachin played with great batsman like shewag,drivid,ganguly,laxman, each evraging above 50 n lara was one man army yet he made w.i win at more than several times. lara remain not out merely in6innings n sachin remain 32times not out in test matches if u do know what does that mean u ll surely consider lara the greatest batsman of all time (from rizwanklair, Dec 2012)
only brandman have an average of 99, but my cricket god sachin have rest of all records (from sabin, Dec 2012)
Whilst Sachin is fantastic you can hardly compare him to Don Bradman irrespective of all arguments. You talk of technology yet fail to mention that the Don had to travel by boat or train. In the modern era both Jacques Kallis and Kumar Sangakkara have better averages and Jacques Kallis may even get more hundreds having played 45 matches less than Sachin. I do want to emphasise that I cannot fault Sachins legacy, he has truly been a great player who I have enjoyed watching. (from Carl Krause, Dec 2012)
sourav ganguly is the best player in the history of cricket. (from anandu, Dec 2012)
Its very hard to say who is the all time great cricketer, It will remain all time discussion on it but as far as modern cricket is concern no doubt the great cricketr who left the major impect on cricket to popular from one level to another is sachin tendulkar. (from salman zaki, Dec 2012)
I think inzamam ul haq is the best batsman.look at his innings against bangladesh in 2003. (from shahid, Dec 2012)
where is virendar sehwag, the great? (from vasu, Dec 2012)
Cricket is not a game where everyone count all the time that the everage is the key to know ability of the player.Every Bowler & batsman having diferent type of situation to adopt those condition is called true champion cricketer.So in this list you cant count lots of great player like, sachin, lara, sobbers, imran ,kapil, botham, richards, gavaskar and many more. But as far as the pressure is concerned on & off the field sachin is far ahead with every one. (from salman zaki, Dec 2012)
i think rahl is simply the best ever ... (from chandu, Dec 2012)
Please guys ... Those two immensely respect each other ... They know who they are ... Stop discussing and comparing ... They are great in their own way ... Each player is great as they have made it to represent their countries..So grow up. (from Arun, Dec 2012)
well to be honest B S CHANDRASHEKAR, G R VISHWANATH, KAPIL DEV, RAHUL DRAVID , SACHIN, KUMBLE AND SRINATH were the best cricketers on the INDIAN SIDE I HAV SEEN SO FAR. (from Nagendra Yadav, Dec 2012)
Indians ... they are truly idiotic. Sachin averages 54.60, Bradman averages 99.94. Bradman averages 45.34 more runs than Sachin. Now think of these 2 things. 1. If someone played Test cricket with an average of 45.34, they would be considered as an outstanding player. Imagine Sachin, and add another outstanding player on top of that. Who do you get? Bradman. 2. Bradman has almost double the average of Sachin ... (from Noah, Dec 2012)
Sachin is no doubt the greatest batsman of all time. aussies dont like him and so are not ready to accept it. they are still backing old school don bradman. (from mahek, Dec 2012)
imran khan is the best of all (from the best, Dec 2012)
When sachin enters the crease already damage will be done by rahul dravid as dravid at no.3 & sachin at 4 all new balls faced by rahul and made easy for sachin to play his shots no doubt to say rahul dravid is great among all his class, patience technique is compare sachin from 1996 to 2012 (from sreenu, Dec 2012)
Sachin is was will all time greatest batsman ever (from krishna, 3 Dec 2012)
sachin is no.1.after sachin,ganguly is the best ... (from anandu, 2 Dec 2012)
Sachin is a god of cricket & number one cricketer in the world (from Rohit b, Dec 2012)
Inzimam is the greatest player who won most matches single handedly than any won in the world (from Nadeem, Dec 2012)
Umesh yadav is best batsman of all time (from Saktiman, Dec 2012)
Rahul Dravid Is One oF The Greatest Batsman In World He Is Wall Of Indian Cricket (from Varsha, Dec 2012)
JAC KALLIS, SACHIN, WASIM AKRAM ,SHANE WARNE AND DON BRADMAN ARE GREATEST CRICKETER EVER. (from SUDHIR, Dec 2012)
where is Aravinda disilva,saeed anwar, inzamamul haque they also deserve to be there.
to be honest with u peeps ... jaques kallis is the greatest player of all time ... the guy has unbelievable records on his shoulders ... yes sachin scored lots of runs, bradman with the highest average but king kallis stands tall ... its like saying sachin + murli + kallis ... watch out for dale steyn and amla (from itumeleng, Dec 2012)
Kallis is the best. cricket is about Runs, Wickets and Catches look @ this guy stats. He is the = poiting * Magrath * Dravid (from Jushaney Rambau, Nov 2012)
Subramanium badrinath is the best cricketer of all time,no one can be compared with him,
S sreesanth is the best bowler of all time,
don bradman is not btr thn S.TENDULKAR IT'S PROVED (from jack rudolf(aus), Nov 2012)
Jacque Kallis just read the record books. Having him in the team is like having two players. Something like 282 test wickets, nearly or over 12000 runs at an average of 57 or more and then don't forget all those catches in the slips. It really isn't much of a debate. To be fair you cant say the best cricketer, you must say best batsman, best bowler and best all rounder. (from Andrew Watson, Nov 2012)
The debate about Bradman v Tendulkar makes me laugh. They cannot be compared. The Don played all of his matches in Australia, NZ, SA and England. He played on uncovered wickets and at a time when a no-ball was determined by the position of the back foot not the front foot. So the wickets could deteriorate far faster than they do now, and an entire match could br played on a "sticky dog". Sachin has scored the vast majority of his runs in India, on covered, and hence protected wickets and with the bowler releasing the ball one stride further away from the batsman than in the Don's day. Cricket has changed beyond all recognition. Tendulkar may well be the greatest batsman of the modern game, given the right conditions. But if we'd had jet airliners rather than ships when the Don was playing, who knows what other records he would have smashed. Over the history of Cricket Don Bradman stands head and shoulders above any other contender for the title of the Worlds Greatest Ever Batsman. Now on the same basis the worlds greatest ever bowler ... Hedley Verity! Even the Don was cautious when the Leeds Lad was bowling. (from Peter Wood, Nov 2012)
I think Shakib Al-Hasan is the best player for 2010-2011-2012. who was the top All-rounder of the world in those years. (from Anwar, Nov 2012)
Sachin is a players player, athletes athlete, idols idol. Proud to tell that he has received our Nation's coveted prize 'Order of Australia'. Salute the great little master!!! (from Talbot Matt, Nov 2012)
Pity that his record is no where near the masters, but rating a batsman on best instantaneous form/skill: Herschelle Gibbs! (South African opener & backward point, later 90's and early 00's).
I don't know of any batsman who has (or had) so much control over a cricket ball, with exceptional power coming from effortless bat strokes. He had an eye like a robot, near artistic style and coordination, and the coolest attitude and demeanor ever! Him being arguably one of the best infielders in the game's history supports my claim as to his natural ability. Note that I base the above only on how good the guy can be, on the pitch, in one instant (innings, over, ball, whatever). P.S. First guy to hit 6 sixes in one over, ODI's :) (from Stefan (Opening seam bowler), Nov 2012)
Rahul dravid and lara are deserving the top seat (from talukder, Nov 2012)
Sehwag is the greatest batsnman noone can play like him (from aman parashar, Nov 2012)
Sachin, Brian, Ricky, Kumar and Herschelle great players to watch stylish and aggresive in all forms of the game, Wasim and Curtly my most favorite bowlers, Adam best wicketkeeper ever (from denzil frm SA(PE))), Nov 2012)
Sachin is a greatest cricket player for all time proffed., so sachin is a god of cricketer ... (from anandwarriors, Nov 2012)
Sachin most centuries against low profiles teams like zimbabwe bangladesh kenya etc. (from atif ali, Nov 2012)
reply to all of u how many players r there in the world who have given there country 3 world cups and that too in different forms i guess no one ..but only YUVRAJ SINGH he was the man of the tournament in 2000 under 19 world cup which india won , 6 sixea in 2007 t20 wc 70 on jzt 30 balls against aus and the bzy one 2011 wc again man of the tournament. so the bzt player who ever born is YUVRAJ SINGH. (from gunpreet taggar, Nov 2012)
sachin tendulkar is a great player.he is the god of cricket.No one can play like him.He is an outstanding batsman.He was the older captain of mumbai indians. (from keshaw bhalotia, Nov 2012)
Sachin tendulkar is a great player.he is the god of cricket.No one can play like him.He is an outstanding batsman.He was the older captain of mumbai indians. (from keshaw bhalotia, Oct 2012)
Bradman is the best player as there were so many disadvantages as Don Maloney rightfully points out.There should be a place for Dennis Lillee as the worlds best seamers-Wasim Akram Glenn Mgrath Courtney Walsh etc have said that heis the best bowler and he was their idol. (from Anish, Oct 2012)
Well, you can keep on arguing who's the greatest, for decades to come. Sir Don himself had called his wife to show her on TV the very close resemblance to Tendulkar's batting technique to that of his own. He is recorded as stating that Sachin's technique reminded him of his own style. I am sure we as humans are capable of understanding fair and honest facts instead of talking about population, votes etc. Judging based on votes is one thing and judging based on performances is another. Both men have enriched the game of cricket in their own right and in their own respective eras. Let us all learn to respect that for starters instead of petty arguments. If Tendulkar would have been born then and Sir Don now, things could have been different but that didn't happen now did it? So, lets all give a standing ovation to two great and extremely talented cricketers who brought joy to countless others like us sitting in our living rooms, watching cricket and then suddenly as if almost crazy, start arguing who's the greatest! Long live cricket and may more greats be produced by all the nations, so that generations after us can enjoy and cherish the gentleman's game. (from Daniel, Oct 2012)
sachin is all time best but viru is all time destructive (from praveenkumar, Oct 2012)
Rahul dravid is worlds best test batsman no one else sure (from sreenu, Oct 2012)
Why kallis is missing, he is good with both bat and boll bredman was a batsman and sachin is also but he is allrouder having 10000+ runs in both test nd ODI nd 300+ wickets in both format.i hope no one can get this landmark. (from Irfan, Oct 2012)
bhaio sachin ki tarah down to earth playerdekha hai kisi ne.ponting nahi hai.Lara is a player of class like sachin.bradman is a bit better player as per his consistency.(from narinder singh, Oct 2012)
Hey buddies u left de greatest finisher with an winnin percentage of more than 100 he is non e othr than m s d (from kiran, Oct 2012)
rahul dravid is all time great.look at his temperment and dedication,no one has fighted like him in crucial circumstances.he is the warrior.so,simply we call him back bone of indian batting. (from harish kumar reddy, Oct 2012)
in sachin vs don they often forget the best ever that is sir ricky thomas ponting.
I think Sachin Tendulkar and Donald Broadman are the best batsman of alltime.Muralitharan is the best the best bowler and Imran Khan is the best allrounder. These cricketers will remain alive until the last day of cricket. (from Amil, Sept 2012)
take a look at thisssssss ... (from jecob, Sept 2012)
- Highest run getter in all matches (15,533 as on 6 September 2012).
- Highest run getter in ODIs (18,426 as on 24 August 2012).
- Most number of centuries in Test matches - 51.
- Most number of centuries in ODIs - 49.
- Most number of man of the match awards (62) in the ODIs.
- Most number of man of the series awards (17) in ODIs.
- Best average for man of the matches in ODIs.
- First cricketer to reach 10000 runs in the ODIs.
- First cricketer to reach 15000 runs in the ODIs.
- He is the highest run scorer in World Cups (2,278 at an average of 56.95 as on 2 April 2011)
- Most number of the man of the match awards in World cups.
- Most number of runs in the 1996 World cup - 523 runs at an average of 87.16.
- Most number of runs in the 2003 World cup - 673 runs in 2003 Cricket World Cup, highest by any player in a single Cricket World Cup.
- Most number of Fifties in ODI's - 96.
- First player to score 200 runs in an ODI.
- He is the only player to be in top 10 ICC Batsmen ranking for 10 years in Tests.
- In 2002, Wisden rated him as the second greatest Test batsman after Sir Donald Bradman.
- In 2003, Wisden rated Tendulkar as the No. 1 and Richards at No. 2 in all time Greatest ODI players.
- He was involved in unbroken 664-run partnership in a Harris Shield game in 1988 with friend and team mate Vinod Kambli.
- Tendulkar is the only player to score a century in all three of his Ranji Trophy, Duleep Trophy and Irani Trophy debuts.
- In 1992, at the age of 19, Tendulkar became the first overseas born player to represent Yorkshire.
- Tendulkar has been granted the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, Arjuna Award, Padma Shri and Padma Vibhushan by Indian government. He is the only Indian cricketer to get all of them.
- Tendulkar has scored over 1000 runs in a calendar year in ODIs 7 times.
- Tendulkar has scored 1894 runs in calendar year in ODIs most by any batsman.
- He has the least percentage of the man of the matches awards won when team loses a match in ODIs. Out of his 62 man of the match awards only 5 times India has lost.
- Tendulkar most number man of match awards (10) against Australia.
- In August 2003, Sachin Tendulkar was voted as the "Greatest Sportsman" of the country in the sport personalities category in the Best of India poll conducted by Zee News.
- In November 2006, Time magazine named Tendulkar as one of the Asian Heroes.
- Tendulkar was the first batsman to score over 50 centuries in international cricket.
- Tendulkar was the first batsman to score over 75 centuries in international cricket.
- Has the most overall runs in cricket, (ODIs+Tests+Twenty20s), as of September 2012 he had accumulated almost 33,969 runs overall.
- Sachin Tendulkar with Sourav Ganguly hold the world record for the maximum number of runs scored by the opening partnership. They have put together 6,271 runs in 128 matches
- The 22 century partnerships for opening pair with Sourav Ganguly is a world record.
- Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid hold the world record for the highest partnership in ODI matches when they scored 331 runs against New Zealand in 1999
- Sachin Tendulkar has been involved in six 200 run partnerships in ODI matches - a record that he shares with Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid
- Most ODI Centuries in a calendar year: 9 centuries in 1998.
- Only player to have over 100 innings of 50+ runs (49 Centuries and 96 Fifties)(as of 07th March, 2012)
- The only player ever to cross the 14,000, 15,000, 16,000, 17,000, 18,000 run marks IN ODI.
Second highest individual score among Indian batsmen (200* against South Africa at Gwalior in 2011).
- The score of 200* is the second highest score recorded in ODI matches
- Tendulkar has scored over 1000 ODI runs against all major Cricketing nations.
- Sachin was the fastest to reach 10,000 runs taking 259 innings and has the highest batting average among batsmen with over 10,000 ODI runs
- Most number of Stadium Appearances: 90 different Grounds
- Consecutive ODI Appearances: 185
- On his debut, Sachin Tendulkar was the second youngest debutant in the world
- When Tendulkar scored his maiden century in 1990, he was the second youngest to score a century
- Tendulkar's record of five test centuries before he turned 20 is a current world record
- Tendulkar holds the current record (217 against NZ in 1999/00 Season) for the highest score in Test cricket by an Indian when captaining the side
- Tendulkar has scored centuries against all test playing nations.[7] He was the third batman to achieve the distinction after Steve Waugh and Gary Kirsten.
- He is second most number of seasons with over 1000 runs in world.
- On 3 January 2007 Sachin Tendulkar (5751) edged past Brian Lara's (5736) world record of runs scored in Tests away from home.
- Tendulkar and Brian Lara are the fastest to score 10,000 runs in Test cricket history. Both of them achieved this in 195 innings.
- Second Indian after Sunil Gavaskar to make over 10,000 runs in Test matches.
- Became the first Indian to surpass the 11,000 Test run mark and the third overall.
- First to score 30,000 international runs.
- Tendulkar's 33,906 runs in international cricket include 18,426 runs in ODIs, 15,470 Tests runs and 10 runs in the lone Twenty20 that India has played.
- On December 10, 2005, Tendulkar made his 35th century in Tests at Delhi against Sri Lanka . He surpassed Sunil Gavaskar's record of 34 centuries to become the man with the most number of hundreds in Test cricket.
- Tendulkar is the only player who has 150 wickets and more than 15,000 runs in ODIs.
- Tendulkar is the first batsman in history to score 100 centuries in international cricket.
Sachin is the greatest. if u dont believe than just go through his records,average and runs ... absolutely don is one of the greatest but playing with an average of 99.94 is amazing but he played only 26 test and majority with his known rivals ... and when it comes to pressure sachin has scored 140000 runs in pressure and bradman couldn't even score 4 in his last test when he was having pressure of expection from crowds .. and his team was the invincibles ... (from Dipanjan, Sept 2012)
rahul dravid, the man who has a record of playing the highest ball,he on own hand won the match against australlia in australlia something greats like sachin, sourav,viv richards ,kalliscant do. talking about don his era was suitable for batsman,no good fielders,poor bowlers (from shuvranshu, Sept 2012)
LARA IS GREAT ... HE IS ONE AND ONLY FIGHTER IN CRICKET ... (from WASIM AKRAM, Sept 2012)
Sourav ganguly also a very good player.and also God of off side,and big hitter thats why dada is calld dada the tiger ... (from Dibakar, Sept 2012)
Wasim akram is a greatest bowler of the world (from Babar ali, Sept 2012)
Vivian Richards, Wasim Akram, and Imran Khan deserved to be in the top 10.
Mr.Velupille Prabakaran. is the greatest player in ground.because fought for combined srilanka's noth province and east province to Tamilnadu to establish a great 'TAMIL EELAM' own tamilian country.Ravichandran Ashwin will be the tamil EELAM captain. (from Viny chandran kumar. Chennai (now in Srilanka), Sept 2012)
i think that brain lara is the greatest batsman i ever see play the game (from cleon bovell, Sept 2012)
i accept sachin is best ever, u compare both side of cricket the westindian lara is best compare to sachin.He hold best in two side of game in same time,u search any where no one can built his carrier best in odi and test cricket world at low range of time. (from venuraj, Sept 2012)
Rahul dravid is the best in test, he is the wall.technique.temprament ... everything he has.and also played in most difficult situations. (from Sushant, Sept 2012)
No mention of Rahul Dravid..not fair ... Fine player from India. (from Roger Bird, Sept 2012)
W.G Grace & Ian Thompson
salo chup karo ... deemag ki dahi bana di ... band karo great great ... only enjoy the cricket .. there is nobuddy special in the cricket.we should respect whole pepole who gave us en10ment in this game .. why should we worry about greatest cricketer .. lets enjoy the jentle game .. (from upadhyay007, Aug 2012)
Dravid is the greatest Test batsman of this era. (from Saurabh, Aug 2012)
y to fight for don and sachin ... both were gud criketers..but .they cannot be said as the biggest players till now ... sachin dint know how to finish games for india an bradman din knw how to face spin bowling and bouncers ... more or less ... there were greater players than them lyk richards and warne ... but din had the luck of getting into toplist as sachin nd don did ... warne was the best bowler in truegrounds as well as richards is the best batsman ... (from anil, Aug 2012)
lara is match winner player his best (from rizwan, Aug 2012)
" RAHUL DRAVID " is the ultimate step of cricket. every youngster should see rahul dravid's batting videos to become an artist in front of wickets (from mohit sharma, 22 Aug 2012)
Sachin is great no doubt bradman is also nice but if we compare both bradman has only 1 record nd sachin has a no. of records (from Aniket, 22 Aug 2012)
Sachin is best because the facts has been provided are wrong , if bowler is good and don has not seen that bowler then bowler had also not spend time for footage to get Bradman weakness. At that time there were no facilities to research on batsmen. and at don time there was time to relax to get fit but in Sachin time the schedule is very busy and there is less time for relax. if Bradman will face murlitharan and anil kumble today time best bowler then he cant get this average. hence sachin is best when fit because he has played all cream bowlers. if early bowler were good then batsman did not have much best technique to handle such situation in that time there were less cricket than today time now both bowler and batsmen are smart and sachin comes good against smart bowlers in heavy schedule. (from sonu, Aug 2012)
sachin is a best cricketers of the world (from laxman singh, Aug 2012)
Graeme Smith is the greatest captain, opener & player of all time. He has record of 25 hundreds no one on loosing side that no other player has ... (from Murtuza, Aug 2012)
Why Sourav Ganguly, Allan Donald is missing? (from AAKASH GOPE, Aug 2012)
One Lopher told Murali vijay where is he ... ? Hit him in slippers (from RpS, 14 Aug 2012)
Don should not be compared with minnows like Tendulkar and anyone else. I've never watched Don playing but after having a look at his records and statistics g think he's one of best of all time and the one and only. People who support Sachin compare his centuries with Don's unbeatable average of 99.94. But the fact is they don't know the difference between No. of centuries and batting average. That's why obviously they say Sachin's 100 100s are greater than Don's 99.94. They don't even know that Sachin has not even averaging 60. So i would definitely say Don is gr8 and the greatest ever produced by world. (from malik, Aug 2012)
I think lara is the great bataman in this world no 2 tendulker no 3 ricky pointing.becouse (from andrew, 6 Aug 2012)
Where is Aravid de silva, Jaysuriya, Kumar Shankakara ... so, it s totally wrong list ... Rahul dravi is here so why not these people not suite ... west statement ... (from UMR, Aug 2012)
He/She says 'why these people suite for west statement' to my dear UMR, I know only one language. Do u know what it is.It is a universel language. it has no country, no race, no nationality, no high class or law class even it has no patriotism. It is 'CRICKET'. Let's think for just a moment Lara or Bradman was playing for INDIAN team. then they will be the greatest in cricket history. (from Gunathilaka. Srilankan. Spet 2012)
Sachin only god da idiots. one more time read hemanth kumar comments. nowadays bradman play test and odi he is getting avg 19.94 only(not 99.94) (from prabhu.p, July 2012)
BRIAN LARA :-) IS THE GREATEST BATSMAN EVER ! any kind of ERA ! It does nt matter pitch is green ,damp ,fast or dusty MURALI also says he is the hardest batsman to out with his all magic deliveries (14 secret deliveries) Best fast baller 'WASIM AKRAM' Best bowler 'MURALìTHARAN' Best allrounder ' GARRY SOBBERS' (from RAVINDU, July 2012)
I think DON BRADMAN is the best batsman the world has ever produced.
India has the 2nd largest population in the world.So they can write many lies about their cricket players.Sachin is not even in the 10th place if we prepare a true list of the greatest batsmen in the world comparing their talents.The asia cup 2012 match between india and Bangladesh is a good example.Sachin got his 100th century very difficultly.But what a shame!! india lost the match!! there are many examples like this. This means if an indian batsmen score some big runs,any opposition can get runs more than that.That is Indian batsmen are very ordinary.Sachin and many indian batsmen get big runs in good batting pitches in India.They even can't score a 50 in a good bawling pitch.Indians think their players are the best in buisness.But actually they are among the most untalented.Most indian batsmen score big runs and create world records mostly to very poor teams in the world.But most players and commentators say indians have the best batting line up in the world, because of the money they receive from the IPL.Indian batsmen become heroes in good batting conditions and against poor teams. Even a 6year old child who is playing cricket for the 1st time will score 40+ runs in those conditions. (from chamdolston, July 2012)
I think yuvraj singh is one of the great player.he is the number one match winner whom i never seen. (from Rohit Dixit, July 2012)
East & west, Shachin is the best. (from Mamun, July 2012)
don't forget the most cracking batsmen for ever in world cricketers he is one and only VIRU he rules any bowler of world and he is a great hitter in all type of cricket (from devaraj, July 2012)
don played at the average above 99% but at the time cricketers are not at the peak level as sachin is proving that he more than don (from bharath, July 2012)
Sachin is the world best batsmen & he is the all time favorite cricketer (from Azhar, July 2012)
Bradman couldn't face bowler like akthr and brett lee. If he born in sachin age then fact will differ (from piyush, July 2012)
jawed miandad was a great player in cricket history who made six at the last delivery of the final over and won the match through this smashy shot. (from imran khan, July 2012)
When you talk about stylish Cricket then my answer is brain lara, saeed anwar, wasim akram, shane warne, andrew flintof, shaoib aktar and shahid afridi. I watch cricket because of these stylish cricketers. Most boring cricketers " Rahul Dravid, Mishbah ul haq. steve wagh, micheal clark (from Rizwan, July 2012)
sehwag will sit on top wait for 300+ bradman tendulkar lara won't do three triple centuries (from nkg, July 2012)
I think best fast bowler in the history it was wasim akram (from Ali, July 2012)
Shakib al hasan is the world best allrounder. (from Md.Faruk, July 2012)
Gentlemen, As a Lean 6 Sigma Black Belt statician, it is pretty hard to argue with Don´s data.
I however prefer to award equal status on the merits of there contribution off the field; fair play, honesty, ethics, play the game and not the man, these are the real statistics that they should be measured upon. Just difficult to measure unfortunately. (from John Miller, July 2012)
sir don bradman greatest batsman in the world all time.ever. he is the real THE DON. (from nikhil patil, July 2012)
Sachin & brandman both equally best (July 2012)
Sachin is not a powerful man but he is run scoring and century Making machine so sachin is best cricketer of all time (from Sudhakar, July 2012)
sachin is god so he is first then only others (from naidu, July 2012)
Sachin is my god i will give life of him i love u sachin nobody talk about him please he done so much to indian cricket sachin is great we wish all the best in future i love love love love love love love love love so much sachin if my son want to play cricket first i will show the sachin cricket vedios becuase he is true legend to game of cricker (from rohith, June 2012)
There can be another way to find that who,s best one. as just think from starting of cricket every decade remember by the greats of game.how many players were their in competition with don but every time critics compare Sachin with Lara , Ponting , Mark Waugh, Arvind, Anwar, Rahul and every time Sachin proves himself the Best .i don,t know why peoples are having problem to admit that he is the best.when he starts every body was the fan of his Technic and aggression then his continuity then the way he handles the pressure what else you want from him .hopeless people who critic Sachin. (from B.P.Singh, June 2012)
We don't nef a player like sachin he does not play for indea he play for him self, and when he get three figure his team loses. (from Aamir, June 2012)
On a scale of 10, I rank bradman at 10 and tendulker at 6.do not compare the greatest with the great.use yor yardstick statistically i.e.average,number of hundreds on paecentage basis on innings played, number of 300',200'and centuries in both the innings.bradman scored 300'twice, 200'ten times and made 100' in both innings in 1 test, whereas tendulker scored 200' six times. bradman played 52 matches/80 innings and tendulker 188 matches/311 innings. (from s r roy, June 2012)
murali vijay is the best. he is greatest than sachin and bradman. (from ramnarayan, May 2012)
@ramnarayan..how can you compare murali vijay to such legends . he is no where near them SACHIN IS THE BESTT!!!!!!! (from arjun, Nov 2012)
Look, bradman is the best ever, the bowling was just as quick as today larwood was 95+ mph and there was no limit to the amount of bouncers I. A over! (from Shut up Indian fanboys, May 2012)
when bradman saw sachin playing he invites sachin to australia why? because he came to knew that god has come (from manthan sharma, May 2012)
SACHIN is the only greatest player (from mohammed ahsan sn, May 2012)
hey, where is the most dangerous player who can rule over any bowler.. and can make cry any bowler even in test match. I mean to say VIRENDER SEHWAG ... world's most destructive player. (from Pritam, May 2012)
Why don't you people talk about "Aravinda De Silva". If you ask from greats like 'Wasim Akram' who was the toughest batsman in the world to ball.. he says its Aravinda De Silva ... (from Sasika, May 2012)
Well I think sachin is greatest batsman ever lived I rated him because of his consistence over the year. Its something phenomenal (from spurgeon issac, May 2012)
Rrahul Dravid is the best (from sarvsh chaubey, May 2012)
Why won't u consider the height of sachin tendulkar, being so short he is capable of scoring that much runs. sachin faced extreme swingers like Mcgrath and Akram, spin wizards Murali and Warne throughout his career. Further his highest scored individual runs is against Australia in odi as well as tests during the peak of austrialian cricket (1998-2008). Is there anybody in bradman's era with such bowling qualities. Could u show any of the england bowlers as per your classification presented above (since bradman played almost all his matchs against england only. You are absolutely wrong about the bowling standards, during bradman's era there is no much of beamers and bouncers as many as tendulkar faced. Iam not saying that bradman isn't good but sachin is best in modern cricket. (from prakash, May 2012)
Hello, guys Bradman on that time there is no quality camera to lbw and run out.ok, even though 99.94. sachin made 100 centuries .99.94 or 100 . so , i say Sachin is the best cricketer i ever seen in my life. (from vishal, May 2012)
You are just talking about the possibilities, if it so then i can say that it is possible that we can have a better player than bradman if cricket is played around all over the world. just talk with what u have!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Bradman is the best in his era, but when it comes to modern cricket it is always sachin.(bradman would cry to play against warne and murali) (from prakash, May 2012)
It is always difficult to compare players from different eras. There were different conditions e.g. uncovered wickets, and individual players suffered from politics e.g. Bradman lost 8 yrs from age 30 because of WWII. Graeme Pollock and Barry Richards lost most of their potential test careers due to apartheid. For my money the top 5 batsmen of all time, in order, were Bradman, B. Richards, Pollock, Hobbs then Tendulkar. Each, in their time, were clearly the best batsmen in the world (Pollock and Richards were contemporaneous. But, initially, Pollock was clearly the greatest of his age, but he was overtaken by Richards later). (from Ian Vos, April 2012)
'DON' ko pakarna muskili nehi na mumkin hai. (from Siddhartha Ray, April 2012)
Jacques Kallis is the greatest cricketer of all time. Just check his record. No one has scored so many runs at such high average and taken so many wickets in any form of the game. This guy is a step above greats such as Tendulkar, Bradmin, Waugh. But don't take my word for it, just check the record. (from EM, April 2012)
Sachin is the best player in the world and he proved it. by hitting double century in odi against south africa who have great bowling attack. so pakistani supporter realise it. (from saif ali, March 2012)
Dan Maloney..are you on a high??? What have you been smoking whilst watching cricket??? (from dawood, March 2012)
I think sachin is great but not a match winner when he scored a century india were loose the game so please remove the sachin name and add Muhammad Yousaf bcoz yousaf scored 13 centuries and pak won 12 times so yousaf is better than sachin bcoz muhammad yousaf is a match winner. (from zairy, March 2012)
In reply to the comment by Zairy that when Sachin Scores India losts .. hey Sachin is a batsman he can only score runs after batting it's upon bowlers how they manage their attack ... by the way ther record says:Sachin's centuries:100 India won:78. So go and think 100 times cauz The God can never be the second best ... (from Anant, June 2012)
Javed Miandad had a great techinique as far as batting is concerned. Wasim Akram introduced in-swing bowling action which is ruling now by all the fast bowlers but Wasim Akram created a indelible mark in this speciality. Sachin created record in longvity since his long haul as a batsman for more than 22 years without any major injuries itself speaks volume about his dedication but he is not a match winner like other cricket greats of past and his many contemporaries and also the many current generation players are playing match winning innings but Sachin failed in that miserably is something rediculous. But records of Sachin are great and not so easy to surpass those records. (from USMAN MOHAMED IBRAHIM, DUBAI, March 2012)
Where is Sanath Jayasuriya? He has scored more than 13000 runs and captured morethan 300 wickets in One Day Internationals. He is the only cricketer to do so? (from Lahiru Gamage, Feb 2012)
Don bradman is the better batsman then Sachin. remember sachin is also great player. (from zahid rahman, Feb 2012)
Richard Hadlee is second in bowling list. He was a legend . (from maximas russell, Jan 2012)
how big joke is it - where is sourav ganguly (dada)? ... he is one of the best and of course where is kumble ... mr (jumbo) (from mayank chhawari, Jan 2012)
All greatest players have unique talent and skills which make them one of the greatest player of all time: Don Bradman (extraordinary Average and record), Tendulkar (King of Records and consistency), Viv Richard (Best Entertainer), Brian Lara (Best temperament), Javed Miandad (Best 'Man of Crisis') etc (from Syed Shah, Nov 2011)
I think So Don Bradman, BC Lara & Mutthiah Muralitharan He is All Times greatest Player (from Swapnil Burhade, Sept 2011)
SAEED ANWAR IS THE BEST PLAYER OF THE WORLD (from ZULQAR NIAN, July 2011)
Sachin is greatest (from abhinav, July 2011)
Sachin is god gifted.his talent is unexectable.he is small height big fight man. (from R2D, July 2011)
Javeed Miandad is the only Greatest player of man of crises. He played through out his carrer as saver. He has more cricketing knowledge then any other player as coding by Clive Lloyd. He has the sharpest and killing batting techneque then any other player. He is the match winer. For example Sharjah cup final. (from Mohammad Ahmad Siddiqui, July 2011)
Cricket is nothing without Sachin, I know sachin is the all time greatest player in the world. (from jagdish menaria, June 2011)
Sachin is the greatest only for reasons the amount of pressure and expectations he need to handle over his cricketing career which is undoubtedly more than any other cricketer, not by mere statistics (from Arul Aravind Baba, June 2011)
SACHIN TONDULKAR IS ALL TIME GREAT CRICKETER FOR HIS EXELLENT TECHNIQUE AND HUMAN NATURE. NO DOUBT ON THAT.WE WANT GOD SHOULD PLAY 2015 WC. (from MURALI KRISHNA, June 2011)
Sachin is the all time greatest (from uday, Apr 2011)
if Bradman has avg of 99.94, Sachin up until now has 99 centuries and awaiting more in d way. Sachins played matches against many teams n away grounds. N even his performance counts
Dats some great.. Playing against Magrath, lee, warne, murlidharan, akthar, steyn n scoring against all is not matter to b 2nd best ... It has to b a nerve of pure cricket blood n joy
He is better n best dan any other batsman in d past n mite b forever (from Ajinkya, Apr 2011)
Well, Sachin is clearly the greatest. The other greats acknowledged in the list have themselves said so. Plus what he has done in the Indian context is important; after Mahatma Gandhi, he is the only one who has united a billion people. That's great social service. Agreed Bradman too carried the weight of a nation's expectation on his back like Sachin, but just compare the weight of India and Australia ... Every year India produces as many people there are in Australia. :) (from Sanket Shrivastava, April 2011)
I think Sachin is great among above list ... (from Spurgeon Issac, Mar 2011)
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In 1843 stamps were issued in two more countries. Those from Switzerland were issued by the cities of Zurich and Geneva. Which country was the second to issue stamps, known as 'Bull's Eyes', which were valid throughout the entire country? | Stamps auction catalogue: Empire of Brazil by David Feldman - issuu
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Empire of Brazil THE MEYER COLLECTION Thursday, October 4, 2007 at 16h00
The new 2007 Brazilian Empire Stamp Catalogue by Meyer see pages 80 onwards POSTAL HISTORY: Lot Nos. Pre-adhesive & stampless covers. . . . . . . . . . . . 20000-20010 British Post Offices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20011-20012 1843 "BULL'S EYES": Superb complete unused set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20013 30r to 90r values specialised. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20014-20065 Cancels & Usage by Town. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20066-20102 America's First Complete Issue Cover. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20103 See also special catalogue 1844 "INCLINADOS" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20104-20137 1850 "VERTICAIS" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20138-20174 1854-61 "COLORIDOS" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20175-20190 1866 EXPERIMENTAL PERFORATIONS . . . . . . . . 20191-20200 1866 DOM PEDRO II - Perforated . . . . . . . . . . . .20201-20216 1876 DOM PEDRO II - Rouletted. . . . . . . . . . . . . 20217-20226 1877-78 DOM PEDRO II - "White Beards". . . . . .20227-20233 1878-88 LATER IMPERIAL ISSUES. . . . . . . . . . . 20234-20259 TELEGRAPHS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20265-20267 POSTAL STATIONERY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20268 David Feldman SA, 175 route de Chancy, P.O. Box 81, CH-1213 Onex, Geneva, Switzerland Tel: +41 22 727 07 77, Fax: +41 22 727 07 78, E-mail: [email protected], Web site: www.davidfeldman.com Representation in 25 cities on all 5 continents
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Rolf Harald Meyer
Empire of Brazil THE MEYER COLLECTION Introduction Rolf Harald Meyer of Sao Paulo, Brazil, the leading specialist dealer since any of us can remember, and his son, Peter Meyer, reknowned expert on Brazil, have entrusted us with the auction of the best of their personal holdings of the Empire of Brazil. Acquired over a lifetime, strong in items that have not been offered at auction in decades, it is a true "connoisseur's collection" that melds quality and specialised interest. Though "RHM" himself has now retired from active dealing, his son Peter continues the "RHM" tradition, including publication of the annual catalogues of Brazil. As auctioneers of Rarities from around the world, we were amazed and impressed by many of the items herein - first and foremost the "Bull's Eyes" cover with the complete set, the America's first of this nature. It is offered herein as lot 20103, and also by means of a special catalogue which presents more of the background and history of this showpiece. Other highlights include the complete unused first issue (lot 20013), and the numerous examples of "Semi-Xifopagos" - stamps which show the interpanneau dividing lines in the margins, and thus come from the se-tenant value positions on the composite plates ("Xifopago" is a Portuguese word roughly translated "Siamese twin"). There are also gems among the other issues of the Empire, such as the marvellous "Dom Pedro II" issues three-colour franking cover, and important multiples, cancels, and usages on cover throughout. We hope lovers of world-wide classics, as well as collectors of Brazil, will take advantage of this truly "once in a lifetime" opportunity to add items that have been in the Meyer family collection for decades. As with all of our auctions, we invite those of you who wish to follow or participate in the auction from your home or office to visit our web site, www.davidfeldman.com. There you can also download, order or view the other catalogues for the rest of the Autumn 2007 auctions, try out our live bidding software, and obtain the Prices Realised for this sale.. This catalogue is typical of the care and attention to detail that we provide those for vendors of specialised collections - and may it "speak for itself".
Viewing Arrangements Feldman Galleries, 175, route de Chancy, 1213 Onex, Geneva, Switzerland From September 18 By appointment: for reservations contact Lydia Stocker, tel.: +41 (0)22 727 07 77 (weekend and late evening viewing by appointment) From October 2 General viewing: 09h00h-19h00 daily
The currency for this auction is the Euro La monnaie utilisée pour cette vente est l’Euro Die Währung für diese Versteigerung ist Euro
Catalogue 1 Scandinavia Part I of the “Kristall” collection of Sweden plus a wonderful offering of Finland, Iceland, Norway and Denmark (with D.W.I., Faroes and Greenland) in over 1000 lots
Catalogue 2 Brazil Important offering of over 250 lots of top quality classics including the unique complete first issue cover
Catalogue 3 Switzerland Over 200 lots of classics showing a wide range of frankings and cancellations
Catalogue 4-5 Europe, Overseas and Collections Important Austrian Levant, Greece, Middle East with Egypt, Madagascar British Consular Mail, Thematics including Polar & Olympics, all-world postal history and a wealth of general and specialised collections, large lots & estates
Catalogue 6 Rarities of the World Important stamps & covers plus valuable specialised collections offered intact.
Postage for Catalogues Each at CHF 30 (e 20 / US $25 / GB £15), or download the “pdf” files on line.
David Feldman SA, 175 route de Chancy, P.O. Box 81, CH-1213 Onex, Geneva, Switzerland Tel: +41 22 727 07 77, Fax: +41 22 727 07 78, E-mail: [email protected], Web site: www.davidfeldman.com Representation in 25 cities on all 5 continents
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AUCTION, October 3-6, 2007
The Philately of the Empire of Brazil The 1843 "Bull's Eyes"
Historical Background Brazil, under Dom Pedro I, acheived independence from Portugal by 1825, almost without bloodshed. Emperor Dom Pedro, of the ruling family of Portugal, the Braganças, was taken ill with tuberculosis and abdicated in favor of his 5-year old son in 1831; he died in 1834. The Imperial Parliament, with the support of the elites, had the young Dom Pedro II declared "of age" at 14 in 1840 and crowned as Emperor in July 1841. Dom Pedro II would reign until crises during the 1870s and '80s in the three pillars of his nation - church, military, and large landowners - undermined his authority. In November 1889, a military conspiracy ended with a coup d'état deposing Dom Pedro II and the eventual establishment of a republic. Dom Pedro II went into exile and died of a severe cold contracted in Paris in November 1891. His long reign, similar to that of Queen Victoria of England, saw a gradual modernisation of his country, including in the field of postal communications. Under Dom Pedro II, Brazil became the second country in the world to issue adhesive postage stamps, and the first country in the “New World” to do so. Its first issue, used from August 1, 1843, was preceded only by the “Penny Black” and "Twopeny Blue" of Great Britain. The honour is Brazil's, because the 1843 Zurich 4 & 6 rappen Cantonals (valid in only a small portion of Switzerland) and the 1842 New York “City Despatch Post” letter carrier’s issue (valid only in the New York area) were not national issues The USA waited until 1847, four years later. Dom Pedro II at age 14
The Empire of Brazil
October 4, 2007
The famous 1843 “Bulls Eyes” were elegance incarnate, simple figures of value on an oval lathe-work ground. For many years it was debated whether such a skillful and complex design could have been produced in Brazil, despite documentary evidence that this was so. Some looked to Perkins, Bacon of England or to the American Bank Note Co. of New York as the parents, if not of the stamps, then of the dies used to produce them. Dr. Jose Kloke's research showed that Brazilian Customs has seized an engraving press in 1841, together with a number of stock dies. This was put to use in the Brazilian Mint. An oval lathe-work die was probably used to create three subsidiary dies, which were then hand-engraved with the three sets of figures of value. These "daughter" dies were used to create printing plates on thin sheets of copper. An engraver’s stylus, or burin, was used to scribe the simple rectangular frame lines visible around each oval, and around each pane, followed by the entry of the ovals. The placement of each oval within the frame lines varied slightly, and is the first test for plating. The oval can touch the frame at one or more sides, rarely not at all. Traces of guide lines, inadequate burnishing of prior entries, slight double entries, etc. can be found as well. Many great philatelists have had a try at plating these stamps. Positions can be found which share distinct peculiarities of the frame lines, but have differing placements of the ovals, indicating a reentry at some point. Complicating matters was the fact that the impressions of the printing showed a spectrum from early impressions (with no trace of wear), to very worn ones (with “white patches” where the plate could no longer hold ink) due to gradual wear. Alfred Lichtenstein, Charles Lathrop Pack, Saul Newbury and others managed to accumulate marginal singles, pairs and a few larger multiples in attempts to work out a plating, and in 1923, Lt.Col. G.S.F. Napier published his book, “The Stamps of the First Issue of Brazil,” which presented his nearly complete platings and his theory of the number, layouts and states of the plates used. Napier’s identification of specific positions, while universally acknowledged to contain numerous errors (including positions whose framelines show distinct features “migrating” from one position to another position, from state to state), has not been superceded in over 8 decades since his book, if only because the material is so widely dispersed. The famous “Centenary Handbook No. 3” of 1943, published by the American Philatelic Society, “Imperio Do Brazil, 1843-1889”, had an article by Lester Brookman on these issues which updated and challenged Napier’s work, but failed to replace Napier’s identifications with something equally useful. Therefore, we have used Napier’s system of “plates”, “states” and “positions” to identify the lots herein, if only to provide a common basis for advanced collectors. The starting point of plating is to understand the layouts of the various plates. Napier posited that there were two similar composite plates, each of three panes of 18 subjects (one of each value), with a horizontal gutter having a central dividing line between panes. Proof lies in the large multiples and intact panes of the 60 and 90 reis values. It is also accepted, again based on multiples, that two additional plates of the 30 reis value (one of 60 subjects in a single pane, the other in three panes of 18 without dividing lines in the gutters), and two plates of 60 of the 60 reis, were created and used in the course of production - thus 6 plates in all, each of which exists in several “states” which developed, according to Napier, through “recuts” or “reentries” or “retouches”. The two composite plates produced all three values simultaneously, on a single sheet of paper (see diagram on next page), and the plate of 54 of the 30 reis likewise produced three panes of 18 but without interpanneau lines. Today, there exist three multiples showing the interpanneau gutter: the famous “Pack” strip (two 30 reis over one 60 reis, illustrated opposite); David Feldman SA
the pen-cancelled pair of 30 reis over 60 reis (somewhat repaired), and the reconstructed block (two vertical pairs) of the 30 reis with simple gutter between. These are known as the “Xifopagos", an informal Portuguese word which roughly translates as “Siamese twins” in that two different items. intended to be separate, remain joined from birth!
Lot 20037- 60r "Semi-Xifopago" showing both the pane border and interpanneau dividing line at foot. The scarce "Semi-Xifopagos" can be found in this catalogue for all three values, in various states of impression, both in the sections that present each value, and among the "Cancels and Usage" lots of "Bull's Eyes" (see index).
A Note About Quality
The famous "Pack Strip" sold by David Feldman in 1993.
We have never handled as many "condition rarities" at one time as those offered in the present catalogue - a testament to the taste and connoisseurship of the Meyer family, and an opportunity for collectors of classics to indulge themselves.
Layout of the composite plate: three panes of 18 of three different values. Pairs which span between panes are called "Xifopagos" - "Siamese twins"
The "Semi-Xifopagos" The definitive “Catalogo Enciclopedico de Selos & Historia Postal do Brasil”, published by Rolf Harald Meyer and Peter Meyer in 1999, defines as “Semi-Xifopagos” those rare single examples from this issue which show the interpanneau dividing line in the top or bottom margin, and proving without need of plating that they came from the composite sheets of 54. This catalogue, referenced herein as “RHM”, prices these positions from twice to ten times “normal” - testimony to how scarce they really are when they clearly show portions of the interpanneau dividing line (necessary to differentiate them from examples from other plates and having large sheet margins. As there are only two se-tenant values multiples recorded (and both are closely held), the "half gutter" of "Semi-Xifopago" stamps are the closest Brazil collectors will get to demonstrating the plate layout Note that only 6 of 18 positions of the 30r or the 90r could possibly qualify as "Semi-Xifopagos" - but to do so, they MUST show a portion of the interpanneau dividing line, which in all but a few surviving examples was cut away when the stamps were separated. Thus, each "Semi-Xifopago" is a rare survivor and a statistical anomaly. We have had long and extensive experience with the stamps of Brazil, having sold the Reynaldo Pracchia and the Angelo Lima collections, and have handled most of the rarities of the country - but we have never seen in any collection at one time the sheer number of “Semi-Xifopagos” in the present offer, undoubtedly the record holding and one that will enable collectors world-wide to acquire one or more “kissing cousins” of the unobtainable “Pack Strip” or "Xifopago pair". David Feldman SA
October 4, 2007
Dom Pedro II in his Imperial splendour, circa 1875. The Empire of Brazil
Provenance The holdings of Rolf Harald Meyer and his son Peter presented herein are the result of a lifetime of buying, selling and studying the stamps of Brazil. Nearly every lot was kept back from sale for a special reason - its beauty, its quality, its nature as a "Semi-Xifopago." The Meyers have been buyers both privately and at public auction, and their connoisseurship is widely recognised. Many of the singles and multiples of the "Bull's Eyes" come from the collection formed by Saul Newbury of Chicago.
Saul Newbury of Chicago
John Boker of New York
Newbury's taste for choice classics rivaled that of John Boker, and he was involved in study of the “Bull’s Eyes” for much of his philatelic life. Some of these stamps are pictured in Napier's handbook. The classic stamps of Brazil have long been a magnet for serious collectors. Tapling, whose collection resides in the British Library, certainly had his share, But the first "name" associated with the rarities of Brazil was that of Charles Lathrop Pack, the early owner of the famous "Pack Strip" (which we
had the honour of selling several years ago). This was the first "Xifopago" discovered, and remains one of the great classic rarities of the world. No mention of the provenance of world classics can be complete without Philippe Ferrary de la Renotière. His voluminous collection included a large classic Brazil section, and one of the lots herein has his famous three-leaf clover handstamp on reverse. Charles Lathrop Pack
The Famous Count Ferrary
In recent times, the dispersal of several important collections (including those handled by our company, has led to the formation of two Grand Prix level exhibits, and numerous collectors of classics have had the opportunity to pursue these wonderful issues. The Empire of Brazil,which ended in 1889, is philatelically alive and well..
Dom Pedro II - responsible for the first postage stamps of any country in the Americas.
Descriptions, Condition & Authenticity We have done our best to plate each of the "Bull's Eyes" offered in this catalogue, based on Napier's handbook and Newbury's identification (with which we concur). The matter of impression is subject to opinion, and there is naturally a "grey area" between each of the "states" listed by Scott - early, intermediate, or late, so we encourage you to examine and confirm for yourselves. Every lot is offered subject to this qualification. The papers for the early issues of Brazil, originally yellowish, greyish or white, have by now been subject to over 160 years of the action of gum and climate. Many stamps have become somewhat toned; this is normal. Where tropical toned spots have developed, or when there is mechanical damage, it will be mentioned as usual. Please note that when catalogue values are stated at the end of a description, these are taken from the "CATALOGO ENCICLOPEDICO DE SELOS & HISTORIA POSTAL DO BRASIL" produced by the Meyers in 1999, and priced in US Dollars. This masterwork, referenced herein as "RHM", includes prices for multiples, plate varieties, and uses on cover including single, multiple, mixed value and mixed issue frankings, proofs and essays, and much more, not priced in their annual catalogue, . As a reference for the current catalogue values of single stamps, this auction catalogue includes a special edition of the Meyer annual catalogue of the stamps of the Empire, priced in EUROS. This is located after the listings of lots, and can be consulted for accurate pricing of single stamps, mint and used. For cancellations, our references to "Ayres" refer to the masterwork by Paulo Ayres, "Catalogo de Carimbos (Brasil - Imperio)", published in 1937 and widely available. Cancel scarcity ratings were updated in the APS Centenary Handbook No. 3, "Imperio Do Brazil" published in 1943. We recommend all of the above as part of a basic library for this area. Mr. Peter Meyer, an expert in the philately of Brazil, has overseen the descriptions in this catalogue and stands ready upon application to provide a certificate of authenticity for any lot in the sale.
"Quality remains, long after price has been forgotten." - Robson Lowe
Thursday, October 4, 2007 at 16h00
POSTAL HISTORY
F
1789 Folded letter from merchant Thomas Gordon of London to Lisbon, endorsed “p.Packett” and “Postpaid 3/-” with ms 380 rate applied on arrival, a scarce and early pre-paid cover from the “Correo Mores” period, fine
400
F
1833 Folded letter with extremely rare LAVRAS cancel, sent to Sao Jose, trivial toning and worm holes, endorsed “Com urgencia”, fine showpiece
1’000
F
Circa 1840, Folded printed matter concerning a new printed collection of Laws, sent from Rio de Janeiro with circular cancel “RIO / DE / JANEIRO” (not in Ayres), ms “60” paid on arrival, very scarce usage and cancel, fine
400
F
1845 Folded letter from Tejuco to Rio showing superb strike of the elegant oval-framed “V. DIAMANTINA” cancel also used on the “Bull’s Eyes”, ms “Pg 60” (Paid 60) and dated at top left “12 / 1845 / 3” in the manner of contemporary cds, minor acidic ink erosion, very fine
200
POSTAL HISTORY (CONT.)
F
1852 Official folded letter with gorgeous red strike of straight-line “MINAS NOVAS” cancel (Ayres n° 1154), sent from the justice of the pease of Itinga to the provincial president at Minas Gerais, very fine showpiece
400
F
1853 Folded letter, apparently official usage, to Paraty with good strike of the famous framed “CIDADE DE NICTHEROY” cancel found often on the “Bull’s Eyes”, fine
300
F
1860 (August 25) Folded letter to Lisbon carried on the first return voyage of the French steamer “Estremadure”, endorsed for same and with octagonal “BRESIL / ESTREMADURE” ds, “150” rate struck on arrival, light red bs (16 Sept.), very fine and important postal history milestone
800
F
1866 Folded letter written at Rio Grande (docketed Jan. 19) and carried by ship to England where posted to Spain with 2d Line Engraved and 4d pl 7, London transit on reverse (March 5) and Cadiz bs on face (March 10), oval italic “PD” as well, vague forwarder’s oval on reverse, fine and attractive
900
POSTAL HISTORY (C0NT.)
F
1870 War of the Triple Alliance, cover docketed from Asuncion (Paraguay) May 25, sent to Humaita with Argentina 5c and 10c ABNC issues uncancelled, bold “PROVEEDURIA / DEL / EJERCITO” handstamp of the occupying army, endorsed “Por Goya”, fantastic and rare showpiece of this bloody conflict, very fine
1’200
F
1870 War of the Triple Alliance, cover to Buenos Aires with Brazilian Occupation “CORREOS DE LA ASUNCION” cancel with central 6-pointed star, docketed March 18, very fine and scarce
500
F
1878 Folded letter carried twice across the Atlantic, leaving Pernambuco on June 2 (cds and boxed “T” hs), then blue “BRESIL 2 BORDEAUX 2” French entry and "PARIS A CALAIS” bs (both June 18) and finally New York “DUE 15 CENTS” duplex cancel of destination (June 29). Endorsed for the steamer “Cotopaxi” from Brazil, very fine and probably unique usage
600
20012
F
1873 (6 Nov.) Complete folded letter from Bahia to Paris, franked with GB 1d pl. 135 and 6d surface printed tied together by “C 81” cancel, sharp British BAHIA cds (code “A”) and London transit plus French Calais entry and small circled “PD”, bs, endorsed for the steamer “Lusitania,” a splendid example of a very scarce complete cover from the British Consular P.O. at Bahia, fine, ex Glassco
Estimate ¤
100
Rio de Janeiro (C83)
1853 Cover from Rio with unframed British P.O. cds on reverse (MR 16 / 1853), sent to Lisbon with bold blue “600” hs and uncommon “LEY DE 20/4 50 / 30 Rs” oval on face, reverse also has superb “P. TRANSATLANTICO (53)” cds (April 4), appears to have been slit-disinfected, uncommon, about fine
David Feldman Special Extended Payment Facility
David Feldman S.A. (DF) may offer a special extended payment facility for buyers. In these cases, the buyer may choose to pay a minimum of 25% of the total invoice on receipt, and the balance over an extended period of 6 months, paying an equal installment at the end of each month. Interest plus charges of 1%, is debited to the buyer's account at the end of each month. When the special extended payment facility has been granted, the buyer understands that any claims regarding his purchases must be made within 30 days of the auction sale date, even though the lots may be held by DF awaiting full settlement of the account. Until delivery, lots may be examined by their respective buyers at the offices of DF.
12
DCE
MAGNIFICENT UNUSED SET
A matchless opportunity to obtain an unused set of the finest quality, superb in all respects. Estimate e 20’000 - 30’000
30 REIS (SCOTT 1-1b) Unused
DCE
DCE 20015
A pinnacle of Brazilian philately, the set of three fine impressions has pane or corner margins with full marginal border lines and out-sized sheet margins beyond, fresh with full black colour and only a hint of plate wear. Plating: - 30r value: 2nd composite plate, state B, pos. 4 (illustrated by Napier) - 60r value: 1st “Large” plate, state A, pos. 55 - 90r value: 1st composite plate, state B, pos. 17; signed A. Diena
Estimate ¤
1843 “BULL’S EYES” (SCOTT 1-3b)
20014
Cat. N°
30r Fine impression from 1st composite plate, State D, pos. 17, sheet margin at foot, unused on thick paper with well-defined “relief” on reverse, faint soiling, very fine, a superior and rare marginal example (RHM 1C, $6’000)
1
Estimate e 1’000 - 1’500 30r Fine Impression, corner margin stamp with plate dividing line at foot from 1st composite plate, State B, pos. 13, slightly soiled and minor horiz creasing near top, an important positional variety, few if any other unused from this state & position known, very fine appearing example of a “Semi-Xifopago” (RHM SXF-1, $6’000)
1
Estimate e 2’000 - 3’000
David Feldman SA
H
H
30r Fine impression, position 1 from 2nd composite plate, state D, thus with corner margins, a very scarce positional item, faults, fine appearing Estimate e 300 -400
30r Fine impression showing slight wear, attractive used pair with Rio cds, from 2nd composite plate, state A, pos. 13-14, minute corner crease, very fine
30r Fine impression, spectacular pair with top & left sheet margin showing pane border lines, pos. 1-2 from the middle pane of the triple 30r plate (Napier “3rd”), neat Rio cds, superb, ex Newbury
30r Fine impression, lovely pair from 2nd composite plate, state C, pos. 16-17 (plated by Saul Newbury, not illustrated by Napier), pane frame line at foot, light 1845 Rio cancel, superb, ex Newbury
Empire of Brazil
Estimate e 600 - 1’000
1
Estimate e 1’000 - 1’500
Estimate e 800 - 1’200
You may participate directly in the auction and bid by Internet at www.davidfeldman.com 14
1
20020
H
30r Fine impression, pos. 5 of the “Large” plate (of sixty 30r), state B, with all positional characteristics clear, an excellent example with large sheet margin at top, superb
Estimate ¤
Estimate e 700 - 1’000
20021
H J
30r Fine impression, the highly important used block of four with sheet margins at right and at bottom, printed from the third (bottom) pane of Napier’s “3rd Plate" (of three panes of 18 of the 30r, with more even spacing in both directions of the subjects than the composite plates or the plate of 60), a spectacular and very rare multiple (in fact one of the few blocks from any position of the “3rd Plate”), trivial toned spot else superb (RHM $9’500+ for normal block of 4)
Expertise: signed A.Diena and Calves
1
Estimate e 6’000 - 8’000
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David Feldman SA
ee
H
30r Intermediate impression, vertical pair with sheet margins at right and at bottom, pos. 54/60 from “Large” plate (of 60), state B per Napier, trivial corner crease at top right, very fine (RHM $1’750+ for pair)
30r Intermediate impression, excellent horiz. pair with 1844 Rio cancel, believed to be from the “Large” plate but does not match any pos. in Napier thus not yet plated, superb in all respects (RHM $1’750 for pair)
30r Intermediate impression, bottom right corner margin stamp from pos. 18 of 2nd composite plate, state B, superb CORREO GERAL DA CORTE cds (of Rio de Janeiro), a magnificent showpiece, superb in all respects
H
30r Worn impression, horiz. pair with light Rio cds, “Large” plate, state A, pos. 25-26 with light Rio cds, faintly thin, very fine (RHM $1’750 for pair)
1b
H
30r Worn impression, sheet margin at right, pos. 12 from 2nd composite plate, state D, light Rio cancel, a splendid stamp, superb
1b
DCE
Cat. N°
60r Fine impression, unused pair from 1st “Large” plate (of 60), state A, pos. 40-41 showing smudges (which are faintly visible in Napier, stronger here), fold between stamps and partly cut (at top), also faint trace of horiz. bend else very fine (RHM $3’000 for pair)
DCE
60r Intermediate impression, top margin pair showing outer line of pane at top, from 1st “Large” plate, state B, pos. 5-6, faint creasing at top right else fresh and very fine (RHM $3’000 for pair)
2a
DCE J
60r Intermediate impression, impressive unused block of four from the right edge of sheet (trace of outer frame line), 1st “Large” plate, state B, pos. 23-24/29-30, faint horiz. crease through lower pair else very fine (RHM $11’000 for block)
2a
60 REIS (CONTINUED) Used
H
60r Fine impression, deep rich colour, “block of three” with sheet margin at foot showing interpanneau dividing line, thus considered “Semi-Xifopago” and very scarce, from 1st composite plate, state C, pos. 8-9/15, pos. 8 with tear in cancel, pos. 15 with horiz. crease along top frameline, dramatic and very fine appearance (RHM $3’200 for strip of 3)
2
20030
H
60r Fine impression, “Semi-Xifopago” showing interpanneau dividing line in top pane margin, pos. 3 from 1st composite plate, state B, red pmk, thin mostly in top margin, very fine appearing, ex Newbury (RHM SXF-2, $4’000)
2
1’200
H
60r Fine impression, vertical pair, pos. 7 & 13 from 2nd “Large” plate, state B, slight thinning at two places else rich colour, fine, ex Newbury (RHM $1’700 for pair)
2
400
H
60r Fine impression, interpanneau gutter at foot, from 2nd composite plate, state D, pos. 17, rich colour, very fine
2
60 REIS USED (CONTINUED)
H
60r Fine impression, 1st “Large” plate, pos. 53, showing spacing of oval to frame lines of state A but break in oval at 1 o’clock of state B (shown but not mentioned by Napier), excellent exhibit material, very fine
2
200
H
60r Fine impression, on greyish paper, sheet margin at right, position 54 from 2nd “Large” plate, state A, neat cds cancel, very fine, signed Sanchez / S. Paolo
2
180
H
60r Fine impression, “Semi-Xifopago” from 1st composite plate, state D, pos. 15, with interpanneau dividing line at foot, light Rio cds, a wonderful example of the “semi-gutter” variety, very fine (RHM SXF-2, $4’000)
2
60r Fine impression, “Semi-Xifopago” showing interpanneau line in bottom pane margin, from 1st composite plate, pos. 16 from state D (Napier has pos. 16 as “17” but see shape of framelines, consistent in states C-D), very faint toning else very fine (RHM SXF-2, $4’000)
G
60r Early Intermediate impression, right corner marginal pair, pos. 17-18 from 1st composite plate, state B, tied to small fragment, neat 1843 ornamented Bahia cds, slight soiling, still very fine (RHM $1’700+ for pair)
2a
800
H
60r Intermediate impression, gorgeous pair with pane margin line at foot, pos. 56-57 from 1st “Large” plate, state A, generous margins all around, superb in all respects, ex Newbury (RHM $1’700+ for pair)
2a
60 REIS USED (CONTINUED)
H
60r Intermediate impressions, two vertical pairs, each positions 4 & 10 from 2nd composite plate, states B and C respectively, and showing horiz. guide lines in bottom right spandrels (faint on the first, stronger on the second), state B pair slightly miscut (see photo) and with slight thin under old hinge, else very very fine, useful for exhibition, each ex Newbury (RHM $3’400 for two pairs)
2a
900
H
60r Intermediate to worn impression, pair with light central cds, from 1st composite plate, state C, pos. 9-10, slight ageing evident on reverse else very fine (RHM $1’700 for pair)
2a
700
H
60r Intermediate impression, “Semi-Xifopago” showing pane margin at foot with interpanneau dividing line, pos. 18 from 1st composite plate, state B, minor faults (incl. corner creases, slight thin) but a rare position and “semi gutter pair”, fine (RHM SXF-2, $4’000)
2a
700
H
60r Intermediate impression, top right corner margin example with full pane border lines on two sides, from 2nd composite plate, state B, pos. 6, faint toned spot outside design, an exceptional and exquisite stamp, superb, signed Drexler
2a
60 REIS USED (CONTINUED)
H
60r Intermediate impression, lovely pair from 1st “Large” plate, state A, pos. 58-59, very light Rio cds, couple thin specks, very fine appearing, ex Newbury (RHM $1’700 for pair)
2a
400
H
60r Early intermediate impression (showing only slight wear), pos. 5 from 1st composite plate, state C, with margin line of pane at top, light Rio cds, very fine, ex Newbury
2a
300
H
60r Intermediate impression, left marginal example with pane border line, from 1st “Large” plate, state A, pos. 49 (exceptionally large space between oval and left frame), light cancel, superb
2a
240
H
60r Intermediate impression, bottom marginal with pane border line at foot, from 2nd composite plate, state A, pos. 17, very fine
2a
200
H
60r Early intermediate impression, showing only slight wear, from the lower left corner of the pane of 18 (pos. 13) from 2nd composite plate, state A (plated by Newbury), “socked on nose” Rio cds, scarce positional stamp, very fine, ex Newbury
2a
300
H
60r Early intermediate impression, bottom marginal example with border line, from 2nd “Large” plate, state B, pos. 56, lovely, very fine
2a
Estimate ¤
2a
Estimate e 1’000 - 1’500 60r Intermediate impression, vertical pair with sheet margin and marginal line at left, lightly canceled, appears to be from 2nd “Large” plate, state B, pos. 43/49, a gem of an item, superb in all respects (RHM for pair $1’700++)
2a
Estimate e 1’500 - 2’000
60r Worn impression, important vertical strip of 3 from 1st “Large” plate, state B, pos. 5/11/17, margins ample to generous except at bottom of left side, neat Rio cds, fold above bottom stamp plus couple very light bends, fine (RHM $3’200 for strip of 3)
October 4, 2007
60 REIS USED (CONTINUED)
H
60r Worn impression, horiz. pair with central unframed Rio cds, from 2nd composite plate, pos. 8-9 by frame lines but position of ovals does not match states B-D thus possible state A (unrecorded by Napier), right stamp trace of old bend else very fine (RHM $1’700 for pair)
2b
600
H
60r Worn impression, very scarce positional rarity, being position 1 of the 2nd composite plate, state A, and showing pane outline running unbroken vertically in top pane margin (not evident in Napier), superb, signed Rath and Georg Bühler
2b
600
H
60r Worn impression, horiz. pair from 2nd composite plate, state D, pos. 11-12, the latter actually illustrated by Napier, Rio cds, faint trace of fold between stamps, very fine, ex Newbury (RHM $1’700 for pair)
2b
600
H
60r Worn impression, pair with central 1845 Rio unframed cds, trace of pane border line at left, from 1st “Large” plate, state B, pos. 43-44, slight ageing, attractive and very fine (RHM $1’700)
2b
500
60r Worn impression, “miniature block of four” encompassing marginal single from 1st “Large” plate, state A, pos. 48 plus large portions of three neighboring positions, double-circle Rio cds, minor creases outside design, superb showpiece
2b
Estimate ¤
60 REIS USED (CONTINUED)
60r Worn impression, bottom left corner margin stamp showing full pane border lines, from 2nd composite plate, state D, pos. 13, neat Rio cds, a gem of the highest order, superb
2b
400
H
60r Worn impression, left marginal with border line, an outstanding variety from the 2nd “Large” plate, with left frame line extending well past bottom one, and three hairlines at top right quadrant, unrecorded by Napier and thus possibly the “missing” pos. 19 of state A, on thin wove paper with a pronounced mesh, superb
2b
240
60r Worn impression, top marginal example with pane border line at top, from 1st composite plate, state D, pos. 5, large to enormous margins, superb
2b
Estimate ¤
90 REIS USED (CONTINUED)
90r Intermediate impression, important showpiece having marginal block of four and vertical pair lightly tied to fragment by CIDADE DE NICTHEROY cancels, from Napier’s 2nd composite plate, state A, pos. 4/10 (pair) and 5-6/11/2 (block), pane marginal lines complete at top and right, slight soiling and fold between pair and block of no importance, superb, signed Fulpius (RHM $19’500+ for block and pair)
H
90r Early Intermediate impression, magnificent large-margin stamp showing interpanneau dividing line at top, thus “Semi-Xifopago” from pos. 5, 1st composite plate, state C, neat Rio cds, a superb gem (RHM SXF-3, $4’000+)
3a
3’000
H
90r Worn impression, spectacular left sheet marginal example from 1st composite plate, state B, pos. 7, superb, signed Miro
3b
Estimate ¤
CANCELS & USAGES BY TOWN
BAHIA, 60r Fine impression vertical pair with ornamented double-circle Bahia cds, deep colour and impression, from 2nd “Large” plate, state A, pos 34/40, natural paper wrinkle at top left, margin crease at top right, still a superb showpiece (RHM $1’700 for pair)
2
800
BAHIA “Correio Da B.” well-struck straight-line cancel on gorgeous large-margined pair of 60r intermediate impression showing STITCH WATERMARK (valued by RHM at 3X - 4X normal), from 2nd “Large” plate, state A, pos. 25-26, wonderful showpiece, superb, signed Bühler
2a
2’000
H
BAHIA double-circle cds (Jan. 15, 1845) centrally struck on top right corner marginal pair of 60r very early intermediate impressions from 1st composite plate, state B, pos. 5-6, a gem, superb, ex Newbury (RHM $1’700+ for pair)
2a
1’200
H
BAHIA, large partial straight-line CORREI(O DE B.) hs (rated “Rare”) on marginal 60r early intermediate impression (2nd “Large” plate, state A, pos. 3) on white paper showing “relief” on reverse, superb, ex Newbury (RHM 2A, $500+)
2a
CANCELS & USAGE (CONTINUED)
H
BARBACENA, superb inverted strike of fancy oval hs (rated “Very Rare”) on 60r worn impression (2nd “Large” plate, state A, pos. 54), a fantastic exhibition item, superb in all respects, ex Newbury
2b
1’000
H
BARRA MANCA, 60r Worn impression, sheet margin at left, from 2nd “Large” plate, state B, pos. 49, with light but legible framed 2-line cancel (Ayres n° 1230, rated “Scarce”), top right corner crease and thin outside design else very fine positional and cancel rarity
2b
600
H
CABO FRIO, 60r Worn impression, magnificent corner margin stamp (2nd “Large” plate, pos. 55), unrecorded state with “hairline” vertically at bottom plus significant break in outer oval at 5 o’clock, cancel is well-struck vertically (rated “Scarce”), trivial pin-point thin speck else superb
2b
1’200
CAMPINAS, circular cancel in brown ties 60r worn impression, marginal frame line at left, to complete folded letter datelined 8 July 1844, sent to Sao Paulo, stamp is from 1st composite plate, state B, pos. 13, faint overall toning, fine and important positional showpiece (RHM $8’000 for cover)
2b
CANCELS & USAGE (CONTINUED)
H
+DE CAM(POS) cancel in brown on top marginal 60r worn impression, expertly ironed crease, from 2nd “Large” plate, state B, pos. 4, this cancel not recorded in Paulo Ayres’ handbook and only one other known, very fine appearing
2b
500
F
CUIABA, purple circular cancel with ms date (1852!) ties marginal 60r intermediate impression to reverse of folded letter to Rio de Janeiro, stamp shows pane border at right (2nd composite plate, state B, pos. 12), usual slight age spots to letter and flaws from old hinging on obverse else very fine, very late usage from Cuiaba
2a
CANCELS & USAGE (CONTINUED)
H
DIAMANTINA, superb nearly complete strike of the lovely “V. DIAMANTINA” double-lined oval in red brown on right marginal 60r early intermediate impression (1st composite plate, state A, pos. 12), a glorious showpiece, superb, ex Newbury
2a
440
H
GRAMPARA (rated “Scarce”), large partial strike in faded red brown with ms date on spectacular bottom left corner marginal 60r intermediate impression, 2nd “large” plate, state A, pos. 55, superb
2
500
H
GRAMPARA, red cancel (rated “Scarce”) on pair of 60r intermediate impressions, right stamp corner crease else fine
2a
360
H
OURO PRETO - CORREIO GERAL DE MINAS (rated “Scarce”), clear large part cds with date slugs inverted on 60r fine impression “Semi-Xifopago” from 1st composite plate, state B, pos. 4, interpanneau dividing line at top, superb (RHM SXF-2, $4’000+)
2
2’000
G
PARANAGUA, spectacular fragment with marginal pair with pane line of 60r Early impression (1st “Large” plate, state B, pos. 4-5) plus 90r worn impression (2nd composite plate, state A, pos. 5), all with enormous margins all around, tied with three strikes of the straight-line town hs (rated “Rare”), superb showpiece (RHM $3’200+ for strip)
2, 3b
Lot N°
CANCELS & USAGE (CONTINUED)
PERNAMBUCO “Shiled” datestamp on fantastic 60r worn impression corner margin pair with interpanneau dividing line at foot, a “double Semi-Xifapago”, from composite plate, state A, pos. 13-14, an exquisite showpiece, superb, signed Bühler (RHM SFX-2, $8’000++)
H
PORTO ALEGRE-SUL, two strikes of this cancel (rated “Scarce”) on spectacular vertical strip of three of the 60r fine impression, intense deep colour, showing trace of interpanneau dividing line at top (thus “Semi-Xifopago”) and pane margin at foot as well, from 1st composite plate, state A, pos. 2/8/14 (and correcting Napier’s pos. 14), “relief” clearly visible on reverse, small toned spot and cut between 2nd & 3rd stamps else superb, an important showpiece
20081
CANCELS & USAGE (CONTINUED)
H
PORTO ALEGRE-SUL, two strikes of this cancel (rated “Scarce”) on wonderful strip of three of the 60r early intermediate impression from 1st composite plate, state C, pos. 9-11, trivial paper wrinkles (probably natural), superb, ex Newbury (RHM $3’200 for strip of 3)
2a
2’000
H
PORTO ALEGRE-SUL, light strike of this cancel (rated “Scarce”) on bottom left CORNER MARGIN 60r early intermediate impression, from 1st composite plate, state A, pos. 13, slight tropic spots else very fine
2a
800
G
RIO DE JANEIRO, “Correo Geral da Corte” 1844 (22 July) cds ties 90r fine impression to small piece supplemented by matching cancel on similar 30r value hinged to similar paper, lovely, very fine
1+3
Cat. N°
CANCELS & USAGE (CONTINUED)
RIO DE JANEIRO unframed cds in RED ties worn impression 30r (“Large” plate, state B, pos. 43) plus 60r (1st “Large” plate, state A, pos. 50) to fragment, 1844 usage, reportedly the ONLY 30r + 60r combination usage known on piece, very fine, ex Newbury
RIO DE JANEIRO, top marginal 60r fine impression tied by 1844 cds to complete folded letter datelined 10 April to Minas Geraes, stamp is from 2nd composite plate, state D, pos. 3 and has generous margins all around showing pane frameline at top, very fine (RHM $8’000 for cover)
Empire of Brazil
Estimate e 1’500 - 2’500
You may participate directly in the auction and bid by Internet at www.davidfeldman.com 32
Estimate ¤
Estimate ¤
CANCELS & USAGE (CONTINUED)
RIO DE JANEIRO, pair of 60r early impressions tied by unframed 1843 (28/9) cds to reverse of cover to San Joze del Norte (San Pedro province), stamps plated by Newbury as 2nd “Large” plate, state A, pos. 28-29, slight soiling and old hinge residue, red seal, attractive and fine (RHM $12’000 for pair on cover)
RIO DE JANEIRO, two 60r early impressions tied to fragment by “...da Corte” cds, one with marginal line at left, other at top, each from 2nd “Large” plate (note spacing to margin lines), pos. 7 and 3B respectively, very fine showpiece
2
Estimate e 4’000 - 6’000
2
360
The currency for this auction is the Euro La monnaie utilisée pour cette vente est l’Euro Die Währung für diese Versteigerung ist Euro David Feldman SA
October 4, 2007
CANCELS & USAGE (CONTINUED)
F
RIO DE JANEIRO, 1845 (April) complete folded letter datelined from Rio, sent to Rio Grande, and franked by UNCANCELLED pair of 60r early intermediate impressions, endorsed “Pr. Steamer”, fine and scarce usage sent to J.Pedrick, forwarding agent at Rio Grande
2a
5’000
H
RIO DE JANEIRO, double-circle cds (22/12/1844) with thick bar at base on pair of 60r worn impressions, from 1st “Large” plate, state A, pos. 27-28, illustrated by Napier (plate 24), strong relief visible on reverse, right stamp slight thin, very fine overall (RHM $1’700 for pair)
2b
400
H
RIO DE JANEIRO, unframed cds (17/10/1843) on luxurious single with large part of stamp above (1st “Large” plate, state A, pos. 6/12, illustrated by Napier), strong relief visible on reverse, superb
2b
2’000
F
S. JOAO DEL REI pre-adhesive straightline cancel (rated “Scarce”) ties 60r EARLY IMPRESSION to attractive folded letter date-lined 20 Jan. 1844, stamp is from 1st composite plate, state A, pos. 7, quite attractive showpiece, very fine, ex Newbury (RHM $8’000 for ordinary single franking)
2
5’000
H
S. JOAO DEL REI, nice strike of straight-line hs (rated “Scarce”) on top right corner marginal 60r intermediate impression, from 2nd composite plate, state C, very fine
2a
600
H
SANTOS, “Correio de Santos” ornamentented cds in BLACK (usually struck in blue-green), nearly complete strike on marginal 60r intermediate impression (2nd composite plate, pos. 7 from state D), pane border line at left, superb, signed Sanchez / S. Paulo
2a
2a-b
750
SOROCABA oval linear hs in red on 60r worn impression, sheet margin and pane dividing line at top, from 1st composite plate, state B, pos. 4, huge balanced margins, very fine
2b
400
SOROCABA, light red linear framed cancel on top marginal 60r showing pane edge line, worn impression from 1st composite plate, state B, pos. 2, faint bend and light thinning (entirely in top margin), superb positional showpiece
2b
300
VALENCA, fancy boxed hs in red brown (rated “Very Rare”) inverted on 60r worn impression, top right CORNER MARGIN example from 2nd composite plate, possibly state C (unrecorded by Napier) as shows shifted traces of re-entry (curved hair-lines) evident in numeral “6”, a dual-purpose showpiece, very fine
2b
1’000
H
VILLA DO RIO DE CONTAS, double-ring cancel sans date, in red-brown, on corner margin pair of the 30r intermediate impression (from 1st composite plate, state A, pos. 17-18), a very scarce cancel (Ayres rated “R”) and positional multiple showing part of interpanneau dividing line at foot, thus a “Semi-Xifopago”, very fine, signed R. Drexler, ex Newbury (RHM SFX-1, $12’000+)
H
VILLA DO RIO DE CONTAS, 60r Intermediate impression, sheet margin at right, from 1st composite plate, pos. 12, state D, with double-ring cancel (Ayres n° 1602, rated “Rare”) in red-brown, superb
20101
THE ULTIMATE “BULL’S EYES” COVER
1-3
Complete set (30 reis + 60 reis pair + 90 reis) each marginal and showing pane border line above or below, neatly tied by Rio de Janeiro double-circle cds dated 22 August 1843 (first month usage, 21 days after issue). The combination of all three values and all from marginal positions is statistically “one in a million” - indeed, this is the ONLY KNOWN cover to have all three values present. Plating: all are early to intermediate impressions. - 30r value: 2nd composite plate, state A, pos. 17 - 60r values: 2nd “Large” plate, state B, pos. 2-3 - 90r value: 2nd composite plate, state A, pos. 2 Expertise: signed Friedl; formerly accompanied by A. Diena certificate Provenance: First appeared in print in 1923 in the “Grosses Lexikon der Philatelie” Sold at auction by Robson Lowe & Paul von Gunten (1975, lot 1506) Exhibited at the “Club de Monaco” in 1997 The earliest cover bearing a “complete set” from anywhere in the Americas. "Ne plus ultra" philatelic item. Estimate e 500’000 - 750’000 See the special catalogue for this item for more information on this cover, its history and significance.
David Feldman SA
20107
20105 H
10r Worn impression, vert. strip of 3 with red cds cancels, shows varying spacing between stamps especially between lower pair, top stamp clear traces of double entry, 2nd stamp patchy impression, generous margins showing parts of 6 adjoining stamps, superb and important showpiece
7
100
H
10r Early impression, rich deep colour and light cancel, traces of neighbors at left and foot and sheet perimeter line at right, a glorious showpiece, superb
7
100
H
10r Intermediate impression, gorgeous single with huge margins and red cancel, shows parts of adjoining positions at right and foot, superb
7
70
H J
10r Intermediate impression, fantastic used block of six with May 1847 Pernambuco “shield” cancel, ample to out-sized margins, superb showpiece
7
20118
20116 DCE
90r Fine impression, unused vertical strip of four on thin bluish paper showing die type IIa, slight toning, margins clear to large all around, an important multiple, very fine (RHM 7D)
10
1’000
DCE
90r Intermediate impression, die type IIa on thin bluish paper, very fine (RHM 7A, $1’800)
10
900
DCE
90r Intermediate impression, die subtype IIa on thin bluish paper, large to huge margins, superb (RHM 7D, $1’800)
10
400
G
Pair of 90r intermediate impressions, die types II/I, plus 30r worn impression with sheet margin at left, all tied to fragment by Cidade de Nictheroy cancels, choice, very fine
10
Estimate ¤
1844-46 "INCLINADOS" (CONTINUED)
90r Intermediate impression, die type I, strip of 4 plus 30r worn impression single tied to large fragment by unframed Rio cds (16.7.46), left 90r with natural paper wrinkle and (with two others) margins touching at foot, attractive mixed value usage, fine
10
1’500
H
90r Fine impression, die type II on yellowish paper, sheet margin and pane border line at left, well-struck brown-violet pre-adhesive type cancel, superb example on “Bull's Eye” paper (RHM 7C, $900)
10
160
H
90r Intermediate impression, highly important vertical strip of 8 with sheet margin and border line at right, showing die types II-I-II-I-II-I-II-I and red Diamantina cancels, cut between 7th & 8th stamps, a gem, superb
10
Estimate e 2’000 - 3'000
20124
H J
90r Worn impression, spectacular used block of 9, die types IIa with top left stamp showing double entry of “9”, red oval MACAHE cancels, sheet margin at left, important showpiece of great rarity and beauty, superb
Largest known multiple of type IIa block Provenance: Ivo Ferreira da Costa Illustrated in the “Catalogo Enciclopedico...” p. 122
20125
DCE
180r Fine impression, large balanced margins incl. part of neighbor at foot, faint toned spot in margin else superb
11
20126
H
180r Fine impression, spectacular used example with neat ms cancel, sheet border line and margin at top, trivial natural paper wrinkle, choice and superb
11
20127
H
180r Fine impression, faintly cancelled but appears unused at first glance, huge margins incl. part of neighbor at right, superb
11
1844-46 "INCLINADOS" (CONTINUED)
C
300r Fine impression, mint example with full original gum (and evenly toned therefrom), perfectly balanced margins, an important example as few if any others are known with original gum, very fine
12
3’000
DCE
300r Early impression, magnificent unused example with large to huge margins, an outstanding example of this rare stamp, extremely fine in all respects
12
2’000
DCE
300r Fine impression, handsome example with balanced margins, trivial thin in corner outside design else very fine, ex Ferrary and double-signed Thier
12
2’000
H
300r Fine impression, lightly cancelled and showing sheet margin at foot, others clear to large, a choice stamp, very fine
12
1’200
H
300r Black, intense rich colour, margins include part of neighbor at top, neat cancel, small horiz. cut outside design, very fine, cert. Calves (RHM $2’400)
12
1’000
H
600r Intermediate impression, fantastic example with large sheet margin and border line at top, all other margins extremely large, central red oily ink cds, superb showpiece for the true connoisseur
13
2’000
H
600r Fine impression, glorious used example with light cds cancel, large balance margins, superb, signed and cert. Pfenninger (1952) who considered it a condition rarity
13
1’200
H
600r Fine impression, excellent example with good to huge margins showing part of next stamp at left, very fine, signed A.Diena
13
800
H
600r Fine impression, sheet margin and border line at left, good margins, natural paper wrinkle as usual, very fine, signed Bühler
13
Estimate ¤
1844-46 "INCLINADOS" (CONTINUED)
600r Fine impression plus later 30r Upright Figures both tied to small fragment by sharp blue partial Rio cds, very fine and most unusual showpiece
13+23
1850-66 BLACK UPRIGHT FIGURES (SCOTT 21-28) / “VERTICAIS”
DCE J
10r Black, spectacular unused block of 9 from the top left corner of the sheet, shows printer’s ink smudges, tiny thin outside designs, superb showpiece
21
200
F
10r Black, block of 6 with large to enormous margins tied to reverse of folded wrapper to Obidos by light though legible red-brown octagonal boxed GRAMPARA cancels, very fine (RHM $550 for block of 6 on cover)
21
360
H
10r Black, huge-margined connoisseur’s delight with red cancel, shows engraver’s guide lines below right and at center, superb
21
30r Black, superb top right corner margin stamp
23
20148
F
30r Pair and strip of 4, all with neat ms cancels, used on cover to Commendador da Silva in Santos, file crease affects one stamp, else very fine and unusual ms cancel usage
23
20149
H
30r Black, undoubtedly the record-sized used example with neat corner cds and sheet margins at top and right, somewhat worn impression, couple creases at far right edge, superb showpiece
23
20150
H
30r Black, gorgeous top left corner margin single with neat cancel, natural wrinkle in margin, superb showpiece
23
20151
H J
30r Black, important used block of 40 with ms line cancels, margins well clear to barely impinging, shows erratic layout of the plate, great showpiece, very fine overall
23
1850-66 "VERTICAIS" (CONTINUED)
C J
60r Black, vertical block of 8 with sheet margin at left, large part original gum (some dulling), evenly toned therefrom, fold above bottom row, very fine showpiece
24
200
DCE J
60r Value, fragment of letter bearing on reverse unused vert. pair and block of 12, no trace of any cancel, ironed-out creases and light even gum toning, very fine appearing
24
300
F
60r Black, superb pair with top sheet margin tied by small Rio cds to 1864 double/weight complete folded letter to Porto Alegre, very fine showpiece
24
300
H
60r Vertical pair with red oval S. Joao da Barra cancel (Ayres n° 1459), fine and scarce
24
1850-66 "VERTICAIS" (CONTINUED)
C
280r Carmine (RHM n° 21a), important unused pair with full original gum, sheet margin at left, an important multiple since this stamp in mint condition is far scarcer than catalogue values would indicate, very fine (RHM $1’120 for pair)
39
400
F
280r Red, huge margins all around, tied by two strikes of small Rio cds to 1866 cover to France (single weight letter rate from 1860), forwarded on arrival within France so with a large variety of bs, obverse has large red boxed “P.D.” and red “BRESIL...” entry cds, some toned spots else very fine, signed Calves
39
800
H
280r Red, beautiful used example with sheet margin at left, light cds cancel at corner, superb
39
100
H
280r & 430r Values in vert. pairs with sheet margin, each showing similar barred oval cancel of Rio (Ayres n° 593), former on small fragment, superb
39-40
500
H
280r & 430r Values, first with grid and blue French cds, second with French mailboat “anchor” diamond, good to huge margins, choice, very fine
39-40
20188
20189 20190
1866 PERFORATED UPRIGHT FIGURES (SCOTT 42-52) These issues are among the rarest of South America. As so many forgeries have devalued their interest to collectors, catalogue values do not begin to reflect their true scarcity in the marketplace. We are confident that the following lots, from the Meyer stock, will pass expert scrutiny and can be pursued with confidence.
20191
C
10r Blue, corner margin example perforated vertically only, full original gum, bit of toning, extremely fine and probably unique position piece (RHM 19B)
20192
20r Black, figurative cancel, very fine, Sanchez / S. Paulo expert hs (RHM 12B)
H J
20193
30r Black, block of four perforated all around and horizontally but imperf between vertically, most unusual, for the advanced connoisseur, minor natural paper wrinkles, superb (RHM 13B variety)
20194
180r Black, good to huge margins, evenly toned, very fine and rare
48
20195
H
280r Red, fantastic stamp with sheet margin at right, dotted grid cancel, superb example of this rarity (RHM 21B)
49
300r Black, light cancels, fine (RHM 17B)
50
20198
DCE
430r Yellow, one of the rarest stamps of Brazil, good margins and showing just a trace of oxidation, very fine (RHM 22B)
51
20199
H
430r Yellow, good to huge margins, neat cds cancel, corner crease and few shorter perfs else very fine (RHM 22B)
51
20200
C
600r Black, full gum which may be original, a fine example of an extremely difficult stamp (RHM 18B)
52
Every Six Months!
Distinguished items are eagerly sought for our Spring 2008 offer of
Rarities of the World If you have a suitable item, please contact us as soon as possible as this auction is always limited to a small number of lots. Special conditions can be considered. David Feldman SA
October 4, 2007
Cat. N°
1866-84 “DOM PEDRO II” ISSUES (SCOTT 53-85)
In a departure for Brazil, but in keeping with standard practice throughout the world, the "Dom Pedro" issues pictured the reigning emperor, both as a mature middle-aged man and later with a snow-white beard. They were, with one exception, produced by the American Bank Note Company of New York (ABNC herein) from engraved plates with imprints in the sheet margins. Their period of use paralleled the development of expanded commerce throughout Brazil, and franked mail to a variety of foreign countries, both before and after the Treaty of Berne that laid the foundations for the U.P.U. Also as a consequence of the Franco-Prussian War, the rates to France changed dramatically, as reflected in the postal history of the period. These issues form a rich, complex playground for the philatelist.
20201
F
10r Vermilion, pair tied by grid cancels to 1867 printed matter (double-page) from Rio to Constituicao, endorsed “S.Paulo”, fine and scarce usage (RHM $1’100 for pair on cover)
20202
20r Chestnut Red (RHM 24a), mint block of 4, original gum with one nh, only a few mint blocks recorded, very fresh and very fine (RHM $1'200)
20203
H
20r Red Lilac, used strip of 5 with gorgeous “wasp” cancels (Ayres n° 805), slight ageing, a treasure, very fine, ex Henry Borden (Comelli recorded only 12 used strips of 5 of this value)
58
1866-84 DOM PEDRO II ISSUES (CONTINUED)
F
50r Blue, vert. pair tied to 1866 cover from Rio (cds) to Pernambuco via steamer “Minas”, faint toning, fine
56
60
DCE
50r Blue, the rare cracked plate variety (visible around top left “50”), only a few known, important and very fine showpiece (RHM n° 25DI, $2’200)
56 var.
1’200
DCE J
50r Blue, cracked plate variety (visible at top left “50”), bottom left stamp in block of four, very rare thus, fresh and fine (RHM n° 25DI, $2’500)
56 var.
1’800
H
50r Blue, “gota” (“drop”) variety showing blank area over part of top left “50”, only two others known, well centred and very fine (RHM n° 25GO, $20’000)
56 var.
6’000
H J
80r Slate Violet, used block of four, scarce multiple with only eight blocks recorded, fine (RHM $2’000 for block)
57
1866-84 DOM PEDRO II ISSUES (CONTINUED)
F
100r Green, type III (RHM type 2), single franking tied by star cancel to 1874 cover from Pernambuco (French-style cds) to Maranhao, endorse “Str. Ceara”, slight overall ageing as usual, fine (RHM 27A)
58
200
DCE J
100r Green, type Ib, block of four (separations reinforced), Comelli records only one unused block (this one), rare and very fine (RHM 27Aa, $7’500 for block)
58a
2’000
DCE J
100r Green, type I, very fresh block of four, Comelli records only one unused block (this one), fine (RHM 27a, $3’600 for block)
58a
1’000
H J
100r Green, type Ia, used block of 6 with 1869 French-style Rio Grande cds, Comelli records only one used block of 6 of this type, great showpiece, fine (RHM 27, $1’600 for block of 4)
58a
1866-84 DOM PEDRO II ISSUES (CONTINUED)
F
200r and 500r Values tied by “circle of Vs” cancels to 1875 cover to France, Rio cds plus French Paquebot “J N° 1” cds and large red boxed “P.D.” hs, bs, endorsed for carriage by the “Niger”, fine and scarce franking (RHM $750 for this combination)
20213
300
F
500r Orange, single franking tied by French-style Sorocaba cds to cover to East Prussia, Sao Paolo and Rio transits plus Metz ds on reverse, scarce, fine (RHM $550+ for cover)
60
300
F
500r Orange, well centred, tied by figurative cancel to 1870 cover to France, Rio cds and blue “BRESIL 2 CALAIS 2” entry cds plus “8” (decimes) tampon rate, endorsed “Par St. Douro”, very fine and scarce single franking (RHM $550 for cover)
60
240
500r Orange, phenomenal used block of 8 with dotted cancels with star, only six such blocks recorded, bottom left stamp with nibbed perf else very fine showpiece (RHM $1’400 for two blocks of 4)
60
61
Lot N°
1876-77 ROULETTED ISSUE, 10r Vermilion, used block of four with lightened ms cancels and corner cds, only 15 used blocks of 4 recorded, fine (RHM $750 for block)
F
1878 Three-colour franking of rouletted 10r, 50r and 200r values all tied by Petropolis cds to cover to Paris (addressed to the Duke de Nemours, father of Gaston d’Orleans), red Rio de Janeiro French paquebot cds ties 10r as well, Brazilian Rio transit plus Paris bs on reverse, the 200r shows part ABNC imprint on right side, a wonderful and colourful example of the UPU treaty rate to Europe, very fine
20218
1866-84 DOM PEDRO II ISSUES (CONTINUED)
CC C J
20r Red Lilac, vert. block of 6 with sheet margin and part ABNC imprint at top, minor age spots, full original gum, fine (Note: Comelli recorded NO unused blocks of 6 and only one larger unused block)
62
600
C J
20r Red Lilac, bottom right corner margin block of four showing two partial ABNC imprints, well centred, very fine (RHM $850+ for block)
62
600
H
50r Blue, used pair showing very scarce “AGENCIA da DILIGENCIAS / ENTRE / ALEGRETE & URUGUAYANA” oval stagecoach line cancel in violet (usually found in lilac; see RHM page 196), important showpiece (this cancel not known on cover), stamps separated and rejoined, very fine (RHM $600 for normal cancel)
63
300
H J
50r Blue, used block of four with light cancels, only 6 used blocks of 4 recorded, very fine (RHM $1’500 for block)
63
1866-84 DOM PEDRO II ISSUES (CONTINUED)
H J
100r Green, RHM type 2 (n° 34A), lovely used block of 6 with light cancels, one stamp small hole else very fine, the only such block recorded by Comelli
65
180
C J
200r Black, left marginal block of four with full Portuguese-language ABNC imprint, very slight ageing, a scarce and beautiful multiple, very fine (RHM $2’800 for block)
66
1’000
F
1884 MIXED ISSUES FRANKING, registered cover to England franked with 1877 200r 66+70(x4) and four 1878-9 50r (totalling 400r) not cancelled but partly tied by blue crayon applied on arrival in London (red oval), endorsed “Urgent”, with bs of Birmingham, Stourbridge and Clent on reverse (all March 1), two 50r torn, 200r corner fault, else a handsome and very fine showpiece (not recorded in RHM)
400
1866-84 DOM PEDRO II ISSUES (CONTINUED)
F
80r Lake, single franking tied by S. Paulo cds to 1886 (27 May) cover to Venice, ITALY addressed to the “Campo de Guerra”, forwarded to final destination Treviso, bs of Venezia and Treviso on reverse, printed contents concern museum objects collected by the Swedish Loefgren botanical expedition of 1874-5, a wonderful example of the printed matter rate to Europe, fine (RHM $2’400 for cover)
71
100r Green tied to 1881 (6 March) cover docketed Alegrete by extremely rare oval “AGENCIA DA DILIGENCIAS / ENTRE / ALEGRETE I URUGUAYIANA” and addressed to the latter. This is the first cover discovered with this rare stagecoach line cancel, an important showpiece, slightly soiled, full contents, very fine (illustrated by RHM, p. 196 though unpriced)
72
Estimate ¤
1866-84 DOM PEDRO II ISSUES (CONTINUED)
1878 “AURIVERDE” ISSUE, 300r Orange & Green, corner margin block of four, og (dull patches) and evenly toned, rare in blocks, very fine, ex Burrus (RHM $3’000 for block)
78
1’000
The "Auriverde" issue was printed by the Continental Bank Note company, their only postage stamp for Brazil in the period.
H J
1878 300r Orange & Green, used block of four with light but distinctive “maltese cross” cancel (as Ayres n° 694), hint of ageing, rare multiple, fine (RHM $7’500)
78
1’800
DCE
1881-88 ISSUES PRINTED BY THE CASA MOEDA, 1881 200r “Small Head”, trace of diagonal bend else fresh and very fine
81
1866-84 DOM PEDRO II ISSUES (CONTINUED)
F
1881 200r “Small Head” tied by Petropolis cds to 1889 cover to Nice, France, with “IRUN A BORDEAUX” cds on obverse, Rio and Nice bs, addressed to “Her Imperial Highness the Countess of Aquila, fine and attractive cover (RHM n° 50, $600 for cover)
81
400
F
1882-84 100r “Large Head” type I, tied to uncancelled 100r entire by “AGEN. DE CAMPINAS / DA MANHA” cds (1 DEZ 89), sent to Germany with various bs incl. Rio and Sao Paulo, fresh, very fine
83
160
20239
1882-84 100r “Large Head”, background of vertical and diagonal lines, perfect centering and large margins, rich colour, full original gum (typical peripheral toning), very fine (RHM n° 55)
83b
20240
DCE
1882-84 100r “Large Head”, background of vertical and diagonal lines, rich colour, fine (RHM n° 55)
83b
20241
CC
200r Type I, the 1882 printing, marvelous mint corner margin pair, nh, traces of light gum toning, well centered, very fine (RHM n° 56, $380)
84
LATER IMPERIAL ISSUES (CONTINUED)
F
1887 50r Chalky Blue tied by Bahia cds (18 Jan. 1890) to cover addressed to someone aboard a steamer there, endorsed “Nesta” (= urban rate) but the P.O. considered the ship, at Salvador harbour, so rated at 100r and double the deficiency paid with 100r postage due also tied by Bahia cds, interesting use of Empire franking with Republican due stamp, very fine and probably unique
93
1’200
F
1887 500r Olive tied to 100r entire also having 1891 100r Liberty tied on reverse, sent reg’d to Germany and forwarded there, several bs, compelling, very fine
95
300
F
1890 Registered cover to SERBIA franked by 1887 500r Olive plus 1890 300r “Southern Cross”, tied by Rio cds, Belgrade bs, endorsed for Paquebot “Iberia”, a great showpiece, very fine
95+104
LATER IMPERIAL ISSUES (CONTINUED)
20259 C J
1890 100r Southern Cross, original design, lovely fresh block of four believed to be UNIQUE in this lilac pink shade, lower pair nh, gum slightly dulled, very fine (Meyer n° 72, $13,200)
101
5’000
F
1890 200r “Southern Cross”, intense fresh colour, tied to registered 200r entire by 1892 (27 May) “PILAR (ALAGOAS)” cds, sent to ALGERIA with octagonal blue French paquebot Ligne J ds (2 June), bs of Maceio, Pernambuco, Marseille and destination, L’Arbah (20 June), highly unusual and extremely attractive cover, bit of backflap missing and stamp with peripheral toning of little import, very fine
103
200
H
1890 200r Southern Cross, the only known vertical pair imperf between, light cancel, superb and important showpiece for these popular issues, ex Niso Vianna and RHM
103 var.
INCOMING MAIL
F
CHINA, 1907 picture pc with 10c Coiling Dragon tied by Tientsin cds, sent to Curityba, fine
100
F
FRANCE, 1869 cover from Paris with 80c Laureate tied, sent to Rio with red “AFFR. INSUFF. / P. 39” hs at foot, Brazil “560” (reis) and “2” (second weight class) in blue crayon, partial blue Rio bs, part of backflap missing, fine and unusual
300
F
FRANCE, 1873 pair of covers from a correspondence, each sent from Paris to Pernambuco, first Feb. 8 with diamond “F / 17” in red-brown, rated “3” and “960” on arrival, 2nd from Oct. 18 with “F / 17” in blue-black and rated “2” and “640”, would make a great exhibit page, very fine
800
INCOMING MAIL (CONTINUED)
F
INDOCHINA, 1896 25c reg’d entire with additional 20c and 30c adhesives all tied by Saigon Port / Cochin Chine cds, sent to Pilar de Algoas via French paquebot (two diff. octagonal ds), travelled via France, Pernambuco and Rio (several bs on reverse), attractive and very fine showpiece
300
F
SWITZERLAND, 1862 cover from Lunnern near Zurich to Rio Grande, with straight-line OBFELDEN and AFFOLTERN cds plus French “Suisse” cds of origin, also octagonal “F / 21” hs and rated “430” on arrival, reverse with Zurich and Swiss bahnpost cds plus bs, very fine
300
20264
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76
Sweden The ÂŤKristallÂť Collection & Estate
Scandinavia & Finland
Part of our October 2007 auction series David Feldman SA, 175 route de Chancy, P.O. Box 81, CH-1213 Onex, Geneva, Switzerland Tel: +41 22 727 07 77, Fax: +41 22 727 07 78, E-mail: [email protected], Web site: www.davidfeldman.com Representation in 25 cities on all 5 continents
BRAZILIAN EMPIRE STAMP CATALOGUE 1843 to 1889 Dear Collector We present the traditional BRAZILIAN EMPIRE STAMP CATALOGUE - RHM, that classifies the postal stamps of the Brazilian Empire period.
Prices The prices are quoted in Euros (€). The prices quoted are for single stamps (or series), multiple items in good condition. Luxury items are worth more while those with defects or which have been repaired are worth less. Values quoted are for authentic items. For items of high value, please request a certificate of authenticity supplied by a recognised expert.
Using the catalogue The Catalogue of Stamps of Brazil has been published since 1943 and classifies the stamps issued in Brazil. The stamps are numbered chronologically and following the number is the face value of the stamp, the colour and, in some cases, the date or the total printed. After that, we have the prices for unused (without cancellations) items and a second column for cancelled items.
Quality Unused stamps from 1843 to 1889, with the original gum, deserve a considerable premium. For stamps to be considered unused there must be no vestiges of cancellation and should be examined under an ultra-violet lamp. Considered defects are: tears, lack of perforations, folds made after printing, discoloration due to prolonged exposure to light, having been cleaned, holes, rust or age blemishes and thinning. Stamps are not considered as defective, which show as being badly centred, in-line perforation faults or folds made previous to printing (plié or “accordion”). The Classic stamps should have minimum margins to quality for the prices given in this catalogue: 1) 1843-Bull's Eyes: minimum of 1 mm, average 1,5 mm. 2) 1844/46 Slanting numerals: minimum of 0,2 mm, average 0,4mm outside the line which surrounds the design. 3) Verticals and Coloureds: minimum of 0,75, average 1mm. Deluxe items are worth considerably more than the prices indicated in the Catalogue. Prices given in this catalogue are for items in fine conditions.
Perforations The perforation indicator refers to the number of perforations per 2 cm. In mixed perforations, for example 11 x 13, the first number represents the horizontal perforations and the second, the vertical. The indication 11-13 means that the stamp exists in different perforations, between 11 and 13 perforations per 2 cm.
Acknowledgements The Brazilian Empire Stamp Catalogue is part of the 56th Edition from the complete catalogue 2007/2008. We wish to thank all those philatelists and stamp dealers who have helped over the years to improve this work but especially to David Feldman and his team that made possible this SPECIAL EDITION.
I
EMPIRE Law number 243, article 17 of November 30th, 1841, authorised the reform of the Mail. In November 3rd, 1842 Mr. Bernardo Pereira De Vaconcellos and José Cesário de Miranda Ribeiro with the reform proposal sent a communication, which proposed: “The calculation of the rate will be according to the weight of the letter: The receiver will not make the payment of the postage to the distributing office but in advance to the receiving postal office by means of a small piece of paper, of the size of a small silver coin, representing the value of the postal rate. These will be sold by designated authorities and has to be affixed on the letter by the sender". So were born the Bull’s Eyes on the 1st August 1843 and Brazil therefore became the first country of the Americas to put into service the postage stamp. Impression – line-engraved at the Mint on copper plates and printed at the “Oficinas de Estamparia das Apólices”. No perforations. Advised on the 5-7-1843.
1-8-1843 - "BULL'S EYES"
Medium paper, greyish or yellowish (65 to 85 microns) 1 2 3
30 rs, black, approximately 856.617 issued................................. € 5.400 60 rs, black, approximately 1.335.865 issued.............................. € 1.500 90 rs, black, approximately 341.125 issued................................. € 4.600
€ 650 € 300 € 1.400
White thick paper with relief visible on reverse (85 to 100 microns) 1A 2A 3A
30 rs, black, ................................................................................. € 8.500 60 rs, black, ................................................................................. € 2.000 90 rs, black, ................................................................................. € 9.200
€ 960 € 420 € 2.300
Fine paper with visible impression on reverse (50 to 60 microns) 1B 2B 3B
30 rs, black, ................................................................................. € 8.500 60 rs, black, ................................................................................. € 2.000 90 rs, black, ................................................................................. € 8.500
€ 900 € 390 € 2.200
Yellowish, fibrous thick paper (90 to 100 microns) 1C 30 rs, black, ................................................................................. € 7.700 2C 60 rs, black, ................................................................................. € 1.500 3C 90 rs, black, ................................................................................. € 8.000
€ 750 € 330 € 2.000
Suture (stitch) watermarks (FS) 1FS 30 rs, black, ............................................................................................. 2FS 60 rs, black, ................................................................................. € 3.500 3FS 90 rs, black, ............................................................................................. Tariffs
Weight Not exceeding 4 oitavas 4-6 oitavas 6-8 oitavas
Land 60 reis 90 reis 120 reis
II
€ 2.750 € 1.400 € 3.500
Sea 120 reis 180 reis 240 reis
SPECIAL CLASSIFICATION OF THE “HALF-SE-TENANTS” The Bull’s Eyes were printed in sheets of 54 stamps (30, 60 and 90 reis) and in sheets of 60 stamps (30 and 60 reis). On the sheet of 54 stamps they appear as se-tenants as well as the “half se-tenants”. The horizontal lines of separation of the values indicate that the stamps are from sheets of 54 and for this reason we have what are called “half se-tenants” (Semi-Xifópagos). These came about because the stamps, showing these lines, above or below, were cut between and are therefore as xifópagos or Siamese twins. These stamps are extremely rare and as such it is not possible for all collectors to have such se-tenant pairs in their collection.
SXF-1 SXF-2 SXF-3
30 reis, black...................................................................................-.- 60 reis, black...................................................................................-.- 90 reis, black...................................................................................-.-
€ 6.500 € 3.500 € 4.000
MULTIPLES OF THE BULL’S EYES PAIRS 30 reis Pair...........................€ 12.000 60 reis Pair.............................€ 3.000 90 reis Pair.............................€ 9.800
€ 1.900 € 1.400 € 4.200
STRIPS OF THREE 30 reis Strip of three....................... -.- 60 reis Strip of three...............€ 5.000 90 reis Strip of three.............€ 14.400
€ 8.200 € 2.800 € 7.500
BLOCKS OF FOUR 30 reis Block of four.............€ 75.000 60 reis Block of four............. € 11.000 90 reis Block of four.............€ 46.000
III
€ 10.500 € 7.700 € 14.000
1-7-1844-“SLANTING NUMERALS” called in the past “GOAT’S EYES” The Slanting Numerals came into through a letter written to the Director of Posts by the Treasury Inspector of Sergipe. He complained of the loss of revenue whereby people were easily reusing the Bull’s Eyes. The General Director of the Mail made arrangements for smaller format stamps to be printed on much finer gummed paper, which would make it more difficult for them to be re-used. The “Inclinados” or slanting numerals were born.
Yellow or bluish fine transparent papers (50 to 60 microns) 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
10 rs, back, 1846............................................................................. € 300 30 rs, black - type II, 1-7-1844......................................................... € 230 60 rs, black - type II, 1-7-1844......................................................... € 230 90 rs, black - type II, 1-7-1844...................................................... € 1.500 180 rs, black, 1-7-1845................................................................. € 6.500 300 rs, black, 1-7-1845................................................................. € 8.100 600 rs, black, 1-7-1845................................................................. € 7.300
€ 40 € 45 € 40 € 160 € 2.300 € 2.600 € 3.000
SINGLE STAMPS, CLASSIFIED BY TYPE AND PAPER In 1844, the values of 30, 60 and 90 reis were printed. These were printed on medium/ thick existing paper, which had been used for the printing of the Bull’s Eyes. In 1845 the first shipment of a new fine yellowish paper arrived in Brazil from England. The 180, 300 and 600 reis values were printed first on this new paper. According to D. Guatemozim, this first printing was for a total of 18.000 copies, on sale from 1-7-1845. In parallel, the same paper was used for printing stamps of the 30, 60 and 90 reis. A paper containing blue pigmentation arrived in 1846, which was used for printing the existing values and for the new 10 reis value.
TYPES 30 reis – two types discovered by Roberto Thut exist. One printed inverted (guilhochê) in relation to the other.
TYPE II 3- Top stem of the “3” follows the curve of the ellipse. 4- Bottom stamp of the “3” is rounded and doesn’t touch the ellipse.
TYPE I 1- Top slant of figure 3 in relation to the background ellipse. Bends inwards away from the ellipse. 2- 1- Bottom slant of the figure 3 touches the ellipse.
IV
60 reis – two types exist discovered by Horst Flatau. The differences are in the design of the figures.
TYPE II 4 - The downstroke where it meets the curve is not rounded. 5 - The line indicated curves from the base of the “6”. 6 - The inside line, right of the “0” is straight.
TYPE I 1 - The inside curve of the downstroke where it meets the circle of the “6” is rounded. 2 - The line indicated cuts the base of the “6”. 3 - The inside line, right of the “0” is lightly curved.
90 reis - Two types classified by G.F.Napier the differences are in the design of the figures. In 1967, Dr. Ivo Ferreira da Costa discovered a subtype of the 90 reis, type II, denominated type IIa:
TYPE I 1 - No trace touch the base of the “0”.
TYPE II 2 - Straight slanting line touches the “0”. 4 - Small break in the outline of the “9”, as shown.
TYPE IIa 3- Straight slanting line touches the “0”. 5- The elliptic line of the “guillhôche” cuts into the figures “9” and “0”, as shown. 6- Black dots in “9” and “0”, as shown.
Transparent fine yellowish or bluish paper TYPE I 5A 6A 7A
30 rs, black...................................................................................... € 460 60 rs, black................................................................................... € 4.600 90 rs, black................................................................................... € 1.500
€ 60 € 1.150 € 230
TYPE IIa 7D 90 rs, black................................................................................... € 1.500
€ 160
Issue of 1844 – Paper left over from the printing of the Bull’s Eyes 5B 6B 7B 5C 6C 7C
30 rs, black, type I........................................................................ € 1.650 60 rs, black, type I........................................................................... € 190 90 rs, black, type I........................................................................ € 2.000 30 rs, black, type II................................................................................... 60 rs, black, type II.......................................................................... € 460 90 rs, black, type II....................................................................... € 2.900
V
€ 230 € 115 € 615 -.€ 190 € 700
1-1-1850-VERTICALS - also known as “CAT’S EYES”
Yellowish or bluish paper 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
10 rs, black........................................................................................ € 45 20 rs, black...................................................................................... € 110 30 rs, black........................................................................................ € 18 60 rs, black........................................................................................ € 18 90 rs, black...................................................................................... € 115 180 rs, black.................................................................................... € 155 300 rs, black.................................................................................... € 460 600 rs, black.................................................................................... € 620
€ 40 € 130 €4 €4 € 15 € 60 € 90 € 110
The 20 reis stamp was originally designated as a surcharge to cover the cost of the home delivery. (Decree 637 of the 27.9.1949). From 1866 the stamp was free for use to cover the cost of forwarding normal letters.
1854/1861-“COLOUREDS”
Yellowish or bluish fine paper 19 10 rs, light blue, 1854........................................................................ € 18 € 12 20 30 rs, grey blue, 1854........................................................................ € 60 € 70 21 280 rs, red, 1861............................................................................. € 200 € 120 22 430 rs, yellow, 1861......................................................................... € 275 € 160 Note: The stamps of 10 and 30 reis were printed in blue to substitute the blacks used in the franking of printed papers, newspapers, etc.
1866 - VERTICALS AND COLOUREDS PERFORATED 12B 13B 14B 15B 16B 17B 18B 19B 20B 21B 22B
20 rs, black................................................................................... € 1.750 30 rs, black...................................................................................... € 480 60 rs, black...................................................................................... € 230 90 rs, black...................................................................................... € 960 180 rs, black.................................................................................... € 960 300 rs, black................................................................................. € 1.250 600 rs, black.................................................................................... € 920 10 rs, light blue, 1854...................................................................... € 230 30 rs, grey blue, 1854................................................................... € 1.200 280 rs, red, 1861.......................................................................... € 1.200 430 rs, yellow, 1861......................................................................... € 800
€ 580 € 230 € 40 € 390 € 390 € 580 € 350 € 230 € 1.200 € 1.200 € 430
CAUTION: Stamps exist with faked perforations. The value quoted is for stamp with a certificate of authenticity supplied by a recognised expert.
VI
1-7-1866 - "DOM PEDRO II" The new series were issued after the 1866 postal reform. After 1867 a new unique inland rate of 100 reis was necessary to send a single letter. The stamps printed at the American Bank Note Company, with perforation 12 was a technical revolution. According to philatelists, Dom Pedro II didn’t want to have the Imperial effigy printed on the Brazilian postal stamps, but after one proof presented by ABN the new series were issued. From the Stahl and Wahnschaffe photos (Rio de Janeiro 1865) the stamps were engraved in plates with 100 stamps from each value. From the 100 reis we have four types.
Medium paper (70 to 90 microns) 23 23a 24 24a 24b 25 26 26a 27 28 28a 29
10 rs, red........................................................................................... € 15 10 rs, carmine red............................................................................. € 60 20 rs, chestnut lilac............................................................................ € 20 20 rs, chestnut red............................................................................. € 85 20 rs, dull violet............................................................................... € 105 50 rs, blue.......................................................................................... € 38 80 rs, violet black............................................................................. € 110 80 rs, rose lilac................................................................................ € 130 100 rs, green, type 1......................................................................... € 38 200 rs, black.................................................................................... € 110 200 rs, greyish................................................................................. € 270 500 rs, orange to orange red........................................................... € 270
TYPES OF 100 RÉIS TYPE 1 1) opem 2) closed 3) single line 4) open
TYPE 1a 1) closed 2) open 3) single line 4) closed
TYPE 1b 1) closed 2) open 3) two lines 4) slightly open
TYPE 2 1) closed 2) closed 3) two lines 4) closed
VII
€6 € 17 €4 € 20 € 38 €2 €6 € 10 €2 € 10 € 30 € 30
TYPES OF 100 REIS - Medium paper (70 to 90 microns) 27 100 rs, green, type 1a, 1869/1870.................................................... € 38 27a 100 rs, green (yellowish), type 1, 1866/1868.................................... € 38 27A 100 rs, green (bluish), type 2, 1870/1875......................................... € 38 27Aa 100 rs, green (yellowish), type 1b, 1868/69.................................... € 380
€2 €2 €2 €6
BROKEN PLATE AND DROP 25DI 50 rs, blue, right upper corner detail............................................. € 1.700 25DII 50 rs, blue, vertical trace.............................................................. € 2.100 25GO 50 rs, blue, white drop under 50................................................ € 18.000
€ 460 € 540 € 14.000
1-7-1876 - DOM PEDRO II - "ROULETTED IN LINE" - "PERCÉ" Ten years after the first Dom Pedro’s perforated issue the ABN (American Bank Note Co.) was produced, with the same plates, the so called “percé” set or rouletted in line perforation. At the time the press criticizes these issue telling that Dom Pedro want to be seen as younger, while he had the face from the next issue (1876), named white beard (see next page).
Medium to fine paper (60 to 85 microns) 30 31 32 33 34 34A 35 36
10 rs, red........................................................................................... € 55 20 rs, chestnut lilac............................................................................ € 80 50 rs, blue.......................................................................................... € 80 80 rs, violet black............................................................................. € 190 100 rs, yellowish green, type 1/1a................................................... € 425 100 rs, green, type 2a....................................................................... € 40 200 rs, black...................................................................................... € 80 500 rs, orange................................................................................. € 240
VIII
€ 40 € 25 € 10 € 20 € 30 €2 €7 € 45
TYPES OF 100 REIS The stamp nº 34 presents the same features from the types 1 and 1a from 1866 and the 34 A the same as the type 2 from 1866 (nº 27 A).
34 100 rs, yellowish green, type 1/1a................................................... € 425 34A 100 rs, type 2a................................................................................... € 40
€ 30 €2
1877-78-DOM PEDRO II-“WHITE BEARD” IN LINE ROULETTED-“PERCÉ” Engraved and printed by the American Bank Note Co. New York Photos – Taken during the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876 and by Stahl and Wahnschaffe for the stamp of 20 reis. Sheets – 200 (10, 20, 50, 100 and 260 reis) and 100 (80, 300, 700 and 1.000 reis).
Medium to fine paper (60 to 85 microns) 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46
10 rs, red (10-8-1877)....................................................................... € 15 20 rs, violet (10-8-1877).................................................................... € 19 50 rs, blue (10-8-1877)...................................................................... € 27 80 rs, carmine (4-10-1878)................................................................ € 38 100 rs, green (10-8-1877)................................................................. € 38 200 rs, black (10-8-1877)................................................................ € 185 260 rs, dark chestnut (10-8-1877)................................................... € 110 300 rs, ochre (4-10-1878)................................................................ € 110 700 rs, chstnut red (4-10-1878)....................................................... € 230 1.000 rs, slate grey (4-10-1878)...................................................... € 270 Caution: The dark stamps need to be well examined to certify they do not have cancellation or manuscript endorsement chemically removed.
IX
€4 €3 €2 € 10 €2 € 16 € 25 €8 € 80 € 40
21-8-1878 - DOM PEDRO II - "AURIVERDE" Engraved and printed by the Continental Bank Note Co. This is the first bicolour stamp used in Brazil. Nickname: Pineapple
Opaque medium paper (47) e fine paper (47B) 47 300 rs, green/yellow........................................................................ € 115 47B 300 rs, green/yellow, fine paper...................................................... € 100
€ 28 ne
Note: According to philatelic sources, at an auction of old furniture, sheets of stamps, with gum, were found after being long forgotten in a drawer. These were the unissued “Auriverde” types. The purchaser seems to have cleaned these stamps then placed them onto the stamp market. For these reason these types do not figure on postal items of the period.
1881/1888-STAMPS PRINTED AT THE MINT Starting 1881, stamps were printed by the Mint in Rio de Janeiro on plates supplied to them by the American Bank Note Company. In order to avoid the problems of the stamps being re-used and to guard against fraud, the Mint deliberately used a fragile paper and decomposible ink. It is important to state the existence of a great range of colour tones for each of the values printed. For separation of the stamps a perforator was used which had the pins set at irregular intervals. This causes an irregular perforation of between 13 and 14 to a 2 cm length. Short teeth, faded colours and porous paper are natural occurrences of this series and should not be considered as defects. The shown dates of issue of the stamps don’t necessarily correspond to the chronological order in which the plates were produced.
15-7-1881 - DOM PEDRO II - "SMALL HEAD"
Laid paper (grooved) - (45 to 60 microns) 48 49 50
50 rs, blue....................................................................................... € 160 100 rs, dark olive green................................................................... € 615 200 rs, light chestnut....................................................................... € 580
X
€ 30 € 60 € 150
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE SMALL AND THE LARGE HEADS 50 reis nº 48 a) small head; b) topknot; c) the hair covers part of the ear; d) there are 10 lines to the background of the “50”. nº 53 a) large head; b) groomed hair; c) the hair doesn’t cover the ear; d) there are 11 lines to the background of the “50”.
100 reis
nº 49 a) small head; b) topknot; c) the hair covers part of the ear; d) the circle of pearls is complete; e) the background has crossed and inclined lines (45 degrees) and horizontal lines. nº 54 a) large head; b) groomed hair; c) the hair doesn’t cover the ear; d) the value “100” cuts the circle of pearls; e) the background has crossed and inclined lines (45 degrees) and horizontal. Small vertical lines, forming a group of delicate roses, which completes the drawing. In the impressions with less ink, the lines disappear; f) the bust presents 3 parallel lines.
200 reis nº 50 a) lock of white hair; b) the forehead stands out; c) beard is distant to the neck; d) the background has crossed and inclined lines (34 degrees) and horizontal. nº 56 a) no lock of white hair; b) the forehead is rounded; c) the beard is closer to the neck; d) the crossing lines are inclined (34 degrees) and horizontal.
nº 48
nº 57 XII
€ 27 € 35 € 2,50 €4 €5 € 23 € 55 €4 € 155
DIFFERENCES OF THE "LARGE HEADS" 10 REIS nº 51a a) the belly of the letter “B” and the leg of the letter “R” of BRAZIL are cornered. nº 51 a) the belly of the letter “B” and the leg of the letter “R” of BRAZIL are rounded.
100 REIS nº 54 a) large head; b) classic hair; c) the hair doesn’t cover the ear; d) the value “100” cuts the circle of pearls; e) the background has crossed and inclined lines (45 degrees) and horizontal. Small vertical lines, forming a group of delicate roses complete the drawing. In the weak impressions with less ink, the lines almost disappear; f) the bust present 3 parallel lines. nº 55 a)-b-c-d) the same as the stamp number 54; e) the background has crossed and inclined lines (34 degrees) and vertical; f) the bust presents 4 parallel lines.
200 REIS nº 56 a) the lock is missing; b) the forehead is rounded; c) the beard is closed to the neck; d) the lines are crossed and inclined (34 degrees) and horizontal. nºs 57 and 57a a) the lock is missing; b) the forehead is rounded; c) the beard is distant to the neck; d) the lines of the background are crossed and inclined (45 degrees).
1883 – DOM PEDRO II – CROSSED AND LINED BACKGROUND
Laid paper (woven) – (45 to 60 microns) 58 59
100 rs, lilac grey (17-3-1883).......................................................... € 430 100 rs, lilac grey (23-4-1883).......................................................... € 210
€ 70 €3
The word CORREIOS (MAIL) appears for the first time on a Brazilian stamp.
19-6-1884-DOM PEDRO II-called “CABECINHA”-(equal to small head)
Laid paper (woven) - (45 to 55 microns) 60
100 rs, pale lilac grey (14-3)............................................................ € 230
€4
Note: The colours from the stamps 58 to 60 are usually very pale. Unused samples or with cancellations, with good colour, well centred deserve an increase in the selling price. Note: The colours from the stamps 58 to 60 are usually very pale. Unused samples or with cancellations, with good colour, well centred deserve an increase in the selling price. At the Encyclopaedic Catalogue of the Stamps and Postal History of Brazil (1999) is possible to know the proofs, letters, and multiples from these issues.
XIII
1884/1888-CIPHER TYPES-SOUTHERN CROSS IMPERIAL CROWN-SUGAR LOAF MOUNTAIN
Laid paper (woven) – (45 to 60 microns) 61 62 62A 63 64 65 66 67 68 69
20 rs, russian green ("R" without dot) (1-1-1884).............................. € 30 20 rs, greenish olive to yellowish ("R" with) (1887)........................... € 30 20 rs, olive, "R" without dot (with certificate)................................... € 300 50 rs, deep greyish blue (8-2-1887).................................................. € 35 100 rs, pale lilac grey, white cipher (3-10-1885).............................. € 230 100 rs, pale lilac grey (3-3-1888)....................................................... € 90 300 rs, deep greyish blue (3-1-1887).............................................. € 215 500 rs, greenish olive (3-1-1887).................................................... € 150 700 rs, violet (28-10-1888)................................................................ € 90 1000 rs, blue to pale ultramarine (3-3-1888)................................... € 290
€ 4,50 €4 € 30 €6 € 2,30 €2 € 40 € 15 € 145 € 145
Notes: The value given for stamp nº 62 A is for an expertise example. Stamps nº s 65, 68 with cancels of the Imperial period (legible dates prior to November 16th, 1889) are worth 200% more. Stamp nº 69 with the same criteria is worth 100% more. CAUTION: Exists forged cancellations from the Empire and also dot removal from the nº 62 A .
VARIETIES
"R" WITHOUT DOT
"R" WITH DOT
REVENUE STAMPS “Brazil-Thesouro” type of 100 and 200 reis were easily confused with stamp numbers 64 and 65 and they were mistakenly used to pay for letters. These were generally returned to the sender, but there also exist circulated envelopes and covers (very rare).
XIV
NEWSPAPER STAMPS The 10 reis stamp (Inclinado = Slanting numeral) was created in 1846 for the purpose of franking newspapers, but the custom of using stamps exclusively for the posting of periodicals dates from 1854 when the 10 and 30 reis Verticals (Nos. 19 and 20) were printed in blue, the so-called Coloureds. Since these two stamps later went into general use, philatelists began to classify specially, certain stamps of 1889 and 1890 that had been created from the Regulation of March, 26th, 1888, which gave editors of publications the exclusive use of such stamps within the national territory. In 1894, the use of these special stamps for newspapers was abolished.
1-2-1889-OBLIQUE CIPHERS
J-1 J-2 J-3 J-4 J-5 J-6 J-7 J-8 J-9
10 rs, orange....................................................................................... € 6 20 rs, orange..................................................................................... € 19 50 rs, orange..................................................................................... € 27 100 rs, orange................................................................................... € 12 200 rs, orange................................................................................ € 4,60 300 rs, orange................................................................................ € 4,60 500 rs, orange................................................................................... € 77 700 rs, orange................................................................................... € 12 1.000 rs, orange................................................................................ € 12
€6 € 19 € 23 €4 €4 €4 € 23 € 38 € 38
1-5-1889 - NEW COLOURS
J-10 J-11 J-12 J-13 J-13 a J-13 b J-14 J-15 J-16 J-17 J-17 a J-17 b J-18
10 rs, olive..................................................................................... € 4 20 rs, yellowish green................................................................... € 4 50 rs, buff (straw).......................................................................... € 4 100 rs, violet.................................................................................. € 6 100 rs, deep violet......................................................................... € 8 100 rs, lilac.................................................................................. € 15 200 rs, black.................................................................................. € 6 300 rs, carmine........................................................................... € 30 500 rs, green............................................................................. € 130 700 rs, light blue.......................................................................... € 85 700 rs, cobalt (with certificate).................................................. € 900 700 rs, ultramarine.................................................................... € 170 1.000 rs, chestnut red................................................................. € 30
XV
€2 €2 €2 €4 € 30 €4 €4 € 30 € 140 € 80 € 900 € 200 € 130
20-1-1890 - HORIZONTAL CIPHER (REPUBLIC)
J-19 J-20 J-21 J-21 a
10 rs, blue (5-7-1890)..................................................................€ 35 20 rs, green (23-8-1890)........................................................... € 115 100 rs, mauve (29-8-1890).......................................................... € 35 Idem, rose (pink)....................................................................... € 680
€ 19 € 35 € 23 € 365
11-9-1890 - "SOUTHERN CROSS"
J-22 J-22 a J-22 b J-22 c J-22 d J-22 e J-22 f J-23 J-23 a J-23 b J-24
10 rs, light blue.............................................................................. € 8 10 rs, blue................................................................................... € 10 10 rs, ultramarine........................................................................ € 12 10 rs, bluish grey......................................................................... € 12 10 rs, buff...................................................................................... € 9 10 rs, slate blue............................................................................. € 9 10 rs, blue (thick paper).............................................................. € 12 20 rs, green................................................................................. € 14 20 rs, emerald............................................................................. € 14 20 rs, yellowish green................................................................. € 19 50 rs, green................................................................................. € 58
€2 € 2,30 €9 €9 €5 €6 €5 €5 €5 € 10 € 19
Note: See a complete classification at the Encyclopaedic Catalogue of the Stamps and Postal History of Brazil (1999).
Visit www.oselo.com.br.
XVI
TELEGRAPH STAMPS The Telegraph System was inaugurated on May, 11th, 1852. Telegraph stamps appeared in 1869 after Fr. A . Kiefer obtained authorisation by decree 4350 of April, 5th, 1859 to start an exploration telegraph line from Rio de Janeiro to Ouro Preto/MG. These stamps weren't fixed on the telegram.
1869 – DIVERSE TYPES WITH CONTROL CANCELS ON THE BACK
Fine unwatermarked paper with a green-blue control cancel on the reverse T-1 200 rs, light green......................................................................... € 9.250 T-1a Idem, green................................................................................ € 12.500 T-2 500 rs, carmin rose....................................................................... € 6.200 T-3 1.000 rs, light blue........................................................................... € 880 T-3a Idem, blue........................................................................................ € 880
€ 2.500 € 5.100 € 2.500 € 380 € 380
1871 – PREVIOUS TYPES – WITHOUT CONTROL CANCELS T-4 200 rs, light green............................................................................ € 140 T-4a Idem, green..................................................................................... € 280 T-5 500 rs, carmin rose.......................................................................... € 115 T-6 1.000 rs, light blue........................................................................... € 115 T-6a Idem, blue........................................................................................ € 140
€ 115 € 190 € 90 € 90 € 190
"LACROIX FRÈRES" WATERMARK French imported paper were used with the “Lacroix Frères” watermark.
T-5A 500 rs, carmin rose................................................................................-.-
-.-
1873 – “TRANSMISSION VOUCHER” TYPE Rectangular format, fine paper, glued on cardboard. 4 stamps per line horizontally. Values quoted are for stamps cancelled with a red or blue-green numbered cancel and generally Viso (seen) written by hand in ink by the official, Guimaraes.
T-7 200 rs, black on light green............................................................. € 350 T-7a Idem, black on chrome yellow......................................................... € 690 T-7b Idem, black on ivory........................................................................ € 350 Strip of 4................................................................................................ € 7.700
XVII
€ 6.000 € 6.000
1873-MODIFIED TYPE B-ROUNDED FIGURES
Unwatermarked fine paper T-8 200 rs, yellowish green.................................................................... € 880 T-9 500 rs, red.................................................................................... € 1.000 T-10 1.000 rs, blue................................................................................ € 2.550 T-11 2.000 rs, dark brown........................................................................ € 850
€ 380 € 580 € 2.800 € 250
PREVIOUS TYPES - "LACROIX FRÈRES" WATERMARK T-8 A T-9 A T-10 A T-11 A
200 rs, yellowish green.......................................................... € 3.500 500 rs, red.............................................................................. € 9.300 1.000 rs, blue......................................................................... € 7.700 2.000 rs, dark brown.............................................................. € 2.900
€ 890 € 5.800 € 4.800 € 540
1-4-1899 - OFFICIAL STAMPS WITH THE REPUBLICAN EMBLEM April, 1st, 1899 official stamps were put into circulation destined for an experimental urban telegraph service. They were sent to the following telegraphic stations: Central, Niterói, Fortaleza de S. Cruz, Rio Comprido, Engenho Novo, Praça da República, Largos dos Leões, Prainha, Sta. Tereza, São Cristovão and Largo do Machado.
Gummed paper, perforation 11,5 - litograph printing T-12 T-13 T-13 A
200 rs, yellowish green............................................................... € 13 500 rs, chestnut violet............................................................... € 540 Idem, purple........................................................................... € 1.100
XVIII
€ 90 € 365 € 290
David Feldman SA - Conditions de Vente La monnaie utilisée pour cette vente est l’Euro (e)
La participation dans l’une des ventes aux enchères de David Feldman SA implique une adhésion totale aux conditions décrites ci-dessous ainsi qu’aux droits et obligations qui en découlent. Ces mêmes conditions sont applicables à toute transaction en relation à des pièces ou des lots faisant partie de la vente aux enchères et conclue en dehors de celle-ci. La Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A., organisatrice de la présente vente aux enchères, agit exclusivement comme mandataire et n'assume donc aucune responsabilité quelconque en cas de manquement(s) des acheteurs et/ou vendeurs.
d'achat et la commission due à réception de la facture de la vente aux enchères. Dans ce cas, la Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. conserve les lots adjugés qui ne seront remis à leurs acheteurs qu'à réception par la Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. du paiement intégral des montants dus. Sauf instructions spéciales de l'acheteur, l'envoi des lots s'effectue par la poste, la Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. assure, de manière usuelle, la marchandise pour le transit. Les lots, délivrés ou non, conservent titre de propriété de la Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. pour le compte du vendeur jusqu’au paiement intégral de la facture.
1. LES LOTS SONT MIS EN VENTE
3.6 Facilités de paiement: La Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. accorde, selon sa libre appréciation, des facilités de paiement aux acheteurs. L'acheteur au bénéfice de telles facilités paie un montant minimum de 25% du montant total de la acture dès réception de celle-ci puis acquitte le solde encore dû en mensualités égales sur une période de 6 mois maximum. Un intérêt mensuel plus les frais encourus au taux de 1% sont perçus, à partir de la date de la vente, par la Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. L'intérêt est débité chaque mois au compte du client. En cas d'oc- troi de facilités de paiement, la Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. garde les lots adjugés jusqu'au paiement intégral des montants dus par l'acheteur, étant précisé que l'acheteur peut, en tout temps avant livraison, examiner la marchandise acquise auprès de la Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. Par ailleurs, l'acheteur perd tout droit de réclamation tel que prévu sous chiffre 4 ci-dessous, 30 jours après la date de la vente aux enchères.
1.1 Sur la base de leur présentation dans le catalogue et/ou sur le site internet: Les lots sont décrits avec le plus grand soin sans toutefois engager la responsabilité de la Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. Les photographies font partie intégrante des descriptions pour ce qui est des marges, de la dentelure, du centrage, des oblitérations et de toute autre qualité apparente. La description des lots mentionne si les pièces sont signées par des experts et/ou sont accompagnées de certificats d'expertise. 1.2 Sur la base de leur examen: Tous les lots peuvent être examinés, avant et pendant la vente dans nos bureaux ou à l’endroit de la vente, aux horaires indiqués dans le catalogue de vente ou sur notre site Internet. Les acheteurs ayant examiné les lots avant la vente et/ou y participant personnellement et/ou y étant représentés, sont censés avoir examiné tous les lots achetés et les accepter dans l'état où ils se trouvent lors de l'adjudication, indépendamment de la description figurant dans le catalogue. 2. LES OFFRES D'ENCHERES 2.1 Chaque offre d'enchère doit être supérieure à celle formulée précédemment selon l'échelle suivante: (la monnaie peut changer selon la vente. aux enchères) e 50 - 100 e 5 e 2000 - 5000 e 200 e 100 - 200 e 10 e 5000 - 10000 e 500 e 200 - 500 e 20 e 10000 - 20000 e 1000 e 500 - 1000 e 50 e 20000 - 50000 e 2000 e 1000 - 2000 e 100 e 50000 - 100000 e 5000 Les offres se situant entre ces montants seront arrondies à la surenchère supérieure. L'enchérisseur est lié par son offre tant qu'une nouvelle surenchère n'a pas été valablement formulée par un autre enchérisseur. 2.2 L'huissier ou le crieur a le droit d'avancer les enchères, de séparer, joindre ou retirer n'importe quel lot, cela à son entière discrétion. La vente a lieu en français mais les enchères pourront être répétées en anglais. La Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. est également autorisée à enchérir pour le compte de vendeurs lorsque des prix de réserve ont été fixés. Si le vendeur fixe des prix de réserve pour certains de ses lots, il sera alors considéré comme acheteur et la Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. enchérira pour le compte de celui-ci jusqu'à concurrence des prix de réserve fixés. Lorsque le prix fixé par le vendeur n'est pas atteint, il sera passé à la criée du lot suivant par un simple coup de marteau. 2.3 Les offres d’enchères écrites reçues par David Feldman SA ou sur le site Internet avant la vente, sont dans tous les cas prioritaires sur les offres d'enchères faites dans la salle de vente. L'enchérisseur donnant un ordre d'enchères écrit peut faire des offres alternatives et/ou limiter le montant global de ses offres. Les offres d'enchères données "à acheter" sont considérées comme pouvant atteindre jusqu'à 10 fois la valeur de l'estimation imprimée dans le catalogue. Les enchères doivent être faites en euros. Les offres d'enchères libellées en d'autres monnaies seront converties en euros au cours du jour de leur réception par la Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. Toute offre écrite d'enchères est considérée comme liant son auteur pendant 60 jours après la date de la vente aux enchères. La Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. est donc en droit de facturer la marchandise à l'enchérisseur jusqu'à l'expiration de ce délai. Toute facture reçue par celui-ci est de ce fait valable et doit être payée immédiatement. 3. LA VENTE AUX ENCHERES 3.1 La vente en direct se déroule sous le contrôle de l’autorité compétente qui n’assume cependant aucune responsabilité. La vente aux enchères se déroule sous le ministère d'un "huissier judiciaire" de la République et Canton de Genève. La monnaie de la vente aux enchères est l'euro. 3.2 Prérogatives de David Feldman S.A.: La Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. est en droit selon sa libre appréciation de retirer, de diviser ou de grouper les lots faisant partie de la présente vente ainsi que de refuser l'adjudication de n'importe lequel desdits lots. La Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. se réserve le droit de refuser selon sa libre appréciation toute offre d'enchères et/ou l'entrée de la salle de vente à n'importe quelle personne quelle qu'elle soit. La Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. n’assume aucune responsabilité quelconque en cas de dommage corporel survenu sur les lieux de la vente. 3.3 Représentants et Agents de Vente aux Enchères: L’enchèrisseur qui agit pour le compte d’un tiers engage son entière responsabilité personelle en particulier en ce qui concerne toutes les obligations contractées dans le cadre de la présente vente. Cette responsabilité s’étend notamment à la verification de la qualité des lots achetés ainsi qu’au règlement ultérieur de la facture des lots acquis. 3.4 L’adjudication: Chaque lot est adjugé au plus offrant pour le compte de son vendeur respectif. Des frais de 19.5% sont facturés en sus du prix d'adjudication par David Feldman SA couvrant la commission, les taxes d'adjudication, frais par lot, assurance, emballage, frais de port, frais d'exportation etc. et ceci dans tous les cas, tous frais encourus ou pas. A la tombée du marteau, les profits et risques des lots ainsi adjugés passent à l'enchérisseur dont l'offre à été acceptée. La marchandise ne sera cependant remise à l'acquéreur qu'au moment du règlement intégral du prix d'achat (prix d'adjudication plus les frais). Exceptionnellement, pour les lots marqués d'un "#" à la fin de la description, ceux-ci sont particulièrement lourds et les frais de port sont facturés en sus et à prix coutant. Les acheteurs donnant des instructions particulières au sujet de l'expédition de leurs lots sont responsables pour leurs frais de port. TVA (Taxe à la vente) - Note indicative concernant les ventes aux enchères dont les lots se trouvent en Suisse: Les acheteurs domiciliés à l'étranger ne sont pas soumis à cette taxe, à condition que les marchandises soient exportées hors de Suisse. DAVID FELDMAN S.A. se fera un plaisir de s'occuper de l'exportation de ces marchandises. Les clients peuvent aussi faire cette exportation par leurs propres moyens; dans ce cas, ils doivent fournir à DAVID FELDMAN S.A. une attestation dûment signée et timbrée par les douanes suisses. Toute acquisition par des acheteurs désirant garder la marchandise en Suisse est soumise à la taxe TVA de 7.6% sur le prix d'achat en francs suisses, montant converti à l'équivalent en euros pendant la vente. 3.5 Paiement: Les adjudicataires présents sont tenus de payer comptant en euros le prix d'achat et la commission contre remise de la marchandise acquise. Le paiement en d’autres monnaies est accepté au cours du jour tel qu'établi par une des grandes banques suisses. Les enchérisseurs par correspondance auxquels un lot est adjugé ainsi que les adjudicataires présents auxquels la Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. accorde l'autorisation expresse d'acquitter les montants dus après la vente, sont tenus de payer le prix
3.7 Droit de gage: Jusqu'au paiement intégral du montant dû, l'acheteur confère à DAVID FELDMAN S.A. un droit de gage sur la totalité des lots gardés par DAVID FELDMAN S.A., acquis avant, pendant et/ou après la présente vente aux enchères. Ce gage garantit le remboursement de tout montant dû en capital, intérêts, commissions et frais éventuels. DAVID FELDMAN S.A. est autorisée, mais non obligée, à réaliser les gages sans autres formalités et sans préavis si l'acquéreur est en demeure pour le paiement de sa dette ou l'exécution d'une obligation quelconque. DAVID FELDMAN S.A. pourra dans tous les cas réaliser les gages de gré à gré. A cet effet, elle n'est pas tenue d'observer les formalités prévues par la Loi fédérale sur la poursuite pour dette et faillite; DAVID FELDMAN S.A. est libre en outre d'introduire ou de continuer une poursuite ordinaire, sans avoir préalablement réalisé les gages et sans renoncer pour autant à ceux-ci. 4. GARANTIE 4.1 Etendue de la garantie: Sous réserve de l'article 4.3 ci-après, l'authenticité de toutes les pièces philatéliques vendues aux enchères est garantie pendant 30 jours à compter de la date de la vente aux enchères. Toute garantie de défaut ou autre garantie de quelque nature qu'elle soit est expressément exclue. Toute réclamation concernant l'authenticité doit être transmise à DAVID FELDMAN S.A. dès réception des lots, mais au plus tard dans les 30 jours à compter de la date de la vente aux enchères. Avant la livraison, qui peut intervenir après ce délai de 30 jours, les pièces philatéliques acquises peuvent être examinées auprès de DAVID FELDMAN S.A. L'acheteur dont la réclamation parvient à DAVID FELDMAN S.A. après ce délai de 30 jours à compter de la date de la vente aux enchères perd tout droit à la garantie. Sa réclamation ne sera pas prise en considération par DAVID FELDMAN S.A. Si un délai supplémentaire pour formuler une réclamation liée à l'authenticité d'une pièce philatélique s'avère nécessaire, la demande doit en être faite à DAVID FELDMAN S.A. dans le délai de 30 jours à compter de la date de la vente aux enchères. Aucune demande parvenue après ce délai de 30 jours à DAVID FELDMAN S.A. ne sera prise en considération. Les résultats de l'expertise pour laquelle un délai a été accordé doivent parvenir à DAVID FELDMAN S.A. dans les trois mois à compter de la date de la vente aux enchères. Un délai supplémentaire ne peut être accordé qu'avec l'accord écrit de DAVID FELDMAN S.A. Seules les réclamations, résultats d'expertise ou autres notifications parvenus dans les délais seront pris en considération par DAVID FELDMAN S.A. 4.2 Expertise ou contre-expertise: Lorsque l'authenticité d'un lot est contestée l'acheteur est tenu de produire un certificat d'expertise ou de contre-expertise émanant d'un expert qualifié justifiant sa réclamation. Si l'expert reconnu, assumant toute responsabilité en cas d'erreur, juge que le timbre a été falsifié, il peut le marquer en conséquence; les signes "FAUX" ou "FALSIFIE" ne constituent pas alors une altération du lot. En présence d'une telle réclamation la Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. se réserve le droit de demander selon la libre appréciation une ou plusieurs expertises subséquentes dont les frais seront mis à charge du vendeur dans l'hypothèse où la réclamation de l'acheteur est fondée. Dans le cas contraire l'acheteur supportera tous les frais d'expertise encourus. Lorsque la réclamation est fondée, le lot est repris et le prix d'adjudication ainsi que la commission sont intégralement remboursés à l'acheteur. Dans le cas d'un paiement retardé dû à une expertise agréée par David Feldman S.A., des intérêts sont payables à 50% du taux habituel pour tout lot dont l'authenticité est confirmée. Si David Feldman S.A. n'est pas d'accord tous les intérêts seront dus. 4.3 Limites de la garantie: Les lots décrits comme collections, sélections ou groupes, ceux formés de doubles et d'accumulations, ne peuvent faire l'objet d'une réclamation quelconque. Les réclamations concernant les lots décrits comme série ou groupes de séries contenant plus d'un timbre, ne sont prises en considération dans les limites de l'article 4.1 ci-dessus que si elles portent sur plus d'un tiers de la valeur totale d'acquisition du lot. Les lots qui ont été examinés par l'acheteur ou son agent, ainsi que les lots qui sont décrits comme ayant des défauts ne peuvent faire l'objet d'aucune réclamation par rapport à ceux ci. Tout lot illustré ne peut du(des) lot(s) concerné(s) et/ou d'agir par toute voie de droit utile contre l'acquéreur afin d'obtenir le paiement des montants dus et/ou d'éventuels dommages-intérêtset/ou le remboursement de tous frais judiciaires. Des frais pou faire l'objet d'aucune réclamation au sujet de la perforation, du centrage, des marges ou tout autre élément visible dans l'illustration. 4.4 Paiement tardif: Si le paiement du prix d'achat et de la commission due par l'acheteur n'intervient pas dans les 30 jours à compter de la date de la vente aux enchères, la Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. se réserve le droit d'annuler la vente et de disposer les paiements en souffrance d’au moins 5% dès le premier mois et 2% par mois supplémentaire. De plus, les dépenses encourues seront perçues sur toutes les sommes dues par l’acheteur 30 jours après la date de la vente aux enchères. Le débiteur défaillant perd en outre tout droit de réclamation. 4.5 Le prix d'adjudication pourra, exceptionellement, être ramené à la mise gagnante la plus basse s'il est établi qu'un enchérisseur a augmenté le prix par inadvertance en utilisant plus d'un moyen de miser. 5. DROIT APPLICABLE ET FOR COMPETENT La présente vente aux enchères ainsi que tous les rapports juridiques qui en découlent seront soumis au Droit suisse exclusivement. Toute action légale ou procédure concernant la vente aux enchères ainsi que les rapports juridiques qui en découlent seront soumis à la juridiction exclusive des tribunaux de Genève, sous réserve d'appel au Tribunal fédéral suisse à Lausanne. Dans tous les cas, la Maison DAVID FELDMAN S.A. se réserve le droit de poursuivre tout acheteur défaillant à son lieu de résidence, auquel cas le Droit Suisse reste applicable et dans les cas se rapportant à la valeur, l'euro est converti à son équivalent en francs suisses pendant la vente. 6. Toute transaction: Ces conditions sont applicables à toute transaction même en dehors des ventes aux enchères, avec David Feldman SA. e/07/2007
David Feldman SA - Conditions of Sale The currency of the auction is the Euro (e)
Participation in any David Feldman S.A. auction means acceptance in full of the following conditions as well as any rights and obligations arising therefrom. These same conditions also apply to all transactions in auction lots taking place outside the realm of the auctions. DAVID FELDMAN S.A., organiser of the auctions, acts as an agent only and is not liable in any way whatsoever for any default(s) of purchaser(s) and/or vendor(s) 1. THE AUCTION LOTS ARE OFFERED 1.1 As presented in the relative auction catalogue and/or through the David Feldman S.A. website: Lots are meticulously described and with the greatest care, however without responsibility. Photographs count as part of the description with regard to the margins, perforation, centering, postmarks and all other visible attributes. The description of the lots mentions if the items are signed by recognised experts and/or accompanied by expert certificates. 1.2 As viewed in person: Before and during auction sales, all lots may be examined at our offices or at the auction location as scheduled in the auction catalogue and on the website. Persons or their agents attending a Live Room auction and/or who have viewed lots before any auction are understood to have examined all lots which they purchase and accept them as they are at the moment of the knocking-down and not necessarily as described. 2. AUCTION BIDS 2.1 The auction bid steps for all auctions are as follows: (some auctions may be in other currencies than Euros) e 50 - 100 e 5 e 2000 - 5000 e 200 e 100 - 200 e 10 e 5000 - 10000 e 500 e 200 - 500 e 20 e 10000 - 20000 e 1000 e 500 - 1000 e 50 e 20000 - 50000 e 2000 e 1000 - 2000 e 100 e 50000 - 100000 e 5000 Bids in between these steps will be adjusted accordingly to the next highest bid step. The bidder is bound by his offer until a higher bid has been validly accepted. 2.2 The Huissier Judiciaire together with DAVID FELDMAN S.A. have full discretion to refuse any bidding, to divide any lot or lots, to combine any two or more lots and to withdraw any lot or lots from the sale without any case giving any reason. DAVID FELDMAN S.A. may also bid on behalf of vendors in cases where reserve prices have been fixed. In these cases, the vendor is treated as a buyer and the auctioneer shall bid on his behalf up to reserve prices. If the reserve price fixed by the vendor is not reached the auctioeer passes to the next lot by a simple knock of the hammer. 2.3 Bid orders received by DAVID FELDMAN S.A. or on its website before the relative auctions have priority over room bids in the case of Live Room auctions. Clients giving bidding instructions to DAVID FELDMAN S.A. may make alternative offers and/or limit the total of their expenditure in advance. Bids marked "BUY" are considered as up to ten times the quoted estimate price where such exists. Bids made in other currencies than the advertised currency of the auction, will be converted into that currency at the market rate of the day of receipt by DAVID FELDMAN S.A. Bids are standing and hold good for at least 60 days from the auction period. DAVID FELDMAN S.A. reserves the right to invoice bidders up to the end of the 60 day period, payment being due immediately. 3. THE AUCTION 3.1 Live Room auctions are held under the control of the relative supervising authority at its location. The relative supervising authority has no liability. The auction will be held under the ministry of a “huissier judiciaire” of the Canton and Republic of Geneva. The currency of the auction is Euros. 3.2 Prerogatives of David Feldman S.A.: DAVID FELDMAN S.A. may withdraw, group differently, divide or refuse to knock down any lot. DAVID FELDMAN S.A. reserves the right to refuse any bid orders and/or for Live Room auctions, refuse admittance to the auction room, at its discretion, to anybody whosoever. DAVID FELDMAN S.A. cannot be held responsible for any physical accident that may occur on the premises where auctions take place. 3.3 Bidders' representatives and auction agents: Any person bidding for the account of a third party is fully liable for any obligation arising from such bidding. This responsibility is notably applicable for the verification of the condition and for the payment of bought lots 3.4 Adjudication: Each lot is sold on behalf of the respective owner to the highest bidder who becomes the buyer at the next highest bid step, which is the adjudication price. In addition to the adjudication price, the buyer pays an all-in fee of 19.5% to cover commission, charges and expenses including lotting fees, adjudication taxes, insurance, packing, mailing, export formalities etc. whether all incurred in particular cases or not. On the adjudication, liability for the lots passes to the bidder whose bids have been accepted. The lots are delivered to the buyer when the sale price (adjudication price plus all fees) have been paid in full Exceptionally lots marked "#" at the end of the description are heavy in weight and mailing expenses, charged at cost, are extra. Buyers who give special mailing instructions are responsible for their own mailing costs. TVA (Sales Tax) - Notes for guidance concerning auctions for which the lots are located in Switzerland: Buyers domiciled abroad are not liable for this tax once the goods are duly exported from Switzerland. DAVID FELDMAN S.A. are pleased to arrange this export; alternatively, clients may make their own arrangements and furnish DAVID FELDMAN S.A. with proof of export, stamped by Swiss customs. Any purchases by buyers who wish to keep their purchases in Switzerland will be liable to TVA at 7.6% of the purchase price in Swiss Francs at the converted Euro value during the auction. 3.5 Payment: Sale price plus commission are due for immediate payment as invoiced against delivery of the lots. Payment in foreign currencies is accepted at the rates of exchange of the day as quoted by a Swiss major bank. The bidders who are successful with whom it has been expressly agreed that they pay after the sale under special conditions, are due to pay the sale price and the commission according to those terms. In these cases, DAVID FELDMAN S.A. keeps the adjudicated lots which
are delivered to the buyers on full settlement of their account. Delivery of the purchased lots by post or any other means if instructed by the buyer including cost of normal transit insurance cover is at the expense of the buyer. Title or ownership of the purchased lots, delivered or not, remains with the auctioneer on behalf of the seller until payment has been made in full. 3.6 Special extended payment facility: DAVID FELDMAN S.A. may offer a special extended payment facility for buyers. In these cases, the buyer may choose to pay a minimum of 25% of the total invoice immediately, and the balance over a maximum period of 6 months, paying an equal instalment at the end of each month. Interest plus charges of 1% is debited to the buyer's account at the end of each month from the auction date. When the special extended payment facility has been granted, the buyer understands that any claims regarding his purchases must be made within 30 days of the auction sale date, even though the lots may be held by DAVID FELDMAN S.A. awaiting full settlement of the account. Until delivery, all lots may be examined by their respective buyers at the offices of DAVID FELDMAN S.A. 3.7 Pledge: Until full settlement of the account, the buyer grants to DAVID FELDMAN S.A. a pledge on any and all properties held by DAVID FELDMAN S.A., acquired prior to, during and/or after any auction. This pledge secures the repayment of any amount due in principals, interests, commissions, costs and other possible fees. DAVID FELDMAN S.A. is entitled, but not obliged, to realise freely the pledge assets without further formalities and without previous notice if the buyer is in default with the payment of his debts or with the fulfilment of any other obligation hereunder. For this purpose, DAVID FELDMAN S.A. is not bound to comply with the formalities of the Federal Law dealing with actions for debt and bankruptcy proceedings; in addition, DAVID FELDMAN S.A. may choose to institute or go on with the usual proceedings without having beforehand sold the pledged goods and without having moreover given them up. 4. GUARANTEE 4.1 Extent of the guarantee: Subject to paragraph 4.3 below, the authenticity of all philatelic items sold in the auction is guaranteed for a period of 30 days from the auction date, with the express exclusion of any other fault(s). Any reclamation regarding authenticity must come to the notice of DAVID FELDMAN S.A. on the delivery of the lots but at the latest within 30 days from that date. Before delivery, which may take place after the 30 days period, the lots purchased may be examined at the Geneva offices of DAVID FELDMAN S.A. The buyer whose reclamation is made after 30 days from the auction date loses all rights to the guarantee. Such reclamation will not be valid by DAVID FELDMAN S.A.. If an extension of the period is required in order to substantiate the claim with an expertise, a request for such extension must be made to DAVID FELDMAN S.A. within 30 days of the auction date. No request for extension will be considered beyond this 30 days period. The results of the expertise for which an extension was agreed must come to the notice of DAVID FELDMAN S.A. within 3 months of the auction date. No further extension of the period will be considered without the express agreement in writing of DAVID FELDMAN S.A. Only claims, expertise results or other details which are made within the agreed periods will be valid. 4.2 Expertise and counter-expertise: Should the authenticity of a lot be questioned, the buyer is obliged to provide an expertise or counter-expertise from a prominent expert in the field, justifying the claim. If a stamp is found by a recognised expert taking financial responsibility for errors to have been forged, he may mark it accordingly. Consequently, the marking "FALSCH" (forged) is not considered an alteration. In the case of such reclamation, DAVID FELDMAN S.A. reserves the right to request, at its own discretion, one or more further expertises. All expertise and relative charges accrue to the vendor's account in the case of a justified claim, or to the buyer's account if the claim is not justified. In the case of a justified claim, the lot is taken back and the adjudication price plus the commission are refunded to the buyer. In the case of delayed payment due to expertise agreed by David Feldman S.A., interest is charged at 50% the standard rate for all cleared lots. If David Feldman S.A. has not agreed then full interest is due. 4.3 Exclusions: Lots described as collections, accumulations, selections, groups and those containing duplicates, cannot be the subject of any claim. Claims concerning lots described as a set or groups of sets containing more than one stamp, can only be considered under the terms of paragraph 4.1 above if they relate to more than one third of the total value of the lot. Lots which have been examined by buyer or his agent, lots described as having defects or faults cannot be subjected to a claim regarding defects or faults.llustrated lots cannot be subjected to a claim because of perforations, centering, margins or other factors shown in the illustrations. 4.4 Late Payment: If the payment of the adjudicated price plus commission due by the buyer is not made within 30 days of the date of the auction, DAVID FELDMAN S.A. reserves the right to cancel the sale and dispose of the lot(s) elsewhere and/or to make a recourse to any legal proceedings in order to obtain payment of the amounts due as well as for any incurred damages and losses and any legal expenses. A charge on overdue payment of at least 5% for the first month and 2% per month afterwards plus expenses incurred is chargeable on any outstanding amount after 30 days of the date of the auction. The buyer who is in default in any way whatsoever has no right of claim under any circumstances. 4.5 Exceptionally, the adjudication price will be reduced to the lowest winning bid where it is shown that a buyer has inadvertently increased the price by using more than one medium of bidding. 5. APPLICABLE LAW AND JURISDICTION Unless otherwise stated, all auctions as well as any rights and obligations arising from them shall be governed exclusively by Swiss law. Any legal action or proceeding with respect to the auctions shall be submitted to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Geneva, subject to appeal to the Swiss Federal Court in Lausanne.In every case, DAVID FELDMAN S.A. shall also be entitled, at its discretion, to sue any buyer in default at his place of residence; in such case, Swiss law shall remain applicable and in the case of issues regarding price value, the Euro is converted at its Swiss franc value at the time of the auction. 6. All Transactions: These conditions apply to all transactions of every kind including those outside the auctions, with David Feldman SA e/03/2007
©Live Auction Software Powered by Core Technologies Inc. [email protected]
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Connect to www.davidfeldman.com and Bid in Real Time at the David Feldman Auctions For seven years you can bid through the Internet at David Feldman Auctions as if you were present in our auction room. You just need a computer and an Internet connection, either at home, the office or anywhere else. Your advantages are: • Bid in real time exactly as if you were present in the auction room. • Hear in real time the auctioneer’s voice. • Know in real time your statement of account and the history of all the bids you have made. • Follow the sale in various currencies with screen display in your chosen language . And much more...
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To join us on the Internet: • Connect to our website, http://www.davidfeldman.com . • Register. • Practice with our simulator in order to become familiar with the Live Auction bidding. • Join us for the auction.
At David Feldman, RESULTS MATTER This catalogue is typical of the presentation, preparation and philatelic knowledge we bring to EVERY property consigned to us for sale through our semi-annual auctions. Our knowledgable staff of philatelists and other specialists work to create a true “labour of love” which showcases in an appropriate manner EVERY rarity, specialised collection and large lot, based on over 40 years’ experience in the philatelic marketplace.
The “Crown Jewel” of Philately, the famous “Bordeaux Cover,” franked by the complete 1847 “Post Office” issue of Mauritius, sold through our auctions in 1993 for US $5 million — the all-time world’s record for ANY philatelic item!
If YOU have a property which may be for sale in the future, it will literally pay you to contact us. Every auction company trumpets “high prices,” but we have set - and hold - world record prices in every area of philately, from individual rarities to large lots. If you want to be sure of obtaining a great result for your great philatelic property, do not hesitate to let us get to work for you. Our auction series each Spring and Autumn each feature a separate catalogue of Rarities (often including highly specialised collections offered intact), large lots and estates, plus stamps and postal history from the world over, with separate specialised auction catalogues as warranted. Items for inclusion in our Autumn auctions must reach us by late June, and for our Spring auctions by mid-January. We can arrange to meet your at your home or office, as our staff travels extensively and we have representatives in 25 countries, on every continent, world-wide. If results matter to you (and we are sure that they do), call or write to us so that we can begin to work together, as your “reliable partner,” towards the intelligent presentation and promotion of your collection, exhibit or other holding. David Feldman SA, 175 route de Chancy, P.O. Box 81, CH-1213 Onex, Geneva, Switzerland Tel: +41 22 727 07 77, Fax: +41 22 727 07 78, E-mail: [email protected], Web site: www.davidfeldman.com Representation in 25 cities on all 5 continents
David Feldman SA Now accepting: Important & Award Winning Collections Major Rarities & Specialised Postal History All World & General Collections Do you have any item(s) or collection(s) that you may consider selling? If yes, please indicate & return to address below: 1. Name ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Address .....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Post Code ........................................................................................................ Country .......................................................................................................................................................... Tel .......................................................................................................................................... Fax ........................................................................................................................................................ E-mail ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 2. Item(s) or Collection(s) which you may consider selling: Description . .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... ...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Approx. value .............................................................................................................................. 3. Cash advance required? If yes, please state amount? .............................................................................................................................................................. 4. Preferred dates to visit you? .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 5. Any other comments: . ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... ...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
David Feldman SA, 175 route de Chancy, P.O. Box 81, CH-1213 Onex, Geneva, Switzerland Tel: +41 22 727 07 77, Fax: +41 22 727 07 78, E-mail: [email protected], Web site: www.davidfeldman.com Representation in 25 cities on all 5 continents
Let us make your reservation
special arrangements have been made with the Geneva hotels below
1 TIFFANY HOTEL ¨¨¨¨
3 HOSTELLERIE DE LA VENDEE
(www.hotel-tiffany.ch)
(www.vendee.ch)
Feldman Galleries: 15 min. by car/taxi, 15 min. by bus no. 2 and no. 19 • the hotel is quietly located only 5 min. from the business and shopping district, museums and Old Town. 20 min. from the airport, 10 min. from the main train station • rooms are fitted with mini-bar, personal safe, cable TV, air conditioning, sound proof windows, bathrobe and hairdryer • cosy Belle Epoque style hotel with restaurant, English bar and lounge Room rates: Single with shower CHF 255. Double CHF 296. breakfast separate. CHF 21.-
Feldman Galleries: 15 min. by car/taxi, 10 min. by bus no. 2 and no. 19 • quietly located, very close to our offices • rooms include bathroom, telephone, cable TV, radio,mini-bar Room rates: Single with shower CHF 194. Single standard CHF 236. Single superieur CHF 254.- breakfast included
4 HOTEL DIPLOMAT ¨¨¨¨¨ non smoking rooms only ([email protected])
Feldman Galleries: 15 min. by taxi/car 25 min. by bus no. 2 • located in heart of the shopping area, 10 min. from the train station, 20 min. from the airport • rooms include 2 or a double bed, bathroom, telephone, TV, radio, video, mini-bar and room service Room rates: Single with shower/bath CHF 198. breakfast included
2 AUBERGE DE CONFIGNON (www.auberge-confignon.ch)
• •
Feldman Galleries: 10 min. by taxi/car quietly located, very close to our offices country guest house with simple rooms Room rates: Single CHF 140.- breakfast included Room rates: Double CHF 240.- breakfast included
The David Feldman Company is pleased to offer 6 months’ credit facilities for auction purchases (Please contact our accounts department in advance of your visit.) Refreshments and drinks available all day at our cafeteria. ______________________________________________________ We would be glad to help you with a hotel reservation. To benefit from the above special rates, the reservation has to be made through us and MUST be confirmed before September 5, 2007.
Name ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. Address ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... Tel.: ........................................................................................................................................................................................ Fax: ........................................................................................................................................................................................ Email: .....................................................................................................................................................................................
I intend to visit Geneva and would like to ask you to book the following: 1st Choice:
Hotel No. .................._..Type of room(s) ..................................................................................................___ Arrival ...................................................................................... 2007
2nd Choice:
Hotel No. ......................Type of room(s) ................................................................................................... Departure ............................................................................ 2007
Signed ............................................................................................................................
Date ................................................................................................ 2007
For ALL hotel reservations and to avail of this offer you MUST confirm before September 5, 2007 PLEASE CONFIRM BY RETURNING THIS SECTION TO DAVID FELDMAN SA (POST,,FAX OR EMAIL)
David Feldman SA, 175 route de Chancy, P.O. Box 81, CH-1213 Onex, Geneva, Switzerland Tel: +41 22 727 07 77, Fax: +41 22 727 07 78, E-mail: [email protected], Web site: www.davidfeldman.com Representation in 25 cities on all 5 continents
Representation in 25 cities on all 5 continents
Philatelists & Outside Assistants Marcus Orsi (Director), David Feldman, Anders Thorell, Gaël Caron, Karol Weyna, Daniel Mirecki, David MacDonnell, Tony Banwell, Michael Tseriotis Administration Lydia Stocker (Director), Joël Feldman, Andreia Pereira Accounting Fabrice Bac, Susanne Mongin Technology Romain Kohn (IT), Leigh Merchant (Graphics) Fred Jacquet & Robin Szemeti (Consultants) We have representatives in the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Thailand, UK, USA
© 2007 David Feldman SA
| Brazil |
In which decade was the Bernardo Bertolucci directed film 'Last Tango In Paris' released? | Numismatics Society
Numismatics Society
Beauty is Breath
Your Maria Theresa Thaler is often a gold bullion trade coin That has become used inside world trade continuously since The idea are 1st minted with 1741. It feel named following Empress Maria Theresa, who ruled Austria, Hungary, AND ALSO Bohemia through 1740 for you to 1780.
It proudly sits with MY OWN small coin collection As single of your most interesting AS WELL AS definitely the most beautiful.
Between 1751 ALONG WITH 2000, several 389 zillion were minted AND ALSO just about all tend to be dated 1780.
The Thaler came for you to be taken Just like currency in large parts associated with Africa until following ones Second World War. This feel common by North Africa for you to Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, AND lower ones coast connected with Tanzania for you to Mozambique. That could possibly help furthermore be found throughout the Arab world, especially within Saudi Arabia, Yemen ALONG WITH Muscat AND Oman, IN ADDITION TO in India.
It was single of your initial coins with MAKE USE OF with the UNITED STATES IN ADDITION TO perhaps contributed, along with the Spanish dollar, towards option of an dollar Equally ones main unit of currency due to the United States.
The coin continues to be minted throughout several countries. inside great Britain at the Birmingham AND London mints furthermore in Bombay, Brussels, Paris, Rome, IN ADDITION TO Utrecht.
The Vienna mint features designed greater than 49 thousand of your coins.
The entire minted possibly exceeds 800 million.
Ionic Order:
Erechtheum
Erechtheum - sanctuary from the center traditional time of Greek workmanship and building design, based on the Acropolis of Athens somewhere around 421 and 405bc.
The Erechtheum contained asylums to Athena Polias, Poseidon, and Erechtheus. The prerequisites of the few places of worship and the area upon a slanting site delivered an abnormal arrangement. From the assemblage of the building porticoes extend on east, north, and south sides. The eastern colonnade, hexastyle Ionic, offered access to the place of worship of Athena, which was divided by a parcel from the western cella. The northern patio, tetrastyle Ionic, remains at a lower level and offers access to the western cella through a fine entryway. The southern colonnade, known as the Porch of the Caryatids (see caryatid) from the six formed hung female assumes that backing its entablature, is the sanctuary's most striking gimmick; it structures a display or tribune. The west end of the building, with windows and captivated Ionic sections, is an adjustment of the first, manufactured by the Romans when they restored the building. One of the east segments and one of the caryatids were evacuated to London by Lord Elgin, reproductions being introduced in their spots.
The Temple of Apollo at Didyma - The Greeks built the Temple of Apollo at Didyma, Turkey (about 300 BC). The design of the temple was known as dipteral, a term that refers to the two sets of columns surrounding the interior section. These columns surrounded a small chamber that housed the statue of Apollo. With Ionic columns reaching 19.5 m (64 ft) high, these ruins suggest the former grandeur of the ancient temple.
The Temple of Athena Nike - part of the Acropolis in the city of Athens. The Greeks built the Temple of Apollo at Didyma, Turkey (about 300 BC). The design of the temple was known as dipteral, a term that refers to the two sets of columns surrounding the interior section. These columns surrounded a small chamber that housed the statue of Apollo. With Ionic columns reaching 19.5 m (64 ft) high, these ruins suggest the former grandeur of the ancient temple.
Ancient India Coinage
Dynastic Coins
Dating of regular dynastic coin issues is controversial. The earliest of these coins relate to those of the Indo-Greeks, the Saka-Pahlavas and the Kushans. These coins are generally placed between the 2nd century BC and 2nd century AD. Hellenistic traditions characterise the silver coins of the Indo-Greeks, with Greek gods and goddesses figuring prominently, apart from the portraits of the issuers. These coins with their Greek legends are historically significant, as the history of the Indo-Greeks has been reconstructed almost entirely on their evidence. The Saka coinage of the Western Kshatrapas are perhaps the earliest dated coins, the dates being given in the Saka era which commences in AD 78. The Saka era represents the official calendar of the Indian Republic.
Indo-Greek Coins
Satavahana
The Satavahanas were the early rulers of the region between the rivers, Godavari and the Krishna. They were also referred to as the Andhras. They soon brought under their control, both the Western-Deccan and Central India. The dates of their coming in to power are contentious and are variously put between 270 BC to 30 BC. Their coins were predominantly of copper and lead, however, silver issues are also known. These coins carried the motifs of fauna like elephants, lions, bulls, horses, etc. often juxtaposed against motifs from nature like hills, tree, etc. The silver coins of the Satavahanas carried portraits and bilingual legends, which were inspired by the Kshatrapa types.
Coins of the Satavahana
Gupta
Gupta coinage (4th-6th centuries AD) followed the tradition of the Kushans, depicting the king on the obverse and a deity on the reverse; the deities were Indian and the legends were in Brahmi. The earliest Gupta coins are attributed to Samudragupta, Chandragupta II and Kumaragupta and their coins often commemorate dynastic succession as well as significant socio-political events, like marriage alliances, the horse sacrifice, etc (King and queen type of coin of Chandragupta 1, Asvamedha type, etc.), or for that matter artistic and personal accomplishments of royal members (Lyrist, Archer, Lion-slayer etc.).
Description
Coins of the Guptas
Foreign Coin Hoards found in India
Ancient India had considerable trade links with the Middle East, Europe (Greece and Rome) as well as China. This trade was carried out over land partly along what came to be alluded to as the silk route and partly through maritime trade. By the time of Pliny, the Roman historian, Roman trade with India was thriving, and indeed creating a balance of payments problem for the Roman Empire. In South India, which had a thriving maritime trade, Roman coins even circulated in their original form, albeit slashed at times as a gesture disclaiming intrusions of foreign sovereignty.
A slashed Roman Aureus of Augustus
Other Coins
In the interregnum between the fall of the Maurayans and the rise of the Guptas various tribal republics in the Punjab and monarchies in the Indo-Gangetic plain issued coins. Most coins were issued in Copper. The coins of the Yaudheyas were influenced in design and motif by the coins of the Kushans. They followed the weights of the Indo-bacterian rulers.
Coin of the Yaudheyas
Value of a Cent
The American Large Cent Coin Value
The American large cent is worth at least $15 to $20 today. That is the minimum value of a coin in what dealers call "good" condition.
Your are very fortunate to own one, as those who assemble collections of the American large cent are very passionate about them and actively seek additions to their collections.
Should your coin be a rare date or even a well preserved large cent the value increases significantly.
The coin pictured is an example of a high condition coin any collector would desire. Quickly paying $120 or more. Spirited bidding often erupts at auctions over the rare large cents.
Discovering rare dates, high condition, or rare varieties all contributes to how much your coins are worth.
The American Large Cent "Grade" Determines Value
In order to determine the value of your coin it is necessary to "grade" its condition.
The concept is straight forward... as a coin circulates and wears, all the varying degrees of its condition are each assigned a grade.
Compare your coin to the grading images and find the closest match. The Braided Hair type large cent is pictured. Examine closely the hair around her face and the amount of detail showing in the leaves of the wreath on the reverse. The more detail evident the better the condition and grade. If your coin is slightly better than pictured, use the higher value of the price range.
Amazingly, some examples of the American large cent survive today in uncirculated or mint state grade, meaning no signs of wear. Skill is required to accurately grade a mint state large cent. Beware... small differences in grade often have large differences in value.
Grading a coin is not an exact science. It is your opinion, dealers and collectors have their own opinions... and they can all differ slightly. There is hope...
Collectors and dealers consider PCGS and NGC as leaders in coin grading services. They both authenticate, grade your coin, and identify any special varieties. Especially important with the earlier years. The small fee you pay provides assurance you understand and receive the full value of your coin.
Investigate dealer's listings, look for those offering the American large cent for sale, their listings and prices usually include a notation of the NGC or PCGS assigned grade. Additionally... these coin dealers are potential buyers of your coins.
Art of ancient Egypt
Ancient Egyptian art is the painting, sculpture, architecture and other arts produced by the civilization of Ancient Egypt in the lower Nile Valley from about 3000 BC to 100 AD. Ancient Egyptian art reached a high level in painting and sculpture, and was both highly stylized and symbolic . Much of the surviving art comes from tombs and monuments and thus there is an emphasis on life after death and the preservation of knowledge of the past.
In a more narrow sense, Ancient Egyptian art refers to the canonical 2nd and 3rd Dynasty art developed in Egypt from 3000 BC and used until the 2nd century. Most elements of Egyptian art remained remarkably stable over that 3,000 year period with relatively little outside influence. The quality of observation and execution started at a high level and remained near that level throughout the period. Portraiture in Ancient Egypt , above all of royalty, was highly developed, and represented a complicated mixture of realistic depiction of individuals and stylization.
Made in History
2,700 years of history
The legacy of aged mint pieces is a subject that interests and enjoyments authorities and researchers the world over. The most established coin accessible today was found in Efesos, an aged Hellenic city and prosperous exchanging focus on the shoreline of Asia Minor. The 1/6 stater, envisioned underneath, is more than 2,700 years of age, making it one of the most punctual coins. Produced using electrum, a characteristic occuring compound of gold and silver, the coin began in the region of Lydia. It had a configuration on one side just, an aftereffect of the primitive system for production. This antiquated stater was hand struck. A bite the dust with a configuration (for this situation a lion's head) for the (front) of the coin was put on a blacksmith's iron. A clear bit of metal was set on top of the pass on, and a punch pounded onto the converse. The result was a coin with a picture on one side and a punch check on the other.
Stater
The stater is a key show in the Department of Coins and Medals of the British Museum, which houses one of the world's finest numismatic accumulations, containing around 1 million items. The most punctual issues, thought to date from the rule of Alyattes (around 610 - 560 BC) or maybe his antecedent Sadyattes - both of the Mermnad administration - characteristic the Lydian lords' image of a thundering lion, quite often with an inquisitive handle, frequently called a "nose wart," on its brow.
Electrum
Lydia does not have numerous brilliant things to expound on in correlation with different nations, aside from the gold clean that is conveyed down from Mount Tmolus.
- Herodotus, The History, 1.93
The Pactolus River next to the slants of Mount Tmolus in the kingdom of Lydia was a standout amongst the most paramount wellsprings of electrum in the antiquated world. As indicated by Greek mythology, the stream procured its electrum when King Midas of close-by Phrygia washed in it to wash away his brilliant touch, which had transformed even his sustenance into gold, an enlightening anecdote regarding the danger of riches. In fact, The Paktolos River obtained its electrum from electrum-laden quartz stores close Mount Tmolos (called Mount Bozdag today).
The alluvial stores of gold were blended with to the extent that 40% silver and some copper; such a gold-silver blend is called electrum. The most punctual coins were made of electrum with an institutionalized 55% gold, 45 silver and 1-2% copper fixation and had either no outline or a some evidently irregular surface striations on one side and a punch impact on the other.
Exactly as the leaders of the Middle East today have ended up rich from oil, so the old Lydian rulers got to be rich by collecting and stamping currencies from electrum. The capital city of old Lydia was Sardis, and it was a real business focus joining the Asian kingdoms of the east with the seaside Greek urban communities of Ionia, including Miletus. It is not a mischance that the first coins showed up in the imperative business focuses of Lydia and contiguous Ionia, nor that the first arrangement of bimetallic cash - the first arrangement of interrelated gold and silver issues - was additionally created there. As the nineteenth century German antiquarian Ernst R. Curtius composed, "The Lydians got to be ashore what the Phoenicians were via ocean, the arbiters in the middle of Hellas and Asia."
Electrum Stater Of Miletos
The most celebrated coin kind of old Miletus, and one of the soonest of all coins that might be ascribed to a specific city, is the electrum stater that peculiarities a squatting lion regardant on the front, and three incuse punches on the opposite. Despite the fact that they are not too much uncommon, these electrum staters (weighing a little more than fourteen grams) are justifiably
exceptionally extravagant. The fourteen-gram staters, on the other hand, speak to stand out group in a complete denominational arrangement that likewise included thirds, sixths, twelfths, and twenty-fourths of a stater, and maybe more modest groups too. These lesser categories, of course, summon less stratospheric costs.
Miletos Stater
A few Greek urban areas, including Miletos, and the Lydian lords started printing these first coins by stamping the symbol of their city into one side of a standard weight piece of electrum and different punches into the other. These gadgets were utilized to encourage exchange by confirming that the inherent esteem and weight of the metal was ensured by the issuing power. Of these first coins, those of Miletos like the current illustration (600-550 BC), are presumably the finest from an imaginative viewpoint. The lion, astutely designed with its head returned and tail twisted over its hindquarters to conveniently fit inside the rectangular casing, is a gem of Archaic Greek symbolization. The energy and fierceness of the mammoth are delightfully passed on by its growling face and erect mane. Mean Diameter: 21 x 17.5 mm. (0.827 x 0.689"). Weight: 13.91 gm. (0.435 Troy oz.)
When a Paper is Diamond
The Penny Black and Two Penny Blue
Initially a competition was launched by the Treasury to find a design suitable for the new stamps, but no winner was declared as it was concluded that none were suitable.
Instead they made use of a design suggested by Hill himself, based on a profile of Queen Victoria, the image being of her when she was just 15 years old. All British stamps continue a tradition of presenting the monarch's head somewhere on the stamp.
Penny Black block of 4
The Penny Black and Two Penny Blue were released together (or at least within days of each other - there is some dispute over whether the Blue was fractionally later) at the start of May 1840. Roughly 68,808,000 Penny Blacks alone were released.
The New York Dispatch
Surprisingly, perhaps it was nearly two years before stamps were picked up in another country. That was the United States of America, but the stamps issued were not by any means for use all round the country.
Instead it was created by one Alexander M Greig of New York City, who issued stamps, bearing a portrait of Washington, printed from line engraved plates, and charged 2c only to carry letters anywhere in the city - or at least as far as 23rd street. The government charged 3c.
Greig established his postage stamp in February 1842. By August it had been sold into the government and became the United States City Dispatch Post. Greig was made a government officer, apparently as part of removing his annoying undercutting of the authorities.
The Zurich 4 and 6
Within days of Greig's postage stamp being absorbed by the government, a report was published in Switzerland - or rather the Swiss canton of Zurich - recommending a simplification of the postage system, which was as cumbersome as Britain's had been.
In March the following year, Zurich became continental Europe's first postal authority to issue postage stamps based on a design produced by a lithographer called Esslinger of Zurich.
The two stamps were valued at four and six rappen to cover postage rates within the city and outside it respectively. The design made things as clear as possible with large numeral appearing right in the centre of the stamp.
The Brazilian Bull's Eye
South America's first stamp issue was the fourth in the world, but in fact could have been its second with a law passed back in November 1841 allowing the Brazilian government to create stamps - some time before Alex Greig started annoying the authorities in New York.
In fact, the Brazilian Bull's Eyes were released on 1 August 1843, having face values of 30, 60, and 90 réis. Brazil was nevertheless the second country in the world, after Great Britain, to issue postage stamps valid within the entire country.
Brazilian Bullseyes
The name derives from the ornamental value figures inside the oval settings such that pairs of them could resemble a pair of bull's eyes.
In mint condition a 30 reis Bull's Eye stamp is worth around $5,000.
The Double Geneva
The second stamp issued in continental Europe was again in Switzerland. But interestingly the early proposal by Alphonse de Candolle makes no reference to events in Zurich if he had any knowledge of them.
Instead he had simply been examining the effects of stamp use by Britain, which he did not refer to in his report by name, but merely refers to it as the 'most mercantile nation in the world which knew best the value of time'.
The Double Geneva followed on Brazil's production closely with the first issuing taking place on September 30 1843. However only a few were successfully created and survive. Indeed, at one point it was thought the stamp was never issued and examples were forgeries.
A Double Geneva in good condition is now worth around 55,000 Swiss Francs (US$50,000).
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Which Shakespeare play features 'Feste', a jester? | William Shakespeare Essay - Shakespeare's Clowns and Fools - eNotes.com
Shakespeare's Clowns and Fools
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Shakespeare's Clowns and Fools
Appearing in most of Shakespeare's dramas, the clown or fool figure remains one of the most intriguing stage characters in the Shakespearean oeuvre and has frequently captured the interest of contemporary critics and modern audiences. Taking many forms, Shakespearean fools may be generally divided into two categories: the clown, a general term that was originally intended to designate a rustic or otherwise uneducated individual whose dramatic purpose was to evoke laughter with his ignorance; and the courtly fool or jester, in whom wit and pointed satire accompany low comedy.
The dramatic sources of Shakespeare's simple-minded clowns are at least as old as classical antiquity. In the plays themselves, such figures as Bottom of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Dogberry of Much Ado About Nothing are typically classified as clowns, their principal function being to arouse the mirth of audiences. The history of the courtly fool or jester in England is somewhat briefer, with these fools making early appearances in the courts of medieval aristocracy during the twelfth century. By the time of Queen Elizabeth's reign, courtly fools were a common feature of English society, and were seen as one of two types: natural or artificial. The former could include misshapen or mentally-deficient individuals, or those afflicted with dwarfism. Such fools were often considered pets—though generally dearly loved by their masters—and appear infrequently in Shakespeare's writing. The artificial fool, in contrast, was possessed of a verbal wit and talent for intellectual repartee. Into this category critics place Shakespeare's intellectual or "wise-fools," notably Touchstone of As You Like It, Feste of Twelfth Night, and King Lear's unnamed Fool.
Critical analysis of Shakespearean clowns and fools has largely explored the thematic function of these peculiar individuals. Many commentators have observed the satirical potential of the fool. Considered an outcast to a degree, the fool was frequently given reign to comment on society and the actions of his social betters; thus, some Shakespearean fools demonstrate a subversive potential. They may present a radically different worldview than those held by the majority of a play's characters, as critic Roger Ellis (1968) has observed. Likewise, such figures can be construed as disrupting the traditional order of society and the meaning of conventional language, as Roberta Mullini (1985) has argued. As for so-called clowns—including the simple "mechanicals" of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Trinculo of The Tempest, and Launcelot Gobbo of The Merchant of Venice—most are thought to parody the actions of other characters in the main plots of their respective plays and to provide low humor for the entertainment of groundlings. Several critics, however, have acknowledged the deeper, thematic functions of Shakespeare's clowns, some of whom are said to possess a degree of wisdom within their apparent ignorance.
Other topics of critical inquiry concerning fools are varied. Several scholars have studied the significance of certain Elizabethan actors who were thought to have initially enacted the roles Shakespeare wrote. Preeminent among these is the comedic actor Robert Armin, for whom several critics have suggested Shakespeare created the witty, even philosophical, fool roles of Feste, Touchstone, and Lear's Fool. Still other critics have focused on Shakespeare's less easily categorized clowns. Walter Kaiser (1963) has examined Falstaff's multifaceted function in the Henriad, which he has argued bears similarities to those of Shakespeare's other "wise fools." William Willeford (1969) has focused on the darker side of folly by exploring the title character of Hamlet as a unique form of the Shakespearean fool. Additionally, Catherine I. Cox (1992) has investigated Shakespeare's characteristic blending of comedy and tragedy through the use of clowns and other purveyors of laughter in his tragic plays.
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Roger Ellis (essay date 1968)
SOURCE: "The Fool in Shakespeare: A Study in Alienation," in The Critical Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 3, Autumn, 1968, pp. 245-268.
[In the following essay, Ellis discusses Shakespeare's fools as figures who represent worldviews fundamentally different from those of the majority of society.]
I
Of all the characters in literature, hardly any has a longer life, runs truer to type, and is of more lasting significance, than the fool. As ancient as Pandarus, he is yet as modern as the tramps in Waiting for Godot. In him society's anxieties about itself find an outlet; yet the laughter which he arouses is at the same time a profound criticism of the forces which have made him what he is. The counterpart in his exaggerated non-involvement of the society of which he is a part, he is yet in his profound self-awareness and in his pity for those who suffer, its one hope of salvation.
Of course, most of the time we do not see him in this way. For us, he is a man slipping on the beliefs of society, one always at odds with the standards it maintains: a man, as it seems, imprisoned in a world of fantasy, and whose sole function is to excite the laughter that assures us of the solidity of our beliefs. So we laugh at Chaplin's agonized incomprehension of a world of umbrellas, hats and lamp-posts that never seem to give us any trouble; we roar at Buster Keaton's unawareness of the logic of existence, from which only benevolent nature rescues him. The fool is often presented to us in this way, as an object merely for scorn or amusement. Consider the fools in Restoration drama, for instance: fops wishing to affect the graces they do not possess, country bumpkins who want to ape the manners of civilized London—these serve only to assure us that society is, after all, in the right.
But this way of presenting the fool depends on the writer's having a fixed view about the nature of the world he is representing. At its simplest, as in the case of Restoration drama, it depends on his having taken on uncritically all the prejudices of his audience. The key to this presentation is that the fool is being studied from the outside. No attempt is made to see why he is a fool, or what it means to him to be a fool, and why he is the fool, rather than the characters who represent a different world-view. But literature which, like Restoration drama, is the embodiment only of the one world-view seems not to represent adequately the fullness of existence for which men long. It is of the essence that there will be many world-views, and literature which does not attempt to represent the totality of existence, but expounds the ethic only of a particular group, runs the risk of ceasing to be literature and becoming something else.
Shakespeare, at least, is not one to neglect the world in order to put forward a certain view. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, he has Duke Theseus say:
. . . I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact . . .
(Act V, Sc. i, 11. 2-8)
This speech is an airy dismissal of the whole fantastic action we have been witnessing—the fond illusions of love which drive people out of their minds. And, no doubt, it is fitting for a man in whom all opposites have harmonised to dismiss with such a wave of the hand all the imperfections of mankind. I am not sure, however, that Shakespeare adopts the same attitude. Perfection is no doubt an admirable thing, but not every man can hope to reach it, and Shakespeare will not risk the narrowness that would follow too rigorous and exclusive a definition of virtue.
But there is a more important point to be drawn from Theseus' speech. Theseus is making an after-dinner joke about the way all imperfections are related, as springing from an incomplete way of viewing the world and as expressed in actions that are consequently rather silly. But Shakespeare, I think, sees another connection between 'the lunatic, the lover and the poet'. In a world where opposites have not harmonised, the poet is like 'the lunatic [and] the lover' because, like them, he is different from the majority of people. He is a trail-blazer, committed to probing the totality of existence, and unwilling to reject any of the views, however bizarre, that are a part of it. If we may borrow Laing's phrase, he interiorizes human existence.1 Where Theseus can consider a whole race of men from the outside, secure in the knowledge of his own perfection, the writer will present all existence from the inside.
In this important respect he is like the fool, for the fool understands his own existence from the inside, as most other characters do not. Set in a world where he is early made aware that he is different and somehow unacceptable to the majority, he is forced to examine himself and the bases of his behaviour. This self-examination is foreign to the others, who have never needed to assess their own existence in this way, and for whom the source of behaviour is found in beliefs outside them and half-felt assumptions shared with everyone else. Consequently, they react to a person who acts on assumptions other than theirs, rooted in the logic of his own being, by dismissing him contemptuously as a fool—treating him as an outsider, and denying him all personality. This is how Goneril treats the fool in King Lear; it is what happens time and again to the tramps and beggars who erupt into the world of modern drama and who are the fool's spiritual descendants—for instance, the tramp in David Rudkin's Afore Night Come. But the fool is aware, as those who judge him are not, that their reaction, far from demonstrating Tightness or wrongness, merely shows that they have never examined their own existence, and have no way of interpreting difference except by labelling it folly. They can hardly respond to another person when they have never taken themselves seriously.
Like the writer, then, the fool is aware of the complexities of social living in a way that most people are not. But there is a vital difference between him and the writer. The writer chooses to present sides of a problem; he creates this complexity, and is thus, however involved he may be in the viewpoints expressed, distant from the conflict, secure in the lordship of creation. The fool, on stage and in real life, lacks this security. He is in the thick of things. He is forced to a recognition of the double standard, his own and the world's, and to the knowledge that where he sees himself as a self, the rest of the world will mark his caperings solely as an excuse for laughter. This becomes his greatest agony. It reflects in his failure to act. As a man, he must act meaningfully in order to build community; as the outsider, he is deprived of the possibility of ever doing so, because he has no one with whom to share the vision which, expressed in action, has as its end the making of community. To remain where he is is to be cut off from community; but the price of his integration into that community is the abandonment of all that he knows, all that makes him a self. The dotty old woman in The Whisperers, for example, is integrated, willy-nilly, into society. But this means the exposing of her 'voices', the only thing she has, as a fantasy, as nothing at all. Like the character of the parable, she is worse off in the end than she was before. So, whichever way he turns, the fool is caught. This agony of indecision is the special mark of Beckett's characters. For them, 'the dreadful has already happened'; the world has passed them by, bound for destruction, and damnation is all about them. They cannot return to a world which they desperately need. And so they remain, waiting, standing at doors, unable to move out into the world. It is the same for Pinter's tramp in The Caretaker. Placed in a mad world, he cannot ever become a person without the papers that give him his identity. But they are at Sidcup, and we know he will never get them. The agony is the greater because the fool sees that the labels society has pinned upon him fit just as well upon society itself, and that it is all merely a matter of perspective. 'Handy-dandy', cries the mad Lear, 'which is the justice, which is the thief?' Where does real madness lie—in the 'voices', or in the sterile cleanliness of a friendless observation ward? In a world where real living is not understood save by a minority, the real agony for the fool is to see that the rest of the world is mad. As Vendice observes in The Revenger's Tragedy:
Surely we're all mad people, and they
Whom we think mad, are not; we mistake those;
'Tis we are mad in sense, they but in clothes.
(Act III, Sc. v, 11. 79-81)
In art the finest expression of this agonizing dilemma is surely the work of Rouault. The clowns and prostitutes whom he so often makes his subjects embody a consciousness of life at odds with the rest of society: a world blindly self-seeking and hypocritical, summed up in the cruel judges and the helmeted soldier of the Miserere etchings. Fixed forever on the point of the world's rejection, they betray no individuality whatever. Even when they band together in community, as in La Petite Famille, they never seem to smile, as if they are only too well aware of the temporary nature of their refuge and the abiding reality of their rejection.
The isolation of the Rouault clown or the Beckett tramp, and his consequent failure to act, is in real life an impossible situation. There is only one way to escape from it. That is for the fool to cover his tracks and to pretend that he does not care. He covers his tracks by laughing at himself, by mocking the self-knowledge which is the reason of his existence, and by inviting our laughter along with his own. He has no other course of action open to him, for to see society committed to standards opposed to his own, and to fell his own powerlessness to change things, or to ever make people see him as a person, is for him to be given over to the despair that drives people mad. He must therefore take on the mask of folly, deny his individuality, and parade his logicality as the illogicality the rest of us reckon it to be. That is, he pretends to be uncommitted. For this reason we welcome him among us, and tolerate the sharp satire which he uses to relieve his feelings because we know he can do nothing about us. But this is merely a temporary refuge for him. His agony is still with him, for he knows that at any moment we may reject him if he comes too close to the truth or if he bores us; and he knows that he has sold himself and accomplished nothing. He has bought himself time, and that is all.
Other people also behave in this way. The cynic, for example, is a person who reacts to the misery of the world by retreating from it. Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov is just such a person. There is no doubt how strongly he feels about the inhumanity of the so-called enlightenment. As an illustration of the way in which enlightened man has failed to treat his neighbour any better than his 'backward Russian brother' does, he tells the story of a young man brought up like a beast and neglected by society until he has committed murder and is condemned to death. Then people come to visit him; but not with expressions of sympathy. No, their purpose is to convince him that the sole responsibility for his actions lies with himself, and that the society which tolerated the abomination in the first place is clear of any guilt. Man's complete indifference to the outsider, except as an object to be cajoled into subscribing to his own ideals, and his readiness to sacrifice the outsider to them rather than seriously examine them, strikes Ivan as loathsome Pharisaism. But, as he recognises, 'That's characteristic'. There seems to be nothing he can do. And so he retreats into a pose of non-involvement, assuming the detachment of a scholar reporting on insignificant facts in an abstruse journal. His cynicism, then, is merely a front for a deep despair. This means that he is where he was, powerless, able only to jest with the sufferings of the world. His only relief is to show it, beneath a cloak which it cannot penetrate, what it is really like. He is baying at the moon.
What if the fool lacks self-awareness, like the hero of Ivan's story? He will not suffer the agonies I have described, for he will never see how his existence is thwarted and his aims frustrated by the rest of the world. Yet, even so, his existence will have a kind of sadness about it—the sadness of a thwarted child—for he will almost certainly react subconsciously to the hostility of the world by the assumption of one rôle or another. The recent performance of Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream by Mr. Jim Dale is a good case in point. Where I have been tempted to see in Bottom the eternal extrovert, as much at home in the world of the fairies as in the court of Theseus, the sensitive performance of Mr. Dale was a reminder that Bottom is at home everywhere merely because he is at home nowhere; that he is not so much actor as acted upon; and that extroversion is usually a mask for a deep insecurity. Marcel Marceau's great comic creation, Bip, is another example of this kind of fool. Raised for our laughter, he yet points to a malaise in society which prompts a man to retreat from authentic communication into a world of fantasy, and his humour, like Bottom's, is not without a deep sadness.
The fool then is a person committed to a world-view at odds with that of society and powerless to effect acceptance by others of it. In the face of this powerlessness, he will, deliberately or subconsciously, assume the mask of folly in order to protect himself from the world. However it goes with him, he cannot be involved overtly, for that is to lay himself open to the rejection of the world. Nor can he act: he can only be acted upon.
The 'natural fool of fortune' and the cynic are, I suggest, two expressions of the fool distinguished only by the greater degree of awareness possessed by the latter. There is a third kind of fool which it may be worth mentioning here, as representing a yet greater degree of self-awareness still, though we shall not be studying its occurrence in Shakespeare's plays. I mean, of course, the lunatic. As Laing points out,2 the lunatic is a man whom the sense of the impossible demands of the world, and of the equal impossibility of ever realising his own aims, has drawn into himself in a state of permanent inaction. For him, the world is as frighteningly topsy-turvey as it is for the fool:
Through tatter'd rags small vices do appear;
Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pygmy's straw doth pierce it.
(King Lear, Act IV, Sc. vi, 11. 166-9)
But now he lacks all ability to come to terms with it. He sees the world destroying his ideals, and he hunches up into himself in terror. There is only this difference between him and the fool: the fool has bought time. Time has stopped for the madman.
II
This account of the fool is surely unexceptionable. We can use it, for example, to account for the source of that ambivalent tone, something between comedy and tragedy but never siding with either, that is the mark of so much modern drama, and especially the plays of Beckett. It is not so easy, however, to apply it to the fools in Shakespeare's plays. This is because, if we are to share the fool's existence from the inside, we must have some expression of his troubled self-awareness; and we cannot expect this in any play where the fool is placed in a social context as accessory to the actions of other people, for this would inhibit his self-expression and, by confining him to the poses which he has to make in order to protect himself, prevent us from ever seeing him as he really is. If the fool is to be at all central, action has to be done away with, and a firm social context cannot be stated, but must be merely inferred, to be the source of this conflict within him. This is why society never appears in the Beckett world, and why in Tom Stoppard's recent play almost the whole action of Shakespeare's Hamlet is represented off stage. Only when the world of action, the world of other men, is somewhere else, can Rosencrantz and Guildernstern show us the real agonies of the fool. In the plays of Shakespeare, however, where the action of protagonists who exist in a firmly detailed social structure is of primary importance, no such opportunity is given to the fool to reveal himself, except in Hamlet. (It is fair to point out that Mr. Stoppard is only doing for Rosencrantz and Guildernstern what Shakespeare himself did for Hamlet). Consequently, we can only interpret the significance of the fool through the understanding other characters have of him. But they will be able to see only that 'this is not altogether fool'; that the fool
uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the
presentation of that he shoots his wit
(As You Like It, Act V, Sc. iv, 11. 103-4)
The secret agonies of the fool can thus only be brought to light by inference, or by a sensitive performance. But I do not see this as a bad thing, because I believe that, if we are not to rob literature of its power, we must allow it something of the range and implication we would allow to people in real life. We do not deal simply in words, but in a whole complex of nuances and half-guessed meanings.
III
Shakespeare's world is thronged with fools and madmen, and often a single play will treat of several levels of madness. The folly of Hamlet, the madness of Ophelia, the professional Yorick; the natural Touchstone, the melancholic Jaques; the mad Lear, the professional fool, the masquerading Bedlam; these, to choose a few only, present various aspects of the outsider's awareness of himself and a world at odds with him. With Shakespeare's fools we are at once in a world where moral certainties are being questioned: where the questioner proves fool by his question, and the fool proves a wise man by his answer: and where the insane alone seem to understand what the real world is like. In the early plays this uncertainty is used to express a comic rather than a tragic vision. Shakespeare came to the mature comedies with a deep conviction that man, for all his folly, was redeemable, and that sin was not so much destructive as laughable in its presumption. Consequently, the fool's part is not so important. He is permitted to reveal inconsistencies in human behaviour, especially the follies that men commit in love ('wise men, folly-fall'n, quite taint their wit') but he does not directly challenge the bases of social living.
Folly is, however, symptomatic of something deeper than itself, and it is clear even in the mature comedies that the corrupt world, as represented by Shylock or the usurping Duke Frederic, can only be done away with in the magic forests or by the perpetration on it of some holy deceit. In the event, Shakespeare does not turn again to the magic forest, after the mature comedies, until he has probed more deeply the implications of the fool's behaviour, and seen that the good, far from being the victors, are really fatally vulnerable; that, in a world given up to selfishness, they are the real outsiders: and that it is not sin, but goodness, that is the great folly. This is the world of the problem plays and the tragedies, where the implications of the earlier comic vision: 'Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly' are made terrifyingly manifest. And it is here, especially in King Lear, that the fool comes into his own as the agonized expositor of a disordered conscience, the figure who sees truly what the world is like and feels his powerlessness to change it.
But we begin a long time before that—before even the world of the mature comedies. We begin with a small boy who is servant to a foolish knight, the braggadochio Armado:
Armado: I am all these three [three faces of love]
Moth: And three times as much more, and yet nothing at all.
Armado: Fetch hither the swain: he must carry a letter.
Moth: A message well sympathised: a horse to be an ambassador for an ass.
Armado: Ha ha! What sayest thou?
Moth: Marry, sir, you must send the ass upon the horse, for he is very slow-gaited.
(Love's Labours Lost, Act III, Sc. i, 11. 45-54)
Moth in Love's Labours Lost is not a true Shakespearean fool. But he has much in common with them. Like the fool in King Lear, he is yoked to a blind and partial authority, and is quite as likely to receive punishment as praise if he put a foot wrong. Like the fool, too, he knows very well what a fool his master is. But, as his servant, he can do nothing to make him aware of this, for he cannot confront him with his true self. He is therefore reduced to asides which Armado will not understand; and if he should happen to be caught out, he must instantly change the meaning so as to protect himself. Moth, then, is playing a part, pretending to be uninvolved, and taking upon himself, in order to protect himself, the guise of folly that he is ridiculing in his master. But this guise is no solution to the problem, for it merely encourages Armado and the others in their attitude towards him. When, for example, Holofernes is bested by Moth in quipping, he can still retort: 'thou disputest like an infant; go, whip thy gig'. It is a vicious circle. Moth reacts to people viewing him from the outside, as it were, as a 'pretty infant'; but the rôle that is forced upon him involves a perpetuation of this attitude, which means that his position is insecure, and that he can do nothing to expose the world to itself. This does not mean for a moment that he has the wider significance of Shakespeare's fools; it means merely that he is placed in the same position as they are, and like them must have recourse to trickery—especially verbal trickery—to conceal his tracks.
Likewise, the 'natural fools' of Shakespearean comedy—Launce and Speed, Lancelot Gobbo, Dogberry and Verges, Justice Shallow—do not have the wider implications of the fool. They are fools raised for laughter, not for any significance they may have as commentators on the action. They stumble across words, and break their shins on the conventions of the world, but without that sense of the world's hostility towards them that marks out the fool. They are so completely lacking in self-awareness that they do not even hear the laughter of the other characters. Yet we can see in them links at a number of points with the true Shakespearean fool. Consider, for instance, Launce and his dog in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. This dog is a perpetual cross to him. He has been obliged to suffer time and again for its misbehaviour in the hope that it will mend its ways. But, of course, it does not. Launce's folly is that, just as Moth expects Armado to be more than Armado, he expects his dog to be more than a dog. On his departure for Milan, he tells us, 'this cruel-hearted cur shed (not) one tear: he is a stone, a very pebble-stone, and has no more pity in him than a dog'. What does he expect? Relationship of the kind he looks for is clearly not to be found with a dog. Shakespeare is here presenting the fool from the outside, since Launce's position is absurd and foolish. But he does have other characteristics in common with the fools of the later plays. Like them, he has a vision simple almost to the point of fixation. He is like a child in the way he can become so absorbed in turning the grief of parting into a game that he hardly has any room for grief. Lancelot Gobbo similarly plays games both with himself and his father in The Merchant of Venice, and he reacts to the threats of Shylock in the same way as, earlier, Moth had done to Armado. But this is because, like Launce, he is a child.
The naturals are also children in their incomprehension of the complexities of language. They do not use the right words; or if they have the right words, they lack the ability to string them together into meaningful sentences. Poor Peter Quince's stuttering version of the prologue to the mechanicals' entertainment earns this rejoinder:
Indeed, he hath played on his prologue like a
child on a recorder: a sound, but not in government.
His speech was like a tangled chain, nothing
impaired, but all disordered.
(Act V, Sc. i, 11. 122-5)
and it is not untypical of the reaction which the mechanicals provoke among the gentry. The court of Theseus, Leonato, the court of the Duke of Navarre—the sophisticated world brushes them contemptuously aside and views them only as subjects for laughter, as blocks, as children. The fool similarly uses language to confuse his hearers, deliberately masking the apparent connections in order to achieve startling results:
A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit:
how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!
(Twelfth Night, Act III, Sc. i, 11. 11-13)
Unlike the fools, however, these naturals are without agony, because they are without self-awareness. Their childlike absorption in their own world-view is total. This is why Costard's impersonation of Pompey at the end of Love's Labours Lost is a success, whereas Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel, characters whose social sense is more developed, are terribly put out by the mockery of the court. Because he is not aware of the court's attitude, Costard can respond to their ironical 'Great thanks, great Pompey', with the modest
'Tis not so much: but I hope I was perfect:
I made a little fault in the 'great'
(Act V, Sc. ii, 11. 553-5)
Characters somewhat like them, but with considerably more self-awareness, are Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. Gratiano reacts to Antonio's heavy cheer in the opening scene with the words:
Let me play the Fool:
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come . . .
Why should a man, whose blood is warm within
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?
(Act I, Sc. i, 11. 79-80, 83-4)
—which earn him Bassanio's tart: 'Gradano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice'. But if, as Antonio has said, the world is a stage where people must play a part (and this is an important image for our understanding of the fool) why should Gratiano not play the part of the fool? Like the naturals, he seems to the others to be talking a great deal of nonsense. For him, however, it is merely a pose, and he knows it. Mercutio similarly talks a great deal, and is rebuked by Romeo for wasting their time: 'Peace, peace, Mercutio peace! Thou talkst of nothing'. The nothing is Mercutio's Queen Mab speech, and it is a great deal of nothing, as Mercutio himself recognises:
True, I talk of dreams
Which are the children of an idle brain
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy
(Act I, Sc. v, 11. 96-8)
Mercutio's attitude to dreams and to fantasy is much the same as Theseus': like Theseus, he takes his stand on the world of reality, the same world where men kill each other for the sake of honour. Yet he is unable to resist chasing an idea to its conclusion, however preposterous, or tilting at inconsistency in himself or his friends. When Romeo has jumped over the wall, Mercutio calls him:
Nay, I'll conjure too:
Romeo! Humours! madman! Passion! Lover! . . .
(Act II, Sc. i, 11. 6-7)
This is all great fun: lovers lay themselves open to this sort of treatment because 'all nature in love is mortal in folly'. But the fool is here a little late with his witticisms. Romeo is no longer conjuring 'Helen's beauty [out of] a brow of Egypt', but calling on the woman whom he loves to distraction. Like Mercutio, the fool has considerable verbal fluency, a device that stretches, as we have seen, all the way back to the early comedies: more important, like Mercutio, he comes too late to do anything. He is always that instant behind the main action. Gratiano and Mercutio adopt the pose of fool here for reasons we cannot fathom. It may be that in a world where misfortune is the common lot of man, and where the Shylocks and the Capulets are always out for revenge, it is simpler to whistle trouble away than to face it. The pose is, however, merely a pose. Gratiano shows his commitment when in the trial scene he reproaches Shylock for his monstrous inhumanity; likewise, Mercutio shows his loyalty by dying for family ties. Comedian to the end, he attempts to externalise his situation by resuming the mask of folly; but the bitterness wrung from him in 'A plague o' both your houses' shows how even the fool's playing must sometimes give way to the realities which it is attempting to put aside. Secure though he may be for the moment, the time will come when he must face the realities symbolised, later, by the skull of Yorick.
IV
And so, by this roundabout way, we come to the fools of the mature comedies—Bottom, Touchstone, Jaques, Feste.3 The characters we have so far considered are not used by Shakespeare strictly as fools. The logic for their existence is little more than quirks of personality. They are expressions of the outsider introduced mainly for the sake of variety, and even if, like Mercutio, they jest about the world they find themselves in, they never compromise it by their wit, or express the sense of divided loyalties. Shakespeare's fools are of course descended from them. Both the natural folly of the mechanicals and the inspired wit of the courtiers have gone into their making. We might think of Bottom and Touchstone as descended from one side of the family, and Jaques and Feste from the other. But there are significant differences; they are all greater than their begetters. They crystallise for us the existence of different worlds, and reflect in the 'shivered mirror'4 of their language the opposites which in themselves make for destruction and which only benevolent nature harmonises. Bottom and Touchstone may be very like the mechanicals in their misuse of language, and Feste and Jaques like the courtiers in the way they deliberately distort it; but they are rather more aware of their position vis-à-vis the world. It is an awareness that sits uneasily upon them.
This is especially true, I believe, of Bottom. As I suggested earlier, he is, for all his extroversion, a character extremely sensitive to criticism, easily hurt, and with a child's need for the approval of the others and fear of being left out in the cold. This is plain from his dealings with Peter Quince, a character who has more sense of what is required by the world and who, like Holofernes, is terribly ill at ease when he has to recite the prologue before the clever lords and ladies of the Athenian court. Peter Quince sees Bottom only as a nuisance, someone who will never keep quiet and leave the managing of the play to its producer, and who has no respect for rank or the fitness of the occasion. He resorts to all kinds of pressure—flat contradictions, flattery, and so on—to persuade Bottom to stay in line. In acting like this he does not see Bottom as the self he is, and treats him only as the mask he presents. Bottom is uneasily aware of all this. When the others flee from him in terror in the forest, he is convinced that they are playing a cruel game on him:
I see their knavery: this is to make an ass of
me: to fright me, if they could. But I will not
stir from this place, do what they can: I will
walk up and down, and I will sing, that they shall
hear I am not afraid.
(Act III, Sc. i, 11. 115-18)
In a world where his own childlike games are misinterpreted as tiresome stupidity, the games other people play are full of menace, as it is with the game Goldberg devises for Stanley in Pinter's Birthday Party. Bottom knows that in this situation it is best to put on a brave face, to jest away his fear. But he is not at home, all the same, and his position is very much that of the fool—acted upon, unsure how to act himself. It is worth noticing in this connection how largely he takes his cue from the attitudes of other people. When the fairy queen addresses him, he seems to be terrified of her and desperately jests his way through the encounter for fear of being transformed into a beast. Not until the fairies greet him does he regain his assurance: from then on, all becomes grist to his mill. But this acceptance of him as a person, which allows him to indulge in his whimsy without rebuke, happens only in a magic world of fairies, in 'the fierce vexation of a dream'. Everywhere else, he seems to be faced with the dilemma of the fool: how to act and be himself.
It may seem strange that a character who has so little to do in the play should bear the weight of such a detailed study. Yet it is clear that what Theseus does for the play symbolically, as it were, Bottom does for it by his participation in the various levels of the action. Where Theseus' non-involvement, as expressed, for example, in the opening speech of Act 5, is the symbolic expression of the unity to which all life aspires, Bottom's non-involvement represents dramatically the only feasible course of action a man can follow in a world where people are given over to the weakness and folly which Theseus condemns. Only once is he given the kind of speeches that point up the fool's function in the other plays:
Methinks, mistress, you should have little
reason for that: and yet, to say the truth,
reason and love keep little company together
nowadays: the more the pity, that some honest
neighbours will not make them friends.
(Act III, Sc. i, 11. 135-8)
and this comment is worth setting alongside Theseus' utterance about the lunatic and the lover, in its expression of the same awareness of the divided self which we find Theseus rejecting from his godlike position. Yet the mere fact of his presence in the play shows us the outsider at odds with his society, unsure how to come to terms with it, and assuming, for his own protection, the mask of the fool. He is the other polarity in a play which has as its ideal the godlike Theseus.
Touchstone is a more obvious instance of the Shakespearean fool. He possesses an awareness of the reality of existence not shared by the other characters. He sees life, for example, as a process of physical change:
And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,
And then from hour to hour we rot and rot
(Act II, Sc. vii, 11. 26-7)
He sees love and marriage as a mere expression of instinct; likewise, he sees how the elaborate patterns of social custom are designed to prevent the natural from ever occurring. Above all, he sees the real wisdom to lie in those who know themselves for fools: 'the fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool'. He knows, moreover, that this awareness of his is ill-matched with the other characters in the play, and not merely the sluttish Audrey, who is unable to understand one of his classical allusions, and to whom he says
When a man's verses cannot be understood,
nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child,
Understanding, it strikes a man more dead
than a great reckoning in a little room.
(Act III, Sc. ii, 11. 10-13)
He knows that the others, similarly, will fail to see the understanding behind his wit, and will not see the 'great reckoning' in his 'little room'. Nor is it wise for him to be too eager in putting his views to a world on whose sufferance he depends, and which has brought him into the forest simply 'as a comfort to our travel'. When, for instance, he satirises a foolish knight whom Rosalind's father loved, Rosalind replies:
Enough! Speak no more of him; you'll be
whipped for taxation one of these days
his reply:
The more pity, that fools may not speak
wisely what wise men do foolishly.
(Act I, Sc. ii, 11. 79-82)
We are some way from the tone of King Lear here, but it is not so great a jump from this to the words of Lear: 'Take heed, Sirra, the whip!' and the Fool's rejoinder:
Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be
whipped out, when Lady the brach may
stand by the fire and stink.
(Act I, Sc. iv, 11. 117-20)
In the same way, when Rosalind attacks him for his attempt to reduce the love exemplified in Orlando's romantic verse to the level of his own awareness, he is silenced, and can only reply: 'You have spoken; but whether wisely or no, let the forest judge'. Like Bottom, he is poised uneasily between his awareness of what the world requires and where his own self-awareness would lead. It is for this reason that he takes the mask of fool upon him, and is quick to disclaim any wit if they should sense it in him:
. . . I shall ne'er be ware of mine own wit till
I break my shins against it.
(Act II, Sc. iv, 11. 56-7)
A man, as it seems, equally at home in court and country, he is really at home nowhere. Isolation seems to be an escape for him from the world of men, at least as Jaques reports him: 'who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun'. Here, at least, he can be himself. Yet this is no escape from his need for community, and in order to be in community with his betters he is obliged to cover his tracks, to play the fool.
Yet, in himself, he does not represent the ideal of the play. His part in the action is minimal. He participates in the wedding rites at the end of the play for completeness' sake only. The reason for this lies in his perpetuating in himself the attitudes others have to him. At the same time as being one of nature's naturals, he has a hankering to be a courtier. This shows up most clearly in the way he treats the country-folk, not with the true respect given to them by men of sense, but with the scornful condescension others have used on him. 'Holla, you clown!' he cries; or, like some gay sophisticate, 'It is meat and drink to me to see a clown'. Even in his dealings with the rustics, he does not have things all his own way. Corin, in his simplicity, is a match for him, and forces him to demonstrate that the illogicality which he parades before the court is the illogicality of a divided self; a self that likes the country but thinks the court better because it is more civilized—and yet fails to realise that the arguments he is advancing are only proving how like they are. If the play has a point, it is surely this: that a man's true self requires neither court nor country. But Touchstone gives only lip-service to the ideal. In his heart of hearts, he would rather be a courtier. That is why he barely belongs to the world of Hymen's rites at the end of the play. It is the others who, purified by the consistency of their inner vision, are incorporated into the marriage feast. Touchstone's consistency is, finally, only a mask. Yet, even as he is, he is acceptable, and accepted, in the magic forests. If he but knew it, it is only here that he can hope to become himself. But it is the lovers who become themselves, and leave him behind. He can never be one with the world because he has not learned to be one with himself.
Jaques is in something of the same position. In a world where we seem to fear no tyranny but that of the bad weather, the voice of Jaques is early heard insisting that if court and country are not the same, it is not because man is less corrupt in the one than in the other. Indeed, for Jaques there is no difference:
Thus most invectively he pierceth through
The body of the country, city, court,
Yea, and of this our life: swearing that we
Are mere usurpers, tyrants, and what's worse,
To fright the animals and kill them up . . .
(Act II, Sc. i, 11. 58-62)
This cynicism may be more than a pose, and may reflect a defensive reaction against a world which is all too prone to idealise its situation. When Jaques thinks himself alone, for instance, he is full of sententious moralising about the way of the world: perhaps he does really believe in what he is saying. Moreover, the others view him unsympathetically: not even his isolation is free from malicious report, just as later, Touchstone's situation is gleefully reported back to the others. Yet much of what he says is clearly a pose: he can 'suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs'. He is, then, a character whose awareness of life is at odds with that of the society he mixes with, and who has therefore found retreat in a pose of cynicism which he hardly ever drops. But he has vested interests in this pose. He enjoys the existence which it provides, and the rôle of the baffling intellectual which his violent wit makes him appear. We see this very clearly in his speech to the Duke: 'I am ambitious for a motley coat'. In it he talks of using his rôle of licensed fool in order to cleanse 'the foul body of the infected world'; it matters most to him, however, that the fool is free to speak his mind and that he has 'a charter large as the wind'. That is, Jaques is not interested in the freedom which comes when inner and outer man are harmonised and the whole world is purified—a process which we see the fool aware of and trying to effect in himself. Jaques is interested only in the freedom from restraint which would enable him to snipe at anyone without suffering the consequences of it. This shows us two things about him. It shows us, first, that he has no understanding of the fool, save as a pose like his own. He has not seen anything of the inner agonies of the fool. Second, if his pose is more than a pose, he has no awareness of what it signifies, for he has no awareness of himself based on anything stronger than Hedonism. Ultimately, he is committed only to his own rôle-playing, which he uses as end rather than as means. The pose of cleansing the foul sins of the world is thus the biggest pose of all. Yet the others tolerate him, except when he comes the self-righteous Pharisee, like Malvolio in Twelfth Night; then they round on him and remind him that he is no better than they are. So Jaques leaves the marriage feast, where he could have no place, and bequeaths to the others the community which he has implicitly denied.
It is interesting that both fools in this play express the conscience of a divided world, not by being the victims of its tensions, but by expressing those tensions in their own characters. Shakespeare usually represents his fools as the conscience of a divided world because his drama is, in the end, symbolic, and its characters assume greater significance than they have in themselves. But in As You Like It the world is clearly a harmony. People who love are made self-consistent, and come to stand for the redemption of a whole society. In such a world, the fool's commentary, presented for the sake of fuller understanding of the real world in which this vision must be lived out, must perforce be a reflection of his own incompleteness as a person. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, on the other hand, where community and redemption are not certain, Bottom has more place as the expositor of a consistency at odds with the world's.
Feste is in a different class again. Altogether more urbane than Jaques, he covers his tracks so completely that we never see what he stands for, but only the folly and affectation which he ridicules in all around him. He shapes his behaviour completely to the situation. He 'wears no motley in [his] brain' but what he does wear there we never find. His function is simply to expose, to laugh, to snipe. Malvolio's comment about him, while it tells us more about Malvolio, is thus important for us: 'I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren fool'. Because he never lets us see what he is really like, he remains, throughout the play, a barren fool. He has no significant part to play in forwarding the action. The heroes and heroines work out their destiny without his help. Like all the fools, he is left behind. The world whose signs he professed to read so clearly perhaps had more to it, after all, than the folly he observed:
Those wits, that think they have thee, do very oft
prove fools; and I, that am sure I lack thee, may
pass for a wise man.
(Act I, Sc. v, 11. 32-4)
A concrete example of the way in which the world shows itself at odds with his interpretation of it is his confusing the newly-arrived Sebastian with his twin sister Viola. But then, how could it be otherwise? The fool deals in probables; he cannot be expected to know about miracles. He thinks he knows everything: but about the possibilities of redemption in the material order, like all the fools, he is uninstructed.
V
In the characters whom we have so far studied certain common features emerge—an awareness at odds with the rest of the world, failure to act, the assumption of a mask. How if the fool should choose to act, or should drop the mask? The result will be either his integration into a society to which he had no wish to belong, or his destruction by that society. For the fool to be other than overtly uncommitted is to bring about his own destruction. We see this in the relationship of Hal to Falstaff. It becomes the key to our understanding of the character of Hamlet, and perhaps also the fool in Lear.
When we talk of Falstaff as a fool, we must remember that from the beginning he has committed himself to a state of misrule, and by putting himself outside the category of fool, has lost the immunity which he might otherwise expect. Nevertheless, his relationship to Hal is based on the apparent uncommitment of the fool, which conceals a deep affection that would not have otherwise been accepted, and which leaves the Prince free to express his ambiguous feelings towards him as he chooses. But Hal knows all along, as Falstaff does not, that the King's son is made for better things:
By this hand, thou thinkest me as far in the devil's
book as thou and Falstaff. . . let the end try the man.
(I Henry IV, Act II, Sc. ii, 11. 43-5)
When he becomes King, Falstaff decides to step outside the rôles they have both been playing until now. It is true that he sees his relationship with the Prince still in material terms, but this matters to him really only as a return of affection which he sees as his due. He will be now, he thinks, treated as butt no longer. His repudiation by the King is inevitable. The rules of a game like that played by Falstaff do not have wider currency than the game; in the real world there is an entirely different set of rules. Only a fool would expect it to be otherwise. To identify the childish vision of society with that society's vision of itself is to invite disaster. And so Henry IV ends with Falstaff made humiliatingly aware of his folly, and, flung back into the world of the fool, making a game of his expectations to con himself out of his grief, like Launce in The Two Gentlemen:
Do not you grieve at this: I shall be sent for in
private to him: look you, he must seem
thus to the world. Fear not your advancement: I
will be the man yet that shall make you great.
(Act V, Sc. v, 11. 76-80)
The world of the comedies is a benevolent one, so that the fool can exist and, to some extent, be himself. But the world of Henry IV is a world where policy reigns, and where men are altogether more calculating. The fool's only hope in such a world is to play his part and never step out of it. This is the world of Hamlet and above all of King Lear. The fool is in a bad way; he must make himself ridiculous, or he is lost. And even then, as Hamlet sees from the skull of Yorick, lost:
Where be your gibes now? your songs? your flashes
of merriment that were wont to set the table on a
roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?
(Act V, Sc. i, 11. 183-86)
Here the fool comes to the point where even self-mockery fails. The reality which his jests concealed is expressed now in the changeless, impartial grinning of a skull. This is a potent symbol for the play. In the same way that the skull in The Revenger's Tragedy serves as the central symbol of the play, so the skull here points to the world's end, whether the world of men or the fool. Hamlet is, above all, about a man who to be secure has to resort to the shifts of folly, and so puts himself in the agonizing position of the fool—a self-awareness that is powerless to act. When he does act, and throw aside the mask of fool, it is his destruction.
Many words have been written about the character of Hamlet, and I cannot pretend that this interpretation will satisfy everybody.5 I take as the key to his character the opening speeches to the Queen and King. I read these as the open, bitter outbursts of a man heavy with grief:
Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not 'seems'.
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black . . .
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
For they are actions which a man might play.
But I have that within which passeth woe . . .
(Act I, Sc. ii, 11. 76-8, 83-5)
In a world of changing customs and loyalties where 'the funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables', Hamlet is certain only of his love for his father and his grief at his death. In terms of this certainty, he sees how the mourning of the others was merely a pose, an affectation: even his mother did not mourn for her husband longer than 'a beast that wants discourse of reason'. But he also sees how his behaviour, springing from his inmost self, must look like a pose 'a man might play' to those who cannot see beyond the forms to the things they signify, and in whom self-interest is the dominant force. He may be right or wrong in thinking this. Probably, Shakespeare means us to see Hamlet as more right than not, because the whole play is mediated to us through his tortured self-consciousness. But that is not in point. Right or wrong, he sees himself in the right: sees the rest given over to a folly that he cannot cure, at best degrading, at worst criminal: sees that other people do not see him as a person, but only as a mask. This sense of his own isolation brings him to the despair that drives people mad, or makes them kill themselves:
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter. O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world . . .
(Act I, Sc. ii, 11. 129-134)
This awareness of the way the court regards him as a man playing a part also suggests to him, when he has vowed vengeance for his father's murder, the pose he is to adopt. As the world sees him, so he will be. He will play the fool and 'put an antic disposition on'. He is not mad, as Ophelia is mad, though his sudden putting on of the mask makes everyone else think that he is. But for him, as for her, to play the fool is to arrest himself in a state of inaction. He can only lie in wait and plot, revealing himself through a mask which even the obtuse Polonius senses to be concealing something deeper: 'though this be madness, yet there is method in it'. His situation is clearly intolerable. He cannot allay suspicion, and the mask of fool leaves him with only the bitterness of a knowledge that is powerless to effect its end. If he is to bring anything about, he must remove the mask.
In the event, he does lower the mask, when he attempts to confront his mother with herself in her chamber. By an unhappy chance, the appearance of the ghost, which only Hamlet sees, convinces her of his madness, so that all he has said to her is merely a further proof of his disordered mind. He disturbs her and perhaps even leads her to a greater awareness of him than she had before, but he does not bring about her repentance. Her treatment of him in the play may be read, as I think Hamlet reads it, as an attempt to salve her conscience in the face of his death's-head awareness; to treat the son more kindly for the father's sake. So she never sees him as a person and cannot do anything to help him.
His confrontation with her, then, is a failure, and his failure to kill the King, and accidental killing of Polonius, mean that he has lost the upper hand, and must now take his chance with the mask of folly firmly in place (IV. 3). His only safety, now that he has exposed himself, is flight. This, as he recognises bitterly, only worsens his situation:
Witness this army [of Fortinbras] of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince . . .
How stand I then
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd . . .
And let all sleep? while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That . . . go to their graves like beds
(Act IV, Sc. iv, 11. 47-8, 56-7, 59-60, 62)
Therefore, he casts aside the mask of folly, and learns the logic of vengeance, the only language the world can understand. There can be no more hesitating; only the fool has time to make the idea of vengeance square with the commandments of God. Hamlet reluctantly takes to the ways of the world. By putting himself on the side of the devils he proclaims that the world leads irresistibly to the grave. And so, for him, it does.
The Lear world is very like the world of Hamlet. In it, self-interest is seen to be the driving force. But where the other characters in Hamlet mostly stand for a simple opposite to virtue in a worldview that does not admit of great complexity, and are consequently flat characters, given prominence only as the searing light of Hamlet's awareness falls upon them, the villains in King Lear are presented much more fully. They have reason for their actions in the self-interested behaviour of their elders, and in their fear of being outside the pale. Goneril and Regan see themselves as deprived both of the power to express themselves and the love which alone makes self-expression possible. They are made to feel outside the pale by their wayward, domineering father. Consequently, when Lear commits the unparalleled folly of removing both the symbol of power and the one prop to his age, they are free to take out all their frustrations on him. Lear's failure is a simple one. He has passed his life in what the others see as a world of make-believe, with the power to make this world pass for the real. Consequently, Cordelia's stepping outside the make-believe in the opening scene leads inevitably to the same reaction as Hal showed to Falstaff. But it also leads to Lear's stepping, himself, outside the game into the real world, where old age, no longer protected by the mask of royalty:
(shaking) all cares and business from our age,
. . . while we
Unburdened crawl toward death
(Act I, Sc. i, 11. 39-41)
can be seen for what it is: 'Idle old man', and 'O sir, you are old . . . You should be ruled and led / By some discretion'. By removing all defences Lear puts himself out on to the heath, beyond the pale. In doing this he learns to see beyond the game to what it ought to have signified, and to what in fact it does signify. To remove the mask is perforce to come to the fool's awareness of the inner man. But for Cordelia, Lear would remain transfixed by this painful awareness of a rottenness, alike within and without, incurable.
Parallel to Lear's removal of the mask, other characters are putting theirs on, notably the fool.6 The fool has a stronger motive for his motley than any of Shakespeare's other fools, for he is devoted to Cordelia and desolated by her banishment, as Lear himself recognises. That is, he is flung back into the hazardous world of the outsider, from which only the love of Cordelia could have protected him. Lear's action has shown the fool all too clearly the ways of the world. He sees Lear much more clearly than Lear sees himself: how blind and self-seeking Lear was in his love, and how violently he reacted to anything that might disturb it, even the threat of Cordelia's openness. This behaviour is of a piece with the rest of the world, and it shows the fool the madness of Lear's expectations of humanity among a people as blind and self-seeking as he is:
Shalt see thy other daughter will use thee kindly; for though she's as like this as a crab's like an apple, yet I can tell what I can tell . . . she will taste as like this as a crab does to a crab.
(Act I, Sc. v, 11. 14-16)
His function is thus to remind Lear insistently of what he has lost by his own stupidity. But because Lear is erratic in his behaviour, affectionate and angry by turns, the fool cannot reveal this awareness fully to him. His only refuge is the perpetual movement from one proposition to another that we saw adumbrated in Moth's relationship with Armado—the distraction that soothes but cannot cure, because it cannot confront the king with himself. But it is not clear that the fool ever hopes for Lear's redemption. The way of the world is a vortex, and there is no escaping from it. Joined together in negation, the fool would reduce Lear to the same awareness of desolation that he has; but not, it seems, in order that he might lead him through it to an acceptance of his situation. Consequently, he cannot, any more than his master, be redeemed, for he rejects the openness that would exchange loss with loss and so build community—in the way, for example, that Behan's characters in The Quare Fellow build community by accepting each other's failure. He hugs his loss of Cordelia to himself as the source of his tormenting of the King which is his only relief. He seems almost to be in love with his own pain.
Both, then, are joined together, by a love and a pain which they will not or cannot share. Yet the bond between them deepens as, one by one, the doors are shut against them, and Lear is reduced to the desolation that the fool had foreseen and perhaps hoped for. It is Lear, however, who makes the advances. In the face of his master's great grief the fool 'labours to outjest / his heart-struck injuries'. But he has not the capacity to respond to Lear as a person. Lear, on the other hand, has. In the fool, on the heath, Lear has the first sight of the human person (Tom o' Bedlam is to be the second) which can alone bring salvation to his fettered self-interest:
My wits begin to turn.
Come on, my boy: how dost, my boy, art cold?
I am cold myself . . .
Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
That's sorry yet for thee.
(Act III, Sc. ii, 11. 67-9, 72-3)
Like the characters in The Quare Fellow, Lear is opening his arms in the overwhelming sense of his own desolation to someone whom he dimly recognises as partner. It is Lear's inherent nobility that brought him to this point. The fool could never have done it, for his refusal to confront Lear openly with himself, or to share his own pain with him, were an insuperable barrier to his being an effective agent in Lear's redemption. In this simple gesture on the heath Lear has outstripped his teacher. The fool is still unable to share his loss, and unable to respond to another's pain, to which his own pain is not in any way commensurate. That is why he disappears. Like Hamlet's actions, the fool's words have all along proclaimed that the way of the world is damnation. He cannot be present when Lear learns at length that this is not the case.
This portrait of the fool is the most compelling and finely drawn of all the fools in Shakespeare. A character who combines piercing insight with the narrowness of despair and who is arrested in the futility of disbelief, he is the perfect embodiment of the ambiguous relationship of the outsider to a world at odds with him. His jesting conceals an agony that is, for all its intensity, shallow. In the end, he fails, because he has not learned to free himself from the toils of his own playing, or to see that the other person matters most in the making of community. The path the fool takes has come a great way from the world of the comedies. It has led him all the way to the blasted heath. There we leave him, forever outside the closed doors of a society which will admit him, if at all, only as far as the kennels.
VI
It remains to consider some of the imagery that Shakespeare uses to point up the fool's situation. The key image seems to me that of the player. It can hardly be accidental that in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet the play-within-the-play has. such an important part. Indeed, we find in Antonio's speech and Gratiano's replay an indication of what the image meant for Shakespeare:
Antonio: I hold the world but as . . . A stage where every man must play a part And mine a sad one.
Gratiano: Let me play the fool . . .
(Act I, Sc. 1, 11. 77-9)
Jaques' speech about the seven ages of man takes up the theme again. Human life is a pageant in which characters act out their destinies and disappear into the wings. The idea was a commonplace at the time: Raleigh uses it, for example, in the poem 'What is our Life?' But Shakespeare develops the idea of playing a part to the point where the actor becomes obscured in the character he is representing. That is why the image fits the fool so perfectly. He is playing a part, and we can never be sure what is really him and what the lines the situation has forced upon him. Strangely, the image is only once used with direct reference to the fool, in Hamlet. Hamlet sees that the players, with no other 'cue for passion' but the need to please their audience, are able to act out vengeance and disaster. Someone in his position, on the other hand, with far more motive for passion, remains unable to act, but
[peaks] like John-a' dreams, unpregnant of
[his] cause
| Twelfth Night |
What was the most used first name of the composer Mussorgsky (1839-1881). | Shakespearean fools: Their modern equivalents - BBC News
BBC News
Shakespearean fools: Their modern equivalents
By Denise Winterman BBC News Magazine
1 April 2012
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Shakespeare loved a fool and not just on 1 April. He used them in most of his well-known plays, but who would their equivalents be today?
It was never about bright clothes, eccentric hats and slippers with bells on them. Shakespeare's fools were the stand-ups of their day and liked to expose the vain, mock the pompous and deliver a few home truths - however uncomfortable that might be for those on the receiving end.
"Shakespearean fools, like stand-ups today, had a licence to say almost anything," says Dr Oliver Double, who teaches drama at the University of Kent and specialises in comedy. "It was an exalted position."
About Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564
He married Anne Hathaway in 1582 and they had three children
He published poetry before his plays, starting in 1593
Records of his plays begin to appear in 1594
Explore the BBC's Shakespeare season
He doesn't use just one type of fool, he uses different characters for different jobs.
There are the knowing, wise fools. Professionals, they are employed by royalty and nobility to entertain. They are smarter than those in positions of authority and used by Shakespeare to mock them, reveal the truth of a situation and provide social commentary.
Then there are the natural fools, who simply lack any grey matter and common sense. As well as providing some slapstick, they are also used to inadvertently reveal some home truths.
"They [the fools] are these strange characters that show up and make witty observations and very often become very central to the action," says Dr Jacquelyn Bessell, a lecturer at the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute.
"They do share a sort of capacity to stir things up, to say things that other characters in their social bracket couldn't possibly get away with saying. In that respect, they're a really useful vehicle driving your moral and argumentative point home if you're a dramatist. They deflate pompous, socially superior characters. They're able to criticise kings."
So smart and articulate or stupid and foolish, who are the closest modern equivalents of Shakespeare's fools and comic characters?
Homer Simpson - Dogberry (Much Ado About Nothing)
Role:Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare's unwitting fools, but one who ultimately comes good. A figure of comic incompetence, he is a clownish policeman who mangles nearly every word he says and botches nearly everything he does. Despite all of this he inadvertently uncovers a villainous plan and saves the day. Incompetent he may be, but ultimately he is the play's real hero. "Characters like Dogberry are humorous and silly, but what they say and do often has a telling significance," says Kiernan Ryan, professor of English Language and Literature at the University of London. "While the characters might not realise this themselves, Shakespeare designs it so the audience doesn't miss the point."
Homer and Dogberry wisdom
Homer to Bart and Lisa: "Kids, you tried, you failed. The lesson is never try"
Dogberry: "O villain! Thou wilt be condemned into everlasting redemption for this"
Modern-day equivalent:Homer Simpson, from Fox Broadcasting's The Simpsons, is greedy, lazy, opportunistic and largely incompetent as a husband, father, friend and employee. Despite his shortcomings and failings he often comes good as well, but in his own amoral way - like taking daughter Lisa to see an exhibition she is devastated to have missed, but doing it by breaking into the museum after hours.
Why:Dogberry and Homer are both incompetents. The policeman fumbles his job the same way Homer has fumbled his way though life, marriage and parenthood for years. But they are both fools who eventually do good, without quite knowing how they did it. Both characters are used to provide moments of insight without being aware of it themselves. And just as Dogberry is one of the Bard's most-loved fools, Homer is one of television's most-loved idiots.
Miranda (Hart) - Bottom (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
Role:In A Midsummer Night's Dream Bottom is silly and bossy, but ultimately very lovable. He makes a fool of himself, but his idiocy is almost endearingly innocent and never malicious. In the play his head is transformed into a donkey's and a spell is cast upon Titania which causes her to fall in love with him. "The Queen of the Fairies falling in love with an ass is the ultimate symbol of comic topsy-turveydom," says Dr Stephen Purcell, who teaches English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University.
Modern-day equivalent:In her sitcom Miranda is likeable, but always stumbling into awkward and often hopeless situations. She usually ends up looking like a fool as she tries to extract herself, and small mistakes end up growing into comic disasters.
Why:Blustering and silly, both Bottom and Miranda end up in all sorts of comic confusion. What they also have in common is that neither has a dark or morally ambiguous side, they are just immensely likeable. "The role of Bottom also involves physical comedy and Miranda Hart is a brilliant physical clown," says the University of Kent's Double.
Frank Gallagher - Falstaff (The Merry Wives of Windsor)
Well, if my wind were but long enough to say my prayers, I would repent
Sir John Falstaff, The Merry Wives of Windsor
Role:Not strictly a fool, Sir John Falstaff is one of Shakespeare's comic characters - but one of ill-repute. He is likeable, humorous and witty, and revels in the pleasures of the flesh, but doesn't think too hard about the consequences. Falstaff - who appears in both The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV (Part I and II) - also has a darker side and is a drunkard who lies, cheats and exploits people.
Modern-day equivalent:An unemployed drunk, Frank Gallagher in Channel 4's Shameless spends most of his time in the pub or trying to get money to go to the pub. Irresponsible and rude, he usually leaves a trail of destruction and insults people wherever he goes. He is the father of countless children by several mothers. But while he usually shirks responsibility for them, he does loves them and they love him. He has been known to step up when it matters most.
Why:Both are classic loveable rogues. They are deeply flawed but their wit and moments of kindness mean they are still loved by those around them, despite some truly appalling behaviour. They are also prone to some drunken philosophising. Frank is even fond of quoting Shakespeare during an alcohol-fuelled rant. "Many of Falstaff's qualities can be detected in Frank Gallagher, but the main difference is that he is not nearly as eloquent or as witty as Falstaff," says Warwick University's Purcell.
Frankie Boyle - Trinculo (The Tempest)
Role:The king's jester in The Tempest , Trinculo is a comical character and a professional fool. It means he is funny but also smart and clever verbally, playing around with words. Also, while a lot of Shakespeare's fools have redeeming features, Trinculo is downright bad. In the play he plots with Caliban and Stephano to kill Prospero.
Modern-day equivalent:Arguably one of the most controversial comics around, Frankie Boyle often provokes outrage. Last year he was censured by Ofcom after it received 500 complaints about one of his jokes. But he is also popular, appearing on television and headlining his own tour. He says he is simply "telling it like it is". There is definitely no sugar-coating going on.
Why:Trinculo and Boyle aren't too worried about being nice or who likes them. They pretty much do what they want. The difference between them is Trinculo gets repeatedly outwitted in The Tempest.
Ian Hislop - King Lear's fool (King Lear)
Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest, Ride more than thou goest...
King's Lear's fool
Role:The fool in King Lear is far removed from Shakespeare's unwittingly wise ones. A professional fool, he is clever and sharp - a social commentator and a satirist. Being the king's fool he gets away with talking to Lear in the way no-one else would, and takes full advantage.
Modern-day equivalent:Editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, Ian Hislop has made a career of taking on and mocking authority. In his work as a journalist and commentator in print and on television, he demonstrates a healthy scepticism towards people in positions of power.
Why:Hislop and Lear share a verbal dexterity and a talent for words. Both are satirical, political and poke fun at those in power. One difference is that King Lear's fool often speaks in riddles and in a roundabout way that Lear cannot always pin down his meaning. Hislop's meaning is usually very clear.
Russell Brand - Feste (Twelfth Night)
Role:Feste in Twelfth Night is part of the household of Countess Olivia, her licensed fool. He is frivolous and naughty, but extremely eloquent. "He is a clever satirist and describes himself as a 'corrupter of words'," says Purcell. "He is quite the opposite of clowns like Dogberry and Bottom, who are merely foolish." But he also has a darker side that occasionally emerges.
Modern-day equivalent:Russell Brand is idiosyncratic, with very distinct mannerisms and use of language. His speech is excessively articulated and flowery and he plays around with tone. "He's almost created his own language," says Double. He also dresses like a modern-day dandy, all tight trousers and flowing scarves. But he has his demons and is a former drug addict.
Why:Both Feste and Brand are slightly bohemian and very imaginative with the way they play with words. Feste sums it up well in his first scene when he says: "Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit." But despite their playful and outwardly frivolous nature, they can be brooding.
Additional reporting by Keith Moore.
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Which singer and actress, married to Lee Mead, gave birth to baby Betsy on May 1st.? | Lee Mead - IMDb
IMDb
Actor | Soundtrack
Lee Mead was born on July 14, 1981 in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, England as Lee Stephen Mead. He is an actor, known for Casualty (1986), The Winner's Story (2007) and Concert for Diana (2007). He was previously married to Denise Van Outen . See full bio »
Born:
| Denise van Outen |
What type of bridge is the Golden Gate Bridge? | denise van outen : definition of denise van outen and synonyms of denise van outen (English)
11 External links
Early life
Born Denise Kathleen Outen in Basildon , Essex, she is the youngest of Ted and Kathleen Outen's three children and was brought up a Catholic. [1] She has a brother Terry and sister Jackie. [2] [3]
At the age of seven, she began modelling for knitting patterns, [2] and showed an early flair for performing. This resulted in her attending the Sylvia Young Theatre School . In 1986, at age 12, [1] she played Eponine in Les Misérables alongside fellow Sylvia Young student Melanie Blatt [4] (the role paid her school fees [5] ), the Anthony Newley directed production of Stop the World - I Want to Get Off , and A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Royal Shakespeare Company . [2]
Early career
As a teenager she had brief roles on a number of television dramas including Kappatoo [6] and The Bill . [7] She also sang with Cathy Warwick in "girl group" Those2Girls, by which time she had become Denise van Outen. She also did backing vocals with Melanie Blatt for the band Dreadzone . [4]
Van Outen has retained her distinct looks gracing the covers of popular men's and women's titles and being voted both Rear of the Year in 1999, and top of a poll to find the most desired "bikini body" in a 2007 poll of readers of Grazia magazine. [8]
Television
During 1995, van Outen started her television career on Saturday morning ITV show Scratchy and Co 's mini youth programme Massive! Van Outen joined The Big Breakfast on Channel 4 as a weather and travel reporter in 1996 [9] and landed the main co-presenting role in 1997. It proved to be her big breakthrough, with her cheeky " Essex Girl " personality and sexy clothing playing off well against the quick wit of Johnny Vaughan , and together they recovered audience figures to respectable levels.
She took a break from presenting the show towards the end of 1998 but returned in 2000 for a further year-long stint in an attempt to boost the ratings, which had tailed off following her departure. [10] When the show closed down, [11] van Outen gave Vaughan a present of a set of AMG wheels for his Mercedes Benz CLK – commented on as a "very Essex Girl" by Jeremy Clarkson when the pair appeared on the BBC 's Top Gear programme. [12] She presented Something for the Weekend on Channel 4 in 1999. In 2001 she co-hosted the 3rd series of the Sky TV show Prickly Heat with Julian Clary .
Van Outen then returned to television, reviving her on screen relationship with Johnny Vaughan in 2004 for one series of the BBC's Saturday night family revival show Passport to Paradise . [13] She continued in 2005 co-presenting ITV 's This Morning with Richard Bacon .
Van Outen was asked to be a panellist How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? in 2006 for the BBC , a programme searching for a girl to play the role of Maria in The Sound of Music , [14] but was unable to accept the offer due to commitments in the USA co-hosting NBC 's Grease: You're the One that I Want!
After her commitments ended on the show she began re-establishing her television career in the UK. In November 2006, she hosted Sky1 's The Race – set at Silverstone Circuit – in which a celebrity Girls Team headed by David Coulthard raced against a celebrity Boys Team headed by Eddie Irvine . In December 2006, she hosted the National Lottery Christmas special, and in January 2007 hosted one show of The Friday Night Project . She also guested on The Charlotte Church Show , and was one of the judges at the Miss World pageant in Warsaw , Poland.
In 2007, she joined the panel for BBC One 's follow up to How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?, Any Dream Will Do! which was casting Joseph in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat . [9] In July 2007, she appeared in a commercial advertising the rebranding of Morrisons supermarket. [15]
In 2008, she presented 'Backstage at the Brits' for ITV1 and continued with a new Saturday night entertainment series for ITV1 , alongside Ben Shephard , called Who Dares Sings. Challenging 100 members of the studio audience to hit the right notes in the largest karaoke competition on TV. [16] Her on screen presence continued with For One Night Only alongside Michael Buble and Hairspray: The School Musical for Sky One. The programme saw van Outen mentor a group of regular school kids to put on their own version of Hairspray on the West End Stage. She also recently appeared in the BBC One drama Hotel Babylon on 24 July 2009. In June 2010, Denise presented a week's run of The 5 o'clock show with Melanie Sykes .
Van Outen had been due to co-present new Channel 5 magazine show OK! TV from 14 February 2011 but pulled out due to a "busy schedule". Her role has now been taken by former Live from Studio Five presenter and Apprentice participant, Kate Walsh . [17]
Van Outen currently narrates the popular ITV2 reality television series The Only Way Is Essex . In 2011, she was a judge on the panel of Born To Shine on ITV1 , a show that raises money (with phone votes) for Save The Children . [18]
In 2012, Van Outen was a panellist on That Sunday Night Show on Sunday 4 March and on Mad Mad World in Spring 2012.
She has guest presented Lorraine and presented items for Daybreak on ITV Breakfast . [19]
Acting career
During her first stint on the Big Breakfast show, she appeared as Jill in ITV1's version of the pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk [20] alongside Julie Walters and Neil Morrissey. Wanting to further develop her acting career, she left The Big Breakfast at the end of 1998. In 1999, she appeared on several episodes of The Bill and The Young Person's Guide To Becoming A Rock Star , the BBC 's Murder in Mind short series of crime dramas, [21] and on 2 series of Babes in the Wood with Karl Howman and Samantha Janus . [20]
Van Outen has also appeared in film, initially as Maureen in the crime comedy Love, Honour and Obey . She had a cameo tease as red head Alex, in the low-key Tube Tales in one of the four separate short films, based on the London Underground . Other directors included Ewan McGregor , Jude Law and Jarvis Cocker ; while her part in "Horny" was directed by Lost In Space director Stephen Hopkins . [22] Van Outen has played a small role in the romantic comedy Are You Ready For Love?
She first played Roxie Hart on the stage in the hit musical Chicago at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End in April 2001. [23] Her run proved a hit with theatre-goers, selling out for the entire 20 weeks. Unknown in the United States, she reprised her role on Broadway in the spring of 2002, before returning to the show's London version in late April 2002. [24] Late the same year, Van Outen appeared as one of many special guest stars in a performance of The Play What I Wrote once again in London's West End.
In 2003, she returned to the London stage at the Gielgud Theatre in Andrew Lloyd Webber 's one-woman show Tell Me On A Sunday , [25] [26] which he reworked for her. She was a huge success and the show ran for nearly a year. [27] She then joined the cast of the established ITV sentimental drama Where the Heart Is as one of the lead characters, playing single mother Kim Blakeney, continuing for two series. [28]
Van Outen played Maureen in the 2007 London revival of Rent Remixed directed by William Baker until 22 December. [29] She was forced to cancel some performances due to a throat infection. [30]
In July 2009, van Outen played Mary in Hotel Babylon for the BBC. Her character was at the hotel for a science convention. [31]
In August 2009, van Outen made her Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut [32] in Blondes, [33] a show by Jackie Clune .
Van Outen took over the role of Paulette Bunafonte from Jill Halfpenny in the West End production of Legally Blonde on 25 October 2010. [34] She continued in the role for 6 months.
In 2012, Van Outen was cast in the film of the Ray Cooney farce Run For Your Wife alongside Danny Dyer , Sarah Harding and Neil Morrissey . [35]
Radio
It was announced on 10 January 2008 that van Outen would be reunited with Vaughan and become the co-host of Capital Breakfast on Capital Radio , from 4 February 2008. [36]
On 29 July 2008 she decided to quit the show half way through her contract due to juggling her extensive TV commitments with the early mornings [37]
However, in April 2011 Denise revealed that she left the show because relations between her and Vaughan had soured. She says Vaughan has not spoken to her since. [38]
Fashion ranges
Van Outen has designed two collections thus far for the website, Very, part of the Shop Direct Group . The first collection was a maternity range launched in March 2010 and the second an autumn/winter collection. [39]
Charity work
Van Outen has lent her support to design limited edition T-shirts or vests for the 'Little Tee Campaign' for Breast Cancer Care which donates money for breast cancer research. [40] She continues to support Breast Cancer Charities and Great Ormond Street Hospital .
In 2009 van Outen climbed Mt Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief. Joining her on the climb were Girls Aloud members Cheryl Cole and Kimberley Walsh , Fearne Cotton , Ben Shephard , Gary Barlow , Ronan Keating , Alesha Dixon and Chris Moyles .
Van Outen will be doing the Inca Trek in Peru for Breast Cancer Care with Fearne Cotton and Alexandra Burke amongst six women with breast cancer. [41]
Personal life
Van Outen's personal life has been subjected to the sharp glare of the British tabloid media. In 1996, Van Outen dated Dodgy guitarist Andy Miller . From 1998 to 2001, she dated Jamiroquai lead singer Jay Kay . They were engaged and reported to be on the verge of marriage, [42] but split up in 2001; his album A Funk Odyssey is mostly about their break-up, with the song " Little L " expressing his fight against cocaine addiction during their break up. [43]
From 2003, she dated 'Brown's' club owner Richard Traviss, but split up with him in May 2005, [27] moving out of the Marylebone home they shared and back into her own garden flat in North London. [5] After appearing on Channel 4 's The Friday Night Project and describing her first real kiss with fellow Sylvia Young student James Lance , subsequently they dated for a few weeks in 2007. [44] In November 2007, she began dating Any Dream Will Do winner, Lee Mead . She married Mead in April 2009 in the Seychelles . They have a daughter, Betsy who was born on 1 May 2010. [45]
Discography
All singles, unless otherwise stated:
1994: "Wanna Make You Go... Uuh!" (with Those 2 Girls ) [UK #74]
1995: "All I Want" (with Those 2 Girls ) [UK #36]
1998: "Especially for You" – shown as Denise & Johnny (a cover of the Kylie Minogue & Jason Donovan song of the same name ) [UK #3]
1999: "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" – from the ABBAMania compilation album
2002: "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" (With Andy Williams ) [UK #23]
2003: "Tell Me On A Sunday" (Original cast recording) [UK Album Charts #34]
2007: "Baby It's Cold" – duet with Russell Watson on his 2007 album Outside In
References
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Albert II, the Sovereign Prince of Monaco is a member of which Royal House? | Albert II Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi, prince souverain - Genealogy
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Albert II Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi, prince souverain
French: Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi, marquis des Baux
Current Location::
Rainier Iii., Louis Henri Maxence Bertrand Grimaldi, Grace Patricia Grimaldi (geb. Kelly)
Siblings:
Caroline Louise Marguerite Grimaldi, <Private> Ducruet (geb. Grimaldi)
Partner:
Charlene Lynette Grimaldi (geb. Wittstock)
Children:
Albert II, Sovereign Prince of Monaco (Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi) born 14 March 1958 at Palais Princier, Monaco
Reign began April 6, 2005
Albert II married Charlene Lynette Wittstock on 1 and 2 July 2011, at Palais Princier, Monaco.
Albert II is the son of Rainier III Grimaldi, Prince of Monaco and Grace Kelly
biography
Albert II is the head of the House of Grimaldi and the current ruler of the Principality of Monaco. He is the son of Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, and the American actress Grace Kelly. His sisters are Caroline, Princess of Hanover, and Princess Stéphanie of Monaco.
links
http://www.today.com/news/princess-charlene-prince-albert-monaco-expecting-first-child-2D79737035
________________________________________________________________________________
Albert II Grimaldi, Prince of Monaco's Timeline
1958
101 guns announced the birth of Prince Albert
1965
Burial of Grace Kelly
Grimaldi family vault; Cathedral of Saint Nicholas, Monte Carlo, Monaco
Princess Grace was buried in the Grimaldi family vault on September 18, 1982, after a requiem mass in Saint Nicholas Cathedral, Monaco. Prince Rainier, who never remarried after Kelly's death, was buried alongside her following his death in 2005. The 400 guests at the service included representatives of foreign governments and of present and past European royal houses, as well as several veteran US film stars. Nearly 100 million people worldwide watched her funeral.
In his eulogy, James Stewart said: "You know, I just love Grace Kelly. Not because she was a princess, not because she was an actress, not because she was my friend, but because she was just about the nicest lady I ever met. Grace brought into my life as she brought into yours, a soft, warm light every time I saw her, and every time I saw her was a holiday of its own. No question, I'll miss her, we'll all miss her, God bless you, Princess Grace."
2005
Burial of Rainier III, Prince of Monaco
Monaco
Below a golden crown, Prince Rainier III was given a tearful farewell Friday April 15th, 2005 at a funeral in Monaco's cathedral, closing a fairy tale that started nearly 50 years ago with his marriage in the same spot to Hollywood beauty Grace Kelly
The fabled Monte Carlo casino was closed, as were other businesses, and security was tight as the funeral attracted more than half a dozen heads of state and other dignitaries from some 60 countries. They included French President Jacques Chirac, Irish President Mary McAleese, Belgium's King Albert II, Spain's King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia and royalty from Sweden, Luxembourg and elsewhere.
The cathedral later was closed to the public for Rainier's burial in the family crypt alongside his beloved Princess Grace at a private service Friday night. She died in a car crash in 1982, and Rainier never remarried.
Their children — son and heir Prince Albert II, and Princesses Caroline and Stephanie — blinked back tears during the Mass as Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" mournfully echoed through the 19th cathedral that overlooks the sea.
Rainier was Europe's longest-serving monarch. The royals, nobles and other VIPs who flew in for the funeral underscored how he helped overcome Monaco's reputation as a "sunny place for shady people" and a haven for tax evasion, money-laundering and gambling, and oversaw its modernization.
In his eulogy at the Mass, Archbishop Bernard Barsi said Rainier was affectionately known as the "builder prince" who oversaw a 20 percent expansion in Monaco's territory by land reclamation from the sea. It still remains, however, no bigger than New York City's Central Park.
"For all of us, the prince was, of course, the sovereign, but he was also a friend, a member of the family," Barsi said. "His family cries for him."
But it was Rainier's 1956 marriage to Kelly that became Monaco's true claim to fame.
The archbishop said they were "an exceptional couple, united by the heart and spirit" and that Rainier bore "with dignity the terrible ordeal of the brutal death of his wife."
"We are convinced that those who were united here below by the fidelity of their conjugal love are forever united in the fullness of God's love," he said.
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In which city were the 2002 Winter Olympic Games held? | His Serene Highness Prince Albert II - Monaco Monte-Carlo
His Serene Highness Prince Albert II
Civil status and distinctions
His Serene Highness Prince Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre, Prince of Monaco, Marquis of Baux, was born on March 14th, 1958.
His Highness is the son of Prince Rainier III , Louis Henri-Maxence-Bertrand, (Monaco May 31st, 1923 - April 6th, 2005) and the Late Princess Grace Patricia Kelly, (Philadelphia U.S.A. November 12th, 1929 - Monaco September 14th, 1982).
His Godfather was the late Prince Louis de Polignac, and his Godmother was the late Queen Victoria-Eugénia of Spain.
H.S.H. the Sovereign Prince is :
Grand Cross of the Order of Grimaldi, April 18th , 1958 ;
Grand Cross of the Order of Saint-Charles, March 13th, 1979 ;
Colonel of the Carabineers, November 11th, 1986.
Prince Albert II of Monaco married Ms Charlene Wittstock on 1 & 2 July 2011, she became Her Serene Highness Princess Charlene of Monaco.
On decembre 10th, 2014 were born a son, Jacques Honoré Rainier and a daughter, Gabriella Thérèse Marie.
Missions and responsabilities
On Thursday the 31st of March 2005, in accordance with the Statutes of the Sovereign Family and after informing H.S.H. Crown Prince Albert - the Secretary of State convoked the Council of the Crown. The Council of the Crown determined that His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III was not able to carry out his functions of State and declared that H.S.H. Crown Prince Albert would act as Regent from that point on.
On the 6th of April 2005, H.S.H. Prince Albert II succeeded his father, the Prince Rainier III who died on this day following a series of afflictions to his heart, lung and kidneys which had required his hospitalization since the 7th of March.
Since 1984, H.S.H. Prince Albert, work alongside with His Father in the management of State affairs.
In other respects, The Prince is responsible for activities in various sectors :
Monte-Carlo Television Festival and Imagina :
H.S.H. Prince Albert was named, by Sovereign Order on June 1st, 1988, Chairman of the Organizing Committee for the Monte-Carlo International Television Festival . In this respect, His Highness supervises the preparation and direction of this annual event as well as "Imagina" : a festival of computer generated images.
Environment :
In the environmental sector, His Highness closely follows the Principality's Environmental Groups and Associations in their battle against different kinds of pollution, with such actions as the annual Electric Vehicle Show, "Méditerranée Propre" (Clean Mediterranean), etc.
Within the framework of Environment Day on July 30th, 1991, and in introduction to the United Nations' Environment Committee meeting which took place just before the 1992 Rio Summit, His Highness underlined the responsibility of one and all with regard to problems linked to the environment.
Sport :
Practicing numerous sporting disciplines from a very young age, the Prince now assumes the chairmanship of various Federations and Organizations :
He has been Chairman of the Monegasque Swimming Federation (Fédération Monegasque de Natation) since October 10th, 1983.
His Highness personally follows the activities of this federation which organizes an International Swimming Meeting every year.
He has been Chairman of the Monaco Yacht Club since May 15th, 1984. His Highness takes a close interest in the club's multiple activities : its sailing school, international sailing and motorboat races, including the Monaco-New York "Transat" race in 1985, but also the yearly maxi-yacht meeting, "Monaco Classic Week", which traditionally takes place in September.
He has chaired the Monegasque Athletics Federation since July 17th, 1984.
His Highness supervises the organization of the annual "Grand Prix IAAF - Herculis" Meeting, which takes place in August in the Louis II Stadium.
In 1986, the Prince was named Honorary President of IAF (International Athletic Foundation).
In 1987, the Prince was Honorary Chairman of the Organizing Committee of the 2nd "Small European States" Games.
On April 10th, 1987, under the impetus of Prince Albert, the Monegasque Bobsleigh, Toboggan and Skeleton Federation was formed.
H.S.H. Prince Albert was Honorary Chairman of the 101st Session of the International Olympic Committee which took place in Monaco in September 1993, during which the city of Sydney was chosen to host the Year 2000 Summer Olympics Games.
The Prince has chaired the Monegasque Olympic Committee since April 1994.
In 1997, Prince Albert II was named Honorary President of UIPM (International Modern Pentathlon Union).
He has chaired the Monegasque Federation of Modern Pentathlon since December 1999.
On November 30th 2004, His Serene Highness was named Honorary President of World Beach Volleyball, by the International Volleyball Federation.
Activities within the International Olympic Committee :
In June 1985, His Highness was co-opted into the International Olympic Committee during its 90th Session in Berlin.
In 1988, Prince Albert II was chosen to be the International Olympic Committee observer to sailing events at Pusan, for the Seoul Olympics.
In December 1988, His Highness was named as Vice-President of the Athletes Commission of the International Olympic Committee by its President, Mr. Juan Antonio Samaranch.
In 1990, he became a member of the Coordination Commission for the 1996 Atlanta Games.
In December 1999, Mr. Juan Antonio Samaranch again called upon the Prince, naming him as representative for Athletes within the Commission of Admission of the I.O.C.
I.O.C. Athletes Commission representative on the Marketing Commission.
Prince Albert is member of the Nomination Commission and member of Turin 2006 Olympic Games Coordination Commission.
In the Cultural Field :
H.S.H. Prince Albert II has assumed :
The Deputy-Chairmanship of the Princess Grace Foundation of Monaco. This institution, founded by Princess Grace in 1964, has a triple vocation :
a) On a cultural level, the Foundation supports the Princess Grace Classical Dance Academy, both directly and through scholarships awarded to young talented dancers as well as to students of the Prince Rainier III Academy of Music.
In 1984, the Foundation was responsible for the establishment of the « Princess Grace Irish Library », whose collections are open to students and those researching literature and Irish History.
b) On a secondary level, the Foundation supports local artisans through two shops : one located in the Old Town (le Rocher), the other located in the district of Monte-Carlo.
c) Finally, the Foundation undertakes benevolent activities, principally in favour of infants, on both a local and an international level. Its main thrust is that of aiding the families of children handicapped through illness. This takes the form of intervention "in situ" (theatre workshops, fitting-out of premises) and the support of medical research via a special open-end investment trust.
The Deputy Chairmanship of the "Princess Grace Foundation - U.S.A. », since 1982.
The Foundation was founded to perpetuate the memory and the engagement of Princess Grace in the artistic domain. Each year, during a Gala event in New York, the Foundation awards scholarships to talented young people in different artistic fields : those of dance, music, theatre and cinema.
The Honorary Chairmanship of the "Friends of the Monte-Carlo Opera" Association, since November 1993.
The Honorary Chairmanship of the National Monegasque's Committee of the UNESCO International Plastics Arts Association since 31st August 1999.
In the Economic Field
As well as following the activities undertaken by the Government and various economic agencies of the Principality, His Highness takes a very close interest in the initiatives of local associations.
Prince Albert is Honorary Chairman of Monaco's "Jeune Chambre Economique" (Junior Chamber of Commerce). This association, founded in 1963, aims to contribute to the economic, social and cultural progress of the community, following the principles of freedom, respect for the individual and tolerance.
In the Field of Humanitarian Action :
H.S.H. Prince Albert II was named, by Sovereign Order, on December 17th, 1982, Chairman of the Monegasque Red Cross.
His Highness has participated in, and followed:
- multiple international aid programs,
| i don't know |
Name the film starring Gwynneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes about an author who gets writers' block whilst writing 'Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter'? | Shakespeare In Love (DVD) DVD product reviews and price comparison
Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush, Judi Dench, Colin Firth, Ben Affleck
Running Time: 137 minutes
'Shakespeare in Love' tells the story of a young, struggling and upcoming Will Shakespeare. He meets, in true twelfth-night style, Lady Viola, aka Thomas Kent, and is further inspired to start writing the greatest love story ever told, Romeo and Juliet.
REVIEW
I bought the DVD of Shakespeare in Love, hoping for a real feel-good comedy. It didn't disappoint as such, however if you are looking for something to laugh-out-loud at, this probably isn't the best choice. It was funny, yes, but the humour was subtle and old-fashioned. This didn't, however, detract from the film as a whole, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
The performances were great, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes in the lead roles - Paltrow, a newcomer at the time, captured the crystal clear emotions of Lady Viola at all times, and all her scenes were great. Fiennes struggled a little more, though his role didn't seem to be written as well as Paltrow's. Judi Dench's character was on for barely ten minutes - practically a cameo - but her performance as Queen Elizabeth I was one of her best, and every moment she had on screen was full of enchantment and wit.
I don't often comment on the score in movies, but this one is one of the best I've listened too, as it suited itself so well to what was happening on screen.
The film itself is full of colour, as well as subtle humour - very light-hearted, but with a deeper story underneath.
I definitely recommend this - don't be put off by the word 'Shakespeare' in the title - this film is a far cry from dull and medieval. It's rated 15, probably for its occasional, brief nude scenes, but its hardly enough to put anyone off from watching it with kids - a great film, and worthy winner of Best Picture at the Oscars (though Saving Private Ryan deserved almost as much).
| Shakespeare in Love |
Give the middle name of former US Vice-President Hubert H. Humphries? | Full text of "All About History Issue No. 25 2015"
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Was there a dark side to Cuba's \ revolutionary hero? A Rebuilding Britain VE DAY How one nation rose from the T 1 1 wreckage of World War II /II ' lALLABCXJT Raleigh’s race to America ♦ Drake vs the Spanish Armada . ♦ Elizabeth I: The dirty tricks of a pirate queen Shakespeare > to Spielberg Inside the star-spangled world offilm and theatre www.historyanswers.co.uk tfil IMAGINE PUBLISHmC DigitalEdition GreatDigitalMags.com ISSUE 25 ARCTIC CONVOYS 1941-45 Featuring Dervish Convoy, which carried the first vitat suppiies from Britain to the Red Army. 21st ARMY GROUP 1944-45 Montgomery's British spearhead in the push from the D-Day beaches to the Rhine. Order from www.philosophyfootball.com or by phone from 01255 552412 philosophyfootball com sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction ©Getty Images Wdcome At its height, the British Empire was the largest the world had ever seen. But decades before Francis Dralce had even left an English port, the Spanish and Portuguese had secured a firm grip on several colonies around the world, setting themselves far ahead of the race. When Elizabeth I came to the throne, she saw the riches her European rivals were bringing home and decided that England too should have a place on the podium. And she was willing to use every dirty triclc in the book to get there. From page 30, we reveal the tactics Tudors used to win the New World, from pirates parading as 'privateers' to the exploitation of their swindled states. On page 42, we celebrate 70 years since the end of World War II with a special VE Day feature, discovering how Britain got itself bade on its feet, and on page 64 we expose a darker side to Che Guevara. If you finish the issue before the next one hits the shelves, fear not. Our website is stacked with juicy articles for your to srnle your teeth into whenever you feel the history hunger pangs. Just head to www.historyanswers.co.uk. Alicea Francis Deputy Editor Editor's picks Martyr or murderer? Che's face adorned the walls of thousands of teens' bedrooms and has come to be a symbol of revolution, but was there a darker side to this Cuban revolutionary? Battle of Gettysburg 150 years since the end of the American Civil War, we take a closer look at its bloodiest battle and see why it was a turning point in the fight for freedom. Secrets of the oracle Discover the truth behind the Ancient Greek oracles, as we reveal what really gave these mystical priestesses their prophetic visions. Be part of history Owww.historyanswers.co.uk OFacebook O Twitter Share your views and opinions online /AlLAboutHistory @AboutHistoryMag 3 16 Timeline From ancient tragedies to computer-animated films (MBITS Welcome to All About History 30 Privateers? Pirates? In Elizabeth's golden age of exploration, the lines became very blurred indeed... FEATURES 42 VE Day: Rebuilding Britain Celebrate 70 years since the end of World War II with our special feature 56 The dark side of Che Guevara We expose the truth about Cuba's revolutionary hero 68 Secrets of the oracle Discover the science behind these ancient prophecy-makers 78 The rise of the Ottomans See how a humble Turkish tribe became a mighty empire THEATRE & HIM 18 How to How did the Ancient Greeks put on their timeless plays? 20 Day in the Life Discover what a typical day would have entailed for a 1950s movie star 22 Hall of Fame The stories behind ten remarkable pioneers of film and theatre 24 Anatomy of Find out how stringless Bunraku puppets are operated 26 Inside History Discover what's behind the scenes of Shakespeare's Globe theatre 28 Top 5 Facts Unbelievable facts about 19th-century playwright Oscar Wilde 4 Be pRTt of history www.historyanswers.co.uk f /AUAboutHistory if @AboutHistoryMag EVERY ISSUE 08 Defining Moments Three unmissable moments from across history 38 Bluffer's guide Learn the need-to-know facts about the Salem witch trials 50 Heroes & Villains Was this woman the first computer programmer? We reveal all about the often-forgotten Ada Lovelace 54 Through History From the discus to baseball mitts, see how sports equipment has changed 64 Greatest Battles The Battle of Gettsyburg was the bloodiest of the American Civil War, but what really happened? 74 What if? Historian Fred Taylor discusses what might have happened had the Berlin Wall never fallen 86 Reviews Find out what we think about the latest historical releases 90 Competition Be in with a chance of winning more than £50 worth of history books 92 History Answers Will the RMS Titanic ever be resurfaced? We reveal all... 94 Your History The son of a World War II Prisoner of War tells his father's story 98 History vs Hollywood Just how true to history was Shakespeare In Love? ALL ABOUT HISTOR*' READERSURVEY Join ou. Reader I today! Take our three-rninute survey at historyansweis.co.uk/survey and win a place on our panel We hope you love reading All About History as much as we enjoy making it. This year, we want to make it even better, so we're asking for your help. By answering a few short questions, you could be chosen to Join our first-ever All About History panel, where you can have your say on what the magazine should be featuring. To get involved, sim ply head to our website today. Alicea Francis k.. Deputy Editor 6 Join our panel and help us make the magazine even better Complete our survey to join our All About History panel and: • See new ideas and changes before anyone else • Get invited to attend special events in your area • Test third-party products for review • Have a chance to meet the All About History team ► Shape the future issues of the magazine • Enter into exclusive competitions r 1 L, Step 2 J jtinvolvi Complete our survey and win your place today www.historyanswers.co.uk/survey - - ■ V $ \ DEFINING MOMENT THE MUPPETS COME TO LIFE The Muppets creator Jim Henson poses with his ‘Muppets’, a word created by combining 'marionette' and 'puppet'. His signature puppet, Kermit the Frog, was the first to appear on television in the hit TV show Sam And Friends. Since then, his characters have become the stars of multiple \ TV series and films including The Muppet Show, from 1976-1981, and Sesame Street, which began in 1969 and is still on today. 1955 f DEFINING MOMENT LINCOLN IS ASSASSINATED Pictured is the funeral train that transported US President Abraham Lincoln's body from Washington DC to Springfield, Illinois, for burial. Lincoln, who led the US through its civil ■ war. was assassinated just six days after the surrender \ of Confederate commanding general Robert E Lee. / L \ His killer was John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate / A sympathiser and strong opponent of the / J % \ abolition of slavery. ^ 3 13 . ^ . Theatre 12 PAGES OF STORYTELLING ON STAGE AND SCREEN After threats fron North Korea due Mr Punch made his first ^ its criticism of Kim Jong-un, r0COrd0d d.131303.r3.IlC0 m a rmTnViA'r of r*irioTn3c 03110011011 *** d IlU.IIlD0r U1 LlI10IIlab LaIlL0110U. England in 1662 screenings of The Interview Bollywood produces around 1,000 movies a year - double that of The Lumiere brothers have been credited with the invention of the motion picture The Savoy Theatre in London's West End was the home of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas Monroe began her career as a model before soaring to film fame The Peking opera combines music, mime and dance The Roman theatre at Bosra, Syria, is one of the largest of its time Shakespeare's 16th-century play Hamlet is still performed today =The THEATRE IS BORN GREECE 700 BCE Although 'performance' did exist in ritual form prior, it was Greek theatre that truly served as the start of Western traditions. Beginning as festivals to the god Dionysus, more structured dramas involving myths and songs gradually emerged. Soon theatrical contests became highly popular events and distinct forms of theatre - tragedy and comedy - were formed. Great auditoriums were built for spectators to gather for these performances, which usually lasted from early in the morning until the evening. across history= It'S not over until... EUROPE 15TH-19TH CENTURY Opera emerged in the late 16th century with Jacopo Peri's Dafne. Originally created in an effort to revive Greek Drama, operatic productions combined musical score with a theatrical setting. Initially performances were confined to court audiences, but opera soon entered the public realm to rousing success and attracted talented composers the world over. Although the mid to late 19th century, when Wagner and Verdi ruled the opera scene, is considered the golden age, to this day opera continues to attract a wide audience, and productions have even been written for radio and television. Theatre & film timeline Theatre in ancient Rome ^ The father of Roman Drama, Livius Andronicus, pens his early tragedy and comedy plays. They become the first Latin plays of ancient Rome. 240 BCE Miracie piays <5 Miracle plays, depicting stories from the Bible, begin to be performed all around Europe by town guilds of actors. 1200 t Curtain caii Elizabeth I and other leaders ban all religious plays. This destroys the united form of theatre that was performed all over Europe, and forces each country to develop its own traditions. 1558 Spain gets artsy The golden age of Spanish theatre sees an incredible 10-30,000 plays published in the country. 1590-1681 I16D0. I ^ Comedy is • France gets restored ' dramatic After the puritan August von regime bans Kotzebue's theatre for T8 Misanthropy And years, comedy Repentance is finally returns in performed in France grand style with for the first time. It racier content marks the beginning encouraged by of melodrama as the Charles II. popular dramatic 1660-1710 form. 1789 f r t 1700 J Kabuki The first Kabuki shows are held across Japan. It quickly becomes immensely popular and performances are even held at the Imperial Court. 1603 A historic doubie act Gilbert and Sullivan's first collaboration Thespis takes to the stage. It is the beginning of a partnership that will profoundly affect musical theatre. 1871 11800 L 4 Fiim canters forward A series of stills showing a trotting horse are put together to form a moving picture. It is believed to be the first motion picture ever made. 1872 6 Fiim studios The first purpose- built film studios are created. One built by Georges Melies features a glass roof and walls. 1897 All the world's a stage ENGLAND 1504 When Shakespeare's plays began to gain popularity, he was attacked by playwright Robert Greene, who called him "an upstart Grow." This attitude, that an unknown boy from Stratford couldn't possibly have penned such exquisite literature, has continued in some circles even today. The influence of Shakespeare's plays on theatre is almost immeasurable. His work transformed the potential of character and plot, linking events in narrative to characters' choices. L Henrik Ibsen is often referred to IS the father of realism in theatrei Theatre gets real NORWAY 1R2R-I90e When Henrik Ibsen began writing plays he was not an immediate success. He struggled financially for years and it wasn't until the 1860s that his work began to make waves. Hailed as the father of realism in the theatre, his plays, such as A Doll's House, offer scathing critiques of modern life. His daring and shocking plays provoked controversy across Europe, attacking the very beliefs society was built on. Despite the scandalous nature of his plays, Ibsen is the most performed dramatist after Shakespeare. 16 ThetUre & Film NOT-SO-SILENT FILMS WORLDWIDE 1894-1929 Silent films in their earliest form were little like the movies we watch today. They were one- reelers that lasted about ten to 12 minutes. Although they are described as silent, when shown in theatres a full-piece orchestra would accompany them. The quality of these films was actually quite high and misconceptions held by many today concerning their primitive nature is due to their deteriorated condition or because the films are played back at the wrong speed. The success of silent film marked the birth of popular film as a medium, and paved the way for a host of innovations. The age of Hollywood DNITED STATES DF AMERICA 19208 World War I had a devastating effect on the massively popular French and Italian film industries, but this gap was quickly filled by the American film industry. In the 1920s, Hollywood was producing 82 per cent of the global total of films - about 800 films a year. Its domination of the industry was helped by the star system, which elevated actors like Charlie Chaplain and Buster Keaton to stardom. 9 Ned Kelly steals the show The first feature length film, The Story Of The i Kelly Gang, is released. It has ’ a 60-minute running time. 1906 m fheStory Of The Kelly Gang\Nas^ an Australian film that told the story of outlaw Ned Kelly • Bollywood's golden age After India's independence, Hindi cinema flourishes and a host of critically acclaimed films are released. 1940 Birth of controversy Birth Of A Nation is released. Despite outrage concerning its racist portrayal of black men, it becomes the first film screened in the White House. 1915 ^■ 1940 ^^ Age of the talkies The Jazz Singer is released. It is the first feature film that contains synchronised dialogue and singing. 1927 • Horror gets horrific Alfred Hitchcock unveils Psycho to the world. Its shocking violence and suspense will forever change the horror genre. 1960 Theatre gets miserabie The musical version of Victor Hugo's book Les Miserables premieres in London. It will go on to become the longest running musical in history. 1985 ® Anew dimension James Cameron's Avatar becomes the highest grossing film of all time, increasing the popularity of 3D film in cinema. 2009 • Yoruba theatre The jubilation of Nigerian independence prompts creativity in the arts, leading to the emergence of Yoruba theatre companies. 1960 i ^ In a theatre far far away... The first Star Wars film is released. It begins a massive media franchise and influences a generation of films with special effects and science fiction elements. 1977 Shakespeare rises A modern reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe theatre is built near to where the second reincarnation was closed in 1642. 1997 ■Ray received the Bharat Ratna.l l^e highest civilian award in Indial ■in 1992, shortly before his death | A ray of hope INDIA 1921-1992 Born in British India on 2 May 1921, Satyajit Ray was an Indian film director whose films had an immense effect not only on Indian cinema but on films the world over. Ray was a director with total control of his own work, with a hand in scripting, casting, directing, scoring, filming, editing and even creating publicity material. He flourished during Indian cinema's golden age in the 1950s and has been quoted as an influence on such directors as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Danny Boyle. Snow White And The Seven Dwarves was based on a fairytale An animated beginning UNITED STATES DF AMERICA 1937 The act of depicting figures in motion through art can be seen as far back as Palaeolithic cave paintings, but it wasn't until the 20th century that the art form really became popular. Although film studios had created short cartoons before, it was Walt Disney who was the first to create a feature film entirely made up of hand-drawn animation. The success of Snow White And The Seven Dwarves ushered in a new age of animation using exciting new techniques that are still being developed today. 17 How to PUT ON A PLAY IN ANCIENT GREECE GREEK THEATRE Skene This building behind the stage was decorated to represent a scene in the play and allowed actors to enter and exit. IN ANCIENT ATHENS, PLAYWRITING WAS A FIERCE COMPETITION ATHENS, ANCIENT GREECE, 450 BCE Theatron The main area where spectators sat, initially the seats were simply cushions or boards, but soon theatres were made with marble seats. 5 FAMOUS... ANCIENT PLAYWRIGHTS SOPHOCLES 49HD6 BCE ATHENS One of three Greek tragedians whose plays have survived, Sophocles penned Oedipus the King and never came lower than second place in competitions. TERENCE 195-159 BCE ROMAN REPUBLIC The earliest recorded evidence of theatre as we know it occurred in Athens in 532 BCE. A theatrical contest was won by Thespis, who is also hailed as the earliest known actor and origin for the term Thespian'. These theatre competitions were held as part of the festival of the City Dionysia. Originally a rural festival to honour the god Dionysus, the City Dionysia developed into a huge event that attracted visitors from all over Greece. Businesses closed and prisoners were released to join in the five-day celebration, of which the theatrical competition was the centrepiece. As democracy spread across Athens, playwrights began to question their society and acted as the voice of the people. Parados These were the passageways where the chorus would enter and exit. The audience would also use these paths to enter and leave the theatre. Orchestra This was a circular or rectangular space in the centre of the theatre where the chorus and actors would perform. Terence was a Roman comedic playwright of North African descent. Brought to Rome as a slave, his owner granted his freedom so he could write plays. ARISTOPHANES 446-386 BCE ATHENS Eleven of Aristophanes' comedic plays have survived completely and are almost the only examples of the Old Comedy genre. EURIPIDES 480-406 BCE ATHENS Euripides was one of the most popular playwrights of ancient Athens; as a result, more plays of his exist than any other tragedian. MENANDER 341-290 BCE ATHENS Menander was a champion of the Lenaia festival, similar to the City Dionysia, and is seen as the father of Athenian New Comedy. n 1 Decide what kind of play to write I I I In Ancient Greece, tragedy and comedy are completely U I separate genres, so it's crucial that you, as a poet, make a decision as to which genre you will write. The City Dionysia features competitions between tragic and comic playwrights, and the ideal way for any budding poet to make their name is to win this competition, so pick your genre and get planning. Get funding Dionysia plays in Athens are publicly funded, which is great for you. However, this does mean that your plays need to be picked by an official known as the eponymous archon. Submit the proposal for your plays with all the other playwrights and wait to hear his decision. Only three playwrights will be picked; the other two will be your competition. 18 ThetUre & Film How not to... impress an audience Russian composer Igor Stravinsky achieved recognition for his first ballets, The Firebird in 1910 and Petrushka in 1911, and in 1913 he premiered his third ballet The Rite Of Spring. The ballet was being shown in the prestigious Theatre des Champs- Elysees in Paris and attracted a huge crowd. Hopes were high, but almost as soon as it began things went downhill. Many believe it was not the music but the 'ugly earthbound lurching and stomping' of the dancers that offended the upper-class audience. There were reports of the crowd attacking each other as well as the orchestra. The disturbance grew into a near-riot and about 40 people were thrown out. Unsurprisingly, the ballet was panned by critics. After its short run the ballet was not performed again until the 1920s, with new choreography. 03 ' I Get some actors jThe eponymous archon is responsible for choosing your I star actors, which will be decided by drawing random lots. However, it is the wealthiest citizens of Athens who will foot the bill for the rest of your production. Rich citizens, known as choregos, can win favour with the public by sponsoring your plays, paying for the chorus actors, scenery and even costumes. n r~ Perform your play I I ^ After many rehearsals the day has arrived to present U Uyour plays. The setting for the competition is a huge theatre built into a hill. The competition can attract up to 14,000 people, beginning at dawn and continuing into the evening. Each playwright presents four plays - three tragedies and a satyr that mocks the mythological theme of the tragedies. 04 ’ I Write your plays I It’s time to sit down and write your plays. Remember, lAncient Greek plays feature music and singing, which you will need to write. Many of the most famous Greek tragedy writers were revolutionary in their ideas - such as Euripedes, who examined characters on a psychological level. Pushing traditional values can be risky but it might see you go down in history. ob; (Collect your prize j After all competitors have performed, the judging tal«s f place. The judges write their rankings on tablets, which are then placed in urns. The eponymous archon draws out five of the ten tablets at random and announces the winners. As there's only three competitors, the worst position is third place. The winner is crowned with a wreath of ivy and wins the adoration of the crowd. a INCREDIBLE THEATRES THEATRE OF EPIDAURUS 4TH CENTURY BCE ANCIENT GREECE Designed by Polykieitos the Younger, this huge theatre is acclaimed for exceptional acoustics that allows all 15,000 spectators to clearly hear actors. GRANTEATRO LAFENIGE 1792 ITALY This renowned Italian landmark was built three times after the first two incarnations were burned down. MINAGKTHEATRE 1932 ENGLAND This open-air theatre near Cornwall was originally constructed in a back garden for a local production. It now attracts 100,000 visitors a year. SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE 1973 AUSTRALIA One of the busiest performing arts centres in the world, the Sydney Opera House has multiple venues hosting more than 1,500 performances each year, attended by about 1.2 million people. 19 © Ed Crooks Theatre & Film A195DSMDVIESTAR RADIATING GLAMOUR AND GRACE WHILE WORKED TO EXHAUSTION UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 1950S The golden age of Hollywood was very much in motion at the dawn of the 1950s. The star system of the Hollywood studios was still in effect, which meant that some stars were still employees of film studios. However, a Supreme Court decision made it illegal for studios to own theatres. Power was being dragged away from the studios and actors wished to take advantage. As film struggled to hold its own against television, the scandals and glamour of the faces of the big screen were still a source of fascination to the public. While on the surface they appeared perfectly groomed at the forefront of fashion, in reality actors and actresses were fighting to stay afloat in a rapidly changing industry. DRESS FOR SUCCESS During the golden era of cinema, mass media was the main influence on fashion, and movie stars were constantly setting new trends. The styles of Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor dragged fashion away from the conservative 1940s and even male stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean were making a splash - with teenage boys everywhere copying their white t-shirt, jeans and leather jacket look. LAND THE PERFECT ROLE ^ The movies of the 1950s were a significant departure from the 1940s. As Cold War paranoia filtered into cinema, science fiction flicks that delivered cynical messages about political powers, such as Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, became popular. For actors it signalled a change from the 'cool' to fractured, emotionally vulnerable characters. Method acting, made popular by Marlon Brando, became prevalent among performers. WORK WITHOUT OREAKS Many popular stars of the era were in such high demand that they barely had any rest between one production and the next. To deal with their demanding schedules, young stars were pumped with amphetamines to keep them awake during filming, then sleeping pills at night. The pressure to produce winning performances also drove many stars to recreational drugs, especially LSD. Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn on the set of the 1951 film The African Queen 20 * be relied on for a authenticity, tabloid newspapers from ™ the era give a great insight into the l^yj RE,P( pressure placed on ^1 ^ movie stars in the 1950s, as well as the fascination people had with them. A I lot of what we know ~ about the lives of actors in this era comes from biographies written by the stars themselves. Lauren Bacall, Katharine Hepburn and Fred Astaire are just some of the stars who wrote revealing autobiographies of their lives during the golden era of film. For a more objective approach. The Fifties: Transforming The Screen offers an in-depth study of the changes cinema underwent in this dramatic decade, while also providing historical context of American culture as a whole. ThetUre & Film DEMAND A BIGGER SALARY At the Start of the 1950s, stars were still attached to studios, but this steadily began to decline through the decade. James Stewart broke tradition by becoming a freelance movie star and demanding to be paid half the profits made by his films. Many other stars followed his lead and went independent, insisting they were paid on a film-by-film basis. This was the beginning of huge independent star salaries that actors are paid today. DATE A CD-STAR As actors spent so much of their time on set, it is no surprise that secret love affairs between co-stars, directors and even agents were common. Esther Williams had a romantic liaison with co-star Victor Mature on the set of Million Dollar Mermaid due to problems with her marriage. Because of the relentless schedule and demanding work of starring in movies, it was very difficult for actors to maintain healthy relationships with anyone outside of the Hollywood bubble. COVER UP A SCANDAL Although Katharine Hepburn managed to hide a 26-year-long affair with co-star Spencer Tracy from the press, other stars were not so lucky. Ingrid Bergman's virginal image was destroyed when the press found out about her affair with director Roberto Rossellini in 1950. As actors were closely tied to studios, any scandalous headlines would impact negatively on the studio's reputation and could see the stars kicked out of their contracts. AVDID THE PAPARAZZI Although the term 'paparazzi' was not attached to them until the 1960s, in the 1950s the scandal sheet photographers were out in force, eager to grab the perfect snap of the decade's film stars in compromising or mundane situations. Even in these early days the paparazzi were the bane of actors' lives. Publicity could be positive, but more often than not photos would be used to support sensationalised stories that could damage an actor's career. The press hounded Marilyn Monroe so relentlessly that during a high-speed chase one of the paparazzo's cars hit a tree and he was killed. APPEAR ON TV In 1959, only 42 million Americans were attending the cinema each week, compared to double that number ten years previously. This was thanks to the growing number of American homes with television sets. Many directors, stars and technicians were forced to leave the film industry and work on television shows instead. There was also a growing trend for stars to appear on advertisements, as making money through film alone was proving difficult. Brando'S performance in On The Waterfront won him an Oscar and transformed the worid of acting How do we know this? I I Although they can't Theatre & Film HaUofFoMne Abramovic fell unconscious during a show and the audience didn't realise for several minutes MARINA ABRAMOVIC SERBIA 1946-PRESENT Born in tumultuous Serbia, then a part of Yugoslavia, Abramovic embarked on a mostly solo-performance career in the 1970s onward, in which she subverted the traditions of stage performance, producing a series of provocative, experimental - often self-endangering - works that explored the nature of sexuality, pain and even social behaviour. This was often reflected in the actions of her audience members, who would frequently become a part of her non-traditional performances. Her fame was only magnified by the advent of social media, and she is still very active in exploring humanity through performance today. From Shakespeare to Spielberg, these writers, directors and actors defined their craft STEVEN SPIELBERG USA 1946-PRESENT Steven Allan Spielberg started his career by making home-made 'adventure' films on his father's 8mm film camera, and after winning an award in a short-film competition, he got an internship at Universal Studios. Quickly proving himself as an able film-maker, his big moment came in 1975 when his horror thriller Jaws was released in cinemas. Becoming the highest-grossing film in history at the time. Jaws ushered in the era of New Hollywood, with big budgets and even bigger incomes for massively marketed event films. Spielberg would spearhead this movement throughout the 1980s, 1990s and the early-21st century, setting the highest- grossing record himself twice again with ET: TJie Extra- Terrestrial in 1982 and Jurassic Park in 1993. Georges Melies FRANCE 1661-1936 Often referred to as the world's first 'cinemagician', Melies took the nascent film technology that had been recently developed by the Lumiere brothers and others and started experimenting with it in creative ways. By trickeries of cinematography, editing and even practical effects, Melies' films, of which he made hundreds from 1896 to 1913, introduced an element of narrative, adventure and fantasy to cinema, forming a fascination with the spectacular still felt in films worldwide today. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Hailed as not only one of the most influential playwrights of all time but also counted among the greatest writers of the English language, Shakespeare wrote almost 40 plays including Hamlet. Romeo And Juliet. Richard III and Macbeth, along with a large collection of poems and sonnets. Equally adept at tragedies, histories and comedies, his work is not only still produced with unerring regularity across the globe but also has an immense ' influence on a ' ^ \ F great number of playwrights, performers, poets and film-makers to this day. " * Shakespeare coined many words now found in any standard English dictionary ThetUre & Film SOPHOCLES ^^■ibA ^ person who has had a greater influence on theatre and play writing throughout the ages than the Ancient Greek pioneer Sophocles. The playwright earned fame by beating the then-guiding light of Greek theatre, Aeschylus, in the Dionysia theatre competition in 468 BCE. By altering the rules of playwriting, for example by adding a third character to the rigid form of two and a chorus, he expanded the possibilities of storytelling on stage. Although only a fraction of his plays survive, those that do M are still popular production di 0 material of directors. iV coll' MOLIERE FRANCE 1622-1673 If Shakespeare was the master of the English language and theatre, Moliere was undoubtedly the master of the French. Born into an upper-class family, he got involved with theatre from a young age and soon went on to write his own plays. Often receiving royal commission for work, he gained fame for his comedies, which are still popular material for the world's stages today. However, despite - or perhaps because of - his background, he began criticising aristocracy and religion through his subversive use of humour, drawing ire from moralists and condemnation from the Catholic church. Some of his plays were considered so insidious that the church banned them, which only went to further his fame in the long run, of course. Dharmendra was Bollywood sL ; romantic star in the 1960s efore turning to action films Dharmendra INDIA 1935-PRESENT In Bollywood, the most prolific film industry in the world, Dharam Singh Deol - known as Dharmendra - is one of Indian cinema's biggest-ever stars. Nicknamed 'Action King' for his action- film roles, Dharmendra was perhaps the world's single most popular film star, in terms of sheer audience numbers, from 1960 to the Iate-1990s. He has appeared in almost 100 hit films in his career. ; turning his hand to \ acting and lives in a ranch house that he built 'All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players" As You Like It, WUttam Shake^teare Sarah Kane UNITED KINGDDM 1971-1999 She only published five plays during her lifetime, was never commissioned by royals and her work has not been adapted into major films, but Sarah Kane has had more effect on contemporary theatre than many other 20th-century playwrights. Creating a stir when her first play. Blasted, was shown in 1995, she was either hailed as a visionary or attacked for her blunt and explicit writing by the British media. She was a big part of the so-called 'in-yer-face' theatre, which moved away from naturalistic theatre in favour of a more provocative, socially and politically critical and gritty depiction of the world through drama. Her influence is still spreading through Western theatre today. E 2 BUNRAKU PUPPETRY BLACK ROBES ITO CREATE THE ILLUSION OF NOTHINGNESS j Unlike operators of string puppets, Bunraku puppeteers appear on I stage. As black traditionally signifies nothingness, the operators often dress in black robes and head coverings to indicate there is I 'nothing' there. However, as the expert skills of some operators I attracted attention, a tradition of the head puppeteer wearing . a kimono with his family crest was created. This allows the I audience to see who the master is. EXPERT SKILLS CREATING CULTURAL MASTERPIECES JAPAN, 17TH CENTURY - MODER THE TRUE GENIUS OF THE PUPPET LIES BENEATH THE SURFACE The mechanism of the puppets is rather simple, but very effective. The hollow wood heads are placed on a grip sick, while the arms and legs are attached to a rounded shoulder board with strings. However, female puppets as a rule do not have any legs, and instead the puppeteer will use their fists in the hem of the robe to create the illusion of feet. COSTUME EVERY DETAIL PAINSTAKINGLY CHOSEN Each puppet is dressed in an under robe, inner kimono, outer robe, collar and an obi belt. The robes are stuffed with cotton to give a more natural look to the puppet's body. Costume masters are in charge of picking out the perfect selection of clothes for the character, which are then sent to the puppeteers to dress the doll in a tradition known as koshirae - 'the dressing of the doll'. THE ‘DO THAT DEFINES THE CHARACTER The construction of the hair of the puppet is also a skilled craft. The wigs tend to be made from human hair attached to copper plates, and yak's tail is sometimes also used to add volume. There are fundamental styles for each character type, and wig masters must build upon these set styles to create an appropriate finished piece. EXPERT CRAFTSMANSHIP FACE THE SOUL OF THE CHARACTER The heads of the puppets, known as kashira, help define the character and are divided into strict categories of gender, class and personality. While specific characters occasionally require a certain head, others can be used for multiple performances by simply repainting them. Some heads contain complex mechanisms that transform the face into a demon. WELL-HONED SKILLS PUPPETRY ISN’T CHILD’S PLAY Extreme dedication and commitment is required from those who wish to operate these sophisticated puppets. Those in the first stages of training will operate the feet of the puppet, then will move on to the left hand. Finally, the master puppeteer will operate the right hand and head. It used to be said "ten years for the feet, ten years for the left," indicating the lengthy training required to become a Bunraku master. THREE OPERATORS __ A REAL JOINT EFFORT Bunraku puppets are unique as they require three puppeteers to operate each doll. Total harmony is required from all three of the operators to ensure the puppet's movements look natural and bring the character to life. The head puppeteer will wear elevated clogs to compensate for the height of the doll, which can be as tall as 150 centimetres (5 feet). COMMEMORATIVE GUERNSEY STAMPS 1 75th Anniversary of the Penny Black Miniature Sheet - Depicts Rowland Hill and a Penny Black on a Guernsey stamp. Also available: First Day Cover - an envelope with the miniature sheet and the first day of issue cancellation mark. Presentation Pack - an attractive way of displaying this sheet along with - * historic details on the Penny Black. The iconic Penny Black stamp The first mention of what became the world's first adhesive postage stamp came from Rowland Hill when answering questions in a parliamentary enquiry into the Post service in February 1837. "...A bit of paper just large enough to bear the stamp, and covered at the back with a glutinous wash." At the time postage was charged by the sheet and the distance travelled therefore too expensive for most people to use. Hill proposed the idea of wrapping a letter in an additional piece of paper - now known as the envelope and attaching a 'label'- now known as a stamp. From this one small stamp developed a new system of processing and delivering mail. The new uniform prices, transportation and postal systems meant that costs became more affordable and almost everyone could afford to write a letter. The miniature sheet (above left) celebrates this historic event and is a true memento of this iconic stamp. Guernsey Philatelic Bureau Envoy House, La Vrangue, St Peter Port, Guernsey, GY1 5SS, Channel Islands Tel: +44(0)1481 716486 Fax: +44 (0)1481 712082 E-mail: [email protected] GUERNSEY POST^ and a half for entry. On arrival, they would drop their entrance fee into a box, hence the term 'box office'. SHAKESPEARE’S THEATRICAL PLAYGROUND, 1599-1642, ENGLAND One of the first purpose-built theatres in London, this open-air building is best known for its links with the most famous playwright in history, William Shakespeare. Its construction was funded by his playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and Shakespeare himself was one of four actors who bought a share in the Globe. Up to 3,000 people from all walks of life would pack into the theatre to watch his latest production - that was until a cannon set off during a 1613 production of Henry VIII misfired and set the thatched roof ablaze. No one was injured, but the theatre was burned to the ground in less than two hours. It was rebuilt a year later, this time with a tiled roof, but was closed down by Puritans in 1642. It wasn't until 1997 that the theatre was rebuilt and opened to the public once more. The yard For a ticket price of one penny, the lower classes would stand for up to three hours to watch a performance. These people were called 'groundlings', although during the summer months they were also referred to as 'stinkards' - for obvious reasons. The galleries Wealthier spectators could sit in one of the three raised galleries, and pay extra for the added comfort of a cushion. Upper-class women would often wear a mask to hide their identities. THE GLOBE 26 ThetUre & Film Roof The original Globe had a thatched roof that covered the gallery areas and stage, protecting the actors and wealthier spectators from the elements. After a fire destroyed the theatre, it was rebuilt with a less flammable tiled roof. Balcony This was where the musicians performed. It could also be used for scenes performed over two levels, such as the balcony scene in Romeo And Juliet The heavens The ceiling under the stage roof was known as the 'heavens', and would have been painted to look like a sky. A trap door in the ceiling allowed actors to drop down onto the stage using a rope. Up to 3,000 people from all walks of life would pack into the theatre 99 Tiring house This was what we would now call the backstage area. Costumes and props were stored on the upper floors, while actors dressed and awaited their entrances on the ground floor. rrm The stage A rectangular stage platform known as an apron stage jutted out into the yard. Actors could enter via a trapdoor or stage doors along the back wall. i. 27 © Sol 90 Images ©Alamy Theatre & Film Top 5 facts OGCAR W DE THE VICTORIAN PLAYWRIGKT AND SOCIALITE PLAGUED BY CONTROVERSY OSCAR WILDE , / « X Nationality: Irish Born: 16 October 1854 Died: 30 November 1900 \ Wilde became popular in the early 1890s I in London as an acclaimed playwright, I during which time he wrote poems and the renowned novel The Picture Of Dorian Gray. The talented playwright was later arrested and imprisoned for 'gross indecency' and died destitute aged just 46. His plays have stood the test of time and continue to be produced today. 01 WILDE WAS A REBELLIOUS STUDENT Although Wilde was a very talented student - he was awarded a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, and then Magdalen College, Oxford University - he grew steadily more rebellious. In one academic year he turned up three weeks late to the start of term. He was one of the VM first ‘celebrities' Wilde was one of the first people who. particularly during his early days in London, was famous for being famous. He entered into high society and caused a stir with his dress and unique manner. He seemed to revel in any attention that came his way and became a master of self-publicity. An author stole the love of his life Florence Balcombe, a stunning socialite, attracted the eye of a young Wilde and they soon became sweethearts. Many believed they were to marry, but Balcombe instead married Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. Wilde was crushed, remembering "the two sweet years" they spent together. f\^Dorian Gray was V ^heavily edited The Picture Of Dorian Grayvjas intended to be very different to the published version. Without Wilde's knowledge. 500 words were deleted before it was published in a magazine. After the edition received criticism, Wilde was forced to remove further homoerotic themes. The unedited version was finally published in 2011. ^CHis parents were w 9 more remarkable Although it is Wilde who is remembered today, his parents were equally, if not more, impressive than he was. His father. Sir William Robert Wilde, was a doctor whose remarkable medical work earned him a knighthood. His mother. Jane, was a prominent poet and Irish nationalist who mastered 12 languages. 28 TICKETS ELDBE THEATRE 2DI5 THEATRE 5EA5DN JUSTICE 51 MERCY APRIL- DCTDBER THE MERCHANT DF VENICE A5 YDU LIKE IT KING JOHN MEASURE FDR MEASURE RICHARD II THE HERESY DF LDVE BY HELEN EDMUNDEBN THE DRESTEIA ADAPTED BYRDRYMULLARKEY FRDMTHE DRIGINAL BY AE5CHYLUE NELL GWYNN BYJEEEIGAEWALE RICHARD III IN MANDARIN MACBETH IN CANTDNEEE RDMED 51 JULIET MUCH ADD ABDUT NDTHING BDDK NDW DZD 74D1 9919 5HAKESPEARE5GLDBEIDM m ELUEIH'S HAIES STOLE THE I n the years before Elizabeth ascended the throne, England was plagued by internal conflicts. Her father Henry VIII's split from the church had caused England to fall out of favour with Rome, and then the early death of his heir Edward VI prompted a succession crisis. The country had switched from Protestant to Catholic with the rise of Mary I, and those who dared to challenge her were burned in the streets without mercy. While other countries were prospering, England was struggling to maintain order within its own borders. What the country needed was a stable, temperate ruler, one whose reign would allow the nation to flourish; that is what it found in Elizabeth. A Protestant, but without the extreme beliefs of her father, Elizabeth was tolerant, moderate and wise enough to listen to her counsellors. Finally, with the country somewhat stable, its population was able to look outwards. They discovered that the world had very much moved on without them. Spanish, Italian and Portuguese explorers ruled the waves. Using their sophisticated navigation tools, they had set up powerful and profitable trading roots, and if it didn't act soon, England would find itself isolated and vulnerable. Armed with new navigation tools, English sailors were finally bold enough to sail beyond the sight of land and into the open sea. The spirit of exploration gripped the nation, which was eager to best the competition, spread Christianity and, most importantly, claim riches. Figures such as Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, a virtual unknown, became household names after completing valiant voyages for the English crown. As riches began to pour in, more and more ambitious seamen took to the waves eager for a taste of glory, wealth and adventure. The risks were high, but the profits, if successful, were even greater. It became obvious that true wealth lay in trade and an abundance of chartered companies began to pop up around the country. Making perilous journeys to plant their flags in far-off exotic lands, traders brought a stream of valuable eastern spices, pepper, nutmeg, wine, precious stones, dyes and even slaves pouring into England. It was an era of exploration, an era of change; a time when a lowly sailor with an adventurous spirit could make his fortune if he was daring enough to take it. There was a new world to explore, and it seemed like the entire world order could change as quickly as the wind. In the age of exploration, the fate of nations and the fortunes of men were created, sunk and stolen on the open seas ► Written by Frances White r rO ' TUDOR EMPIRE I Writer, courtier, spy, Walter Raleigh used his favour with the queen to wipe out his Spanish rivals T he life story of Sir Walter Raleigh is one of glittering highs and devastating lows. It perfectly encapsulates how, in the age of exploration, one's fate could be changed, for better or worse, in an instant. Born into moderate influence, Raleigh was the youngest son of a highly Protestant family. Educated at Oxford University, it seemed he was set for an academic life, but when the French religious civil wars broke out, he left the country to serve with the Huguenots against King Charles IX of France. However, it was his participation in the Desmond Rebellions in Ireland that would forever alter his life. When uprisings broke out in Munster, Raleigh fought in the queen's army to suppress the rebels. His ruthlessness in punishing the rebels at the Siege of Smerwick in 1580 and his subsequent seizure of lands saw him become a powerful landowner and, most importantly, it caught the attention of the queen. Oozing natural charm and wit, Raleigh became a frequent visitor to the Royal Court and he soon became a firm favourite of Elizabeth. She bestowed her beloved courtier with large estates and even a knighthood. Her deep trust in Raleigh was demonstrated in 1587, when she made him Captain of the Queen's Guard. It is no surprise then that when Raleigh suggested colonising America, it was supported whole heartedly by the queen, who granted him trade privileges to do just that. From 1584 to 1589, Raleigh led several voyages to the New World; he explored from North Carolina to Florida and bestowed it with the name 'Virginia' in honour of the virgin queen. His attempts to establish ador ships explored the world Dr riches, but the journey was anything but luxurious 1 feknutnr 1515 ts have infested the ship, making the deck ; ^en more uncomfortable and cramped to ;p on. After the vicious winds last night, the ; have been repaired and the water pumped jt of the ship. Luckily my backgammon set was not harmed. * IS 1S15 iupplies running low. Hardtack biscuits are Dmpletely riddled with maggots and wornris | t. with nothing else, there is no choice but to It them. Water no longer suitable to drink, so must survive on beer alone. K VI '515. Many of the men hdve faiien victim to scui^y. The doctor is unable to do much to ease their symptoms. Their teeth are falling out and sores have broken out all over their bodies. Some cases became so severe that several men have died. We threw the corpses overboard. ^ We- 1515 The men are getting restless arid rebellious. One had to be flogged after speaking back to an officer. Another was keelhauled - tied t° a lin looped around the ship, thrown overboard and dragged under the vessel. The barnacles cut him up so terribly that he lost an arm. t-l We- 1515 Saw some driftwood today, and another officer informed me he saw a seabird. We may be close to land. This completely contradicts the map we were given (again), so new instructions will need to be drawn up if land is spotted. It is said that after his death. Raleigh's wife kept his embalmed head with her in a velvet bag 32 S5: 1 colonies, however, ended in failure. His settlement at Roanoke Island especially was a disaster, as the entire colony mysteriously disappeared, their fate unknown to this day The Roanoke colony was not the only one to experience a disastrous end - Raleigh's relationship with the queen was destroyed when she discovered his secret marriage to one of her own ladies in waiting. Not only was she 11 years younger than him, but she was also pregnant. Furious that he had failed to obtain her permission, and likely a little jealous, Elizabeth had Raleigh imprisoned and his wife cast out of court. Upon his release, Raleigh was eager to reclaim favour with the monarch so led a mission to search for the legendary city of gold - El Dorado. Although his accounts would claim otherwise, he did not find the city of legend, but instead explored modern-day Guyana and Venezuela. His attack on the powerful Spanish Port of Cadiz and attempts to destroy the newly formed Spanish Armada helped to gradually win back favour with Elizabeth. When Elizabeth died and James I came to the throne in 1603, Raleigh must have realised his time was up. His ruthless spirit and charm had won him a soft spot in the English queen's heart, but the Scottish king took an immediate dislike to him. Raleigh was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London less than a year after James's ascension. He was found guilty of treason, but was spared from his death sentence and committed to life imprisonment. In 1616 he was released by the money-hungry king to, yet again, search for the fabled city of gold, which his own accounts had helped make into a legend. During the expedition, he disobeyed James's orders and attacked a Spanish outpost. Spain was furious, and in order to appease them, James had no choice but to punish the rebellious adventurer. Raleigh was re-arrested and his sentence was finally carried out. Bold and cunning to the end, Raleigh reportedly said to his executioner: "This is sharp medicine, but it is a cure for all diseases. What dost thou fear? Strike, man, strike." A ship of 200 men setting sail for a week would be loaded with... TUDOR EMPIRE L 331 ‘ - I I I I I \ 'r By the 1560s, the young Drake was making frequent trips to Africa. There, he would capture slaves and sell them in New Spain. This was against Spanish law and in 1568 his fleet was trapped by Spaniards in the Mexican port of San Juan de Ulua. Although Drake managed to escape, many of his men were killed. This incident instilled a deep hatred in Drake towards the Spanish crown that would last throughout his entire life. In 1572 he received a privateer's commission from Elizabeth and set his sights on plundering any Spanish ship that crossed his path. He targeted wealthy Spanish-owned port towns and settlements, attacking them and claiming as much gold and silver as he could load on to his ships. It ^ \ or many. Sir Francis Drake is ^ I ^ physical embodiment of the glories of Tudor England. But / I Drake himself was an entirely I untypical hero. His birth was viewed so unremarkable that no one is sure exactly when it was. He came from a very ordinary family he was the eldest of 12 sons, and his father was a farmer. When the Catholic Mary began to persecute Protestants, the family fled from Devonshire to Kent, where his father became a preacher. It seemed fate itself wished to place Drake on a ship, as he was apprenticed to their neighbour, and when the old, childless sailor died, he left his ship to his favourite pupil. A shaky start I On 15 November 1577, Drake sets off from Plymouth, but his voyage is immediately halted by bad weather. They are forced to return to Plymouth to repair their already battered ships. On 13 December, he sets sail again on the Pelican. He is accompanied by four other ships manned by 164 men, and he soon adds a sixth ship to his fleet. The Mystery Landing 4 Drake sails north and lands on the coast of California on 1 June 1579. While there he befriends the natives and dubs the land Nova Albion, or 'New Britain'. The location of this port remains a mystery to this day, as all maps were altered to keep it a secret from the Spanish. The officially recognised location is now Drakes Bay, California. A grim l^md^ng 2 After being forced to sink two ships, Drake lands on the bay of San Julian, where he burns another rotting ship. There, Drake tries Thomas Doughty, who is accused of treachery and incitement to mutiny. He is sentenced to death and executed alongside the decaying skeletons swinging in the Spanish gibbets. The lone flagship 3 With just three ships remaining, Drake reaches the Pacific Ocean. However, sudden violent storms destroy one and force another to return home. The flagship Pelican is pushed south and they discover an island, which Drake names Elizabeth Island. He then changes the name of his lone ship to the Golden Hind. 134 ^ ‘ ' - ~ I ^ TUDOR EMPIRE The Spanish had circumnavigated the globe decades before, but English explorer Francis Drake threatened to destroy their success f Although Tudor sailors liked to paint themselves i as masters of the seas, their navigation tools were rather primitive and a lot of guesswork was involved. Maps did exist, but they were often incorrect, as much land was undiscovered. Compasses were used for direction and an instrument called a nocturnal was used to determine the alignment of the stars, which helped to calculate tides. The term 'knots' came from a Tudor method to calculate the speed of a ship - a piece \ of wood attached to a rope with knots in it was / ^ V cast out and the knots counted as they passed ^ through a sailor's fingers. Another sailor / . used a sandglass to determine how ./ many knots were travelled in // \ a period of time. ^ The Hind lives on 5 Drake reaches a group of islands in the southwest Pacific known as the Moluccas. After a close shave in which the Golden Hind is almost lost after being caught on a reef, Drake befriends the sultan king of the islands. The valiant return 6 On 26 September 1580, the Golden Hind finally returns to Plymouth with Drake and the 59 remaining crewmembers onboard. The queen receives half of the treasures and spices loaded onto the ship. In return, Elizabeth gives Drake a jewel with her miniature portrait, now known as the 'Drake Jewel'. IrnmiAiinr mmU I 1 llllllliiiAi IfEHlIli Oinf*' was Drake who, when discovering that he had too much gold to carry, decided to bury it and reclaim it later. This was not the only comparison made between Drake and pirates. Although in England his success had seen him become a wealthy and respected explorer, this was not the case in Spain. To the Spaniards whose ships he had plundered, Drake became a bloodthirsty figure to be feared; they even gave him the terrifying nickname 'El Draque' - the Dragon. Dragon or not, the daring and bountiful voyages of the English adventurer had impressed Queen Elizabeth I. He perfectly epitomised the kind of pioneering English spirit that she felt her country needed to ensure it became a major world power. In 1577, she sent Drake on an expedition against the Spanish along the Pacific coast of South America. He raided the Spanish settlements in his usual ruthless style and, after plundering Spanish ships along the coasts of Chile and Peru, he landed in California and claimed it for his queen. His journey continued through the Indian Ocean and when he finally returned to England on 26 September 1580, he became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world. This delighted the queen, but what pleased her even more were the pretty jewels he bestowed her with. In a move that insulted the king of Spain, she dined onboard the explorer's ship, bestowed him with a jewel of her own and gave him a knighthood. Drake's formidable success at the expense of Spain did not end there. In 1588 he was made vice admiral of the Navy, and when 130 Spanish Armada ships entered the English Channel, he fought them back with relish. Now, he wasn't only a wealthy explorer and royal favourite, he was also a war hero. However, in 1596 his luck finally ran out. The queen requested him to engage his old enemy Spain one last time and in a mission to capture the Spanish treasure in Panama, Drake contracted dysentery and died. His body was placed in a lead coffin and cast out to sea. His enduring legacy remains, and to this day divers continue to search for the coffin of the man who led Elizabethan England to glory. 1 35 roAd \h\/o\p^ Ginmisr- WiKc^ ^ra: ZQXrOMdY^ rra.Ke^K TUDOR EMPIRE The Muscovy Company's demands to close Russian trade to other European powers were met with anger by Ivan IV Wrt — A world full of riches awaited to make England a wealthy and powerful nation once again W hen it came to trade, England had some catching up to do. For a long time, Italian spice and dye traders dominated the seas, but the Italian monopoly that had existed on trade was finally broken by Spain and Portugal. In their efforts to loosen the Italian hold on trade, these traders discovered sea routes to the Indies and the hugely valuable spices that lay beyond. England looked on greedily as Spain grew wealthier and wealthier and became determined to share in the riches that were on offer in the New World. If England failed to get a foothold in the exploration of the New World, its European rivals would leave it behind and the nation would be left vulnerable. Trade didn't just mean riches anymore - it meant survival. After an English spy gained a copy of Breve Compendio De La Sphera, a secret Spanish textbook that held the secrets to success at sea, craftsmen began designing new instruments and English explorers were finally ready to take to the waves. Queen Elizabeth supported the voyages of these intrepid explorers and expressed that she would not disapprove if they were to take advantage of richly laden Spanish ships while doing so. Soon, English adventurers gained a reputation for piracy, although the raids were conducted not by pirates but by 'privateers'. Spanish ships in the Caribbean trembled in terror upon the sight of an English galleon on the horizon. A new world was dawning, and using their cunning, daring and ruthlessness, English traders would come to rule it. 36 g/ an d CAKGAPQU yACHlR. 'KU£. ootn<( I ^TaOK P VA CRlME^-p-'l :HniKA^3 1 PETIOOR^ Kl METMDIE 3 Elizabethan privateer James Lancaster commanded the first East India Co. voyage Richard Grenville V 1542-1591 ^ An English war hero, Grenville \ was a major part of early 1 attempts to settle in the I New World. He attempted to f set up colonies in Roanoke m Island and his daring death . M aboard his ship Revenge is ^ immortalised in Tennyson's ^ poem The Revenge. Martin Frobisher V 1535/1539-1594 \ Frobisher was determined to \ find a north-west passage I as a trade route to India I and China, and made three I voyages in an effort to do so. / The privateer collected what ^ he believed was 1,550 tons of ^ gold, but actually turned out to be worthless iron pyrite. Richard Hawkins y 1562-1622 X Son of John Hawkins, he set _ \ sail to prey on the possessions ^ I of the Spanish crown in I South America. Although his I plundering of Spanish towns M Strongly suggest otherwise, M he maintained that the f purpose of the expedition was geographical discovery. TUDOR EMPIRE THEEmilliiCOMPilNy Half brother of Sir Walter The tiny English company that came to control half of all the world's trade The men whose voyages carved the world for England Humphrey Gilbert k 1539-1583 Y Raleigh, Gilbert's voyages I established St John's I Newfoundland, the most I eastern province of Canada, ^ m in 1583. An early pioneer of f M the English colonial empire in ^ North America, Gilbert initially sailed to find a sea route through North America to Asia. John Hawkins 1532-1595 ) Cousin of Francis Drake, Hawkins was not only chief architect of the Navy but also conducted several voyages to West Africa and South America. Hawkins was a trade pioneer and made a huge profit from the slave trade. When Queen Elizabeth granted a Royal Charter to the traders that would become the East India Trading Company it's doubtful she could foresee the impact it would have upon the world. The 15-year charter permitted the fledgling company a monopoly on trade with countries east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan, but they were motivated by one thing - spices. But the Dutch East India Company had the monopoly and the small English company had to work from the bottom up, slowly gaining income and respect. Eventually the company's trade in spices, cotton and silk saw profits pour in. Just 47 years after its creation, the little business morphed into a giant. For many, the pioneering nature of the company was symbolic of the spirit of exploration, tearing down the barriers of the world. But as the company became more powerful, its ambitions grew in kind. The initial focus on trade morphed into dangerous colonial aspirations that would lead to the company's eventual downfall. Although the East India Trading Company was a major player in the arena of English trade, many other companies were making waves worldwide. The first major chartered joint stock company was the Muscovy Company, focusing on trade between England and Muscovy, modern-day i Russia. Trading with this mysterious state in | the frozen tundra involved perilous journeys that left one crew frozen, but when Richard Chancellor finally made it to Moscow he found a market eager to trade. English wool was exchangee for Russian fur and an array of valuable goods. The Muscovy Company even led to a marriage propose from Ivan the Terrible to Elizabeth. Another major English chartered company was the Levant, or Turkey, Company, drawn to the Ottoman empire by the lure of exotic i spices. The Levant Company amassed a small | fortune trading in silk and valuable currants. What set the Levant Company apart was that the leaders never appeared to have colonial ambitions, instead working closely with the sultan, This allowed for a relationship of mutual benefit. The East India Company weren't the only English traders to rule the seas TTT ^ ■ H ^ 37 .1 ■f Bluffer's Guide Salem Witch Trials MASSACHUSEHS, 16921693 V- ■'.:***- Bluffer^s Guide SALEM WITCH TRIALS Visions and fits may have been caused by convulsions after eating bad bread Salem's drug problem? Some researchers explain the symptoms of the girls as being the result of eating bread infected with a fungus, which led to an LSD-like poisoning. Others think different medical conditions were to blame, and many suggested it was entirely non-medical and motivated by spite or attention seeking. - 4* Coffin in the glass It all began when Betty Parris and Abigail Williams broke an egg white into a glass of water to see what shape it would take, thinking it would indicate the profession of their future husbands. When the egg appeared as a coffin, Betty fell into a hysterical fit, which soon spread to others. How to survive Most of the 150 people who were accused avoided death. The best way to escape the hangman's noose was to confess to witchcraft. Many also tried to help themselves by accusing others, fuelling more arrests. Interrogators often chose easy targets who they thought would confess. Torture was used if they did not. A sinister motive Many of the accused had crossed Salem resident Thomas Putnam over previous years. This has led to suggestions that the trials were abused by him to settle old scores and grudges. Of the 21 accusation records that survive, 15 were signed by at least one member of the Putnam family. More weight Five men were among the 19 who were hanged, while Giles Corey was pressed to death because he refused to enter a plea. Heavier and heavier rocks were placed on his chest until his ribs cracked and he could not breathe. According to tradition, his last words were "more weight." Why were they believed? Belief that the devil gave witches the power to harm others was widespread in Puritan New England. Much of the proof used was spectral evidence, where accusers said they had a vision of the person who was afflicting them. When spectral evidence was deemed inadmissible, the trials came to an abrupt end. V. The Crucible Playwright Arthur Miller saw parallels between the Salem witch trials and life in 1950s America. He wrote The Crucible as a critical allegory of McCarthyism. He fictionalised many aspects of the witch trials, especially the invention of a love story between Abigail Williams and John Proctor - in real life, she was 11 and he was 60. Key figures Tituba Unknown-unknown A Native American slave, Tituba was the first to confess to using witchcraft after being beaten by her owner. Cotton Mather 1663-1728 A Puritan minister and vigorous supporter of the trials, Mather was influential in the creation of the courts for the trials. William Stoughton 1631-1701 Chief justice of the court, Stoughton was in charge of the trials and a firm believer in the use of spectral evidence. Rebecca Nurse 1621-1692 Initially cleared of witchcraft. Nurse was executed after Stoughton urged the jury to reconsider its verdict. William Phips 1651-1695 Governor of Massachusetts, Phips established the court and later disbanded it, perhaps because his wife was accused. Key events The hysteria begins 20 January 1692 Two girls begin to suffer fits that are quickly deemed to be the result of witchcraft. The authorities become involved 29 February 1692 Thomas and Edward Putnam file a complaint to magistrates and the first arrest warrants for witches are issued. The first victim 10 June 1692 Bridget Bishop is the first to be hanged for witchcraft, two days after her trial. The deadliest day 22 September 1692 Eight people are hanged but critics of the hysteria are becoming more vocal. Beginning of the end 6 December 1692 A new court is created to deal with witch trials and spectral evidence is banned. 39 ©Alamy: Look and Learn; Topfoto SPECIAL SUBSCRIPTION OFFER FREEFAMILYTICKET WORTH £40 WHEN YOU SUBSCRIBE TODAY ORDER HOTLINE nN NFAT 0844 848 8408 WWW.IMAGINE80BS.C0.0K/HIST BY POST Send your completed form to: All About History Subscriptions, 800 Guillat Avenue, Kent Science Park, Sittingbourne, Kent ME9 8GU The Chalke Valley History Festival is the largest festival dedicated to history in the UK 22-28 JUNE 2015 For details visit cvhf.org.uk iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiMMimiiiiimiiiiiiimaiimmiiiHiiimjtiiJpnin WHY YOU SHOULD SUBSCRIBE... • Save 25% off the cover price - just £17.95 every 6 issues on Direct Debit • FREE family ticket to Chalke Valley History Festival • FREE delivery direct to your door • Never miss an issue ORDER BY To claim your free ticket use code CVHF15 22 May 2015 YOUR DETAILS Title .First name. 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The ticket includes entry for up to two adults and three children. Offer code CVHF15 must be quoted to receive this special subscription offer. Please provide a valid email address, as details of how to collect your tickets will be sent to you shortly after the closing date. The offer for the free ticket ends 22 May. If you subscribe after 22 May you can still take advantage of the 25% off subscription offer but without the free ticket. New subscriptions will start from the next available issue. Details of the Direct Debit Guarantee are available on request. Imagine Publishing reserves the right to limit this type of offer to one per household. MAGGIE ANDREWS 1“ — -* Maggie Andrews is a professor of Cultural History at the University of Worcester. She is a historical consultant for the BBC Radio 4 drama series Home Front. Her most recent book is The Home Front In Britain, edited jointly with Janis Lomas. World War II tore homes and families apart, but Britain would rise stronger than ever Written by Maggie Andrews orld War II placed an almighty strain on the population of Britain. Bombing, rationing, food and fuel shortages, families fractured by men and women away in the armed forces or undertaking war work and children evacuated to safety meant that many, on the home and battle fronts, idealised home life. The legacies of war resulted in many finding their dreams of home and family hard to attain in the post-war world. It wasn't just buildings that needed to be rebuilt. The announcement that war in Europe was over was greeted with much excitement; Joan Carmichael recalled: VE day came after I had been working in Bath for just over a year. With some friends from the office, including the boss and his wife, we all rushed down to the centre of Bath and found a nice pub, where we had a celebratory meal and lots of drinks. Later in the evening we joined the crowds dancing around Bath Abbey until the small hours. Someone suggested going to London to celebrate there, so we caught the early morning train with a two-hour journey to Paddington and somehow - tube, taxi, walking, I cannot remember - we made our way to St Pauls, the symbol of Britain surviving the Blitz. Hundreds of people were walking around. VE day was not the end of hostilities - the British army was still involved in conflicts in the Middle 43 Rebuilding Britain and Far East. Many men and women were stationed in Europe and the majority of those in the fighting forces were not demobbed until 1946, by which time they had contributed to electing a Labour government. The transition between war and peace was fuzzy. For many their dream of 'happy ever after' life was delayed. Barbara Cooke met her future husband on a train in 1944 and they continued their courtship by mail, meeting occasionally when he was on leave. When he received orders of an overseas posting, they set the date for their wedding - 7 May 1945. The wedding dress was a collection of coupons that everybody collected together and the dress was bought from John Lewis in Leicester for the grand sum of £16, The dress was made with plain heavy white satin. Around four o'clock it came over on the radio; the newscaster announced that the hostilities had ceased, making me the last wartime bride'. Along with our wedding telegrams came one for my husband, Tom, to return to his unit immediately. Two and a half million couples were apart for long periods of time between 1939 and 1946. A third of a million merchant seaman, servicemen and women and 67,635 civilians had been killed; for some there would be no return to normality. James Teather met his future wife, Marjorie, when he was wounded and she was a nurse at Longdon Hall, Staffordshire, and they were married in 1943. In October 1944, Teather was killed over Belgium and her son recalls how in 1945 she found "her plans for the future destroyed by the war. Widowed and a single mother at 22." However, 18 months later she met and married another RAF hero and they remained together until his death in 1994. The return of many men from the armed forces was tinged with the anxiety they felt about their wives' behaviour during their absence. Wives, mothers and sweethearts were emblems of the homes and country that the war was fought to protect; nevertheless, questions about whether women were worthy of men's sacrifices lurked at the back of some soldiers' minds. The high number of foreign troops that were stationed on British soil and Nazi propaganda that suggested American troops were 'lend-leasing' British women had not assuaged their concerns. Nor did the News Of The Worlds almost weekly coverage of stories of Mrs Redford, wearing her husband's medals, was widowed in the war Returning evacuees found it hard to re-adjust to home life violent incidents caused by returning servicemen's discovery of their infidelity which accompanied the forces' demobilisation. Some men and women faced moral dilemmas about whether to disclose wartime misdemeanours. During the conflict, women's magazines advised wives against undermining men's morale by confessing to extra-marital affairs. Sometimes the consequences of a wife's infidelity were clear for all to see, and married women who found themselves pregnant in their husband's absence became a new group of mothers with illegitimate children. The atmosphere of sexual suspicion could be acted upon speedily, thanks to the quickie divorces available to those in the forces. Divorce petitions in England and Wales leapt from approximately 9,970 in 1938 to 24,857 in 1945, and reached a post-war peak of 47,042 in 1947. Men who discovered their wives had been unfaithful initiated two thirds of them. At least, this was the reason given. It was in a couple's financial interests for the husband to take on the role of injured party if he was in the forces, to gain a cheap divorce. For some couples it may have been a mutual decision, given the speed of some marriages at the outset of war and how many years and experiences had followed the nuptials. Reconstructing fractured, tentative family units was emotionally taxing, although both the radio and women's magazines were full of advice for women about how to create the perfect post-war home and family. Woman's Hour was introduced in 1946, when television also returned with TV cooks Philip Harden and Marguerite Pattern. In practice, many families felt estranged from one- another. Douglas Wood, who had been evacuated to Staffordshire, found it difficult to re-adjust when he went home. He recalled: Well it was very difficult actually because I didn't have any affinity with my family When my father eventually came back from the war, he was then working night shifts cleaning buses. My mother was working shifts on the buses as a bus conductress and there was my brother, my sister and myself who were left to our own devices a great deal of the time. We were still relatively young of course, and, you know, it was quite a violent household and quite a Rebuilding Britain British cities targeted civilians killed of high explosives dropped Imlon London homes destroyed or damaged 45 Rebuilding Bri^ i • 1 - Schoolchildren help workmen put up prefab houses in April 1946 Prefabs Ready-made homes delivered straight to your not-yet-existent doorstep In an effort to address the post-war housing shortage, wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill envisaged houses built on factory production lines that could be delivered on lorries and ready to live in within hours. The AIROH (Aircraft Industries Research Organisation on Housing) house was an all-aluminium bungalow assembled from just four sections, all of which were fitted with a kitchen and bathroom. Future Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock lived in an AIROH prefab: "It seemed like living in a spaceship." Members ofabombed- out family sleep in a neighbour's living room poor household, it was a shame really but the contrast to me was really unbearable, the contrast to what rd been so used to. And I didn't have a Birmingham accent. The problems were exaggerated for many families by difficulties in finding suitable places to turn into a home. Although St Paul's Cathedral had survived the blitz, hundreds of thousands of houses across the UK had been destroyed and damaged. The British economy faced crippling debts to the USA and a balance of payments crisis. The austerity measures, shortages and more severe rationing that followed VE day meant rebuilding Britain proved a much slower process than many had imagined. During the war, damages to houses were addressed - tiles and slates were replaced, tarpaulins and plumbing improved and more than two million houses repaired by 1944 - but the doodlebugs of 1944 and 1945 destroyed more homes. Government policy was to prioritise repairing the already- existing housing stock before building new houses; by the end of 1946, 85 per cent of necessary house repairs were completed. This approach - given the severe housing crisis, scarcity of resources and skilled labour - was rational; however, men returning from war looking forward to a home of their own, and seeking to start a new life with their wife and family, found the situation disappointing. Paul Baker recalls his father: I was due to come home from Italy in 1945 but at the last minute his troop's ship was diverted left on the Med instead of going right through Gibraltar to Greece to fight the EOKA terrorists in Athens. So, in fact, he didn't come back until 1946, so when he came back into Coventry, he'd actually been crossed off the council house waiting list and he felt very bitter about that, because he was coming back and saying: "Well I've just come back from the war." in the struggle to find a home, many lived in one of more than 50 per cent of rural homes with no piped water to the house or lived in overcrowded late 19th and early 20th-century urban housing, which desperately needed updating, in London, Victorian and Edwardian houses were divided into rented rooms with numerous families often sharing a single sink and toilet. In exasperation and desperation, tens of thousands of people, including many ex-servicemen, moved in August 1946 into empty military camps around Britain - including Drayton Bassett in Staffordshire. The squatting movement spread to hotels and empty apartments around Britain, some staying a few weeks, others staying for many years. Nellie Rigby, who married ex-RAE serviceman Rob in 1946, was luckier. After living for a couple of months in the Wavertree area of Liverpool with her husband's sister and family, she remembered that: "In May we got a letter to say we have been awarded a prefab. And we was so thrilled." Prefabricated bungalows, or 'prefabs' as they were called, were supposed to be temporary and last for only ten years, but actually remained much longer and were immensely popular. These aluminium bungalows were planned during the war to deal with the expected post-war housing shortages. A prototype was exhibited outside the Tate Museum in 1944 and it was met with approval. Consequently, Churchill announced plans for half a million to be built. Prefabs were made in factories that had previously produced wartime aircraft. German and Italian Prisoners of War assembled those on the Excalibur Estate, in Catford, southeast London, from 1945 to 1946. Eddie O'Mahony was one of the first to move into this estate after his return from serving in Singapore. He was initially unconvinced, but his wife Ellen was delighted by the fitted kitchen, indoor bathroom, fireplace, boiler and fitted cupboards. The detached two-bedroom properties had their own garden and were painted throughout in magnolia. They were nicknamed 'the people's palaces'. However, rising production costs and the Labour government's desire to build permanent homes of high standard meant that fewer than 47 Crowas maKe ineu way hear Winston Churchill's speech on VE Day Aneurin Bevan visits the Davyhulme Park Hospital in Manchester 160,000 were completed. Instead, in 1946 the government introduced the New Towns Act, which initiated developments in Harlow, Crawley, Kernel Hempsted and Stevenage in the 1950s. The rebuilding of Britain was not just about creating homes, it also required schools and hospitals. The 1944 Education Act raised the school leaving age to 15, but improvements were hampered by a shortage of teachers and appropriate buildings. The need for greater speed in new school buildings was one of the main themes of the National Union of Teachers' Annual Conference in 1946, when the president stated that: Three-quarters of the schools in the country do not comply with the ministry's new building regulations." But one of the real successes of post- war Britain was the National Health Service. After many months of political wrangling to persuade doctors to participate, on 3 July 1948, the Daily Mail announced that: Your Rat"’"®-*’-' POST-WAR RATIONING The end of war did not mark the end of rationing. Instead, it would continue for almost ten more years ■ I H H H H H H H iiHiiiiyiiMi On Monday morning you will wake up in a new Britain, in a state that 'takes over' its citizens six months before they are born, providing care and free services for their birth, for their early years, their schoohng, sickness and workless days, widowhood and retirement. All with free doctoring, dentistry and medicine - bath chairs too, if needed. CANNED FRUIT I94M 950 PETRDl 1939-1950 1 1939—1940—1941—1942—1943—1944 1945— 194B— 1947 When, two days later, health secretary Aneurin Bevan opened Park Hospital in Manchester, it was the culmination of an ambitious plan to take care of the health care needs of the whole population and to make medical care free at the point of delivery to meet people's needs. Dr John Marks, a newly qualified doctor working in Shoreditch, remembered: The demand when the NHS started was unbehevable. Before the health service started, there was guaranteed treatment through National Health Insurance for low- paid workers, but their families were excluded. There was an enormous demand for surgery for previously untreated conditions. In the years that followed VE day, Britain gradually rebuilt itself - the NHS, schools, houses and new towns. Finally, in 1954, the end of rationing provided the wherewithal for ordinary people to rebuild every-day family life and create the people's peace. 48 It’s 200 years since Wellington triumphed over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Our highly detailed models allow you to faithfully recreate this epic conflict. Ada Lovelace This unusual countess was one of the most influential figures in the history of technology and one you have most likely never heard of Written by Alex Hoskins T hat the world's first computer programmer was a Victorian woman is remarkable in itself, but that she was the daughter of one of literature's most well-known poets adds such colour to the story it is difficult to understand how it isn't more widely known. Born in 1815, Ada Lovelace is not a name that draws the same reverence or even recognition as the likes of Alan Turing, Charles Babbage or Tim Berners-Lee - all undeniable innovators in technology Yet she was the first to imagine the potential that modern computers held, and her predictions so accurately mirrored what later became the technological revolution that she is seen by many as a visionary, and even, by some, a prophet. Understanding Ada's ancestry and childhood is key to discovering how this unlikely historical figure played her part in the creation and proliferation of the computer. Her mother, Anne Isabella 'Annabella' Byron, didn't want her daughter to grow up to be like her father, the eminent poet Lord Byron. He was tempestuous and prone to mood swings - the true picture of a popular poet. Annabella was terrified Ada would inherit her father's instabilities - a fear that would prove to be not entirely unfounded. As such, it was upon Annabella's insistence that her daughter be brought up completely in control of herself, able to apply logic and certainly not preoccupied with sensation and emotions in the same way that her father was. If flights of fancy were Annabella's concern, there were signs early in Ada's life that her determination had not suppressed all of these tendencies. At the age of 12, Ada was already developing a curious scientific mind, and became obsessed with the idea of learning to fly. In the hope of achieving this lofty ambition, Ada undertook extensive and methodical research into materials that could be used to make effective wings and examined birds and insects for further inspiration. She gathered her findings in a volume and named it ‘Flyology. At first, Annabella encouraged her daughter's enthusiasm for research and science, but as the obsession took hold, Ada was forced by her mother to abandon her project. Ada’s mother ^ forbade her from V \ seeing a portrait of V \ \ her father. Lord Byron, ( I until she was 20 / years old Heroes & Villains ADA LOVELACE i. Enemies Augusta Lei^ In 1841, Ada's mother informed her that her half-cousin Medora Leigh was in fact her half-sister, following an incestuous affair between Lord Byron and his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Ada wrote: "I am not in the least astonished," and blamed the affair on Augusta, writing: "I feel 'she' is more inherently wicked than 'he' ever was." Bruce Collier Ada's work has been the source of much contention, with many dismissing her part in the project. One historian, Bruce Collier, wrote: "It is no exaggeration to say that she [had] the most amazing delusions about her own talents, and a rather shallow understanding of both Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine." Annabella's insistence on bringing up her daughter firmly rooted in logic was most likely inspired by her own interest in mathematics, and manifested itself in many occasionally odd, ways. Part of Ada's 'education' was to observe the task of lying still for hours on end, an activity designed to teach 'self control'. In addition, Annabella was not a particularly maternal force, referring to Ada in letters as "it", and leaving Ada in the care of her grandmother, Lady Judith Millbanke. However, Judith died when Ada was six years old, and from then on her guardianship was covered by various nannies, and later, tutors, who had been chosen and approved by Annabella. Lord Byron, Ada's father, had left two months after her birth for a life in Italy His marriage to Annabella had ended abruptly in a slew of scandalous rumours of affairs between Byron and a chorus girl, myriad financial troubles and rumoured violence and abuse. After travelling to Italy where he stayed with Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley Byron's final years were spent in Greece, where he had joined the forces fighting for independence from the Ottoman Empire. It was here that he died in 1824, when Ada was just eight years old - the two never met. While the mathematical passions of her mother meant Ada had endured some unorthodox methods in her upbringing, it also meant that she received an extraordinary gift, rare for women in the 19th century - a comprehensive mathematical education. Ada's tutors were a diverse group of academics, reading as a 'who's who' of early to mid- 19th century intellectuals. Among the most notable were William Frend, a renowned social reformer; William King, the family's doctor, and perhaps most notably Mary Somerville, a fellow female mathematician and astronomer. "Ada became obsessed with the idea of learning to fly’" Five years after her obsessive research into flight, Ada met a man who would prove integral to her life, and in particular, her intellectual pursuits. Charles Babbage was a technological innovator and had created the Analytical Engine - the device generally considered to be the first computer. Babbage was 42, and yet despite the gap of more than 20 years between them, a friendship would grow that would not only provide them with comfort and intellectual stimulation, but provide the world with its most revolutionary invention yet - the computer. Babbage had been working under commission from the British government on a machine called the Difference Engine, but the Analytical Engine was something far more complex. Where the Difference Engine was essentially a calculator, designed to eliminate inaccuracies by fallible humans, the Analytical Engine could perform more complex calculations, stretching far beyond numbers. This was the first time any such machine had been conceived, let alone designed. Babbage couldn't secure funding for his research into the new machine while the last project remained unfinished, but his determination to progress the Analytical Engine spurred him on, until he eventually found a sympathetic reception in Italy In 1842, an Italian mathematician named Luigi Menabrea published an essay on the function of the machine. The text was in French, and Ada's talent for languages coupled with her mathematical understanding made her the perfect candidate to translate the document for Babbage. Over the course of nine months, she did this, but while the memoir was valuable, it paled in comparison to Ada's additions, which Babbage had suggested she should add in as she saw fit. The notes that Ada made alongside the document were ground breaking. They exceeded the document she had translated, not just in length, but in depth and insight. One of the most quoted phrases, "the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves," is a particularly feminine turn of 52 Heroes & Villains ADA LOVELACE phrase, strategically plucked from a much more lengthy as well as technical, comparison of the machine to the Jacquard loom. In fact, most of the text is purely scientific, of a tone that wouldn't be out of place in a modern-day programming textbook. For example, she wrote: "When the value on any variable is called into use, one of two consequences may be made to result." Ada also used the example of the complex numerical sequence known as Bernoulli numbers to prove the ability of the machine to calculate complex sequences from an original program. Detractors have used this against Lovelace, taking it as proof that the observations expressed in her notes weren't truly hers, but simply a relaying of information given to her by Babbage. Indeed, Ada did not have a full understanding of calculus, but even if Bernoulli numbers were the suggestion of Babbage, the principle of her assumptions remained the same. It was the insight for potential in her translation of this document that earned Countess Lovelace the moniker the 'World's First Computer Programmer'. Ada saw herself foremost as an "analyst and metaphysician," but while her scientific prowess earned her a place in history, she lived a generally unremarkable domestic life. In 1835, two years after her first meeting with Babbage, Ada married William King, 8th Baron of King, later to become the Earl of Lovelace. Ada and William would go on to have three children, the first, named Byron, born in May 1836. Two siblings shortly followed: Anne in September 1837 and Ralph in July 1839. Ada suffered with health problems, both mentally and in the form of physical sicknesses, including cholera, from which she recovered. Annabella held Ada, William and the family in her financial thrall and as such, they lived on her terms. This, combined with William's sometimes controlling, even abusive, character, was at odds with Ada's friendly and fiercely independent nature. Affairs were rumoured, one in particular with the tutor to Ada's children, William Benjamin Carpenter, but there is no evidence that she ever embarked on an extra-marital relationship. Ada died of uterine cancer aged just 36, the same age as her father, and was out-lived by On Artificial Intelligence, Ada concluded that computers could never have original / thoughts ^AlUes \MKHK TSUNAJW Charles Babbage ’ vv , Ada was introduced to the ^ polymath when she was 17 , .1 and they began a lifelong ' friendship. Babbage called her an q I "enchantress of numbers that has ' I thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of sciences and , has grasped it with a force that ' few masculine intellects could have ' exerted over it." Mary Somerville A fellow scientist and mathematician, Somerville mentored Ada when she was a child and the young countess ■ j developed a strong respect and ! affection for her. They continued ! their correspondence right up until Ada’s death in 1852, at the age of 36. Kim & Toole Fierce defenders of Ada's legacy, they wrote: "[Ada] was certainly capable of writing the program herself given the proper formula; this is clear from her depth of understanding regarding the process of programming and from her improvements on Babbage's programming notation." her mother. In the years following her death, incredible advances have been made in the fields of technology, and her prophecies have been realised. The authenticity of her authorship has been questioned, but her findings proved invaluable to Alan Turing's work in the mid-20th century and were re-published at that time, tier legacy continues in the form of Ada Lovelace day, observed annually on 15 October. The day has the aim of raising awareness and interest for women in science. Ada was an unusual person in so many ways, and a remarkable one, and she continues to inspire those who feel that they must defy expectation to follow their passions. s/fero or villain? imiiimmiiitiimiiiimiiimii heroism miimmimi Her role in Babbage's project has been contested, but there is no doubt that Ada is a role model for women even today VILLAINY tiniiiiiiiiniimiiimiiiiiiiiiimimiiiiiiiiiii Despite her contribution to science, Ada was accused of several extra-marital affairs and was addicted to gambling imimiiiiiimiiimiiii LEGACY immiimiiiiiiiiiiimii Ada has been forgotten by many, but those in the field have coined her the world's first ever computer programmer ©Alamy, Getty Images Through History Now an industry worth millions of pounds and that invests huge amounts in research, sports equipment has seen many changes since the Ancient Olympics r Jimmy Connors ^ 1952-PRESENT, AMERICAN ' One of the first tennis players to embrace metal rackets, Connors used a Wilson T2000 to win multiple Grand Slam titles and become the number one player in the world. Connors used his T2000 for 20 years and by the L time he stopped using it in the j 1980s, it was already out ^ of date. H DARTBOARD isse People had thrown miniature javelins or darts at targets as a form of recreation for centuries before Bury carpenter Brian Gamlin devised a segmented target with numbers one to 20 on it. Gamlin's stroke of genius was that the higher scoring segments were separated by lower ones to make the game harder. He used the target on his fairground stall claiming "no skill required." His dartboard has stood the test of time, although there are thousands of other possible number layouts. METAL TENNIS RACKET 1967 DISCUS 708 BCE Little equipment was required in the Ancient Greek Olympics - most of the events were running races and competitors often participated naked. However, one event that did require equipment was the discus throw, first recorded at the 18th Olympiad in 708 BGE. Unlike today. Ancient Greek athletes threw a bronze discus from a raised platform. The discus was not a separate event but formed part of the pentathlon with the long jump, javelin, wrestling and a foot race - each involved skills thought to be useful in the army GOLF CLUBS 1603 Golf was banned in Scotland in 1467 because it stopped people from practising archery, so it's ironic that the first recorded set of manufactured golf clubs was made by Scottish bowyer William Mayne in 1603. He was appointed to the task by King James VI, who wanted different types of clubs for different shots. Mayne's clubs were made of wood and the longnoses, similar to today's drivers, were susceptible to breaking. A golfer would typically need to replace one after every round. For 100 years tennis players used wooden rackets that changed little, until Wilson introduced the first steel racket in 1967. The T2000 had a tubular steel frame that was lighter and featured a new method of stringing, allowing shots to be hit with more power. Manufacturers then ploughed money into research and signed deals to supply top players with their brands. Steel was soon superseded by lighter aluminium and carbon-graphite rackets, while newer models included bigger heads and longer handles. JOUSTING LANCE Jousting emerged as a sport in the later Middle Ages, allowing competitors to show their skill with horse and lance away from the battlefield. Jousting lances were blunt, often ending in a cup, and the middle was hollow so the lance would break rather than unhorse an opponent. However, jousts could still be dangerous - Henry VIII was seriously injured in a jousting accident in 1536, while Henry II of France died from wounds that he suffered from a broken lance Through History r Spalding ^ 1850-1915, AMERICAN 1 Professional baseball player Spalding formed his own sports equipment company in 1876. One of the first products to be sold in his store was a baseball mitt, although he did not wear one himself for another year because . early glove wearers were often L ridiculed. When he did, it helped A to remove the stigma of wearing a mitt. Japanese martial arts have their origins in the samurai period but were only codified as sports at the turn of the 20th century. Among the first was judo, which was founded by Kano Jigord. Kano decided that competitors should wear a three-piece judogi, made up of a heavy jacket, lighter trousers and a belt. ^ It's a simple outfit but there are still rules that must be followed - only blue and white judogi are allowed in competition and the left side of the jacket must overlay the right. Many other martial arts, like karate, subsequently adopted their 1 jf own versions of the judogi. Ticket pads are relatively | nchanged since they were irst used nearly 200 years ago Alfred Mynn 180M861.ENGLISN Mynn took to using cricket pads after his legs were severely bruised during one match in 1836. He had been sent back to London laid out on the top of a stagecoach and surgeons contemplated amputating his leg. They didn’t, and Mynn went on to play nearly 200 more first-class matches for both Kent and Sussex. CRICKET PADS 1836 BASEBALL MITT 1875 In the early years of baseball, players caught the ball bare- handed. In 1875, Charlie Waitt first used gloves while playing for the St Louis Brown Stockings, after which ^ the baseball mitt slowly became more popular. They were initially simple leather gloves with the fingers cut off to improve ball control and players kept them on whether pitching or batting. Soon the gloves became too large and unwieldy to hold a bat with. More padding was added and a piece of webbing between thumb and forefinger created a pocket for the ball. BODYSKIN SWIMSUIT New developments in sporting equipment are not always welcomed. The Speedo LZR Racer swimsuit was designed to reduce drag and improve the performance of competitive swimmers. It was created with the aid of NASA facilities and featured ultrasonic welding of the seams and water-repelling material. It certainly aided performance - three world records were broken by athletes using the bodyskin swimsuit within a week - but the swimsuit was quickly criticised as "technological doping" and bodyskin swimsuits were banned within a year of the LZR Racer's launch. VULCANISED FOOTBALL 1855 Prior to the mid-1850s, footballs were made from inflated animal bladders covered in leather. They were often irregular shapes and behaved unpredictably. The first modern football was created when engineer Charles Goodyear designed a rubber bladder using the process of vulcanisation, which he invented. The new bladder pressured the outer leather into shape, did not become malformed in hot or cold weather and bounced well. But the leather still absorbed water and became very heavy in wet conditions, leading to head and neck injuries until synthetic coverings were adopted. JUDOG1 1906 Cricket balls are hard, and a batsman's legs are vulnerable to being struck by them. In the early days of the sport, batsmen were often injured and playing careers could come to a sudden end, so pads were introduced to protect the batsman in the 19th century Cotton, foam and cane rods created piping that wrapped around the leg. Although it made movement more difficult, some batsmen deliberately used the new pads to block the ball, leading to a change in the rules and the introduction of the leg before wicket (Ibw) dismissal. 55 ©Alamy.Thinkstock The remarkable and radical life of a qualified doctor, guerrilla fighter, and unflinching executioner in Cuba's Revolution who sought to export Marxist rebellion across Latin America Written by Ian Rimmer e'd had beer, probably plenty, but it was consumed in celebration rather than for courage. The day before, the Bolivian Army had been in a fierce firefight with communist guerrillas trapped in a mountainside gulley. The enemy had been routed and a few had been captured. But there had been dead on both sides, so when an officer called for an execution volunteer. Sergeant Mario Teran was more than ready to avenge his fallen Bolivian brothers. Beer was not going to affect his aim. Teran stepped into the humble schoolhouse, the main prisoner's makeshift cell. The captive was filthy, his hair a tangled mess, his clothes torn and ragged. Rather than boots, he'd tied pieces of leather to his feet. Lying on the dirt ground, bleeding from a bullet hole in his leg, he was the very embodiment of the words 'wounded animal'. Teran raised his semi- automatic rifle. Legend has it that the prisoner said: "I know you have come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man." Teran fired. He hit the captive's arms and legs, as he was supposed to make it look like the guerrilla had died in the firefight. As the man writhed on the ground, Teran fired again, fatally hitting his target's thorax. The prisoner's name was Che Guevara. The world's most feared Marxist revolutionary was dead. 39 years earlier, in 1928, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born in Rosario, Argentina - and his first brush with death was not far away. Severe breathing difficulties were diagnosed as asthma, and at times the choking attacks were so violent they were feared life-threatening. Often bed- ridden, young Ernesto had time to think, to contemplate his illness, to realise that his next breath, if he could catch it, might actually be his last. Startlingly early in life he became aware of his own mortality. By facing the proximity of death, and not fearing it, he refused to let the illness define him. Yet that live-in-the-moment outlook stayed with him - many years later, his fearlessness in the face of death led Fidel Castro to express surprise that he made it through the Cuban Revolution alive. The Guevara family moved often during Ernesto's formative years, always searching for an area of Argentina with a B climate that might alleviate his condition, li Eventually, they came to Alta Gracia, a Jr small town at the foot of the Sierras Chicas _ in the province of Cordoba, where the dry 3 mountain air offered their firstborn some H relief. There, as siblings arrived and the family grew, they continued to move house, meaning the concept of settling, of putting down roots, was something Ernesto never really knew. His parents were both well educated, coming from families that, while not rich, were far from poor. Due to his illness, Ernesto's schooling was initially intermittent, involving a lot of home tutoring from his mother. Later, as management of his asthma improved, so did his school attendance. He was considered an able, intelligent student, though not one overly interested in the school syllabus. Perhaps this was because in his teenage years he was reading widely and extensively, from political works to French classicists like Dumas and Zola and American authors like Steinbeck. He was also keen on chess and, despite his illness and scrawny physique, a tough and enthusiastic rugby player, even enlisting 1 V 1: Martyr Or Murderer? r/ someone to run alongside him down the j touchline with his inhaler if it was needed, i. By 1947, Ernesto was eligible for ‘ conscripted military service, but he was "exempted because of his asthma. It was the one time he was grateful for his feeble lungs as it allowed him to continue --studying. He enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Buenos ^ Aires, intent on becoming a doctor. Oddly, given this choice, his personal hygiene j was notoriously poor. He rather delighted iin being nicknamed El Chancho ('the Pig') r- due to his pungent body odour, just as he enjoyed wearing old, unfashionable or grubby clothes - as much for shock value as anything else. Such idiosyncrasies would not bother someone who wished to travel, however, this was something Ernesto was keen to do during university breaks. He first took off alone on a bicycle fitted with a motor in 1950. As much a test of his own willpower to keep his illness at bay as the bike's hardiness, he travelled some 4,500 kilometres (2,800 miles) to the far I jorth of Argentina. He kept a diary of his adventures, as he did on a subsequent trip he made with his friend Alberto Granado. That one began in January 1952, on a motorbike christened 'The Mighty One', even though it broke down numerous times and was eventually abandoned. The trip took the pair across Argentina to Chile, Peru, Columbia and Venezuela. Ernesto went on further alone, visiting —Miami in the United States and returning to Argentina in September 1952. The diaries gave a clear indication of how the poverty and deprivation that Ernesto witnessed on his travels informed I . and shaped his world view. Prior to his journeys, even though he had read much political theory, he had not declared himself a supporter of any formal political doctrine. Yet witnessing the poor, the sick nd the exploitation - often by companies _ from the United States - of the indigenous populations of Latin America had affected him deeply. By October, Ernesto was back studying .in Buenos Aries, working towards the exams needed to pass his medical degree. He phoned home one day six months later, stressing that it h^was Doctor Guevara de la Serna speaking. _3 Almost immediately after qualifying, ■Ernesto began planning another trip, this time with his friend Calica Ferrer. They set off on 7 July 1953, heading for Caracas in Venezuela, where Alberto was working. During the trip the pair learned there were revolutionary changes taking place in Guatemala. Ernesto was intrigued. They ' were together in Ecuador when Calica _ ^received an offer to coach a football team in Quito. Ernesto was invited too, but he wanted to continue north, so they split up. They never saw each other again. ■ ! ■ i X 14 June 1928 The first child of Ernesto Guevara-Lynch and Celia de la Serna, both from well-educated, well-heeled Argentine families, is named after his father. For distinction, he's referred to as Ernestito. il930 The family return to Buenos Aires for the birth of their second child. There, Ernestito begins having breathing difficulties. The problem is eventually diagnosed as asthma - and it becomes chronic. • 1942 Often forced to stay home through his illness, Ernestito reads voraciously. Management of his asthma steadily improves and he attends a good school in Cordoba, making friends with Tomas Granado. il943 Tomas's older brother Alberto runs a rugby team. The far-from-robust Ernestito nevertheless joins, plays fearlessly, and earns a new nickname from Alberto, 'Fuser', from part furibundo (furious), part Serna. Il947 Fuser and Alberto, a biochemistry student who is also widely read, become firm friends. After graduating from school. Fuser enrols to study medicine at Buenos Aires University, Argentina. m 4 January 1952 During a break from their university studies. Fuser and Alberto begin an epic journey on motorbikes to truly discover their South American continent. 58 En route to Guatemala, Ernesto stopped -in Costa Rica, where he met influential political thinkers such as Juan Bosch, who ‘later became president of the Dominican Republic, and Romulo Betancourt, a future president of Venezuela. Ernesto’s political .awareness couldn't fail to grow And in Guatemala, it mushroomed. First ■he met Hilda Gadea, a left-wing exile from Peru. Ernesto was a strikingly handsome man and, despite his shabby clothes and lax washing habits, he'd had numerous lovers. Hilda, though no Latin beauty, was ■as well-read as Ernesto, and they struck up a deep relationship. Her social circle included many exiles from other Latin American countries under right-wing military dictatorships. Included in those ■that Ernesto met were several Cubans who J^^ondwife March , ^nd their children Inhis former home, now a museum dedicated to his life, the motorcycle on which Che travelled across South America is displayed ill February 1952 En route, the pair witness widespread poverty and medical deprivation. At a copper mine run by United States monopolies in Chile, they encounter ruthless exploitation of the indigenous population. i 26 September 1952 After visiting Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela, and meeting the likes of Dr Hugo Pesce, an influential Marxist scientist. Fuser returns to university in Buenos Aires to complete his medical degree. ^24 December 1953 The now qualified Dr Guevara de la Serna has begun another trip. After hearing of revolutionary social reforms taking place in Guatemala, he arrives in Guatemala City. • 31 December 1953 Dr Guevara meets Hilda Gadea. She has a wide circle of friends and at a New Year's Eve party, he meets a group of Cuban exiles from a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks. • 1954 The Cubans call him Che, from his Argentine manner of speaking. Che witnesses the fall of the Guatemala regime first hand and notes the mistakes that its leaders had made. Xl955 Fidel Castro, the Cuban exiles' leader, arrives in Mexico. He meets an Argentine doctor, they talk all night, and Fidel's planned revolution gains a new recruit - Che Guevara. 59 Havana Santa Clara Yaguajay From a shipwreck to mountain hideouts, the guerilla fighters had a perilous journey to the capital ^ 7 Within hours of Santa Clara's fall, Batista flees the country. Che and Cienfuegos push on to Havana and take control of the city without opposition. Castro, on a victory march up the country. Joins them six days later. 6 Batista sends an armoured train with hundreds of men and weapons to help defend Santa Clara. Che's force ambushes it after using tractors to rip up the tracks. With Molotov cocktails raining down on the men trapped inside, they quickly capitulate. 5 The rebels sweep down from the Sierra Maestra on a counter offensive. While Castro's division battles for control of the Oriente Province, Che and Camilo Cienfuegos lead columns heading west. Cienfuegos besieges an army garrison at Yaguajay, which eventually surrenders. Playa Las Coloradas I The revolution almost fails before the rebels touch Cuban soil when their leaking boat grounds on a sandbar, far from their intended landing point. Vital equipment and weapons are lost as the men struggle ashore through dense, spikey mangrove. had escaped the island after a failed attack on a barracks. Their leader, still imprisoned _in Cuba, was Fidel Castro. Guatemala had become a haven for political exiles because its government, under President Jacobo Arbenz, was "^instigating sweeping social reforms [including land rights, education and ' suffrage. This angered American interests, particularly the United Fruit Company. By the spring of 1954, there were strong rumours that rebels, backed by the CIA, .were planning to overthrow the president. , When planes began bombing raids in the summer, the rumours were confirmed. Ernesto confessed in letters home that he ■found the raids thrilling, feeling "...a magic {sensation of invulnerability." He joined a medical unit to help as -the fighting intensified, telling everyone who would listen that Arbenz should arm the population to allow them to .. ^defend their revolution. As it happened, perhaps under pressure from his military, perhaps attempting to avoid bloodshed, the president resigned, allowing the rebels “|to take power. Soon, everyone connected {with the previous regime, or suspected of ■ communist leanings, were being rounded up. Hilda was arrested. Ernesto took refuge in the Argentine embassy He was there a month before being allowed passage to Mexico while Hilda, released from prison after a few days, later joined him. By now, Ernesto's political beliefs were crystallising. He was viewing 'the region of South America as a whole. Alegria del Pio 2 The guerrillas are ambushed by General Batista's army near a sugar plantation. Che is wounded, others killed, others still captured and executed. The survivors scatter. In the thick-forested, sparsely populated mountains of the Sierra Maestra, they gradually regroup. Sierra Maestra 3 a New York Times reporter, Herbert Matthews, visits their camp and writes about the impressive mountain guerrillas - even though he's tricked into thinking there are far more men than there actually are. Inspired, underground groups begin forming across Cuba. La Plata 4 Continuously recruiting and training locals, the rebels harass the army. Batista launches an offensive against them, but it goes disastrously wrong at La Plata. 500 soldiers are killed, wounded or captured by Castro's vastly outnumbered force. believing its various indigenous populations were being exploited and kept in poverty [by colonialist corporations largely from the iUnited States. Those populations needed 1 to drive out their abusers from the north, then defend their new freedoms, violently if - necessary He was still unsure, though, if he should attach himself to a particular cause _or continue travelling on to Europe - until, in the summer of 1955, he met Fidel Castro. - - Several of the Cuban exiles that Hilda and Ernesto had encountered in [Guatemala had gone to Mexico too. Fidel jand his brother Raul had been granted an amnesty in Cuba. When they joined their fellow exiles in Mexico, the paths of the Castro brothers and Ernesto crossed. At length, Fidel outlined his plan to land _a small guerrilla force by boat on Cuba to begin a revolution there. Won over by the ■ - charismatic leader who echoed many of Ernesto's own thoughts, he agreed to join [the rebel invasion. j Shortly after, Hilda became pregnant and ^ the pair married, but none of that lessened his commitment to the cause. Nicknamed 'Che' by the Cubans - because he used that Argentine word roughly meaning 'mate' or 'pal' in much of his speech - Hilda's husband was principally the group's medic. Yet Che took part in all aspects of military r graining, eager to prove himself. He was declared "the best guerrilla of them all" by " Alberto Bayo, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who was instructing them. A force of 82 men squeezed on board a ■ motor launch called Granma when it left Mexico on 25 November 1956. The craft --had seen better days. Laden with weapons and equipment, and battling against heavy weather, it took seven days to reach Cuba. _Once there, the launch hit a sandbar off the coast. The men had to carry what • they could ashore, wading through dense mangrove and thorny bushes. "It was a 'shipwreck rather than a landing," Che wrote ■ later. Worse, the group quickly came under attack from the Cuban army. = In another brush with death, Che was shot in the neck. Losing a lot of blood, he ' thought he was going to die, but was pulled Jo relative safety by the other fighters. In the chaos and confusion, many of the men were killed, others captured and executed. Those that remained alive were scattered across the region. j .... .. 60 j. Now described as the most reproduced ^ photograph in the world, the 'Heroic Guerrilla' image of Che Guevara was almost lost to history The picture was actually taken in 1960. Photographer Alberto Korda was covering a memorial service for victims of an explosion, thought to be sabotage, aboard a ship called La Coubre. Che made a brief appearance, and the photographer took two exposures of him. They were never published, but something in one appealed to Korda. He printed a cropped image of it, and hung it on a wall in his studio. It may have stayed there, lost to the eyes of the world, except that in 1967, an Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, came looking for photos of Che for a publication. Korda allowed the Italian free > use of the image on his wall because he was a friend of the ^ ^ revolution. Following Che's death soon after, the photo ^ ^ was widely circulated, becoming a Zeitgeist icon - an j ^ ^ executed revolutionary with rock star good ^ Jf * 'lit looks expressing both the pain of grief ^ ^ ^ . and the anger of youthful ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ , rebellion. . ll^ ^ jche (farsight) r ' in the last photo taken of jhim before his I death in 1967 Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara receiving an award -Che in Havana, Cuba, in 1961 doing voluntary work The root of the problem Journeying through Latin America, Che observed for himself the problems faced by the vast majority of the region's people. His analysis that this was caused by colonialism and exploitation, largely by corporations of the United States, was devastatingly accurate. Education, education, education The local recruits Joining the rebels in Sierra Maestra were often illiterate. Che organised classes to teach them to read and write. Subsequently, the literacy campaign in Cuba that began after the revolution was one of his favourite initiatives. A revolution of the self Che developed and lived by the concept of the New Man as the way to true socialism. The New Man didn't work for material goods, but had a selfless moral duty to work for society, which in turn nurtured him and his family. Medic! As a doctor, Che treated leprosy victims in Peru, people injured during the overthrow of Guatemala's government, rebels under Castro's command, the local population in the Sierra Maestra - and even wounded Batista soldiers after a raid on the El Uvero garrison. Unshakeable integrity Many men have ideals, few will die for them as Che did. He lived by the words he wrote to his children in a final letter, wanting them to feel deeply any injustice committed against any person anywhere in the world. Revolutionary justice Numbers are disputed, but certainly hundreds were executed at Che's La Cabana tribunals. The final decision was his, and he didn't let political or humanitarian pleas affect it. To Che, enemies of the revolution had no place in the new Cuba. The enemy in the north The dislike and distrust that Che felt for the United States as colonialist exploiters ran very deep. It can be compared to the hatred developed by Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and other religious fundamentalist terrorist groups. Cuban missiles To protect the revolution, even nuclear Armageddon wasn't out of the question. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Che informed reporter Sam Russell that, fearing invasion, had the missiles been under Cuban control, they would have launched them against the United States. Executioner Castro had ordered the execution of Eutimio Guerra, who had betrayed the rebels' movements to the army. Dispassionately, Che stepped forward and put a bullet into the spy's brain, later detailing the incident in his diary with chilling detachment. Warmonger As a Marxist, Che was an enemy of democracy. His advocacy of guerrilla warfare, in his own words calling for "two, three... many Vietnams," led untold numbers of young, idealistic Latin Americans to lose their lives in futile rebellions. Weighing up the good against the bad of Che Guevara - a man of extremes ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 62 Y r Slowly, the surviving guerrillas found ’ each other and hid out in the Sierra , *,Maestra mountains. Their exact number is disputed but it was less than 25. Over ^time, with the help of sympathetic locals and other Cubans keen to end Batista's hated regime, the rebels acquired recruits and weapons. Che became masterful at organising hit-and-run attacks against the “army, inflicting damage then fading back ' into the countryside before any counter- , attacks. His work impressed Fidel, who gave , ^him command of a second force. Che organised his men to help locals ^learn to read and write while offering medical care himself. He was a stern I disciplinarian, but as an excellent strategist L who invariably led from the front, morale I within his group was high. His men were .^always ready to lay down their lives for their leader and their cause. After a failed offensive by Batista's army, , _the guerrillas struck out across the country. Fidel's force headed towards Santiago, ;*^Cuba's second city, while Che's group went ■ towards Santa Clara. The battle for Santa Clara proved decisive. Just hours after the city fell to the rebels, Batista fled the country. Che's men marched on Havana —and took the capital unopposed. It had taken just over two years for guerrillas numbering little more than 20 at one point '| _to claim the country. Next, they had to keep it. Che was put in charge of La Cabana prison, where t revolutionary justice was swiftly and J ruthlessly administered to Batista's torturers and war criminals, to traitors, and to enemies of the revolution. Defendants ^ .—were allowed witnesses and lawyers, but j there were no juries. Che selected judges ' and reviewed numerous cases with them, ] _ _though as chief prosecutor, his decision was ^ final. Hundreds were executed by firing ■^squad on his order. The lack of firmness -i he'd witnessed first-hand in Guatemala was | r~not going to be repeated. He was equally uncompromising in his private life. When Hilda arrived in Cuba , —with their three-year-old daughter, Che I [ bluntly informed her that he had fallen in J ■' love with Aleida March, who had fought _alongside him. Che and Hilda divorced quickly. He married Aleida, and had four -^more children with her. However, neither they nor Cuba, where he was granted citizenship, could fully capture his heart. Che's over-riding T I 11 '• commitment, now that he had successfully T 1 —fought one, was to revolution. U After holding various government posts over several years, Che wrote a "farewell "j ^letter" that Fidel revealed to the Cuban .people in October 1965. In it, Che declared ibis intention to leave the country to fight for the revolutionary cause abroad. By that 'time, he was already in Africa, working Jwith elite Cuban fighters training Marxist rebels in the Congo. - 1 It was thought that the guerrilla tactics used successfully in Cuba could be lepeated to bring about a communist state in central Africa. However, Che found ,the rebels to be poorly disciplined and 1 badly led. They also encountered fierce opposition from South African mercenaries ■flown in to aid the Congo National Army. ^Suffering from dysentery and, inevitably, acute asthma attacks, Che was forced to abandon the mission. To recover, he lived incognito in Dar es Salaam and Prague. He made a final secret visit to Cuba to see his family and Fidel, 7then, shaving off his beard and most of his i.hair in order to pose as an unremarkable Uruguayan businessman, he flew to Bolivia. ' In the rural south east of the country, he ~ |met up with a group of about 50 guerrillas. They had some initial success in skirmishes! with what was thought to be a poorly L Trained and equipped Bolivian army. Yet the local population steadfastly refused to rise up and join them in revolution, and dheir opponents were in fact being aided [by the CIA and US Special Forces. Quickly picked off by their opponents, the guerrilla numbers dwindled while the net around |them tightened. In October 1967, with morale low and his men fatigued, Che's group were near the Ullage of La Higuera. The Bolivian Army ■trapped them in a ravine, and the firefight that led to Che's capture began. It was his 'final brush with death. 7. a 9 OCTOBER 1967 The Bolivia campaign has gone badly. The peasants refuse to rise up. Che has 16 men left... Exhausted, hungry and in some cases sick, the ragtag gang of guerrillas led by Che are in a steep, jungle-clad ravine near a small village. La Higuera. They encounter a peasant woman herding goats. They ask if she has seen soldiers but get no clear answer. They give her some money, hoping she won't reveal their position. A company of Bolivian army rangers receive information that there are guerrillas nearby. They sweep into the area, taking up positions on both sides of the ravine. The rangers are spotted. Che divides his men into three, the likelihood being that they'll have to shoot their way out. They hold their fire and positions for several tense hours. Just after 1pm some guerrillas are detected. A fierce firefight begins. Che's M-2 carbine rifle is hit in the barrel, rendering it useless. His pistol is empty. Che is shot in the leg. As rangers close in he reportedly yells: "Don't shoot! I am Che Guevara. I am worth more to you alive than dead!" The captured Che, unable to walk, is carried away from the area to a one-room schoolhouse at La Higuera. Bound hand and foot, he is held overnight. Felix Rodriguez, a CIA operative working with the Bolivians, arrives early next morning. He is startled by Che's bedraggled appearance. They talk and Rodriguez has a photo taken with him. Despite the United States hoping to keep Che alive, the Bolivian government orders his execution. Rodriguez informs Che of his fate. Sergeant Teran volunteers for the task. Che is killed. His hands are amputated and chemically preserved for identification purposes. He is buried with other guerrillas in a mass grave. Years later it is discovered. Che's remains are now in Cuba. fl 6 ? ©Alamy Greatest Battles Heat of the day All three days of the battle were fought in incredibly hot weather, during the height of the Pennsylvanian summer. This meant both sides were suffering and struggling to maintain composure in these difficult conditions, making water as precious as ammo to many soldiers. V Desperate defence On more than one occasion during the battle, the Union line was tested to its limits. With Confederate attacks springing up at various points in great numbers. General Meade was forced to rapidly reorganise battalions across the field. Absent cavalry Though they engaged on the first day of the battle, much of the cavalry on either side was occupied away from Gettysburg. This changed the dynamic of the battle significantly, as General Lee's scout reports on the Union movements were proven incorrect, which affected his decisions. GEOYSBURG PENNSYLVANIA, USA 1-3 JULY 1863 A t noon on 2 July 1863, the heat of the summer day had already sapped the energy from every man, Union or Confederate, unable to find a piece of shade. Nearby, the deserted town of Gettysburg lay eerily quiet after the desperate fighting of the previous day, as the Union men had beat a hasty retreat through its streets and into the hills. General George Meade had steadied his men, forming up a tight defence that he now hoped would be enough to block his enemy's path to Washington DC, the political heart of the United States. As shots were heard breaking out towards the Union's left flank, he realised that the attack had begun, but couldn't have any idea just how bloody the day would prove to be. During the previous month, Robert E Lee, the Confederate's finest commander and arguably the greatest general of the American Civil War, had taken his Army of Northern Virginia, more than 72,000 men, to the north. Penetrating deep into Union territory, he predicted, would boost support for those calling for a peace deal to be brokered between the North and the South. A victory in this invasion so deep into the North would also put great pressure on President Lincoln, and could even allow Lee to march on Washington DC itself. The relatively small town of Gettysburg, southern Pennsylvania, was only significant in that it saw the convergence of several key roads leading to the south, the north and elsewhere, from where Lee saw an opportunity to spread his army. Major General Joseph fJooker, commanding the Army of the Potomac, had shadowed Lee in his march north, following the rebel army to engage and destroy it. Three days before the battle, however, he was relieved of his command and General Meade was put in his place. The new general's sudden rise through the ranks earned him widespread mistrust among his officers, who questioned his ability to lead them effectively. The two armies met at Gettysburg on 1 July, with troops engaging at first in light skirmishes that soon escalated into a pitched battle, as limited Union regiments defended their line against advancing Confederates. With General Meade not yet on the field. Union officers took the initiative to control the defence of Gettysburg, but disaster struck when the senior officer. Major General John F Reynolds, was struck down by a sharpshooter's bullet. Though they defended bravely, and delayed Lee's troops as much as they could, the Union soldiers were forced to run for their lives through Gettysburg's streets and up into the hills to the south, where a defensive line of artillery had been established. As more reinforcements arrived during the late afternoon and during the night, the position on the high ground was fortified further and the Union generals could only wait to see what General Lee would do the next day. With Gettysburg surrounded and taken on the first day, albeit with the lives of more men than he would have cared to give. General Lee was now as confident as he usually was of victory. fJe planned to outflank the Union position, killing its superior position on the high ground and forcing Meade to retreat from the field. The next two days would decide the fate of the United States, and would cost the lives of thousands of Americans. GreeUest Battles GENERAL GEORGE GORDON MEADE LEADER Meade was appointed general of the army just days before the battle. Strengths Was able to make full use of his subordinates' skills. Weakness Without the full backing of his troops, he failed to control many of his officers. 5TH CORPS KEY UNIT The stalwart defenders of Little Round Top. Strengths Drawn mainly from Lincoln's second call for volunteers, these will die for the Union cause. Weakness Under-supplied and with stretched lines, they faced greater difficulties than just the enemy. SPRINGFIELD , MODEL 1861 KEY WEAPON The most commonly used rifled musket of the Civil War. Strengths Long range, along with fairly good accuracy. Weakness A slight arcing in the bullet's trajectory proved problematic when used by novices. 01 Foimiiig the defensive line After the retreat from Gettysburg on 1 July, General Meade forms his troops into the shape of an inverted fish hook - with the curve facing north in the direction of the town and a long straight line facing the Confederates to the west. With the high ground and with each unit close enough to support one another, Meade is confident his Federal troops can hold off any attacks. 02 SICKLES MOVES TO ATTACK Major General Daniel Sicldes moves his Third Corps, which holds the Union's left flank, to higher ground towards the west to an area known as Devil's Den, giving his J artillery a better position. General Meade sends in his Fifth Corps to support Sickles. 03 Lee oiders the first attack With the bulk of his forces along Seminary Ridge, parallel to the Union's fish hook. General Lee orders Lieutenant General Longstreet to attack the enemy's left flank. General Ambrose Hill is to attack the centre, while General Richard Ewell threatens the enemy's right. Lee plans for hK forces to roll up on the Uni™ Mt, flanking them entirely. 04 Longstreet advances Moving towards the Union's left flank, Longstreet's men encounter the Union Third Corps at the Devil's Den, a deadly position perfect for sharpshooting. Texas and Alabama regiments move towards Little Round Top to flank the Den. 05 BIHER FIGHTING IN THE DEN The Devil's Den changes hands several times, with neither side able to hold it for long before being forced to retreat. About 1,800 casualties result from the fighting here. Further to the right of the Confederate attack, Alabama and Texas regiments begin assaulting Little Round Top, but encounter elements of the Fifth Corps General Meade has sent to support Sickles. 66 Greatest Batttes 4 ^General Lee Awretreats Confederate cavalry finally arrive on the battlefield but are too late to have any significant impact on proceedings. General Lee remains on the field to organise a rearguard for his army's retreat, anticipating a Union general advance on the rebels. However, General Meade keeps his army on Cemetery Ridge and Cemetery Hill. 09 Pickett's Charge In the last major Confederate attack of the battle, General George Pickett is ordered to assault the Union centre with his relatively fresh division with others under the command of General Longstreet. After a lengthy artillery bombardment from both sides, 12,000 Confederate soldiers attack, but are eventually broken. 06 BAHLE FOR LIHLE ROUND TOP With ammunition running low and having talcen heavy casualties, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain orders his men to fix bayonets and charge the Confederate troops. The attack routs the attacldng rebels. 07 The end of the second day Sickles's Third Corps is pressed hard by the Confederate attacks, with the Wheatfield and Devil's Den finally falling into enemy hands. Sickles is wounded by a cannonball to the leg as his men retreat to Cemetery Ridge, where they hold. A huge gap in the Union centre emerges after the Third Corps retreats, so the line is hastily reorganised to prevent the army being split in two. A OThe armies regroup night falls on 2 July, there are more than 14,000 casualties of the battlefield. The Union now holds a defensive line along Cemetery Ridge, Cemetery Hill and south to Little Round Top. In the evening. Confederate attacks on the right Union flank are barely repulsed, as the defences are under-strength from supporting Sickles' position in the day. The next day, more attacks on Culp's Hill and around Spangler's Spring on the Union right flank are repulsed. Corrfeeterate Army of Normern Virginia TROOPS 72,000 GENERAL ROBERT E LEE LEADER One of the finest leaders of the Civil War and a seasoned soldier. Strengths Substantially experienced in battle. Weakness Lacked a thorough reconnaissance of the battlefield. CONFEDERATE SHARPSHOOTERS KEY UNIT The elite marksmen of the Civil War. Strengths Precise shooting could take out enemy officers with ease. Weakness Didn't have the numbers of rank-and-file troops. WHITWORTH RIFLE KEY WEAPON Arguably the world's first sniper rifle, manufactured in Britain. Strengths Incredibly long range, could hit targets from up to one mile away. Weakness Far less effective in the hands of a raw recruit. 67 © Nicolle Fuller Secrets oe the Oracle The oracles of Delphi have been shrouded in mystery for millennia, but now scientists believe they have an explanation A ncient Greece was a world dominated by men. Men filled the highest positions in society men fought on the battlefield and men ruled the mightiest empires. However, all these men, from the lowliest peasant to the emperor himself, sought the council and advice of one person - and that person was a woman. The city of Delphi had long traditions of being the centre of the world; it was said that Zeus himself named it the navel of Gaia. According to legend, a huge serpent, named Python, guarded the spot before it was slain by the infant god Apollo. When Apollo's arrows pierced the serpent, its body fell into a fissure and great fumes arose from the crevice as its carcass rotted. All those who stood over the gaping fissure fell into sudden, often violent, trances. In this state, it was believed that Apollo would possess the person and fill them with divine presence. These peculiar occurrences attracted Apollo-worshipping settlers during the Mycenaean era, and slowly but surely the primitive sanctuary grew into a shrine, and then, by 7th century BCE, a temple. It would come to house a single person, chosen to serve as the bridge between this world and the next. Named after the great serpent, this chosen seer was named the Pythia - the oracle. Communication with a god was no small matter, and not just anyone could be allowed or trusted to serve this venerated position. It was decided that a pure, chaste and honest young virgin would be the most appropriate vessel for such a divine role. However, there was one drawback - beautiful young virgins were prone to attracting negative attention from the men who sought their council, which resulted in oracles being raped and violated. Older women of at least 50 began to fill the position, and as a reminder of what used to be, they would dress in the virginal garments of old. These older women were often chosen from the priestesses of Delphi temple, but could also be any respected native of Delphi. Educated noble women were prized, but even peasants could fill the position. Those Pythia who were previously married were required to relinquish all family responsibility and even their individual identities. To be an oracle was to take up an ancient and vitally important role - one that transcended the self, and entered into legend. Pythia were so important to the Greek Empire that it was essential that they were a blank slate, so children, husbands and any links to previous life had to be severed in favour of Apollo and divinity. The reason for the growing importance of the oracles was simple - the Pythia provided answers. For an ambitious and religious civilisation, this very visual and vocal link to the gods was treated with the utmost respect. For the nine warmest months of each year, on the seventh day of each month the Pythia would accept questions from all members of Greek society. This was to correspond with the belief that Apollo deserted the temple during the winter months. After being 'purified' by fasting, drinking holy water and bathing in the sacred Castalian Spring, the Pythia would assume her 68 mMw -,.{' »1V .. ./ :a^ Ask TT-re Or ACT, u If you have a problem or simply wish to know what the future holds - the oracle has the answer I'm a Spartan lawmaker and recently outside influence has been threatening our proud nation. Are these other countries a bad influence or am I being an old stick in the mud? Lycurgus, Sparta Love of money and nothing else will ruin Sparta. I know it's silly but I'm absolutely obsessed with my own death! Do you have any idea what I can do to prevent my early demise? Lysander, Sparta Beware the serpent, earthborn, in craftiness coming behind thee. I've recently captured my own island. I have to come up with some laws but I'm not sure what sort of ruler I should be. Any advice? Solon, Athens Seat yourself now amid ships, for you are the pilot of Athens. Grasp the helm fast in your hands; you have many allies in your city. An old foe has reared his ugly head and wants to face my soldiers in battle. The only problem is that we are vastly outnumbered. Should I face him? Leonidas, Sparta The strength of bulls or lions cannot stop the foe. No, he will not leave off, until he tears the city or the king limb from limb. Although I'm already a king. I feel unfulfilled with my life. I want to do something really impressive. What should I do to make my name? Philip, Macedon With silver spears you may conquer the world. My friend is a really important person, but he's been making some really questionable decisions lately. Should I stick by him? Cicero, Arpino Make your own nature, not the advice of others, your guide in this life. My enemy will not leave me alone! I know I can't fight him. but is there a way I can at least defend myself from his attacks? Themistocles, Athens A wail of wood alone shall be uncaptured, a boon to you and your children. My friend, Socrates, is such a know- it-all. He literally has an answer for everything. Please settle a dispute for US: is there anyone who is smarter than hi m? Chaerephon, Athens No human is wiser. I've sacrificed everything, even family members, for power. But it's still not enough. What can I do to satisfy my greed? Nero, Antium Your presence here outrages the god that you seek. Go back, matricide! The number 73 marks the hour of your downfall! My dad was a very famous soldier and everyone expects me to follow in his footsteps. Now war has broken out. I feel pressured to join the army. But I am not sure. Should I sign up? Gaios, Delphi You will go, return not die in t the war. The first oracles were young virgins. They were later replaced with women aged over 50 The site of Delphi was one of the most sacred in Ancient Greece ^CSecretIof ™ ■’ i nL position upon a tripod seat, clasping laurel reeds in one hand and a dish of spring water in the other. Positioned above the gaping fissure, the vapours of the ancient vanquished serpent would wash over her and she would enter the realm of the divine. People flocked from far and wide to speak to the woman who could communicate with the gods. Known as consultants, many of those who wished to ask the oracle a question would travel for days or even weeks to reach Delphi. Once they arrived they underwent an intense grilling from the priests, who would determine the genuine cases and instruct them the correct way to frame their questions. Those who were approved then had to undergo a variety of traditions, such as carrying laurel wreaths to the temple. It was also encouraged for consultants to provide a monetary donation as well as an animal to be sacrificed. Once the animal had been sacrificed, its guts would be studied. If the signs were seen as unfavourable, the consultant could be sent home. Finally, the consultant was allowed to approach the Pythia and ask his question. In some accounts, it seems the oracles gave the answers, but others report the Pythia would utter incomprehensible words that the priests would 'translate' into verse. Once he received his answer, the consultant would journey home to act upon the advice of the oracle. This was the tricky part. The oracle received a multitude of visitors in the nine days she was available, from farmers desperate to know the outcome of the harvest to emperors asking if they should wage war on their enemies, and her answers were not always clear. Responses, or their translations by the temple priests, often seemed deliberately phrased so that, no matter the outcome, the oracle would always be right. It was essential for the consultant to carefully consider her words, or else risk a bad harvest, or even the defeat of an entire army. When Croesus, the king of Lydia, asked the oracle if he should attack Persia, he received the response: "If you cross the river, a great empire will be destroyed." He viewed this as a good omen and went ahead with the invasion. Unfortunately, the great empire that was destroyed was his own. In this way, the oracle, just like the gods, was infallible, and her divine reputation grew. To question the oracle was to question the gods - and that was unthinkable. Soon, no major decision was made before consulting the oracle of Delphi. It wasn't just Greek people, but also foreign dignitaries, leaders and kings who travelled to Delphi for a chance to ask the oracle a question. Those who could afford it would pay great sums of money for a fast pass through the long lines of pilgrims and commoners. Using these donations, the temple grew in size and prominence. Quickly, Delphi seemed to be fulfilling its own prophecy of being the centre of the world, and attracted visitors for the Pythian Games, a precursor of the Olympic Games. On the influence of the oracle's statements, Delphi became a powerful and prosperous city-state. The oracle sat at the centre of not just the city of Delphi, but the great Greek empire itself. No important decision was made without her consultation, and so, for nearly a thousand years, the position of perhaps the greatest political and social influence in the ancient world was occupied by a woman. 71 Secrets oe the Oracle Wall SURROUNDING THE SANCTUARY OF Apollo Alternative Theories The oracles claimed their trances came from Apollo, scientists blame gases, but these aren't the only explanations for the peculiar incidents The Sqence BeeundThe Myth Excavations have revealed that there may be more to the story than first believed... Ever since the emergence of science in society, a scientific explanation for the Pythia's visionary trances has been sought. One of the most valuable accounts of the oracle’s trances comes from Plutarch, who served as a priest at the temple in Delphi. He described how sweet-smelling gases arising from the fissure would cause the priestesses to fall into a strange trance. It seemed there was some truth to Plutarch's account, as when archeologists studied the temple ruins they discovered a few peculiar features. The inner sanctum where the Pythia sat, for example, was two to four metres below the level of the surrounding floor, and there was also a nearby drain for spring water. This structure was unique when compared to any other Ancient Greek temple. All of this proved one thing - that there was definitely something strange going on in the temple of Apollo. Curious about the existence of the fissure mentioned in Plutarch's accounts, in 1892, French archeologists set about excavating the ruins of the temple with the goal of discovering an ancient cave or hole in the ground. However, surprisingly, nothing of the sort was found. By 1904, it was declared that Plutarch's temple fumes were simply an ancient myth, and never really existed. In 1948, the Oxford Classical Dictionary redid that: "Excavation has rendered improbable the post- 72 Sanctuary OF Apollo At this sacred site, thousands heard the SS. oracle's wisdom A A coin from 480 BCE stamped with the tripod of the oracle Temple oe Apollo Worship of the oracle came to an end in 390 AD Sacred Way classical theory of a chasm with mephitic vapours." That was believed to be true until the late 1980s, when a new team of curious scientists decided to investigate the ruins for themselves. The rocks they discovered beneath the temple were oily bituminous limestone and were fractured by two faults that crossed beneath the temple. This had to be more than a coincidence. The scientists theorised that tectonic movements and ancient earthquakes caused friction along the faults. Combined with the spring water that ran beneath the temple, methane, ethylene and ethane gas would rise through the faults to the centre and directly into the temple. The low room with its limited ventilation and lack of oxygen would help amplify the effect of the gasses and induce the trance-like symptoms experienced by the oracles. It was the ethylene gas especially that drew a lot of interest. Ethylene is a sweet-smelling gas, just like Plutarch had reported, and in small doses is said to have the ability to cause trances and frenzied states. Tests conducted with ethylene reported that a dosage higher than 20 per cent could cause unconsciousness; however, less than Snake Venom It is possible that the trances were brought upon by snake venom, particularly that of the cobra or krait snake. After becoming immunised against the venom, a bite from a snake can produce hallucinogenic symptoms that affect the person's emotional and mental state. Laurel Leaves Laurel leaves were always carried by the oracles, and they were also reported to chew on them because of their link with Apollo. It has been hypothesised that it was the leaves that brought on the oracle's trances, but as they are not hallucinogenic, this is unlikely. Political Puppets One of the most popular theories explaining the state of the oracles is that they were simply faking their trances. Because of the power that their prophecies could hold, it's theorised that the priests or the women themselves manipulated this power as they saw fit. that and the patient was able to sit up and answer questions, though their voice was altered. There were also instances of fits, thrashing, loss of memory and altered speech patterns, all of which correspond with Plutarch's accounts of the oracles. However, as is always the case with speculative science, this theory is not universally agreed upon, and other scientists argue that other gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are responsible for the hallucinogenic states. Either way, it seems the answer to the question of the mysterious Delphi oracles lies in the peculiar structure of the temple and unique geography of the site, which all aligned to produce something truly remarkable. 73 ® Look & Learn, Thinkstock, Corbis, Alamy, Frank Ippolito What if... The Berlin Wall never fell? GERMANY, 1949-2000 Written by Calum Waddell FRED TAYLOR Fred Taylor was born in Aylesbury, ' Buckinghamshire, England. In 1967 ’ he was awarded a history scholarship to Oxford University, where he read History and Modern Languages (German). After graduating, he pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Sussex, where he was awarded a Volkswagen Studentship and travelled widely in East and West Germany, researching a thesis on the German far-right before 1918. He has since worked as a publisher, a translator of fiction and non-fiction, a novelist and a scriptwriter. He edited and translated The Goebbels Diaries 1939-1941 and his books include The Berlin Waii: 13 August 196T9 November 1989 and Exorcising Hitier, about the destruction and resurgence of post-war Germany. What if the Berlin Wall had never collapsed? Basically you would have had something not dissimilar to North Korea. The only way it would have worked is through massive repression. I think for the wall not to have fallen, it would have, first of all, meant that we would have experienced a different Eastern Bloc than the one we had in the 1980s. They would have had to stop the reforms, Gorbachev particularly, and if that had taken place it would mean that the Cold War would have continued. Can you envision a scenario where the Berlin Wall is still standing and East Germany, much like North Korea, still exists as a separate country? It is very difficult to imagine this but, theoretically, I suppose they could have cracked down on dissent. There are a few reasons behind the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first, and most simple, is that the East German economy simply did not work. They had very few natural resources and terrible problems with inefficiency. Then, moving into the 1970s and 1980s, the Russians had stopped selling the East Germans cheap oil. This caused more economic problems. There are pictures of East German shops from the 1960s and 1970s, and then the 1980s; they tried to make it look as if everything was wonderful, but there was not much to buy except a few turnips. Another thing that needs to be established is that by the 1970s they were also being loaned a lot of money from the West Germans, which they became very dependent on. Then, of course, there is the Helsinki Accords, which the East cynically signed up to - but they could not really offer the freedoms that they had just promised. Nevertheless, they wanted the kudos of seeming forward thinking and freedom loving, albeit without paying any of the costs for that. Inevitably, though, over time, there were some brave people in East Germany who demanded the freedoms of the Helsinki Accords and, unless the authorities started to crack down on them, returning them to a Stalinist regime, it is difficult to see how the communists could have stayed in power. So let us imagine they did go down the route of announcing a state of emergency, offering the Stasi complete control over law and order and thousands of people were imprisoned or murdered. We are back to the idea of East Germany as a contemporary North Korea. How would the wall have evolved? Well it is interesting because the East Germans were actually quite good at basic electronics. They were skilled at putting together cheaper versions of Western electronics - and they had a plan to build a high-tech Berlin Wall. Moving into the 1990s and the millennium, it would have all kinds of alarms so that you wouldn't need armed guards. You would basically have an electronic surveillance system. However, while that was the goal, I don't think they had the financial or logistical ability to achieve that. If this high-tech version of the Berlin Wall had come into practice, how much longer can you envision East Germany hanging on for? No more than a few years after 1989. The huge sums they would need to spend in order to keep their new high-tech wall going would, I think, lead to the end in about 1995. How would West Germany have benefited, if at all, from the continuation of East Germany? In some ways it might have benefited West Germany to keep the East in business, because it would result in more cheap labour. East Germany, from the 1960s onwards, was a place 74 Wlmtif... THE BERLIN WALL NEVER FELL? where Western manufacturers had their work done cheap. In West Germany, back when I lived there, you could get 24-hour film development done - straight from your camera - back in the days when you delivered it to a chemist. But they would actually ship it over the border to East Germany and ship it back again. That was true of textiles and other businesses. So if I can imagine an East Germany, with this high-tech Berlin Wall still intact, I think it would be one that had basically become an economic colony of West Germany. It would have re-established a Stalinist regime to keep everybody quiet. The selling of political prisoners to the West was also an enormously profitable trade for the East, so that would probably have continued. In fact, there were rumours that they were arresting people just so they could make some income from selling them back. Let's say the Berlin Wall falls, as it did in 1989, but the majority of East Germans want to remain part of a separate state. Is this imaginable? A few idealists at the time did actually want to try a third way - a liberal socialist state of sorts. But, honestly, the only reason that East Germany could have, and perhaps should have, survived for a few more years was for the economy. When unification did happen, it was a bit of an economic car crash. All of these totally uncompetitive East German businesses were faced with the full force of competition from the West, as well as these carpet-bagging yuppies that went straight into East Berlin, in particular, and looked for profit. So I think a few years of adjustment, with some economic advantages and privileges and a loose political confederation, before total reunification, would have been a softer landing for most people. It was pretty bad for a lot of East Germans when the wall came down. East Germany was horribly uncompetitive. But the West Germans were already bailing them out before the border fell, and I suppose when you are paying somebody else's bills you demand power over them. So reunification, in light of that, had to come from the most practical economic solution. But had there been some way to have a two-tier system, so that the East could adjust to the new economics, I think it would certainly have helped. In East Germany there was no unemployment, free health and childcare and a supportive welfare state - but no freedom of speech and a wealth of political prisoners. Now, in a reunified Germany, there is plenty of homelessness and poverty but, of course, you can take to the streets in protest. So what was really the best outcome for so-called 'freedom', in retrospect? That's the very question we are all asking ourselves, isn't it? What is freedom? What is democracy? And does one type of freedom potentially undermine and even destroy the freedom of a different kind of person? Unemployment was a criminal offence in East Germany, as it was in Russia at the time, but the problem is they built up this fake economy to keep people working. That economy was running up huge deficits and liii!iii]Miii:ililtMi!iniiiiiiiiiiiniii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii tiiiiiiiiiiiiii tiiiii "There was an Eastern Bloc joke - we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us" How would it be different? Realtimeline 1945 • Yalta Conference Shortly before the Red Army reaches Berlin, Winston Churchill, a critically ill Franklin D Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin agree that after World War II, Germany will split into four separate 'occupation zones' under America, Britain, France and Russia. 4-11 February 1945 ^ West German Republic In February 1948, the United States, Britain and France meet in London, where they agree to unite each of the Western occupation zones into a greater German Republic. The Soviets, meanwhile, oversee a separate East German state. February 1948 • The Warsaw Pact The Cold War gets even chillier when eight Eastern Bloc countries, including East Germany, sign up to The Warsaw Pact - a pledge to defend any nation sympathetic to the Soviet cause from attack. 14 May 1955 • Erection of the Beriin Waii Perhaps the most famous event of the Cold War, The German Democratic Republic erects a barrier between East and West Berlin. The wall is designed to stop the mass emigration from East to West. 13 August 1961 • East German Constitution The German Democratic Republic (better as East Germany) is officially formed, complete with its own constitution. East Germany offers the right to emigrate and to trade union protection, however, inevitably, as with all Soviet-aligned nations, a heavy-handed one- party rule would soon surface. Amendments that will further limit personal freedoms of East Germans would emerge in a 1968 draft. 7 October 1949 Realtimeline Alternative timeline • East German Constitution Rather than maintaining influence from the Weimer era of the country's politics, the first constitution of the German Democratic Republic explicitly maintains a totalitarian. Stalinist state in which Western influences are banned outright. 7 October 1949 Whatff... THE BERLIN WALL NEVER FELL? that is what caused the financial implosion of the Eastern Bloc in the 1980s. There was an Eastern Bloc joke - we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us. So, yes, everybody was working but productivity was low. So this fagade of full employment was stirring up trouble for itself. However, we have certainly gone too far the other way now. Being a sentimental old social democrat, I think the 1960s and 1970s were when we found a decent balance that we have since lost. If you don't, to some extent, curb the freedoms of the very wealthy few to help those who have less power and money, you have a society where different kinds of pressures build up. We have touched a little on the North Korea analogy. Finally, then, can we look at the East-West divide in Germany and really make that comparison? In reality, I don't think so, because the balance between North and South Korea is different to the relationship that existed between East and West Germany while the wall was up. There was always, aside from during the first few years of the wall being built, a cordial political relationship as well as travel going on between the two German states. Pensioners, for instance, could leave the East for the West if they wanted, and if they did not want to come back, it was not a big deal. They were just a burden on the state anyway. There was a lot of family visiting going on between the two states too and a functioning economic relationship. The two Korean countries have none of that. If North Korea suddenly collapsed, then 25 million people, some of them starving, would flee to Seoul or to Ghina and look for a job and a handout, which would cause economic devastation for those countries. That is why North Korea manages to hang on - Ghina simply does not want that problem to develop. West Germany was different - reunification was actually the goal there and it was inevitable. Have your say Do you agree with our expert’s view? /All AboutHistory @AboutHistoryMag iiiiiiiiiijii)i]|[iriii iiiinitmiti • Killing of Peter Fechter Perhaps the most notorious execution of anyone trying to flee from East to West shows the world the brutality of the German Democratic Republic. Fechter, aged just 18, is shot in the pelvis and left to bleed to death. 17 August 1962 • The Warsaw Pact East Germany pressures the Soviets, who would give the Mongolian People's Republic 'observer status', to widen the signatories to include nations in Africa, Latin America and Asia. 14 May 1955 • The Helsinki Accords 35 countries meet in Finland. An agreement between communist and democratic nations is signed that guarantees numerous human rights and freedoms, but such declarations are later seen as a sham. July-August 1975 • Reagan's Speech at the Brandenburg Gate President Reagan gives one of his most iconic speeches in West Berlin, urging Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the Soviet Union, to "tear down this wall." 12 June 1987 • The Wall Falls The 'Peaceful Revolution' begins in East Germany during the summer of 1989. The climax comes on a winter's day in 1989 as East Germany, struggling to maintain order, declares the borders to be open for all. 9 November 1989 • The End of East Germany With no borders to separate the East from the West, the German Democratic Republic is dissolved and a country that has been split apart for 45 years is finally reunified. 3 October 1990 • Suppression of the Peaceful Revolution 25,000 East Germans are sent to prison, and thousands more shot dead, in a Tiananmen Square-style suppression of political protest in the middle of East Berlin. 30 June 1989 • A new high-tech Berlin Wall "The wall is here to stay," states Egon Krenz, the latest unapologetic leader of East Germany. He reveals plans for a new high-tech Berlin Wall that will have state-of-the-art security. 1 January 1990 • Military First programme Influenced by North Korea, parliament announces a Military First programme to sustain the financially ailing state. State employment will be increased by mandatory military service for all under-35s. October 1996 • The last man standing East Germany remains the lone wolf of Europe and a testament to the lasting effects of the Cold War. The annual visit from Kim Jong-un garners world attention, but little else. Present day • Erection of the Berlin Wall East Berlin's notorious Stasi, the country's official state security, forewarn all members of East Germany that anyone found to even be plotting to escape will be imprisoned for a minimum often years. 13 August 1961 • Long live Leonid Brezhnev The hard-line Soviet leader surprises many with his Castro- like ability to stay healthy. He makes it to the end of the 1980s in perfect health and celebrates his 83rd birthday. Gorbachev, who? 19 December 1989 • The USSR crumbles A belated attempt to sustain the Eastern Bloc comes to nothing and the Soviet Empire is no more. But East Germany refuses to budge and proudly proclaims a new trade partnership with China. 9 November 1994 • Wall for the millennium The Berlin Wall remains active on 1 January 2000, despite rumours it may be dissolved to celebrate the millennium. Armed guards return as, among power outages, the technology becomes too expensive to sustain. 1 January 2000 11 @ Ian Hinley [r^eeocfi^ ftP»fLf?A • liiU; » » U ^ >J ftpt>>»9n<*ftgniig finnltfiw s ^ @ 'inc.'>«ri' 0*f*t*' iStM^ntflrMeA^eA iim '^-vv jj I/Em I f L 1 'i^^ ' r' ''‘^T~^B^r ■ wt S.^v 9J>'f • y i. ijjgl3 BRIRii ;fS^ From humble beginnings, the Ottomans went on to conquer lands in three continents, forging an empire that lasted for 700 years Written by Will Lawrence t was an empire founded on the promise of a dream that visited the Turkish tribal chief Osman as he slept one night outside the home of a holy man. During his slumber, Osman saw a moon rise from the holy man's breast and sink into his own. Then a tree sprouted from his own navel, spreading its branches and encompassing the entire world. The holy man interpreted this night-vision as God giving Osman imperial office. The dream became reality. In truth, this vision was first communicated in the 15th century, 100 years after Osman's death, but it stands as one of the empire's key founding myths and provided temporal and divine authority for the Ottomans' remarkable success. For the Ottoman Empire was indeed an almighty achievement. Launched from the plains of the smallest Turkish emirate in western Anatolia, at the height of its power it encompassed a vast domain, stretching from Hungary to the Persian Gulf and from North Africa to the Caucasus, before beginning a slow decline through the 17th century to its final demise in the 1920s. The Ottomans first made their mark at the turn of the 14th century, when they were just one among many Turkish tribal groups from central Asia vying for prominence in Anatolia, the swathe of land nestled between the Black Sea, the Aegean and the Mediterranean. This land had once formed part of the Eastern Roman Empire and then, after the founding of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire. Following the conquest of this great city by the Europeans of the Fourth Crusade during the previous century, however, the Byzantine Empire had diminished, and by 1300 its Asian holdings comprised only a few ports on the Anatolian coast. The Ottomans' first step towards toppling the Byzantines and establishing a regional authority came under the leadership of Osman, and at the expense of their fellow Turkish tribes in Anatolia. The region flexed its autonomous muscles during the 1291 succession dispute among their Mongol overlords in Persia. But, as the other Turkish tribes gradually gave up the fight, Osman continued fighting and by 1299, his Ottomans were besieging the city of Nicaea. The Ottomans' great period of conquest was about to begin. In 1302, the Byzantine emperor Andronicus II, alarmed at Osman's growing influence and his perennial raiding of the Byzantine borderlands, mustered his army to put the Turkish tribesmen in their place. The Byzantine force met the Ottomans not far from Constantinople, on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara, where they were ambushed and routed from the field. This was the Ottomans' first great victory over the Byzantines and greatly enhanced Osman's reputation, as did his follow-up campaign, which severed communications between the cities of Brusa and Nicaea. Thousands of immigrant Turkish households rallied to his banner. As Osman's power grew, Andronicus sought alliances, though these came to nought, and Ottoman raiding continued until Osman's death around 1323/24. Leadership passed to Osman's son, Orhan, who went on to capture Brusa, establishing the first Ottoman capital. This was in 1326, a date that is often cited as the birth of the empire itself. 79 Rise Of The Ottomans The early Ottoman leaders Osman I: The founder Little is known about the background of this ruler of a small principality in north- western Anatolia. Both the name of the dynasty and the empire that the dynasty established are derived from his name’s Arabic form, Uthman. He died in 1323/24. k Murad I: The first sultan Ruling from 1360 to 1389, Murad oversaw rapid Ottoman expansion in Anatolia and the Balkans. During his reign, new forms of government and administration emerged to consolidate Ottoman rule. The Janissaries and the child- levy flowered under his stewardship. Bayezid I: The Thunderbolt' The most ambitious of the Ottoman leaders, Bayezid ruled from 1389-1402 and founded the first centralised Ottoman state based on traditional Muslim institutions. He also stressed the need to extend Ottoman conquest in Anatolia as well as waging war against the infidels. Mehmet II: The Conqueror' Mehmet ruled from 1444-46 and then again from 1451-81. Despite his youth, he overruled his advisers and conquered Constantinople, bringing down the Byzantine Empire and establishing what would remain the Ottoman heartland for the next 400 years. Suleiman I: 'The Magnificent' Sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1520 to 1566, Suleiman's bold military campaigns expanded the realm - he evicted the Hospitallers from Rhodes and won the great victory at Mohacs - while making great strides in the fields of law, literature, architecture and art. The Empire Expands Mehmet the Conqueror's entry into the defeated city of Constantinople Between the 14th and 16th centuries, the Ottoman Empire flowered, threatening the very heart of Europe n the 1340s, civil war erupted within the Byzantine Empire and the Ottomans were invited to step into imperial affairs, leading to the capture of Gallipoli in 1354, their first foothold in Europe. They extended their influence into the continent when, in 1361, Murad I captured the city of Adrianople, which was renamed Edirne before emerging as the new Ottoman capital in 1365. The Ottomans' freshly acquired territories now encircled Constantinople and the emperor, John V, signed a treaty that saw his once mighty city become little more than an Ottoman vassal. With a European base at Edirne, the Ottomans struck out against the Balkans. The Serbian Empire was also burgeoning during this period, but the decisive battle of Kosovo in 1389, though claiming the life of Murad I, saw the Ottomans emerge victorious once again. Murad's son Bayezid succeeded his father and earned the name 'the Thunderbolt', such was his military prowess. Claiming he would water his horse at the altar of St Peter's in Rome, he quelled rebellion within the empire before taking Bosnia and Bulgaria, and then finally coming face to face with Western Europe, winning his first engagement against European heavy cavalry at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396. The Ottomans did not escape without setbacks, and the rise of the fabled leader Tamerlane, the successor to the Mongols in the east, checked their power when defeating and capturing Bayezid at Anakara in 1402. It seemed as though the empire would disintegrate amid the power struggle that followed Bayezid's death. Ottoman fortunes began to revive, however, picking up pace when Sultan Murad II led the first, albeit unsuccessful, siege of Constantinople in 1422. He launched a Hungarian offensive in 1439 that culminated in one of the greatest Ottoman victories at Varna in 1444, where the Hungarians and Western crusading forces, which included the mighty Teutonic Knights, were heavily defeated. It was Murad's successor, Mehmet II, who was to cement Ottoman power in the European sphere. Known to history as Mehmet the Conqueror, he finally toppled Constantinople in 1453 and ravaged 80 Rise Of The Ottomans The Government Oe The Ottoman Empire The sultan The sultan had absolute power, though he maintained a council of ministers called a Divan. All laws were made in his name. The dvil service The Ottomans, like the Romans, enjoyed a powerful civil service with the Grand Vizier chief among them. The millets Non-Muslim communities were afforded independence and allowed to appoint their own mSSSm^ r KtsRi Kii isi ■ II KKitwsKid m naRi llflRiirmiHk«inif[SKaii[SKtsi:i«:ii iraaiiRiBsiirii Rise Of The Ottomans The Janissaries The Ottoman army was a fearsome machine, unlike anything else that Medieval Europe had ever seen, and their elite troops were the mighty Janissaries n Medieval Europe, the Ottoman army was unique - the entire empire lived for war and one conquest fuelled the next. Even later in the empire's life, during the siege of Baghdad in 1683 when the Persians demanded the contest be settled by single combat, the sultan, Mehmet IV, stepped forward and cut down the Persian champion himself. Unlike the European armies they so regularly routed, the Ottoman forces were full-time professionals. Chief among their myriad units were the Janissaries, the Ottoman elite infantry, who lived solely for war. Even marriage and family were forbidden to them. Their only love was combat; the only person to who they owed loyalty was the sultan. They were his men, forming his personal bodyguard. They were recruited from Christian slave boys - to enslave fellow Muslims was contrary to religious law - though to describe the Janissaries as a slave- army fails to recognise the honour and prestige they enjoyed within the Ottoman Empire. The boys surrendered little when they left their homes. Recruited mostly from the Balkan states, they left behind poverty in a rural life that offered little hope of professional advancement. Once converted to Islam, educated and trained, they became important players in an empire that admired martial ability and, as time developed, like the Praetorian Guard in ancient Rome they even became kingmakers, famously rebelling against Osman II in 1622 and restoring Mustapha to the Sultanate. Recruitment Ottoman soldiers recruit Janissaries in the Balkans Murad I is widely regarded as the founder of the Janissary units following his recruitment of Christian prisoners of war into his army some time after 1377. It was a move that was enhanced by his successor, Bayezid, who introduced the 'gathering' during the 1380s, a levy on Christian boys, aged between eight and 18 years, from the Balkan states. "We light our lamp with oil taken from the hearts of the infidels," wrote the Sultan Mehmet II in the 1400s. Ottoman officials would visit the Balkan villages every three to seven years and drafted the best-looking, strongest and most intelligent boys to be employed in service of the empire, either as soldiers (in the case of the Janissaries) or administrators or as palace servants. In the earlier years of empire, the Ottomans were careful not to impoverish their subjects and so would absolve from the levy any boy who was the oldest or the only male child in his family, or any who was a widow’s son, and they would never deplete a village of its entire stock. It was in the Ottoman interests to keep Balkan agriculture as buoyant as possible to fuel their empire and keep rebellions quiet. During the 1500s it is estimated that the yearly draft was about 1,000-3,000 boys. Often families from poor mountain districts would volunteer their sons willingly, delighted to see them step onto the Ottoman career ladder. Though technically slaves, the Janissaries could maintain contact with their families and, as possessions of the Sultan himself, could not be bought or sold. Rise Of The Ottomans mse of the Janissaries It is impossible to chart the exact _ _ growth of Janissary numbers, though one respected study places the numbers as follows: Janissaries favoured the arquebus when firearms became readily available Anatomy OF A Janissary The Janissary's distinctive headgear featured a holding place for a simple wooden spoon attached to the front as a badge, signifying the shared comradeship among the troopers - who ate, fought and died together. Robe A felt coat called a capinat, which was both light and waterproof TraininF Once marched to the Ottoman capital - a test in Uself - the boys were circumcised and converted to Islam. Most did this willingly and conversion back to Christianity was rare. They were then tested to discover their best potential, the brightest being selected for the palace schools and future jobs in the Ottoman palaces or civil service. Those not selected for such lofty positions were marked for military duties and were hired out to Turkish villagers for up to seven years. After this service, they were then packed off to the training crops, with the majority trained for the regular infantry, learning weapon skills and strict discipline, as well as mathematics. Some of the more promising were selected for education in the households of powerful families, where they were taught more technical skills such as gunnery and carriage driving. The barrack life instilled a sense of loyalty among the recruits, who also acted as policemen a nd firemen when the main military bodies were away on campaign. They had the tradition of [egimental life drummed into them during these formative years, swearing loyalty to their fellows upon a tray that contained salt, a Koran and a sword, though their ultimate fealty belonged to the sultan. Across the empire they were his eyes, his ears and his ultimate fighting machine. The small hand axe was useful in a tight melee, while palace guards carried long- shafted axes and halberds. Uniform The basic trooper wore blue wool, while senior officers had Jackets trimmed with fur. Wide breeches Into which they stuffed their robes, so they did not hinder them while marching or fighting. Yatagan sword A light and single- edged curved blade that became one of the symbols of the corps. Arquebus The first Janissaries were ace archers, and were quick to adopt firearms when they became readily available. 11 ^^ m^mi^ Why was the Ottoman Empire so successful? A STANDING ARMY EXCELLENT MORALE I The Ottomans were the first since the Roman Empire to maintain a professional army with a brilliant logistical supply chain. While European rulers had to coax their squabbling lords into combat, the Ottomans could call into action a well-oiled war machine. 2 The Ottoman army contained the Janissaries, who lived for war, while their other troops were often motivated by a religious fervour that demanded they wage war against the infidel. Their leaders successfully analysed strategy and tactics and kept morale high. FLEXIRLE GOVERNANCE 3 While heavy-handed in conquest, the Ottomans were light-handed in governance, tolerating different religious dominations where conversion proved too difficult. They also maintained local laws and customs so that their subjects would better fuel the Ottoman war machine. The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 Rise Of The Ottomans The Fall of Constantinople Though masters of the surrounding landscape, the toppling of Constantinople proved a symbolic victory for the Ottomans t was Mehmet the Conqueror who launched the final assault on Constantinople and brought the last vestige of a once-mighty empire into the Ottoman fold. Though the city had long proved little more than a vassal state, he coveted the glory its fall would bring. Succeeding to the Sultanate in 1451, he swiftly mobilised his armies and picked off remaining Byzantine possessions along the Black Sea coast. In 1452, he erected a castle on the European shore of the Bosphorus, opposite a Turkish castle on the Asiatic shore, taking strategic command of this vital waterway. The Turks now controlled all shipping in and out of the Black Sea and Mehmet's artillery were quick to sink a Venetian ship that defied his order to halt. Mehmet beheaded the crew and impaled the captain, Antonio Rizzi. "As Rizzi's body mouldered in the rain," writes one historian, "the Byzantines made their last, desperate appeals to the West." With the great trading states of Genoa, Venice and Ragusa deeply involved in mercantile activity with the Ottomans, and at odds among themselves, they offered little in the way of support to the Byzantines. The Holy Roman Emperor issued a stern warning to Mehmet, but it fell on deaf ears. The sultan had a warning of his own: the Byzantines should leave the city by 5 March 1453, or suffer his wrath. As the vast Turkish fleet sailed into the Sea of Marmara, a frightening weapon of war was uncovered before the city's outermost walls, a 28-foot cannon with the bronze of its barrel said to be eight inches thick. It had to be dragged into position by 700 men and 60 oxen. Constantinople's stone defences were almost as formidable, comprising two sets of mighty walls dotted with towers. The emperor also ordered a mighty chain to be slung along the entrance to the Golden Horn, preventing any Turkish ships from launching an assault on the inner sea walls. The Turks found the opening days difficult, their artillery proving less effective than they'd hoped against the city's lofty walls, while their siege towers were set ablaze and mining efforts repulsed. To add further insult, in April a small flotilla of supply ships successfully ran the Turkish blockade and safely entered the Golden Horn. Mehmet upped his game and soon pulled off an extraordinary feat of engineering, building a wooden roadway from the Bosphorus to the Springs - over which he hauled 70 ships that took to the Golden Horn. He could now mount sea- borne assaults from much closer quarters. On 29 May 1453, Mehmet launched his most intense assault, a simultaneous attack from land and sea, his Janissaries achieving the final victory as they pressed through a breached wall. It is presumed the brave Byzantine Emperor, Constantine, died while rallying his men. With the city at the Ottomans' mercy, Mehmet allowed three days of looting and thousands of civilians were dragged off into slavery before the sultan took ownership of this renowned city and began its reconstruction as a Muslim metropolis. The Attack It has been said that Mehmet rallied the whole of his empire for the assault on Christendom's most easterly outcrop, and if figures of 300,000 men seem exaggerated, the forces assembled outside Constantinople's walls certainly dwarfed those inside, perhaps numbering as few as 12,000. OTTOMANS BYZANTINES NO. OF SOLD ERS: 7.000- 2.000 SHIPS: 26 mil mill SH PS 90- 25 REVIEWS All About History on the books, TV shows and films causing a stir in the history world — 'I'XTIl* A 1\A1\J |l' I 1 one expects the A A aXw Spanish Inquisition Author Tarn Richardson Publisher Duckworth Overlook Price £12.99 Released 21 May Q uestion: how do you make a World War I setting even darker and more terrifying? Answer: throw in some of history's most enigmatic yet sinister villains, the Spanish Inquisitions. And some werewolves. Despite having ceased functioning in actuality a large amount of the time, The Damned sees author Tarn Richardson positing an alternative reality where the Spanish Inquisition merely moved into the shadows, in the process giving them more license to carry out their work than ever before. All the rumours about their methods turn out to be even worse than you could have possibly envisaged, which takes a toll not only on their victims, but on the Inquisitors themselves. One such individual is Poldek Tacit, an orphan brought into the church as a child and trained to be one of this elite group, whose years of committing the most twisted of acts has seen him become unhinged and hardened against any kind of human contact. When the church itself falls under attack from the forces of darkness. Tacit is immediately brought in to get to the bottom of things - although what he discovers may transpire to be even more than he can handle. Although the premise might seem more like a Family Guy joke than the basis for a novel ("It reminds me of that time we were fighting werewolves with the Spanish Inquisition during World War I), the end result is an engaging and gripping read. The constant switching between narratives from different time periods (primarily depicting Tacit’s life pre and post-inquisition) helps to break things up and inject suspense, and helps add layers to Tacit's character. In the present day, he initially comes across as a token psychopath, but seeing the process by which his innocence is gradually erased helps sell him as a thi dimensional character. Also aiding its accessibility is the fact that minimal knowledge of the subject matter is required to enjoy this story - the fact that you're reading this magazine in the first place says that you'll likely already possess whatever background knowledge is necessary for understanding it. By often tackling the (numerous) death scenes from the perspective of the victims themselves, the brutality and horror of this time in history is hammered home. The war dead weren't just nameless faces, they were real people with families and their own lives, and Richardson does an efficient job of humanising them. In terms of literary touchstones, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is the more obvious point of comparison, although unlike the mega- blockbuster, this doesn't claim any pretensions of being anything more than a great read. Similarly, Elizabeth Rostova’s The Historian bears close comparison, due to the way in which Richardson intricately and effortlessly weaves historical fact with the more grandiose and far-fetched elements of fantasy fiction. All in all then, Richardson has created a book that may not necessarily be the best read with regards to a historical grounding in World War I or the Spanish Inquisition, but has undoubtedly succeeded in creating a thoroughly entertaining read nonetheless. Steve Wright "Richardson intricately weaves fact with the more grandiose and far-fetched elements of fantasy fiction" The Spanish Inquisition makes an unexpected appearance in this World War II thriller 86 Reviews SCIENCE IN WONDERLAND From dragons and fairies to dinosaurs and microbes Author Melanie Keene Publisher Oxford University Press Price £16.99 Released 26 March T he 19th century was an age of discovery, where the population of the Western world experienced a quick transition from the realm of superstition and fairy tales to the textbooks of science. The role of human beings in the history of the world was suddenly made less significant as the first palaeontologists began to pull the fossilised remains of ancient creatures out of chalk cliffs and quarries, while microscopes in laboratories revealed to the world living things far tinier than the naked eye could see. Scientific fact, however, can often be far stranger and more wonderful than any conceivable fiction. In her snapshot of this society, Melanie Keene effectively conveys the sense of wonder felt across the world in a brief window of time where writers leveraged the Victorian fascination with dragons, fairies and fey magic to teach people about this esoteric new world of science. This method worked; apparently somewhat too well, as some Victorians clearly took these allegorical stories to be as true as the scientific concept it intended to teach. Keene pursues the argument that some classic tales such as The Water Babies, as well as other, lesser-known stories, were used by the authors to criticise and communicate scientific ideas, in what was a generational stepping stone towards the hard science that emerged in the 20th century. For scholars of the sciences, this book is a great insight into the minds of the Victorian layman and the people who tried to teach the new methods. Those who study literature or history will get a broader idea of the origins of literary works from a fascinating era. But this really is a book that anyone with an inquiring mind can pick up and relate to. Ben Biggs The 1863 novel The Water Babies is said to be inspired by scientific ideas THE LAST REBEL: AFTER BOSWORTH: LOVELL FIGHTS ON Fictionalised history at its finest Publisher Stellar Books Price £7.99 Released Out now T he Battle of Bosworth and the victory of Henry Tudor is a story that has been told countless times, but what we rarely hear is: what happened to the losers? Nigel Green takes us on the road less travelled by and tells just this, in his semi- fictionalised account of their rebellion against the newly crowned king. A sequel to Green's earlier novel The King's Dogge, the story picks up at the end of the Battle of Bosworth, when Yorkist loyalist Francis Lovell realises the fate of his friend and king Richard III. Determined to uphold his vow of allegiance to the house of York, Lovell flees north to build an army of resistance, with an aim of putting Richard's imprisoned nephew on the throne. The Last Rebel is an impeccably well-researched piece of work, seamlessly combining historical accounts with believable fictional fill-ins. Green is a master of dialogue, giving his characters voices that fit the place and time of the novel and add to its believability The novel is fast paced and packed full unforeseen twists and turns, along with dramatic battle scenes and nail- biting escape stories that are bound to leave you on the edge of your armchair. The author succeeds in keeping the reader hooked throughout, although at times this can come at the expense of the character development. Despite this. Green covers enough ground to ensure that The Last Rebel reads fluently as a standalone novel, without needing to have read the prequel. Overall, this is a thrilling and thoroughly enjoyable novel that will appeal to even the most casual of historians, and one that is sure to redefine your ideas of courage, loyalty and determination. Alicea Francis HISTORY THROUGH 0 COINS 0 Home study coin collecting course. Where to find them, how to identify and photograph them. A must for every new collector. Makes a great present! • 9 Support whilst you learn Course material supplied on CD, USB or as download Coins available for purchase historycoins.co.uk Reviews The events leading to the Siege of Paris made France a turbulent place to be IuLDEmIki I o riivri A revolution extinguished Author Lydia Syson Publisher Hot Key Books Price £7.00 Released 7 May 2015 P aris in 1871 is a time of political and social turmoil After the Prussian siege, the city is in revolt and its citizens are searching for a new way to live their lives. It is here that we join the intertwined stories of Jules the photographer, Zephyrine the orphan, Marie the opera singer and Anatole the violinist. Unfortunately, despite their initial engaging qualities, these characters are conveniently capable of massive personality shifts from one scene to the next, depending on what is apparently needed. Zephyrine is the worst offender, flitting from damsel to revolutionary in a heartbeat - one minute portrayed as an intellectual thinker fallen on hard times, the next falling asleep at a women's politics meeting - but all four of our main players are guilty of it. And it isn't simply a case of unrealistic character progression. At times their behaviour makes it feel as though these are four entirely different people to the ones we've been introduced to. But, for all its irritations in terms of character, Syson paints a beautiful picture of Paris. From the Hotel de Ville to the Theatre Lyrique, the city is realised in loving detail It's a shame that the action shifts from the contemplative American photographer Jules to his excitable violinist room-mate Anatole, though, as Jules' perspective on the revolution and fallout thereafter are considerably more engaging than Anatole's increasingly whirlwind passions of politics and Zephyrine. The main issue is that there just seems to be no real drama, despite the revolutionary setting. Neither of the main characters seem to fall in love for any real reason other than proximity, while minor disagreements or concerns between characters seem to just sort of resolve themselves, leaving the threat of conflict in Paris the more impending worry. And even that prompt of high- stakes drama just isn't given I the violent reality it deserves. I Neither the history of the H conflict nor the blossoming fl love story are given the ^ space they need, leaving I ^ us with a readable but B' ultimately light-in-meaning B ’ tale of half-baked friendship ^ - and poorly-realised love in what is, admittedly, a fascinating time period. ^ Rebecca Richards Hisr()m RECOMMENDS... Great Battles: Waterloo Alan Forrest £18.99 Oxford University Press With this year marking the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, interest in the battle is rising. If you're after an exhaustive critique of the battle, be warned, as Forrest takes a different slant on Waterloo, focusing on what came after. Overall, this book is arguably more interesting for looking beyond the action on the battlefield and into the political landscape of a continent constantly at war with itself. RICHARD 111: THE KING IN TT7 A n n A "D ¥^How the controversial king's X XllZi L /\XVXXmemory was muddled Author Terry Breverton Publisher Amberley Price £9.99 Released 4 February 2015 hen Richard Ill's bones were found underneath a car park in Leicester, interest in one of Britain's most polarising monarchs rocketed. This prompted a surge in accounts of his life, one of which was Richard III: The King In The Car Park Terry Breverton has crafted a well-researched book on Richard Ill's rise to power and subsequent fall from grace. He takes us through the monarchs of the Plantagenet, Lancaster and York dynasties, detailing how each came to the throne, by birth, marriage or deception. Breverton's writing is mixed in style, making for a slightly disjointed book. There are many interesting and well-written passages, especially when digging into the characters of the protagonists and antagonists, building up a fascinating picture of this turbulent time in history. However, there are also periods in which the reader feels bombarded with dates, names and titles. These sections are quite hard to take in and often have to be re-read. Further confusion is created in the names of the people involved. By switching between their names and their titles, Breverton attempts to keep the narrative varied but at times it just gets confusing who Gloucester, Edward, Buckingham or Elizabeth are, especially when so many people share the same first name or have inherited a title. There are also times when he refers to something that has already been discussed, creating a slightly messy timeline, although these back references often help jog the memory. This is a really interesting biography of a man whose name has become shrouded in mystery and is well worth a read, but be prepared for the occasional slog. Jamie Frier Reviews JAMBUSTERS: THE STORY OF THE WOMEN'S INSTI'TUTE IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR Far more than simply jam and Jerusalem Author Julie Summers Publisher Simon & Schuster Price £8.99 Released Out now W hen World War 11 broke out, the Women's Institute found itself in a tricky position. Officially a pacifist organisation, it saw its membership fall as members left to join the war service, but those that remained were aware just how powerful they were. With more than 300,000 members dotted all over the country, the W1 were already in position to help keep Britain operating through the war. Unpaid and often unacknowledged, Jambusters sheds light on the very real and significant contributions of the women of the Wl, who did far more than simply make jam. This excellently researched and compelling read introduces the stories of individual, real members of the Wl, as well as the role the organisation was taking as a whole. Rather than a collection of facts and figures, Jambusters paints a vivid and detailed picture of women 'getting on with it' in a country that had been turned upside down. Using records, archives, letters, diaries and interviews with wartime members themselves, Jambusters is an accurate and fitting homage to the inspiring and astonishing contributions the Women's Institute made during World War 11. Although this would be a perfect read for any serving Wl members, or those who had relatives in the organisation during the war, it is also a compelling read for anyone interested in this period of history, or women's history as a whole. Jambusters is far more than an informative non- fiction, it is a story of survival, of determination against the odds, and of the private battles that all the mothers, wives, sisters, nurses, schoolteachers and daughters quietly fought with no promise of glory or medals. Frances White Thousands of tons of fruit were boiled in WI preservation centres ■■■ The WI made potato baskets for the Ministry of Agriculture Among other activities, the WI collected herbs for medicinal purposes Interview with... Julie Summers How important was the Wl during Worid War II? It was the largest voluntary women's organisation in the country that was non-military. At the outbreak of the war it had 328,000 members, with institutes in one in three English and Welsh villages. The most useful thing about that was the government only needed to ring the general secretary in London to have the ears of a third of a million women throughout England and Wales, and that was an incredibly powerful thing. Because it was a pacifist organisation, it couldn't do work directly connected to the military aspect of the war effort, but it could work on food production and any other voluntary work that needed doing to keep the countryside ticking. You must have come across incredible stories while writing this book. Do any in particular stand out? Some characters stood out to me. I think universally what impressed me was how women just got on with it without making a fuss. Whatever they were asked to do, it was no problem, they didn't really draw the line at anything. When they were asked to write a report on housing or evacuees - it happened, if they were asked to make Jam - no problem. Jambusters inspired new ITV drama Home Fires. Did you have much input in making the show? Into the actual production, nothing at all, however, I was very lucky that the scriptwriter Simon Block involved me right from the beginning in his ideas for the storytelling. I didn't come up with any ideas as such, but I would comment on tone and colour of the history and I was very keen that Simon understood the mood of the country in the first years of the war. He wanted to get a sense of how the Wl was perceived in the village, so all of that kind of background hue I could help with. I read every single script several times and was able to say "no, the Wl didn't do that until 1942," or "yes, that's perfect." And it was lovely to do that, very special indeed. What can people expect from Home Fires? It's a sort of microcosm of life in rural Britain during World War II and shines a light on the role that women played in it. It's a drama, so it has all the ingredients a drama has to have - it'll make people laugh, gasp, cry. The women are so authentic and although they're not based on the ones in the book, I think if any of the women in my book had walked onto the set they would have recognised the type of women there. In the book you mentioned that you cameo in the show. That must have been pretty incredible? It was. What was really special was that I hadn't realised until I first went up on set the impact it would have on me, on seeing the world I know so well in black-and-white photos come alive. It was very moving; I wept when I saw it. All the women were authentically 1940s. It was extraordinary, like walking back into history. When we saw the crew in their 21st-century clothes, it looked like they had come from a different planet, it was Just bizarre. And magical. 89 © The National Federation of Women's Institute. Tvn Competition • Tell us which part of the UK is home to this 19 th-century castle to win Is it in... A. England B. Wales C. Scotland < ^ ' r A fantastic selection of history boolts worth over £50 Visit www.historyaiiswers.co.uk to let us loiow ir^CX IHE MQfilCni flfftl W(H ASSJIUJ UfibelievaUte technology designe^^ to bring on apocalypse [®^^^liliiiiiiKjji How the Red Airny crusJied Berfirt greatest MACWNtSWWWI AnAiqi O IM {kianilrlliLi'O ^i^iwKill Tutka O /ALCmRIK i^HE SKIES FAc^tFbl:£l4 a 1 1 llliPNi WWIHaiftSlfTBt WEMSPORGOTTUS I CSOUtDiaJiRfliMOtO ' QADDAFIS LEBiACT niE ROOTS QFL®iA'St:fBSS HISTQ RY 3 Available from all good newsagents and supermarkets. > Cold War weapons Six-day War Fall of the Third Reich Jacobite Rebellion Snipers GREAT BATTLES MILITARY MACHINES HEROES OF WAR SECRETS & INSIGHT ! INCREDIBL E PHOTOS alUBI BUY YOUR ISSUE TODAY Print edition available at www.imagineshop.co.uk Digital edition available at www.greatdigitalmags.com Available on the following platforms ■ HHi f facebook.com/HistoryofWarMag twitter.eom/@HistoryofWarMag HISTORY ANSWERS Send your questions to [email protected] Which nation was the winner of the Anglo-German arms race? Neil BulL Cheltenham In 1906, Britain launched the HMS Dreadnought. Weighing in at 17,900 tons (15,422 kilograms) with ten 30-centimetre (12-inch) guns, it represented a new era of naval warfare. The German Empire was watching the British developments and began building a fleet to match the Royal Navy. War wasn't on the agenda at this point. The aim was instead to claim as many international colonies as possible. Huge amounts of money were thrown at the navies as both nations tried to outdo each other. By the start of World War I in 1914, Britain had 29 Dreadnoughts to Germany's 17. The British had won in the quantity stakes but the German vessels had better armour and their sailors were better trained. In the end, the whole arms race was more a show than an act of strength. During the war, there was only one major naval skirmish at the Battle of Jutland, which ended with an inconclusive result. Over the four years, both navies were generally too afraid to engage each other for fear of losing their ships. It was Britain who won the race and the war but by the end of 1918, the Washington Naval Treaty kick-started an era of disarmament and the ships were dismantled. wm the RMS Titanic ever be resurfaced? Jason Miller, Sunderland Resurfacing it is unlikely, but there is a plan to construct a new Titanic from scratch. Initially intended for a 2016 launch, the Titanic II would be an exact replica of the original White Star Line ship, from first class down to third. Its only changes would be new, modernised safety and performance measures such as a welded rather than a riveted hull and stabilisers to reduce roll when at sea. The proposal was most recently funded by Australian billionaire Clive Palmer until he ran into financial trouble. The project is currently on hiatus until new funds can be found. The legacy of the ship and its ill-fated maiden voyage continues to be popular This day in history so April r 311 * i 1492 Christian persecution ends For many years in the Roman Empire, followers of Christianity were rounded up and killed for their beliefs. However, as its base grows, it gradually becomes the main religion of Rome and flourishes under Emperor Constantine. Coiumbus gains commission of expioration A watershed moment in the discovery of the New World, Christopher Columbus gains the commission of exploration from the Spanish crown. He will set sail in the Pinta, Nina and Santa Maria. 1338 ^ First teievised FA cup finai The FA Cup final between Preston North End and Huddersfield Town becomes the first game to be put in front of BBC cameras. The match at Wembley Stadium ends with a 1-0 win to Preston. 1945 Hitier commits suicide With the Red Army advancing ever closer, the dictator of the Third Reich decides all is lost. The Fuhrer, along with his wife Eva Braun, takes a cyanide pill as Berlin falls around them. History Answers The deal worked out at approximately three pence (four cents) per acre What was the Louisiana Purchase? Nicholas Spencer, Warwick The Louisiana Purchase may well be the biggest exchange of land in history. Completed on 20 October 1803 by President Thomas Jefferson, the deal gave the USA 530,000,000 acres (214,483,390 hectares) of territory and was worth $15 million (£10.1 million). The land grab doubled the size of the United States as it expanded further west to the Rocky Mountains. The land was bought off France, as Napoleon decided that territory in the New World was not cost effective and instead used the money to finance wars in Europe. The USA was keen to gain new territory and desired the southern port of New Orleans. If they could tdke hold of this settlement, they could utilise the Mississippi River to transport resources further north. The Louisiana Purchase would go on to contain 13 of the current states and add 100,000 new people to the population of TWEETS Follow us at... @AboutHistoryMag Nothing better than a week off work and feet up on a Thursday afternoon reading latest @AboutHistoryMag #historygeek @MissRuthielVI Got No.23 of All About History mag for Mother's Day, chuffed with this especially as it's featuring Tut. Great issue @AboutHistoryMag @dbrock82 @AboutHistorylVlag The troops absorbed Austria? I was unaware it had been an ocean. #antecedents @bearringer To celebrate my tax rebate I bought a copy of Puzzler and the latest @AboutHistoryMag Having a geek out. #TreatYoSelf @Shayshie Why was Julius Caesar assassinated? Liam Jenkins. Dover The forces of Julius Caesar defeated his rival Pompey in 47 BCE, ending civil war, after which the senator declared himself the all-powerful dictator of Rome. Caesar’s rise to power was met with disdain in some quarters of the Roman Senate, so a group of conspirators led by Brutus set out to murder him and restore the republic. On 15 March, the men surrounded Caesar and stabbed him 23 times, quickly killing the most influential man in Rome. Caesar was dictator for less than a year when he was assassinated The leader of the “ assassination was , once a supporter of mO Caesar but changed his allegiance to Pompey during the civil war. He was officially pardoned, but conspired against Caesar when he declared himself dictator. After the assassination, Brutus was driven out of Rome and began a new life in Asia. amwii Did Nazi Germany have plans to invade Ireland? Find out at... historyanswers.co.uk 1952 t 1973 t 1975 i Anne Frank published The Diary Of Anne Frank is first published in England. The book is an account of Jewish suffering under the Nazi regime and tells the story of when the teenager and her family were living and hiding in Amsterdam. 4 Soviet K-19 commissioned The first submarine to be equipped with nuclear missiles, the Soviet K-19, is commissioned on this day. Throughout its service, the submarine will be riddled with issues and suffer from several breakdowns, accidents and fires. Watergate scandai Richard Nixon takes full responsibility for the Watergate scandal as many of his closest aides resign. The president, however, denies any personal involvement in the affair as the saga rumbles on. Vietnam War ends The city of Saigon surrenders as the Viet Cong take control of the South Vietnamese capital. With the US troops long gone from the conflict, the president, Duong Van Minh, orders the laying down of arms and the cease of hostilities. 93 V >oorpasX'^' SHARE & WIN Share your history with Hijl US and win a fantastic , selection of history books " ^ worth more than £50 if I your letter is selected for I publication in All About History, including The Harlem Hellfighters. PLUS: - One year's FREE nfflffWllIlf subscription » to All About History HELIFICI WE WANT YOUR. Photos Prisoner of War Letters from the past Old correspondence can hold a wealth of historical info and fascinating stories News clippings Articles reporting on iconic events Amazing stories Interesting or insightful tales passed down from your ancestors Eyewitness accounts Did you witness a historic event in person? Share it today Family trees A chance to boast about famous or significant ancestors Eric and other relatives of the Prisoners of War at Kinkaseki camp visit the mine and meet a survivor Scans of snaps that offer insight to the past Antiques and objects Show off your family heirlooms, mementos and retro curios Eric Ward My father was Russell V Ward, a Lance Bombardier in the Royal Artillery of the 5th Field Regiment during World War II. When Singapore fell in 1942, he, with thousands of others, was confined in a prison camp in the Changi area. There, the prisoners suffered instances of brutality on a daily basis and a severe shortage of food, but this was no indication of the horrors and atrocities that lay ahead for him. During October 1942, hundreds of POWs, my father among them, were confined in the holds of the Japanese ship England Mam and began a hellish three-week voyage to Taiwan. The first camp my father and others were taken to was No 6 Camp - Taihoku, where they were forced to do hard manual labour clearing land. The unlucky ones were taken direct to Kinkaseki Camp. This became known as the infamous Copper Mine Camp, where the POWs were semi starved and brutally beaten with hammers if they did not mine the required quota of copper every day. As prisoners died from malnourishment and the inhumane treatment, fresh men were transferred in from other camps. In 1943, my father and others were taken from Taihoku Camp to Kinkaseki Copper Mine Camp. My father had joined the British Army in India, where he had been born and brought up in the days of the Raj in the hillside town of Darjeeling. On transfer to the UK in about 1938, he met and married my mother. She was settled in our small Welsh village of Rhuddlan near the seaside resort of Rhyl. On his arrival at Kinkaseki Camp, my father saw a young POW of about 20 years of age. Send your memories to: © [email protected] 94 AUAhout YOUR HISTORY Ward (middle row with sideways hat) and other prisoners of war recovering in Australia A typical midday meal issued to the prisoners On his hat he had written the words "Sunny Rhyl” and my father discovered that the man, named Eifion Roberts, was a native of Rhuddlan. The two young men from a small Welsh village had met on the other side of the world in the hell that was Kinkaseki. Until early 1945 they worked together as drillers down the mine suffering all the cruelties that the Japanese could administer to them. They survived on several small balls of rice a day and were subjected to the threat of daily beatings and deadly diseases. Around March 1945, the mine was becoming unproductive and the Japanese had begun to realise that they could lose the war. Eifion was transferred to another camp and my father joined a large group of POWs being taken to Kukutsu Camp, otherwise known as the Jungle Camp. They had to walk up to ten miles along steep jungle paths while Do you have any family stories to share? carrying heavy loads, often collapsing and being beaten. It was later discovered that the Japanese had never intended any of them to survive and wished to hide the history of the atrocities they committed. Thanks to sudden American air raids and the dropping of supplies of food and medicines, they were eventually rescued, many of them weighing just five or six stone. My father was taken to Manilla on the USS Block Island, and from there to Sydney on the JIMS Formidable to recover. When he returned to the UK, I met him for the first time at the age of six. fie and Eifion remained life-long friends. My father suffered a chronic chest condition for the rest of his life, dying in 1992, and Eifion died just three years ago. For more information on the Taiwan POW Camps, please see the Taiwan POW Society's website at: www.powtaiwan.org. Q /AllAboutHistory Q) @AboutHistoryMag Plan your perfect Inspire your family and go somewhere amazing this weekend. GREAT DAYS OUT, the new FREE iPhone app from HOW IT WORKS H Search 'Great Days Out' in the App Store or visit www.greatdaysoutapp.com Download on the w AppStore N XT SSU What does the future hold for All About History? VICTORIAN** On sale 28 May CRME Inside London's dark and dangerous underworld RUSSIA’S OCIDBER REVOLUTION i WATBILOOlTHE FALLOFNAPOlfON Lenin's seaet plan to bring power to the BolshevU<s How his fatal flaws led to ruin for France and himself THE QUEEN WHOk KRlEOTHEGOOSi The story behind one of Egypt's ancient treasures PLUS: Bad King John, Siege engines, Ming dynasty. Animal heroes, Didc Turpin, Battle of Gaugamda, Day in the life of a cowboy. 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All text and layout is the copyright of Imagine Publishing Ltd. Nothing in this magazine may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publisher. All copyrights are recognised and used specifically for the purpose of criticism and review. Although the magazine has endeavoured to ensure all information is correct at time of print, prices and availability may change. This magazine is fully independent and not affiliated in any way with the companies mentioned herein. If you submit material to Imagine Publishing via post, email, social network or any other means, you grant Imagine Publishing an irrevocable, perpetual, royalty-free licence to use the material across its entire portfolio, in print, online and digital, and to deliver the material to existing and future clients, including but not limited to international licensees for reproduction in international, licensed editions of Imagine products. Any material you submit is sent at your risk and, although every care is taken, neither Imagine Publishing nor its employees, agents or subcontractors shall be liable for the loss or damage. © Imagine Publishing Ltd 2015 ISSN 2052-5870 HI PU£Ul!lhlMC 97 ©Alamy Director: John Madden Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush Country: USA Released: 1998 VERDICT A tongue ~ that doesn't strav tc.c . - orm Do we protest too much about this depiction of Shakespeare's life? WHATTHEY GOT WRONG... WHATTHEYGOTRGHT.. M in the film, Elizabeth attends a performance of Romeo And Juliet in disguise, then reveals herself at the end. Although this is used as a plot point, it's very improbable that Elizabeth would have attended plays, rather the performances would have been brought to her. When Marlowe is murdered, a crowd of jubilant men and women are seen celebrating in a tavern with flowing cups of ale. The glaring inaccuracy here for any Elizabethan era expert is the glass beakers. These should be made of pewter or wood. Throughout the film, Shakespeare is seen writing and planning what will ultimately be Romeo And Juliet, but starts as 'Romeo and Ethel'. This would not have been the case as the story of Romeo And Jufief was well known before Shakespeare's adaptation of it. ^^ylThe character of Lord ^^*iwessex repeatedly mentions his plans to take Viola to a plantation he owns in Virginia. Considering the events of the movie are said to occur in 1593, there would be no plantations in Virginia to take her to for another 20 years. Many of the characters within the film have clearly been researched. John Webster, Philip Henslowe and Ned Alleyn are Just a few examples of people who existed. Henslowe and Alleyn especially are presented realistically, with their personalities and eccentricities based on the diaries left behind by the men themselves. 98 THE Great Courses' C d T Lou Hits World War “Great ^ Explore the Turmoil ofWorldWarl From August 1914 to November 1918, an unprecedented catastrophe gripped the world — the aftershocks of which reverberate well into our own time. World War I was the first conflict involving entire societies devoting all their wealth, industries, institutions, and the lives of their citizens to win victory at any price. World War I: The “Great War” tells the riveting, tragic, and cautionary tale of this watershed historical event in 36 lectures delivered by award- winning Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius. He devotes great attention to the often-explored Western Front, but also examines in depth other important arenas of engagement, each of which played its own important role in history’s first “total war.” By the conclusion of the last lecture, as you finish your survey of World War I, you’ll have discovered how our own understanding of ourselves in the world has been shaped by the experience of the first major war of the 20^^ century. Offer expires 30/05/15 TheGreatCourses.co.uk/4abh 0800 298 9796 World War I: The “Great War” Taught by Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE LECTURE TITLES 1. The Century’s Initial Catastrophe 2. Europe in 1914 3. Towards Crisis in Politics and Culture 4. Causes of the War and the July Crisis, 1914 5. The August Madness 6. The Failed Gambles— War Plans Break Down 7. The Western Front Experience 8. Life and Death in the Trenches 9. The Great Battles of Attrition 10. The Eastern Front Experience 11. The Southern Fronts 12. War Aims and Occupations 13. Soldiers as Victims 14. Storm Troopers and Future Dictators 15. The Total War of Technology 16. Air War 17. War at Sea 18. The Global Reach of the War 19. The War State 20. Propaganda War 21. Endurance and Stress on the Home Front 22. Dissent and Its Limits 23. Remobilisation in 1916-1917 24. Armenian Massacres— Tipping into Genocide 25. Strains of War— Socialists and Nationalists 26. Russian Revolutions 27. America’s Entry into the War 28. America at War— Over There and Over Here 29. 1918— The German Empire’s Last Gamble 30. The War’s End— Emotions of the Armistice 31. Toppled Thrones— The Collapse of Empires 32. The Versailles Treaty and Paris Settlement 33. Aftershocks— Reds, Whites, and Nationalists 34. Monuments, Memory, and Myths 35. The Rise of the Mass Dictatorships 36. Legacies of the Great War World War I: The “Great War” Course no. 8210 I 36 lectures (30 minutes/lecture) ^ SAVE UP TO £45 DVD £29.99 NOW £34.99 CD £54t99 now £34.99 +£2.99 Postage and Packing Priority Code: 110734 For 25 years, The Great Courses has brought the world’s foremost educators to millions who want to go deeper into the subjects that matter most. No exams. No homework. Just a world of knowledge available anytime, anywhere. Download or stream to your laptop or PC, or use our free mobile apps for iPad, iPhone, or Android. Over 500 courses available at www.TheGreatCourses.co.uk. The Great Courses®, Unit A, Sovereign Business Park, Brenda Road, Hartlepool, TS25 1NN. Terms and conditions apply. See www.TheGreatCourses.co.uk for details. Discover your military ancestors at Findmypast Start your journey here With a comprehensive collection of military records from around the world, Findmypast is the best place to discover your family's WW1 and WW2 history. 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Who launched the 'Today' newspaper in 1986? | British Newspaper History in the UK
Cultural Products >> Historic Commemorative Anniversary Newspapers
Milestones in 20th Century Newspaper history
in Britain ....
The history of newspapers in the UK in the 20th century is a fascinating story of the emergence of new titles, technologies and formats, and the disappearance of old titles, mainly through mergers. Once famous national titles like the Daily Sketch (later to merge with the Daily Mail in 1971) and the News Chronicle are now less known by younger generations. British newspaper history is also almost as much about the stories of the newspaper bosses - the big personalities, such as Lord Rothermere, Lord Northcliffe and Robert Maxwell, amongst others, who had a big impact on the course of this history.
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Jan 17 1902 - launch of the Times Literary Supplement.
Nov 2 1903 - launch of the Daily Mirror - the first daily newspaper illustrated exclusively with photographs. The Mirror was a broadsheet newspaper until the 1950s.
March 2 1909 - launch of the Daily Sketch. (merges with the Daily Mail in 1971)
Jan 25 1911 - launch of the Daily Herald (1st newspaper to sell two million copies a day)
April 12 1913 - New Statesman founded
March 11 1914 - First half-tone photo in the Times newspaper: a 4 by 3 inch picture of the Rokeby Venus, damaged in a Suffragette demonstration (the first ever half-tone in a daily newspaper appeared in the New York Graphic in 1880).
1915 - The Daily Mail launches 'Teddy Tail' - first UK comic strip.
March 14 1915 - the Sunday Pictorial launched (becomes the Sunday Mirror in 1963).
Dec 29 1918 - launch of the Sunday Express.
Nov 2 1924 - the Sunday Express publishes first crossword in a British newspaper
May 1926 - most newspapers cease publishing during the General Strike. The Government publishes the British Gazette and the TUC publishes the British Worker.
Jan 1 1930 - launch of the Daily Worker newspaper (becomes the Morning Star in 1966).
Feb 1 1930 - the first Times crossword appears (6 years after the first one appeared in Sunday Express).
June 2 1930 - the News Chronicle newspaper is formed by the merger of the Daily News and the Daily Chronicle. (merges with the Daily Mail in 1960).
Oct 18 1934 - the Daily Mail publishes the first photograph that was transmitted by beam radio (from Australia to London).
Oct 1 1938 - first issue of the Picture Post (last issue in 1957).
1940 - Newsprint rationing is introduced.
Nov 26 1940 - death of Lord Rothermere.
Aug 24 1959 - the Manchester Guardian changes title to the Guardian, based in London.
Feb 5 1961 - launch of the Sunday Telegraph.
Feb 4 1962 - first issue of the Sunday Times magazine, known as the Sunday Times Colour Section.
1964 - the Press Council replaces General Council of the Press.
Sept 6 1964 - the Observer colour supplement launched.
Sept 15 1964 - the Daily Herald becomes the Sun.
Sept 25 1964 - first issue of the Daily Telegraph.
May 3 1966 - the Times begins printing news on the front page.
1969 the News of the World is bought by Rupert Murdoch.
Nov 17 1969 - Rupert Murdoch re-launches the Sun newspaper as a tabloid.
1971 - Dail Sketch merges with the Daily Mail.
Nov 2 1978 - launch of the Daily Star newspaper.
Dec 1 1978 - publication of the Times and Sunday Times is suspended for 11 months.
Oct 31 1980 - the Evening News ceases publication and leaves London with just one evening newspaper.
1981 - Rupert Murdoch buys the Times and Sunday Times.
May 3 1981 - the Sunday Express magazine launched.
Sept 6 1981 - first issue of the News of the World Sunday magazine.
1982 - May 2 : the Mail on Sunday is launched: the first photocomposed national newspaper in Britain.
1984 - Robert Maxwell acquires the Mirror Group.
1985 - the Daily Telegraph is acquired by Conrad Black.
1986 - News International moves the printing of all national titles to Wapping.
March 4 1986 - launch of the Today by Eddy Shah, sold as the first national colour newspaper.
Sept 14 1986 - launch of the Sunday Sport newspaper.
Oct 7 1986 - first issue of the Independent newspaper.
1987 - the Today newspaper is acquired by Rupert Murdoch.
1987 - Wendy Henry (News of the World) and Eve Pollard (Sunday Mirror) become the first woman editors.
Feb 24 1987 - the London Daily News (ceases publication on July 23rd).
Aug 7 1988 - first issue of Scotland on Sunday.
Aug 17 1988 - the Sport newspaper is launched, published on Wednesdays.
March 5 1989 - the Wales on Sunday newspaper is launched.
Jan 28 1990 - first issue of the Independent on Sunday.
May 11 1990 - Robert Maxwell launches the European (ceases publication on 14th December 1998).
1991 - the Press Complaints Commission replaces the Press Council.
Oct 7 1991 - the Sport newspaper becomes daily.
Nov 5 1991 - Robert Maxwell dies.
1993 - the Guardian Media Group acquires the Observer.
Nov 17 1995 - the Today newspaper stops publication (1st national newspaper title to cease publication since the Daily Sketch in 1971).
April 21 1996 - first issue of the Sunday Business paper.
March 15 1998 - first issue of Sport First, the UK's first national Sunday newspaper focused on sport.
Feb 7 1999 - the Sunday Herald newspaper is launched in Glasgow.
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Who is the wife of singer Jamie Cullum? | History of Newspapers by the NMA
William Caxton sets up the first English printing press in Westminster.
1549
First known English newsletter: Requests of the Devonshyre and Cornyshe Rebelles.
1621
First titled newspaper, Corante, published in London.
1649
Cromwell suppressed all newsbooks on the eve of Charles I's execution.
1690
Worcester Postman launched. (In 1709 it starts regular publication as Berrow's Worcester Journal, considered to be the oldest surviving English newspaper).
1702
Launch of the first regular daily newspaper: The Daily Courant.
1709
First Copyright Act; Berrow's Worcester Journal, considered the oldest surviving English newspaper, started regular publication.
1712
First Stamp Act; advertisement, paper and stamp duties condemned as taxes on knowledge. Stamford Mercury believed to have been launched.
1717
The Kentish Post and Canterbury Newsletter launched. It took on its current name, Kentish Gazette, in 1768.
1718
Leeds Mercury started (later merged into Yorkshire Post).
1737
Belfast News Letter founded (world's oldest surviving daily newspaper).
1748
Aberdeen Journal began (Scotland's oldest newspaper - now the Press & Journal).
1772
Hampshire Chronicle launched, Hampshire's oldest paper.
1788
Daily Universal Register (est. 1785) became The Times.
1791
Harmsworth (then Northcliffe) bought The Observer.
1906
Newspaper Proprietors Association founded for national dailies.
1907
National Union of Journalists founded as a wage-earners union.
1915
Rothermere launched Sunday Pictorial (later Sunday Mirror).
1922
Death of Northcliffe. Control of Associated Newspapers passed to Rothermere.
1928
Northcliffe Newspapers set up as a subsidiary of Associated Newspapers. Provincial Newspapers set up as a subsidiary of United Newspapers.
1931
Audit Bureau of Circulations formed.
1936
Britain's first colour advertisement appears (in Glasgow's Daily Record).
1944
Iliffe took over BPM Holdings (including Birmingham Post).
1946
Guild of British Newspaper Editors formed (now the Society of Editors).
1953
General Council of the Press established.
1955
Month-long national press strike. Daily Record acquired by Mirror Group.
1959
Manchester Guardian becomes The Guardian. Six-week regional press printing strike.
1960
Photocomposition and web-offset printing progressively introduced.
1964
The Sun launched, replacing Daily Herald. Death of Beaverbrook. General Council of the Press reformed as the Press Council.
1969
Murdoch's News International acquired The Sun and News of the World.
1976
Nottingham Evening Post is Britain's first newspaper to start direct input by journalists.
1978
The Times and The Sunday Times ceased publication for 11 months.
1980
Association of Free Newspaper founded (folded 1991). Regional Newspaper Advertising Bureau formed.
1981
News International acquired The Times and the Sunday Times.
1983
Industrial dispute at Eddie Shah's Messenger group plant at Warrington.
1984
Mirror Group sold by Reed to Maxwell (Pergamon). First free daily newspaper, the (Birmingham) Daily News, launched by husband & wife team Chris & Pat Bullivant.
1986
News International moved titles to a new plant at Wapping. Eddie Shah launchedToday, first colour national daily launched. The Independent launched.
1987
News International took over Today.
1988
RNAB folded. Newspaper Society launched PressAd as its commercial arm. Thomson launched Scotland on Sunday and Sunday Life.
1989
Last Fleet Streetpaper produced by Sunday Express.
1990
First Calcutt report on Privacy and Related Matters. Launch of The European (by Maxwell) and Independent on Sunday.
1991
Press Complaints Commission replaced the Press Council. AFN folded. Death of Robert Maxwell (November). Management buy-out of Birmingham Post and sister titles. Midland Independent Newspapers established.
1992
Management buy-out by Caledonian Newspapers of Lonrho's Glasgow titles, The Herald and Evening Times.
1993
Guardian Media Group bought The Observer. UK News set up by Northcliffe and Westminster Press as rival news agency to the Press Association. Second Calcutt report into self-regulation of the press.
1994
Northcliffe Newspapers bought Nottingham Evening Post for £93m. News International price-cutting sparked off new national cover-price war.
1995
Lord Wakeham succeeded Lord McGregor as chairman of the PCC. Privacy white paper rejected statutory press controls. Most of Thomson's regional titles sold to Trinity. Newsquest formed out of a Reed MBO. Murdoch closes Today(November).
1996
A year of buyouts, mergers and restructuring in the regional press. Regionals win the battle over cross-media ownership (Broadcasting Act). Newspaper Society launches NS Marketing, replacing PressAd.
1997
Midland Independent Newspapers is bought by Mirror Group for £297 million. Human Rights and Data Protection bills are introduced.
1998
Fourth largest regional press publisher, United Provincial Newspapers, is sold in two deals: UPN Yorkshire and Lancashire newspapers sold to Regional Independent Media for £360m and United Southern Publications sold to Southnews for £47.5m. Southern Newspapers changes its name to Newscom, following acquisitions in Wales and the West (including UPN Wales in 1996). Death of Lord Rothermere. Chairmanship of Associated Newspapers passes to his son Jonathan Harmsworth. Death of David English, editor-in-chief of Daily Mailand chairman of the editors' code committee.
1999
Trinity merges with Mirror Group Newspapers in a deal worth £1.3 billion. Newsquest is bought by US publisher Gannett for £904 million. Portsmouth & Sunderland Newspapers is bought by Johnston Press for £266m. Major regional press groups launch electronic media alliances (eg, This is Britain, Fish4 sites.) Freedom of Information bill introduced. Associated launches London's free commuter daily, Metro.
2000
Newscom is sold to Newsquest Media Group for £444m, Adscene titles are sold to Southnews (£52m)and Northcliffe Newspapers, Belfast Telegraph Newspapers are sold by Trinity Mirror to Independent News & Media for £300m, Bristol United Press is sold to Northcliffe Newspapers Group, and Southnews is sold to Trinity Mirror for £285m. Daily Express and Daily Star are sold by Lord Hollick's United News & Media to Richard Desmond's Northern & Shell. Launch of Scottish business daily Business a.m. and more Metro daily frees. Newspaper Society launches internet artwork delivery system AdFast. Communications white paper published.
2001
RIM buys six Galloway and Stornaway Gazette titles, Newsquest buys Dimbleby Newspaper Group and Johnston Press buys four titles from Morton Media Group. UK Publishing Media formed. Sunday Business changes name to The Businessand publishes on Sunday and Monday.
2002
Johnston Press acquires Regional Independent Media's 53 regional newspaper titles in a £560 million deal. Northcliffe Newspapers Group Ltd acquires Hill Bros (Leek) Ltd. Queen attends Newspaper Society annual lunch. New PCC chairman, Christopher Meyer, announced. Draft Communications Bill published. The Sunand Mirror engage in a price war.
2003
Conrad Black resigns as chief executive of Hollinger International, owner of Telegraph group. Claverly Company, owner of Midland News Association, buys Guiton Group, publisher of regional titles in the Channel Islands. Archant buys 12 London weekly titles from Independent News & Media (December) and the remaining 15 the following month (January 04). Independent begins the shift to smaller format national newspapers when it launched its compact edition. Sir Christopher Meyer becomes chairman of the Press Complaints Commission. DCMS select committee chaired by Gerald Kaufman into privacy and the press. Government rejects calls for a privacy law.
2004
Phillis Report on Government Communications published (January). Barclay Brothers buy Telegraph group and poach Murdoch Maclennan from Associated to run it. Kevin Beatty moves from Northcliffe Newspapers to run Associated Newspapers. Trinity Mirror sells Century Newspapers and Derry Journal in Northern Ireland to 3i. Tindle Newspapers sells Sunday Independent in Plymouth to Newsquest. The Times goes compact (November).
2005
Johnston Press buys Score Press from EMAP for £155m. Launch of free Liteeditions for London Evening Standard and Manchester Evening News. The Timesputs up cover price to 60p, marking the end of the nationals’ price war. The Guardian moves to Berliner format after £80m investment in new presses. DMGT puts Northcliffe Newspapers up for sale; bids expected to open at £1.2 billion. Johnston Press buys Scotsman Publications from Barclay Brothers for £160m.
2006
DMGT sale of Northcliffe group aborted but DC Thomson acquires Aberdeen Press & Journal. Trinity Mirror strategic review: Midlands and South East titles put up for sale. Growth of regional press digital platforms. Manchester Evening Newscity edition goes free. Government threat to limit Freedom of Information requests. Associated and News International both launch free evening papers in London during the autumn.
2007
Archant Scotland acquired by Johnston Press. Northcliffe Media buys three regional newspaper businesses from Trinity Mirror; Kent Regional Newspapers, East Surrey and Sussex Newspapers and Blackmore Vale Publishing. Dunfermline Press Group acquires Berkshire Regional Newspapers from Trinity Mirror. Tindle Newspapers buys 27 local weekly newspapers from Trinity Mirror which retains its Midlands titles.
The government abandons plans to tighten Freedom of Information laws and limit media access to coroners’ courts. Former Hollinger International chief executive Conrad Black is sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison for fraud. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation buys Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal, appointing News International boss Les Hinton as chief executive.
2008
The global economic downturn hit advertising revenues and shares of media companies fell sharply during the year. John Fry was announced as Tim Bowdler’s successor at Johnston Press in September. The Independentannounced a plan to move to DMGT’s Kensington building to cut costs in November. The BBC Trust rejected plans for local video that would have a negative impact on regional titles in the same month following a sustained campaign by the NS.
2009
Russian businessman Alexander Lebedev acquires the London Evening Standardfrom Daily Mail & General Trust and the title is subsequently relaunched as a free newspaper. Baroness Peta Buscombe is appointed chairman of the Press Complaints Commission.
2010
Britain officially emerges from the longest and deepest recession since the war. Lebedev acquires the Independent and Independent on Sunday from Independent News & Media for a nominal fee of £1. Trinity Mirror acquires GMG Regional Media, publisher of 32 titles, from Guardian Media Group for £44.8 million.
News International erects paywalls around its online content for The Times and The Sunday Times. Eleven regional print titles are launched by seven publishers in the first six months of the year. Newly-elected coalition government announces it will look at the case for relaxing cross-media ownership rules and stop unfair competition from council newspapers. The Independent launches i, a digest newspaper to complement their main title, and the first daily paper to be launched in the UK in almost 25 years.
2011
In April, following campaigning by the NS and the industry, a revised Local Authority Publicity Code came into effect to crack down on council newspapers. In July, The News of The World was closed after 168 years of publication. The Prime Minister announced an inquiry led by Lord Justice Leveson into the role of the press and police in the phone-hacking scandal. In October, Lord Hunt of Wirral was appointed chairman of the Press Complaints Commission.
Five regional daily titles switched to weekly during the year. Local cross media ownership rules were abolished. Kent Messenger Group’s proposed acquisition of seven Northcliffeweekly titles was referred to the Competition Commission by the OFT forcing the deal to be abandoned. Northcliffe Media announced the subsequent closure of Medway News and the East Kent Gazette.
2012
The London 2012 Olympics and Diamond Jubilee saw national and local press titles produce a host of supplements, special editions and other initiatives in digital and print to help their readers celebrate the events.
In November, the press industry came together to progress plans for a new, tougher, independent system of self regulation following publication of Lord Justice Leveson's report into the role of the press and police in the phone-hacking scandal. MailOnline became the world's biggest newspaper website with 45.348 million unique users.
The creation of a new local media business Local World was announced. Led by former chief executive of publishers Mecom and Mirror Group David Montgomery, Local World is created from the newspapers and websites of Northcliffe Media and Iliffe News & Media.
2013
Significant progress was made by the newspaper and magazine industry in setting up the Independent Press Standards Organisation - the new regulator for the press called for by Lord Justice Leveson. More than 90 per cent of the national press, the vast majority of the regional press, along with major magazine publishers, signed contracts to establish IPSO. Led by Sir Hayden Phillips, the independent appointments procedures were well underway, with the regulator due to launch on 1 May 2014.
Politicians, publishers and press freedom organisations from across the globe railed against the Government's Royal Charter for press regulation which Culture Secretary Maria Miller admitted could become redundant if IPSO was successful. The Guardian prompted heated debate over the issue of mass surveillance after publishing a series of stories based on information leaked by the US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
The local press was widely praised for its coverage of floods which blighted communities with Prime Minister David Cameron singling out the Eastern Daily Press in particular. Local papers created thousands of jobs distributing Regional Growth Fund cash to small businesses.
2014
A new voice for the £6 billion national, regional and local UK news media sector was launched in the form of the News Media Association, formed by the merger of the Newspaper Society and the Newspaper Publishers’ Association.
In a climate of grave threats to press freedom, the importance of newspaper journalism was highlighted through stories such as The Times’ exposure of the Rotherham abuse scandal and The Yorkshire Post’s Loneliness campaign.
The Independent Press Standards Organisation, the new press regulator, launched in September with the vast majority of local and national publishers signed up to it.
2015
In October 2015, Trinity Mirror announced the acquisition of Local World for £220 million, demonstrating the publisher’s firm belief in the future of local news media.
Newspapers grew their UK monthly print and online reach to more than 47 million people, more than Google’s 45 million, with newsbrands driving nearly a billion social media interactions over the course of the year.
The importance of news media in holding power to account was emphasised through agenda agenda-setting campaigns such as The Sunday Times’ exposure of corruption within football world governing body Fifa and Sunday Life’s hard hitting campaign to expose and abolish the cruel practice of illegal puppy farming.
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Which country is the home of football club Shakhtar Donetsk? | Shakhtar Donetsk: a club in exile – video | Football | The Guardian
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Shakhtar Donetsk: a club in exile – video
Shakhtar Donetsk, Ukraine’s most successful football club in recent times, have to play all of their home games 600 miles away in Lviv because of the conflict in the region. Ukraine has been in turmoil since February 2014, with pro-Russian forces claiming large areas of the east of the country. Here, the club’s players and its CEO discuss how the conflict has affected them . We also hear from champion boxer-turned-politician Vitali Klitschko and Kiev’s mayor
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Who is the subject of the 1961 biography 'The Agony And The Ecstasy' by Irving Stone? | ANDY MITTEN: TALKING FOOTBALL - Shakhtar Donetsk, the club without a home - Yahoo Sport
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ANDY MITTEN: TALKING FOOTBALL - Shakhtar Donetsk, the club without a home
Shakhtar Donetsk have a UEFA five-star, 52,000 seat stadium but they are a club with a home. Due to the Ukrainian conflict, Wednesday's 'home' Champions League match will be 600 miles away in a stadium where the fans back the other team.
By Andy Mitten 30 September 2015 15:40
Shakhtar Donetsk are a club with a home away from home. We learn about their story having been displaced 600 miles away from the Donbass Arena, and how it has affected them.
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Sunday marked the sixth anniversary of the Donbass Arena,the 52,000 seater UEFA five-star venue which staged England ’s games against France and Ukraine in Euro 2012. The impressive, glass-fronted stadium was built to stage the home games of Shakhtar Donetsk, yet when Ukraine’s most successful modern club host Paris Saint Germain in the Champions League on Wednesday night, they’ll do so 600 miles west of the city which takes their name.
War has pushed Shakhtar into an indefinite exile since July 2014, shortly after six of their foreign players refused to return to Donetsk for fear of their safety. The club president and oligarch Rinat Akhmetov told them that they “had nothing to fear” and claimed the players were agitating for a move, but one, Douglas Costa retorted on his Instagram page: “We want to stay at the club, but we must have risk-free working conditions.”
Shakhtar knew they couldn’t play games in a city at war, with the front line close to their stadium, airport and modern training ground. The club had long looked west for players and their squad has included a significant number of Brazilians. Now they’d look west to survive, for predominantly Russian speaking Donetsk is in separatist hands, with the club’s administration shifted to a hotel in Kiev, where the players now live and train.
They fly into Lviv for matches, the venue chosen after the players responded favourably to the atmosphere in the 34,000 Arena Lviv during the 2014 Ukrainian Super Cup against Dynamo Kiev, themselves long perceived as the standard bearer for Ukrainian football.
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The Lviv arena was buil tfor Euro 2012 but the intended host team, FC Karpaty Lviv left after only one season, reluctant to pay the rent for a stadium that was too big for their needs. Shakhtar filled the void and a month after they reluctantly moved, the Donbass was hit by artillery shelling as the Ukrainian armed forces clashed with pro-Russian separatists for control of Ukraine’s fifth biggest city.
The Donbass was hit by shelling again in October 2014, when shockwaves shattered a large pain of glass, which fell and narrowly missed a young girl. “We are warning residents not to approach the stadium as it might be unsafe,” the Arena’s manager Vadyn Gunkotold the BBC.
Though a truce has been signed, Shakhtar are still playing in Lviv, with the badly damaged Donbass now used as a depot for humanitarian aid for those suffering in the conflict, with club president Akhmetov helping the relief efforts.
In going west, Shakhtar left behind their fan base, their community, their people. But it wasn’t safe to stay.
“In one day we lost everything,” the club’s CEO Sergei Palkin told the Guardian. “We lost one of the best stadiums in the world, we lost our training camp, but the most important thing was that we lost our fans. It’s difficult to stay without fans, to play without fans and to live without fans.”
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Fernandinho of Shakhtar Donetsk lifts the 2009 UEFA Cup Trophy following his team's victory extra time 2-1 victory …
Despite ticket prices starting at £1.40 (and £4 for the visits of PSG and Real Madrid ) crowds in Lviv were often just a couple of thousand and even then many of the locals preferred the visiting teams to win. Most people in western Ukraine didn’t expect to see top-class football again any time soon after Euro 2012, but the Champions League brought it back via Shakhtar. Yet while the locals filled the stadium in Lviv, many wanted visiting foreign sides like Bayern Munich to win.
From playing in one of the most febrile, passionate arenas in world football in Donetsk, where the ultras unfurled a giant flag of a miner – the club’s nickname ‘the pitmen’ denotes their history of being founded by miners - when they played Manchester United in 2013, they now play where many don’t even want them.
Not everyone in Lviv supports Shakhtar’s opponents, but PSG can expect an easier ride on Wednesday night against a team for whom the constant flights and travelling took their toll. The team who’d won the league eight times in the last decade and for five successive seasons up to 2014, didn’t win the title in 2015. They did better in Europe, qualifying from their group stage last season, when striker Luiz Adriano equalled both Lionel Messi ’s record of five goals in a Champions League match and Cristiano Ronaldo ’s record of scoring nine in the group stage.
Star players continued to be sold, Adriano left for AC Milan in 2015 and Douglas Costa leftfor Bayern Munich, but Shakhtar’s business model had long been a successful and based around selling star Brazilians like Manchester City’s Fernandinho and Chelsea’s Willian.
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Until the war, Shakhtar had been a success. With their Ukrainian-Brazilian mix of players, they became only the second Ukrainian club to win a European trophy, the 2009 UEFA Cup. They were Champions League regulars and ahead of the game against United in 2013, I spoke to the former Arsenal striker Eduardo who played for Shakhtar.
“We have big crowds at home and a beautiful stadium: 30,000 watch most of our league games, 50,000 see the Champions League,” explained the Rio de Janiero-born Croatian international. “The league stops in December when the temperature can drop to minus 10 or minus 15. We played Porto (in 2011) and it was minus eight. It gets even colder in January and February, that’s why we don’t play.”
It didn’t seem a natural fit for a Brazilian.
“It’s true that the culture is very different but we have a lot of Brazilian players here, not just at Shakhtar but at other clubs in Ukraine,” he said. “We socialise together, especially in the summer when the weather is hot. We enjoy BBQ stogether. In the winter, we stay inside and watch TV.”
It wasn’t only Brazilians, of whom nine remain in the Shakhtar squad playing under 70-year-old Romanian coach Mircea Lucescu, in charge since 2004. While Lucescu loved emerging Brazilian forwards, a large number of Spaniards play in Ukraine, where they’ll be better paid than in Spain. Jordi Cruyff was one of the first to move, in 2006 when he joined Metalurh Donetsk, the city’s second team until the war saw them bankrupted in July.
“I like strange countries,” Cruyff explained. “I was going to play in Jordan, but went instead to Ukraine, where the football isn’t bad and I was treated well there. I enjoyed two years before returning home to Barcelona to be with my family.”
As with other displaced teams from eastern Ukraine from Donetsk, Luhansk and Mariupol, Shakhtar want to go home themselves, but with the east of of the country still under the control of pro-Russian forces, now is not the time. Many of the residents in the city of two million (though more than a million people have been displaced from the region) have bigger priorities than football, yet sport can sometimes transcend boundaries and be a refuge when everything else is bleak.
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How were musical duo Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield known? | The Righteous Brothers’s Biography — Free listening, videos, concerts, stats and photos at Last.fm
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Biography
The Righteous Brothers were the musical duo of Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield. They recorded from 1963 through 1975, and continued to perform live until Hatfield's death in 2003. Their emotive vocal stylings were sometimes dubbed "blue-eyed soul."
They adopted their name in 1962 while performing together around Los Angeles, USA as part of a five-member group called The Paramours, which featured John Wimber (who was much later one of the founders of the Vineyard Movement) on keyboards.
Hatfield and Medley both possessed exceptional vocal talent, with range, control, and tone that helped them create a strong and distinct duet sound (and perform as soloists). Medley sang the low parts with his deep, soulful baritone, with Hatfield taking the higher register vocals with his soaring tenor. They gained their name when an African-American Marine shouted out "That was righteous, brothers" at the end of a show. John Wimber, one of the founding leaders of the Vineyard Movement, played the keyboard in the band.
Their first major hit single was " You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' " in 1965. Produced by Phil Spector, the record is often cited as one of the peak expressions of Spector's Wall of Sound production techniques. It was one of the most successful pop singles of its time, despite exceeding the standard length for radio play. Indeed, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" remains the most played song in radio history, estimated to have been broadcast over 8 million times to date. A little known fact about this song was that Spector utilized Sonny and Cher as back-up singers.
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What is the title of the recent BBC 4 comedy series about the organising of the London Olympics? | The Righteous Brothers | Play MP3 Music Online
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The Righteous Brothers were the musical duo of Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield. They recorded from 1963 through 1975, and continued to perform live until Hatfield's death in 2003. Their emotive vocal stylings were sometimes dubbed blue-eyed soul. They adopted their name in 1962 while performing together around Los Angeles, USA as part of a five-member group called The Paramours, which featured John Wimber (who was much later one of the founders of the Vineyard Movement) on keyboards. Hatfield and Medley both possessed exceptional vocal talent, with range, control, and tone that helped them create a strong and distinct duet sound (and perform as soloists). Medley sang the low parts with his deep, soulful baritone, with Hatfield taking the higher register vocals with his soaring tenor. They gained their name when an African-American Marine shouted out That was righteous, brothers at the end of a show. John Wimber, one of the founding leaders of the Vineyard Movement, played the keyboard in the band. Their first major hit single was You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' in 1965. Produced by Phil Spector, the record is often cited as one of the peak expressions of Spector's Wall of Sound production techniques. It was one of the most successful pop singles of its time, despite exceeding the standard length for radio play. Indeed, You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' remains the most played song in radio history, estimated to have been broadcast over 8 million times to date. A little known ...
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Who was Master of the King's Music from 1924 until 1934? | Sir Edward Elgar’s Biography — Free listening, videos, concerts, stats and photos at Last.fm
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Edward William Elgar , 1st Baronet, OM, GCVO (2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English Romantic composer. Several of his first major orchestral works, including the Enigma Variations and the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, were greeted with acclaim. He also composed oratorios, chamber music, symphonies and instrumental concertos. He was knighted at Buckingham Palace on 5 July 1904 and appointed Master of the King's Music in 1924.
Edward Elgar was born in the small village of Lower Broadheath outside Worcester to William Elgar, a piano tuner and music dealer, and his wife Anne (née Greening). He was the fourth of seven children. His mother, Anne, had converted to Catholicism shortly before Edward's birth, so Edward was baptised and brought up as a Roman Catholic.
Elgar was an early riser, and would often turn to reading Voltaire, Drayton, historical classics, Longfellow and other works encouraged by his mother. By the age of eight, he was taking piano and violin lessons, and would often listen to his father playing organ at St. George's church, and soon took it up also. His prime interest, however, was the violin, and his first written music was for that instrument.
Surrounded by sheet music, instruments, and music textbooks in his father's shop in Worcester's High Street, the young Elgar became self-taught in music theory. On warm summer days, he would take manuscripts into the countryside to study them (he was a passionate and adventurous early cyclist from the age of 5). Thus there began for him a strong association between music and nature. As he was later to say, "There is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require."
At the age of 15, Elgar had hoped to go to Leipzig, Germany to study music, but lacking the funds, he instead left school and began working for a local solicitor. Around this time he made his first public appearances as a violinist and organist. After a few months, he left the solicitor and embarked on a musical career, giving piano and violin lessons, and working occasionally in his father's shop. Elgar was an active member of the Worcester Glee Club, along with his father, and he accompanied singers, played violin, composed and arranged works, and even conducted for the first time. At 22 he took up the post of bandmaster at the Worcester and County Lunatic Asylum in Powick, three miles south-west of Worcester, a progressive institution which believed in the recuperative powers of music. He composed here too; some of the pieces for the asylum orchestra (music in dance forms) were rediscovered and performed locally in 1996.
In many ways, his years as a young Worcestershire violinist were his happiest. He played in the first violins at the Worcester and Birmingham Festivals, and one great experience was to play Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 6 and Stabat Mater under the composer's baton. As part of a wind quintet and for his musical friends, he arranged dozens of pieces by Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and other masters, honing his arranging and compositional skills, and applying them to his earliest pieces. Although somewhat solitary and introspective by nature, Elgar thrived in Worcester's musical circles.
In his first trips abroad in 1880-2, Elgar visited Paris and Leipzig, attended concerts by first rate orchestras, and was exposed to Wagnerism, then the rage. Returning to his more provincial milieu increased his desire for a wider fame. He often went to London in an attempt to get his works published, but this period in his life found him frequently despondent and low on money. He wrote to a friend in April 1884, "My prospects are about as hopeless as ever…I am not wanting in energy I think, so sometimes I conclude that 'tis want of ability…I have no money–not a cent."
At 29, through his teaching, he met (Caroline) Alice Roberts, daughter of the late Major-General Sir Henry Roberts and a published author of verse and prose fiction. Eight years older than Elgar, she became his wife three years later against the wishes of her family. Her faith in him and her courage in marrying 'beneath her class' were strongly supportive to his career. She dealt with his mood swings and was a generous musical critic. Alice was also his business manager and social secretary. She did her best to gain him the attention of influential society, though with limited success. In time he would learn to accept the honours given him, realizing that they mattered more to her and her social class. She also gave up some of her personal aspirations to further his career. In her diary she later admitted, "The care of a genius is enough of a life work for any woman." As an engagement present, Elgar presented her with the short violin and piano piece Salut d'amour. With Alice's encouragement, the Elgars moved to London to be closer to the centre of British musical life, and Edward started composing in earnest. The stay was unsuccessful, however, and they were obliged to return to Great Malvern, where Edward could earn a living teaching and conducting local musical ensembles. Though disappointed at the London episode, the return to the country proved better for Elgar's health and as a base of musical inspiration, bringing him closer to nature and to his friends.
During the 1890s Elgar gradually built up a reputation as a composer, chiefly of works for the great choral festivals of the Midlands. The Black Knight and King Olaf (1896), both inspired by Longfellow, The Light of Life and Caractacus were all modestly successful and he obtained a long-standing publisher in Novello and Company. He also generously recommended the young composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor to the Three Choirs Festival for a concert piece, which helped establish the younger man's career. Elgar was catching the eyes of the prominent critics, although their reviews were still lukewarm, and he was in demand as a festival composer, but he was just getting by financially and not feeling appreciated the way he wanted to be. In 1898, he continued to be "very sick at heart over music" and hoped to find a way to succeed with a larger work. His friend Jaeger tried to lift his spirits, "A day's attack of the blues…will not drive away your desire, your necessity, which is to exercise those creative faculties which a kind providence has given you. Your time of universal recognition will come."
In 1899, that prediction suddenly came true. At the age of 42, Elgar's produced his first major orchestral work, the Enigma Variations, which was premièred in London under the baton of the eminent German conductor Hans Richter. In Elgar's own words, "I have sketched a set of Variations on an original theme. The Variations have amused me because I've labelled them with the nicknames of my particular friends…that is to say I've written the variations each one to represent the mood of the 'party' (the person)… and have written what I think they would have written–if they were asses enough to compose". Elgar dedicated the work "To my friends pictured within".
The large-scale work was received with general acclaim, heralded for its originality, charm, and fine craftsmanship, and it established Elgar as the pre-eminent British composer of his generation. It is formally titled Variations on an Original Theme; the word "Enigma" appears over the first six measures of music, which led to the familiar version of the title. The enigma is that, although there are fourteen variations on the "original theme", the 'enigma' theme, which Elgar said 'runs through and over the whole set' is never heard. Many later commentators have observed that although Elgar is today regarded as a characteristically English composer, his orchestral music and this work in particular share much with the Central European tradition typified at the time by the work of Richard Strauss. Indeed, the Enigma Variations were well-received in Germany, and persist to this day as a world-wide concert favourite.
The following year saw the production at the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival of his choral setting of Cardinal Newman's poem The Dream of Gerontius. Despite a disastrous first performance due to poorly-prepared performers, the German première was much better received and the work was established within a few years as one of Elgar's greatest. It is now regarded as one of the finest examples of English choral music from any era.
Elgar is probably best known for the five Pomp and Circumstance Marches, composed between 1901 and 1930. Shortly after he composed the first march, Elgar set the trio melody to words by A. C. Benson as a Coronation Ode to mark the coronation of King Edward VII. The suggestion had already been made (allegedly by the future King himself) that words should be fitted to the broad tune which formed the trio section of this march. Against the advice of his friends, Elgar suggested that Benson furnish further words to allow him to include it in the new work. The result was Land of Hope and Glory, which formed the finale of the ode and was also issued (with slightly different words) as a separate song. The work was immensely popular and became a second national anthem. At last, he had made the leap from accomplished back-country musician to England's foremost composer. It also gained Elgar the highest recognition he could have dreamed of–honorary degrees, a knighthood, special royal audiences, and a triumphal three-day festival of his music at Covent Garden attended by the King and Queen.
Between 1902 and 1914 Elgar enjoyed phenomenal success, made four visits to the USA including one conducting tour, and earned considerable fees from the performance of his music. Between 1905 and 1908 Elgar held the post of Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham. His lectures there caused controversy owing to remarks he made about other English composers and English music in general; he was quoted as saying "English music is white - it evades everything". The University of Birmingham's Special Collections contain an archive of letters written by Elgar. His new life as a celebrity was a mixed blessing as it often provoked ill-health from his high-strung nature and interrupted his privacy. He complained to Jaeger in 1903, "My life is one continual giving up of little things which I love."
Elgar's Symphony No. 1 (1908) was given one hundred performances in its first year, the violin concerto (1910) was commissioned by the world-renowned violinist Fritz Kreisler, and in 1911, the year of the completion of his Symphony No. 2, he had the Order of Merit bestowed upon him. In 1912, he moved back to London, again to be closer to musical society but to the detriment of his love of the countryside and to his general mood.
Elgar's musical legacy is primarily orchestral and choral, but he did write for soloists and smaller instrumental groups. His one work for brass band, The Severn Suite (later arranged by the composer for orchestra), remains an important part of the brass band repertoire. This work was dedicated to his friend George Bernard Shaw. It is occasionally performed in its arrangement by Sir Ivor Atkins for organ as the composer's second Organ Sonata; Elgar's first, much earlier (1895) Organ Sonata was written specifically for the instrument in a highly orchestral style, and remains a cornerstone of the English Romantic organ repertoire.
During World War I his music began to fall out of fashion. The war was overturning his world and his time. He himself grew to hate his 'Pomp and Circumstance' March No.1 with its popular 'Land of Hope and Glory' tune, which he felt had been made into a jingoistic song, not in keeping with the tragic loss of life in the war. This was captured in the film Elgar by Ken Russell. After the death of his wife in 1920, loneliness and declining interest in his art fostered little in the way of new works of importance. Shortly before her death he composed the elegiac Cello Concerto, often described as his last masterpiece.
Elgar lived in the village of Kempsey from 1923 to 1927, during which time he was made Master of the King's Musick.
He was the first composer to make extensive recordings of his own compositions. HMV (His Master's Voice) recorded much of his music acoustically from 1914 onwards and then began a series of electrical recordings in 1926 that continued until 1933, including his "Enigma Variations," "Falstaff," the first and second symphonies, his cello and violin concertos, all of the "Pomp and Circumstance" marches, and other orchestral works. Part of a 1927 rehearsal of the second symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra was also recorded and later issued.
Elgar's recordings of his violin concerto and the Enigma Variations have been reissued on CD by EMIIn November 1931, Elgar was filmed by Pathe for a newsreel depicting a recording session of Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 at the opening of the famous Abbey Road Studios in London. It is believed to be the only surviving sound film of Elgar, who makes a brief remark before conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, asking the musicians to "play this like you've never played it before." Silent films of the composer have also survived.
In the 1932 recording of the violin concerto, the ageing composer worked with the American violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who was then only 16 years old; they worked well together and Menuhin warmly recalled his association with the composer years later, when he performed the concerto with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Menuhin later conducted an award-winning recording of Elgar's Cello Concerto with the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber and much of the major orchestral music.
Elgar's recordings usually featured such orchestras as the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra (which reverted in 1928 to its earlier name, New Symphony Orchestra) and, in 1933, the newly-founded London Philharmonic Orchestra. Elgar's recordings were released on 78-rpm discs by both HMV and RCA Victor. In later years, EMI reissued the recordings on LP and CD.
In his later years, Elgar befriended young conductors such as Adrian Boult and Malcolm Sargent who championed his music when it was out of fashion.
At the end of his life Elgar began work on an opera, The Spanish Lady, and accepted a commission from the BBC to compose a Third Symphony. His final illness prevented their completion.
He died on 23 February 1934 and is buried at St. Wulstan's Church in Little Malvern. Within four months, two more great English composers - Gustav Holst and Frederick Delius - were also dead.
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| Edward Elgar |
Who played 'Sabrina Duncan' in the 1970's TV series 'Charlie's Angels'? | Sir Edward Elgar’s Biography — Free listening, videos, concerts, stats and photos at Last.fm
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Biography
Edward William Elgar , 1st Baronet, OM, GCVO (2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English Romantic composer. Several of his first major orchestral works, including the Enigma Variations and the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, were greeted with acclaim. He also composed oratorios, chamber music, symphonies and instrumental concertos. He was knighted at Buckingham Palace on 5 July 1904 and appointed Master of the King's Music in 1924.
Edward Elgar was born in the small village of Lower Broadheath outside Worcester to William Elgar, a piano tuner and music dealer, and his wife Anne (née Greening). He was the fourth of seven children. His mother, Anne, had converted to Catholicism shortly before Edward's birth, so Edward was baptised and brought up as a Roman Catholic.
Elgar was an early riser, and would often turn to reading Voltaire, Drayton, historical classics, Longfellow and other works encouraged by his mother. By the age of eight, he was taking piano and violin lessons, and would often listen to his father playing organ at St. George's church, and soon took it up also. His prime interest, however, was the violin, and his first written music was for that instrument.
Surrounded by sheet music, instruments, and music textbooks in his father's shop in Worcester's High Street, the young Elgar became self-taught in music theory. On warm summer days, he would take manuscripts into the countryside to study them (he was a passionate and adventurous early cyclist from the age of 5). Thus there began for him a strong association between music and nature. As he was later to say, "There is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require."
At the age of 15, Elgar had hoped to go to Leipzig, Germany to study music, but lacking the funds, he instead left school and began working for a local solicitor. Around this time he made his first public appearances as a violinist and organist. After a few months, he left the solicitor and embarked on a musical career, giving piano and violin lessons, and working occasionally in his father's shop. Elgar was an active member of the Worcester Glee Club, along with his father, and he accompanied singers, played violin, composed and arranged works, and even conducted for the first time. At 22 he took up the post of bandmaster at the Worcester and County Lunatic Asylum in Powick, three miles south-west of Worcester, a progressive institution which believed in the recuperative powers of music. He composed here too; some of the pieces for the asylum orchestra (music in dance forms) were rediscovered and performed locally in 1996.
In many ways, his years as a young Worcestershire violinist were his happiest. He played in the first violins at the Worcester and Birmingham Festivals, and one great experience was to play Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 6 and Stabat Mater under the composer's baton. As part of a wind quintet and for his musical friends, he arranged dozens of pieces by Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and other masters, honing his arranging and compositional skills, and applying them to his earliest pieces. Although somewhat solitary and introspective by nature, Elgar thrived in Worcester's musical circles.
In his first trips abroad in 1880-2, Elgar visited Paris and Leipzig, attended concerts by first rate orchestras, and was exposed to Wagnerism, then the rage. Returning to his more provincial milieu increased his desire for a wider fame. He often went to London in an attempt to get his works published, but this period in his life found him frequently despondent and low on money. He wrote to a friend in April 1884, "My prospects are about as hopeless as ever…I am not wanting in energy I think, so sometimes I conclude that 'tis want of ability…I have no money–not a cent."
At 29, through his teaching, he met (Caroline) Alice Roberts, daughter of the late Major-General Sir Henry Roberts and a published author of verse and prose fiction. Eight years older than Elgar, she became his wife three years later against the wishes of her family. Her faith in him and her courage in marrying 'beneath her class' were strongly supportive to his career. She dealt with his mood swings and was a generous musical critic. Alice was also his business manager and social secretary. She did her best to gain him the attention of influential society, though with limited success. In time he would learn to accept the honours given him, realizing that they mattered more to her and her social class. She also gave up some of her personal aspirations to further his career. In her diary she later admitted, "The care of a genius is enough of a life work for any woman." As an engagement present, Elgar presented her with the short violin and piano piece Salut d'amour. With Alice's encouragement, the Elgars moved to London to be closer to the centre of British musical life, and Edward started composing in earnest. The stay was unsuccessful, however, and they were obliged to return to Great Malvern, where Edward could earn a living teaching and conducting local musical ensembles. Though disappointed at the London episode, the return to the country proved better for Elgar's health and as a base of musical inspiration, bringing him closer to nature and to his friends.
During the 1890s Elgar gradually built up a reputation as a composer, chiefly of works for the great choral festivals of the Midlands. The Black Knight and King Olaf (1896), both inspired by Longfellow, The Light of Life and Caractacus were all modestly successful and he obtained a long-standing publisher in Novello and Company. He also generously recommended the young composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor to the Three Choirs Festival for a concert piece, which helped establish the younger man's career. Elgar was catching the eyes of the prominent critics, although their reviews were still lukewarm, and he was in demand as a festival composer, but he was just getting by financially and not feeling appreciated the way he wanted to be. In 1898, he continued to be "very sick at heart over music" and hoped to find a way to succeed with a larger work. His friend Jaeger tried to lift his spirits, "A day's attack of the blues…will not drive away your desire, your necessity, which is to exercise those creative faculties which a kind providence has given you. Your time of universal recognition will come."
In 1899, that prediction suddenly came true. At the age of 42, Elgar's produced his first major orchestral work, the Enigma Variations, which was premièred in London under the baton of the eminent German conductor Hans Richter. In Elgar's own words, "I have sketched a set of Variations on an original theme. The Variations have amused me because I've labelled them with the nicknames of my particular friends…that is to say I've written the variations each one to represent the mood of the 'party' (the person)… and have written what I think they would have written–if they were asses enough to compose". Elgar dedicated the work "To my friends pictured within".
The large-scale work was received with general acclaim, heralded for its originality, charm, and fine craftsmanship, and it established Elgar as the pre-eminent British composer of his generation. It is formally titled Variations on an Original Theme; the word "Enigma" appears over the first six measures of music, which led to the familiar version of the title. The enigma is that, although there are fourteen variations on the "original theme", the 'enigma' theme, which Elgar said 'runs through and over the whole set' is never heard. Many later commentators have observed that although Elgar is today regarded as a characteristically English composer, his orchestral music and this work in particular share much with the Central European tradition typified at the time by the work of Richard Strauss. Indeed, the Enigma Variations were well-received in Germany, and persist to this day as a world-wide concert favourite.
The following year saw the production at the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival of his choral setting of Cardinal Newman's poem The Dream of Gerontius. Despite a disastrous first performance due to poorly-prepared performers, the German première was much better received and the work was established within a few years as one of Elgar's greatest. It is now regarded as one of the finest examples of English choral music from any era.
Elgar is probably best known for the five Pomp and Circumstance Marches, composed between 1901 and 1930. Shortly after he composed the first march, Elgar set the trio melody to words by A. C. Benson as a Coronation Ode to mark the coronation of King Edward VII. The suggestion had already been made (allegedly by the future King himself) that words should be fitted to the broad tune which formed the trio section of this march. Against the advice of his friends, Elgar suggested that Benson furnish further words to allow him to include it in the new work. The result was Land of Hope and Glory, which formed the finale of the ode and was also issued (with slightly different words) as a separate song. The work was immensely popular and became a second national anthem. At last, he had made the leap from accomplished back-country musician to England's foremost composer. It also gained Elgar the highest recognition he could have dreamed of–honorary degrees, a knighthood, special royal audiences, and a triumphal three-day festival of his music at Covent Garden attended by the King and Queen.
Between 1902 and 1914 Elgar enjoyed phenomenal success, made four visits to the USA including one conducting tour, and earned considerable fees from the performance of his music. Between 1905 and 1908 Elgar held the post of Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham. His lectures there caused controversy owing to remarks he made about other English composers and English music in general; he was quoted as saying "English music is white - it evades everything". The University of Birmingham's Special Collections contain an archive of letters written by Elgar. His new life as a celebrity was a mixed blessing as it often provoked ill-health from his high-strung nature and interrupted his privacy. He complained to Jaeger in 1903, "My life is one continual giving up of little things which I love."
Elgar's Symphony No. 1 (1908) was given one hundred performances in its first year, the violin concerto (1910) was commissioned by the world-renowned violinist Fritz Kreisler, and in 1911, the year of the completion of his Symphony No. 2, he had the Order of Merit bestowed upon him. In 1912, he moved back to London, again to be closer to musical society but to the detriment of his love of the countryside and to his general mood.
Elgar's musical legacy is primarily orchestral and choral, but he did write for soloists and smaller instrumental groups. His one work for brass band, The Severn Suite (later arranged by the composer for orchestra), remains an important part of the brass band repertoire. This work was dedicated to his friend George Bernard Shaw. It is occasionally performed in its arrangement by Sir Ivor Atkins for organ as the composer's second Organ Sonata; Elgar's first, much earlier (1895) Organ Sonata was written specifically for the instrument in a highly orchestral style, and remains a cornerstone of the English Romantic organ repertoire.
During World War I his music began to fall out of fashion. The war was overturning his world and his time. He himself grew to hate his 'Pomp and Circumstance' March No.1 with its popular 'Land of Hope and Glory' tune, which he felt had been made into a jingoistic song, not in keeping with the tragic loss of life in the war. This was captured in the film Elgar by Ken Russell. After the death of his wife in 1920, loneliness and declining interest in his art fostered little in the way of new works of importance. Shortly before her death he composed the elegiac Cello Concerto, often described as his last masterpiece.
Elgar lived in the village of Kempsey from 1923 to 1927, during which time he was made Master of the King's Musick.
He was the first composer to make extensive recordings of his own compositions. HMV (His Master's Voice) recorded much of his music acoustically from 1914 onwards and then began a series of electrical recordings in 1926 that continued until 1933, including his "Enigma Variations," "Falstaff," the first and second symphonies, his cello and violin concertos, all of the "Pomp and Circumstance" marches, and other orchestral works. Part of a 1927 rehearsal of the second symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra was also recorded and later issued.
Elgar's recordings of his violin concerto and the Enigma Variations have been reissued on CD by EMIIn November 1931, Elgar was filmed by Pathe for a newsreel depicting a recording session of Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 at the opening of the famous Abbey Road Studios in London. It is believed to be the only surviving sound film of Elgar, who makes a brief remark before conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, asking the musicians to "play this like you've never played it before." Silent films of the composer have also survived.
In the 1932 recording of the violin concerto, the ageing composer worked with the American violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who was then only 16 years old; they worked well together and Menuhin warmly recalled his association with the composer years later, when he performed the concerto with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Menuhin later conducted an award-winning recording of Elgar's Cello Concerto with the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber and much of the major orchestral music.
Elgar's recordings usually featured such orchestras as the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra (which reverted in 1928 to its earlier name, New Symphony Orchestra) and, in 1933, the newly-founded London Philharmonic Orchestra. Elgar's recordings were released on 78-rpm discs by both HMV and RCA Victor. In later years, EMI reissued the recordings on LP and CD.
In his later years, Elgar befriended young conductors such as Adrian Boult and Malcolm Sargent who championed his music when it was out of fashion.
At the end of his life Elgar began work on an opera, The Spanish Lady, and accepted a commission from the BBC to compose a Third Symphony. His final illness prevented their completion.
He died on 23 February 1934 and is buried at St. Wulstan's Church in Little Malvern. Within four months, two more great English composers - Gustav Holst and Frederick Delius - were also dead.
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Which Hungarian born Modernist was the architect of 2, Willow Road in Hampstead? | Willow Road, Hampstead - Rodic Davidson Architects London
Willow Road, Hampstead
Ernö Goldfinger and the Hampstead Architects
Ernö Goldfinger settled in Hampstead, London in the late 1920’s and joined an increasingly large community of Hampstead architects, artists and intellectuals. Along with other well-known architects such as Water Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Bertold Lubetkin, he was instrumental in bringing Modern Architecture to London.
Goldfinger was born in Budapest in 1902, moved westward with his family in the years following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, finally settling in Paris in the early 1920’s. During this period the young architect was influenced by the work of Le Corbuiser, Walter Gropius, and Adolf Loos. Goldfinger was one of the first of the ‘Hampstead Architects’ – in 1933, he moved to Highpoint, the modernist apartments designed by Bertold Lubetkin and Tecton that had just been completed. Shortly afterwards, Goldfinger and his wife bought a beautiful site in a neighbourhood of Georgian residences that overlooked Hampstead Heath. His position as one of the most prominent Hampstead architects came with his acclaimed design of a three-story block of terraced apartments that contained three dwellings. The Goldfingers lived here in the middle apartment, No. 2 Willow Road, until he died in 1987. Goldfinger was a leading figure in the English Modern Movement and, on a more local level, became the heart of a leftist community of Hampstead architects, planners and intellectuals. While Willow Road established Goldfinger as an important figure in the Modern movement in London, and his office building on Albemarle St, built in 1953-58, continued that early tradition, he is better known for several very large Modernist/Brutalist high-rise buildings built in the 1970’s, most notably, Trellick Tower in 1972.
Willow Road was influential as a prototype of a modern version of the London terraced type and was an important source for certain later projects, especially the housing designed in the 1960’s and 70’s by Camden Council Architect’s office and other London and Hampstead architects.
In 1995, the National Trust purchased No. 2 Willow Road and it was opened to the public the following year.
| Ernő Goldfinger |
In which subject did Margaret Thatcher obtain a B.Sc. at Oxford? | Adrian Yekkes: 2 Willow Road - Goldfinger in Hampstead
Travel adventures, life in London, books, music and art...
Sunday, 19 May 2013
2 Willow Road - Goldfinger in Hampstead
During the 1930's Hampstead became a magnet for progressive artists and writers due (amazingly today!) to the then relatively cheap property prices and the attractions of the Heath. An artists colony developed from the lower parts of Hampstead Village as far as Belsize Park. By the late 1930's, there were even rival factions in the colony with the Surrealists and the Abstractionists following different manifestos, despite both being politically left-wing.
This creative milieu was joined by many refugees from Germany, Austria and other parts of central Europe as the European mainland became increasingly uncomfortable for Jews, left-wingers and progressive artists and intellectuals. Architect Erno Goldfinger had come to London from Paris in 1934 and together with his British born wife and young son moved into a flat in the iconic High Point 1 apartment building in Highgate. High Point was designed by Berthold Lubetkin , who like Goldfinger was an Eastern European Jew - Goldfinger having been born in Budapest and Lubetkin in Tbilisi (now Georgia, formerly the Soviet Union) - and a professional rival.
Goldfinger wanted to build a house for his wife and family and acquired a piece of land in Willow Road, occupied by four small cottages built partly below the level of the road. His proposal was to demolish these buildings and to construct a modernist home for his family as part of a block of flats, but his detailed designs were rejected by the Council and he had to re-think his project. The final design included three properties (as today), the largest being the Goldfinger family home in the centre (number 2), flanked by smaller properties that were to be sold to finance the construction.
Again his designs met with opposition. The then Hampstead Borough Council demanded a greater proportion of wall to window than he intended for the central feature windows at the front of the house. As if this wasn't enough, one Henry Brooke, secretary of the Heath and Old Hampstead Protection Society wrote a letter to the local press that sparked controversy and ran for several weeks before Goldfinger finally secured the necessary approvals. Numbers 1-3 Willow Road were finally completed in summer 1939, just a short time before the outbreak of war in September of that year. The much longed for family home was short lived as the by then two Goldfinger children, were evacuated to Canada - although they did return towards the end of the war.
So what of the house? Many of its original features have been retained by the National Trust who now have care of the property. The ground floor lobby gives immediately on to a spiral staircase leading to the upper floors. The staircase is narrow but captures light from a skylight which together with the lobby lamps makes interesting shapes and patterns on the walls that must change throughout the course of the day. The balustrade is made of rope and Peter Goldfinger, the architect's son remembers it being re-tensioned every two or three years. Speaking of interesting shapes, the glass walls at the entrance are frosted - that's a good thing as they afford views of guests using the ground floor toilet!
The first floor is perhaps the most interesting space. It is extremely flexible and can either be a single large space or three separate rooms by virtue of a series of sliding doors. The short film that visitors see before touring the house makes reference to the glittering parties that the family held here over many years and which were attended by artists, writers, architects and other leading cultural figures of the day. Much of the furniture was designed by Goldfinger who also collected sculpture, painting and various objets d'art. The family art collection is impressive and includes works by Marx Ernst , Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp and Henry Moore. Like many intellectuals of their time, the Goldfingers were pro-Soviet and in 1942 staged an art exhibition in their home, the proceeds of which were donated to the Soviet war effort. Also like many left wing intellectuals of their time, they were what might be termed "champagne socialists" keeping servants to help run the house.
Still on the first floor, the spaces include a dining area, a room once used as a studio by Ursula, Erno's wife and a member of the Blackwell family (as in Cross and Blackwell - the soup people) and a sitting room at the rear of the floor. The studio is particularly fascinating, with a platform lit for posing and a collection of Erno's magazines, books and some of his professional papers. It seems that over time, the room became less of an artist's studio and more of a home working space for our man. The lounge is a fantastic space with a white painted convex screen wall, which supports a decorative cast-iron fire back held in a dark steel frame. There is also a green marble hearthstone which is flush with the parquet flooring. Just beautiful. This room includes one of the quirkier pieces of art - a circulating spiral decorated, blue and white disc by Marcel Duchamp. It is operated from a wall switch and must have been extremely technologically advanced for its time. I looked at it for all of thirty seconds before feeling dizzy. I can imagine viewers becoming hypnotised by its never ending spiral!
There are books everywhere at 2 Willow Road. There are books on art, science, history, cookery and just about anything you could think of. There are also many works of fiction, which brings us to the "other" Goldfinger, known to fans of James Bond films and novels. Goldfinger had a reputation for being almost impossible to work with. Many employees parted company with him after very short periods of time - weeks for some, days for others due to what appears to have been a somewhat over-bearing personality, unable to tolerate dissent, disagreement or mistakes. However, there are also stories about him displaying unsolicited acts of generosity and of being able to accept a different point of view - so long as he could claim it as his own afterwards! For some reason, Ian Fleming , writer of the James Bond novels did not like Goldfinger and used the name for one of his "baddies". Erno Goldfinger was an extremely tall man but the film of the book cast an extremely small actor Gert Frobe in the role. The book describes the villain as a complete megalomaniac and an utterly obnoxious individual. Erno considered suing, but was advised against it by friends. The reasons for Fleming's depiction of Goldfinger are not clear, however he was openly anti-semitic, so who knows if this was a consideration?
Back to the house. The upper floor is where the five bedrooms are. These are fairly spartan spaces, not especially large and with only minimal furniture. The back three rooms are currently set out as a single room. This space was once the nursery, divided into three with the nanny's tiny room in the middle and her two charges in he rooms on each side of her. In later years, Erno's mother, Regina, moved into this space bringing her heavy Austro-Hungarian style furniture with her. I wonder what he thought of that! These rear rooms look over a large and beautiful garden that was once home (for more than 20 years) to a Henry Moore sculpture, left there by a family friend who eventually took it back to sell it!
The main bedroom has built in cupboards, again, extremely modern for the 1930's, one of which is not a cupboard, but a door into a rather roomy and stylish en-suite bathroom which contains a number of small items in 1930's packaging - a nice touch. There is also an enormous wash-basin hidden in a cupboard in the very spartan guest room and a second bathroom on this floor.
Goldfinger has a mixed legacy. The Willow Road house is acknowledged as a significant modernist building, but he achieved notoriety for the design of two enormous social housing projects for the former Greater London Council, Trellick Tower in North Kensington and Balfron Tower in the east end. Much criticised in later years, Goldfinger truly believed in his designs, going so far as to move his family into a flat on the 27th and top floor of Balfron Tower for a couple of months in 1967. He also designed the monolithic Alexander Fleming House for the Ministry of Health at the Elephant and Castle. Following many problems in the 1970's and 1980's, all three of these buildings have had major works completed and are being sold off at huge prices. Alexander Fleming House is now a residential development known as Metro Central Heights with substantial prices being paid for flats there whilst in January this year a flat on the 31st and top floor of Trellick Tower was sold for more than 330, 000 pounds!
In fairness, Goldfinger's career was interrupted by the war. When building began again in the 1950's he was competing with younger, homegrown architects and found it hard to gain commissions. However 2
Willow Road remains a real treasure of British modernist architecture and perhaps opinion on his larger, later works will change as their value increases.
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Which Rugby League club has been coached by Brian McClennan and Brian McDermott? | BBC Sport - Rugby League - Brian McClennan resigns as Leeds Rhinos boss
Brian McClennan resigns as Leeds Rhinos boss
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McDermott 'humbled' by Rhinos role
Brian McClennan has resigned as head coach of Leeds Rhinos, with assistant Brian McDermott replacing him.
McClennan, 48, took over at Headingley in 2007 and led them to the Super League title in 2008 and 2009 but they lost in the 2010 semi-finals to Wigan.
McDermott agreed to leave his role as Harlequins head coach earlier this season to join the Rhinos, with a view to replacing McClennan in 2012.
The 40-year-old from Wakefield has signed a three-year deal as head coach.
McClennan, who only signed a new one-year deal in May, said: "Since the conclusion of last season, I have had time to reflect. I have also spent time with Brian McDermott assessing the future. Therefore, I think the time is right to hand over the reins now rather than later.
"I just feel if I continued it would be for selfish reasons only. Brian is ready now and will do a great job.
McClennan thankful for 'three brilliant years'
"I would also like to acknowledge and thank all the wonderful players and staff who have been terrific these past three years. The fans have been great too."
McDermott, who was assistant coach at Leeds in 2004 and 2005, said: "I feel very humbled and honoured to take over from Brian McClennan and I'm also very determined to help improve again a top-class bunch of players and men.
"Super League is a tough competition to win and we'll all have to step up another level if we are challenge for honours next year."
GEORGE RILEY'S BLOG
| Leeds Rhinos |
The Hoover Dam is on the border of Arizona and which other state? | Journey to the top – The Brian McDermott story | Rugby AM
Journey to the top – The Brian McDermott story
Posted 3rd December 2015 at 15:00 By Mike Andrews
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Recently Brian McDermott gained more recognition for the sport of Rugby League and himself by winning the prestigious UK Sports Coach of the Year award.
It has been previously won by big names such as Warren Gatland. But how did he go from second fiddle at Leeds to being the best coach in Britain?
McDermott is no stranger to success; as a player he won many honours as part of the famous Bradford Bulls side that dominated Super League early doors. Once he retired, he took up coaching – assisting Tony Smith at Leeds Rhinos – until 2006. During his first stint at Leeds, he learned about the winning mentality it took to be a coach. He helped guide the Rhinos to their first championship in 32 years in 2004, and helped develop the youth. McDermott in that time always had his own way of coaching and how he wanted his team to play; which helped set the initial foundations for the Rhinos' huge success over the last ten or so years.
Once he learned a winning mentality from Tony Smith and the Rhinos, he set out to be the top man at another club, Harlequins RL. Unfortunately, this is where the true character building began, as he learnt a lot about himself and more importantly, how to take defeat on the chin. In his first half-season at 'Quins he earned five wins and four losses, in doing so he guided them to a seventh place finish. Thereafter things got worse for McDermott as in his remaining three seasons at the London outfit he never reached the play-offs, and the seventh place finish turned out to be his best finish whilst in the capital. It wasn't all bad for Mac as he developed the grass roots level of the game in the south and remains keenly interested in their progression. Add to that the overall development of the likes of Luke Gale and Ben Jones-Bishop, then you see the impact he had in London was mostly positive.
In October 2010 Brian McDermott returned to the Rhinos as Head Coach – a year earlier than anticipated – taking over from Brian McClennan. The appointment was met with mixed feelings from the Rhinos faithful, and in 2011 the Rhinos would face similar adversity to McDermott's old side Harlequins. Using his knowledge of the players he'd already assisted around him and the character and mental tolerance he'd gained from his previous storm of adversity, he guided Leeds to the Super League title from fifth place – the first time in the competition's history. That season will be remembered for two games; Catalans Dragons away – when Leeds got destroyed and McDermott was stood on the pitch seemingly contemplating how on earth he was going to get them out the mess they were in; and Warrington away in the play-offs – when Leeds snatched a 26-24 win over the favourites for Old Trafford. The first demonstrated his tolerance in adversity and the second showed the character and mental strength he'd gained from those years coaching.
During his time at Leeds, McDermott has struggled to combine his willingness to have his team 'push and play' from their half and having rock-solid defence; such is his unstructured style. Since finishing fifth in 2011, McDermott has guided Leeds to fifth, third and sixth. The latter of those saw Leeds sort out their defence and finish with the best points against, but their attack faltered and they couldn't finish off games properly. But in the 2015 season McDermott had seen enough of the inconsistency and went after combining his philosophy in attack with his unstructured defence to lead Leeds through their best season ever. The season wasn't without hiccups and despite looking the best side for long periods; it took a bit of brilliant man-management from McDermott for the Rhinos to keep faith.
It is almost fitting that last season McDermott managed to combine all the pieces of his coaching to guide some very special players to even more success. It is perfect timing as the Rhinos will be without Kevin Sinfield, Jamie Peacock and Kylie Leuluai, since they retired from the sport. McDermott's task in 2016 and beyond is big, but using all the experience he's gained over the years I'm betting it'll be fairly smooth. Much like his time at 'Quins, McDermott has brought through youngsters such as Stevie Ward, Liam Sutcliffe and Jordan Lilley – making this transition easier.
When you piece together Brian McDermott's coaching career and then look at his latest season with Leeds, you begin to understand what has made him into the best coach in the country, and one of the best in the world. He is fully deserving of his latest award and I'm certain there will be more to come.
| i don't know |
Which fishing boat, which sank in 2000 off the Isle of Man, was salvaged and is now moored in Douglas? | BBC NEWS | Europe | Isle of Man | Trawler 'break-in' investigated
Trawler 'break-in' investigated
The Solway Harvester sank off the Isle of Man in January 2000
Police are investigating a break-in on the Solway Harvester, which is moored in an Isle of Man harbour.
The Manx Constabulary was called in after evidence of a forced entry was found on Sunday evening.
Scenes of crime officers are on the vessel and an investigation is continuing, police said.
The fishing boat sank off the Isle of Man in 2000, killing seven Scottish fishermen on board. It is currently moored at Douglas Outer Harbour.
Director of harbours, Captain Michael Brew, said: "Evidence of a possible break-in was reported to the police on Monday morning.
"However, the extent of the break-in isn't clear, nor is the reason behind it," he added.
"Although we are not directly involved, we will continue to liaise with Isle of Man Constabulary."
| Solway Harvester |
Who did Henry Cooper fight in his last bout? | BBC NEWS | Europe | Isle of Man | Trawler 'break-in' investigated
Trawler 'break-in' investigated
The Solway Harvester sank off the Isle of Man in January 2000
Police are investigating a break-in on the Solway Harvester, which is moored in an Isle of Man harbour.
The Manx Constabulary was called in after evidence of a forced entry was found on Sunday evening.
Scenes of crime officers are on the vessel and an investigation is continuing, police said.
The fishing boat sank off the Isle of Man in 2000, killing seven Scottish fishermen on board. It is currently moored at Douglas Outer Harbour.
Director of harbours, Captain Michael Brew, said: "Evidence of a possible break-in was reported to the police on Monday morning.
"However, the extent of the break-in isn't clear, nor is the reason behind it," he added.
"Although we are not directly involved, we will continue to liaise with Isle of Man Constabulary."
| i don't know |
"""It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of good fortune, must be in want of a wife"", is the first line of which Jane Austen novel?" | SparkNotes: Pride and Prejudice: Chapters 1–4
Pride and Prejudice
Chapters 1–4, page 2
page 1 of 2
Summary: Chapters 1–2
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
(See Important Quotations Explained )
The news that a wealthy young gentleman named Charles Bingley has rented the manor known as Netherfield Park causes a great stir in the neighboring village of Longbourn, especially in the Bennet household. The Bennets have five unmarried daughters, and Mrs. Bennet, a foolish and fussy gossip, is the sort who agrees with the novel’s opening words: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” She sees Bingley’s arrival as an opportunity for one of the girls to obtain a wealthy spouse, and she therefore insists that her husband call on the new arrival immediately. Mr. Bennet torments his family by pretending to have no interest in doing so, but he eventually meets with Mr. Bingley without their knowing. When he reveals to Mrs. Bennet and his daughters that he has made their new neighbor’s acquaintance, they are overjoyed and excited.
Summary: Chapters 3–4
(See Important Quotations Explained )
Eager to learn more, Mrs. Bennet and the girls question Mr. Bennet incessantly. A few days later, Mr. Bingley returns the visit, though he does not meet Mr. Bennet’s daughters. The Bennets invite him to dinner shortly afterward, but he is called away to London. Soon, however, he returns to Netherfield Park with his two sisters, his brother-in-law, and a friend named Darcy.
Mr. Bingley and his guests go to a ball in the nearby town of Meryton. The Bennet sisters attend the ball with their mother. The eldest daughter, Jane, dances twice with Bingley. Within Elizabeth’s hearing, Bingley exclaims to Darcy that Jane is “the most beautiful creature” he has ever beheld. Bingley suggests that Darcy dance with Elizabeth, but Darcy refuses, saying, “she is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.” He proceeds to declare that he has no interest in women who are “slighted by other men.” Elizabeth takes an immediate and understandable disliking to Darcy. Because of Darcy’s comments and refusal to dance with anyone not rich and well bred, the neighborhood takes a similar dislike; it declares Bingley, on the other hand, to be quite “amiable.”
At the end of the evening, the Bennet women return to their house, where Mrs. Bennet regales her husband with stories from the evening until he insists that she be silent. Upstairs, Jane relates to Elizabeth her surprise that Bingley danced with her twice, and Elizabeth replies that Jane is unaware of her own beauty. Both girls agree that Bingley’s sisters are not well-mannered, but whereas Jane insists that they are charming in close conversation, Elizabeth continues to harbor a dislike for them.
The narrator then provides the reader with Bingley’s background: he inherited a hundred thousand pounds from his father, but for now, in spite of his sisters’ complaints, he lives as a tenant. His friendship with Darcy is “steady,” despite the contrast in their characters, illustrated in their respective reactions to the Meryton ball. Bingley, cheerful and sociable, has an excellent time and is taken with Jane; Darcy, more clever but less tactful, finds the people dull and even criticizes Jane for smiling too often (Bingley’s sisters, on the other hand, find Jane to be “a sweet girl,” and Bingley therefore feels secure in his good opinion of her).
Analysis: Chapters 1–4
The opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”—establishes the centrality of advantageous marriage, a fundamental social value of Regency England. The arrival of Mr. Bingley (and news of his fortune) is the event that sets the novel in motion. He delivers the prospect of a marriage of wealth and good connections for the eager Bennet girls. The opening sentence has a subtle, unstated significance. In its declarative and hopeful claim that a wealthy man must be looking for a wife, it hides beneath its surface the truth of such matters: a single woman must be in want of a husband, especially a wealthy one.
1
| Pride and Prejudice |
Which man, who is credited with being the first 'white- faced clown', died on May 31st. in 1837? | Pride & Prejudice (2009) #1 | Comics | Marvel.com
Variant Covers of this Issue
Pride & Prejudice (2009) #1
Added to Marvel Unlimited: October 12, 2009
Rating: RATED T
Penciller: Hugo Petrus
IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife... Tailored from the adored Jane Austen classic, Marvel Comics is proud to ... more
IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife... Tailored from the adored Jane Austen classic, Marvel Comics is proud to present PRIDE AND PREJUDICE! Two-time Rita Award-Winner Nancy Butler and fan-favorite Hugo Petras faithfully adapt the whimsical tale of Lizzy Bennet and her loveable-if-eccentric family, as they navigate through tricky British social circles. Will Lizzy's father manage to marry off her five daughters, despite his wife's incessant nagging? And will Lizzy's beautiful sister Jane marry the handsome, wealthy Mr. Bingley, or will his brooding friend Mr. Darcy stand between their happiness? "This project has been like a dream come true for me as a writer and as a former graphic designer-not only am I adapting a book I love, I am doing it in the one forum, comics, where words and pictures carry equal weight." Nancy Butler, two-time RITA winner and multiple RT Reviewer's Choice winner in Regency more
The Story
IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife... Tailored from the adored Jane Austen classic, Marvel Comics is proud to present PRIDE AND PREJUDICE! Two-time Rita Award-Winner Nancy Butler and fan-favorite Hugo Petras faithfully adapt the whimsical tale of Lizzy Bennet and her loveable-if-eccentric family, as they navigate through tricky British social circles. Will Lizzy's father manage to marry off her five daughters, despite his wife's incessant nagging? And will Lizzy's beautiful sister Jane marry the handsome, wealthy Mr. Bingley, or will his brooding friend Mr. Darcy stand between their happiness? "This project has been like a dream come true for me as a writer and as a former graphic designer-not only am I adapting a book I love, I am doing it in the one forum, comics, where words and pictures carry equal weight." Nancy Butler, two-time RITA winner and multiple RT Reviewer's Choice winner in Regency
More Details
FOC Date: Mar 12, 2009
Cover Information
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Which part does Matt Damon play in the film 'Invictus'? | Invictus (2009) - IMDb
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Nelson Mandela, in his first term as the South African President, initiates a unique venture to unite the apartheid-torn land: enlist the national rugby team on a mission to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup.
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Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 10 wins & 33 nominations. See more awards »
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Storyline
The film tells the inspiring true story of how Nelson Mandela joined forces with the captain of South Africa's rugby team to help unite their country. Newly elected President Mandela knows his nation remains racially and economically divided in the wake of apartheid. Believing he can bring his people together through the universal language of sport, Mandela rallies South Africa's rugby team as they make their historic run to the 1995 Rugby World Cup Championship match. Written by alfiehitchie
His people needed a leader. He gave them a champion. See more »
Genres:
Rated PG-13 for brief strong language | See all certifications »
Parents Guide:
11 December 2009 (USA) See more »
Also Known As:
The Human Factor See more »
Filming Locations:
$8,611,147 (USA) (11 December 2009)
Gross:
Did You Know?
Trivia
Jonah Lomu is portrayed by Zak Feaunati , who was once a player of the Bath Rugby team and is (2009) head of Rugby at Bishop Vesey's Grammar school in Sutton Coldfield. See more »
Goofs
In the scene where Nelson Mandela is dancing, several of the violin players are holding their bows several inches above their violins. See more »
Quotes
[first lines]
High School Boy : [seeing passing motorcade] Who is it, sir?
High School Coach : It's the terrorist Mandela, they let him out. Remember this day boys, this is the day our country went to the dogs.
See more »
Crazy Credits
During the first part of the end credits, pictures are shown of the real life characters that were portrayed in the movie. Those images are then followed by a scene of South African kids playing rugby. See more »
Connections
User Reviews
As a South African, I can tell you the entertaining, inspiring and enjoyable "Invictus" exceeded all my expectations.
13 December 2009 | by JeffersonCody
(South Africa) – See all my reviews
As a South African who saw this film on Friday morning, I can tell you you the entertaining, inspiring and enjoyable "Invictus" exceeded all my expectations.
It really is a true story of epic proportions yet it's told with an intimate feel, and it is at least 98% accurate to the events of the time. Clint gets all the big details and so many of the little details right, but he never goes over the top. He directs with minimum fuss and achieves maximum effect, just letting the powerful story unfold without getting in its way.
I watched the 1995 Rugby World Cup and saw Madiba come out in the Springbok jersey. It was a wondrous sight. And when Joel Stransky slotted that drop kick over in the dying minutes and the Boks won, I wept and cheered along with everyone else. After the match millions of South African - of all races - celebrated. It was an amazing time. It was the birth of the "Rainbow Nation". Nelson Mandela is the greatest and most beloved of all South Africans. The man is a living legend, but so human and real. When he was President he brought hope to all South Africans, white and black. We, in my country, will never stop loving this incredible man. Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman did South Africa and our beloved Madiba proud. Francois Pienaar is also an amazing South African, an intelligent, big-hearted rugby played who always led by example, and Matt Damon's performance as him was superb. I was glued to the screen for every second of the film's running time (I didn't even move from my seat until the final credit rolled and the house lights came on), and I was moved to tears on several occasions. The final scene was especially touching.
Freeman's performance was magical and I can see him getting as Oscar nomination. If you think his Mandela is too cool to be true, think again. Mandela really is this cool. A brave and intelligent man whose courage and strength of character should serve as an example to people all over the world. After being unjustly imprisoned for nearly 30 years by a cruel and repressive regime, he emerged to run a country and teach its people the meaning of forgiveness and reconciliation.
I thoroughly recommend the authentically detailed, historically accurate "Invictus" to film lovers, Eastwood fans, Nelson Mandela fans and sports fans everywhere in the world. South Africans would be crazy to miss this excellent film, but it deserves to be a hit all over the globe. Let's hope it is.
Viva Clint Eastwood, viva Morgan Freeman, viva Madiba.
PS. I'm a huge fan of Clint Eastwood as both an actor and a director.
Of the films Eastwood has directed, my favorites, in no particular order, are "Unforgiven", "Million Dollar Baby", "Gran Torino", "The Outlaw Josey Wales", "Letters From Iwo Jima", "The Bridges of Madison County","Bird" and "Invictus". Yes, it's really that good. "Invictus" is another winner from Clint. He just seems to get better with age. What a creative roll he is currently on.
PPS. "Invictus" is one of the best sporting movies I have ever seen. But it's also about more than sport.
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| Francois Pienaar |
Which 'Beatle' had a hit single with 'Photograph'? | First look of Morgan Freeman playing Nelson Mandela in new film Invictus | Daily Mail Online
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Hollywood legend Morgan Freeman is fulfilling his long-nurtured ambition to make a film about South Africa's first black president Nelson Mandela.
Now that dream is pulling closer to reality as never-before-seen footage emerged of Freeman playing Mandela on the set of upcoming Clint Eastwood-directed drama Invictus.
The film is based on the iconic image of Mandela handing Springboks' white captain Francois Pienaar - played by Matt Damon - the 1995 World Cup trophy.
Rare glimpse: Morgan Freeman plays Nelson Mandela, while Matt Damon is rugby captain Francois Pienaar on the set of Invictus, directed by Clint Eastwood
In that moment, Mandela took a significant step forward to unifying a post-apartheid South Africa.
Believing he could bring his people together through the universal language of sport, Mandela rallied South Africa's underdog rugby team as they made an unlikely run to the World Cup championship match.
A political genius, Mandela used sporting glory to help build a new identity for a racially and economically divided nation.
After 14 years, and numerous books, the extraordinary and multi-faceted story has finally captivated Hollywood.
Iconic moment: Freeman plays the part of Mandela right up to the hat, while Damon is decked out in his rugby garb
United in glory: Nelson Mandela hands Springbok captain Francois Pienaar the 1995 World Cup trophy after South Africa beat New Zealand 15-12
The latest Eastwood project is an adaptation of John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela And The Game That Made A Nation.
Damon prepared for his role by training with a local rugby side.
New stills from the film show Freeman and Damon capturing the moment when black and white South Africa were united.
When Mandela was arrested in 1962, he was founder and commander-in-chief of the military wing of the African National Congress, Umkhonto we Sizwe, regarded by many white South Africans as a terrorist organisation determined to end their privileged way of life.
Upcoming: Clint Eastwood gives directions to his actors and production team on the set of Invictus, which is set for release in December
During his 27 years in prison, Mandela was the embodiment of white South Afica's worst fears.
Two years before the 1995 World Cup, the country was heading towards civil war - the white Afrikaners under the banner of far right Volksfront, vowed to stop Mandela becoming president.
But they failed, and when Mandela won power he quickly set about trying to reconcile whites and blacks.
A year into Mandela's presidency, South Africa was selected as the host country for the World Cup, and the new leader saw an opportunity not to be missed.
The Springboks had been banned from international competition because of the country's apartheid practices.
But Mandela said, why not use it now as a carrot? Why not use the Springbok team to unite the most divided nation on earth around a common goal?
The majority of blacks viewed the team as a symbol of exclusion, but they rooted along with white countrymen as the Springboks won in overtime against New Zealand to capture the Cup.
The name Invictus refers to a poem by William Earnest Henley that was often recited by Mandela.
Invictus, which has already been tipped for an Academy Award, is set for release in December.
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Which Middle East airline has an in-flight magazine called 'Oryx', the antelope which is on its logo? | Learn and talk about Qatar Airways, 1993 establishments in Qatar, Airlines established in 1993, Airlines of Qatar, Arab Air Carriers Organization members
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Qatar Airways Company Q.C.S.C. ( Arabic : القطرية, Al Qatariyah), [4] operating as Qatar Airways, is the state-owned flag carrier [5] [6] of Qatar . Headquartered in the Qatar Airways Tower in Doha , [7] the airline operates a hub-and-spoke network, linking over 150 international destinations across Africa, Central Asia, Europe, Far East, South Asia, Middle East, North America, South America and Oceania from its base at Hamad International Airport , using a fleet of more than 180 aircraft.
Qatar Airways Group employs more than 40,000 people, of whom 24,000 work directly for Qatar Airways. The carrier has been a member of the Oneworld alliance since October 2013 (2013-10), the first Gulf carrier to sign with one of the three airline alliances.
Contents
Qatar Airways was established on November 22, 1993 (1993-11-22); [8] operations started on January 20, 1994 (1994-01-20). [9] Amman was first served in May 1994 (1994-05). [10] In April 1995 (1995-04), the airline's CEO was the Sheikh Hamad Bin Ali Bin Jabor Al Thani who employed a staff of 75. By this time the fleet consisted of two Airbus A310s that served a route network including Abu Dhabi , Bangkok , Cairo , Dubai , Khartoum , Kuwait , London , Madras , Manila , Muscat , Osaka ,[ contradictory ] Sharjah , Taipei , Tokyo and Trivandrum . [9] During 1995, two ex- All Nippon Airways Boeing 747s were bought from Boeing . [11] [12] The airline acquired a second-hand Boeing 747SP from Air Mauritius in 1996. [13] [14]
A Qatar Airways Airbus A320-200 in old livery on short final to Domodedovo International Airport in 2005.
Services to Athens , Istanbul , Madras and Tunis were suspended in late 1996, whereas Calcutta and Muscat were removed from the route network in January and September 1997 (1997-09), respectively. [15] Flights to London were launched during 1997. [16] The airline also took delivery of two second-hand 231-seater Airbus A300-600R aircraft on lease from Ansett Worldwide Aviation Services (AWAS) during the year; they replaced two Boeing 747s. The entering of these two A300s into the fleet also marked the introduction of a new logo. [17] A third A300-600R joined the fleet shortly afterwards, also on lease from AWAS. [18] In July 1998 (1998-07) the carrier placed a firm order with Airbus for six Airbus A320s , slated for delivery between 2001 and 2005; it also took options for five more aircraft of the type. [19] [20] Also in 1998, the carrier struck a deal with Singapore Aircraft Leasing Enterprise (SALE) for the lease of four Airbus A320s, with deliveries scheduled between February and April 1999 (1999-04); [21] these latter four aircraft were aimed at replacing the Boeing 727-200 Advanced fleet and to fill the capacity gap before the hand over of the first A320 from Airbus. [20] The airline took delivery of the first A320 powered by Aero Engines V2500 on lease from SALE in February 1999 (1999-02). [22]
A Qatar Airways Airbus A340-600 departing from London Heathrow Airport in 2014. The airline became a customer for the type in 2003. [23]
A fourth A300-600R on lease from AWAS joined the fleet in April 2000 (2000-04). [24] In October 2000 (2000-10), Qatar Airways ordered an International Aero Engines V2500-powered Airbus A319CJ and took an option for another aircraft of the type. [25] The airline became the Airbus A380 's ninth customer in 2001 when two aircraft of the type were ordered, plus two options. [26] Also that year, the airline resumed services to Jakarta . [27] In 2002, the government of Qatar withdrew from Gulf Air . [28] [29] In June 2003 (2003-06), a Qatar Airways Airbus A320 was the first aircraft that resumed the international services to Iraq when it flew the Doha– Basra route. [30] Also that month, Qatar Airways incorporated its first dedicated cargo aircraft to the fleet. It was an Airbus A300-600R that was converted to freighter in Germany for US$10 million. [31] Also in June 2003 (2003-06), [23] at the Paris Air Show, the carrier placed an order with Airbus valued at US$5.1 billion for two Airbus A321s , 14 Airbus A330s and two Airbus A340-600s . [32] [33] The deal included eight A330-200s and six -300s; [23] it also included options for further six A330-300s and eight A340-600s. [23] The first aircraft were scheduled to enter the fleet in 2004, with the A340-600 slated for delivery in 2006. [23] During the year the airline started serving the Chinese market with the introduction of flights to Shanghai . [34] Also in 2003, the carrier expanded its portfolio of destinations with the commencement of services to Manchester in April, [35] Tripoli in November, [36] and Cebu and Singapore in December. [37] During the 2003 Dubai Air Show the airline firmed up an earlier commitment for two Airbus A380s and took options for another two of these aircraft. The value of the transaction was US$1.2 billion. [38] It was also in 2003 that Qatar Airways became the first airline to be audited under the new IATA operational audit programme, IOSA . [39]
The Qatar Airways Group —which included Qatar Airways, Doha International Airport and corporate business air services, ground handling and in-flight catering companies— reported its first profit ever for the fiscal year (FY) that ended on March 2004 (2004-03). The FY2004 saw the airline transporting 3.35 million passengers. [40] Zurich became the carrier's 53rd destination worldwide in July 2004 (2004-07); [41] Yangon was added to the list of destinations in December the same year. [42] A new service to Osaka was launched in March 2005 (2005-03). [43] [44] Its first A340 was delivered on September 8, 2006.
In May 2007 (2007-05), Qatar Airways and Airbus signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for the acquisition of 80 Airbus A350 XWBs , including 20 A350-800s plus 40 and 20 aircraft of the –900 and –1000 variant, respectively, with the first aircraft initially slated for delivery in 2013. [45] The agreement was firmed up in June during the 2007 Paris Air Show ; [46] three more Airbus A380s were also made part of the order. [47] In July the same year, during the unveiling ceremony of the Boeing 787 in Everett , Qatar Airways was recognised as a future customer for the type when its logo appeared on one side of the brand new aircraft. By that time, the airline had not acknowledged it had placed an order for a number of these new aircraft. [48] In November the same year, a firm order for 30 Boeing 787-8s , plus options for 35 more aircraft of the –9 or –10 variant, was confirmed. The order also included 14 Boeing 777-300ERs , six Boeing 777-200LRs and seven Boeing 777Fs , whereas five more aircraft of the type were on option. The combined order was valued at US$13.5 billion. [49] [50] The airline took delivery of its first 335-seater Boeing 777-300ER in late November 2007 (2007-11). [51] The route network grew further during 2007 with the incorporation of Newark in June, [52] Nagpur —the carrier's seventh destination in India— in September, [53] and Stockholm in November. [54] A new scheduled service to New York-JFK that commenced in November 2008 (2008-11) replaced the Newark route. [52] The first two Boeing 777-200LRs were handed over by the aircraft manufacturer in February 2009 (2009-02). [55]
On June 15, 2009, at the Paris Air Show, Qatar Airways ordered 20 Airbus A320 and 4 Airbus A321 aircraft worth $1.9bn. [56]
On October 12, 2009, the company completed the world’s first commercial passenger flight powered by a fuel made from natural gas, [57] Also in 2009, Qatar Airways launched its first scheduled flights to Australia with Melbourne being the first city served; [58] routes to Chengdu , Hangzhou , Phnom Penh and Clark International Airport in the Philippines were launched during 2009 as well. [44]
Tokyo-Narita was first served by the carrier in April 2010 (2010-04). [44] On May 18, 2010, the airline put its first Boeing 777 F (A7-BFA) into service, with a flight from Doha to Amsterdam . The aircraft had been delivered on May 14, 2010. [59]
The airline has launched 22 new destinations since 2010, with nine more destinations announced: Ankara , Aleppo , Bangalore , Barcelona, Brussels , Bucharest , Budapest , Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Hanoi , Montreal , Nice, Phuket , São Paulo, Shiraz , Kolkata , Medina , Oslo , Sofia , Stuttgart , Venice and Tokyo. Qatar Airways also launched Benghazi and Entebbe during 2011. [60] Service to Baku and Tbilisi , originally planned for 2011, was delayed until February 1, 2012 due to "operational issues". [61]
Boeing's handover of a Boeing 777-200LR in September 2011 (2011-09) marked Qatar Airways receiving its 100th aircraft from this aircraft manufacturer. [62] In November the same year, at the Dubai Airshow , the airline ordered 55 Airbus planes: 50 A320neo and 5 A380, in addition to two Boeing 777 freighters. [63]
In July 2012 (2012-07), Perth became the second city served in Australia. [58] On October 8, 2012, Qatar Airways announced its intention to join the Oneworld alliance.
Qatar Airways became the seventh carrier worldwide that incorporated the Dreamliner to the fleet when Boeing handed over the airline's first aircraft of the type on November 12, 2012 (2012-11-12), [64] the first one delivered to a Middle East airline. [65] The aircraft was deployed on the Doha– Dubai corridor on nov. 20 [66] Dreamliner services on the long-haul Doha– London-Heathrow route commenced on Dec 13, with the airline becoming the first one to offer regular services to the United Kingdom using this aircraft. [67] [68] During 2013, Qatar Airways launched flights to Gassim in Saudi Arabia, Basra and Najaf in Iraq, Phnom Penh, [nb 1] Salalah and Chicago . [69] Services to Ethiopia began in September 2013 (2013-09). [70]
In February 2013, Qatar Airways open its European Customer Service centre, which is in Wrocław , Poland. [71] [72]
In June 2013 (2013-06), the airline firmed up an order for two Boeing 777-300ER aircraft plus seven options. [73] On November 17, 2013, the first day of the Dubai Airshow, Qatar Airways purchased 50 Boeing 777-9Xs . [74] The commitment was firmed up during the 2014 Farnborough Air Show in a deal worth US$18.9 billion; purchase rights for another 50 aircraft of the type were also taken. In addition, the transaction included firm orders for four Boeing 777Fs plus options for another four with a combined value of US$2.7 billion. [75] Deliveries of the passenger aircraft are expected to start in 2020. [76]
An all-business class flight to London Heathrow was launched in May 2014 (2014-05) with Airbus A319LR aircraft. [77] [78] [79] Flights to Edinburgh were launched in May 2014 (2014-05). [16] [80] The carrier expected to take delivery of its first three Airbus A380 aircraft in June 2014 (2014-06), [81] with plans for the aircraft to be displayed at the Farnborough Air Show . [82] There were intentions to first deploy the type on the Doha-Hamad –London-Heathrow route starting jun 17; [83] [84] another two undisclosed European points would likely become served with the A380. [85] In late May 2014 (2014-05), it was reported the delivery of the aircraft would be delayed by several weeks. [86] Further delays shifted the start of A380 services to London to August 1, 2014 (2014-08-01). [87] [88] Delivery of the first aircraft of the type finally took place on 16 September 2014 (2014-09-16). [89] A380 services to London commenced in October 2014 (2014-10). [90] [91] [92] The airline became the launch customer for the A350 XWB; the first Airbus A350-900 was handed over to the company on December 22, 2014 (2014-12-22) and had its first revenue flight to Frankfurt almost a month later, on January 15, 2015 (2015-01-15). [93] [94] [95]
In January 2015 (2015-01), the airline concluded an order for four Boeing 777Fs in a deal worth US$1.24 billion; Qatar Airways also took purchase rights on four more aircraft of the type. [96] [97] In June 2015 (2015-06), it was disclosed Qatar Airways ordered ten Boeing 777-8Xs and four additional Boeing 777Fs for USD 4.18 billion. [98] [99] [100]
In January 2016 (2016-01), the carrier received its first Boeing 747 nose loader. [101]
Key people[ edit ]
As of May 2015 [update] the Qatar Airways' CEO is Akbar Al Baker , [102] who has been serving in this position since November 1996 (1996-11). [103] Baker is also a member of the Heathrow Airport board. [104]
Ownership and subsidiaries[ edit ]
As of May 2014 [update] , the company is fully owned by the Qatari government . [105] Qatar Airways has been fully controlled by the government since July 2013 (2013-07), [106] following the buyout of a 50% stake from a former foreign minister and other shareholders. [107] As of April 2016 [update] , the Qatar Airways Group employs more than 40,000 people; 24,000 of them work directly for the airline. [108]
Divisions[ edit ]
Qatar Airways has many divisions including: Qatar Aircraft Catering Company, Doha International Airport , Qatar Airways Holidays, United Media Int, Qatar Duty Free, Qatar Aviation Services, Qatar Distribution Company, and Qatar Executive .
A Boeing 777F of Qatar Airways Cargo taxiing at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport
Qatar Airways Cargo, the airline's freight branch, is the world's third largest international cargo carrier. [109] It has ordered three Boeing 777F . [110] The first Boeing 777F was delivered to the airline in on May 14, 2010, and has freight facilities able to handle 750,000 tonnes of cargo per annum during its first development phase. The Boeing 777F will be used primarily on Qatar Airways' Far East and European routes and will be supplemented by Airbus A300-600F freighters operating on regional routes feeding the airline's hub.
Dedicated cargo flights to Cairo International Airport were launched in June 2009 complementing the passenger services already operated. [111]
On August 18, 2010, the airline launched its first US dedicated cargo service from its hub in Doha to Chicago-O'Hare with a stop-over in Amsterdam , Netherlands using Boeing 777 freighter aircraft. [112]
On March 13, 2013, Qatar Airways Cargo first of three A330F was delivered provided on lease from BOC aviation replacing A300-600F. [113] [114]
Global Supply Systems operated three Boeing 747-8F aircraft under a wet lease arrangement for British Airways World Cargo until BA terminated the contract early on January 17, 2014. [115] An agreement with Qatar Airways to operate flights for IAG Cargo using Boeing 777F was announced on the same day. [116]
On March 18, 2015, Qatar Airways Cargo announced that starting April 4, 2015 will launch a twice-weekly Boeing 777 Freighter service to Los Angeles which will become Qatar Airways Cargo’s fourth US freighter destination alongside Houston, Chicago and Atlanta. [117]
On December 27, 2016, Qatar Airways Cargo has announced that it will launch freighter operations to four new destinations in the Americas, Boeing 777 freighters will fly twice a week to the South American cities of Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Quito* and the North American city of Miami. starting 2 February 2017. [118]
Qatar Executive[ edit ]
Qatar Executive is a corporate jet subsidiary of Qatar Airways, with its own livery, sporting a white fuselage with a slightly smaller Oryx painted in the airline's traditional colours of burgundy and gray.
The Royal fleet of Qatar Amiri Flight also are painted in full Qatar Airways livery, although they are not part of the airline or Qatar Executive.
Al Maha Airways[ edit ]
Al Maha Airways is a proposed airline based in Saudi Arabia fully owned by Qatar Airways. It uses a similar livery, except in green instead of burgundy. [119] It was planned to launch in September 2014, but due to licensing problems this may not happen until the summer of 2016. By May 2015 the airline had already taken delivery of 4 Airbus A320 aircraft. [120]
Livery[ edit ]
Qatar Airways has an oryx , the national animal of the State of Qatar , [121] as its logo. [122] The aircraft decor includes the word Qatar appearing in burgundy -coloured letters on a light grey background at both sides of the forward part of the fuselage with the word Al Qataria in Arabic titles appearing close to it in a darker grey and a smaller typeface. A burgundy oryx in a grey background adorns the tailfin. The airline unveiled this branding in 2006. [121]
Natural gas to liquid fuel demonstration[ edit ]
On October 12, 2009, a Qatar Airways Airbus A340-600 conducted the world's first commercial passenger flight using a mixture of kerosene and synthetic gas-to-liquids (GTL) fuel, produced from natural gas, on its flight from London's Gatwick Airport to Doha. [123] The experiment's purpose was to demonstrate the viability of jet fuel made from a source not subject to rapidly fluctuating oil prices. In addition, positioning natural gas in particular as an alternative source of jet fuel is in the interests of the Qatari government; Qatar is the world's leading exporter of natural gas. However, some experts believe that GTL fuel is likely to remain a marginal choice due to an expensive production process. [124]
Sponsorships[ edit ]
In July 2013, Qatar Airways became FC Barcelona 's primary shirt sponsor. [125]
In October 2014, Qatar Airways named Official club sponsor of Al-Ahli Saudi FC 's primary shirt sponsor. [126]
in August 2016, Qatar Airways became Official international Airline Sponsor for Sydney Swans [127]
A Qatar Airways Boeing 777-300ER in Oneworld markings lands at London Heathrow Airport in 2014.
On 27 May 2014 (2014-05-27), the touchdown of a flight from Bahrain at Doha's Hamad International Airport marked the official transfer of Qatar Airways' operations to its new hub, replacing Doha International Airport . [129] [130] [131] [132]
Fourteen additional destinations were added to the Qatar Airways network during 2012, including Addis Ababa , Baghdad , Belgrade , Erbil , Gassim , Kigali , Kiliminjaro , Maputo , Mombasa , Perth , Saint Petersburg , Warsaw , Yangon , and Zagreb . [133] [134] [135]
As of December 2014 [update] , Qatar Airways served 146 points worldwide [136] following the launch of flights to Asmara . [137] The airline had previously added to the route network Dallas/Fort Worth , the carrier's seventh destination in the United States and the second one in Texas along with Houston , [138] [139] [140] Haneda , [141] [142] [143] Miami, [144] [145] [146] Edinburgh, its third destination in the United Kingdom, [16] Istanbul's Sabiha Gökçen International Airport , its third point served in Turkey , [147] and Djibouti . [148] Starting June 2015 (2015-06), the carrier will serve Amsterdam . [136] Starting December 2015, it was announced the airline will serve Durban . [149]
On October 8, 2012, Qatar Airways announced it would be part of Oneworld within the forthcoming 18 months. [150] [151] The entrance of the carrier into the alliance was mentored by British Airways . The joining ceremony took place on October 29, 2013 (2013-10-29). The event marked Qatar Airways as the first of the major Gulf carriers in being part of an airline alliance. [152]
First class[ edit ]
Qatar Airways offers first class passengers over 6.5 feet of legroom and seats that fold into flat beds with feather duvets first class seats are equipped with massage functions and an entertainment system. Qatar Airways plans to eliminate first class cabins from existing A340 aircraft, as well as new aircraft deliveries, except the A380s on June 17, 2014. The A380s features a 90-inch seat pitch, transforming into a fully flat bed, together with an expansive choice of entertainment options displayed on individual 26-inch television screens. It is configured as 1-2-1. [171] [172] An all new Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft will be in standard two-class configuration. [173]
Business class cabin on a Boeing 777-200LR
Qatar Airways offers business class passengers fully flat horizontal beds in a 2-2-2 configuration on board its Boeing 777 aircraft. On other long-haul aircraft, business class seats recline up to 172 degrees, with massage functions. Wines and Champagne are served.
Qatar Airways has introduced new business class seats on board its newly delivered A320 aircraft with IFE seat-back PTVs in every seat. It will introduce the new seats in each upcoming new A320 aircraft, as well as retrofitting 4 existing A321 and 2 A319LR aircraft.
In March 2012 Qatar Airways revealed a new business class cabin, to be launched on the new Boeing 787 aircraft from summer 2012, initially on intra-Gulf routes before being introduced on the Doha to London Heathrow route. The new seats are arranged in a 1-2-1 configuration allowing direct aisle access for every passenger, and provide almost twice as much space as existing business class cabins. [174] The seats will be 22 inches wide and converts easily to a flat-bed which extends to 80 inches and is 30 inches wide. Each seat has also been fitted with touch screen technology which is powered by Android . [175]
Qatar Airways Boeing 777-200LR economy class cabin with Oryx IFE
An Economy class meal on Qatar Airways
Qatar Airways economy class was named best in the world in the 2009 and 2010 Skytrax Awards. Qatar Airways offers economy class passengers a seat pitch of up to 34 inches. Economy class passengers on A330/A340 aircraft are offered individual seat-back TV screens. Passengers on Boeing 777 and 787 aircraft are offered touch-screen TVs.
Qatar Airways has taken delivery of several A320 family aircraft so far with individual seat-back personal televisions in every seat in economy class. The IFE is equipped with the same Thales entertainment system as used in the widebody fleet. A further four A321s and the two A319LRs will be equipped with the new IFE, as well as new upcoming A320 family aircraft deliveries.
New economy seats will be introduced with the launch of the 787. [174] These new seats will be produced by Recaro and are fitted in a 3-3-3 configuration. 16.9 inch width and a pitch of 32 inches will offer less personal space than before. Furthermore, each seat will have a 10.6 inch in seat TV monitor offering in-flight entertainment. The features will also extend to the possibility of Wi-Fi and GSM telephony usage and USB ports for connecting personal items such as digital cameras. [176]
In-flight entertainment[ edit ]
Qatar Airways' in-flight entertainment system is called Oryx One. [177] With the exception of some Airbus A320 family aircraft, all aircraft have personal seat-back television screens. Some Airbus A320 family aircraft are fitted with main screen entertainment. Qatar is updating Airbus A320 family aircraft to seat-back AVOD. Qatar Airways also offers Onboard Connectivity Wi-Fi, send SMS and MMS or access your email and browse the Internet to stay in touch with everyone on the ground . this service available on all A380, A350, B787, A319, and select A320, A321, and A330-200 aircraft. [178] The arrival of the airline's first A380 in 2014 marked a significant milestone for the airline, whose new home, Hamad International Airport (HIA), has been specially designed to cater to the aircraft, with six contact gates designed with specifications required for the super jumbo. In addition, the maintenance hangar at HIA – which is the largest in the world – is able to accommodate two A380s simultaneously.
Privilege Club[ edit ]
Qatar Airways' Privilege Club loyalty program has reciprocal agreements with Asiana Airlines ' Asiana Club, Middle East Airlines ' Cedar Miles, Royal Air Maroc ' Safar Flyer, [179] Gol Transportes Aéreos ' Smiles, [180] and All Nippon Airways ' Mileage Club frequent flyer schemes. Privilege Club also has tie-ups with international hotel and car rental companies.
Partnership with Lufthansa 's Miles and More and United 's Mileage Plus has been terminated as of December 31, 2011 and September 14, 2012, respectively. [181]
Lounge[ edit ]
This section needs to be updated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.
(October 2016)
The Premium Terminal, Qatar Airways' dedicated terminal for first and business class passengers, opened at Doha International Airport in Winter 2006. Built in nine months at a cost of US$90million, the 10,000sqm Premium Terminal features facilities include check-in, duty-free shopping , conference rooms, nursery and play area, spa treatment rooms, sauna, jacuzzi and restaurants. The business class lounge has undergone renovation that has increased the seating capacity by more than 80%. CEO Akabar Al Bakar is also leading the development of the New Doha International Airport, which opens in phases from June 2014. [182]
The airline's first lounge outside Doha opened at London Heathrow's Terminal 4 in January 2012 and Qatar Airways has opened its new Premium Lounge at Dubai-International 's Concourse D in April 2016 .
After commenced full operations at its new hub, Doha in 2014, Al Mourjan Business Lounge for Qatar Airways’ Premium passengers opened in July 2014. Al Mourjan Business Lounge is about 10 times the size of an Olympic size swimming pool and the Lounge access is for Qatar Airways and oneworld first and business class passengers only.
Later, in 2015 Qatar Airways opened Al Safwa First Lounge for its First class passengers, also Al Safwa lounge has been presented the prestigious Seven Star First Class Lounge Award by the Seven Stars Luxury Hospitality and Lifestyle Awards at an award ceremony held in Marbella , Spain on October 15. [183]
Accidents and incidents[ edit ]
A7-ABV, the aircraft that was destroyed in Abu Dhabi, taxiing at Charles de Gaulle Airport in 2001.
April 19, 2007: An Airbus A300 , registration A7-ABV, was written off as a result of a hangar fire during maintenance at Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies. [184] [185]
Qatar Airways' flight attendants
In 2013, The Economist claimed that "a perusal of online forums used by cabin crew suggests that Qatar has a reputation for severity among industry professionals, including "allegations of harsh treatment and overbearing scrutiny are commonplace", and that "the conditions laid down by Qatar Airways go beyond more familiar rules ... the employee can be fired if she becomes pregnant (which she is contractually obliged to disclose 'from the date of her knowledge of its occurrence')". [186] The airways' CEO Akbar Al Baker has previously stated, "We are not running an intelligence agency, we are an airline company. The reason why I know everything happening in the company is ... I'm simply everywhere, talking to everyone, listening to them". [187]
In 2014, the Swedish newspaper Expressen published a report ostensibly based around three Qatar Airways employees, whose lives were allegedly heavily "monitored" and "controlled" by the company. [188] Qatar Airways' Swedish PR agency responded to the report by stating, "Because we do not know which individuals and which particular cases the article is based on, Qatar Airways is unable to comment". [188] CEO Akbar Al Baker stated that the allegations "are not against [the company] but against [Qatar]". He added, "They are throwing stones at my country for no reason at all". [189]
The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) has "slammed" Qatar Airways for certain stipulations found in the standard hiring contracts for female cabin crew members, including the need to apply for permission before getting married. [189] The ITF has lobbied the International Civil Aviation Organization to "take action" on what ITF termed “flagrant abuses of aviation workers’ labour rights" by carriers based in Qatar and the UAE . [189]
In August 2015, Qatar Airways was forced into relaxing its policy of sacking cabin crew for getting pregnant or marrying in their first five years of employment. A spokeswoman stated “our policies have evolved with the airline’s growth”. Under the new regulations, “we will provide an opportunity for someone to continue working in a ground position”, the spokeswoman said. [190]
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| Qatar Airways |
'CL' is the international vehicle code for which country? | Qatar Airways Pre Induction Booklet July 2012 | Qatar | Doha
Qatar Airways Pre Induction Booklet July 2012
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Which Roman Emperor came between Claudius and Galba? | Roman Emperors - DIR Galba
[Additional entry on this emperor's life is available in DIR Archives]
John Donahue
College of William and Mary
Introduction
The evidence for the principate of Galba is unsatisfactory. The sources either concentrate on the personality of the man, thereby failing to offer a balanced account of his policies and a firm chronological base for his actions; or, they focus on the final two weeks of his life at the expense of the earlier part of his reign. [[1]] As a result, a detailed account of his principate is difficult to write. Even so, Galba is noteworthy because he was neither related to nor adopted by his predecessor Nero . Thus, his accession marked the end of the nearly century-long control of the Principate by the Julio-Claudians. Additionally, Galba's declaration as emperor by his troops abroad set a precedent for the further political upheavals of 68-69. Although these events worked to Galba's favor initially, they soon came back to haunt him, ending his tumultuous rule after only seven months.
Early Life and Rise to Power
Born 24 December 3 BC in Tarracina, a town on the Appian Way 65 miles south of Rome, Servius Galba was the son of C. Sulpicius Galba and Mummia Achaica. [[2]] Galba's connection with the noble house of the Servii gave him great prestige and assured his acceptance among the highest levels of Julio-Claudian society. Adopted in his youth by Livia, the mother of the emperor Tiberius , he is said to have owed much of his early advancement to her. [[3]] Upon her death, Livia made Galba her chief legatee, bequeathing him some 50 million sesterces. Tiberius , Livia's heir, reduced the amount, however, and then never paid it. Galba's marriage proved to be a further source of disappointment, as he outlived both his wife Lepida and their two sons. Nothing else is known of Galba's immediate family, other than that he remained a widower for the rest of his life.
Although the details of Galba's early political career are incomplete, the surviving record is one of an ambitious Roman making his way in the Emperor's service. Suetonius records that as praetor Galba put on a new kind of exhibition for the people - elephants walking on a rope. [[4]] Later, he served as governor of the province of Aquitania, followed by a six-month term as consul at the beginning of 33. [[5]] Ironically, as consul he was succeeded by Salvius Otho, whose own son would succeed Galba as emperor. Over the years three more governorships followed - Upper Germany (date unknown), North Africa (45) and Hispania Tarraconensis, the largest of Spain's three provinces (61). He was selected as a proconsul of Africa by the emperor Claudius himself instead of by the usual method of drawing lots. During his two-year tenure in the province he successfully restored internal order and quelled a revolt by the barbarians. As an imperial legate he was a governor in Spain for eight years under Nero , even though he was already in his early sixties when he assumed his duties. The appointment showed that Galba was still considered efficient and loyal. [[6]] In all of these posts Galba generally displayed an enthusiasm for old-fashioned disciplina, a trait consistent with the traditional characterization of the man as a hard-bitten aristocrat of the old Republican type. Such service did not go unnoticed, as he was honored with triumphal insignia and three priesthoods during his career.
On the basis of his ancestry, family tradition and service to the state Galba was the most distinguished Roman alive (with the exception of the houses of the Julii and Claudii) at the time of Nero's demise in 68. The complex chain of events that would lead him to the Principate later that year began in March with the rebellion of Gaius Iulius Vindex, the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis. Vindex had begun to sound out provincial governors about support for a rebellion perhaps in late 67 or early 68. Galba did not respond but, because of his displeasure with Neronian misgovernment, neither did he inform the emperor of these treasonous solicitations. This, of course, left him dangerously exposed; moreover, he was already aware that Nero , anxious to remove anyone of distinguished birth and noble achievements, had ordered his death. [[7]] Given these circumstances, Galba likely felt that he had no choice but to rebel.
In April, 68, while still in Spain, Galba "went public," positioning himself as a vir militaris, a military representative of the senate and people of Rome. For the moment, he refused the title of Emperor, but it is clear that the Principate was his goal. To this end, he organized a concilium of advisors in order to make it known that any decisions were not made by him alone but only after consultation with a group. The arrangement was meant to recall the Augustan Age relationship between the emperor and senate in Rome. Even more revealing of his imperial ambitions were legends like LIBERTAS RESTITUTA (Liberty Restored), ROM RENASC (Rome Reborn) and SALUS GENERIS HUMANI (Salvation of Mankind), preserved on his coinage from the period. Such evidence has brought into question the traditional assessment of Galba as nothing more than an ineffectual representative of a bygone antiquus rigor in favor of a more balanced portrait of a traditional constitutionalist eager to publicize the virtues of an Augustan-style Principate. [[8]]
Events now began to move quickly. In May, 68 Lucius Clodius Macer, legate of the III legio Augusta in Africa, revolted from Nero and cut off the grain supply to Rome. Choosing not to recognize Galba, he called himself propraetor, issued his own coinage, and raised a new legion, the I Macriana liberatrix. Galba later had him executed. At the same time, 68 Lucius Verginius Rufus, legionary commander in Upper Germany, led a combined force of soldiers from Upper and Lower Germany in defeating Vindex at Vesontio in Gallia Lugdunensis. Verginius refused to accept a call to the emperorship by his own troops and by those from the Danube, however, thereby creating at Rome an opportunity for Galba's agents to win over Gaius Nymphidius Sabinus , the corrupt praetorian prefect since 65. Sabinus was able to turn the imperial guard against Nero on the promise that they would be rewarded financially by Galba upon his arrival. That was the end for Nero . Deposed by the senate and abandoned by his supporters, he committed suicide in June. At this point, encouraged to march on Rome by the praetorians and especially by Sabinus , who had his own designs on the throne, Galba hurriedly established broad-based political and financial support and assembled his own legion (subsequently known as the legio VII Gemina). [[9]] As he departed from Spain, he abandoned the title of governor in favor of "Caesar," apparently in an attempt to lay claim to the entire inheritance of the Julio-Claudian house. Even so, he continued to proceed cautiously, and did not actually adopt the name of Caesar (and with it the emperorship) until sometime after he had left Spain. [[10]]
The Principate of Galba
Meanwhile, Rome was anything but serene. An unusual force of soldiers, many of whom had been mustered by Nero to crush the attempt of Vindex, remained idle and restless. In addition, there was the matter concerning Nymphidius Sabinus . Intent on being the power behind the throne, Nymphidius had orchestrated a demand from the praetorians that Galba appoint him sole praetorian prefect for life. The senate capitulated to his pretensions and he began to have designs on the throne himself. In an attempt to rattle Galba, Nymphidius then sent messages of alarm to the emperor telling of unrest in both the city and abroad. When Galba ignored these reports, Nymphidius decided to launch a coup by presenting himself to the praetorians. The plan misfired, and the praetorians killed him when he appeared at their camp. Upon learning of the incident, Galba ordered the executions of Nymphidius' followers. [[11]] To make matters worse, Galba's arrival was preceded by a confrontation with a boisterous band of soldiers who had been formed into a legion by Nero and were now demanding legionary standards and regular quarters. When they persisted, Galba's forces attacked, with the result that many of them were killed. [[12]]
Thus it was amid carnage and fear that Galba arrived at the capital in October, 68, accompanied by Otho , the governor of Lusitania, who had joined the cause. Once Galba was within Rome, miscalculations and missteps seemed to multiply. First, he relied upon the advice of a corrupt circle of advisors, most notably: Titus Vinius, a general from Spain; Cornelius Laco, praetorian prefect; and his own freedman, Icelus. Second, he zealously attempted to recover some of Nero's more excessive expenditures by seizing the property of many citizens, a measure that seems to have gone too far and to have caused real hardship and resentment. Third, he created further ill-will by disbanding the imperial corps of German bodyguards, effectively abolishing a tradition that originated with Marius and had been endorsed by Augustus . Finally, he seriously alienated the military by refusing cash rewards for both the praetorians and for the soldiers in Upper Germany who had fought against Vindex.
This last act proved to be the beginning of the end for Galba. On 1 January 69 the troops in Upper Germany refused to declare allegiance to him and instead followed the men stationed in Lower Germany in proclaiming their commander, Aulus Vitellius , as the new ruler. In response, Galba adopted Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi Licinianus to show that he was still in charge and that his successor would not be chosen for him. Piso, although an aristocrat, was a man completely without administrative or military experience. [[13]] The choice meant little to the remote armies, the praetorians or the senate, and it especially angered Otho , who had hoped to succeed Galba. Otho quickly organized a conspiracy among the praetorians with the now-familiar promise of a material reward, and on 15 January 69 they declared him emperor and publicly killed Galba; Piso, dragged from hiding in the temple of Vesta, was also butchered.
Assessment
In sum, Galba had displayed talent and ambition during his lengthy career. He enjoyed distinguished ancestry, moved easily among the Julio-Claudian emperors (with the exception of Nero towards the end of his principate), and had been awarded the highest military and religious honors of ancient Rome. His qualifications for the principate cannot be questioned. Even so, history has been unkind to him. Tacitus characterized Galba as "weak and old," a man "equal to the imperial office, if he had never held it." Modern historians of the Roman world have been no less critical. [[14]] To be sure, Galba's greatest mistake lay in his general handling of the military. His treatment of the army in Upper Germany was heedless, his policy towards the praetorians short sighted. Given the climate in 68-69, Galba was unrealistic in expecting disciplina without paying the promised rewards. He was also guilty of relying on poor advisors, who shielded him from reality and ultimately allowed Otho's conspiracy to succeed. Additionally, the excessive power of his henchmen brought the regime into disfavor and made Galba himself the principal target of the hatred that his aides had incited. Finally, the appointment of Piso, a young man in no way equal to the challenges placed before him, further underscored the emperor's isolation and lack of judgment. In the end, the instability of the post-Julio-Claudian political landscape offered challenges more formidable than a tired, septuagenarian aristocrat could hope to overcome. Ironically, his regime proved no more successful than the Neronian government he was so eager to replace. Another year of bloodshed would be necessary before the Principate could once again stand firm.
Bibliography
The works listed below are main treatments of Galba or have a direct bearing on issues discussed in the entry above.
Benediktson, Dale T. "Structure and Fate in Suetonius' Life of Galba." CJ 92 (1996-97): 167-172.
Bowman, Alan K. et al. The Cambridge Ancient History, X: The Augustan Empire. 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1996).
Brunt, P. A. "The Revolt of Vindex and the Fall of Nero." Latomus 18 (1959): 531-559.
Chilver, G. E. F. A Historical Commentary on Tacitus' Histories I and II. (Oxford, 1979).
Fluss, M. "Sulpicius (Galba)." Real-Encyclopädie IVA2.772-801 (1932).
Greenhalgh, P. A. L. The Year of the Four Emperors. (New York, 1975).
Haley, E. W. "Clunia, Galba and the Events of 68-69." ZPE 91 (1992): 159-164.
Keitel, E. "Plutarch's Tragedy Tyrants: Galba and Otho." Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar 8, Roman Comedy, Augustan Poetry, Historiography. edited by Roger Brock and Anthony J. Woodman. (Leeds, 1995): 275-288.
Kleiner, Fred S. "The Arch of Galba at Tarragona and Dynastic Portraiture on Roman Arches." MDAI(M) 30 (1989): 239-252.
________. "Galba and the Sullan Capitolium." AJN 1 (1989): 71-77.
________. "Galba Imperator Augustus P(opuli) R(omani)." RN 32 (1990): 72-84.
Murison, Charles L. Galba, Otho and Vitellius: Careers and Controversies. (Hildesheim, 1993).
________. Suetonius: Galba, Otho, Vitellius. (London, 1992).
Nawotka, Krzysztof. "Imperial Virtues of Galba in the Histories of Tacitus." Philologus 137 (1993): 258-264.
Sutherland, C. H. V. Roman Imperial Coinage, vol 1. (London, 1984).
Syme, R. "Partisans of Galba." Historia 31 (1982): 460-483.
________. Tacitus. (Oxford, 1958).
Townsend, G. B. "Cluvius Rufus in the Histories of Tacitus," AJPhil 85 (1964): 337-377.
Wellesley, Kenneth. The Long Year A. D. 69. 2nd. ed. (London, 1989).
Zimmerman, M. "Die restitutio honorum Galbas." Historia 44 (1995): 56-82.
Notes
[[1]] The main ancient sources for Galba's life are: Suet. Galba; Tac. Hist. 1.1-49; Plut. Galba; Dio 63.22-64.7. In addition, there were major works for this period by Cluvius Rufus, Fabius Rusticus and Pliny the Elder, but they have not survived. For an important discussion, see G. B. Townsend, "Cluvius Rufus in the Histories of Tacitus," AJPhil 85 (1964): 337-377.
[[2]] Galba's birthdate is impossible to determine. Suetonius give it as 24 December, 3 B.C. (Galba 4.1), yet in the final chapter of Galba's Life, he presupposes 5 B.C. as the date (Galba 23). Dio (64.6.52), taken with Tacitus' evidence (Hist. 1.27.1), also gives his birthdate as 5 B.C. The evidence given here is preferable, since Suetonius provides the information precisely and is concerned with Galba's actual birthdate, not the length of his life or his reign.
[[3]] Suet. Galba 4. This must be a testamentary adoption, since a woman in classical law was not allowed to adopt during her lifetime. See the commentary of Charles L. Murison, editor, Suetonius: Galba, Otho, Vitellius (London, 1991), 33.
[[4]] Suetonius' claim that Galba was the first to offer an exhibition of rope-walking elephants has been refuted. See J. M. C. Toynbee, Animals in Roman Life and Art (London, 1973), 48-49, 352 nn. 103-110. See also H. H. Scullard, The Elephant in the Greek and Roman World (London, 1974), 250-259.
[[5]] This governorship is slightly unconventional, since most nobiles in this period usually governed senatorial provinces as praetorian proconsuls, not important imperial provinces like Aquitania. Galba was perhaps being groomed for a career as a vir militaris. Regarding the consulship, there may have been a delay at some point in Galba's accession to the office. For a more complete discussion on this point, see Charles L. Murison, Galba, Otho and Vitellius: Careers and Controversies (Hildesheim, 1993), 35-36.
[[6]] On Galba's behavior in Spain, see Suet. Galba 9 and Murison, Careers and Controversies, 37-38. Galba's eight-year term, although lengthy, was not unprecedented. The time spent by an imperial legate as a provincial governor was entirely at the discretion of the emperor.
[[7]] On Nero's order for Galba's death, see Suet. Galba 9.2.
[[8]] On Galba's coinage, see C. H. V. Sutherland, Roman Imperial Coinage I.2, (London, 1984), 197-215, 216-257. On Galba as a strict constitutionalist in the Augustan mold, see Murison, Careers and Controversies, 31-44.
[[9]] To obtain the necessary financing Galba confiscated and sold all of Nero's property in Spain (Plut. Galba 5.6) and received a large amount of gold and silver from Otho (Plut. Galba 20.3). He also seems to have demanded contributions from communities in Spain and Gaul. See Tac. Hist. 1.8.1 and 1.53.3.
[[10]] On the chronology of Galba's journey from Spain to Rome, see Murison, Careers and Controversies, 27-30. On events at Rome, see K. Wellesley, The Long Year A.D. 69. 2nd ed. (Bristol, 1989), 15-30.
[[11]] For the most complete account of the Nymphidius affair, see Plut. Galba 2; 8-9; 13-15.
[[12]] Tac. Hist. 1.6.2; Plut. Galba 15; Dio 64.3.1-2. See also Murison, Careers and Controversies, 63-64.
[[13]] Piso Licinianus was the son of M. Licinius Crassus Frugi, consul in 27, and of Scribonia, a direct descendant of Pompey the Great. He was only about eight years old when his parents and eldest brother were executed as part of the senatorial opposition to the later Julio-Claudians. Tacitus records that he was diu exul (Hist. 1.48.1; cf. Hist. 1.21.1; 1.38.1), which would explain his lack of experience.
[[14]] Tac. Hist. 1.6.1; 1.49. R. Syme, "Partisans of Galba," Historia 31 (1982): 460-483. See also K. Nawotka, "Imperial Virtues of Galba in the Histories of Tacitus." Philologus 137 (1993): 258-264.
Copyright (C) 1999, John Donahue. This file may be copied on the condition that the entire contents, including the header and this copyright notice, remain intact.
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Which sport uses the terms 'Set', 'Spike' and 'Block'? | Vespasian | Roman emperor | Britannica.com
Roman emperor
Alternative Titles: Caesar Vespasianus Augustus, Titus Flavius Vespasianus
Vespasian
Diocletian
Vespasian, Latin in full Caesar Vespasianus Augustus, original name Titus Flavius Vespasianus (born November 17?, ad 9 , Reate [Rieti], Latium—died June 24, 79), Roman emperor (ad 69–79) who, though of humble birth, became the founder of the Flavian dynasty after the civil wars that followed Nero’s death in 68. His fiscal reforms and consolidation of the empire generated political stability and a vast Roman building program.
Bust of Vespasian, found at Ostia; in the Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome.
Anderson—Alinari/Art Resource, New York
Early life
Vespasian was the son of Flavius Sabinus, a Roman knight who had been a tax collector. His mother, Vespasia Polla, also belonged to the equestrian order in society but had a brother who entered the Senate. In his early life Vespasian was somewhat overshadowed by his older brother, Flavius Sabinus, who rose to hold an important command on the Danube about ad 48 and was prefect of Rome for many years under Nero . Although Vespasian is said to have hesitated before following his brother into the Senate, his career was in no sense retarded; for, after military service in Thrace and a quaestorship in Crete , he reached the praetorship in the earliest year allowed him by law, namely ad 39, the year in which his elder son, Titus , was born.
Vespasian ingratiated himself with the ruling emperor, Caligula (Gaius Caesar); and in the next reign, that of Claudius , he won the favour of the powerful freedman Narcissus . He became commander of the Legio II Augusta, which took part in the invasion of Britain in 43. After distinguished conduct at the crossing of the Medway River, he was given charge of the left wing of the advance; he proceeded to occupy the Isle of Wight and to conquer tribes as far west as Devon , capturing more than 20 “towns.” For these achievements he was awarded triumphal honours and appointed to two priesthoods, and in 51 he became consul . But, on Claudius’s death in 54, Narcissus, whose power had been waning, was driven to suicide; and for a time Vespasian received no further appointment. About 63 he obtained the proconsulate of Africa, where his extreme financial rigour made him so unpopular that on one occasion the people pelted him with turnips. There was no ground for suspecting personal enrichment, but the reputation for avarice remained with him the rest of his life.
In the autumn of 66 he accompanied Nero to Greece, where he was indiscreet enough to fall asleep at the emperor’s artistic performance. But this did not prevent his appointment, in February 67, to the command against the Jewish rebellion in Judaea , the scene of two disastrous Roman defeats in the previous year. The appointment was exceptional because Judaea had never before been garrisoned by a legionary army, and Vespasian was given three legions with a large force of auxiliary troops. For such an appointment Vespasian was regarded as a safe man—a highly competent general but one whose humble origins made it almost inconceivable that he would challenge Nero’s government should he win victories. As long as Nero was alive, this diagnosis was surely right. Vespasian conducted two successful campaigns in 67 and 68, winning almost all Judaea except Jerusalem . But on Nero’s death in June 68 he stopped fighting.
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This pause was surprising, and it was accompanied by the fact that at this moment, with his son Titus as intermediary, Vespasian settled certain differences he had had with the neighbouring governor of Syria, Gaius Licinius Mucianus. The matters discussed between the two commanders are unknown, but the circumstances cannot but raise the question whether they were already considering a bid for power. Vespasian seems to have claimed that further operations against the Jews required a directive from the new emperor, Galba . Such a claim may have been formally valid, but there may have also been underlying political considerations. Vespasian did eventually decide to accept Galba, whose noble descent, given the standards of the day, would have been daunting to a man of Vespasian’s position in society. He therefore remained quiet and in the following winter sent Titus to congratulate Galba.
The Roman Empire
The news of Galba’s murder on January 15, 69, reached Titus on his way at Corinth, and he returned to participate in more pregnant discussions between Vespasian and Mucianus. A civil war in Italy was now inevitable; but the main contenders , Otho and Vitellius , were both men whom Vespasian could reasonably hope to challenge. The chronology of Vespasian’s actions cannot be precisely determined; what is certain is that at the latest after Otho’s defeat and suicide on April 16, he began to collect support. On July 1, probably as a result of a contrived plot, the two Egyptian legions proclaimed him emperor, followed a few days later by the legions of Syria and Judaea. The ubiquitous response in other parts of the empire can hardly have been unplanned, despite Vespasian’s claim that his pronunciamento was a response to the misgovernment of Vitellius (who only reached Rome in mid-July).
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To ensure his base he had fought a brief campaign against the Jews in midsummer; but he now sent Mucianus with an expeditionary force to Dyrrhachium (Durazzo), where a fleet was instructed to meet him. Vespasian himself went to Alexandria and held up Rome’s corn supply. During August the Danubian armies made open their support for him; one of their legionary commanders, Antonius Primus, entered Italy with five legions, destroyed the main Vitellian force near Cremona , and sacked that city. Antonius then proceeded victoriously southward, entering Rome on December 20, when Vitellius was murdered by his own troops. But Antonius arrived too late to prevent the execution of Vespasian’s brother Sabinus, who had been persuaded to occupy the capitol, where his small force had been stormed by the Vitellians. It was also alleged that but for Antonius’s invasion and its destructive progress Vespasian’s victory could have been bloodless, a very doubtful claim. Vespasian gave no thanks to Antonius, whose final misfortune was that Mucianus was able to cross quickly to Rome and take over the reins of power.
Reign as emperor
On December 21 Vespasian’s position was officially confirmed by the Senate, but he remained quite frank about the military origin of his rule. He dated his powers to July 1, when the troops had acclaimed him, thus flouting constitutional precedent and contradicting even the behaviour of his rival Vitellius, who had awaited confirmation by the Senate. Later Vespasian received by law a number of powers for which his Julio-Claudian predecessors had not sought explicit sanction. Whether similar grants had been made to Galba, Otho, and Vitellius or were to be made to Vespasian’s successors is not known; but a fragment of the enabling law survives, and it includes a provision that can be said to confer on him a naked autocracy . More important to him than any legal enactment, however, was the recognition of his extralegal authority (auctoritas) and the prestige of his upstart house. He carefully publicized the divine omens that portended his accession and also built up the titles surrounding his name. He held the consulate, for brief periods on each occasion, every year of his reign except two; and he gave frequent consulates to his two sons, Titus and Domitian . He accumulated “salutations” as imperator from his armies and allowed Titus to share them with him. Throughout his reign he was insistent that his sons would succeed him, one after the other (Titus having no male issue); and it was probably over hereditary succession that he quarrelled with certain doctrinaire senators such as Helvidius Priscus , who was executed about 76. But Helvidius and his friends had already expressed general misgivings about Vespasian’s government in the early months of 70.
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About October 70 Vespasian returned to Rome from Alexandria. While in Egypt he had been concerned with raising money; and his exactions, coupled with sales of imperial estates to speculators, caused great discontent among the Egyptians. He now announced that about three times the revenue of the empire was needed to put the state to rights, and both before and after his return he promoted his financial program. He increased, and sometimes doubled, provincial taxation and revoked immunities granted to various Greek-speaking provinces and cities. He reclaimed public land in Italy from squatters and instituted various new taxes, including the diversion to Rome’s treasury of the tax paid by Jews of the Diaspora to the Temple at Jerusalem. Such measures were essential after the deficit incurred by Nero and the devastations of the civil wars, but contemporaries inevitably continued to charge Vespasian with “avarice.” Such a charge, however, was irrelevant to any emperor of the year 70.
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The sum raised by Vespasian for public funds cannot be determined. But he was able to build his Forum and the Temple of Peace, to begin the Colosseum over the foundations of Nero’s “Golden House,” and above all to restore the capitol. His biographer Suetonius claims that throughout Vespasian’s reign his firm policy was “first to restore stability to the tottering state, and then to adorn it.” But, despite his buildings and his generosity to needy friends, he probably bequeathed a substantial surplus of public money to his successors.
It was in the same spirit of stabilization that he turned to military affairs. The first task was to restore discipline to the armies after the events of 68–69. Before Vespasian’s return Mucianus reduced the Praetorian Guard , greatly enlarged by Vitellius, to approximately its former size; and the legions on the frontiers were soon regrouped to remove from dangerous positions those that had fought for Vitellius. Important changes were made in the East, where Vespasian replaced the single army (which until Nero’s time had only four legions) in Syria with three armies, with a total of six legions, in Cappadocia, Syria, and Judaea. Titus effectively ended the Jewish war with the capture of Jerusalem in August 70, and about the same time an alarming revolt in the Rhineland was broken by Vespasian’s cousin Petilius Cerealis . The way was now open for the improvement of certain frontiers. In southern Germany annexation of a territory called Agri Decumates cut off the reentrant angle formed by the Rhine at Basel. In Britain more important advances were made; the kingdom of Brigantia in northern England was incorporated in the province, the pacification of Wales was completed, and in 78 the general Gnaeus Agricola began the seven years’ governorship that was to lead Roman arms into the Scottish Highlands .
Vespasian had some difficulty with his sons at the beginning of his reign. Domitian had been overbearing and irresponsible in the months before his father’s return and was kept firmly in a junior position during the remaining years. With Titus there was cause for alarm when his troops, after his victory in Judaea, asked him to take them to Italy; but he returned alone. Although Titus was not allowed an independent triumph, he became virtually a partner in Vespasian’s rule, not only accumulating consulates and imperatorial salutations with his father but also being given command of the Praetorian Guard.
In 73 Vespasian and Titus became censors . In this office, although little is known about the details, they probably carried out extensive reorganization of the provincial communities , including some of the taxation reforms mentioned earlier. They bestowed Latin rights on all Spain, which meant that all city magistrates obtained Roman citizenship, with consequent profit to the imperial treasury; and no doubt Roman citizenship was granted liberally elsewhere. In addition they recruited many new members, provincial as well as Italian, to the Roman Senate .
With the Senate, despite the discords of the early months, Vespasian succeeded in maintaining friendly relations. To the historian Tacitus , who was embarking on his senatorial career in Vespasian’s last years, he was “the only emperor who had changed for the better.” With opponents he considered dangerous or irreconcilable, he could be ruthless: with Helvidius Priscus may be associated a group of “philosophers” who were expelled from Italy; and in 78 he executed Eprius Marcellus, one of his earliest and most efficient supporters, accused of a conspiracy that may have been directed at Titus’s association with the Jewish princess Berenice. But he showed good-natured tolerance of offensiveness that could do no harm.
Personal characteristics
Matching the rugged and uncompromising features that are familiar from his portrait busts, Vespasian cultivated a bluff and even coarse manner, characteristic of the humble origins he liked to recall. This was popular, as also were his great capacity for hard work and the simplicity of his daily life, which was taken as a model by the contemporary aristocracy . At the same time he was astute and ambitious; he built up a powerful party quickly at the outset, and many of his initial appointments were dictated by nepotism or the desire to reward past services. The policies of his reign, though sensible, reveal no great imaginativeness, compared with those of such later emperors as Trajan or Hadrian . Yet it was justly believed by contemporaries that Vespasian had prevented the dissolution of the empire by putting an end to civil war, and it was fitting that pax (“civil peace”) should be a principle motif on his coinage. In his last illness he said, “Vae, puto deus fio” (“Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god”); and after his death he was immediately accorded deification.
He had married one Flavia Domitilla, who bore his sons Titus and Domitian and a daughter, Flavia Domitilla (later deified). Both his wife and daughter died before he became emperor. He then returned to an earlier mistress, called Caenis, who had been a freedwoman of Antonia, sister-in-law to the emperor Tiberius; she too died before he did.
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Shrewsbury School
Moser Library Centenary
Forthcoming Events
These are just some of our events from our Calendar - Clicking on an event title will show the event in more detail.
Saturday 14 January 2017
11:00
Music Scholars' Recital at Emmanuel Church, Didsbury
Shrewsbury School musicians are looking forward to returning to the wonderful Emmanuel Church in Didsbury near Manchester for the seventh successive year.
This concert is part of an established series of Saturday morning 'Coffee Concerts' at Emmanuel Church, attracting a sizeable local audience.
Please come along and join them.
FREE admission
19:30
An Evening of Music in aid of OnTrack (Maidment Auditorium)
OnTrack is a charitable organisation aiming to deliver free tuition in music to young persons who are not in a position to pay in order that they may develop confidence and communication skills and thrive in society. They provide instruments, rehearsal venues and recording facilities too.
OnTrack's founder members are Mick Allport and Colin Green who have extensive experience as successful professional musicians and educators, and we are looking forward to an evening of music by Mick, Colin and guests in aid of the charity.
Mick Allport started playing in the Household Cavalry Military Band as a clarinettist. He then became a detective in Thames Valley Police for 13 years before returning to music and becoming a professional Saxophonist and Clarinettist, being a prominent figure at the Marlborough Jazz festival.
Colin Green’s career began with Rock singer Billy Fury and was subsequently Musical Director for Eddie Calvert, Georgie Fame and Alan Price. Since 1959 he has performed as a guitarist for recordings on disc with many of the leading acts of recent years including Elton John, Diana Ross, Paul Simon, Tom Jones, Kiri Te Kanawa, Gene Vincent, Jose Carreras, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Bjork. Musical Director for Dame Shirley Bassey from June 1995 to August 2003, conducting orchestras all over the world and her rendition of 'Goldfinger' at the 'Party at the Palace' celebration at Buckingham Palace; this was seen worldwide by an estimated audience of 200 million!
Please do join us for a wonderful evening of Jazz music in aid of a fantastic charity, the concert has been organised by Upper Sixth-Former Ben Higgins and admission is FREE- with a retiring collection in aid of OnTrack.
Tickets available from www.ticketsource.co.uk/shrewsburyschool or 01743 280812
Sunday 15 January 2017
11.00 am - 90-minute guided walk of Owen's Shrewsbury
2.00 pm - Lectures by Dr Guy Cuthbertson, Dr Martin Deahl and Dr Adrian Barlow
7.30pm - Recital of readings and chamber works
Tickets available from www.ticketsource.co.uk/stchadsshrewsbury or telephone 0333 666 3366 (booking fees apply), by post or in person from St Chad's Office, 1 St Chad's Terrace, Shrewsbury SY1 1JX (cheques payable to: The Friends of St Chad's Shrewsbury)
For more inforamtion, please email [email protected] or [email protected] .
Monday 30 January 2017
19:30
'Persuasion Lecture Series: The Holocaust': Freddy Naftel (Hodgson Hall)
Freddy Naftel describes himself as ‘a Holocaust Enrichment Educator.’ He is the son and grandson of German refugees; his great-grandmother survived the camps, but his great-aunt and uncle perished in Auschwitz.
He has spoken at over 150 schools throughout the UK, and in his presentations he usually concentrates on the issue of rising anti-Semitism, its causes and arguments.
In his talk he will consider the theme of Persuasion in relation to prejudice, discrimination and the Holocaust.
This talk takes place in the Haining Auditorium in Hodgson Hall and is open to members of the public. There is no charge for admission.
Thursday 2 February 2017
19:30
An Evening of Chamber Music performed by Music Scholars and Musicians of Shrewsbury School (Barber Institute, Birmingham)
Following last year's very successful concert in the Holywell Room in Oxford, do join us for what promises to be another wonderful evening of music-making at the very highest level, in the beautiful Art Deco buildings of The Barber Institute, opened by Queen Mary in 1939.
Tickets are FREE but must be booked in advance at www.ticketsource.co.uk/shrewsburyschool .
A pre-concert drinks reception will be held in the Gallery at the Barber Institute from 6.00 - 7.00pm. All audience members are warmly invited to attend - please contact Nikki Bevan if you wish to do so (email [email protected] ; tel. 01743 280521).
Friday 3 February 2017
19:30
Bastille Society: 'How Dictators Cheat': Dominic Howell, Intellitas (Hodgson Hall)
Dominic Howell, former Head of Politics at Merchant Taylors' School Northwood, is a veteran of dozens of election observation missions for the British government and the international community. He has also worked for community-based charities in three continents and managed the political reputation of a top ten FTSE company. Dominic is in a unique position to bring contemporary political issues alive in an academically rigorous, accessible manner.
'How Dictators Cheat' will highlight the importance of safe and fair elections, with case studies from Egypt, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan and others. This talk is designed to make students consider how the political process is interlinked; democracy is a permanent process, not an occasional event. Examples include how tax codes and fire regulations are used to silence opposition, as well as more brutal examples of overt political repression experienced worldwide. The talk also provides a practical demonstration of carousel voting, widely used to cheat in many countries, and how participation can be manipulated even in Western democracies. A must for any student interested in the links between History, Politics and Economics.
This talk takes place in Hodgson Hall and members of the public are welcome to attend. There is no charge for admission.
Saturday 25 February 2017
10:15
Open Day for prospective 13+ and 14+ entrants
Open Days are an opportunity for prospective parents and pupils to get a feeling for Shrewsbury and our aim is to give visitors a broad picture of School life. They are informal occasions that allow you to meet the Headmaster, Housemasters, academic staff and current pupils, tour the School and ask questions.
The day starts at 10.15am and concludes after a buffet lunch.
Places must be booked in advance, please see our Open Day page , which includes an online booking form.
Monday 6 March 2017
17:30
Shrewsbury School Chapel Choir sings Evensong in Lichfield Cathedral
Shrewsbury's Chapel Choir is in very fine form under its Director, Alex Mason. In the past two years, the Choir has sung Evensong at St George's Chapel Windsor, Worcester Cathedral, Southwell Minster, Tewkesbury Abbey, The Queen's College Oxford and, last September, Jesus College Cambridge.
Come and join them for a service of uplifting choral music in a return visit to Lichfield Cathedral on Monday 6th March 2017 at 5.30pm.
Following the service, the Headmaster and senior members of staff, including the Director of Music John Moore, will be hosting a Drinks Reception in the Cathedral.
We hope to run a Supporters' Coach from Shrewsbury to Lichfield free of charge.
Places at Evensong are limited and must be reserved in advance by contacting Nikki Bevan, email [email protected] , tel. 01743 280521. Please also let her know if you are able to attend the Drinks Reception and if you would like to book a place on the coach.
Sunday 12 March 2017
18:00
Shrewsbury School performs in the Cadogan Hall, London SW1X 9DQ
Shrewsbury School’s Symphony and Wind Orchestras return to perform in the splendid setting of the prestigious Cadogan Hall, alongside musicians from the old Salopian community and other invited guests.
It promises to be one of the major highlights of the School's concert season in one of the great concert venues in the UK, conveniently situated near Sloane Square.
Cadogan Hall is the home to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and hosts a full season of concerts, including the Proms, as well as having been a much used BBC Radio 3 venue.
The programme includes Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No, 1 in C major (Soloist Both Ruechuseth), Haydn’s London Symphony No, 104, Sibelius’ Finlandia, Scottish Dances by Malcolm Arnold and other works for orchestra.
Tickets cost £15 and are available from the Cadogan Hall Box Office: 020 7730 4500.
High tea will be served in the foyer at the Cadogan Hall before the concert from 4.30 - 5.30pm. All members of the audience are warmly invited to attend - please contact Nikki Bevan if you wish to do so (email [email protected] ; tel. 01743 280521).
Friday 17 March 2017
19:30
Semi-Toned: Sing Theory (Maidment Auditorium)
We are thrilled to welcome the fabulous winners of this year’s ‘The Choir: Gareth Malone’s Best in Britain’, shown on BBC 2.
Founded in 2010, and featuring Old Salopian Rob Cross, Semi-Toned is an all male a cappella group comprised of students from the University of Exeter.
The group started out as a barbershop quintet, before establishing themselves as a contemporary group with a wide range of repertoire. Praised for their creativity, uniqueness and vocal acrobatics the group embraces music of a variety of genres to ensure there really is something for everyone in any of their shows.
The group were featured on Olly Murs’ UK-wide tour in 2015, alongside the release of their highly acclaimed music video, ‘Rich Man’, which quickly became a viral hit. Later that year, they won the Voice Festival UK and in 2016 they embarked on an East Coast tour of the US.
Semi-Toned perform at the Edinburgh Fringe every year and have received 5* reviews for all their shows to date, with 'Toned Up' winning the highly coveted Bobby Award, reserved for the highest-rated shows of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
“The charm in this group lies within the fact that they don’t take themselves too seriously, and that each member brings their own quirky style to every number. This individuality is a breath of fresh air from the traditional show choir set-up, as they relate to the audience as people, not just shiny, stagey, Glee cut-outs.”
(Natasha Grainger, Edinburgh Fringe 2014)
Friday 24 March 2017
Save the Date: SSPA presents... The Shaken Not Stirred Ball
Welcome to Shrewsbury
Whilst I am delighted to welcome you to Shrewsbury School's website, I hope you will not regard a trawl through our web pages as a substitute for a visit in person.
Shrewsbury is a unique school in many ways. We are committed to strong academic standards and we believe in a vision of holistic education, as demonstrated through an incredible range of different activities and societies. We are passionate about boarding not just being for convenience, but in providing the best opportunity for young men and women to develop real confidence and belief in themselves. We are fortunate to have one of the best locations of any school in the country, a most beautiful site on the edge of one of the most historic county towns in England.
We are delighted that in September 2014 we welcomed our first cohort of Third and Fourth Form girls, building on the outstanding success of the introduction of girls into our Sixth Form in 2008. We believe our traditional values and time-honoured reputation will be enhanced by this move to full co-education. We are committed to providing an environment where young men and women can learn together on foundations of trust and mutual respect. We are confident that the future will be a more equal one and we support that historical evolution.
Above all, in the words of the motto of our youth club, based in inner-city Liverpool, ‘People matter more than things’. You will find at Shrewsbury a community which is aiming for the stars in every respect. Come and visit our beautiful school and meet some of the people who make it such an inspirational place.
Mark Turner
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Who is the husband of Dutch model Lara Stone? | Salopians | Article about Salopians by The Free Dictionary
Salopians | Article about Salopians by The Free Dictionary
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Salopians
Salop,
England: see Shropshire Shropshire
, county (1991 pop. 401,600), 1,348 sq mi (3,491 sq km), W England; administratively, Shropshire is a unitary authority (since 2009). It is also sometimes called Salop. The adminstrative center is Shrewsbury.
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References in periodicals archive ?
Once described as "the greatest Corinthian of the Edwardian period" - he turned down the chance to win a cap for Wales in 1903 to play for Old Salopians in the first Arthur Dunn Cup final - he played 170 times for Corinthian FC between 1897 and 1915 and toured the world with them.
How a Welshman's Corinthian spirit led to Brazilian brilliance
Victory over Saturday's visitors to The Book People Stadium would give Neville Powell's side a six-point advantage over the Salopians.
Letter: Viewpoints - Stalwart who never fouled
The Salopians actually went ahead with a drop goal in the fourth minute but it was the last time they led as wing Steve Hughes snared an interception try and Dan Richards kicked two penalties to hand his side an 11-3 advantage at the break.
Football: KEV: PAMPERED STARS IN FOR SHOCK
Before long Salopians were helping to run the club.
Rich boy, poor boy; It was a bold social experiment - the boys from a public school establishing a mission in Liverpool. But it worked and next year Shrewsbury House celebrates its centenary. David Charters reports
The county of Shropshire is, I suppose, the one unifying thread through this book, which combines a collection of famous Salopians with a handful of key events from the county's history.
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Which Spanish city is the home of football club 'Hercules'? | Official: Hercules Complete Signing Of Netherlands International Piet Velthuizen - Goal.com
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Aug 24, 2010 16:28:00
The former Vitesse shot-stopper moves to the Liga new boys...
La Liga new boys Hercules have pulled off a major coup by securing the signature of Dutch international goalkeeper Piet Velthuizen from Eredivisie side Vitesse .
The 23-year-old broke into the first team of the Arnhem club in 2007, and his performances were good enough to ensure a contract extension through to 2011.
In addition Velthuizen was a member of the Netherlands squad for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, and he has received one full international cap from Oranje. Now the big-spending promoted club have taken him to Spain for an undisclosed fee.
The shot-stopper will complete a medical tomorrow morning at the home of the Blanquiazules, and subject to there being no fitness concerns, he will be unveiled in a mass media press conference tomorrow afternoon.
Velthuizen becomes the eighth summer addition of Hercules, following other high-profile purchases such as Nelson Valdez from Borussia Dortmund and Mohammed Sarr from Belgian side Standard Liege.
Former French international striker David Trezeguet is also thought to be mulling over a move to the men from Alicante.
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Barcelona laboured to a 1-1 draw at Segunda Division B side Hercules in the first leg of their Copa del Rey fourth-round tie.
With El Clasico on the horizon this weekend, manager Luis Enrique made the expected sweeping changes for the trip to Alicante.
However, the visitors found themselves behind early in the second half when David Mainz bundled the ball in at the far post.
Barcelona soon equalised through a long-range effort from midfielder Carles Alena, his first goal for the club, on 58 minutes,...
Real Madrid must pay €18.4m in land case - Madrid city
Real Madrid president Florentino Perez was in charge of the club at the time of the land transfer in 1998.
The Madrid city government said on Monday it would give Real Madrid a bill for €18.4 million ($20.6m) in illegal state aid after the European Commission ordered the club to repay the money.
The commission ruled that Real had been given an "unfair advantage" through tax breaks and land transfers.
"The city hall will establish the measures necessary to carry out the decision of the European Commission to recover the aid of €18.4m granted to Real Madrid," the local government said in a...
Spain's EU state aid case explained as La Liga clubs face sanctions
The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union.
The European Commission ruled on Monday that seven La Liga clubs have received illegal state aid in recent years -- and that the money must now be repaid to the government coffers. We take a look at what the ruling actually means and how things might play out.
Q: What happened on Monday?
A: The European Commission ruled that various parts of the Spanish government had broken EU state-aid rules by providing illegal assistance to seven different La Liga clubs.
The headline finding was that Real Madrid...
Real Madrid, Barcelona among La Liga clubs ordered by EU to repay state aid
ESPN FC's Gab Marcotti gives his take on Spanish club's dominance in European competitions over the last three seasons.
Real Madrid, Barcelona and five other La Liga clubs were ordered Monday by the European Commission, the European Union's executive arm, to repay money to the Spanish government over various instances of the state providing aid to them.
European champions Real Madrid, Spanish league champions Barcelona, Athletic Bilbao and Osasuna were ordered to repay state tax credits given to them by Spain that date back 20 years.
The initial sum total was estimated to be €68.8 million euros, according to...
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On which island is the resort of Ayia Napa? | Christofinia Hotel – Luxury Resort, Ayia Napa, Cyprus - Home
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Postal Address: Nissi Avenue 112,P.O. Box 30281 5342 Ayia Napa
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Christofinia Hotel - Ayia Napa, Cyprus
Christofinia Hotel is situated in the islands leading cosmopolitan resort of Ayia Napa, 3km from the town centre and only 150 meters from the picturesque, white sands and crystal clear waters of Nissi Beach and Macronisos Beach.
The hotel offers a great opportunity for couples and families who wish to combine the best of what Ayia Napa has to offer, in the setting of a friendly, modern and relaxing atmosphere.
Hotel Overview
Cyprus may seem like a small island, but it is an island steeped in historical and natural beauty. Our Cyprus travel information pages and our hotel website will tell you everything you need to know in advance about Cyprus and Christofinia Hotel.
Christofinia Hotel, in Agia Napa, Cyprus occupies a superb location overlooking the golden sandy beaches and sparkling waters of Agia Napa. Christofinia Hotel is the perfect destination in Cyprus for vacations from March to October. Christofinia hotel has ensured that you can enjoy all that Cyprus has to offer. Christofinia Hotel’s guests are encouraged to try some of the amazing water sports offered. Facilities for diving and swimming are available close to the hotel. For a much more exciting Cyprus leisure activity the guests can experience scuba diving in the beautiful waters near the national park Cape Greko. Historical and religious sights’ such as Ayia Napa Monastery are situated in the centre of Agia Napa. Or there’s the naturally beautiful Cape Greko where you can go walking or cycling through the beautiful nature. Christofinia Hotel offers everything, from class, prestige, fine dining, swimming pools, gym but above all the best service with warmth that makes everyone feel at home. Experience, relax, play and be entertained at Christofinia Hotel.
Christofinia Hotel is the excellent choice for holiday-makers, couples and families, offering high standards of accommodation and impressive range of facilities in exclusive surroundings.
Cyprus is an island of spectacular beauty; a living mosaic of cultures, cuisine and undiscovered riches, Cyprus is a romantic place with something for everyone. You will receive a warm and friendly welcome from this fascinating island, with its wonderful beaches and clear blue seas.
With the country surrounded by the beautiful Mediterranean Sea there are more than enough beaches for you to experience. Agia Napa has the most beautiful sandy beaches in Cyprus and most of them are blue flag awarded. Not the only the sunny Mediterranean beaches enclosed by rugged cliffs can be found, but also cool cedar forests, scented orange groves and gentle meadows blanketed in wildflowers, charming villages, ruins of ancient civilisations and distinctive local cultures: there are whole worlds to discover in this exceptionally accessible island, where the service is extraordinary and the people are as warm as the Mediterranean sun.
As the sun sets and nightlife begins, you will find everything, from traditional taverns to lively bars and clubs. Take time to discover the breath-taking Troodos Mountains and the raw beauty of Akamas peninsula, or explore some of the island's rich history, from pre-historic tombs to Crusader castles.
The Agia Napa monastery is another major historical site and is located in the middle of the village of Ayia Napa surrounded by a high wall. It has extensive links to the history of Cyprus, as the name of the village is taken from the ancient Greek word for wooded valley, “Napa”. It was built in 1500 AD and is a well-known landmark close to Christofinia Hotel. Another Cyprus attraction is the naturally beautiful Cape Greko, which lies close to Ayia Napa on the way to Protaras. It is a protected natural park and has some beautiful and stunning sea caves, making it a popular choice for scuba divers.
Cyprus can really please everyone: couples, families and groups can choose between lively resorts and quieter settings with plenty of space to relax. Rich in history yet equipped with modern facilities, relaxing but also effortless full of surprises.
Cyprus is irresistible to everyone. As it has been for nine thousand year!
You can visit the island of Cyprus from Agia Napa, with Christofinia Hotel as your base.
| Cyprus |
Who partnered Bill Medley on the hit single '(I've Had) The Time Of My Life'? | Olympic Lagoon Resort Ayia Napa, Cyprus - Booking.com
Olympic Lagoon Resort Ayia Napa
Olympic Lagoon Resort Ayia Napa
http://www.booking.com/hotel/cy/olympic-lagoon-resort-ayia-napa.html
Xylofagou - Ayia Napa Road, 5330 Ayia Napa, Cyprus – Great location - show map
Excellent location — rated 9/10!
(score from 49 reviews)
Rated by guests after their stay at Olympic Lagoon Resort Ayia Napa.
Lock in a great price for Olympic Lagoon Resort Ayia Napa - rated 9.1 by recent guests.
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Superb 9.1 /10 Score from 49 reviews
Cleanliness
Everything you would expect from a hotel while on holiday. Fantastic!
Remi, United Kingdom
Everything. we would recommend the full board option, the food is great and the variety is fantastic, you will never get the same value eating out. The sea is so clean and the beach is beautiful!
Daria, Russia
Great place and staff defo booking again in future
Tony, United Kingdom
Everything was perfect (room was spotless, very comfortable bed, endless variety of delicious food). My requests were met above and beyond. The staff was excellent at every small detail. The hotel is a real gem and a small paradise. Highly recommend.
Nikoletta, Cyprus
A relaxing time was had with plenty of amenities available. All members of staff where helpful and very friendly.
Paul, Cyprus
overall fantastic experience,the staff I could,nt fault
Stephen, United Kingdom
Loved it all staff and entertainment were fantastic
Adam, United Kingdom
Resort was fantastic for both adults and children. Entertainment was really good, had something different every night with kids mini disco. Hotel grounds and facilities were clean. We had a basic room room which was quite compact for a family of 3 however we upgraded to a junior suite by the pool which was more than adequate. Restaurants were all excellent. Plenty to choose from at each meal in the buffet restaurant. American diner is great for burgers etc and Chinese restaurant was also great. Had a really good time here and struggle to find fault with anything. Hotel staff can't do enough for you. Planning to return next year.
David, United Kingdom
Value for money, friendly service, very good buffets
Oliver, Cyprus
One of the best resorts we'be stayed in. Great pools, excellent for kids, good food and lovely staff
Ayelet, Israel
9.5
This property is 1 minute walk from the beach. Just a few yards from the Landa Golden Beach in Agia Napa, the 4-star Olympic Lagoon Resort features 7 swimming pools surrounded by landscape gardens, a spa centre including sauna and hamam, 4 restaurants and a kid's club. Other facilities include a fitness centre, water slides, a tennis court and a games room.
All accommodation types at Olympic Lagoon are elegantly decorated in soft colours and wooden furnishings. Each is air conditioned and equipped with a flat-screen, satellite TV, a safe, a mini bar and a coffee machine. They all open to balconies or terraces, while some enjoy views over the garden, the pool or the Mediterranean Sea.
Guests can start their day with a rich certified Cypriot breakfast and then enjoy traditional Cypriot, Mediterranean or Japanese cuisine at one of the 4 restaurants for lunch or dinner, which also include special kids' buffet. Exotic cocktails can also be enjoyed at the modernly decorated bar or at the pool bar throughout the day.
Dedicated entertaining staff has a professionally designed program with outdoor and indoor activities. Extra services in Olympic Lagoon Resort include babysitting, room service and a 24-hour front desk. Free WiFi is available throughout and free on-site parking is possible.
The centre of Larnaca Town lies within 28 miles from the resort, while Larnaca International Airport is at a distance of 34.8 miles. Protaras is located 5 miles away and Nissi Beach is 3.1 miles away.
This property is also rated for the best value in Ayia Napa! Guests are getting more for their money when compared to other properties in this city.
We speak your language!
Olympic Lagoon Resort Ayia Napa has been welcoming Booking.com guests since 20 Mar 2015.
Hotel Rooms: 301
낍 Top location: Highly rated by recent guests (9)
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끸 Free private parking available on-site
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The most recent booking for this property was made on 17 Jan at 15:04 from Russia.
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Just booked in Ayia Napa: 2 resorts like Olympic Lagoon Resort Ayia Napa were just booked on our site
Eat, drink and relax at the onsite restaurant
Royal Restaurant
5 reasons to choose Olympic Lagoon Resort Ayia Napa
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Free! WiFi is available in all areas and is free of charge.
Parking
Free! Free private parking is possible on site (reservation is not needed).
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Tourist Information Ayia Napa 0.8 miles
Thalassa Museum 1 miles
Agia Napa Monastery 1.2 miles
Church of Profitis Elias 2.3 miles
Agia Napa Sea Caves 2.5 miles
Most popular landmarks
National Forest Park Kavo Gkreko 2.6 miles
Protaras Ocean Aquarium 4 miles
WaterWorld Ayia Napa 4.3 miles
Othello Tower 10.5 miles
Cyherbia Botanical Park 10.9 miles
Good to know
Cancellation/
prepayment
Cancellation and prepayment policies vary according to room type. Please enter the dates of your stay and check the conditions of your required room.
Children and extra beds
Free! One child under 2 years stays free of charge in a child's cot/crib.
The maximum number of children's cots/cribs in a room is 1.
There is no capacity for extra beds in the room.
Pets
Cards accepted at this property
Hover over the cards for more info.
Guests' Choice
#15 out of 159 hotels in Ayia Napa , based on 21,372 verified guest reviews
The fine print
This property serves traditional Cypriot breakfast certified by the Cypriot Tourism Organisation.
The property will be going through renovation works from Sun 29 Oct 2017 until Sat 31 Mar 2018. During this period, guests may experience some noise or light disturbances, and some hotel facilities and services may not be available.
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What is the name of the Neurosurgeon played by James Nesbitt in a recent ITV drama series? | James Nesbitt (Actor) - Pics, Videos, Dating, & News
James Nesbitt
Male
Born Jan 15, 1965
James Nesbitt is a Northern Irish actor. Born in Ballymena, County Antrim, Nesbitt grew up in the nearby village of Broughshane, before moving to Coleraine, County Londonderry. He wanted to become a teacher like his father, so he began a degree in French at the University of Ulster. He dropped out after a year when he decided to become an actor, and transferred to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.… Read More
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Meg Hemphill: The Hobbit World Premiere: An Unexpected Journey Indeed
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'\n Yesterday afternoon I arrived in Wellington, New Zealand\'s capital city, to stand on the red carpet for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey premiere (covering for Entertainment Weekly). It was a beautiful day -- upper 60s, light breeze, nary a cloud in the sky, but the 100,000 people lining the 500-meter long red carpet made it feel quite a bit warmer. I\'ve covered at least a dozen red carpets and have never seen anything this long (nearly a third of a mile) -- not at Harry Potter...
Learn about the memorable moments in the evolution of James Nesbitt.
CHILDHOOD
1965 Birth James Nesbitt was born on 15 January 1965 in Ballymena, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. … Read More
His father, James "Jim" Nesbitt, was the headmaster of the primary school in Lisnamurrican, a hamlet near Broughshane, while his mother, May Nesbitt, was a civil servant. Jim and May already had three daughtersâMargaret, Kathryn and Andrea. The family lived in the house adjoining the one-room school where Nesbitt was one of 32 pupils taught by Jim; the other pupils were all farmers' children. Nesbitt grew up "completely" around women, and spent a lot of time alone, "kicking a ball against a wall". He had ambitions to play football for Manchester United, or to become a teacher like his father. The family was Protestant, and Lisnamurrican was in "Paisley country". The Nesbitts spent Sunday evenings singing hymns around the piano. Jim marched in the Ballymena Young Conquerors flute band and Nesbitt joined him playing the flute. After the Drumcree conflicts, they stopped marching with the band. The family's residence in the countryside left them largely unaffected by The Troubles, although Nesbitt, his father, and one of his sisters narrowly escaped a car bomb explosion outside Ballymena County Hall in the early 1970s. Read Less
1972 7 Years Old Nesbitt had been approached at a British Academy Television Awards ceremony by director Paul Greengrass, who wanted him to star in a television drama he was making about the 1972 "Bloody Sunday" shootings in Derry. … Read More
Nesbitt was only seven years old when the shootings happened and was ignorant of its cause; he believed that there was "no smoke without fire" and that the Catholic marchers must have done something to provoke the British Army. He was filming Cold Feet in Manchester when he received the script. He read it and found that had "an extraordinary effect" on him. Nesbitt played Ivan Cooper in Bloody Sunday, the man who pressed for the march to go ahead. To prepare for the role, Nesbitt met with Cooper and spent many hours talking to him about his motives on that day. He met with relatives of the victims and watched the televised Bloody Sunday Inquiry with them, and also read Don Mullan's Eyewitness Bloody Sunday and Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson's Those Are Real Bullets, Aren't They? Greengrass compared Nesbitt's preparation to an athlete preparing for a race, and told The Observer, "For an Irish actor, doing the Troubles is like doing Lear." Nesbitt had questioned whether he was a good enough actor to effectively portray Cooper and was worried what Derry Catholics would think of a Protestant playing the lead, although Ivan Cooper himself is a Protestant. Read Less
TEENAGE
1978 13 Years Old …
When Nesbitt was 11 years old, the family moved to Coleraine, County Londonderry, where May worked for the Housing Executive. He completed his primary education at Blagh primary school, then moved on to Coleraine Academical Institution (CAI). Read Less
In 1978, when he was 13, his parents took him to audition for the Riverside Theatre's Christmas production of Oliver! … Read More
Nesbitt sang "Bohemian Rhapsody" at the audition and won the part of the Artful Dodger, who he played in his acting debut. He continued to act and sing with the Riverside until he was 16, and appeared at festivals and as an extra in Play For Today: The Cry (Christopher Menaul, 1984). He got his Equity card when the professional actor playing Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio broke his ankle two days before the performance, and Nesbitt stepped in to take his place. Acting had not initially appealed to him, but he "felt a light go on" after he saw The Winslow Boy (Anthony Asquith, 1948). When he was 15, he got his first paid job as a bingo caller at Barry's Amusements in Portrush. He was paid £1 per hour for the summer job and would also, on occasions, work as the brake man on the big dipper. Read Less
TWENTIES
1987 22 Years Old The day after leaving CSSD in 1987, Nesbitt got a bit part in Virtuoso, a BBC Two Screen Two television play about the life of John Ogdon. … Read More
He worked for two days on the play, earning £250 per day. His first professional stage appearance came in the same year, when he played Keith in Up on the Roof. The musical ran at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth, before transferring to the London West End. Read Less
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Nesbitt reprised the role when the production returned to Plymouth in early 1989. … Read More
Roger Malone in The Stage and Television Today wrote that Nesbitt "steals the show with the best lines and best delivery as he laconically squares up to life with an easy contentment". Read Less
Nesbitt appeared in two other plays in 1989; in June, he played Dukes Frederick and Senior in Paul Jepson's As You Like It at the Rose Theatre Club, and then appeared in Yuri Lyubimov's version of Hamlet. … Read More
Hamlet had been translated back to English from Boris Pasternak's Russian translation. It ran at the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester for a month before a transfer to the Old Vic and then a nine-month world tour. Nesbitt played Guildenstern, Barnardo and the second gravedigger. He recalled that the play received "shocking" reviews, but was exciting.<br /><br /> In the early 1990s, he lived with fellow actor Jerome Flynn and earned money by signing fan mail for the successful star of Soldier Soldier. In his debut feature film, Hear My Song (Peter Chelsom, 1991), Nesbitt played Fintan O'Donnell, a struggling theatrical agent and friend of Mickey O'Neill (Adrian Dunbar). A New York Times critic wrote, "the jaunty, bemused Mr. Nesbitt, manages to combine soulfulness with sly humor". The praise he received made him self-assured and complacent; in 2001, he recalled, "When I did Hear My Song, I disappeared so far up my own arse afterwards. I thought, 'Oh, that's it, I've cracked it.' And I'm glad that happened, because you then find out how expendable actors are." His attitude left him out of work for six months after the film was released. Until 1994, he mixed his stage roles with supporting roles on television in episodes of Boon, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Covington Cross, Lovejoy, and Between the Lines. Read Less
Nesbitt was married to Sonia Forbes-Adam, the daughter of Reverend Sir Timothy Forbes Adam. The two met when Nesbitt went to the final call-back for Hamlet at Loughborough Hall in 1989, and they soon began dating. They split up for a year after the release of Hear My Song but reunited and married in 1994. … Read More
They have since had two daughters, Peggy and Mary (both of whom appeared in the final two Hobbit movies as the daughters of Bard the Bowman). Nesbitt's three sisters all became teachers. Read Less
1993 28 Years Old In 1993, he appeared in Love Lies Bleeding, an instalment of the BBC anthology series Screenplay and his first appearance in a production directed by Michael Winterbottom; he later appeared in Go Now (1995), Jude (1996) and Welcome to Sarajevo (1997). … Read More
A Guardian journalist wrote that "he showed himself to be a generous supporting actor" in Jude and Sarajevo.<br /><br /> Back on stage, he appeared as Doalty in Translations (Gwenda Hughes, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 1991), Aidan in Una Pooka (Mark Lambert and Nicholas Kent, Tricycle Theatre, 1992), Damien in Paddywack (Michael Latimer), Cockpit Theatre, 1994), and Jesus in Darwin's Flood (Simon Stokes, Bush Theatre, 1994). Read Less
1994 29 Years Old Paddywack, in which Nesbitt's character is suspected by others of being an IRA member, transferred to the United States for a run at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut in October 1994. … Read More
A Variety critic called Damien "the play's only fully developed character" and commended Nesbitt for giving "the one strong, telling performance the cast". Read Less
THIRTIES
In 1996, Nesbitt appeared in an episode of the BBC Northern Ireland television drama Ballykissangel, playing Leo McGarvey, the ex-boyfriend of Assumpta Fitzgerald (Dervla Kirwan) and love rival of Peter Clifford (Stephen Tompkinson). … Read More
He reprised the role for four episodes in 1998. Read Less
In 1996, Nesbitt auditioned to play Adam Williams, the male lead in Cold Feet, an ITV Comedy Premiere about three couples in different stages of their romantic relationships. … Read More
The audition came about through a mutual friend of Nesbitt's and the director, Declan Lowney. The producer, Christine Langan, had also recalled his performances in Hear My Song and Go Now. Adam had not been written with an Irishman in mind to play himâEnglish writer Mike Bullen had written the character as a thinly veiled portrayal of himself in his youthâbut Nesbitt wanted to take the opportunity to appear in a contemporary drama as an ordinary man from Northern Ireland with no connection to the Troubles, especially after the Troubles-based plot of Love Lies Bleeding. Cold Feet was a critical success; it won the 1997 Golden Rose of Montreux and the 1997 British Comedy Award for Best ITV Comedy and was thus commissioned for a full series. Cold Feets first series aired at the end of 1998 and was followed by the second series in 1999. A storyline in that series featured Adam being diagnosed with testicular cancer, which inspired Nesbitt to become a patron of the charity Action Cancer. By the time of the third series, Nesbitt and the other cast members were able to influence the show's production; an episode featuring Adam's stag weekend was due to be filmed on location in Dublin but Nesbitt suggested it be filmed in Belfast and Portrush instead. Several scenes were filmed at his old workplace Barry's Amusements, although they were cut from the broadcast episode. At the end of the fourth series in 2001, Nesbitt decided to quit to move on to other projects. Read Less
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Cold Feet ran for five years from 1998 to 2003, and Nesbitt won the British Comedy Award for Best TV Comedy Actor in 2000, the Television and Radio Industries Club Award for Drama TV Performer of the Year in 2002, the National Television Award for Most Popular Comedy Performance in 2003, and the TV Quick Award for Best Actor in 2003. … Read More
Nesbitt credits the role with raising his profile with the public. Further television roles during these five years included women's football team coach John Dolan in the first two series of Kay Mellor's Playing the Field (appearing alongside his Cold Feet co-star John Thomson), investigative journalists Ryan and David Laney in Resurrection Man (Marc Evans, 1998) and Touching Evil II respectively, and womaniser Stanley in Women Talking Dirty (Coky Giedroyc, 1999). Read Less
Nesbitt's performance in Hear My Song had also impressed first-time screenwriter and film director Kirk Jones, who cast him in his 1998 feature film Waking Ned.
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Playing amiable pig farmer "Pig" Finn brought Nesbitt to international attention, particularly in the United States (where the film was released as Waking Ned Devine); the cast was nominated for the 1999 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Theatrical Motion Picture.
In 1999, he appeared as the paramilitary "Mad Dog" Billy Wilson in The Most Fertile Man in Ireland (Dudi Appleton). … Read More
The following year, he appeared in Declan Lowney's feature debut, Wild About Harry. Lowney had personally asked him to appear in the supporting role of cross-dressing Unionist politician Walter Adair. Read Less
2001 36 Years Old In 2001, he made his debut as a lead actor in a feature film in Peter Cattaneo's Lucky Break. … Read More
He played Jimmy Hands, an incompetent bank robber who masterminds an escape from a prison by staging a musical as a distraction. On preparing for the role, Nesbitt said, "Short of robbing a bank there wasn't much research I could have done but we did spend a day in Wandsworth Prison and that showed the nightmare monotony of prisoners' lives. I didn't interview any of the inmates because I thought it would be a little patronising as it was research for a comedy and also because we were going home every night in our fancy cars to sleep in our fancy hotels." The film was a commercial failure, despite receiving good feedback from test audiences in the United States. Read Less
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Shortly before Bloody Sunday was broadcast, Nesbitt described it as "difficult but extraordinary" and "emotionally draining". The broadcast on ITV in January 2002 and its promotion did not pass without incident; he was criticised by Unionists for saying that Protestants in Northern Ireland felt "a collective guilt" over the killings. … Read More
His parents' home was also vandalised and he received death threats. During the awards season, Nesbitt won the British Independent Film Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a British Independent Film and was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor. The film was also screened at film festivals such as the Stockholm International Film Festival, where Nesbitt was presented with the Best Actor award.<br /><br /> In an analysis of the film in the History & Memory journal, Aileen Blaney wrote that it is Nesbitt's real-life household name status that made his portrayal of Cooper such a success. She reasoned that Nesbitt's celebrity status mirrors that of Cooper's in the 1970s: "A household name across Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic sic, Nesbitt's widespread popular appeal is emphatically not contingent upon his Protestant Ulster identity, and consequently the double-voicing of the character he plays does not alienate viewers of an alternative, or no, sectarian persuasion." Guardian journalist Susie Steiner suggested that his appearance in Bloody Sunday was an attempt to resolve the expression of his "Irishness" on screen: "Where he has taken part in a sectarian theme, his intelligence as an actor has often been masked by an excessive, cartoon-style comedy. Yet in his more successful, high-profile roles, (notably in Cold Feet, and as Pig Finn in the gently pastoral film Waking Ned), Nesbitt's Irishness has been exploited for its romantic charm. Read Less
In 2002, Nesbitt made his documentary debut as the presenter of James Nesbitt's Blazing Saddles, a production for BBC Choice that saw him spend two weeks in Las Vegas at the National Finals Rodeo and the Miss Rodeo America pageant. … Read More
In 2007, he was the guest host of an episode of the late-night Channel 4 comedy The Friday Night Project. Read Less
In 2002, a Sunday tabloid published an interview with a legal secretary who claimed to have had a two-month affair with Nesbitt. … Read More
Shortly afterwards, another tabloid story revealed an affair with a prostitute, who claimed Nesbitt had boasted of liaisons with his Cold Feet co-star Kimberley Joseph, and Amanda Brunker, a former Miss Ireland. Commenting on the publication of details about his personal life, Nesbitt has said he feared that he would lose his marriage, though the exposing of his "dual life" allowed him to "take a long and considered look" at himself. In October 2013, Nesbitt announced that he and his wife Sonia Forbes-Adam would separate from each other after 19 years. The couple says that the filming of The Hobbit Trilogy has forced the couple to live separately for the past two years. The split came as a mutual decision and the couple says that infidelity was not one of the reasons for their decision.<br /><br /> Nesbitt is a patron of Wave, a charity set up to support those traumatised by the Troubles. The charity faced closure due to funding problems before Nesbitt encouraged celebrities and artists to become involved. Since 2005, he has been a UNICEF UK ambassador, working with HIV and AIDS sufferers, and former child soldiers in Africa. He describes the role as "a privilege". Writing in The Independent about his visit to Zambia in 2006, Nesbitt concluded that the children he met were owed a social and moral responsibility. The article was described in the Evening Standard as "moving and notably well-crafted". Read Less
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In 2003, Nesbitt played undercover police detective Tommy Murphy in the first series of Murphy's Law, after starring in a successful pilot episode in 2001. … Read More
The series was conceived when Nesbitt was working on Playing the Field; he and producer Greg Brenman approached author Colin Bateman about creating a television series for Nesbitt in a similar vein to Bateman's Dan Starkey novels. Bateman and Nesbitt were already well acquainted; Nesbitt had been considered for a main role in Divorcing Jack (David Caffrey, 1998), based on Bateman's original novel. A 90-minute pilot of Murphy's Law was commissioned by the BBC, initially as a "comedy action adventure". Bateman created a complex backstory for Murphy, which was cut at the request of the producers. After the broadcast of the pilot, Guardian critic Gareth McLean wrote, "the likeable James Nesbitt turned in a strong, extremely watchable central performance, though rarely did he look taxed by his efforts, and his chemistry with Claudia Harrison was promising and occasionally electric." Read Less
In 2003, Nesbitt won the Irish Film & Television Award (IFTA) for Best Actor in a TV Drama for the role. … Read More
The second series was broadcast in 2004.<br /><br /> By 2005, Nesbitt had become tired of the formula and threatened to quit unless the structure of the series was changed. He was made a creative consultant and suggested that Murphy keep one undercover role for a full series, instead of changing into a new guise every episode. This new dramatic element to the series was intended to make it a closer representation of real-life undercover work. Alongside his research with former undercover officer Peter Bleksley, Nesbitt hired a personal trainer and grew a handlebar moustache to change Murphy's physical characteristics and tone down the "cheeky chappie" persona that the audience had become accustomed to from his roles. With his trainer, he worked out three times a week, boxing and doing circuits and weights. After the first new episode was broadcast, Sarah Vine wrote in The Times, "In the past, when attempting a nasty stare or a hard face, Nesbitt has never managed much more than a faintly quizzical look, hilarity forever threatening to break out behind those twinkly Irish eyes. But here, it's different. He genuinely has the air of a man who means business." The refreshed series marked another milestone in Nesbitt's career; he describes it as "a big moment" in his life. Murphy's Law was not recommissioned for a sixth series, which Nesbitt attributed to the damage done to the fifth series ratings when it was scheduled opposite the popular ITV drama Doc Martin. Read Less
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An amateur golfer since his teenage years, Nesbitt joined the European team for Sky One's All*Star Cup in 2005 and 2006. Read Less
He signed up to a series of high-profile television advertisements for the Yell Group in 2003, playing a hapless character called James for the company's Yellow Pages campaign until 2006. … Read More
Times writer Andrew Billen noted that the adverts "cost him some credibility" but Nesbitt was pleased with the money he made from them. In 2004, he joined the supergroup Twisted X to produce "Born in England", an unofficial anthem for the England national football team's entry in the UEFA Euro 2004 tournament. His vocals have also appeared in Lucky Break and an episode of Cold Feet. The song he performed in the latterâ"(Love Is) The Tender Trap"âwas released on one of the series' soundtrack albums. He also contributed vocals to the Waking Ned soundtrack. A fan of Northern Irish band Ash, he made a cameo in their unreleased film Slashed. In 2009, he starred in the music video for "The Day I Died", a single by English dance-pop artist Just Jack. Nesbitt was recommended to Just Jack by Elton John. Nesbit is scheduled to host the 2013 British Independent Film Awards in London on 8 December 2013. Read Less
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Nesbitt returned to theatre acting in June 2005 when he appeared in David Nicholls' After Sun, a ten-minute-play performed as part of the Old Vic's 24-Hour Play season. … Read More
Nesbitt and Catherine Tate starred as a married couple who meet a pair of newlyweds returning from their honeymoon. Later that year, he appeared in his first full-length play in 11 years, in Owen McCafferty's Shoot the Crow. He enjoyed the stimulation of learning his lines and rehearsing with the cast and director. Read Less
The play opened at the Trafalgar Studios in September 2005 and his role as Socrates gained mixed reviews. … Read More
In The Independent, Michael Coveney suggested the role did not fit the actor: "Nesbitt is cool. But I never felt that he was inside his role of a chap called Socrates He grinned and shrugged through the evening which steadily became less about grouting on tiles and more about grating on nerves." In The Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer described Nesbitt's acting as "outstanding". Read Less
At the end of 2005, Nesbitt and his agent met with BBC Controller of Fiction Jane Tranter to discuss a new series of Murphy's Law. … Read More
At the meeting's conclusion, Tranter offered Nesbitt the first episode script of Jekyll, a television series by Steven Moffat that updated Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Nesbitt spent three hours reading the script before accepting the role of Tom Jackmanâand his alter-ego Mr Hyde. After signing on for the role, he met with Moffat and Hartswood Films executive producer Beryl Vertue to discuss the character, and had several make-up tests. Read Less
As a film awards presenter, he hosted the IFTA Awards ceremony for three consecutive years between 2005 and 2007, the British Independent Film Awards from 2005 to 2010, and the National Movie Awards in 2008 and 2010.
2006 41 Years Old His anticipation for the part was heightened because filming was not scheduled to begin until September 2006. … Read More
Nesbitt spent an hour each day being made up as Hyde; a wig altered his hairline and prosthetics were added to his chin, nose and ear lobes. He also wore black contact lenses to make Hyde "soulless", though CGI was used to show the transformation from Jackman in close-ups. The series was broadcast on BBC One in June and July 2007. The role secured him a nomination from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for the Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television, and a nomination for the Rose d'Or for Best Entertainer. Read Less
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In 2008, he portrayed Pontius Pilate in The Passion, a BBC/HBO adaptation of the last week in the life of Jesus. … Read More
He had originally rejected the script due to other filming commitments, but accepted the role after his agent told him to re-read it before making a final decision. He was pleased to learn that the serial was being produced by Nigel Stafford-Clark, whose Bleak House adaptation he had enjoyed, and that he would be appearing with his Jekyll co-star Denis Lawson. Contrary to previous portrayals of Pilate, Nesbitt played the biblical figure as "nice", andâas when playing Jack Parlabaneâused his own accent. The serial was broadcast in the UK during Easter week 2008. Read Less
Shortly after filming The Passion, he filmed the part of journalist Max Raban in the Carnival Films thriller Midnight Man, which was shown on ITV in May 2008. … Read More
It won him a joint nomination (along with the 2007 series of Murphy's Law) for the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for Best Actor. At the end of the year, he had a starring role in the low-budget independent film Blessed. The writer and director Mark Aldridge scripted the character of Peter with Nesbitt in mind to play him. The film had a limited release throughout 2008 and 2009 before the BBC screened it on television in 2010. Nesbitt said, "The role of Peter is what I have dreamed about playing, you wait your whole life for an opportunity like this and when it comes you have to grab it."<br /><br /> The following year, Nesbitt co-starred with Liam Neeson in the fact-based television film Five Minutes of Heaven (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2009). The first part of the film dramatises the real-life murder of Jim Griffin by Alistair Little in 1970s Lurgan; the second part features a fictional meeting between Little (Neeson) and Jim's brother Joe (Nesbitt) 33 years later. Nesbitt met with Griffin before filming began to learn about how his brother's murder affected him. The film was broadcast on BBC Two in April 2009. He also starred as Colour Sgt. Mike Swift in Peter Bowker's three-part BBC/Kudos television serial Occupation. In Occupation, set over six years, Nesbitt's character is one of three British soldiers who return to Basra, Iraq after their tours have concluded. Read Less
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He continued to be represented in the United Kingdom by Artists Rights Group. The next year Nesbitt played the hunter Cathal in the low-budget British horror film Outcast, which was a departure from his previous character types. After screening at major international film festivals in early 2010, the film had a general release in the latter part of the year. Nesbitt had previously worked with the film's director and co-writer Colm McCarthy on Murphy's Law, which was one reason he took the role. He researched the mythical aspects of the character by reading about Irish folklore and beliefs. He also starred alongside Minnie Driver and his Welcome to Sarajevo co-star Goran ViÅ¡njiÄ in the Tiger Aspect television serial The Deep. In the five-part drama, Nesbitt played submarine engineer Clem Donnelly. The serial was filmed over 12 weeks at BBC Scotland's studios in Dumbarton. August 2010 saw the release of Nadia Tass's film Matching Jack, in which Nesbitt plays the leading role of Connor. He became involved in the film after reading an early script draft in 2006. Read Less
In 2008, the global financial crisis severely reduced the budget of the film, and Nesbitt volunteered a reduction in his salary so the film could still be made. … Read More
The film was shot over eight weeks in Melbourne in 2009 and released in 2010.<br /><br /> Next, Nesbitt reunited with Occupation screenwriter Peter Bowker to star in the ITV medical drama series Monroe, playing Gabriel Monroe. Nesbitt was Bowker's first choice for the part. Nesbitt researched the role of the neurosurgeon character by watching brain surgery being performed by Henry Marsh, and by consulting Philip Van Hille at Leeds General Infirmary. The series was filmed over 12 weeks in Leeds at the end of 2010 and broadcast on ITV during March and April 2011. Nesbitt will reprise the role in a second series, which is due to begin production in 2012. In film, Nesbitt co-stars as Irish writer Jack in Emilio Estevez's drama The Way, alongside Martin Sheen, Deborah Kara Unger, and Yorick van Wageningen, and has a role as Sicinius in Ralph Fiennes' contemporary Shakespeare adaptation Coriolanus. Read Less
| Monroe |
Which Harvard Professor features in the novels 'Angels And Demons' and 'The Da Vinci Code' by Dan Brown? | Monroe (TV Series 2011– ) - IMDb
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Medical drama series about brilliant neurosurgeon Gabriel Monroe.
Stars:
Sally Fortune,one of Monroe's team,collapses during an operation and is revealed to have a life-threatening aneurysm requiring immediate surgery. It is successful and even brings Monroe closer to ...
8.0
Laurence surprises Monroe with the news that he is thinking of leaving to work elsewhere but changes his mind after a talk with Jenny,where she tells him why she shies away from relationships. ...
7.9
Young ex-soldier David Foster is admitted with a blood clot caused when he fell off a wall whilst stoned. Monroe decides against surgery as he feels the clot could disappear but David's parents are ...
7.8
Grimm Video: 'Decimated' Hadrian's Wall, a New (?) Eve, Adalind's Ring Dilemma and More Season 6 Scoop
27 July 2016 2:29 PM, -08:00 | TVLine.com
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Murphy's Law (TV Series 2003)
Crime | Drama | Mystery
As a maverick cop with a dark past, DS Tommy Murphy fails a psychiatric assessment but is given one last chance by his boss and given a dangerous undercover assignment.
Stars: James Nesbitt, Del Synnott, Sarah Berger
Murphy's Law (TV Movie 2001)
Crime | Drama
Tommy Murphy is a tough talking cop. He is a bit of a womeniser and is particularly interested in Annie, his colleague, who is later is boss. An excellent undercover cop, Murphy, solves ... See full summary »
Director: John Strickland
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 8.2/10 X
London, 2007. Tom Jackman is the only living descendent of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He has made a deal with his dark side: a body share. What Mr. Hyde doesn't know is that Tom has a family.... See full summary »
Stars: James Nesbitt, Gina Bellman, Denis Lawson
Cold Feet (TV Series 1997)
Comedy | Drama | Romance
At times comedic and at other times heartbreaking, the series follows the intertwining lives of three Manchester couples at different stages in their relationships. At the start, Adam ... See full summary »
Stars: James Nesbitt, John Thomson, Robert Bathurst
Midnight Man (TV Mini-Series 2008)
Drama | Thriller
Conspiracy thriller starring James Nesbitt as a down-on-his-luck journalist who uncovers a dangerous secret.
Stars: James Nesbitt, Catherine McCormack, Rupert Graves
The Deep (TV Mini-Series 2010)
Action | Adventure | Drama
A research submarine beneath the Arctic stumbles upon a terrifying secret with Earth-shattering consequences.
Stars: James Nesbitt, Orla Brady, Goran Visnjic
Three ex-servicemen return to Basra, each for a different reason.
Stars: James Nesbitt, Stephen Graham, Warren Brown
Single mother DCI Janine Lewis struggles with the problems of bringing up four children while leading her team of detectives in solving high-profile murders.
Stars: Caroline Quentin, Ian Kelsey, Paul Loughran
Set in Edinburgh, the mercurial Detective Inspector John Rebus's investigations lead him through the city's ancient beauty and into its more sinister quarters.
Stars: Ken Stott, Claire Price, Jennifer Black
Inspector George Gently (TV Series 2007)
Crime | Drama | Mystery
With the help of DS John Bacchus, Inspector George Gently spends his days bringing to justice members of the criminal underworld who are unfortunate enough to have the intrepid investigator assigned to their cases.
Stars: Martin Shaw, Lee Ingleby, Simon Hubbard
Touching Evil (TV Series 1997)
Crime | Drama | Mystery
Touching Evil is a crime drama following the exploits of a crack squad on the Organised & Serial Crime Unit, a rapid response police force that serves the entire county.
Stars: Robson Green, Nicola Walker, Shaun Dingwall
The life and career of British singer and entertainer Cilla Black
Stars: Sheridan Smith, Aneurin Barnard, John Henshaw
Did You Know?
Trivia
The actors prepared for their roles by watching operations; James Nesbitt watched two neurosurgeons performing brain surgery and Sarah Parish watched heart surgery. See more »
Connections
excellent hospital drama with the personal touch
4 May 2011 | by steviec1972
(United Kingdom) – See all my reviews
Having been a big fan of james nesbitt's since his cold feet days i was really looking forward to this new drama as the character Monroe (a larger than life, wise cracking, chain smoking neurosurgeon) seems to be made for nesbitt's charming and sometimes overconfident persona and i was certainly not disappointed. Whilst previous hospital dramas hailing from the UK have tried to imitate their US counterparts with their clichéd, overburdened, permanently exhausted staff, Monroe has an edge to it which subtly introduces us to the personal complexities and difficulties needed to survive in a field where the mortality rate is so high. Everything about this drama is top notch from the writing,the acting, to the highly entertaining incidental music. Don't be put off by 'lame' reviews dissing this as a poor UK remake of House. Not only is it almost completely different from House (the similarities ending in it's set in a hospital)it is superior in every way. Trust me give this drama a chance you won't be disappointed.
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| i don't know |
Which member of the Royal Family married Katharine Worsley in 1961? | Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, Marries Katharine Worsley, June 1961 | The Royal Forums
Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, Marries Katharine Worsley, June 1961
June 8, 2009 at 1:25 pm by PrincessofEurope
On the 8th June 1961, Miss Katharine Lucy Worsley married Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent in York Minster. It was the first royal wedding to take place there for over six hundred years when King Edward III had married in 1328. The bride, who had been born in 1933, was the only daughter of the late Sir William Worsley of Hovingham Hall. The couple had met in 1956 whilst Edward was stationed with the Royal Scots Greys at their barracks in Catterick, Yorkshire. Their engagement was announced on the 8th March 1961. (Offical engagement picture image ) The wedding was attended by all the senior members of the family ( image ) as well as some foreign royalty including Crown Prince Harald of Norway, Crown Prince Constantine of Greece, Crown Princess Margrethe of Denmark, Princess Sophia of Greece and Don Juan Carlos of Spain. image
The bride chose John Cavanagh of Mayfair to make her wedding dress. Cavanagh was Princess Marina’s favourite designer and she persuaded her future daughter-in-law to give him the task of creating the wedding dress. The dress was made of a shimmering white silk gauze with a pearlized motif. image The details on the dress were kept simple with a stand away collar and as series of buttons on the long fitted sleeves. The tight bodice fell into a full bell-shaped skirt with a long train. image The bride’s tulle veil was held in place with a small diamond tiara. image Katharine also wore a simple pearl necklace and earrings. The bride carried a small rose bouquet. image The dress out on display in London. image
The bride was attended by eight bridesmaids including Princess Anne and three pageboys. The bridesmaids wore long white organdie dresses trimmed with yellow ribbon and they carried posies of roses to match the rosebuds which were in their hair. image The reception was held at the bride’s family home of Hovingham Hall where the official pictures were taken. image
The couple have three children, George, Earl of St Andrews born in 1962, Lady Helen Windsor (now Taylor) born in 1964 and Lord Nicholas Windsor born in 1970. image The Duchess also had a stillborn child in 1977. The couple also have 8 grandchildren – Edward Lord Downpatrick, Lady Marina-Charlotte Windsor, Lady Amelia Windsor, Columbus Taylor, Cassius Taylor, Eloise Taylor, Estella Taylor and Albert Windsor. Today, the Duchess is rarely seen in public and only attends a small number of family functions. She converted to Roman Catholicism in 1994 and now prefers to be known simply as Katharine Kent.
More information and pictures of the wedding can be found at this thread .
| Duke of Kent |
In which city is the 'Sixth Floor Museum' at Dealey Plaza? | Prince Edward Duke of Kent and Miss Katharine Worsley: 8 June 1961 - The Royal Forums
Prince Edward Duke of Kent and Miss Katharine Worsley: 8 June 1961
User Name
Posts: 143
Prince Edward Duke of Kent and Miss Katharine Worsley: 8 June 1961
I was wondering if anyone has photos of The Duke of Kent's wedding.Thank you in advance
scott
this site has pics of the Duchess of Kent's wedding, Princess Alexandra
__________________
Location: Ryde, Australia
Posts: 3,783
Thanks for the photos everybody.Princess Alexandra looks really elegant as well as the Duchess of Kent.
__________________
"God save our Gracious Queen,
Long live our Noble Queen,
God save The Queen"
http://worldroots.com/brigitte/royal...n1936album.htm
this site has pics of the Duchess of Kent's wedding, Princess Alexandra
Thanks Australian. This is actually Alexandra, the sister of the Duke of Kent. It is very hard to find photos of Katherine the Duchess. It really is a shame as she was a beautiful bride. I remember being at York Minister on that day. The fashions were unbelievible. I think the Duchess and Princess Margaret had the simolest dresses of all British Royal Brides of that time.
Thanks for your help
Prince Edward Duke of Kent of Kent and Miss Katherine Worsley Wedding 1961
Excerpt taken from "Two Centuries of Royal Wedding" by Christopher Warwick.
"Princess Marina annonced her son's engagement on 8 March 1961 which was well received by the public at large. The couple were to be married precisely three months later on 8 June at York Minster. During the next few weeks, Princess Marina suggested her own principal wedding designer, John Cavanagh, for her future daughter-in-law's wedding dress.
Once the design had been chosen it was left to Cavanagh to have the material made. A reliable French company set about weaving 237 yards of shimmering white silk gauze enhanced by an attractive pearlized motif, Cavanagh concentrated on the question of concealing details of the design from the eyes and ears of the press at his elegant Mayfair Salon. From his staff of fitters and seamstresses he hanpicked a small team, set aside one workroom on the second floor, blacked out the windows and had the existing door reinforced with steel which was to remain locked at all times.
By the end of April, John Cavanagh had set to work on the bridal gown with its small stand-away collar, tight bodice and diaphanous skirt. Miss Worsely and Princess Marina were worried as to how the fabric would behave when the bride was required to kneel and stand unaided. The designer produced a stack of telephone directories roughly the height of the faldstool on which Katherine would have to kneel. She practiced the movements and all was well. There was another little hurdle, the train was found to drag itself on carpeted floor, and although the nave at York Minster wasn't covered, the sacrarium would be. It was there at the end of the service that the new Duchess of Kent would have to curtsey to the Queen. It was therefore impossible for Katherine to effect the movement gracefully as she wished. The designer again provided the solution, as the bride and bridegroom approached Her Majesty, the young Duchess should effect a half-turn in the Queen's direction, step back into the folds of her gown, thus releasing the tension on her train, and with head slightly bowed, perform her act of homage.
The bride was to have three wedding veils made of white tulle. One would be worn by Katherine's understudy during the wedding rehearsals, another would be worn by the bride at the ceremony itself and the third would be kept at Hovingham Hall as a standby to be worn for the official photographs if need be.
One the wedding day, shortly after two o'clock, the first procession of the day arrived. Lord Mountbatten with his daughters led Crown Princes Harald and Constantine, heirs to the throne of Norway and Greece, along the nave, together with Crown Princess Margrethe of Denmark, Princess Irene of The Netherlands, Prince and Princess Alexander of Yugoslavia and Lord and Lady Harewood. A quarter of an hour later, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret arrived along with Mr. Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Queen Victoria Eugenie of Spain, Lady Patricia Ramsay, Princess Sophia of Greece and Don Juan Carlos of Spain. Ten minutes later, Princess Marina and her daughter Alexandra arrived followed by the Queen and Prince Philip.
Headed by Princess Anne there were eight bridesmaids and three page-boys. The girls, dressed in long white organdie "Kate Greenaway" dresses, carried posies of roses and wore rosebuds in their hair.
The bride's face was covered by an extra panel of veiling fastened by diamond pins tucked under her head-dress. This cloud-like addition to her full length veil was designed to be removed easily when the ceremony reached its conclusion. The Groom was resplendent in the ceremonial uniform of his regiment with the dark blue sash of the Grand Cross of the Victorian Order across his chest, waited his brother and best man, Prince Michael.
After the wedding, the Duke and his bride left the sacrarium for the choir of the minster where the marriage registers were signed.
They had their reception on the lawns of Hovingham Hall and later left York for the quite seclusion of the Queen Mother's estate, Birkhall, in Scotland, for the first part of their honeymoon."
| i don't know |
Who commanded the 'USS Bonhomme Richard' which sank after the 'Battle of Flamborough Head' in 1779? | History of the USS Bonhomme Richard
History
The Frigate BonHomme Richard
In 1765, a 900-ton merchant vessel, DUC DE DURAS, was built in France for the East India Company. The ship was used for trading between France and the Orient. Ten years later, the ship would play a historic role in America's fight for independence.
As the Revolutionary War raged on in the Colonies, the newly founded Continental Congress began gathering a small navy. By cutting down the English war efforts in North America this became immediate success. Those successes prompted the Continental Congress to send Benjamin Franklin, as an Ambassador in 1777, to advise the French Court and garner more European support efforts for the American war. In 1779, the King of France donated to the American cause the DUC DE DURAS,
On February 4, 1779, the Continental Congress placed this fleet under the command of the Captain John Paul Jones. Swiftly, Jones refitted the DUC DE DURAS increasing her firepower to 20 guns a side, and renamed her BONHOMME RICHARD; in honor of both America and France.
Captain John Paul Jones chose the Pen Name of Benjamin Franklin, the Ambassador to France, and author of "Poor Richard's Almanac." This early 18th century journal urged men to seek out roles in the public sphere and shape their own destinies. Clearly, his journal helped forge the will that resulted in the American Revolution.
The Battle against HMS Serapis
On June 19, 1779, Jones sailed BONHOMME RICHARD from L' Orient, France accompanied by ALLIANCE, PALLAS, VEGEANCE, and CERF. Their mission was to escort troop transports and merchant vessels under the convoy to Bordeaux, France, and cruise against the British in the Bay of Biscay. Forced to return to port for repairs, Jones' squadron sailed again on August 14, 1779. Going northwest around the British Isles into the Northern Sea and down the eastern seaboard of Great Britain, the squadron swiftly took 16 merchant vessels as prizes. On the evening of September 23, 1779, they encountered the Baltic Fleet of 41 near the English shore of Flamborough Head. Sailing for England, the Fleet was under the fleet of the newly built frigate, HMS SERAPIS (50 guns) and the small sloop of COUNTESS OF SCARBOROUGH (20 GUNS).
Before the British fleet could respond, BON HOMME RICHARD lashed out at SERAPIS igniting a bitter struggle that would last the entire night. Early in the battle, the guns of Jones' main battery exploded, temporarily disabling his ship.
To offset the SERAPIS' speed, Jones lashed his flagship alongside and continued the fight long after his subordinates regarded the situation as hopeless.
Burning, sinking, and scattered with the dead and wounded, BONHOMME RICHARD lit up the darkness with a constant barrage. Jones struggled to keep his vessel afloat and, in one instance, an overwhelming number of prisoners in hold threatened to rush the deck to save from drowning. Jones defied all odds and continued the fight against Captain Pearson's SERAPIS.
In the final hour, BONHOMME RICHARD'S mast was hit above the top-sail. Along with her Colors, a large section of the mast came crashing to the deck near Jones’s feet. In response to the downfallen colors, SERAPIS called out, "Have you struck your Colors?" Resoundingly, John Paul Jones exclaimed, "Struck Sir? I have not yet begun to fight!" With newfound will, his crew delivered decisive blows from all sides and aloft. Jones' sent 40 Marines and Sailors into the rigging with grenades and muskets.
Decimated, SERAPIS could not avoid defeat and at 2230 she struck her Colors. Victorious, John Paul Jones commandeered SERAPIS and sailed her to Holland for repairs. Sadly, on September 24, 1779 at 1100, BONHOMME RICHARD sank never to rise from her watery grave.
This epic battle was the American Navy's first-ever defeat of an English ship in English waters! Rallying colonial hope for freedom, Jones' victory established him to many as "The Father of the American Navy."
CV/CVA-31
Bon Homme Richard (CV 31), the second ship to bear the name after John Paul Jones’s Revolutionary War Frigate was launched on April 29, 1944 by the New York Navy Yard. She was sponsored by Mrs. J. S. McCain, wife of Vice Adm. McCain. On November 26, 1944, USS Bon Homme Richard (CV 31) was commissioned with Captain A. O. Rule, Jr., in command.
Bon Homme Richard departed Norfolk 19 March 1945 to join the Pacific Fleet and arrived at Pearl Harbor on April 5, 1945. Following additional training in Hawaiian waters, the carrier joined TF 38 off Okinawa on June 6, 1945.
From June 7-10, she joined in the attacks on Okino Daito Jima and then served with the 3rd Fleet during the air strikes against Japan (July 2 - August 15). She remained off Japan until September 16 and after a short training period off Guam. On October 20th, 1945 she arrived in San Francisco, California. Nine days later she left San Francisco and headed to Pearl Harbor to undergo conversion for troop transport duty.
From November 8, 1945 to January 16, 1946 she made trans-Pacific voyages, returning servicemen to the United States. Bon Homme Richard then reported to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard for inactivation and was placed out of commission in reserve on January 9, 1947.
On January 15, 1951, Bon Homme Richard was recommissioned and on May 10, she departed to San Diego for the Far East. On May 29, she joined TF 77 off Korea and launched her first air strikes on May 31st. Bon Homme Richard continued operations with TF 77 until November 20, 1951. The carrier reached San Diego in mid-December and on May 20, 1952 was off-again to the Far East. She joined TF 77 once more on June 23, 1952 and took part in the heavy strikes against a North Korean power complex from June 24 -25 and the amphibious feint at Kojo from October 12 - 16. She continued operations against North Korean targets until December 18, 1952. On January 8, 1953 she arrived to San Francisco.
Her classification was changed from CV-31 to CVA 31 on October 1, 1952. Bon Homme Richard went out of commission on May 15, 1953 due to modernization. On September 6, 1955 she was recommissioned as CV/CVA 31. She had an angled, strengthened flight deck with an enclosed bow, enlarged elevators, and steam catapults. She completed her conversion period on October 31, 1955 and commenced to sea trials in the Alameda-San Diego area.
On September 1955, she was recommissioned to start her first of a long series of Seventh Fleet deployments. The initial west coast deployment of a squadron equipped with the new Sidewinder missile was with Fighter Squadron 211, equipped with FJ-3s, aboard Bon Homme Richard in September 1956. On June 6, 1957, two F8U Crusaders and two A3D Skywarriors flew non-stop from Bon Homme Richard off the California coast to USS Saratoga (CVA 60) of the east coast of Florida. This was the first carrier-to-carrier transcontinental flight that was completed by the F8Us in 3 hours 28 minutes and by the A3Ds in 4 hours 1 minute.
Bon Homme Richard made additional western Pacific cruises in 1957, 1958-1959, 1959-60, 1961, 1962-63, and 1964, with the last including a voyage into the Indian Ocean. The ship entered the Indian Ocean on April 4, 1964 with the "Concord Squadron," composed of Bon Homme Richard, USS Shelton (DD 790), USS Blue (DD 744), USS Frank Knox (DD 742), and the fleet oiler USS Hassayampa (AO 145). The cruise lasted six weeks and went near Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, then down the African coast and into many ports along the way for goodwill visits.
The Vietnam War escalation in early 1965 brought Bon Homme Richard into a third armed conflict, and she deployed on five Southeast Asia combat tours over the next six years. Her aircraft battled North Vietnamese MiGs on many occasions, downing several, as well as striking transportation and infrastructure targets. Occasional excursions to other Asian areas provided some variety to her operations.
Bon Homme Richard was ordered inactivated at the end of her 1970 deployment. She decommissioned in July 1971, becoming part of the Reserve Fleet at Bremerton, Washington. The ship was stricken from the Navy List in 1989 and was sold for scrapping on February 4, 1992.
Bon Homme Richard received one battle star for her World War II service and five battle stars for participating in the Korean conflict.
Other BonHomme Richards
In 1864, Congress authorized the 3,700-ton AMMONOOSUC class screw frigate to take the renowned name BONHOMME RICHARD, but the vessel was never built.
On September 26, 1942, while still under construction, the name of CV 10 was changed from BONHOMME RICHARD to YORKTOWN (the previous YORKTOWN was lost three months earlier at the Battle of Midway).
| John Paul Jones |
"""Proud Edward's army. And sent him homeward. To think again."" are lines from the song 'Flower Of Scotland'. Who is the Edward?" | The Fight between the Bon Homme Richard and the Serapis
The Fight between the Bon Homme Richard and the Serapis .
By John Paul Jones
[Excerpted from American History Told by Contemporaries , Vol. II: Building of the Republic, Albert Bushnell Hart, ed. (New York, MacMillan, 1899), pp. 587-590]
The capture of the Serapis was the most Striking naval victory of the war. Jones was born in Scotland, but had served as a brilliant officer in the American navy from its organization in 1775.
On the morning of that day, the 23d [September, 1779], the brig from Holland not being in sight, we chased a brigantine that appeared laying to, to windward. About noon, we saw and chased a large ship that appeared coming round Flamborough Head, from the northward, and at the same time I manned and armed one of the pilot boats to send in pursuit of the brigantine, which now appeared to be the vessel that I had forced ashore. Soon after this, a fleet of forty-one sail appeared off Flamborough Head, bearing N. N. E. This induced me to abandon the single ship which had then anchored in Burlington Bay; I also called back the pilot boat, and hoisted a signal for a general chase. When the fleet discovered us bearing down, all the merchant ships crowded sail towards the shore. The two ships of war that protected the fleet at the same time steered from the land, and made the disposition for battle. In approaching the enemy, I crowded every possible sail, and made the signal for the line of battle, to which the dalliance showed no attention. Earnest as I was for the action, I could not reach the commodore's ship until seven in the evening, being then within pistol shot, when he hailed the Bon Homme Richard. We answered him by firing a whole broadside.
The battle being thus begun, was continued with unremitting fury. Every method was practised on both sides to gain an advantage, and rake each other; and I must confess that the enemy's ship, being much more manageable than the Bon Homme Richard, gained thereby several times an advantageous situation, in spite of my best endeavours to prevent it. As I had to deal with an enemy of greatly superior force, I was under the necessity of closing with him, to prevent the advantage which he had over me in point of manoeuvre. It was my intention to lay the Bon Homme Richard athwart the enemy's bow; but as that operation required great dexterity in the management of both sails and helm, and some of our braces being shot away, it did not exactly succeed to my wish. The enemy's bowsprit, however, came over the Bon Homme Richard's poop by the mizen-mast, and I made both ships fast together in that situation, which, by the action of the wind on the enemy's sails, forced her stern close to the Bon Homme Richard's bow, so that the ships lay square alongside of each other, the yards being all entangled, and the cannon of each ship touching the opponent's. When this position took place, it was eight o'clock, previous to which the Bon Homme Richard had received sundry eighteen-pound shots below the water, and leaked very much. My battery of twelve-pounders, on which I had placed my chief dependence, being commanded by Lieutenant Dale and Colonel Weibert, and manned principally with American seamen and French volunteers, was entirely silenced and abandoned. As to the six old eighteen-pounders that formed the battery of the lower gun-deck, they did no service whatever, except firing eight shot in all. Two out of three of them burst at the first fire, and killed almost all the men who were stationed to manage them. Before this time, too, Colonel de Chamillard, who commanded a party of twenty soldiers on the poop, had abandoned that station after having lost some of his men. I had now only two pieces of cannon, (nine-pounders,) on the quarter-deck, that were not silenced, and not one of the heavier cannon was tired during the rest of the action. The purser, M. Mease, who commanded the guns on the quarter-deck, being dangerously wounded in the head, I was obliged to fill his place, and with great difficulty rallied a few men, and shifted over one of the lee quarter-deck guns, so that we afterwards played three pieces of nine-pounders upon the enemy. The tops alone seconded the fire of this little battery, and held out bravely during the whole of the action, especially the main-top, where Lieutenant Stack commanded. I directed the fire of one of the three cannon against the main-mast, with double-headed shot, while the other two were exceedingly well served with grape and canister shot, to silence the enemy's musketry and clear her decks, which was at last effected. The enemy were, as I have since understood, on the instant of calling for quarter, when the cowardice or treachery of three of my under-officers induced them to call to the enemy. The English commodore asked me if r demanded quarter, and I having answered him in the most determined negative, they renewed the battle with double fury. They were unable to stand the deck; but the fire of their cannon, especially the lower battery, which was entirely formed of ten-pounders, was incessant; both ships were set on fire in various places, and the scene was dreadful beyond the reach of language. To account for the timidity of my three under-officers, I mean, the gunner, the carpenter, and the master-at-arms, I must observe, that the two first were slightly wounded, and, as the ship had received various shot under water, and ode of the pumps being shot away, the carpenter expressed his fears that she would sink, and the other two concluded that she was sinking, which occasioned the gunner to run aft on the poop, without my knowledge, to strike the colours. Fortunately for me, a cannon ball had done that before, by carrying away the ensign-staff; he was therefore reduced to the necessity of sinking, as he supposed, or of calling for quarter, and he preferred the latter.
All this time the Bon Homme Richard had sustained the action alone, and the enemy, though much superior in force, would have been very glad to have got clear, as appears by their own acknowledgments, and by their having let go an anchor the instant that I laid them on board, by which means they would have escaped, had I not made them well fast to the Bon Homme Richard....
. . . My situation was really deplorable; the Bon Homme Richard received various shot under water from the Alliance; the leak gained on the pumps, and the fire increased much on board both ships. Some officers persuaded me to strike, of whose courage and good sense I entertain a high opinion. My treacherous master-at-arms let loose all my prisoners without my knowledge, and my prospects became gloomy indeed. I would not, however, give up the point. The enemy's mainmast began to shake, their firing decreased fast, ours rather increased, and the British colours were struck at half an hour past ten o'clock.
This prize proved to be the British ship of war the Serapis, a new ship of forty-four guns, built on the most approved construction, with two complete batteries, one of them of eighteen-pounders, and commanded by the brave Commodore Richard Pearson. I had yet two enemies to encounter, far more formidable than the Britons, I mean, fire and water. The Serapis was attacked only by the first, but the Bon Homme Richard was assailed by both; there was five feet water in the hold, and though it was moderate from the explosion of so much gunpowder, yet the three pumps that remained could with difficulty only keep the water from gaining. The fire broke out in various parts of the ship, in spite of all the water that could be thrown in to quench it, and at length broke out as low as the powder magazine, and within a few inches of the powder. In that dilemma, I took out the powder upon deck, ready to be thrown overboard at the last extremity, and it was ten o'clock the next day, the 24th, before the fire was entirely extinguished. With respect to the situation of the Bon Homme Richard, the rudder was cut entirely off, the stern frame and transoms were almost entirely cut away, and the timbers by the lower deck, especially from the mainmast towards the stern, being greatly decayed with age, were mangled beyond my power of description, and a person must have been an eye witness to form a just idea of the tremendous scene of carnage, wreck, and ruin, which every where appeared. Humanity cannot but recoil from the prospect of such finished horror, and lament that war should be capable of producing such fatal consequences....
. . . The wind augmented in the night, and the next day, the 25th, so that it was impossible to prevent the good old ship from sinking. They did not abandon her till after nine o'clock; the water was then up to the lower deck, and a little after ten I saw, with inexpressible grief, the last glimpse of the Bon Homme Richard. No lives were lost with the ship, but it was impossible to save the stores of any sort whatever. I lost even the best part of my clothes, books, and papers; and several of my officers lost all their clothes and effects.
[Robert Charles Sands. ed., Life and Correspondence of John Paul Jones (New York, 1830), 180-188 passim.]
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What is 'Emma's' surname in the Jane Austen novel 'Emma'? | Emma by Jane Austen | PenguinRandomHouse.com
Introduction by A. Walton Litz
“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” So begins Jane Austen’s comic masterpiece Emma. In Emma, Austen’s prose brilliantly elevates, in the words of Virginia Woolf, “the trivialities of day-to-day existence, of parties, picnics, and country dances” of early-nineteenth-century life in the English countryside to an unrivaled level of pleasure for the reader. At the center of this world is the inimitable Emma Woodhouse, a self-proclaimed matchmaker who, by the novel’s conclusion, may just find herself the victim of her own best intentions.
INCLUDES A MODERN LIBRARY READING GROUP GUIDE
About Emma
Emma, first published in 1816, was written when Jane Austen was at the height of her powers. In a novel remarkable for its sparkling wit and modernity, Austen presents readers with two of literature’s greatest comic creations—the eccentric Mr. Woodhouse and that quintessential bore, Miss Bates. Here, too, we have what may well be Jane Austen’s most profound characterization: the witty, imaginative, self-deluded Emma, a heroine the author declared “no one but myself will much like,” but who has been much loved by generations of readers. Delightfully funny, full of rich irony, Emma is regarded as one of Jane Austen’s finest achievements.
About Emma
The most perfect of Jane Austen’s perfect novels begins with twenty-one-year-old Emma Woodhouse comfortably dominating the social order in the village of Highbury, convinced that she has both the understanding and the right to manage other people’s lives–for their own good, of course. Her well-meant interfering centers on the aloof Jane Fairfax, the dangerously attractive Frank Churchill, the foolish if appealing Harriet Smith, and the ambitious young vicar Mr. Elton–and ends with her complacency shattered, her mind awakened to some of life’s more intractable dilemmas, and her happiness assured.
Jane Austen’s comic imagination was so deft and beautifully fluent that she could use it to probe the deepest human ironies while setting before us a dazzling gallery of characters–some pretentious or ridiculous, some admirable and moving, all utterly true.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
About Emma
The most perfect of Jane Austen’s perfect novels begins with twenty-one-year-old Emma Woodhouse comfortably dominating the social order in the village of Highbury, convinced that she has both the understanding and the right to manage other people’s lives–for their own good, of course. Her well-meant interfering centers on the aloof Jane Fairfax, the dangerously attractive Frank Churchill, the foolish if appealing Harriet Smith, and the ambitious young vicar Mr. Elton–and ends with her complacency shattered, her mind awakened to some of life’s more intractable dilemmas, and her happiness assured.
Jane Austen’s comic imagination was so deft and beautifully fluent that she could use it to probe the deepest human ironies while setting before us a dazzling gallery of characters–some pretentious or ridiculous, some admirable and moving, all utterly true.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Introduction by A. Walton Litz
“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” So begins Jane Austen’s comic masterpiece Emma. In Emma, Austen’s prose brilliantly elevates, in the words of Virginia Woolf, “the trivialities of day-to-day existence, of parties, picnics, and country dances” of early-nineteenth-century life in the English countryside to an unrivaled level of pleasure for the reader. At the center of this world is the inimitable Emma Woodhouse, a self-proclaimed matchmaker who, by the novel’s conclusion, may just find herself the victim of her own best intentions.
| Woodhouse |
Which cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his drawings of eccentric machines, was born on May 31st. 1872? | SparkNotes: Emma: Plot Overview
Plot Overview
Context
Character List
Although convinced that she herself will never marry, Emma Woodhouse, a precocious twenty-year-old resident of the village of Highbury, imagines herself to be naturally gifted in conjuring love matches. After self-declared success at matchmaking between her governess and Mr. Weston, a village widower, Emma takes it upon herself to find an eligible match for her new friend, Harriet Smith. Though Harriet’s parentage is unknown, Emma is convinced that Harriet deserves to be a gentleman’s wife and sets her friend’s sights on Mr. Elton, the village vicar. Meanwhile, Emma persuades Harriet to reject the proposal of Robert Martin, a well-to-do farmer for whom Harriet clearly has feelings.
Harriet becomes infatuated with Mr. Elton under Emma’s encouragement, but Emma’s plans go awry when Elton makes it clear that his affection is for Emma, not Harriet. Emma realizes that her obsession with making a match for Harriet has blinded her to the true nature of the situation. Mr. Knightley, Emma’s brother-in-law and treasured friend, watches Emma’s matchmaking efforts with a critical eye. He believes that Mr. Martin is a worthy young man whom Harriet would be lucky to marry. He and Emma quarrel over Emma’s meddling, and, as usual, Mr. Knightley proves to be the wiser of the pair. Elton, spurned by Emma and offended by her insinuation that Harriet is his equal, leaves for the town of Bath and marries a girl there almost immediately.
Emma is left to comfort Harriet and to wonder about the character of a new visitor expected in Highbury—Mr. Weston’s son, Frank Churchill. Frank is set to visit his father in Highbury after having been raised by his aunt and uncle in London, who have taken him as their heir. Emma knows nothing about Frank, who has long been deterred from visiting his father by his aunt’s illnesses and complaints. Mr. Knightley is immediately suspicious of the young man, especially after Frank rushes back to London merely to have his hair cut. Emma, however, finds Frank delightful and notices that his charms are directed mainly toward her. Though she plans to discourage these charms, she finds herself flattered and engaged in a flirtation with the young man. Emma greets Jane Fairfax, another addition to the Highbury set, with less enthusiasm. Jane is beautiful and accomplished, but Emma dislikes her because of her reserve and, the narrator insinuates, because she is jealous of Jane.
Suspicion, intrigue, and misunderstandings ensue. Mr. Knightley defends Jane, saying that she deserves compassion because, unlike Emma, she has no independent fortune and must soon leave home to work as a governess. Mrs. Weston suspects that the warmth of Mr. Knightley’s defense comes from romantic feelings, an implication Emma resists. Everyone assumes that Frank and Emma are forming an attachment, though Emma soon dismisses Frank as a potential suitor and imagines him as a match for Harriet. At a village ball, Knightley earns Emma’s approval by offering to dance with Harriet, who has just been humiliated by Mr. Elton and his new wife. The next day, Frank saves Harriet from Gypsy beggars. When Harriet tells Emma that she has fallen in love with a man above her social station, Emma believes that she means Frank. Knightley begins to suspect that Frank and Jane have a secret understanding, and he attempts to warn Emma. Emma laughs at Knightley’s suggestion and loses Knightley’s approval when she flirts with Frank and insults Miss Bates, a kindhearted spinster and Jane’s aunt, at a picnic. When Knightley reprimands Emma, she weeps.
News comes that Frank’s aunt has died, and this event paves the way for an unexpected revelation that slowly solves the mysteries. Frank and Jane have been secretly engaged; his attentions to Emma have been a screen to hide his true preference. With his aunt’s death and his uncle’s approval, Frank can now marry Jane, the woman he loves. Emma worries that Harriet will be crushed, but she soon discovers that it is Knightley, not Frank, who is the object of Harriet’s affection. Harriet believes that Knightley shares her feelings. Emma finds herself upset by Harriet’s revelation, and her distress forces her to realize that she is in love with Knightley. Emma expects Knightley to tell her he loves Harriet, but, to her delight, Knightley declares his love for Emma. Harriet is soon comforted by a second proposal from Robert Martin, which she accepts. The novel ends with the marriage of Harriet and Mr. Martin and that of Emma and Mr. Knightley, resolving the question of who loves whom after all.
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Who designed 'The Willow Tearooms' at 217 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow? | The Willow Tea Rooms, Glasgow. Design by Charles Rennie MackintosWillow Tea Rooms, Glasgow — Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Welcome to the world-famous Willow Tea Rooms
A visit to The Willow Tea Rooms is a must for anyone interested in enjoying tasty traditional food and drinks in an atmospheric setting.
Owned by Anne Mulhern for over 30 years, the Willow Tea Rooms are very much part of the history of Glasgow, a go to place for many people, where our visitors enjoy seeing some of the recreated features from the partnership of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Kate Cranston in the early 1900s.
Situated in the heart of Glasgow’s style mile, The Willow Tea Rooms at 97 Buchanan Street, are a recreation of the White Dining Room and Chinese Room, which were originally part of Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tea Rooms. The use of colour has probably never been more evident than in the contrast in these two rooms.
And we have more good news…..The Willow Tea Rooms at Watt Brothers Store is now open! Situated on the 3rd floor, the Tea Rooms are in our signature monochrome with colour pops of dove grey, lilac and purple. The Tea Rooms continue to have a hint of Mackintosh and a focus on Miss Cranston, including a screen with recreated glass panels from the original Ingram Street Tea Rooms to complete the look.
At both our Tea Rooms, you can enjoy breakfast, lunch, morning coffee or afternoon tea – the choice is yours – all available all day. For that special day-out or celebration, Afternoon Tea is the perfect choice.
| Charles Rennie Mackintosh |
What was the title of the 1991 Channel 4 drama in which Robert Lindsay played 'Michael Murray' the militant Labour leader of a city council? | Willow Tearooms Glasgow
Willow Tearooms Glasgow
June 11, 2011
The world famous Glasgow Willow Tea Rooms were designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1904.
To-day you can take tea at the Willow Tea Rooms at 217 Sauchiehall Street and enjoy the original features and Billiard Room Exhibition or visit the recreated Charles Rennie Mackintosh interiors ar the Willow TeaRooms located at 97 Buchanan Street where you can also shop for gifts in the new Mackintosh Gift Shop.
Enjoy Lunch or Afternoon Tea in the beautiful settings of the Willow Tearooms.
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Which musician, together with George Harrison, organised 'The Concert For Bangladesh' at Madison Square Garden in 1971? | Concert For Bangladesh
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Concert For Bangladesh
On this day 1st August 1971, the Concert For Bangladesh, organized by George Harrison to aid victims of famine and war in Bangladesh, took place at New York's Madison Square Garden. The two concerts, one afternoon and one evening, played to over 40,000 people and featured the all-star cast of Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, Leon Russell, Billy Preston, Eric Clapton, Ravi Shankar, Klaus Voorman, and Badfinger.
Harrison was well ahead of his time, organizing a large scale charity event with the aid of his musician mates, almost 15 years prior to Live Aid.
His original plan was to recruit his former bandmates, which would’ve turned this into a Beatles reunion, seeing the four on stage together in the U.S for the first time since 1966. But that was never going to happen.
John Lennon agreed to take part in the concert, however Harrison stipulated that Lennon's wife Yoko could not perform with him. Lennon agreed, but left New York two days before the event following an argument with Ono regarding his and Harrison's agreement, so that was the end of that.
Paul McCartney declined because of bad feelings caused by The Beatles' legal problems on their breakup. McCartney told Rolling Stone years later, "George came up and asked if I wanted to play Bangladesh and I thought, blimey, what's the point? We're just broken up and we're joining up again? It just seemed a bit crazy". Ringo Starr did, however, appear.
At the press launch for the event, the former Beatle was asked by a reporter, “Why Bangladesh?” Harrison replied, "Because I was asked by a friend if I would help, you know, that's all”. His friend was Indian musician Ravi Shankar (who surprised us all a few years back when we discovered he was the father of the very talented Norah Jones).
After Shankar had opened the proceedings, Harrison took to the stage with his guests - Eric Clapton on guitar, Ringo on drums, Leon Russell on keyboards, and the guys from Badfinger on guitars and vocals (Badfinger's Peter Ham did a duet with Harrison on "Here Comes the Sun"). After pleasing the crowd with a selection of his hits, including a few Beatles songs, Harrison casually announced his next guest. "I'd like to bring on a friend of us all, Mr Bob Dylan”.
This was a reclusive time for Dylan - and the first proper live show since his Isle of Wight appearance in '69. Dylan didn’t disappoint, performing "Blowin' In The Wind", "Mr. Tambourine Man", and "Just Like A Woman" backed by Harrison and his all-star band.
Harrison had to shell out his own money to maintain the fund after legal problems froze all proceeds. The triple album release (the second in a row by Harrison) hit #1 in the UK and #2 in the U.S. and received the Grammy award for Album of the Year.
The concert raised $243,418.50, which was given to UNICEF to administer. However, there were complaints about the high price of the album and allegations that there were delays in money from the album sales being sent to help the Bangladeshi refugees. Allen Klein, then an executive at Apple Corps, insisted the company made no money from the album or film and was only recovering its advertising and production costs.
The Los Angeles Times reported that by 1985 nearly $12 million had been sent to Bangladesh for relief. However, the money was tied up in an Internal Revenue Service escrow account for 11 years because the concert organizers had not applied for tax-exempt status. Sales of the DVDs and CDs of the concert continue to benefit the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF.
It was the crowning event of Harrison’s public life, a gesture of great goodwill that captured the moment in history. I read that after the concerts Harrison and Dylan headed back up to Woodstock to Bob's house, where the two hung out for a few days. Wouldn’t you have just loved to share that journey with them? I bet George and Bob were pretty damn pleased with themselves.
More on George Harrison
| Ravi Shankar |
Which school was founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham? | George Harrison honoured on 35th anniversary of âConcert for Bangladeshâ
© UNICEF video
UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman, Olivia Harrison and Jay Marciano, President of Madison Square Park Entertainment, with the George Harrison 'Walk of Fame' plaque.
By Rachel Bonham Carter
NEW YORK, USA, 1 August 2006 â Thirty-five years after George Harrisonâs âConcert for Bangladeshâ raised over $15 million for UNICEF, the late Beatle has been inducted into the Madison Square Garden âWalk of Fameâ.
The concert was the first of its kind and is recognized as the inspiration behind more recent humanitarian fundraising ventures like âBand Aidâ and âLive Aidâ.
âGeorge Harrison was a pioneer who understood the power of rock music to move people to embrace causes larger than themselves,â said UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman on the 35th anniversary of the concert.
She was speaking at the presentation of a plaque which commemorates the event where it happened, at Madison Square Garden.
In 1971, the venue played host to an unprecedented group of musicians, pulled together by Harrison, including Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Billy Preston, Leon Russell and Ringo Starr.
© UNICEF video
A plaque commemorating George Harrison and the Concert for Bangladesh for the Madison Square Garden 'Walk of Fame' was presented to Olivia Harrison.
In response to a call from Bengali musician Ravi Shankar, they helped raise the profile of the plight of children caught in political and military turmoil in Bangladesh, a crisis which worsened when devastating floods hit the region.
Last autumn, Olivia Harrison, who received the plaque today, opened a fund in her late husbandâs name with an initial donation of $1 million. The George Harrison Fund for UNICEF specifically targets UNICEF programs in Bangladesh but also provides lifesaving assistance to children suffering from civil conflict, natural disasters and poverty elsewhere.
Speaking at Madison Square Garden at midday, Ms. Harrison said: âWhen people walk through this Walk of Fame and they come to the plaque for the âConcert for Bangladeshâ, I hope theyâre reminded how fortunate we are to be on the giving end of aid and not the receiving end of charity. And I think that one thought is motivation enough for us to continue to help others.â
The launch of the fund coincided with the release of a DVD and CD of the âConcert for Bangladeshâ. Already more than 3 million copies have been sold and all artistsâ royalties from the DVD and CD continue to go to UNICEF.
âTo date the US Fund and the George Harrison family have generated more than $1 million for children in need through sales of the CD and DVD,â said Jay Aldous, Vice President of Marketing, Communication and Corporate Partnership for the US Fund for UNICEF. âI look forward to collaborating in the future to generate even more funding for UNICEF programmes around the world.â
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'EAK' is the international vehicle code for which country? | Country codes
Warning! This page is no longer updated regularly. Please see the Country Codes page of Russ Rowlett's "How Many?" dictionary. There you find a list with six types of country codes.
Country codes
ISO 3166 and car codes
I had difficulties finding the car country codes so I made this page.
Please note that the car codes are also sometimes used as international postal codes, at least in Europe (CEPT codes).
Most of this page is stolen from this FTP document .
NEW! Ken Bagnall sent me these sportive country codes which are use by the International Olympic Committee and others. Certainly, these codes are different from the three-letter ISO codes below.
After I made this list I have become aware that the car country codes are officially known (in English) as international Distinguishing Signs.
I have also found other pages with the codes on them:
An updated one (with flags that take a long time to download)
Auto World Symbols' info page gives facts of different kinds.
The distinguishing signs were introduced by the UN at the
Convention on Road Traffic (Vienna, 1968 November 8th) . Warning: The convention is in GIF image format!)
Status of this convention including distingtive letters of some 54 distinguishing signs can be found in the database of UN treaties, chapter XI, B, 19. (You should really register to get the to UN documents linked above.)
NEW! There is a new page with ISO and olympic coutry codes:
Country Codes , in "How Many?" by Russ Rowlett.
ISO 3166 codes ----------------------- Car / \ country Country A 2 A 3 Number code ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ AFGHANISTAN AF AFG 004 � (AFG) ALBANIA AL ALB 008 � (AL ) ALGERIA DZ DZA 012 � (DZ ) AMERICAN SAMOA AS ASM 016 � ANDORRA AD AND 020 � (AND) ANGOLA AO AGO 024 � ANGUILLA AI AIA 660 � ANTARCTICA AQ ATA 010 � ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA AG ATG 028 � ARGENTINA AR ARG 032 � (RA ) ARMENIA AM ARM 051 � (ARM) ARUBA AW ABW 533 � AUSTRALIA AU AUS 036 � (AUS) AUSTRIA AT AUT 040 � (A ) AZERBAIJAN AZ AZE 031 � (AZ ) BAHAMAS BS BHS 044 � (BS ) BAHRAIN BH BHR 048 � (BRN) BANGLADESH BD BGD 050 � (BD ) BARBADOS BB BRB 052 � (BDS) BELARUS BY BLR 112 � (BY ) [obsolescent (SU )] BELGIUM BE BEL 056 � (B ) BELIZE BZ BLZ 084 � (BH ) BENIN BJ BEN 204 � (DY ) BERMUDA BM BMU 060 � BHUTAN BT BTN 064 � BOLIVIA BO BOL 068 � (BOL) BOSNIA AND HERZEGOWINA BA BIH 070 � (BIH) BOTSWANA BW BWA 072 � (RB ) BOUVET ISLAND BV BVT 074 � BRAZIL BR BRA 076 � (BR ) BRITISH INDIAN OCEAN TERRITORY IO IOT 086 � BRUNEI DARUSSALAM BN BRN 096 � (BRU) BULGARIA BG BGR 100 � (BG ) BURKINA FASO BF BFA 854 � BURUNDI BI BDI 108 � (RU ) CAMBODIA KH KHM 116 � (K ) CAMEROON CM CMR 120 � (CAM) CANADA CA CAN 124 � (CDN) CAPE VERDE CV CPV 132 � CAYMAN ISLANDS KY CYM 136 � CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC CF CAF 140 � (RCA) CHAD TD TCD 148 � (TCH), (TD ) CHILE CL CHL 152 � (RCH) CHINA CN CHN 156 � (RC ) CHRISTMAS ISLAND CX CXR 162 � COCOS (KEELING) ISLANDS CC CCK 166 � COLOMBIA CO COL 170 � (CO ) COMOROS KM COM 174 � CONGO CG COG 178 � CONGO, THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CD COD 180 � (RCB) COOK ISLANDS CK COK 184 � COSTA RICA CR CRI 188 � (CR ) COTE D'IVOIRE CI CIV 384 � (CI ) CROATIA (local name: Hrvatska) HR HRV 191 � (HR ) CUBA CU CUB 192 � (C ) CYPRUS CY CYP 196 � (CY ) CZECH REPUBLIC CZ CZE 203 � (CZ ) DENMARK DK DNK 208 � (DK ) DJIBOUTI DJ DJI 262 � DOMINICA DM DMA 212 � (WD ) DOMINICAN REPUBLIC DO DOM 214 � (DOM) EAST TIMOR TP TMP 626 � ECUADOR EC ECU 218 � (EC ) EGYPT EG EGY 818 � (ET ) EL SALVADOR SV SLV 222 � (ES ) EQUATORIAL GUINEA GQ GNQ 226 � ERITREA ER ERI 232 � ESTONIA EE EST 233 � (EST) ETHIOPIA ET ETH 231 � (ETH) FALKLAND ISLANDS (MALVINAS) FK FLK 238 � FAROE ISLANDS FO FRO 234 � (FO )?, (FR ) FIJI FJ FJI 242 � (FJI) FINLAND FI FIN 246 � (FIN) FRANCE FR FRA 250 � (F ) FRANCE, METROPOLITAN FX FXX 249 � FRENCH GUIANA GF GUF 254 � FRENCH POLYNESIA PF PYF 258 � FRENCH SOUTHERN TERRITORIES TF ATF 260 � GABON GA GAB 266 � (GAB) GAMBIA GM GMB 270 � (WAG) GEORGIA GE GEO 268 � (GE ) GERMANY DE DEU 276 � (D ) GHANA GH GHA 288 � (GH ) GIBRALTAR GI GIB 292 � (GBZ) GREECE GR GRC 300 � (GR ) GREENLAND GL GRL 304 � GRENADA GD GRD 308 � (WG ) GUADELOUPE GP GLP 312 � GUAM GU GUM 316 � GUATEMALA GT GTM 320 � (GCA) GUINEA GN GIN 324 � (RG ) GUINEA-BISSAU GW GNB 624 � GUYANA GY GUY 328 � (GUY) HAITI HT HTI 332 � (RH ) HEARD AND MC DONALD ISLANDS HM HMD 334 � HOLY SEE (VATICAN CITY STATE) VA VAT 336 � (V ) HONDURAS HN HND 340 � HONG KONG HK HKG 344 � (HK ) HUNGARY HU HUN 348 � (H ) ICELAND IS ISL 352 � (IS ) INDIA IN IND 356 � (IND) INDONESIA ID IDN 360 � (RI ) IRAN (ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF) IR IRN 364 � (IR ) IRAQ IQ IRQ 368 � (IRQ) IRELAND IE IRL 372 � (IRL) ISRAEL IL ISR 376 � (IL ) ITALY IT ITA 380 � (I ) JAMAICA JM JAM 388 � (JA ) JAPAN JP JPN 392 � (J ) JORDAN JO JOR 400 � (HKJ) KAZAKHSTAN KZ KAZ 398 � (KZ ) KENYA KE KEN 404 � (EAK) KIRIBATI KI KIR 296 � KOREA, DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF KP PRK 408 � KOREA, REPUBLIC OF KR KOR 410 � (ROK) KUWAIT KW KWT 414 � (KWT) KYRGYZSTAN KG KGZ 417 � (KS ) LAO PEOPLE'S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC LA LAO 418 � (LAO) LATVIA LV LVA 428 � (LV ) LEBANON LB LBN 422 � (RL ) LESOTHO LS LSO 426 � (LS ) LIBERIA LR LBR 430 � (LB ) LIBYAN ARAB JAMAHIRIYA LY LBY 434 � (LAR) LIECHTENSTEIN LI LIE 438 � (FL ) LITHUANIA LT LTU 440 � (LT ) LUXEMBOURG LU LUX 442 � (L ) MACAU MO MAC 446 � ? MACEDONIA, THE FORMER YUGOSLAV REPUBLIC OF MK MKD 807 � (MK ) MADAGASCAR MG MDG 450 � (RM ) MALAWI MW MWI 454 � (MW ) MALAYSIA MY MYS 458 � (MAL) MALDIVES MV MDV 462 � MALI ML MLI 466 � (RMM) MALTA MT MLT 470 � (M ) MARSHALL ISLANDS MH MHL 584 � MARTINIQUE MQ MTQ 474 � MAURITANIA MR MRT 478 � (RIM) MAURITIUS MU MUS 480 � (MS ) MAYOTTE YT MYT 175 � MEXICO MX MEX 484 � (MEX) MICRONESIA, FEDERATED STATES OF FM FSM 583 � MOLDOVA, REPUBLIC OF MD MDA 498 � (MD ) MONACO MC MCO 492 � (MC ) MONGOLIA MN MNG 496 � MONTSERRAT MS MSR 500 � MOROCCO MA MAR 504 � (MA ) MOZAMBIQUE MZ MOZ 508 � (MOC) MYANMAR MM MMR 104 � (BUR) NAMIBIA NA NAM 516 � (NAM) NAURU NR NRU 520 � NEPAL NP NPL 524 � (NEP) NETHERLANDS NL NLD 528 � (NL ) NETHERLANDS ANTILLES AN ANT 530 � (NA ) NEW CALEDONIA NC NCL 540 � NEW ZEALAND NZ NZL 554 � (NZ ) NICARAGUA NI NIC 558 � (NIC) NIGER NE NER 562 � (RN ) NIGERIA NG NGA 566 � (WAN) NIUE NU NIU 570 � NORFOLK ISLAND NF NFK 574 � NORTHERN MARIANA ISLANDS MP MNP 580 � NORWAY NO NOR 578 � (N ) OMAN OM OMN 512 � ? PAKISTAN PK PAK 586 � (PAK), (PK ) PALAU PW PLW 585 � PANAMA PA PAN 591 � (PA ) PAPUA NEW GUINEA PG PNG 598 � (PNG) PARAGUAY PY PRY 600 � (PY ) PERU PE PER 604 � (PE ) PHILIPPINES PH PHL 608 � (RP ) PITCAIRN PN PCN 612 � POLAND PL POL 616 � (PL ) PORTUGAL PT PRT 620 � (P ) PUERTO RICO PR PRI 630 � ? QATAR QA QAT 634 � (QA ) REUNION RE REU 638 � ROMANIA RO ROM 642 � (RO ) RUSSIAN FEDERATION RU RUS 643 � (RUS) RWANDA RW RWA 646 � (RWA) SAINT KITTS AND NEVIS KN KNA 659 � SAINT LUCIA LC LCA 662 � SAINT VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES VC VCT 670 � SAMOA WS WSM 882 � (WS ) SAN MARINO SM SMR 674 � (RSM) SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE ST STP 678 � SAUDI ARABIA SA SAU 682 � (SA ) SENEGAL SN SEN 686 � (SN ) SEYCHELLES SC SYC 690 � (SY ) SIERRA LEONE SL SLE 694 � (WAL) SINGAPORE SG SGP 702 � (SGP) SLOVAKIA (Slovak Republic) SK SVK 703 � (SK ) SLOVENIA SI SVN 705 � (SLO) SOLOMON ISLANDS SB SLB 090 � SOMALIA SO SOM 706 � (SO ) SOUTH AFRICA ZA ZAF 710 � (ZA ) SOUTH GEORGIA AND THE SOUTH SANDWICH ISLANDS GS SGS 239 � SPAIN ES ESP 724 � (E ) SRI LANKA LK LKA 144 � (CL ) ST. HELENA SH SHN 654 � ST. PIERRE AND MIQUELON PM SPM 666 � SUDAN SD SDN 736 � (SUD) SURINAME SR SUR 740 � (SME) SVALBARD AND JAN MAYEN ISLANDS SJ SJM 744 � (SD ) SWAZILAND SZ SWZ 748 � SWEDEN SE SWE 752 � (S ) SWITZERLAND CH CHE 756 � (CH ) SYRIAN ARAB REPUBLIC SY SYR 760 � (SYR) TAIWAN, PROVINCE OF CHINA TW TWN 158 � (RC ) TAJIKISTAN TJ TJK 762 � (TJ ) TANZANIA, UNITED REPUBLIC OF TZ TZA 834 � (EAT) THAILAND TH THA 764 � (T ) TOGO TG TGO 768 � (TG ) TOKELAU TK TKL 772 � TONGA TO TON 776 � TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO TT TTO 780 � (TT ) TUNISIA TN TUN 788 � (TN ) TURKEY TR TUR 792 � (TR ) TURKMENISTAN TM TKM 795 � (TM ) TURKS AND CAICOS ISLANDS TC TCA 796 � TUVALU TV TUV 798 � UGANDA UG UGA 800 � (EAU) UKRAINE UA UKR 804 � (UA ) UNITED ARAB EMIRATES AE ARE 784 � (UAE) UNITED KINGDOM GB GBR 826 � (GB ) UNITED STATES US USA 840 � (USA) UNITED STATES MINOR OUTLYING ISLANDS UM UMI 581 � URUGUAY UY URY 858 � (ROU) UZBEKISTAN UZ UZB 860 � (UZ ) VANUATU VU VUT 548 � VENEZUELA VE VEN 862 � (YV ) VIET NAM VN VNM 704 � (VN ) VIRGIN ISLANDS (BRITISH) VG VGB 092 � VIRGIN ISLANDS (U.S.) VI VIR 850 � (BUI)? WALLIS AND FUTUNA ISLANDS WF WLF 876 � WESTERN SAHARA EH ESH 732 � YEMEN YE YEM 887 � (ADN), (YEM) YUGOSLAVIA YU YUG 891 � (YU ) ZAMBIA ZM ZMB 894 � (RNR) ZIMBABWE ZW ZWE 716 � (ZW ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Kenya |
The full title of which play by George Bernard Shaw is completed by 'A Romance In Five Acts'? | Country codes
Warning! This page is no longer updated regularly. Please see the Country Codes page of Russ Rowlett's "How Many?" dictionary. There you find a list with six types of country codes.
Country codes
ISO 3166 and car codes
I had difficulties finding the car country codes so I made this page.
Please note that the car codes are also sometimes used as international postal codes, at least in Europe (CEPT codes).
Most of this page is stolen from this FTP document .
NEW! Ken Bagnall sent me these sportive country codes which are use by the International Olympic Committee and others. Certainly, these codes are different from the three-letter ISO codes below.
After I made this list I have become aware that the car country codes are officially known (in English) as international Distinguishing Signs.
I have also found other pages with the codes on them:
An updated one (with flags that take a long time to download)
Auto World Symbols' info page gives facts of different kinds.
The distinguishing signs were introduced by the UN at the
Convention on Road Traffic (Vienna, 1968 November 8th) . Warning: The convention is in GIF image format!)
Status of this convention including distingtive letters of some 54 distinguishing signs can be found in the database of UN treaties, chapter XI, B, 19. (You should really register to get the to UN documents linked above.)
NEW! There is a new page with ISO and olympic coutry codes:
Country Codes , in "How Many?" by Russ Rowlett.
ISO 3166 codes ----------------------- Car / \ country Country A 2 A 3 Number code ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ AFGHANISTAN AF AFG 004 � (AFG) ALBANIA AL ALB 008 � (AL ) ALGERIA DZ DZA 012 � (DZ ) AMERICAN SAMOA AS ASM 016 � ANDORRA AD AND 020 � (AND) ANGOLA AO AGO 024 � ANGUILLA AI AIA 660 � ANTARCTICA AQ ATA 010 � ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA AG ATG 028 � ARGENTINA AR ARG 032 � (RA ) ARMENIA AM ARM 051 � (ARM) ARUBA AW ABW 533 � AUSTRALIA AU AUS 036 � (AUS) AUSTRIA AT AUT 040 � (A ) AZERBAIJAN AZ AZE 031 � (AZ ) BAHAMAS BS BHS 044 � (BS ) BAHRAIN BH BHR 048 � (BRN) BANGLADESH BD BGD 050 � (BD ) BARBADOS BB BRB 052 � (BDS) BELARUS BY BLR 112 � (BY ) [obsolescent (SU )] BELGIUM BE BEL 056 � (B ) BELIZE BZ BLZ 084 � (BH ) BENIN BJ BEN 204 � (DY ) BERMUDA BM BMU 060 � BHUTAN BT BTN 064 � BOLIVIA BO BOL 068 � (BOL) BOSNIA AND HERZEGOWINA BA BIH 070 � (BIH) BOTSWANA BW BWA 072 � (RB ) BOUVET ISLAND BV BVT 074 � BRAZIL BR BRA 076 � (BR ) BRITISH INDIAN OCEAN TERRITORY IO IOT 086 � BRUNEI DARUSSALAM BN BRN 096 � (BRU) BULGARIA BG BGR 100 � (BG ) BURKINA FASO BF BFA 854 � BURUNDI BI BDI 108 � (RU ) CAMBODIA KH KHM 116 � (K ) CAMEROON CM CMR 120 � (CAM) CANADA CA CAN 124 � (CDN) CAPE VERDE CV CPV 132 � CAYMAN ISLANDS KY CYM 136 � CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC CF CAF 140 � (RCA) CHAD TD TCD 148 � (TCH), (TD ) CHILE CL CHL 152 � (RCH) CHINA CN CHN 156 � (RC ) CHRISTMAS ISLAND CX CXR 162 � COCOS (KEELING) ISLANDS CC CCK 166 � COLOMBIA CO COL 170 � (CO ) COMOROS KM COM 174 � CONGO CG COG 178 � CONGO, THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CD COD 180 � (RCB) COOK ISLANDS CK COK 184 � COSTA RICA CR CRI 188 � (CR ) COTE D'IVOIRE CI CIV 384 � (CI ) CROATIA (local name: Hrvatska) HR HRV 191 � (HR ) CUBA CU CUB 192 � (C ) CYPRUS CY CYP 196 � (CY ) CZECH REPUBLIC CZ CZE 203 � (CZ ) DENMARK DK DNK 208 � (DK ) DJIBOUTI DJ DJI 262 � DOMINICA DM DMA 212 � (WD ) DOMINICAN REPUBLIC DO DOM 214 � (DOM) EAST TIMOR TP TMP 626 � ECUADOR EC ECU 218 � (EC ) EGYPT EG EGY 818 � (ET ) EL SALVADOR SV SLV 222 � (ES ) EQUATORIAL GUINEA GQ GNQ 226 � ERITREA ER ERI 232 � ESTONIA EE EST 233 � (EST) ETHIOPIA ET ETH 231 � (ETH) FALKLAND ISLANDS (MALVINAS) FK FLK 238 � FAROE ISLANDS FO FRO 234 � (FO )?, (FR ) FIJI FJ FJI 242 � (FJI) FINLAND FI FIN 246 � (FIN) FRANCE FR FRA 250 � (F ) FRANCE, METROPOLITAN FX FXX 249 � FRENCH GUIANA GF GUF 254 � FRENCH POLYNESIA PF PYF 258 � FRENCH SOUTHERN TERRITORIES TF ATF 260 � GABON GA GAB 266 � (GAB) GAMBIA GM GMB 270 � (WAG) GEORGIA GE GEO 268 � (GE ) GERMANY DE DEU 276 � (D ) GHANA GH GHA 288 � (GH ) GIBRALTAR GI GIB 292 � (GBZ) GREECE GR GRC 300 � (GR ) GREENLAND GL GRL 304 � GRENADA GD GRD 308 � (WG ) GUADELOUPE GP GLP 312 � GUAM GU GUM 316 � GUATEMALA GT GTM 320 � (GCA) GUINEA GN GIN 324 � (RG ) GUINEA-BISSAU GW GNB 624 � GUYANA GY GUY 328 � (GUY) HAITI HT HTI 332 � (RH ) HEARD AND MC DONALD ISLANDS HM HMD 334 � HOLY SEE (VATICAN CITY STATE) VA VAT 336 � (V ) HONDURAS HN HND 340 � HONG KONG HK HKG 344 � (HK ) HUNGARY HU HUN 348 � (H ) ICELAND IS ISL 352 � (IS ) INDIA IN IND 356 � (IND) INDONESIA ID IDN 360 � (RI ) IRAN (ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF) IR IRN 364 � (IR ) IRAQ IQ IRQ 368 � (IRQ) IRELAND IE IRL 372 � (IRL) ISRAEL IL ISR 376 � (IL ) ITALY IT ITA 380 � (I ) JAMAICA JM JAM 388 � (JA ) JAPAN JP JPN 392 � (J ) JORDAN JO JOR 400 � (HKJ) KAZAKHSTAN KZ KAZ 398 � (KZ ) KENYA KE KEN 404 � (EAK) KIRIBATI KI KIR 296 � KOREA, DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF KP PRK 408 � KOREA, REPUBLIC OF KR KOR 410 � (ROK) KUWAIT KW KWT 414 � (KWT) KYRGYZSTAN KG KGZ 417 � (KS ) LAO PEOPLE'S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC LA LAO 418 � (LAO) LATVIA LV LVA 428 � (LV ) LEBANON LB LBN 422 � (RL ) LESOTHO LS LSO 426 � (LS ) LIBERIA LR LBR 430 � (LB ) LIBYAN ARAB JAMAHIRIYA LY LBY 434 � (LAR) LIECHTENSTEIN LI LIE 438 � (FL ) LITHUANIA LT LTU 440 � (LT ) LUXEMBOURG LU LUX 442 � (L ) MACAU MO MAC 446 � ? MACEDONIA, THE FORMER YUGOSLAV REPUBLIC OF MK MKD 807 � (MK ) MADAGASCAR MG MDG 450 � (RM ) MALAWI MW MWI 454 � (MW ) MALAYSIA MY MYS 458 � (MAL) MALDIVES MV MDV 462 � MALI ML MLI 466 � (RMM) MALTA MT MLT 470 � (M ) MARSHALL ISLANDS MH MHL 584 � MARTINIQUE MQ MTQ 474 � MAURITANIA MR MRT 478 � (RIM) MAURITIUS MU MUS 480 � (MS ) MAYOTTE YT MYT 175 � MEXICO MX MEX 484 � (MEX) MICRONESIA, FEDERATED STATES OF FM FSM 583 � MOLDOVA, REPUBLIC OF MD MDA 498 � (MD ) MONACO MC MCO 492 � (MC ) MONGOLIA MN MNG 496 � MONTSERRAT MS MSR 500 � MOROCCO MA MAR 504 � (MA ) MOZAMBIQUE MZ MOZ 508 � (MOC) MYANMAR MM MMR 104 � (BUR) NAMIBIA NA NAM 516 � (NAM) NAURU NR NRU 520 � NEPAL NP NPL 524 � (NEP) NETHERLANDS NL NLD 528 � (NL ) NETHERLANDS ANTILLES AN ANT 530 � (NA ) NEW CALEDONIA NC NCL 540 � NEW ZEALAND NZ NZL 554 � (NZ ) NICARAGUA NI NIC 558 � (NIC) NIGER NE NER 562 � (RN ) NIGERIA NG NGA 566 � (WAN) NIUE NU NIU 570 � NORFOLK ISLAND NF NFK 574 � NORTHERN MARIANA ISLANDS MP MNP 580 � NORWAY NO NOR 578 � (N ) OMAN OM OMN 512 � ? PAKISTAN PK PAK 586 � (PAK), (PK ) PALAU PW PLW 585 � PANAMA PA PAN 591 � (PA ) PAPUA NEW GUINEA PG PNG 598 � (PNG) PARAGUAY PY PRY 600 � (PY ) PERU PE PER 604 � (PE ) PHILIPPINES PH PHL 608 � (RP ) PITCAIRN PN PCN 612 � POLAND PL POL 616 � (PL ) PORTUGAL PT PRT 620 � (P ) PUERTO RICO PR PRI 630 � ? QATAR QA QAT 634 � (QA ) REUNION RE REU 638 � ROMANIA RO ROM 642 � (RO ) RUSSIAN FEDERATION RU RUS 643 � (RUS) RWANDA RW RWA 646 � (RWA) SAINT KITTS AND NEVIS KN KNA 659 � SAINT LUCIA LC LCA 662 � SAINT VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES VC VCT 670 � SAMOA WS WSM 882 � (WS ) SAN MARINO SM SMR 674 � (RSM) SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE ST STP 678 � SAUDI ARABIA SA SAU 682 � (SA ) SENEGAL SN SEN 686 � (SN ) SEYCHELLES SC SYC 690 � (SY ) SIERRA LEONE SL SLE 694 � (WAL) SINGAPORE SG SGP 702 � (SGP) SLOVAKIA (Slovak Republic) SK SVK 703 � (SK ) SLOVENIA SI SVN 705 � (SLO) SOLOMON ISLANDS SB SLB 090 � SOMALIA SO SOM 706 � (SO ) SOUTH AFRICA ZA ZAF 710 � (ZA ) SOUTH GEORGIA AND THE SOUTH SANDWICH ISLANDS GS SGS 239 � SPAIN ES ESP 724 � (E ) SRI LANKA LK LKA 144 � (CL ) ST. HELENA SH SHN 654 � ST. PIERRE AND MIQUELON PM SPM 666 � SUDAN SD SDN 736 � (SUD) SURINAME SR SUR 740 � (SME) SVALBARD AND JAN MAYEN ISLANDS SJ SJM 744 � (SD ) SWAZILAND SZ SWZ 748 � SWEDEN SE SWE 752 � (S ) SWITZERLAND CH CHE 756 � (CH ) SYRIAN ARAB REPUBLIC SY SYR 760 � (SYR) TAIWAN, PROVINCE OF CHINA TW TWN 158 � (RC ) TAJIKISTAN TJ TJK 762 � (TJ ) TANZANIA, UNITED REPUBLIC OF TZ TZA 834 � (EAT) THAILAND TH THA 764 � (T ) TOGO TG TGO 768 � (TG ) TOKELAU TK TKL 772 � TONGA TO TON 776 � TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO TT TTO 780 � (TT ) TUNISIA TN TUN 788 � (TN ) TURKEY TR TUR 792 � (TR ) TURKMENISTAN TM TKM 795 � (TM ) TURKS AND CAICOS ISLANDS TC TCA 796 � TUVALU TV TUV 798 � UGANDA UG UGA 800 � (EAU) UKRAINE UA UKR 804 � (UA ) UNITED ARAB EMIRATES AE ARE 784 � (UAE) UNITED KINGDOM GB GBR 826 � (GB ) UNITED STATES US USA 840 � (USA) UNITED STATES MINOR OUTLYING ISLANDS UM UMI 581 � URUGUAY UY URY 858 � (ROU) UZBEKISTAN UZ UZB 860 � (UZ ) VANUATU VU VUT 548 � VENEZUELA VE VEN 862 � (YV ) VIET NAM VN VNM 704 � (VN ) VIRGIN ISLANDS (BRITISH) VG VGB 092 � VIRGIN ISLANDS (U.S.) VI VIR 850 � (BUI)? WALLIS AND FUTUNA ISLANDS WF WLF 876 � WESTERN SAHARA EH ESH 732 � YEMEN YE YEM 887 � (ADN), (YEM) YUGOSLAVIA YU YUG 891 � (YU ) ZAMBIA ZM ZMB 894 � (RNR) ZIMBABWE ZW ZWE 716 � (ZW ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| i don't know |
'ETIHAD Airways' is based in which of the United Arab Emirates? | Book flights to United Arab Emirates - Etihad Airways
*Return fares Inclusive of taxes and surcharges. View all deals
Travel to United Arab Emirates
Book flights to the United Arab Emirates with Etihad Airways and visit the vast deserts, idyllic beaches, ancient archaeological sites, and awe-inspiring structures that are waiting for you.
*To share this image, copy and paste the code from the text box at the bottom of this page.
Top 5 Things To Do in the United Arab Emirates
Marvel at the phenomenal Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. Journey to the Observation Deck of this remarkable 828m edifice and witness the greatest panorama on Earth
Traverse the dunes of the Arabian Desert in a SUV or at a relaxed pace on the back of a camel
Step through time into the ruins of Hili, an archaeological site allowing you to walk in the footsteps of ancient people dating back to the Bronze Age
Have fun at Ferrari World, the world’s largest indoor theme park, where you can ride the world’s fastest rollercoaster, the amazing Formula Rossa, and get a close look at the most iconic models of the brand
Experience the wonders of the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, which was constructed from building materials from across the globe and designed to unite the Islamic world’s various cultures
Plan Your United Arab Emirates Holiday
The United Arab Emirates have a cultural calendar that can pique the interest of even the most cultured and refined individuals. The Dubai International Jazz Festival attracts more than 20,000 enthusiasts and the Abu Dhabi Film Festival brings in prominent figures from the industry.
With Etihad Airways you can find great flight deals to the United Arab Emirates, but keep in mind that it is a desert country, and in the summer the temperatures can climb to the mid-40s. The best time to buy tickets to the United Arab Emirates is from November to April, but as it is peak season, you will need to book in advance to find cheap hotels in the United Arab Emirates.
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<p><strong>Source: 'http://flights.etihad.com/en/flights-to-united-arab-emirates' </strong><br /><br /><a href='http://flights.etihad.com/en/flights-to-united-arab-emirates'><img src='http://www.etihad.com/Documents/TRFX/10-facts-about-uae-etihad-airways-infographics.png' alt='Infographic: 10 facts about the United Arab Emirates to celebrate our 100th aircraft' width='620px' border='0' /></a></p>
Related Flights
| Abu Dhabi |
Who was Poet Laureate from 1968 to 1972? | Etihad to 'review policies' after fog snarls flights
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Etihad to 'review policies' after fog snarls flights
Etihad Airways has apologized to passengers delayed by "unprecedented fog" that snarled dozens of flights at the carrier's hub in Abu Dhabi since Saturday. The United Arab Emirates-based airline says it
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Etihad to 'review policies' after fog snarls flights Etihad Airways has apologized to passengers delayed by "unprecedented fog" that snarled dozens of flights at the carrier's hub in Abu Dhabi since Saturday. The United Arab Emirates-based airline says it Check out this story on USATODAY.com: http://usat.ly/1IhoWX4
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Etihad to 'review policies' after fog snarls flights
Ben Mutzabaugh , USA TODAY Published 3:38 p.m. ET Jan. 5, 2015 | Updated 4:35 p.m. ET Jan. 6, 2015
(Photo: Rithvik Reddy via AP)
Etihad Airways has apologized to passengers delayed by "unprecedented fog" that snarled dozens of flights at the carrier's hub in Abu Dhabi since Saturday. The United Arab Emirates-based airline also plans to review its policies on long ground delays and says it expects to resume a normal schedule by Tuesday.
In the meantime, Etihad adds that it's doing all it can to get stranded customers on to their final destinations.
Abu Dhabi International Airport suspended flight operations for several hours on Saturday (Jan. 3) as "as visibility fell below General Civil Aviation Authority-mandated safety limits," Etihad said in its statement.
"Etihad Airways apologizes to its guests for any inconvenience caused as a result of this airport closure, for mandated safety reasons, and thanks them for their patience during these extremely challenging few days," Etihad adds.
MORE: Irate passengers suffer 12-hour wait on tarmac
Etihad says it provided more than 15,000 meals to fliers stuck at the airport and has booked more than 2,000 hotel rooms for passengers with broken itineraries. The airline has mobilized 500 additional staff and has scheduled relief flights to help with the fog-related backlog, which it expects will be mostly cleared by the end of Tuesday.
Still, several unflattering stories emerged for Etihad in the wake of the disruption.
One San Francisco-bound flight was stuck on the tarmac for 12 hours, leading to gripes from fliers who ended up spending more than a full 24-hour day on the aircraft.
On another flight delayed by the fog, an Etihad plane bound for Dusseldorf, Germany, diverted to Vienna, Austria, after a 73-year-old passenger died during the flight. The National of the United Arab Emirates says passengers on that plane – Flight 23 – had been onboard the plane for about 13 hours when the fog delays were included.
Etihad confirmed to the National that a passenger died on board that flight, but tells the UAE newspaper Khaleej Times the passenger's death was unrelated to the tarmac delay.
"Etihad Airways apologizes to those passengers affected by these delays which were beyond the airline's control and offers its deepest condolences to the family of the passenger who passed away," Etihad says in a statement to the Khaleej Times.
As for the San Francisco-bound flight, Etihad Flight 183 suffered a 12-hour tarmac delay before finally taking off for San Francisco. By the time the aircraft arrived to the Bay Area, fliers had been on the aircraft for about 28 consecutive hours.
"The passengers remained on the aircraft as all efforts were being made to secure a new departure time," Etihad said in a statement. "The delay was then compounded by the requirement to replace the aircraft's ultra-long haul operating crew who had exceeded their flight time limitations."
"No one was angry about the delay itself. If it's unsafe to fly, we don't want to fly," Flight 183 passenger Ravali Reddy says to The Associated Press . "It just didn't seem to make any logical sense why we had to stay on the plane."
Still, Venkatesh Pahwa -- another Flight 183 passenger -- described an ugly scene onboard the plane.
"Everybody was fighting with each other, and the flight attendants were fighting with us, and we were fighting with the flights attendants," Pahwa tells KGO TV of San Francisco .
Etihad acknowledged that Flight 183 "was one of the flights most affected by the runway closure" and has pledged "to review its policies on the length of time aircraft can remain on the ground, with passengers aboard, while waiting for a take-off slot."
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What was the surname of the character known as 'Face' or 'Faceman' in the 1980's TV show 'The A-Team'? | 'The A-Team': Where Are The Original Cast Now? - ABC News
'The A-Team': Where Are the Original Cast Now?
By SHEILA MARIKAR and LUCHINA FISHER ( @luchina )
Jan. 23, 2013
NBC/Kobal Collection
It's been 30 years since "The A-Team" debuted on NBC.
In case you're not familiar with them, a primer: The A-Team is a four-man band of ex-U.S. Army Special Forces/Vietnam War veterans/fugitives on the run for war crimes they didn't commit who become mercenaries for hire. Over-the-top violence and cartoon-like action characterized the 1980s TV series based on their misadventures.
The gang got back together in summer 2010 for the movie version of the classic show and it became one of the summer's biggest blockbusters.
But of course, the people who played the parts of Hannibal, Faceman, Howling Mad and Bad Attitude weren't the same ones who graced TV screens in the 1980s. Even the A-team can't escape getting older, and a new crop of actors were brought in to get the job done. In the movie remake, the crew were united by their shared status as Iraq war veterans.
Click through to see where the former stars of the A-Team are now and who took over.
Kobal Collection | Niki Nikolova/FilmMagic/Getty Images
Lt. Templeton "Faceman" Peck
Dirk Benedict played smooth-talking Faceman (aka Face) in the original "A-Team" series. As the A-Team's resident con man and pretty boy, he charmed his way into getting supplies the crew needed and emerged from dangerous endeavors unscathed, cleanly styled, cigar in hand. After "The A-Team" went off the air in 1987, Benedict tried his hand at theater, attempting the title role in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and earning poor reviews. Then it was on to film. He starred in 1993's "Shadow Force" and in 2000 wrote and directed his first screenplay, "Cahoots."
A foreign film and a TV movie later, Benedict dipped his toe in the waters of reality TV, competing in the U.K. version of "Celebrity Big Brother" in 2007. His "A-Team" fame followed him there: a replica of the A-Team van brought Benedict and his character's signature cigar onto the set as the "A-Team" theme tune blasted in the background. He ended up scoring third place in the competition.
Benedict divorced his wife, actress Toni Hudson, in 1995. They had wed in 1986 after she appeared in an episode of "The A-Team." They have two sons together. Benedict has another son from a previous relationship. In 1975, Benedict was diagnosed with prostate cancer and adopted a macrobiotic diet to better his health. He wrote a book about advocating a macrobiotic lifestyle in 1991, "Confessions of a Kamikaze Cowboy."
"Hangover" star Bradley Cooper brought Benedict's character to the big screen in the movie remake. Benedict himself made an appearance in the "A-Team" movie as well, playing Pensacola Prisoner Milt, but he hasn't acted since the film.
Kobal Collection | Danny Martindale/FilmMagic/Getty Images
Sgt. Bosco Albert B.A. "Bad Attitude" Baracus
Pity the fool who gets in Bad Attitude's way. Mr. T brought Sgt. Bosco Albert Baracus to life and cemented his own place in pop culture history with quippy one-liners and chunky gold bling. B.A. served as the A-Team's muscle. His signature move: grabbing an adversary and hurling him in the air. He also had a knack for mechanics, and could engineer pretty much anything with a pair of pliers and a hunk of metal.
Mr. T parlayed his "A-Team" fame into personal success long before the show ended. In 1983, he lent his voice to a cartoon named after him and appeared on the sitcom "Diff'rent Strokes." The following year, he released a motivational video, "Be Somebody ... or Be Somebody's Fool!" inspired by his iconic "A-Team" line, "I pity the fool." The video featured Mr. T's priceless advice to kids, like how to make tripping look like breakdancing. He also released a rap album in 1984 and starred in the movie "The Toughest Man in the World."
But acting and rapping weren't Mr. T's only arenas. In 1985, he broke into professional wrestling, and participated in WWF events through 2001. After "The A-Team," he scaled back his professional projects to commercials (Comcast, Snickers, World of Warcraft, among others) and cameo TV/movie appearances, in part because of his health -- he was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma in 1995.
Quinton "Rampage" Jackson brought Bad Attitude into the 21st century in the movie remake. Although Mr. T himself did not star in the 2010 film, he has had small roles in other TV series and films, including "Not Another Teen Movie."
Photoshot/Getty Images | Ron Galella/Wireimage/Getty Images
Col. John "Hannibal" Smith
Actor George Peppard played the role of Col. John "Hannibal" Smith, the leader of the A-Team. Rarely seen without a cigar between his teeth or black leather gloves on his hands, Hannibal was known for his signature line: "I love it when a plan comes together." A master of disguise, Hannibal also took on various aliases for the A-Team.
Peppard was himself a veteran -- of war films. He starred in "The Blue Max" and "The Bravos" after finding stardom opposite Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's." In the 1970s, he played millionaire sleuth Thomas Banacek in the television series "Banacek." But he's best known to younger audiences as Hannibal, joining the cast of "A-Team" when he was 55.
A lifelong smoker, Peppard was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1992. But he never stopped acting. He had just completed a pilot for a "Matlock" spinoff when he died in 1994 at age 65.
Liam Neeson took over Peppard's role as Hannibal. Tall and ruddy-faced, he bears a striking resemblance to Peppard.
Newscom | Bobby Bank/WireImage/Getty Images
Capt. H.M. "Howling Mad" Murdock
Relative unknown actor Dwight Schultz rose to fame playing mentally unstable Capt. H.M. "Howling Mad" Murdock. Producers had planned to drop his role after the series debut, but the character was a hit with the audience, so Howling Mad was written back in. Howling was the A-Team's craft pilot. His nickname came from his time spent in a mental hospital.
After "The A-Team," Schultz starred as Lt. Reginald "Reg" Barclay in "Star Trek: The Next Generation," reprising the role for "Star Trek: Voyager" and the film "Star Trek: First Contact."
He now provides the voice for video games such as "Spider-Man: Web of Shadows," "FusionFall" and "Terminator Salvation: The Video Game."
South African newcomer Sharlto Copley, best known for his role as Wikus van de Merwe in the Oscar-nominated sci-fi film "District 9," took on the big-screen role of Howling. But Shultz made a cameo appearance as a German doctor in the film.
| Peck |
Sarawak is a state in which country? | Tawnia Baker - The A-Team Characters - ShareTV
Season 2 / Episode 23: - Curtain Call
Tawnia Baker: Face, do you think Murdock will be all right? He's lost so much blood...
Faceman": Eh, Murdock, he's tough! Like a piece of rawhide. One that's just got out of therapy. Yeah, he's got the kind of strength that counts.
Faceman": Don't you worry about Murdock. A few weeks and eh, he won't be able to distinguish reality from a couple of breadsticks.
Season 2 / Episode 23: - Curtain Call
Tawnia Baker: Face, are you listening to me? You go in there and you'll be on the first flight to Leavenworth.
Face: Listen, without those medical supplies, Murdock is dead, so it doesn't matter what the risk is, now does it? And, like you said, the worst that could happen is I go to prison. Not exactly my idea of little fun in the sun, but eh, the hours are regular, the food's plentiful and there's plenty of starch in the shirts.
Tawnia Baker: Face, you're amazing! I can't believe you pulled it off.
Face: Well, green always was my lucky color!
Season 2 / Episode 23: - Curtain Call
Tawnia Baker: Face, the uniform wil never work. Decker will recognize you the moment you walk in. Are you listening to me? You go in there and you'll be on the first flight to Leavenworth.
Face: Listen, without those medical supplies Murdock is dead so it doesn't matter what the risk is, does it? Besides, people very seldom look at what's right under their nose, right?
Tawnia Baker: Are you alright?
Col. John "Hannibal" Smith: There's a doctor in Bad Rock... Maggie Sullivan, get her... hurry! [collapses on the floor]
Tawnia Baker: You're doing it again, Face. Didn't Hannibal say to leave the keys in the ignition?
Face: Aw, It's one thing to leave the car here in Siberia, but to leave the keys?
Face: They took my 'Vette?
Murdock: No, the van.
Face: They took the van AND the 'Vette?
Murdock: No! They took the van and not the 'Vette. Hannibal and B.A. got in the 'Vette to go after the van. And they took my plant!
Tawnia Baker: [on the phone] Listen, Face, you guys should pick me up at the nearest airport so I can get a great story on this guy, er, even an interview on this Driscoll guy.
"Faceman": The answer is no, as in foolish, impossible and say hi to Ted.
Tawnia Baker: I can't tell you guys how included this makes me feel. I mean were like family, practically. I, I mean it's great, don't you think?
Col. John "Hannibal" Smith: Tawnia, you may not be thanking us for long.
"Hannibal" Smith: [to Tawnia] We don't give autographs, honey. What's going on, Murdock?
Tawnia Baker: I got some very important information for you: Colonel Decker is after you.
"Faceman" Peck: Now there's a hot flash.
Season 2 / Episode 15: - The Battle of Bel-Air
Tawnia Baker: You guys are a real trip!
Col. John "Hannibal" Smith: We can be a real mean trip, too. You got a lot of explaining to do.
Tawnia Baker: I'm telling you, I am a reporter. I work for L.A. Career Express and I know Amy Allen very well.
Col. John "Hannibal" Smith: Which is very difficult for us to confirm on short notice, seeing that Amy's in Jakarta right now.
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Who founded 'Auto Trader' in 1975? | Auto Trader Used Cars Stock | Lookers Motor Group
Lookers on Auto Trader See our stock on the leading UK car portal
Lookers Group Cars on Auto Trader
The Auto Trader Heritage
Auto Trader is something of an institution in British motoring circles.
Originally founded in 1975 by John Madejski the first Auto Trader released was Hurst's Thames Valley Traderin 1977 closely followed by Southern Auto Trader, which launched in 1981.
Issued weekly thereafter in a number of regional editions, this popular magazine soon became the go-to publication for drivers and motor retailers alike looking to either sell or buy a car. Circulation peaked at 368,000 per week in January 2000.
In 1996 the company launched its first website and this successfully ran in tandem with the magazine for 17 years. With visitors to the site increasing to 6.5 million by December 2012 the decision was made to discontinue the printed magazine and in 2013 the final editions of this iconic publication were sold.
Auto Trader Today
Today the site attracts a staggering 11 million visitors per month and has grown to become an integral resource for Lookers. As a sales tool it offers a flexible and user friendly platform on which to list cars. Useful features include updated stock levels and a very easy to use search function which makes it simple for buyers to find exactly what they want.
Whether looking for a used Corsa or a brand new Land Rover , customers can quickly find what they need. The Auto Trader passion for cars is legendary and their passion for digital limitless. Together, this delivers an unparalleled customer experience.
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Which major river runs through the Scottish city of Perth? | Unlimited Cars |
Home
Good websites for car dealers and traders.
Auto Trader the printed magazine was founded in the UK in 1975 by John Madejski, from an idea he brought over from America. In partnership with Paul Gibbonsin, the business was launched in 1977. Trading initially as Hurst’s Thames Valley Trader, in four years it spawned Southern Auto Trader which launched in 1981.
Regional Editions:
Although the UK’s AutoTrader website was launched in 1996, the company continued printing its regional weekly magazines. With the printed versions peaking at 368,000 in January 2,000, the magazine saw a steady decline until in March 2013 circulation was down to 27,000 magazines a week. After 36 years in print, the June 2013 edition was the last, and the company began concentrating on its online sites.
Auto Trader the Websites:
Auto Trader plc now concentrates all its efforts into its online business. Having nothing to do with the buying and selling of automobiles, it is a platform where dealers, traders, and private individuals can advertise or look for cars online.
As the country’s largest online automotive site, Auto Trader lists over 400,000 vehicles daily, and boasts the largest pool of those selling vehicles of any online site. A recent survey revealed 80% of time spent by prospective car, van and truck purchasers online was spent on Auto Trader. Autotrader.co.uk also has a sister site in Ireland trading as carzone.ie.
Auto Trader UK quotes some impressive figures with a reported 92% of the population knowing who they are, and what they do. Over 80% of dealers and traders advertise on Auto Trader, and 65% of used car sales and purchases are made through the firms online businesses.
AutoTrader.com:
AutoTrader.com is based in Atlanta Georgia, and was founded in 1997. Very similar to the UK version it also boasts some impressive figures with over 3 million vehicles listed. Over 40,000 dealers and 250,000 private sellers use the site and it attracts over 14 million potential buyers a month.
Everything under one roof with AutoTrader:
Other AutoTrader sites can be found including New Zealand, Australia, and India. Based on similar software, Auto Trader sites allows a buyer to research and compare models new and used, body types, mileage, and prices.
As well as cars, AutoTrader has separate sites for vans, motorcycles, caravans, motorhomes, and trucks. Add to that vehicle checks and valuations, vehicle insurance and loans, warranties and private registration plates, and AutoTrader really is your one stop shop for buying and selling vehicles.
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In which sport did Dave Prowse ('Darth Vader') represent England at the 1962 Commonwealth Games? | David Prowse, M.B.E. - May the Force Be With You
By David Gentle
At 6ft 7 inches, 20 stone and with a 51 inch chest, David Prowse is a big man and with a big heart. Multi talented and known not simply for his physical prowess, immense though it is, but also for his long involvement in International sport, show business and charity work. Consider just one aspect for example. The 'Green Cross Code Man" is famous in this country and indeed the world, as for 14 years, Dave Prowse gave road safety talks in over 2,000 shows at schools, to half a million children in countries all over the world; In Europe. U.S.A,. Australia. Barbados, even the Cayman Isles. In the UK alone he visited approximately 700 cities. towns, and villages the net result for his efforts was accidents involving children dropped by over half, helping to save 20,000 lives per year! Imagine the tragedies averted which might be enough to justify a man's worth in his lifetime. During this time Dave was appointed Special Deafriender by the Royal Institute for the Deaf and used to travel the UK presenting phonic hearing aids to hearing impaired children. He was also invited to lecture at The National Technical Institute for The Deaf in Rochester, New York.
Devoted to many charities, including The Variety Club of Great Britain, The Stars Organization for Spastics, (now affiliated to the Scope charity), Arthritis Care, he has supported major organizations for the disabled and handicapped in the U.K. and overseas. He is also heavily involved in his own charity. Dave Prowse's 'Force Against Arthritis', pledging to assist in raising two and three quarter million pounds for a new research centre at the world famous orthopaedic hospital in Oswestry, Shropshire. The Arthritis and Rheumatism Council is also involved in raising funds for Dave's charity. Dave knows all about how debilitating and frustrating arthritis can be. Still suffering from arthritis (not helped by a bad weightlifting accident in 1989) has meant a hip replacement and more recently major surgery to save his ankle from being amputated.
He is also the man to achieve perhaps most fame from his large screen role as Darth Vader the ultimate in movie villains. Dave was born 1st July 1935, brought up and educated in Bristol winning a scholarship to attend Bristol Grammar school 1947 to 1952. At first he was a capable athlete, especially good at sprinting but later aged 13 yrs., he developed suspected T.B. of the knee and so for the next 4 years landed up mainly bed ridden and wearing a leg iron. Time is supposed to heal all ills, where he certainly grew in length and by the time they took the leg iron off, David had sprouted form 5ft 9: to a lanky 6 ft, 5 inch lanky underweight teenager. Desperate to fill out his frame, he was inspired by Reeves, Park and Pearl and after a quick try out with a Charles Atlas course, David took up weight training/bodybuilding. Just 17 yrs. old he made such progress, going from 160lbs to 240 lbs. that he was invited to enter the 1960 Mr. Universe contest, won by mighty Henry Downs. Although not a physique winner, David was often featured in Health & Strength, known then as Britain's tallest bodybuilder.
After ten years of bodybuilding and aware that height was his limiting factor for stardom per se Dave diverted his energies and every growing strength into weightlifting. At first, coming 3rd in the 1961 British Heavyweight Class, then in 1962 becoming the British Heavyweight champion, and again in 1963 and 1964. Later he competed in both the World Championships in Budapest and the European Commonwealth Games in Perth, Australia. Around that period, he set numerous British records including a deadlift of 674 3/4 lbs., straight arm pullover of 160 lbs and a strict barbell curl with 202 lbs. He also recalls with pleasure, the great lifters he associated with, including Louis Martin and competing with Yurl Viasov and Serge Reding.
Before and after this active era David like most mortals (before he became immortal as Darth Vader in star Wars) had to earn a living. He had a whole succession of jobs, confessing the main criteria of work had to be conducive with and to his training. Occupations ranged from lifeguard to accountant, at one time working for a famous football pools company. However, once he became the British W/L champion he decided to produce his own magazine 'Power', also buying 'Fitness & Health' and publishing both for a limited period making an attempt to encourage all around training interests. it was not to be. With an ever increasing number of magazines and a fragmented market of bodybuilders, lifters, powerlifters, keep fit fans and plain old health nuts, 'Power' folded in 1969. Disappointed at missing out in the Tokyo Olympic Games, because for reasons best known to themselves, BAWLA decided not to send a heavyweight; David totally anti-steroid, turned professional. He endorsed the then novel apparatus Bullworker which was even on sale in Harrods (I never had the power to get mine out of the box!), and later touring as 'Britain's Strongest Man'; tearing telephone directories, bending bars among many other strength demonstrations. He then entered as a contestant, in the Highland Games and was in the worlds top three at caber tossing. In 1963 on a Scottish tour With George Eiferman and David Webster, David Prowse became the first person to lift the fabled Dinnie Stones which weigh approx 7cwt. (nearly 800 lbs).
By 1965 David was making major inroads into show business from TV commercials to full bodied roles. From 'The Saint' TV series to the big screen 'Casino Royale', he worked With just about everyone in a galaxy of stars. In the 1970's he played prime parts in the Hammer Horror movies, but it was in 1976/7 when George Lucas 'Star Wars' hit town, that David Prowse really came into the limelight as the evil Darth Vader (in the highest grossing movie in the U,S.A. for all time). Meanwhile not one to waste time, David landed a contract for the Child Pedestrian Road Safety commercial, for the Dept. of Transport as The Green Cross Code man. Keeping his finger on the pulse in the fitness world, he became National Director of weight training at Crystal Palace and for ten years, Keep-fit consultant to Harrods.
Come 1970, despite his multiple commitments and TV and film career blossoming, fitness fanatic David opened and has run ever since his own Health Studio & Gym in S.E. London; a venue used by many top stars, Frank Zane in particular praising David's facilities for training and coaching. Meanwhile, David becomes even more famous as a one-to-one personal trainer of the stars and celebrities. His client list is like an International show biz Who's Who, Film stars include, Albert Finney. Stephanie Powell, Robert Powell, Shane Richie etc. plus professional people and politicians. Most publicized would be David's efforts to build up a scrawny Christopher Reeve into a credible muscled 'Superman' movie role (1977). Under Dave's tuition, Chris put on 30lbs of muscle in six weeks. Reeves of course is now fighting a new battle to regain health from his tragic horse riding accident and David Prowse aka Darth Vader wishes Chris all the power and 'Force' he can muster.
Dave's charity work in the U.S.A started in Washington D.C. when he attended a film premier organized on behalf of Eunice Kennedy's Special Olympics Movement. At a reception at the Shriver's house he was asked if he would like to drum up publicity (and cash) for the cause. Dave met up With his old training buddy, Arnold S, who was already fully involved with the cause. Introduced later to Alan Reich. who is head of the National Organization on Disability (N.O.D.), Dave was asked to M.C. the annual General Conference of the Presidents Committee on Employment for the Handicapped. Over 5,000 delegates attended. He was appointed M.C. for three years in succession. This was followed by an invitation to tour schools for Child Pedestrian Safety. The media thought it unique for an Englishman to tour the States teaching American kids how to cross the road, They turned up in droves.
In 1983. Dave was summoned to The White House to witness President signing the proclamation declaring 1983-1992 the International Decade of the Disabled Person. At the end of the ceremony Dave was awarded the honour of being appointed Special Ambassador to the International Decade by President Regan himself.
Least known in this country is David's quite amazing celebrity status especially when invited to attend U.S.A. Sci-Fi conventions. Enthusiasts of Star Wars. Star Wars 2, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedl, Forbidden World etc, queue in their thousands just to see him, sometimes to just touch him (Darth Vader) or obtain his autograph. With just a few days notice that he was coming, one such convention in San Diego was attended by 32,000 fans!
David is married to Norma and they have three children. He has long since proven he's not just a musclemen" (as did Arnold S.) with a diversity of talents, his most recent being literary. His two published books are 'Play Safe With The Stars', a child's guide to safety, and 'Fitness is Fun' an autobiography/weight tra1n1ng and fitness manual which is worth buying for the photographs alone. A lover of good food, German sweet wine and cider (hope it's Bulmers Strongbow cider, Dave! Ed.), he is also co-author of a celebrity recipe book, a movie trivia manual and Hammer House of Horrors anthology.
Only two things scare me about Dave. He once sat in front of me at a Universe show and I couldn't see a damn thing (and I wasn't going to ask him to move!). The other is his apparent ambition to sing With a trad Jazz band. I suspect Dave's singing is like Les Dawson's piano playing, so I do hope to miss that occasion!
In over 40 year at International sport and show biz. from Benny Hill to the Return of the Jedi et al, David Prowse deserves every honour bestowed upon him, because he is a man who has given his time and great effort to improve the quality of life for many. especially the handicapped and most worthy of all to save children's lives. I for one am grateful that all those long years ago, a lanky kid had the courage to throw off that leg piece and take up the barbell. May "The Force be With You" David.
For further information on his charity work (mention Health & Strength) contact: Dave Prowse. 12 Marshalsea Road, London SEl IHL England. Tel: 01071-407 -5650 Fax: 0171·403-8326 or in the U.S.A. c/o Max Patterson, 508 Maplewood Avenue, Wilson, N.C. 27893, U.S.A. Tel: (919) 291 9468.
Athletic Achievements
Mr. Universe contender 1960 weighing 250 lbs at 6'7".
British Heavyweight Weightlifting Champion 1962, 1963 and 1964.
Competed in Worlds Weightlifting Championships Budapest 1962.
Empire and Commonwealth Games representative Perth, Australia 1962.
Scottish Highland Games champion.
| Weightlifting |
What is the title of the Head of State of Oman? | Details of Publication - Apex Publishing Ltd.
Classification:
Autobiography/Film
Brief Description: Everyone has heard of Darth Vader, the infamous Star Wars villain we all love to fear, created by George Lucas and brought to life by Dave Prowse MBE, but people may not be so familiar with the story of the multi-talented man behind the mask.
It required someone exceptional to turn a helmeted costume into the principal character in the highest grossing film series in cinema history - that someone was Dave Prowse. The towering, physical presence of the 6ft 7” bodybuilder was ideally suited to personify the intimidating Darth Vader.
Straight from the Force’s Mouth takes us behind the scenes of Star Wars and documents how this extraordinary man took on the role of the menacing central character to creating one of the most iconic villains in cinema history.
In this book of memoirs, Dave shares his journey from disadvantaged child and poor student to champion weightlifter and international film star. The Dave Prowse story is one of determination and hard work and in this honest account he explains how he overcame the many setbacks in his life to achieve success and global recognition.
This book is a must have for Star Wars fans of all ages and will appeal to anyone who enjoys a truly inspirational and motivating real life story.
Special Note: This book is also available as an eBook. An old edition of the paperback version carries the following ISBN: 978-1-782818-20-5.
About the Author: Dave Prowse was born in Bristol in 1935. He was a disadvantaged child from a working class background and grew up without a father. As a teenager, Dave developed an interest in bodybuilding and competed in the Mr Universe contest alongside his lifelong friend Arnold Schwarzenegger. After training hard, he went on to win the British heavyweight weightlifting title and became a highly respected health and fitness trainer. Dave trained Christopher Reeve for his role as Superman and has also trained Albert Finney, Daniel Day Lewis, Vanessa Redgrave and many other well known stars.
Prior to achieving fame with the Star Wars films, Dave was also known for his role as the ‘Green Cross Code’ man during the 1970s, heading up the UK Child Pedestrian Road Safety Campaign. He was awarded the MBE in the Millennium Honours List for his services to road safety and charity.
His physique secured his entry into the world of show business and he is possibly best known for his portrayal of iconic villain Darth Vader in the Star Wars films, a role which catapulted him to international stardom. Dave has also appeared in a number of other films including A Clockwork Orange.
Dave is the author of two previous books Fitness is Fun and Play Safe with the Stars and is in constant demand as a public speaker.
Purchasing
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For which British national newspaper did the cartoonist Giles produce his most famous work? | OBITUARY:Carl Giles | The Independent
OBITUARY:Carl Giles
Monday 28 August 1995 23:02 BST
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The Independent Online
Carl Giles was a phenomenon. At a time when most cartoonists were striving for spontaneity, many of them experi- menting with versions of the squiggle and doodle, he carried on composing his cartoons like pictures, striving for accuracy in the settings, the facial expressions, the body language, the tonality and the textures.
As a household name whose annuals regularly topped the best-seller lists at Christmas Giles would have been expected to accept if not to court publicity, but he resolutely refused to be interviewed and on the very rare occasions he capitulated gave nothing away, not because he was shy but because he did not feel like it. As a commentator on the contemporary scene, he should have found London attractive but he had to be dragged there and got what he wanted from newspapers, his Suffolk farm, local pubs and the view from his Ipswich studio. And, once he could get away with it, he obliged the Express to come and collect his drawings by taxi or, in snowy weather, by helicopter.
He insisted on cartooning no more than three days a week so as to leave time for the vigorous pursuit of his other interests. One editor might ad- monish him as "brilliant, but unpunctual, unreliable and unbusinesslike" but it did not matter - everyone knew the Express could not afford to lose him - he could follow Rabelais' advice "Fay ce que voudras". All this because he head found a formula that made him the first social cartoonist to have a truly national appeal.
Until Giles was established, humour knew its place. For the educated readers of Punch there was urbane social comedy; for the ignorant readers of Tit-Bits there was knockabout fun. For a cartoonists to bridge the gap seemed an almost impossible task. Phil May - he who said "draw firm and be jolly" - nearly did it with his cockney types but too much condescension showed through. Bruce Bairnsfather, the creator of "Old Bill", did do it - but that was during the First World War when national unity was a condition of survival. Heath Robinson did do it - by escaping into fantasy. Giles was the first cartoonist of real life to be appreciated as much in the public bar as he was at the Palace.
How did it happen? First a share of the credit must go to Express Newspapers. It is doubtful if any proprietor has valued cartoonists more highly than did the first Lord Beaverbrook. He wanted the best, irrespective of their politics, and in the shape of Low, Vicky, Strube, Giles and Osbert Lancaster he got them. Cartoonists liked working for him not just because he paid well and allowed them freedom, within limits, to upset his readers, but because he and his editors treated them as artists.
In Giles's case this meant agreement upon an unpunishing schedule (two cartoons a week for the Daily Express, one for the Sunday Express); allocation of generous space on the page and putting up with a good deal of artistic temperament. Most unusual in those days (the mid-1940s) was their consent to Giles's staying put in the Suffolk country so that his cartoons were never discussed or seen as rough sketches but despatched on a take-it- or-leave-it basis. The treatment worked. Giles stayed with the paper for more than 50 years - a record only equalled by Tenniel and Shepard in Punch.
When John Gordon, editor of the Sunday Express, lured the 27-year-old Giles away from Reynolds News in 1943, he was taking on a self-taught cartoonist of promise but no marked individuality. Born over a tobacconist shop at the Angel, Islington, north London, educated up to the age of 14 at the local Barnsbury Park School, Giles worked first as an office boy for a Wardour Street film company from which he graduated to becoming an animator on cartoons. He joined Reynolds News, a left-wing Sunday newspaper, in 1937, doing single-panel and strip cartoons and turned to good account his animating experience in composition and capturing movement.
Rejected for war service because of injuries incurred in a motor-cycle accident, he treated war in his early cartoons rather as Bairnsfather had done: battle as a bloody nuisance; Tommy as a wag. Later, as the Express's official war cartoonist, who had entered the concentration camp at Belsen with the liberating troops, he sometimes stopped joking to show the Nazi leaders in all their bestiality. But generally he was genial and he was no longer in search of a style. In April 1944 he drew his first classic. A group of cheerful US airmen are standing beside their crashed bomber in the street of a German city. One of them has spotted a passing Nazi car. The caption is "Taxi!"
By the time that the first collection of Giles cartoons was published in 1946, Giles was famous. John Gordon, in the introduction, hailed him as "a spreader of happiness", "a really great artist", "a genius" with "the common touch". Next year Arthur Christiansen praised his realism. But the following year Nathaniel Gubbins moved off on another tack seeing Giles as a savage satirist, "a great hater of stupid things and people". Was there more then to Giles than his admirers had assumed?
There had been the anti-Nazi cartoons; there had been frequent appearances by a skeletal schoolmaster and tormentor of Giles's youth called "Chalkie" (actually he got as much as he gave); there were to be tilts at tax inspectors, teddy boys, traffic wardens, shop stewards and Members of Parliament. But hatred? The Giles Family, who started to emerge in 1947, helped to clear things up. It consisted of Grandma, the indomitable anarchist; work- shy Father who thinks he's head of the household and sensible Mother who is; their son George, married to Vera, thin, sad and constantly under the weather; an infant son, Ernie, diabolic and prematurely bald, the Twins and others.
All the members of the cast were drawn with the sort of affection for their faults that characterised a novelist like H.E. Bates rather than a satirist like Swift. Satire implies an urge to reform which seemed totally foreign to Giles's intentions. Of course Englishmen are incurably lazy and boozy and philistine and prone to violence. But what the Hell, they're funny. His attitude was summed up in a cartoon which showed Ernie disconsolate under a tree. His father, who had been happily fishing, turns round and says, "All right. You despair of the human race, I despair of the human race, we all despair of the human race. Now hold your tongue."
Vicky once described Giles as "a present day Hogarth". But Hogarth was a satirist, more than a moralist. Giles's line of descent is traced more convincingly from Rowlandson whose morality, in so far as it existed, comes a poor second to his graphic talent for reporting the world around him. Both men were true reporters so that sentimentality towards man or beast was excluded from the fluent curving line with which they often captured beauty. Kinder than Rowlandson, and a good deal cleaner, Giles, in those senses, owed more to Baxter and Thomas, the creators of a shabby purple-nosed reprobate called Ally Sloper who with his family and friends was loved by the Victorians in the same way that the Giles family was loved by us. In our own century Giles professed admiration for Bairnsfather, "Pont",Posy Simmonds and "Trog", none of whom could be described as Hogarthian in outlook. The Hogarth analogy better suits some of the many cartoonists whose style showed a strong Giles influence, notably "Jak" in the Evening Standard.
In fact a description of Giles that was nearer the mark came from Colin MacInnes in an article in the New Left Review in March 1950. While rhapsodising about Giles's powers as an artist "There is no one (and may I repeat no one - no film director, no photographer, no painter) who has caught as precisely and poetically as he has, and with such strength of wit, fantasy and sardonic-tender observation the true aspect of the contemporary urban scene", he attacked his social attitude accusing him of being "well satisfied with society as it is". MacInnes deplored his "frantic adulation of the powerful", his sycophancy towards the royal family, his "basic respectability". However he could not have looked closely at "Grandma".
It seemed as if one of Giles's greatest joys was to set up figures of authority so that Grandma could knock them down. Black-coated, black-hatted, black-hearted and squat, she wasn't choosy in her malevolence. She and Ernie attend a meeting to debate capital punishment. Ernie pipes up, "Grandma says hang everybody". Another of her rare occasions for pleasure is at an RAF recruitment centre when the sergeant says to her, "I can only suggest that if we've called you up as a rear-gunner there has been a ghastly mistake". He underestimated her; she was heroic, and as a hero she was much needed. The Britannia of Tenniel and Partridge hardly suited a nation whose potential to cut ice in the world was sadly diminished - but Grandma as Britannia was just right. She might be old and steeped in sin but she never knew when the game was up. Brandishing her parrot-head umbrella she'd have whacked our lads inland on the beaches of Dunkirk and prodded them upwards on to the summit of Everest. In one of his letters Giles Junior said that he didn't know if Grandma had burnt her bra but that if she had it would have "gone up like Vesuvius". Any confrontation with authority was likely to produce a similar eruption.
There are many reasons to account for Giles's popularity and the conviction that it will last. His scenes set in pubs, schools, hospitals, village- halls, churches, farmyards, stables, parade-grounds, harbours, factories and above all in council-house front rooms and back gardens give an authentic picture of British life and attitudes of the second half of the 20th century. Much of the attraction of these scenes comes from an enthusiasm for detail which reflected the interests of Giles's richly varied life - as a farmer, racing-driver, horseman, sailor, DIY enthusiast and pub-crawler.
His humour, based on a marvellous eye for incongruity, laced (especially in the captions) with sarcasm and occasionally vaulting into the absurd, was rooted in affection for the comedie humaine and to his credit he had no truck with jokes based on smut or racism. Despite or perhaps because of the fact he had no children he will be best remembered as a family man - the creator of the Giles Family, as endearing a bunch of layabouts and mischief-makers (except Mum) as one could ever hope to find. Above all else he will be remembered as the creator of Grandma who will surely enter the Pantheon of immortal comic characters alongside Falstaff, Uncle Toby, Micawber and Mr Pooter, or in pictorial terms Ally Sloper, Old Bill, Colonel Blimp and Maudie Littlehampton.
Simon Heneage
The works of Giles are the least collected of all the world's collectable cartoons, writes Denis Gifford.
For most of Giles's 50-year career on the Daily Express, the originals of his cartoons have been rarer than hen's teeth, largely thanks to Giles himself, who guarded the dissemination of his art work. Now and then he presented one, but never would he personally allow one to be sold for money at auction; although one would occasionally slip through.
Giles possessed a vast quantity of his work. A one-man exhibition of his cartoons, held at the National Museum of Cartoon Art, in London, in autumn 1993, which he attended in one of his last public appearances, was so bedecked with his drawings, black-and-white and fully coloured, that no admirer could absorb the sight in one go.
For most people, copies of Giles Annuals are sufficient, but even these have rocketed in price since they were first given a value by the Book Collector in January 1985. At that time, the first annual, published in 1946, was priced at pounds 30. Five years later, it would have cost you pounds 100, and last week you would have been lucky to buy one for pounds 200. Now that Giles has left us, the price could well increase further. Cheaper, then, to buy the facsimile, recently republished by the Express. Of the almost 50 annuals that have followed, prices run from around pounds 100 for No 2 to 50p for last year's souvenir compilation.
Although they are not pure Giles books, the wartime series of humorous paperbacks edited by the Rev S. Evelyn Thomas already cost rather more than the 1s 6d (71/2p) they sold for at the time. This was the famous Laughs series, and Giles provided his first full-colour art work for their covers. They began with Humours of ARP (1941) and continued with Laughs With The Home Guard, working their way through each branch of the forces, land, sea, air and land girls. Their value was pounds 10 per piece a few years ago, but has now reached a minimum of pounds 35, with some dealers asking pounds 50.
But as to a Giles original, and in colour, bids could begin at pounds 3,000 - but where will they end?
Carl Ronald Giles, cartoonist: born London 29 September 1916; cartoonist, Reynolds News 1937-43; cartoonist, Daily Express and Sunday Express 1943- 95; OBE 1959; married 1942 Joan Clarke (died 1994); died Ipswich 27 August 1995.
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Which is the only continent through which pass both the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer? | Famous Suffolk People
Suffolk Barns
Famous Suffolk People
Suffolk has a rich history, unique architecture, stunning beaches and breath-taking countryside as well as first class local food & drink, so it's no wonder that we attract a host of celebrities & famous residents, both past and present.
Famous Suffolk People
Sir Peter Hall CBE was born in Bury St Edmunds on November 22, 1930 and during his life founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and directed the National Theatre, Glyndebourne and then his own The Peter Hall Company.
Peter Hall made his mark at the age of 24 when, in 1955, he produced a new play by a relatively unknown writer - Samuel Beckett. The play was Waiting for Godot and the rest, as they say, is history.
In 1974 Peter made a film based loosely upon the book 'Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village' by Ronald Blythe. The book has been described as a work of rural realism and is based in East Anglia. The author himself appeared in the film, as did Sir Peter Halls father, and all other parts are played by real-life villagers who improvised their own dialogue.
Benjamin Britten was expected to write the music for the film, as a fellow Suffolk resident (see below) but unfortunately he was unwell so it fell to Michael Tippett, also from East Anglia, who produced his Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli which contributed significantly to the popularity of the film.
Big fan of performing arts? See our guide to Theatre's in Suffolk or find out more about the lovely town of Bury St Edmunds . For further information on Aldeburgh, the hometown on Benjamin Britten, see our Aldeburgh article, and in particular Snape Maltings .
Home grown Wimbledon champions are few and far between but we have our very own in Suffolk - Christine Truman made her Wimbledon debut at 16 and won the French Open 2 years later in 1959. She won £40! Today she lives and plays tennis in Aldeburgh, where she's President of the Tennis Club & regularly beats us lesser mortals on the court. A dream to watch and an inspiration to many younger players, including her daughter Amanda Janes who followed in her footsteps and became British No 1. Amanda coaches regularly in Aldeburgh and Ipswich. You can recognise her easily as she's the spitting image of Gwyneth Paltrow - but a much better tennis player!
If you love the great outdoors, see our guide to Camping in Suffolk or for some great active days out....
Did you watch Poldark on BBC on Sunday evenings? The original Poldark in the 1970's was Robin Ellis, who plays the Reverend Mr Halse in the recent series. Robin Ellis is an actor and cookery book writer who was born in Ipswich and he remains a loyal Ipswich Town Football Club supporter to this day even though he now lives in France. Find out more about Ipswich
P.D. James - the renowned crime fiction writer, P. D. James, had a second home in Southwold and was created Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991. Several of her novels were set in Suffolk – for example, in Unnatural Causes, when Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh spends a quiet holiday at his aunt's cottage on Monksmere Head, just south of Dunwich . However, all hope of peace is soon shattered by murder. On his initial journey, the detective stops at Blythburgh church and enters ‘the cold silvery whiteness of one of the loveliest church interiors in Suffolk’. Covehithe is the setting for Death in Holy Orders, and in The Children of Men, a novel set in the future, Southwold is the centre for the compulsory suicide of the old! P. D. James’ autobiography is full of local allusions, including pictures of the Cathedral of the Marshes at Blythburgh.
Visit a Suffolk Museum to find out more about the rich and varied heritage of our historic county.
Bob Hoskins 1942 - 2014 - well known and award-winning actor, Bob Hoskins, was famous for playing a great variety of roles in many films over a long period (his acting career began in the 1960's and lasted until close to his death). He was particularly known for playing tough, Cockney gangsters - but was actually born in Bury St Edmunds in 1942! His mother was evacuated to Suffolk from London as a result of the heavy bombings, and the Hoskins family left Bury while Bob was just a baby. Star of The Long Good Friday, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and many more, he was diagnosed with Parkinsons disease and retired in 2012.
Ralph Fiennes was born in Ipswich on 22 December 1962. As well as being a world famous actor (credits include Schindlers List, The Constant Gardener, The English Patient, Harry Potter etc etc) he is an 8th cousin of the Prince of Wales and a 3rd cousin of adventurer Ranulph Fiennes. He is the eldest of six children and his siblings include actor Joseph Fiennes as well as Martha Fiennes, a director (in her film Onegin, he played the title role); Magnus Fiennes, a composer; Sophie Fiennes, a filmmaker; and Jacob Fiennes, a conservationist. Ralph Fiennes is a UK UNICEF Ambassador and his full name is ....Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes!
Benjamin Britten - (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) -
2013 was the centenary of his birth in Lowestoft to a dentist father and an amateur musician mother. Britten was educated at Old Buckenham Hall School in Suffolk and in 1927 he began private lessons in music that would be the beginning of his world-famous musical career.
In 1947 he and his partner Peter Pears founded the Aldeburgh Festival , an English arts festival devoted mainly to classical music. In 1976 Britten accepted a life peerage as Baron Britten of Aldeburgh but he died of heart failure soon after at his house in Aldeburgh, and is buried in the churchyard of St. Peter and St. Paul's Church. The Red House in Aldeburgh, where Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears lived and worked together for almost thirty years, is now the home of the Britten-Pears Foundation which promotes their musical legacy.
Ed Sheeran is a singer-songwriter who is currently signed to Asylum / Atlantic Records. Sheeran broke through commercially in June 2011, when his debut single "The A Team" debuted at number 3 on the UK chart. He was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire to Irish and English parents, before moving to Framlingham, Suffolk. He learned guitar at a very young age, and began writing songs during his time at Thomas Mills High School in Framlingham .
John Peel – the influential DJ and radio presenter, John Peel lived in Suffolk for 33 years, and his gravestone was erected three years after his death. Peel was Radio 1's longest serving DJ when he died aged 65 in October 2004, famously championing The Undertones' Teenage Kicks on his show. He was quoted as saying he would like the song's line "our teenage dreams so hard to beat" on his tombstone. The DJ is buried in St Andrew's Church, in the village of Great Finborough, Suffolk. Peel's widow, Sheila Ravenscroft, said: "We have put the words on the stone that he would've wanted. I wouldn't dare do anything else!"
John Peel Centre for Creative Arts. The former Corn Exchange building in the Town Centre of Stowmarket is being converted into a top quality centre for creative arts in honour of the legendary John Peel who lived just outside the
Town. A group of dedicated volunteers - including John's wife, Sheila - have done some excellent work to raise funds to carry out initial improvement work to which will enable the building to be used to host events.
To find out more information, visit www.johnpeelcentreforcreativearts.co.uk
Twiggy - one of the world’s most famous models, Twiggy, shares a home in Southwold with her actor husband, Leigh Lawson. The couple (pictured above) can often be seen taking a walk along the beach in Southwold, and Twiggy says she loves shopping – especially for food – in a number of Suffolk markets. It was one winter in 2004, when the couple were having lunch in a pub after one of their walks on the gusty beach, that she was spotted by Steve Sharp, the marketing executive for Marks & Spencer....the rest, they say is history
He had the immediate idea of using her in the well-regarded M&S campaign. Twiggy says, "I'm very happy I went to that pub. It's funny, when I think of all the times I've been to meet someone about a job, and worried about what to wear, and got changed a million times. And then there I am that day in Southwold in my woolly hat and anorak, and Steve spots me. It just shows, doesn't it?”
BBC Radio 4 and Newsnight Broadcaster Martha Kearney lives in Suffolk where she enjoys producing honey from her six beehives. Watch her on a BBC4 TV series called The Joy of Honey in 2014.
Griff Rhys Jones
Presenter, comedian and documentary maker, Griff Rhys Jones may love the open road and exploring rivers but home is where the heart is. For the 59-year-old that means Holbrook with a garden sloping down the banks of the River Stour, on the Shotley Peninsular in Suffolk, where he lives with wife Jo and Labrador Cadbury.
After making his name alongside Mel Smith in Not The Nine O’clock News and Alas Smith and Jones, the multi-talented Jones went on to star on stage and screen.
A keen sailor who first tacked his way around the East Anglian waterways with his father Elwyn, Jones has brought the magic of sailing yachts to life through programmes such as Three Men in a Boat and the BBC series River Journeys, which have featured the River Orwell and
Pin Mill . The 60-year-old owns a classic yacht, the Undina, which has been berthed at Shotley Marina and is a keen conservationist who supports the work done by the RSPB.
See some of the reasons why Griff Rhys Jones loves Suffolk: Attractions
Jimmy Doherty (born 1975) - this Suffolk-based farmer and television presenter was born in Ilford, Essex and trained as a farmer in Cumbria. It was here that he met Michaela Furney, his future wife, and the two of them set up The Essex Pig Company utilising free–range meat production practices. Jimmy went on buy his own farm in Wherstead near Ipswich , which became the base for his BBC TV series, Jimmy's Farm. The series followed Jimmy's trials and tribulations as he set up his rare breed pig farm. Jimmy has since established the farm as a visitor attraction with shops, butterfly house, gardens, animal pens, market and events throughout the year - you can visit the farm by clicking here Jimmy's Farm, Ipswich .
Since Jimmy's Farm, Doherty has made a number of series for the BBC including Jimmy's Food Factory, In Darwin's Garden, The Wild Honey Hunters and Farming Heroes.
Jonathan Aitken was the first MP for many years to be sentenced to jail in 1999, but he started a trend with 9 MPs and peers have since following him (due to the expenses scandal). Aitkens was jailed following a libel action against the Guardian which he lost and was shown to have perjured himself. The former Orwell Park schoolboy and journalist at the East Anglian Daily Times served time at Her Majesty's Pleasure in Belmarsh Prison. His family had moved to Halesworth just after the end of WW11, and his father, Sir William Aitken was a Conservative MP for Bury St Edmunds.
Brian Capron - the actor, Brian Capron, was born in Eye and is probably best known for his role as serial killer Richard Hillman in the television soap opera Coronation Street. He appeared in the series from 2001 to 2003. Other notable TV credits include: Z-Cars, Dixon of Dock Green, The Sweeney, Blake's 7, Tales of the Unexpected, Bergerac, Minder, Casualty, Birds of a Feather, Murder Most Horrid, The Bill, Taggart, Peak Practice, and Grange Hill.
Delia Smith - once one of Britain's best-loved celebrity cooks, authors and TV presenters, Delia Smith is also a Suffolk celebrity for her role as shareholder at Norwich City F.C. Delia currently resides near Stowmarket with her husband and co-shareholder of Norwich City, Michael Wynn-Jones. Delia has had a varied and successful career, beginning as a behind-the-scenes consultant for Sainsbury's. She has presented a number of highly popular TV shows and written many well-loved cookery books, each with an aim and focus on teaching basic cookery skills.
June Brown MBE - a true British Treasure, June Brown, is best known for her role as the chain-smoking gossip Dot Cotton in the popular soap opera EastEnders. She was born in Needham Market in 1927. During the Second World War, she was evacuated to Wales. At 17, she met and married the actor John Garley, but he suffered depression and committed suicide at home in 1957. In 1958, she married Robert Arnold, star of the well-known early BBC television programme Dixon of Dock Green. Since Arnold died in 2003, June has lived alone in their house in Surrey.
Humphrey Lyttelton May 1921-April 2008
The famed jazz trumpeter, broadcaster and quizmaster was a regular visitor to his father’s home in Grundisburgh , enjoying the solitude of Suffolk’s scenic countryside.
Humphrey’s father George, the second son of the 8th Viscount of Cobham, moved to Suffolk after retiring as a housemaster at Eton College, in 1945 and stayed there until his death, aged 79, in 1962.
Although an accomplished jazz musician , Humphrey’s celebrity stemmed from his roles on radio with I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue and The Best of Jazz.
Marcus Evans - Ipswich Town
The owner and chairman of Ipswich Town Football Club spent his early years in a family cottage in the small village of Walsham le Willows, near Bury St Edmunds.
That abiding memory was a factor when he bought the Portman Road club in 2007 at a knock down price. The 49-year-old Evans is listed 143rd in the Sunday Times Rich List with a £625 million fortune from companies, which employ more than 3,000 people worldwide.
A keen golfer, he has two homes in London, but is a regular visitor to Suffolk, often arriving by helicopter and staying and dining close to the Ipswich club. See places to stay
Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (approx. 1471-1475 – 29 November 1530) - this historical political figure and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church was born in Ipswich and attended Ipswich School. Wolsey came into great power as King Henry VIII's chief adviser, and held Henry's confidence until the King decided to seek an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn. Wolsey's failure to secure the annulment is widely perceived to have directly caused his downfall and arrest. In 1529, Wolsey was stripped of his government office and property and accused of treason. Wolsey fell ill and died just before his hearing on 29 November 1530.
George Orwell - Born: Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) - the English writer, George Orwell, penned works such as Ninteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and is considered one of the 20th Century's best narrators of English culture. His work displays high intelligence and keen wit, focusing on social injustice. Orwell's family set up home in Southwold upon his father's retirement. Orwell attended a Cram School there and visited frequently in his later life. In 1929 he returned to his parents' house in Southwold, where he stayed for 5 years. The family was well established in the local community and his sister Avril was running a tea house in the town. During his last year in Southwold he wrote A Clergyman’s Daughter, based on his life as a teacher and on his experiences in Southwold. On 21 January 1950, Orwell died of a burst artery aged just 46.
Sir Alfred Munnings - (8 October 1878–17 July 1959) - one of England's finest painters of horses, Alfred Munnings was born in Mendham, Suffolk. Munnings' artistic talent was employed as war artist and he painted many scenes, working on canvas just a few thousand yards from the German front lines. Munnings was elected president of the Royal Academy of Art in 1944 until 1949. His presidency is most famous for the departing speech he gave in 1949, attacking modernism. He was awarded a knighthood in 1944. In 1959 he died at Castle House, Dedham, and his wife later turned their home in Dedham into a museum of his work. The village pub in Mendham and a street is also named after him.
WG Sebald - (18 May 1944 – 14 December 2001) - Although not a Suffolk resident, the great author WG Sebald focused his second novel, The Rings of Saturn, on an account of his own on a walking tour of East Anglia, including Suffolk. The frist sentence of the novel thus begins: "In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work." In addition to describing the places he sees and people he encounters, Sebald also discusses various episodes of history and literature. Sebald died in a car crash near Norwich in 2001, losing control after suffering a heart attack. He is buried in St. Andrew's churchyard in Framingham Earl, Norwich, close to where he lived.
Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, LSA, MD (9 June 1836 – 17 December 1917) - Garrett was a physician and feminist. She second of the nine children of Newson Garrett, a grain merchant and maltster from Aldeburgh . After studying medicine in London, her name was entered on the medical register and she was the first woman qualified in Britain to do so. In 1897 Dr Garrett Anderson was elected president of the East Anglian branch of the British Medical Association. On 9 November 1908 she was elected mayor of Aldeburgh, the first female mayor in England. She died in 1927 and is buried in Aldeburgh.
Famous Suffolk People
Beryl Cook, OBE - (10 September 1926 – 28 May 2008) - born in Surrey and best known for her comical paintings of people, Beryl Cook had no formal training and did not take up painting until middle age. Beryl met John Cook when they were just ten years old and living as neighbours, and the pair met again after the Second World War and went on to marry in 1948. They took a tenancy of a pub in Stoke by Nayland in Suffolk, but the countryside was not for them. As Beryl said, "It may have been healthy, but we hated the life."!
William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836) - the journalist, political philosopher and novelist, William Godwin, moved to Debenham with his parents when he was just 2 years old. William Godwin moved to Stowmarket in 1780, where he became a deist. He married early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, and that same year Mary gave birth to their daughter, also called Mary - who later became Mary Shelley and wrote the world-famous novel, Frankenstein. On August 30 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft died from complications ten days after the birth of her daughter.
George Crabbe (24 December 1754 – 3 February 1832) - the English poet and artist, George Crabbe, was born in Aldeburgh where he first developed his love of poetry. In 1768 he was apprenticed to a local doctor. The field of medicine taught and interested him little, and in 1771 he changed masters and moved to Woodbridge . There he met his future wife, Sarah Elmy. His first major work, a poem entitled Inebriety, was self-published in 1775. He became most well known for The Village (1783) and The Borough (1810). He was ordained as a priest in 1872. At one time, Crabbe was also an active and notable coleopterist and recorder of beetles, and is credited for taking the first specimen of Calosoma sycophanta L. to be recorded from Suffolk.
Jimmy Hoseason (1927-2009) - one of the region's most successful and well-known holiday entrepreneurs, Jimmy Hoseason, grew up in Lowestoft where his father Wally was the harbourmaster. A civil engineer by trade, he took over his father's small boatyard after Wally's death. Hoseasons was founded in 1944 by Wally, who started hiring out boats in Oulton Broad as holiday homes on behalf of their owners during a fuel ban because of the Second World War. Mr Hoseason, who lived in Beccles, died on Saturday 7th November 2009 at age 82.
Angus McBean (1904-1990) – a highly influential photographer thought to have revolutionized portraiture in the 20th century by photographing the likes of Audrey Hepburn, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Agatha Christie, Laurence Olivier, Noel Coward, Vivien Leigh, and The Beatles (to name but a few). During the 1970s, McBean began his first short-lived retirement and moved to Suffolk. Here he concentrated on restoring his spectacular moated house, Flemmings Hall, in Bedingfield near Eye . McBean turned the house into a decorative fantasia on Greensleeves, in keeping with his own sartorial style. For ten years McBean did not work as a professional photographer, preferring to photograph a few of his Suffolk friends as a hobby, and instead focused his energies on giving guided tours of Flemmings Hall, and restoring antiques for the antiques shop he owned in Debenham. McBean was a highly regarded member of the Suffolk community, and there are even reports of him having judged a photography competition in Eye. By his eightieth birthday McBean was restoring his second medieval house in Suffolk. He died in 1990, on the night of his eighty-sixth birthday.
Sir Clement Freud (24 April 1924 – 15 April 2009) – the broadcaster, writer, politician and chef, Sir Clement Freud, was born in Berlin and was the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the brother of artist Lucian Freud. In his early years, Clement was one of Britain's first celebrity chefs and wrote various newspaper and magazine columns. He later became a familiar face on television for his appearance in a series of dog food commercials. Whilst running a nightclub he met a newspaper editor who gave him a job as a sports journalist. From there he became an award-winning food and drink writer. In 1973, Clement turned his talents to politics when he won the Isle of Ely Parliamentary by-election. He and became a Liberal Member of Parliament between 1973 and 1987, and his departure was marked by the award of a knighthood.
Clement died at his home in Walberswick on 15 April 2009, aged 84. His wife, actress Jill Raymond, runs a successful theatre company near to the family home, and his daughter, broadcaster Emma Freud, and her partner, Four Weddings and a Funeral scriptwriter Richard Curtis, own and reside in a country house also Walberswick.
Norman Tebbit - the outspoken former Conservative MP who was a key figure in Margaret Thatcher's government, Lord Tebbit and his wife, Margaret, currently live in Bury St Edmunds , where he aimed to enjoy his retirement and “a peaceful life”. The couple also favored Bury St Edmunds because of the facilities close at hand for Margaret, who was confined to a wheelchair after the IRA's bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the 1984 Conservative Party conference, where Tebbit was also injured.
Brian Eno -the musician, composer, record producer and singer, Brian Eno, is best known as the keyboard and synthesiser player for Roxy Music. He grew up in Woodbridge , where he still owns a large Victorian house.
Maggi Hambling - Maggi Hambling is a household name in British art for her work as a figurative painter, sculptor and printmaker. Maggi has many connections with Suffolk, having been born there and created the Scallop sculpture on Aldeburgh beach. Please see Maggi Hambling for more information.
Ronald "Carl" Giles (1916 –1995) – often referred to simply as Giles, this Suffolk-born cartoonist was most famous for his work for the British newspaper the Daily Express. A bronze statue of his character "Grandma" to commemorate him is located in Ipswich town centre.
Two of Britain’s greatest painters, John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough were both born and lived in Suffolk - please see Gainsborough and Constable for more information.
Claudia Schiffer – the eternally youthful, German super-model and actress Claudia Schiffer owns a £5 million Elizabethan mansion, Coldham Hall (pictured below), in Lawshall near Bury St Edmunds . Schiffer was married to Matthew Vaughn, producer of hit British film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, in St. George's church in the village of Shimpling on 25 May 2002. Shimpling is in south Suffolk, located around 7 miles from Bury St Edmunds, and is part of Babergh district. Despite being very a private person, Schiffer has been seen at the fashionable Suffolk Show in Trinity Park, Ipswich.
Ronald Blythe - the English writer and editor for Penguin Classics, Ronald Blythe, is best known for his book, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, which details life in Suffolk from the turn of the century to the 1960s. Blythe was born in Suffolk and educated in Sudbury . While a young man, he worked for Benjamin Britten at the Aldeburgh Festival .
Sportsmen - Suffolk's contributions to sport include Formula One magnate Bernie Ecclestone and England footballers Terry Butcher, Kieron Dyer and Matthew Upson. Due to Newmarket being the centre of British horseracing many jockeys have settled in the county, including Lester Piggott and Frankie Dettori. For more information please see Newmarket Racing .
Sue Ryder (1923–2000) – this remarkable British peeress who worked with Special Operations Executive in the Second World War later opened and based the Sue Ryder Foundation (AKA Sue Ryder Care) in Cavendish , Suffolk in 1979.
Cradle of Filth - this extreme metal band featuring songs that focus on a horror theme were formed in Suffolk 1991, and lead singer Dani Filth married his girlfriend Toni on October 31 2005 in Ipswich – the couple and their daughter Luna still reside in Suffolk.
Corgis from the film, The Queen - Helen Mirren impressed cinema-goers the world over with her performance as the Queen - but few people know her co-star Corgis come from a small Suffolk village! The dogs - Anna, Poppy, and Poppy's puppies Megan, Alice and Oliver - belong to Liz Smith, a retired outside caterer from Little Blakenham, near Ipswich , who became known as “Corgi Liz” on set. Smith was approached to help with the film after her dogs were spotted at an obedience competition by an animal consultant for film and television.
If you love bringing your furry friends on holiday with you then you're in luck - Suffolk is a super dog friendly county and we have a whole heap of articles especially for dog owners, including Doggy Days out and Dog Friendly beaches, click here to read more Dog friendly Suffolk
Famous Suffolk People
A number of famous people were born in Suffolk and spent their childhood here – these include the actor the film & theatre director Trevor Nunn ( Ipswich ), Hip-Hop DJ and television presenter Tim Westwood ( Lowestoft ), and poet, writer, and traveller Charles Montagu Doughty (1843 – 1926, Saxmundham ).
William Songer - Captain Arthur Wakefield's brother-in-law who travelled to Nelson, New Zealand on the Whitby as Wakefield's servant, was born in the village of Stoke by Nayland , and suggested naming the township after his birthplace.
Francis Bacon - not exactly a resident but the artist Francis Bacon was frequent visitor to Long Melford , where his lover's brother, David Edwards, owned Westgate House. This Georgian house was an ideal escape for Bacon from London pressures. The House has a large walled garden which played host to riotous parties, as Bacon enjoyed entertaining his friends from the East End. Long Melford is today offers a thriving Arts Scene with many top class art galleries. For more information please see Art Galleries in Suffolk and Art Exhibitions in Suffolk .
Ruth Rendell – another much loved author, Ruth Rendell once lived in Polstead, and in 1997 was created Baroness Rendell of Babergh (of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk). Rendell features Suffolk in many of her novels, produced her own illustrated Ruth Rendell’s Suffolk. Make Death Love Me begins with a robbery at the Anglia Victoria bank in Suffolk, and – written under Rendell’s penname, Barbara Vine - Gallowglass is set in Sudbury, while she wrote about Orford and Aldeburgh for part of No Night is Too Long, Polstead and Nayland for A Fatal Inversion and Bury St Edmunds and its surroundings for The Brimstone Wedding.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) – a frequent visitor to Suffolk, the author Charles Dickens made several references to Suffolk in his work. For example, Satis House is featured in Great Expectations. When he became famous he toured the county giving recitals of his work - he opened the lecture hall for the Ipswich Mechanics Institute in 1851.
A more contemporary Suffolk writer is Erica James who has written more than 19 books including the Gardens of Delight, The Hidden Cottage and Summer at the Lake. The Dandelion Years was published in early 2015 and is set in Suffolk and Bletchely Park.
Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) was a high profile anti-slavery campaigner who spent much of his life lobbying for the abolition of the slave trade. Born in Cambridgeshire, he won a scholarship to Cambridge University in 1779 where he won a Latin essay competition on the subject of whether it was lawful to make slaves of others against their will. He continued to campaign for abolition after leaving University, and, in 1787, he and Granville Sharp formed the Committee for the Abolition of the African Slave Trade. This Committee helped to persuade MP William Wilberforce to take up the abolitionist cause. Clarkson collected information and evidence about the slave trade from eyewitnesses, especially sailors who had worked on slave trading ships, and he used examples of equipment used on slave ships, including handcuffs, shackles and branding irons, as visual aids.
The slave trade was abolished in the British empire in 1807 and the following year, Clarkson published a book 'History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade' and continued to campaign for the complete abolition of slavery. In 1833, Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act which gave all slaves in the British Empire their freedom.
Clarkson retired to Ipswich and died on 26 September 1846.
Thanks to Ian Coles for bringing Martin Routh to our attention -
Although not famous by modern day standards, Martin Routh was born in South Elmham close to Halesworth in 1755.
He was a classical scholar and became President of Magdalen College Oxford in 28 April 1791, and held that position for 63 years until he died in 22 December 1854. This is still the record for a head of any UK College ever. He died in 1854 at 99, a very rare age then.
Do you know of any famous Suffolk residents? Please send the details for inclusion to [email protected] .
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Which French author wrote 'J'accuse', an open letter to the French government regarding the 'Dreyfuss Affair'? | When Zola wrote 'J'accuse!' - The Boston Globe
When Zola wrote 'J'accuse!'
Email | Print | Single Page | Text size – + By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / March 30, 2008
IT IS the most famous front page in the history of journalism. Its one-word headline - "J'accuse!" - is if anything even more renowned. On Jan. 13, 1898, the French newspaper L'Aurore published Emile Zola's extraordinary 4,000-word open letter on the Dreyfus Affair, a travesty of justice in which an innocent captain in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, had been convicted of treason and sentenced to solitary confinement for life on Devil's Island, a hellish penal colony off the coast of South America.
Zola was then the most popular writer in France , and his impassioned essay defending Dreyfus and accusing the military court and the French government of a massive cover-up electrified the nation and reverberated around the world.
Zola's Page 1 article - part investigative reportage, part impassioned advocacy - is on display at Boston University's 808 Gallery. It is one of scores of documents, cartoons, and artifacts that make up "The Power of Prejudice: The Dreyfus Affair," an exhibition sponsored by the BU Hillel House and Bostons New Center for Arts and Culture. The Dreyfus saga was the first legal ordeal to trigger a media feeding frenzy, and to view "J'accuse!" more than a century after it appeared is to confront the birth of something the modern world takes for granted - the power of the press to galvanize and shape public opinion.
The Dreyfus case began with the discovery of a letter offering to sell French military secrets to the Germans. After an inept investigation, the military intelligence chief, an outspoken anti-Semite, fingered Dreyfus, the only Jew on the armys General Staff. In truth, Dreyfus was an ardent French patriot, whose boyhood ambition had been to serve his country in uniform. A secret court martial convicted Dreyfus on the basis of a falsified dossier, and in a humiliating public "degradation" at the Ecole Militaire, he was stripped of his decorations and his sword was broken. As Dreyfus loudly protested his innocence, the historian Paul Johnson writes, "an immense and excited crowd ... was beginning to scream, 'Death to Dreyfus! Death to the Jews.'"
Within months a new intelligence chief had identified the real villain, Major Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy. Supporters of Dreyfus - the Dreyfusards - demanded that the case be reopened, but high-ranking officers, determined to shield the army from embarrassment, conspired to protect the traitor. In a sham court-martial, Esterhazy was acquitted. It was in response to that second travesty that Zola wrote "J'accuse!"
All this was played out against a wave of anti-Semitic hysteria, much of it fueled by the press. Among the most chilling items in the BU exhibition are posters, headlines, and caricatures depicting Jews as snakes, vermin, and hook-nosed swindlers, a filthy race from which France must be cleansed. One giant poster urges voters to support Adolphe Willette , unabashedly campaigning for municipal office as the "Candidat Antisemite." The Dreyfus Affair set off the first great wave of modern political anti-Semitism, a forerunner of the Nazi terror that would devour Europe a few decades later.
Zola's article mobilized the Dreyfusards, who included many of the era's leading writers, artists, and academics. This too was the birth of something the modern world takes for granted: an intellectual class actively engaged in a war over national culture and values. To the supporters of Dreyfus, the stakes were those of French democracy and justice: individual rights, due process, equality under the law. The anti-Dreyfusards feared the loss of social stability, clerical influence, and French tradition.
The battle raged for a dozen years, cleaving French society, and irrevocably changing the 20th century. Dreyfus was eventually freed and exonerated, reinstated as an officer and publicly decorated with the Legion of Honor. His patriotism undimmed, he saw active duty in World War I, then lived quietly in retirement until his death in 1935.
The effects of the Dreyfus Affair lived on long after Dreyfus was laid to rest. The anti-Semitism it roused was institutionalized, the anti-Dreyfusards in time becoming the pro-fascist core of the Vichy regime. The Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl , stunned by what he saw during Dreyfus's "degradation," went on to write " The Jewish State ," the book that launched modern Zionism.
But of all that the Dreyfus Affair set in motion, it is the ascendancy of the press that has, for good and ill, most shaped modern life. "J'accuse!" Zola wrote, and a new age was born.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at [email protected] .
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
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Which SAS soldier wrote the book 'Bravo Two Zero', an account of a failed mission during the first Gulf War? | J'accuse, Dreyfus 119 years later! | Marc Goldberg | The Blogs | The Times of Israel
Looking at Israel from London
It was exactly 119 years ago today that the French army officer Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty of treason against the state. This conviction set in motion a chain of events that would have huge consequences both for Jews everywhere and for France. It sparked off both internal debate in France and Herzl’s personal crusade for a Jewish State.
Captain Dreyfus was a heavily assimilated Jew who proudly served in the French army as an artillery officer when he was framed for treason against the state. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devils Island on French Guiana. He swore his innocence at the time before crowds of Frenchmen shouting “Death to the Jews.”
A mere two years later a different head of military intelligence, Lt Colonel Picquart, uncovered intelligence vindicating Dreyfus and proving he had not betrayed France. He was promptly reassigned to the Tunisian Desert.
The young journalist Theodore Herzl, himself every bit as assimilated a Jew as Dreyfus was present among the crowds shouting “Death to the Jews”. For him that was a critical moment. Hearing those crowds led Herzl to believe that the only way Jews were ever going to be free of the madness around him was through having their own state. The Dreyfus affair set him inexorably on the path towards the first Zionist congress.
The Jew Dreyfus had his epaulets cut from his shoulders and his sword broken before the public. He shouted out to that same crowd, while they were baying for his blood,
“I swear that I am innocent. I remain worthy of serving in the Army. Long live France! Long live the Army!”
The Dreyfus affair, as it became known, caused a great deal of soul searching in France. As it became clearer that Dreyfus was the victim of anti-Semitism rather than a traitor the campaign to have him freed went public. The journalist Emile Zola wrote an open letter to the government, which has gone down in history as the epitome of a journalist holding his government to account. The letter entitled “J’accuse” can be read in full here . At the end Zola accuses the establishment of a coverup:
I accuse Lt. Col. du Paty de Clam of being the diabolical creator of this miscarriage of justice – unwittingly, I would like to believe – and of defending this sorry deed, over the last three years, by all manner of ludricrous and evil machinations.
I accuse General Mercier of complicity, at least by mental weakness, in one of the greatest inequities of the century.
I accuse General Billot of having held in his hands absolute proof of Dreyfus’s innocence and covering it up, and making himself guilty of this crime against mankind and justice, as a political expedient and a way for the compromised General Staff to save face.
I accuse Gen. de Boisdeffre and Gen. Gonse of complicity in the same crime, the former, no doubt, out of religious prejudice, the latter perhaps out of that esprit de corps that has transformed the War Office into an unassailable holy ark.
I accuse Gen. de Pellieux and Major Ravary of conducting a villainous enquiry, by which I mean a monstrously biased one, as attested by the latter in a report that is an imperishable monument to naïve impudence.
I accuse the three handwriting experts, Messrs. Belhomme, Varinard and Couard, of submitting reports that were deceitful and fraudulent, unless a medical examination finds them to be suffering from a condition that impairs their eyesight and judgement.
I accuse the War Office of using the press, particularly L’Eclair and L’Echo de Paris, to conduct an abominable campaign to mislead the general public and cover up their own wrongdoing.
Finally, I accuse the first court martial of violating the law by convicting the accused on the basis of a document that was kept secret, and I accuse the second court martial of covering up this illegality, on orders, thus committing the judicial crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty man.
In making these accusations I am aware that I am making myself liable to articles 30 and 31 of the law of 29/7/1881 regarding the press, which make libel a punishable offence. I expose myself to that risk voluntarily.
As for the people I am accusing, I do not know them, I have never seen them, and I bear them neither ill will nor hatred. To me they are mere entities, agents of harm to society. The action I am taking is no more than a radical measure to hasten the explosion of truth and justice.
I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul. Let them dare, then, to bring me before a court of law and let the enquiry take place in broad daylight!
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The 'Ridolfi Plot' was a Roman Catholic plot to kill which English monarch? | BBC Bitesize - National 5 History - Mary in England 1568-1587 - Revision 4
Mary Queen of Scots and the Reformation
Mary in England 1568-1587
After Mary fled to England, she was kept imprisoned for many years. She was accused of being involved in a number of plots against Elizabeth I. She was executed in 1587.
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Mary’s involvement in Catholic plots
Elizabeth’s distrust of Mary continued and a number of plots against the English Queen were uncovered.
She was aware that many English Catholics wanted to depose her. Elizabeth knew that there were plots to kill her, to allow Mary to become Queen of England.
Mary was implicated in a number of plans against Elizabeth.
The Ridolfi plot 1571
This plot planned to depose of Elizabeth and replace her with Mary as Queen.
The Duke of Norfolk was implicated and there were rumours of help from Spanish troops.
Norfolk was executed.
Throckmorton plot 1583
Similar to the Ridolfi plot, the Throckmorton plot planned the murder of Elizabeth and her replacement with Mary.
This plot contributed to the Act of Association of 1585 after which, Mary would be held responsible for any plot carried out in her name – whether she knew of it or not.
The Parry plot 1585
In 1585, yet another plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth was uncovered. William Parry had been working as a double agent for both the English Queen and Mary, Queen of Scots. Queen Elizabeth was informed that he had planned to kill her either in a private meeting or ambushing her. There were calls for Mary, Queen of Scots, to also be brought to justice –although there was no proof of her involvement in the Parry Plot. Parry was arrested for treason and hanged at Westminster.
The Babington plot 1586
A year later, an English Catholic nobleman plotted to restore the Roman Catholic religion by placing Mary on the English throne. Anthony Babington had made Mary aware of his plans to kill Elizabeth and help Mary escape.
Mary replied to Babington in letters, she explained how she wanted France and Spain to help her become Queen by invading England.
However, these letters were intercepted by Elizabeth’s spy, Sir Francis Walsingham.
Siobhon Redmond describes some of the plots against Elizabeth in the video below.
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| Elizabeth I of England |
'Young' was a UK number one hit in May 2012 for which singer? | BBC - History - Elizabeth's Spy Network
Elizabeth's Spy Network
By Alexandra Briscoe
Last updated 2011-02-17
As a Protestant Queen, Elizabeth was forced to live with the threat of assassination from Catholics throughout her reign. But there was an army of men working in secret to protect the Queen. These were her spies, her secret service, and they were overseen by the most ruthless spy master of them all: Francis Walsingham.
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The Queen in danger
The long and successful reign of Elizabeth I proved that a woman could be as effective and popular a monarch as any King. But there existed around the Queen a critical support structure which was made up almost exclusively of men. This was her network of spies supervised by Walsingham, one of Elizabeth's most loyal ministers, and their aim was to safeguard the life of the Queen. The efficiency of this network unearthed a series of plots to overthrow Elizabeth and replace her with the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. It is a testament to the success of this secret service that Elizabeth died peacefully of old age and not at the hands of an assassin.
...the threat to her life was growing ever more serious.
In the early years of her reign William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) had been overseeing the gathering of intelligence, but once Mary Queen of Scots arrived on English soil things moved up a gear. She was a magnet for conspiracy, the perfect focus for discontented Catholics who refused to conform to Elizabeth's Protestant faith.
A number of plots came to light, such as the Northern Uprising of 1569 and the Ridolfi Plot two years later, which centred on rescuing Mary. So far, the plots had been uncovered in time and disaster had been averted. But the threat to her life was growing ever more serious. Realising the scale of the task ahead he called upon the man who was to become known as Elizabeth's spy master, Francis Walsingham.
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Walsingham and his spies
Walsingham had studied as a lawyer and was intelligent, serious and disciplined. He held strong Protestant beliefs, and had gone to live abroad during the reign of the Catholic Mary I. But when Protestantism was re-established under Elizabeth I, he returned to England and became Secretary of State in 1568. Quick-witted and ruthless, he was soon playing a critical role in intelligence-gathering operations. Without the other commitments which had taken up much of Cecil's time, Walsingham could devote himself to overseeing Elizabeth's secret service.
This he did with zeal. He was strict, almost Puritan in his religious beliefs, and passionate about protecting the country from Catholic threat. Spies were posted to live abroad who could supply him with intelligence on the politics and attitudes of Catholic countries towards England. This information enabled Walsingham to piece together, for example, the policy of the Pope towards Elizabeth. Armed also with information from spies based in this country, Walsingham could trace lines of communication between Catholics here and abroad, and keep track of any plots.
The world of a spy was not, however, one of glamour and intrigue.
The world of a spy was not, however, one of glamour and intrigue. Many spies were ambitious undergraduates recruited from Oxford and Cambridge who saw this as a route to fame and fortune. But the reality was quite different. Long journeys, low pay and the logistical difficulties of delivering information meant that, unless involved in a high-profile success, the work of a spy was often thankless and mundane. More challenging was the area of intelligence-gathering. This kind of work included travelling abroad to gather information on national security.
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Coded letters
Intelligence work also involved learning how to break the different codes used by plotters in their correspondence. Often, letters of the alphabet were shuffled in a certain sequence and, once the key was worked out, the message could be read and understood. Alternatively individual letters could be substituted with numbers, symbols or signs of the zodiac. But spies had to learn not only how to decipher code but also how to write it themselves. This was frustrating and time-consuming work, paid off only by the satisfaction of finally cracking a difficult code.
...spies had to learn not only how to decipher code but also how to write it themselves.
Some codes could only be understood by placing a sheet of paper punched with holes over the top so that just the relevant letters making up the message could be read. Success therefore depended on calculating the exact sequence of thousands of holes. Also popular was the practice of conveying information in invisible ink. Written in milk or lemon juice, the secret message could be read as the page was warmed over a candle and the letters appeared. Innocent text in normal ink was often written alongside the hidden message in order to throw a spy off the scent.
Walsingham knew that this work was critical to his success, and established a spy school to provide formal training for recruits. The security of the country was at stake, after all. Mistakes were unthinkable.
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The Babington plot
For reasons of security Mary, Queen of Scots was regularly moved from one residence to another. She still had her entourage and spent her days sewing, reading or hunting, but in reality Mary was a prisoner. She did not, however, realise the level of scrutiny she was under. Walsingham loathed Mary and everything she stood for, and vowed to bring her down. It was to take him almost 20 years. But when he discovered in 1586 that she was corresponding with a group of Catholics led by the young Anthony Babington, he seized his chance.
For the first stage of his plan, Walsingham used a spy named Gifford to act as a double agent. Gifford persuaded the local brewer to encourage Mary to use him as a secret means of communicating with the outside world. By establishing a system whereby Mary's personal letters were carried in and out of Chartley (her current residence) hidden in a beer barrel, Walsingham was able to intercept and decode her correspondence. The relatively simple code used by Mary was quickly deciphered, and translations were provided for Elizabeth. These letters were then resealed and sent on to their destination or delivered to Mary in prison. And so the plot progressed.
Walsingham could now move in for the kill.
Walsingham, meanwhile, was biding his time. Luckily for him, Babington and his friends were enthusiastic but inexperienced plotters and were happy to discuss their plans in public. It was therefore not difficult for the authorities to keep track of their movements. Having outlined his plans to Mary, Babington now tried to secure her participation in the plot. This was the moment Walsingham had been waiting for. When the vital letter from Mary asking for details was intercepted, a postscript was forged in her hand asking for the identities of the plotters. The names were duly supplied, and their fate was sealed. Mary's involvement in the plot had been proven, and a gallows was drawn on the page by the decoding expert. Walsingham could now move in for the kill.
By now Babington and the others, realising something was wrong, had gone into hiding. But Walsingham was one step ahead and they were quickly captured and tried. Elizabeth, keen to signal a warning against further plots, ordered that their executions be public and brutal. The men were hung, drawn and quartered.
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Mary's downfall
Mary realised that she had fallen into the trap set by Walsingham, and launched a personal attack on him during her trial. 'Spies are men of doubtful credit,' she said, 'who make a show of one thing and speak another.' But there was to be no escape and, found guilty of treason, Mary was sentenced to death.
Mary realised that she had fallen into the trap set by Walsingham...
The execution took place on 8 February 1587 in the Great Hall at Fotheringhay, but even now events did not go according to plan. The executioner, understandably nervous, missed his aim and it took three blows of his axe to sever her head. Horrified onlookers said that, for fifteen minutes afterwards, her lips continued to move in silent prayer.
With Mary dead, Walsingham's life work was now complete and he died just three years later. Throughout Elizabeth's reign he had done more than anyone else to ensure her personal safety. But the Queen, though appreciative of his actions, was never close to Walsingham in the way that she was to Cecil or Leicester. She distrusted his Puritan leanings and was wary of his manner and intellect. Reluctant as always to spend money, the Queen had never provided proper funding for his work. Walsingham, devoted to the Queen and determined to protect the country's Protestant faith, had put most of his own money into making sure his spy network was a success. He left as his legacy the most advanced and efficient secret service of its time.
Find out more
Books
Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret Services 1570 - 1603 by Alan Haynes (Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1992)
On The Trail of Mary Queen of Scots by J. Keith Cheetham (Luath Press Ltd, 1999)
The English Captivity of Mary Queen of Scots by Patrick Collinson (Sheffield History Pamphlets, 1987)
Mary Queen of Scots by Rosalind K Marshall (HMSO, 1991)
Elizabeth the Queen by Alison Weir (Pimlico, 1999)
The Virgin Queen by Christopher Hibbert (Viking, 1990)
The Word of a Prince by Maria Perry (The Boydell Press, 1990)
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About the author
Alexandra Briscoe has a background in documentary programme-making. She is Assistant Producer on Simon Schama's A History of Britain, specialising in the reign of Elizabeth I for the programme entitled The Body of the Queen.
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Which former British landmark is now the most famous tourist attraction in Lake Havasu City, Arizona? | Map of the Week! London in 1776 | Outside the Neatline
Map of the Week! London in 1776
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/uconnlibrariesmagic/3789830058/
The featured map this week is a 1776 city map of London, making it as old as the United States! It is found in a book called “A new and universal history, description and survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, and their adjacent parts” by Walter Harrison. As the title suggests, the book outlines the history of London and contains numerous drawings and maps of the city. There are many interesting locations displayed on the map, including:
London Bridge – Made famous by the nursery rhyme, London Bridge in the late 18th century was one of three places to cross the River Thames in the city. Harrison’s book featured drawings of the bridge in 1776, as well as drawings of when the bridge had buildings on it in the 1750s. London Bridge was torn down and rebuilt in 1831, and then again in 1972. The entire 1831 bridge was purchased in 1968 by an American named Robert McCulloch for two million dollars. McCulloch moved the bridge to Lake Havasu City in Arizona, where it is now the state’s second most popular tourist attraction.
Drawing of London Bridge from 1616 with buildings on it. The gate at the end of the bridge has the spiked heads of executed prisoners above it.
London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona
Tower of London – One of the most famous landmarks in London, the Tower of London was built in 1078 and has been used for torture, imprisonment, and storage of England’s crown jewels. Famous prisoners at the tower of London include Sir Walter Raleigh and Saint Thomas Moore.
Tower of London
Buckingham Palace – Currently home to the British monarch, Buckingham Palace was simply known as the “Queen’s Palace” in the late 18th century. The palace was greatly expanded and renovated in the early 19th century.
Buckingham Palace in 2009
| London Bridge |
Lying on the Sunzha River, what is the capital of the Chechen Republic? | MAGIC News & Updates: Map of the Week! London in 1776
Map of the Week! London in 1776
http://www.flickr.com/photos/uconnlibrariesmagic/3789830058/
The featured map this week is a 1776 city map of London, making it as old as the United States! It is found in a book called “A new and universal history, description and survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, and their adjacent parts” by Walter Harrison. As the title suggests, the book outlines the history of London and contains numerous drawings and maps of the city. There are many interesting locations displayed on the map, including:
London Bridge – Made famous by the nursery rhyme, London Bridge in the late 18th century was one of three places to cross the River Thames in the city. Harrison’s book featured drawings of the bridge in 1776, as well as drawings of when the bridge had buildings on it in the 1750s. London Bridge was torn down and rebuilt in 1831, and then again in 1972. The entire 1831 bridge was purchased in 1968 by an American named Robert McCulloch for two million dollars. McCulloch moved the bridge to Lake Havasu City in Arizona, where it is now the state’s second most popular tourist attraction.
Drawing of London Bridge from 1616 with buildings on it. The gate at the end of the bridge has the spiked heads of executed prisoners above it.
London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona
Tower of London – One of the most famous landmarks in London, the Tower of London was built in 1078 and has been used for torture, imprisonment, and storage of England’s crown jewels. Famous prisoners at the tower of London include Sir Walter Raleigh and Saint Thomas Moore.
Tower of London
Buckingham Palace – Currently home to the British monarch, Buckingham Palace was simply known as the “Queen’s Palace” in the late 18th century. The palace was greatly expanded and renovated in the early 19th century.
Buckingham Palace in 2009
Posted by Brandon at 4:41 PM
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Yakutsk is the capital of which federal subject of Russia, that at 3,103,200 km2 (almost as big as India) is the largest subnational governing body by area? | Collection: Yakutia
Egor Fedorov > Collections
Yakutia
The Sakha (Yakutia) Republic (Russian: Респу́блика Саха́ (Яку́тия), Respublika Sakha (Yakutiya); Sakha: Саха Республиката, Sakha Respublikata) is a federal subject of Russia (a republic). The population of Yakutia mainly consists of ethnic Yakuts and Russians.
Comprising half of the Far Eastern Federal District, it is the largest subnational governing body by area in the world at 3,103,200 km2 (1,198,200 sq mi) (just smaller than India which covers an area of 3,287,240 km2). If Sakha Republic were an independent country, it would be the eighth largest in the world, yet it has a population of only 949,280 inhabitants. Its capital is Yakutsk.
| Sakha Republic |
The majority of 'The Only Way Is Essex' is set and filmed in which Essex town? | Święto Dzieci Gór 2011 - folder by Andrzej M. Switniewski - issuu
Dziecięca przyjaźń buduje pokój świata dorosłych
Children’s Friendship Builds the Peace of the Adults’ World
ŚWIĘTO DZIECI GÓR XIX Międzynarodowy Festiwal Dziecięcych Zespołów Regionalnych
FESTIVAL CHILDREN OF MOUNTAINS 19th International Festival of Children’s Folk Ensembles
pod patronatem / under the patronage of: Bogdana Zdrojewskiego Ministra Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego
Bogdan Zdrojewski
Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland
Marka Sowy
Marek Sowa
Governor of the Province of Malopolska
Festiwal jest członkiem Międzynarodowej Rady Stowarzyszeń Folklorystycznych, Festiwali i Sztuki Ludowej C.I.O.F.F ® The Festival is a member of the International Council of Organizations of Folklore Festivals and Folk Arts C.I.O.F.F ® Nowy Sącz, 24-31 lipca 2011 Nowy Sącz, 24-31 July 2011
Dofinansowano ze środków Ministra Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego Subsidised by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland
Festiwal współfinansowany przez: Samorząd Województwa Małopolskiego Urząd Miasta Nowego Sącza oraz samorządy i ośrodki kultury miast festiwalowych The Festival is co-financed by the local government of the Province of Małopolska, the Municipal Office of Nowy Sącz as well as the local authorities and community centres in the Festival towns
Patroni medialni / Media Coverage:
ŚWIĘTO, ŚWIĘTO I… WCIĄŻ ŚWIĘTO! Jak ozdoby na choince… Mienią się milionami barw, blaskiem czystego, radosnego światła. Poruszane delikatnymi wibracjami powietrza wydają się żyć. Każda swoim własnym życiem, ale jednocześnie wszystkie razem sprawiają, że całe drzewo tchnie jakimś mistycznym oddechem. No i zapachem. Lepkim zapachem żywicy, tętniącej wciąż jeszcze w krwioobiegu słojów. I każda ozdoba ma na bożonarodzeniowym drzewku swoje własne miejsce. Te większe – niżej, bo tam mocniejsze gałęzie, te drobniejsze – gdzieś pod gwiazdą lśniącą na szczycie. I jeszcze lampki, które przypominają, że o światło tu chodzi, nie o ciemność. I jeszcze łańcuchy, które miast opowiadać o zniewoleniach, głoszą prawdę o jedności zespolonych ogniw. Święto Dzieci Gór jest jak pół tysiąca tęcz, z których każda mieni się nie siedmioma, a siedemdziesięcioma siedmioma barwami strojów narodowych z całego świata. I… paradoks! Mimo tylu kolorów – ogrom prostoty i ani śladu kiczu. Święto Dzieci Gór odbywa się w jednym z najjaśniejszych miesięcy w roku, pod wakacyjnym słońcem Beskidu, które figlarnie przegląda się w radosnych źrenicach uczestników. A co najważniejsze „w temacie jasności” – Festiwal zaczyna się i kończy błyskiem światła mistycznego. Święto Dzieci Gór pachnie… Czy Święto Dzieci Gór pachnie? Tak! Czasem łąką, czasem sianem, czasem lasem, a każdego dnia potrawami, z których każda mogłaby opowiedzieć inną historię, bo jakże często, nasze narodowe jadłospisy, świadczą o naszych narodowych dolach i niedolach. Święto Dzieci Gór jest trochę jak choinka: lśni, rozsiewa barwy i… żyje. I tak jak na bożonarodzeniowym drzewku, tu również wszystko ma swoje miejsce. Wszystko jest po kolei. Ubieramy je od dołu. W wielkich bombkach naszych przyjazdów na sądecką ziemię odbijają się pierwsze spojrzenia. Pełne ciekawości. Pierwsze słowa, a częściej gesty wobec nowych kamratów z innych światów, choć wciąż z tej samej Ziemi. Snujemy niteczki porozumienia jak anielskie włosy. A gdy zbudujemy już fundament najniższych, najmocniejszych gałęzi, zaczynamy piąć się w górę festiwalowej niecodziennej
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c odzienności. Każdy dzień to dwie kolejne ozdoby. Jedna swojska, dobrze znana, bombka, gwiazdka, pozłacany orzech… Druga odmienna, jak odmienne są domy, wiersze czy kapelusze na całym tym najpiękniejszym ze światów. I kiedy wreszcie gałązka po gałązce, nutka po nutce, wejdziemy na sam szczyt zielonej piramidy, otuli nas światło dwunastoramiennej gwiazdy. Opleciemy festiwalową choinkę nierozerwalnym łańcuchem kamrackich ogniw, a czas Festiwalu się dopełni. Mówimy: święta, święta i po świętach. Zwłaszcza, gdy opadają igiełki choinek, a ozdoby wracają do swych gawr, by zapaść w letni sen. Ale są drzewa, które nigdy nie przestają być zielone, nigdy nie gubią liści. I są dzieci, które nigdy nie przestają świętować, bo widzą, że każdego dnia rodzi się coś nowego. A jak się urodzi, to żyje. I trwa… Święto Dzieci Gór jest jak choinka, pod którą rodzi się przyjaźń. A gdy przychodzi na świat coś tak cennego i po prawdzie rzadkiego, to pojawia się doskonały powód, by świętować. Przez cały rok. Codziennie. Niech się święci przyjaźń, a kiedyś „zaświęci” się pokój. / Kamil Cyganik /
FESTIVAL, FESTIVAL AND STILL… FESTIVAL! Just like the trinkets on the Christmas tree… Iridescent with millions of colours, the glitter of clear joyous light. Moved with gentle air vibrations, they seem to have a life of their own. Each seems to live its own life, but at the same time they all make the whole tree exude some mystical breath. And a smell too. A sticky smell of resin, still pulsating in the circulation system of the tree rings. And every trinket has its own place in the Christmas tree. The bigger ones take lower places, for there the branches are sturdier; the smaller ones take places closer to the star shining at the top. And the fairy lights which remind us that it’s all about light, not darkness. And the chains, which instead of telling of servitude, tell the truth about the unity of the combined links. The Festival of the Children of Mountains is like five hundred rainbows, each of which is iridescent not with seven, but seventy seven colours of national dress from all over the world. And… a paradox! Despite so many colours, such enormous simplicity and not a single trace of kitschiness. The Festival of the Children of Mountains takes place in one of the brightest months, under the Beskid holiday sun, which playfully peeks into children’s pupils. And what is most important as far as „the subject of light” is concerned, the Festival begins and ends with the shine of the mystical light. The Festival of the Children of Mountains has an aroma… Does the Festival of the Children of Mountains have an aroma? Yes, it does! Sometimes it’s an aroma of a meadow, sometimes – hay, at other times – forest, but every day it’s an aroma of dishes. Each of those might tell a story, for it’s more often than not that our national cuisine reflects our national fortunes and misfortunes. The Festival of the Children of Mountains is a bit like a Christmas tree – it glitters, spreads colours and… lives. And just like in the Christmas tree, everything has its own place here. Everything is in the right order. We decorate it from the bottom up. The big baubles of our arrivals in the Sącz region reflect the first glances. They are glances of curiosity. The first words, but more often than not the gestures towards new companions from different quarters but the same globe. We spin the little threads of communication like lametta.
And once we have built the foundation of the lowest and sturdiest branches, we begin to soar up the extraordinary Festival everyday life. Each day brings two more trinkets. The one is native and familiar – a bauble, a star, a golden nut; the other one is strange – just like strange are houses, poems or hats in this most beautiful of the worlds. And once we have climbed, branch by branch and note by note, to the very top of the “green pyramid,” we will be wrapped in the light of the twelve-pointed star. We will embrace the Festival tree with the indissoluble chain of companion links, and the Festival time shall run its course. We have the habit of saying: the holiday lasts, but it soon comes to an end. Especially when the Christmas tree needles are already falling off, and the decorations come back to their lairs to fall into summer sleep. But there are trees which remain evergreen, and which never shed leaves. And there are children who never stop celebrating, because they can see that something new is born every day. And once it’s born, it lives. And it lasts… The Festival of the Children of Mountains is like a Christmas tree, under which friendship is born. And when something so precious and so veritably rare is born into this world, then that is a perfect reason to celebrate. All year round. Every day. May friendship be hallowed, and one day may peace be hallowed. / Kamil Cyganik /
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24 lipca (niedziela) / July 24th (Sunday)
INAUGURACJA FESTIWALU FESTIVAL OPENING
9.30 msza festiwalowa – Bazylika św. Małgorzaty 9.30 am church service – St Margaret’s Basilica 11.00 spotkanie kierowników zespołów z władzami miasta i regionu – Ratusz 11.00 am ensemble leaders’ meeting with town and region authorities – Town Hall
12.00 konferencja prasowa – MCK SOKÓŁ 12.00 pm press conference – MCK SOKÓŁ 12.30 spotkanie kierowników zespołów z organizatorami – MCK SOKÓŁ 12.30 pm ensemble leaders’ meeting with the festival organizers – MCK SOKÓŁ
19.00 korowód festiwalowy ulicami miasta – ul. Nadbrzeżna–Rynek 7.00 pm festival parade – Nadbrzeżna St.– Old Market Square
20.00 otwarcie festiwalu i KONCERT INAUGURACYJNY – Rynek, estrada przed Ratuszem 8.00 pm festival opening and the INAUGURAL CONCERT – Old Market Square, stage in front of the Town Hall
22.00 pokaz sztucznych ogni 10.00 pm fireworks display
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25 lipca (poniedziałek) / July 25th (Monday)
DZIEŃ ROSYJSKO-LACHOWSKI DAY OF THE RUSSIANS AND LACHS
11.00 prezentacja zespołów uczestniczących w dniu narodowym, Rynek – estrada przed Ratuszem 11.00 am preview of the national day ensembles – stage in front of the Town Hall 19.00 koncert zespołów – hala widowiskowo-sportowa 7.00 pm main concert of the national day ensembles – multi-purpose hall
YALGA z Oymyakon – Rosja / Jakucja YALGA from Oymyakon – Russia / Yakutia
DOLINA SŁOMKI ze Stronia – Polska DOLINA SLOMKI from Stronie – Poland
Prezentacja zapowiadająca dzień czesko-podhalański Presentation announcing the day of the Czechs and Podhale Highlanders OKŘEŠÁNEK– Czechy / Czech Republic MALI BYSTRZANIE – Polska / Poland
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26 lipca (wtorek) / July 26th (Tuesday)
DZIEŃ CZESKO-PODHALAŃSKI DAY OF THE CZECHS AND PODHALE HIGHLANDERS
11.00 prezentacja zespołów uczestniczących w dniu narodowym, Rynek – estrada przed Ratuszem 11.00 am preview of the national day ensembles – stage in front of the Town Hall 19.00 koncert zespołów – hala widowiskowo-sportowa 7.00 pm main concert of the national day ensembles – multi-purpose hall
OKŘEŠÁNEK z Třebíč – Czechy OKŘEŠÁNEK from Třebíč – Czech Republic
MALI BYSTRZANIE z Nowego Bystrego – Polska MALI BYSTRZANIE from Nowe Bystre – Poland
Prezentacja zapowiadająca dzień czarnogórsko-babiogórski Presentation announcing the day of the Montenegrins and Babia Góra Highlanders CRVENA STIJENA – Czarnogóra / Montenegro ZBYRCOCEK – Polska / Poland
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27 lipca (środa) / July 27th (Wednesday)
DZIEŃ CZARNOGÓRSKO-BABIOGÓRSKI DAY OF THE MONTENEGRINS AND BABIA GÓRA HIGHLANDERS
11.00 prezentacja zespołów uczestniczących w dniu narodowym, Rynek – estrada przed Ratuszem 11.00 am preview of the national day ensembles – stage in front of the Town Hall 19.00 koncert zespołów – hala widowiskowo-sportowa 7.00 pm main concert of the national day ensembles – multi-purpose hall
CRVENA STIJENA z Podgoricy – Czarnogóra CRVENA STIJENA from Podgorica – Montenegro
ZBYRCOCEK z Juszczyna – Polska ZBYRCOCEK from Juszczyn – Poland
prezentacja zapowiadająca dzień indonezyjsko-pogórzański presentation announcing the day of the Indonesians and the Foothill Highlanders SMP ISLAM JAKARTA TUGASKU PULOMAS – Indonezja / Indonesia KORCZYŃSKA BRAĆ – Polska / Poland
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28 lipca (czwartek) / July 28th (Thursday)
DZIEŃ INDONEZYJSKO-POGÓRZAŃSKI DAY OF THE INDONESIANS AND FOOTHILL HIGHLANDERS
11.00 prezentacja zespołów uczestniczących w dniu narodowym, Rynek – estrada przed Ratuszem 11.00 am preview of the national day ensembles – stage in front of the Town Hall 19.00 koncert zespołów – hala widowiskowo-sportowa 7.00 pm main concert of the national day ensembles – multi-purpose hall
SMP ISLAM JAKARTA TUGASKU PULOMAS z Dżakarty – Indonezja SMP ISLAM JAKARTA TUGASKU PULOMAS from Jakarta – Indonesia
KORCZYŃSKA BRAĆ z Korczyny – Polska KORCZYŃSKA BRAĆ from Korczyna – Poland
prezentacja zapowiadająca dzień austriacko-orawski presentation announcing the day of the Austrians and Orava Highlanders KINDERVOLKSTANZ UND SCHUHPLATTLERGRUPPE FÜRNITZ – Austria / Austria ORAWIANIE – Polska / Poland
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29 lipca (piątek) / July 29th (Friday)
DZIEŃ AUSTRIACKO-ORAWSKI DAY OF THE AUSTRIANS AND ORAVA HIGHLANDERS
11.00 prezentacja zespołów uczestniczących w dniach narodowych: piątek i sobota, Rynek – estrada przed Ratuszem 11.00 am preview of the national day ensembles: Friday and Saturday – stage in front of the Town Hall 19.00 koncert zespołów – hala widowiskowo-sportowa 7.00 pm main concert of the national day ensembles – multi-purpose hall
KINDERVOLKSTANZ UND SCHUHPLATTLERGRUPPE z Fürnitz – Austria KINDERVOLKSTANZ UND SCHUHPLATTLERGRUPPE from Fürnitz – Austria ORAWIANIE z Lipnicy Wielkiej – Polska ORAWIANIE from Lipnica Wielka – Poland
prezentacja zapowiadająca dzień wenezuelsko-żywiecki presentation announcing the day of the Venezuelans and Żywiec Highlanders FUNDACION DANZAS TEMERI – Wenezuela / Venezuela KLIMCZOK – Polska / Poland
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30 lipca (sobota) / July 30th (Saturday)
DZIEŃ WENEZUELSKO-ŻYWIECKI DAY OF THE VENEZUELANS AND ŻYWIEC HIGHLANDERS
19.00 koncert zespołów – hala widowiskowo-sportowa 7.00 pm main concert of the national day ensembles – multi-purpose hall
FUNDACION DANZAS TEMERI z Guanare – Wenezuela FUNDACION DANZAS TEMERI from Guanare – Venezuela
KLIMCZOK ze Szczyrku – Polska KLIMCZOK from Szczyrk - Poland
oraz gościnnie
MEI LING HOLISTIC ACADEMY – Tajwan and guest performance by the ensemble
MEI LING HOLISTIC ACADEMY – Taiwan
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31 lipca (niedziela) / July 31 st (Sunday)
ZAKOŃCZENIE FESTIWALU FESTIVAL CLOSING
9.30 msza festiwalowa – Bazylika św. Małgorzaty 9.30 am church service – St Margaret’s Basilica 10.30 pożegnanie miasta – Rynek 10.30 am farewell to the Town – Old Market Square
12.00 finisaż wystawy: ŚWIĘTO DZIECI GÓR Michał Piotrowski – fotografia – Galeria SOKÓŁ 12.00 pm closing of the exhibition: CHILDREN OF MOUNTAINS Michał Piotrowski – photography – SOKÓŁ Gallery 12.30 konferencja prasowa – MCK SOKÓŁ 12.30 pm press conference – MCK SOKÓŁ
19.00 KONCERT FINAŁOWY – hala widowiskowo-sportowa 7.00 pm FINAL CONCERT – multi-purpose hall
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KONCERTY W MAŁOPOLSCE CONCERTS IN MAŁOPOLSKA Krynica Zdrój
Bardejov (Słowacja)
25 lipca (poniedziałek) KINDERVOLKSTANZ UND SCHUHPLATTLERGRUPPE FÜRNITZ – Austria ORAWIANIE im. Heródka – Lipnica Wielka
29 lipca (piątek), godz. 19.00 YALGA – Rosja/Jakucja DOLINA SŁOMKI – Stronie RASLAVIČAN – Słowacja
26 lipca (wtorek) FUNDACION DANZAS TEMERI – Wenezuela KLIMCZOK – Szczyrk
Łącko
27 lipca (środa) YALGA – Rosja/Jakucja DOLINA SŁOMKI – Stronie
30 lipca (sobota), godz. 19.00 SMP ISLAM JAKARTA TUGASKU PULOMAS – Indonezja KORCZYŃSKA BRAĆ – Korczyna
28 lipca (czwartek) CRVENA STIJENA – Czarnogóra ZBYRCOCEK – Juszczyn
Muszyna
25–30 lipca, godz. 19.00, Estrada na Deptaku
Estrada w Rynku
Amfiteatr na Jeżowej
Amfiteatr Zapopradzie 30 lipca (sobota), godz. 18 .00 CRVENA STIJENA – Czarnogóra ZBYRCOCEK – Juszczyn
29 lipca (piątek) SMP ISLAM JAKARTA TUGASKU PULOMAS – Indonezja KORCZYŃSKA BRAĆ – Korczyna 30 lipca (sobota) OKŘEŠÁNEK – Czechy MALI BYSTRZANIE – Nowe Bystre
Szczyrk Juszczyn
Nowe Bystre Bardejov
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– Rosja/Jakucja Oymyakon – Russia/Yakutia YALGA Oymyakon Republika Sacha, zwana również Jakucją, jest częścią Federacji Rosyjskiej. Zajmuje większość terytorium północnowschodniej Azji i jest największą pod względem powierzchni subnarodową jednostką podziału terytorialnego. Jej powierzchnia wynosi 3,103,200 km2, co stanowi niewiele mniej od powierzchni Indii, jakkolwiek liczba ludności nie przekracza 1 miliona. Stolicą Jakucji jest Jakuck, miasto liczące 269,5 tys. mieszkańców i położone 450km na południe od Koła Podbiegunowego. Jest to główny port na rzece Lena, która jest jedną z trzech największych syberyjskich rzek uchodzących do Oceanu Arktycznego. Jakucja jest zamieszkała głównie przez etnicznych Jakutów, którzy są ludem tureckim, a ich liczba sięga ok. 440 tys. Pierwotnie przywędrowli z regionu Jeziora Bajkał. Pod względem geografii i ekonomii dzielą się na dwie podstawowe grupy: mieszkańcy północy są historycznie półkoczowniczym ludem myśliwych, rybaków, hodowców reniferów, podczas gdy Jakuci mieszkający na południu zajmują się hodowlą zwierząt, głównie koni i bydła. Charakterystycznymi potrawami kuchni jakuckiej są tradycyjny napój kumis, mrożona i solona ryba, różnego rodzaju klopsy, sarnina, naleśniki, salamat (owsianka z dodatkiem prosa) oraz indigirka (rodzaj sałatki). Zespół YALGA przyjechał z wsi Ojmiakon, położonej we wschodniej części Jakucji na dużej szerokości geograficznej, co wpływa na dużą amplitudę długości dnia (od 3 godzin w grudniu do 21 godzin w lecie). Ojmiakon liczy 521 mieszkańców. Ma szansę zostać ogłoszonym północnym biegunem zimna, ponieważ najniższa odnotowana tam temperatura to –69,2ºC. Nazwa Ojmiakon oznacza w języku jakuckim „niezamarzającą” wodę – w pobliżu znajdują się gorące źródła, mimo że grunt jest wiecznie zamarznięty. Na Festiwalu YALGA zaprezentuje wiązankę tańców: lot północny (taniec narodowy), khedzhe (kompzycja ludowa), etiudy północy (taniec narodowy) oraz taniec szamanów. W skład kapeli wchodzą muzycy grający na instrumentach takich jak khomus, buben, domra, sayukh. Kierownikiem zespołu jest Sivtseva Lyubov, a kierownikiem muzycznym Natalia Karelova.
The Sakha Republic, better known as Yakutia, is a federal subject of Russia. It takes up the bulk of northeastern Asia and is the largest subnational governing body with the total area of 3,103,200 km2, which is just a bit less than the area of India. Interestingly, the population of Yakutia does not extend 1 million inhabitants. The capital is Yakutsk, which – located 450 km south of the Arctic Circle – has the population of 269,500 and is the main port on the Lena River, which is one of the three greatest Siberian rivers that flow into the Arctic Ocean. Yakutia is inhabited mainly by ethnic Yakuts and Russians. Yakuts are a Turkic people of about 440,000, who originally migrated from the region of Lake Baikal. Inhabiting mainly Yakutia, they fall into two basic groups based on geography and economics: those in the north are historically semi-nomadic hunters, fishermen, reindeer breeders, while southern Yakuts engage in animal husbandry focusing on horses and cattle. The cuisine of Sakha consists predominatly of traditional drink kumis, sliced frozen salted fish, loaf meat dishes, venison, frozen fish, thick pancakes, and Salamat - a millet porridge. Kourchah, a popular dessert, is made of mare milk. Indigirka is a traditional salad. The ensemble comes from the village of Oymyakon, located in the east of Yakutia at a high latitude, which results in considerable day length variation (from 3 hours in December to 21 hours in summer). The population of the village is 521 people. The village is a candidate for the Northern Pole of Cold, for the lowest temperature recorded there is –69,2ºC. The name Oymyakon means “non-freezing water” in the Sakha laguage, since although the ground there is permanently frozen, there are hot springs nearby. At the Festival YALGA is going to present a medley of dances: the flight of north (a national dance), khedzhe (folk composition), northern etudes (a national dance), dance of the shamans. The music band will be playing such instruments as khomus, buben, domra, sayukh. Sivtseva Lyubov is the ensemble manager, and Natalia Karelova is the music manager.
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– Polska Stronie – Poland DOLINA SŁOMKI Stronie Miejscowość Stronie położona jest w gminie Łukowica, w powiecie limanowskim na pograniczu Beskidu Wyspowego i Kotliny Sądeckiej na wysokości 400–580 m n.p.m., a etnograficznie zaliczana jest do grupy Lachów Sądeckich. Beskid Wyspowy swoją nazwę zawdzięcza pojedynczym szczytom poprzedzielanym dolinami i słynie z sadownictwa. Przez wieś Stronie przepływa rzeka Słomka. Od niej właśnie wzięła się nazwa zespołu. Odrębność kulturową Lachów widać w muzyce, tańcu i śpiewie. Dominują melodie oparte na rytmie walca, a także żywe tańce z podkładem muzycznym z towarzyszeniem trąbki, klarnetu i kontrabasu. Odrębne cechy kultury lachowskiej można także, choć ostatnio coraz rzadziej, uchwycić w sztuce regionu – rzeźbie, malarstwie oraz w ceramice – kształtach i wykończeniu. Można je najpełniej dostrzec w zdobnictwie (kolorowe motywy geometryczne i roślinne), rzeźbie ludowej (tematyka religijna) oraz tzw. plastyce obrzędowej. Na uwagę zasługują też zwyczaje ludowe kultywowane do dziś, takie jak ognie sobótkowe, smażenie jajecznicy w Zielone Święta. Regionalny zespół DOLINA SŁOMKI powstał w kwietniu 2008 roku z inicjatywy małżeństwa Joanny i Romana Liszków ze Stronia. Razem z kapelą zespół liczy 66 osób w wieku od 4–20 lat. Na Festiwalu zespół zaprezentuje program pod tytułem ,,Przed chałpom”. Dzieci bawią się lalkami, piłką oraz w dawne zabawy dziecięce typowe dla pastwiska, polany czy podwórka przydomowego. Kiedy przez podwórko przechodzi kapela, dzieci proszą o zagranie im do tańca. Starsze dzieci słysząc granie muzyki z ciekawości przychodzą popatrzeć, a przy okazji potańczyć. Proszą kapelę, żeby im też zagrała. Przedstawiają tańce podpatrzone u dorosłych takie jak „śtajerek”, ,,krakowiok”, walc „w ciomnom losku”, „cioto polka” i „polka z przyśpiewkami”. Na koniec matka woła swoje dzieci do wieczerzy, kapela idzie do ciotki Hanki grać na imieninach, a pozostałe dzieci rozchodzą sie do swoich domów. Kierownikami zespołu są Joanna i Roman Liszka, a kierownikiem muzycznym jest Łukasz Liszka. Choreografem zespołu jest Elżbieta Sroka.
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The village of Stronie is located in the commune of Łukowica, Limanowa county. It sits on the borderline between the Wyspowy Beskid and the Sącz Valley at the altitude of 400–580 m. Ethnographically, the village inhabitants are Sącz Lachs. The name Wyspowy Beskid [the Island Beskid] is derived from the way the single hills separated by valleys look. The Wyspowy Beskid is well-known as a fruitgrowing region. Stronie is traversed by the river Słomka, which provides the name for the ensemble: Dolina Słomki [the Słomka River Valley]. The cultural identity of the Lachs can be traced in their music, song and dance. Melodies based on the waltz rhythm as well as lively dances with the accompaniment of the trumpet, clarinet and double bass are predominant. The distinct features of the Lach culture can also be seen –increasingly rarely though – in the arts of the region, e.g. sculpture, painting and ceramics (shapes and finishes). These can be fully discerned in ornamentation (multicoloured geometric and floral motifs), folk sculpture (religious motifs), as well as in ritual plastic arts. Some folk customs observed to this day are particularly remarkable, e.g. bonfires on the Kupala Day, making scrambled eggs at Whitsuntide (both pagan traditions). The folk ensemble DOLINA SŁOMKI was established in April 2008 on the initiative of Joanna and Roman Liszka. Along with the musical band the ensemble has 66 members aged 4–20. At the Festival the ensemble will present the programme entitled “In front of the peasant cottage.” The children engage in ball playing; girls play with dolls. There are ancient children’s games typical of the settings such as pasture land, forest clearing or homestead yard. As the band crosses the yard, the children ask them to play for dances. Hearing the music play, the older children come over to have a look and dance as well. They want the musicians to play for them too, and start emulating adult dances such as śtajerek, krakowiok, “w ciemnom losku” waltz, cioto polka, polka z przyśpiewkami. As the party draws to an end, the mother calls her children for supper; the musicians walk off to play at aunt Hanka’s; the remaining children leave for home. Joanna and Roman Liszka are the ensemble managers, Łukasz Liszka is the music manager and Elżbieta Sroka is the ensemble choreographer.
– Czechy Třebíč – Czech Republic OKŘEŠÁNEK Třebíč Třebíč jest przytulnym i pełnym zieleni miasteczkiem na Morawach, historycznej krainie stanowiącej część Republiki Czeskiej. Liczący prawie 40 tys. mieszkańców, Třebíč położony jest w kraju Wysoczyzna, nad rzeką Igławą (65 km od Brna), a do jego atrakcji turystycznych można zaliczyć liczne zabytki, m. in. romańską bazylikę św. Prokopa, dzielnicę żydowską (oba zabytki znajdują się na liście światowego dziedzictwa UNESCO), pomnik św. Cyryla i Metodego, drugi największy rynek w Czechach oraz wieżę ratuszowa z największym zegarem w Europie. Zespół OKŘEŠÁNEK został założony w 2002 roku. W jego skład wchodzi 47 osób, w tym siedmioosobowa kapela grająca na skrzypcach, klarnecie, kontrabasie i vozembouchu. Repertuar obejmuje ludowe piosenki i tańce, rymowanki dziecięce i zwyczaje ludowe. Ukazuje dawne życie dziecka w grach i zabawach, gdy nie było jeszcze nowoczesnych zabawek, mediów ani rozrywek elektronicznych. OKŘEŠÁNEK jest członkiem dwóch stowarzyszeń folklorystycznych: Stowarzyszenia Horácko oraz Stowarzyszenia Republiki Czeskiej. Zespół cieszy się dużą popularnością i dlatego często uczestniczy w wielu festiwalach, przeglądach i koncertach. W 2010 roku został zakwalifikowany przez specjalną komisję do występu podczas cieszącego się największą popularnością dziecięcego festiwalu folklorystycznego w Luhačovicach, gdzie przyznano mu tytuł najlepszego zespołu ludowego. OKŘEŠÁNEK występował w Chorwacji, Włoszech, Słowacji, Ukrainie oraz na Węgrzech, gdzie uczestniczył w Międzynarodowych Spotkaniach Dzieci i Młodzieży – Przyszłość Europy – Csipero w Kecskemét. Na Festiwalu zespół przedstawi program złożony z dziecięcych zabaw, piosenek i tańców wykonywanych w polu podczas pasienia krów i gęsi. Będzie można również zobaczyć dawny zwyczaj topienia Marzanny, czyli kukły przedstawiającej słowiańską boginię zimy i śmierci. Obrzęd ten odbywał się zazwyczaj w dzień równonocy wiosennej. Ponieważ fabuła przedstawienia związana jest z codziennym życiem, będzie można zobaczyć cały szereg sprzętów gospodarstwa domowego oraz rekwizytów takich jak miotły, kije, taczki, wózki dziecięce, łyżki, itp. Kierownikiem zespołu i choreografem jest Ilona Mikešová.
Třebíč is a cosy and green tourist town in Moravia, which is a historical region of the Czech Republic. It has the population of nearly 40,000 inhabitants and is situated in the Vysočina Region, on the banks of the Jihlava River (65km west of Brno). It boasts a number of historic monuments, e.g. the largely Romanesque St. Procopius Basilica, the Jewish Quarter (both listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites), the statue of SS Cyril and Methodius, the second largest market square in the Czech Republic and the townhall tower with the biggest clock in Europe. The ensemble OKŘEŠÁNEK was established in 2002. It comprises 47 members and has a seven-piece band playing such instruments as the violin, clarinet, double bass and vozembouch. The ensemble repertoire includes folk songs and dances, nursery rhymes and folk customs. It shows children’s ancient lifestyle with its everyday fun and games, which children engaged in before the advent of modern toys, media and electronic diversions. OKŘEŠÁNEK is a member of two Folklore Associations, the one of Horácko and the Czech Republic. It is a very popular ensemble, and thus a participant in a great many folk festivals, reviews, concerts and performances. In 2010 it was qualified by a special committee to perform at the most famous children’s folk festival in Luhačovice, and was awarded the title of the best folk ensemble. It has given concerts in Croatia, Italy, Slovakia, Ukraine and Hungary, where OKŘEŠÁNEK performed at the Future of Europe - International Children’s and Youth Meeting – Csipero in Kecskemét. At the Festival the ensemble is going to present a programme of children’s games, songs and dances performed in a field while grazing cows and geese, as well as the ancient folk custom of drowning Morana, an effigy of the Slavic goddess of winter and death. The ceremony would usually take place on the day of vernal equinox. Because of the nature of the show associated with everyday life, it will feature a number of household utensils and props such as brooms, staffs, barrows, buggies, spoons, etc. Ilona Mikešová is the ensemble leader and choreographer.
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Bystre - Polska Nowe Bystre – Poland MALI BYSTRZANIE Nowe Zespół pochodzi z Nowego Bystrego. Jest to mała miejscowość leżąca u podnóża północnego stoku Gubałówki. Administracyjnie należy do gminy Poronin w powiecie tatrzańskim. Wieś ta liczy niewiele ponad 2 tysiące mieszkańców i jest oazą spokoju, gdzie wśród ciszy i z dala od zgiełku można odpoczywać, podziwiać wiejskie klimaty oraz piękne tatrzańskie krajobrazy. Nowe Bystre jest nazywane „zagłębiem oscypka”, ponieważ to tu rozwija się produkcja różnorakich odmian oscypków, czyli przysmaku, którym delektują się turyści przyjeżdżający w góry. Dziecięcy zespół MALI BYSTRZANIE powstał w 1988 roku równolegle przy tworzącym się wówczas Związku Podhalan. Do zespołu należy ok. 50 dzieci. Zespół aktywnie uczestniczy w imprezach wiejskich oraz uroczystościach gminnych, przeglądach zespołów regionalnych, recytatorów, gawędziarzy i grup śpiewaczych w Poroninie, Czarnym Dunajcu, Bukowinie Tatrzańskiej, Ratułowie, a także w festynach ludowych takich jak Poroniańskie Lato, Majówka Tatrzańska, Witowiańska Watra, Dożynki na Kaszubach, Cepeliadzie. Zespół co roku uświetnia i jest gospodarzem największej imprezy w Nowem Bystrem – słynnego miejscowego festynu „Osod”. W czerwcu ubiegłego roku zespół gościnnie uczestniczył w Międzynarodowym Festiwalu Dziecięcych Zespołów Folklorystycznych Mniejszości Narodowych w Węgorzewie. Na Festiwalu MALI BYSTRZANIE zaprezentują program „Na holi” składający się z zabaw, pieśni i tańców dziecięcych z Podhala. Do dwóch dziewczynek idących z tobołkami, dołączają kolejne. Zaczyna się śpiew, a następnie zabawa w kryjówkę. Nadchodzą chłopcy udający zbójników na koniach. Po chwili chłopcy rywalizują między sobą, a dziewczynki im kibicują. W pobliżu przechodzi muzyka wracająca z odpustu. Zaczyna przygrywać dzieciom do tańca. Zabawa kończy się wraz z pojawieniem się baby, która przegania dzieci, krzycząc, że jej trawę zdeptały. Dzieci uciekają z polany. Kierownikami zespołu są Józef Staszel – aktualnie urzędujący prezes Oddziału Związku Podhalan w Nowem Bystrem oraz nauczycielka Anna Zubek. Dzieci ćwiczą podstawy ta��ca góralskiego i śpiewu pod kierunkiem państwa Czesławy i Stanisława Sobczyków.
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The ensemble comes from Nowe Bystre, which is a village lying at the foothills of the northern slope of Gubałówka. Administratively, Nowe Bystre is part of the Poronin commune, the Tatras county. Its population is a little more than 2,000 and it is an oasis of peace, where in tranquility and far away from din, one can rest, savour the countryside atmosphere and admire the glorious Tatra landscapes. Nowe Bystre is called the “oscypek region,” for it is here that the production of various kinds of oscypek (smoked cheese made from sheep milk, and a delicacy so loved by tourists visiting the mountains) has been thriving. The ensemble MALI BYSTRZANIE was established in 1988 along with the then-created Association of Podhale Inhabitants. It numbers around 50 children, and actively takes part in events and festivities organized by the village and commune, as well as in folk ensemble festivals, recitation, storyteller and singing ensemble contests in Poronin, Czarny Dunajec, Bukowina Tatrzańska, Ratułów. The ensemble is also a participant in folk fêtes such as Poroniańskie Lato, Majówka Tatrzańska, Witowiańska Tatra, Dożynki in Kashubia, Cepeliada. Every year it hosts and graces the popular local fête called Osod – the biggest event in Nowe Bystre. Last June the ensemble participated, as a guest, in the International Children Festival of Folk Groups of Ethnic Minorities in Węgorzewo. At the Festival MALI BYSTRZANIE are going to present the programme “In the Mountain Pasture,” which consists of games, songs and children’s dances from the Podhale region. Two bundle-carrying girls are joined by some more. They begin singing, and then start playing hide-and-seek. Boys come riding hobby-horses and playing highland robbers. In a while they start competing, and the girls are cheering. A musical band pass by; they are coming back from the church fair, and start playing for the children to dance. The fun is over when an elderly woman appears. She chases the children away, scolding them for trampling the grass. The children flee the clearing. Józef Staszel, the current president of the Nowe Bystre Branch of the Association of Podhale Inhabitants, and schoolteacher Anna Zubek are the ensemble managers. The children practise the basics of highland song and dance under the guidance of Czesława and Stanisław Sobczyk.
– Czarnogóra Podgorica – Montenegro CRVENA STIJENA Podgoricy Czarnogóra leży w śródziemnomorskiej części Europy, nad Morzem Adriatyckim, a jej społeczeństwo jest wielokulturowe i wielowyznaniowe, gdyż przez wieki kształtowało się pod silnym wpływem nie tylko basenu Morza Śródziemnego, lecz także cywilizacji i kultury Europy Środkowej i Wschodniej. Leżąc pomiędzy Wschodem i Zachodem, kultura czarnogórska jest zlepkiem elementów iliryjskich, hellenistycznych, rzymskich, katolickich, prawosławnych i islamskich. Terytorium Czarnogóry zostało zasiedlone 180 tys. lat temu, a najstarsze historyczne pozostałości to znaleziska archeologiczne wykopane w jaskini Crvena stijena, która była pierwszym zasiedlonym ludzkim habitatem na tym terenie. Stowarzyszenie kulturalno-artystyczne CRVENA STIJENA zostało założone w 2006 roku w stolicy Czarnogóry – Podgoricy. Nazwa Podgorica znaczy „pod Goricą” [pod górką], gdzie Gorica to nazwa wzniesienia górującego nad miastem. Z kolei nazwa zespołu wzięła się od nazwy jaskini Crvena stijena [czerwona skała], znajdującej się w jednym ze wzgórz otaczających miasto i zwanym Velje brdo. W skład stowarzyszenia wchodzą następujące zespoły: zespół folklorystyczny, chór młodzieżowy oraz sekcja teatralno-recytatorska. Jako że Czarnogóra jest krajem wieloetnicznym, zespół folklorystyczny wykonuje tańce i pieśni nie tylko z terytorium Czarnogóry, lecz również z innych republik byłej Jugosławii. Zespół liczy ok. 200 członków pogrupowanych według wieku. Na Festiwalu CRVENA STIJENA zaprezentuje następujące tańce: sumadija (z północy kraju), vrsuta (ze wzgórz okalających wybrzeże), bokeljske igre (tańce z regionu Boka – nadmorskiej części Czarnogóry), povardarje (z północnowschodniej części kraju), vranjanska svita (z południowej części Serbii, graniczącej z północną częścią Czarnogóry), pirinska makedonija (z Macedonii Pirińskiej), banat (z Banatu, północnej części Serbii – taniec wykonywany przez Czarnogórców mieszkających na terenach przygranicznych). Wiązankę tradycyjnych melodii wykona na piszczałce Stefan Martinovic. Kierownikiem zespołu jest Drasko Savkovic, a Goran Savkovic jest choreografem.
Montenegro is situated in the Mediterranean part of Europe, on the Adriatic Sea. It is a multi-cultural and multi-confessional community, which over centuries has been exposed to strong influences of the Mediterranean, central and eastern European civilization and culture. Positioned between East and West, the Montenegrin culture has taken on pagan, Illyrian, Hellenistic, Roman, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Islamic elements. The territory has been inhabited for more than 180,000 years. The oldest historical remains are the archaeological findings in the Crvena Stijena cave, which was the first inhabited human habitat in the territory of Montenegro. The cultural-artistic association CRVENA STIJENA was formed in 2006 in Podgorica, which is the capital of Montenegro. The name Podgorica means “under the Gorica” [under the little mountain], where Gorica is the name of the hill overlooking the city. The ensemble is named after a cave called Crvena stijena [Red Rock] located in the suburbs of Podgorica on one of many hills overlooking the city and called Velje brdo. Within the CAA the following groups operate: Folklore Ensemble, Youth Choir, Drama and Recitation Section. Since Montenegro is a multi-ethnic country, the Folklore Ensemble performs dances and songs not only from Montenegro, but also from the other former Yugoslavian republics. The ensemble is comprised of about 200 members who are classified in age groups. At the Festival the ensemble is going to present the following dances: sumadija (from the north of the country), vrsuta (from the hills surrounding the coast), bokeljske igre (dances from Boka – the coastal part of Montenegro), povardarje (from the northeastern part of the country), vranjanska svita (from the southern part of Serbia, which borders on the northern part of Montenegro), pirinska makedonija (from Pirinska Macedonia), banat (from Banat, northern part of Serbia, and danced by Montenegrins living close to the border). Stefan Martinovic is going to perform a medley of traditional tunes on the fife. Drasko Savkovic is the ensemble manager, and Goran S avkovic is the choreographer.
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– Polska Juszczyn – Poland ZBYRCOCEK Juszczyn Zespół pochodzi ze wsi Juszczyn, należącej pod względem etnograficznym do regionu babiogórskiego. Babiogórcy zamieszkują tereny położone u północnych podnóży Babiej Góry (1725 m n.p.m.), najwyższego szczytu Beskidu Wysokiego. Od południa graniczą z Orawiakami, od zachodu z Góralami Żywieckimi, od wschodu z Podhalanami, a od północnego-wschodu z Kliszczakami. Od północy obszar ten zamyka miasteczko Maków Podhalański i granicząca z nim przez rzekę Skawę Sucha Beskidzka. Podstawą tradycyjnej gospodarki przez wieki była hodowla owiec i bydła bazująca na sezonowym wypasie stad na polanach i halach, towarzyszące jej rolnictwo oraz praca w lesie połączona jeszcze w XIX wieku ze spławem drewna. W obrzędowości dorocznej zachowały się ciekawe stare zwyczaje jak np. kolędowanie z Dorotą i z Trzema Królami oraz Palenie Judasza w Wielki Czwartek, a także szereg obrzędów pasterskich, zwłaszcza owczarskich. Na okres Bożego Narodzenia w izbie u powały zawieszano tzw. światy – ozdoby wykonywane ze słomy i nasion. Folklor muzyczny i słowny był zdominowany przez wątki pasterskie i zbójnickie. Oprócz kapeli (skrzypce prym i sekund oraz basy) muzykowano także na dudach, a od schyłku XIX stulecia na heligonkach. Na Festiwalu zespół zaprezentuje program pt. „Przy kopaniu”. Jesienią na kartoflisku kobieta kopie ziemniaki. W jego sąsiedztwie na łące bawią się dzieci pod opieką starszej dziewczyny – Zośki. Kobieta przerywa w południe pracę i idzie doić krowy. Pod jej nieobecność przychodzi gromada dzieci wracających z grzybów. Korzystając z nieobecności dorosłych bawią się, palą ognisko, pieką ziemniaki, chłopcy popisują się przed dziewczętami zręcznościowymi zabawami. Niebawem przychodzi kapela – dzieci, które uczyły się grać przy pasieniu na sąsiedniej polanie. Zaczynają się tańce na łące. Kierownikiem zespołu jest Roman Guzik, kierownikiem muzycznym Marcin Pokusa, a choreografem Krystyna Kołacz.
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The ensemble comes from the village of Juszczyn, which ethnographically is part of the Babia Góra [Witches’ Mountain] region. The Babia Góra highlanders inhabit the areas lying at the northern foothills of Babia Góra (1,725 metres), the highest peak in the Wyspowy Beskid. The area to the south is inhabited by Orava highlanders, to the west Żywiec highlanders, to the east Podhale highlanders, to the northeast Kliszczacy. To the north the area is bounded by the towns of Maków Podhalański and Sucha Beskidzka (across the Skawa River). Over the centuries the foundation of traditional economy has been constituted by sheep and cattle breeding based on seasonal pasturing in clearings and mountain pastures, as well as agriculture, forest-related activities and wood floating (still in the 19th century). The yearly calendar of rites has managed to preserve such traditions as carolling on the nameday of Dorota and on the Feast of Three Kings, burning an effigy of Judas Iscariot on Good Thursday, as well as a number of shepherd customs, particularly those related to sheep tending. At Christmastime people would hang, on the ceiling, the so-called worlds – decorations made from straw and grain. Verbal and music folklore consisted predominantly of highland-robber and shepherd motifs. Apart from the traditional set of musical instruments (the primary and secondary violins, double bass), musicians also played the bagpipes and heligonka (a kind of button accordion; since the end of the 19th century). At the Festival the ensemble is going to present the programme “Picking potatoes.” In the autumn a woman is picking potatoes in the field. Nearby children are playing in a meadow, being looked after by Zośka, an older girl. The woman stops working at midday and walks off to milk the cows. While she is absent, a bunch of children come returning from mushroom picking. Taking advantage of the adults’ absence, they play, make a fire, roast potatoes; the boys show off in front of the girls with games involving agility. Soon comes the band – the children who have been playing while grazing the cattle in the neighbouring clearing. Dances begin in the meadow. Roman Guzik is the ensemble manager, Marcin Pokusa is the music manager, and Krystyna Kołacz is the choreographer.
SMP ISLAM JAKARTA TUGASKU – Indonezja Jakarta – Indonesia PULOMAS Dżakarta Indonezja to kraj-archipelag złożony z 17,508 wysp (6 tys. zamieszkałych) rozciągających się wzdłuż równika w Azji Południowo-Wschodniej. Terytorium Indonezji zamieszkują ludy przybyłe w czasie różnych migracji, czego wynikiem jest wielka różnorodność kultur, grup etnicznych i języków. Stąd też tradycyjna kultura indonezyjska i folklor są wielowymiarowe i synkretyczne. Archipelag zamieszkuje w sumie ponad 300 grup etnicznych noszących ślady wpływów arabskich, chińskich, a także europejskich. Każda z grup posiada zbiór własnych tradycyjnych tańców, a wszystkich oryginalnych tańców indonezyjskich jest ponad 3000. Pod względem czasowym można je podzielić na trzy ery: prehistoryczną, hinduistyczno-buddyjską oraz islamską. Pod względem rodzajowym – na dwa gatunki: tańce dworskie i ludowe. Zespół SMP ISLAM TUGASKU pochodzi z dzielnicy Pulomas w mieście Dżakarta Wschodnia. Faktycznie Dżakarta nie jest oficjalnie miastem, lecz prowincją ze statusem stolicy i liczy ok. 10 milionów mieszkańców. Na Festiwalu zespół przedstawi następujące tańce: tari pendet (balinejski taniec będący pierwotnie wyrazem kultu religijnego i przedstawiający przyjęcie powitalne z okazji zejścia bogów na ziemię), nandak ganjen (względnie nowa kompozycja taneczna z Dżakarty, wyrażająca swawolną i figlarną naturę młodzieży), gambyong (taniec jawajski rzekomo wymyślony przez tancerza ulicznego noszącego właśnie takie imię; jest to taniec towarzyski wykonywany w rytm bębna), indang (taniec, który jest owocem„małżeństwa” pomiędzy kulturą Minangkabau z Sumatry Zachodniej a cywilizacją islamską, która pojawiła się na wyspie w XIV wieku), lilin (sumatrzański taniec ze świecami), kancet tebengang madang (taniec plemienia Dayak Kenyah symbolizujący lot dzioborożca), tekenaq bungan malan (taniec poświęcony bogini mądrości Bungan Malan), Saman (taniec z regionu Aceh), jaran kepang (jawajski taniec przedstawiający grupę jeźdźców na koniach), mollucas (taniec z bambusami). Muzyka indonezyjska jest oryginalna i urzekająca; wymaga specjalnego zestawu instrumentów gamelan, dzięki którym uzyskuje się niepowtarzalny styl muzyczny. Widownia festiwalowa będzie miała okazję zobaczyć cały szereg metalofonów, ksylofonów, bębnów, gongów i fletów bambusowych. Kierownikiem zespołu jest Andris Adhitra, kierownikiem muzycznym Jufri, a choreografem Yachinta Gisella Alisya.
Indonesia is an archipelagic country of 17,508 islands (6,000 of which are only inhabited) stretching along the Equator in South East Asia. The area of Indonesia is populated by peoples of various migrations, thus creating a diversity of cultures, ethnicities and languages. Consequently, the Indonesian traditional culture and folklore are multifarious and syncretic. Altogether, there are more than 300 ethnic groups, with visible traces of the Arabic, Chinese and European influences. Each of the indigenous ethnic groups has a number of its own traditional dances, which results in a total sum of about 3000 original Indonesian dances. These, in turn, can be divided into three eras: the Prehistoric era, the Hindu/Buddhist era and the era of Islam, and into two main genres: court dance and folk dance. The ensemble comes from the district Pulomas in the city of East Jakarta. In fact, Jakarta as such is not officially a city, but a province with the capital status, and has the population of around 10 million. At the Festival the ensemble is going to present the following dances: tari pendet (a Balinese dance originally of religious worship; it present the welcoming reception on the descent of gods into the earth), nandak ganjen (a dance from Jakarta, which is a recent creation and display of adolescent playfulness and frolic), gambyong (a Javanese dance allegedly created by the street dancer of the same name, it is a social piece performed to the rhythm of the drum), indang (a dance which is a result of the “marriage” between the Minangkabau culture native of West Sumatra and the Islamic civilization around the 14th century), lilin (a candle dance from Sumatra), kancet tebengang madang (a dance of the Dayak Kenyah tribe symblizing the flight of a hornbill), tekenaq bungan malan (a dance dedicated to the goddess of wisdom Bungan Malan), Saman (a dance from Aceh), jaran kepang (a Javanese dance depicting a group of horsemen), mollucas (a bamboo dance). Indonesian music is original and captivating; it requires a special set of the so-called gamelan instruments, which all make for the inimitable style. The Festival audience will have an opportunity to see a number of metallophones, xylophones, drums, gongs and bamboo flutes. Andris Adhitra is the ensemble manager; Jufri is the music manager, and Yachinta Gisella Alisya is the choreographer.
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- Polska Korczyna – Poland KORCZYŃSKA BRAĆ Korczyna Wieś Korczyna leży w gminie Biecz w powiecie gorlickim. Pod względem etnograficznym jest to region Pogórzan. Od wschodu i południa region ten graniczy z Łemkowszczyzną. Obszar na północ zamieszkują Krakowiacy Wschodni, a na południowy zachód Pogórzanie Sądeccy i Lachy. Pogórze Bieckie odznacza się znacznymi walorami krajobrazowymi. Wokół Korczyny znajduje się wiele punktów widokowych zapewniających piękną panoramę. W XVI wieku na terenie Korczyny znajdowała się kopalnia ałunu. Zespół folklorystyczno-teatralny KORCZYŃSKA BRAĆ został założony przy zespole szkolno-przedszkolnym w Korczynie w 1988 roku. Od samego początku działał aktywnie w różnych obszarach kultury i sztuki oraz uczestniczył w licznych wydarzeniach szkolnych i pozaszkolnych. Poprzez udział w konkursach, przeglądach i spotkaniach, a także w zajęciach teatralnych, muzycznych i plastycznych uczniowie pogłębiali swą wiedzę o regionie. We wrześniu 2002 roku nastąpiła zmiana na stanowisku kierownika zespołu. Zmienił się także nieco profil artystyczny – KORCZYŃSKA BRAĆ to aktualnie teatr obrzędowy oraz grupa śpiewacza kultywująca folklor Pogórza. Od jesieni 2009 roku ,,Korczyńska Brać” zaczęła zgłębiać tajniki ludowego tańca pogórzańskiego pod kierunkiem choreografa, pani Stefanii Bogumiły Kowalskiej. Na Festiwalu zespół zaprezentuje program „Na świętych Piotra i Pawła”. Dzieci pod opieką śpiącego na ławie ojca, bawią się w izbie. Z kościoła wraca matka. Zachęca dzieci do uporządkowania zabawek i zapowiada przyjście gości. Do izby przybiega chłopiec z sąsiedztwa, prosząc o pomoc przy ocieleniu krowy. Kobieta budzi męża, który wychodzi. Do izby wchodzą kolejni uczestnicy sumy odpustowej wraz z dziećmi. Dorośli są zajęci rozmową, dzieci rozpoczynają wspólną zabawę. Dorośli muszą odbyć próbę muzyki przed wieczorną potańcówką u wójta z okazji odpustu. Dzieci proszą o pozwolenie zatańczenia przy muzyce, na co otrzymują zgodę. Rozpoczynają się tańce. Widowisko kończy się podziękowaniem i wyjściem na nieszpory. Kierownikiem zespołu jest Beata Bochnia.
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The village of Korczyna lies in the Biecz commune, Gorlice county. Ethnographically, it represents the region of the Foothill Highlanders (also called Uplanders). To the east and south the region borders on Lemkivshchyna; the area to the north is inhabited by Eastern Krakowiaks; the southwest is inhabited by Sącz Uplanders and Lachs. The Biecz Foothills are distinguishable by their remarkable landscape features. The environs of Korczyna offer a number of vantage points affording magnificent panoramic views. In the XVI century the village was known for its potassium alum mine. KORCZYŃSKA BRAĆ [the Korczyn brethren] was established at the kindergarten-primary school complex in Korczyna in 1988, and ever since the ensemble has been active in various fields of culture and arts, as well as participated in numerous school and out-of-school events. Taking part in contests, reviews and festivals, as well as in theatre, music and visual arts classes, the pupils have broadened their knowledge about the region. In September 2002 the manager changed and so did the character of the ensemble. Today, KORCZYŃSKA BRAĆ is a ritual theatre and singing group, cultivating the folklore of the Foothills. In autumn 2009 the ensemble began to learn folk dance led by choreographer Stefania Bogumiła Kowalska. The Festival audience will have an opportunity to see the programme entitled “On the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul.” The children play in the room, being looked after by the father sleeping on a bench. The mother, having returned from church, instructs the children to put away the toys, and tells them that some guests are coming over. A little boy dashes into the room, asking for help with a calving cow at the neighbour’s. The mother wakes the father up, and so he leaves. More people with children walk in, coming back from the High Mass at the church fair. The adults are busy talking; the children begin playing. The adults need to have some band practice before the evening dance organised the occasion of the church fair at the borough leader’s place. The children ask permission to dance and the adults consent. The dances begin. The performance concludes with thanks and the party leaves for vespers. Beata Bochnia is the ensemble manager.
KINDERVOLKSTANZ UND – Austria Fürnitz – Austria SCHUHPLATTLERGRUPPE Fürnitz Miejscowość Fürnitz, wspomniana w źródłach po raz pierwszy ok. 990 roku, leży niedaleko malowniczego jeziora Faaker-See, tuż nad południową granicą kraju związkowego Karyntia. Granica ta jest również granicą państwową, za którą rozciągają się już Włochy i Słowenia. Tak więc historycznie jest to punkt przecięcia się trzech kręgów kulturowych: słowiańskiego, romańskiego i germańskiego. W Fürnitz bardzo wcześnie rozwinęło się bogate życie kulturalne. Powstawały chóry, towarzystwa kulturalne, korporacje akademickie, grupy teatralne oraz zespoły kultywujące ludowy śpiew i taniec. Zespół Kindervolkstanz- und Schuhplattlergruppe Fürnitz został założony w 1995 roku. Priorytetowym zadaniem od samego początku było zapewnienie dzieciom możliwości ciekawego i wartościowego spędzenia czasu wolnego, z dala od mediów elektronicznych, a także wspieranie poczucia wspólnoty i ducha koleżeństwa w grupie – wychodzenia od koncentrowania się na„ja” do koncentrowania się na„my”. Przekazywanie wartości kulturalnych idzie w parze z przekazywaniem i kultywowaniem typowych karynckich zwyczajów. Oprócz tańców karynckich, takich jak Kreistanz, St. Veiter, czy Grafensteiner dzieci uczą się także tańców z innych krajów związkowych oraz niemieckojęzycznego regionu alpejskiego, które w większości bazują na podstawowych krokach lendlera, mazurka, polki, walca i tańca Boarischer. Najbardziej ciekawym a zarazem popularnym tańcem jest Schuhplattler, którego pierwotną formą był żywiołowy taniec zalotny, który wielu literatów i badaczy próbowało niegdyś porównać do tokowania cietrzewia. Autorami byli prości ludzie – chłopi, myśliwi, drwale. Nieporadni w swoim sposobie wyrażania się, co wynikało z braków wykształcenia, a także codziennej ciężkiej fizycznej pracy, próbowali w tańcu zaimponować kobietom tężyzną, sprawnością i wytrwałością. Stąd też charakterystyczne kroki i gesty. Zespołowi towarzyszy własna kapela grająca na akordeonie, gitarze, cymbałkach oraz flecie poprzecznym. Koncertując i uczestnicząc w licznych festiwalach zespół dotychczas odwiedził takie kraje jak Francja, Belgia, Węgry, Polska, Słowenia, Niemcy, Włochy, Czechy, Holandia, Chorwacja. Kierownikiem grupy jest Beatrix Mischkot.
The town of Fürnitz (first mentioned in historical sources around 990) is located near the picturesque lake FaakerSee, close to the southern border of the Austrian state of Carinthia, which is also the border of the Republic of Austria. The neighbouring countries stretching to the south are Italy and Slovenia, and so historically the spot is the intersection of three cultures: the Slavic, Romanesque and German one. It was quite early that the cultural life began to flourish in Fürnitz. A number of cultural enterprises were undtertaken, e.g. choirs, cultural societies, academic corporations, theatre groups, as well as folk song and dance ensembles. The Kindervolkstanz- und Schuhplattlergruppe was established in 1995. It has been a priority task since the beginning to provide the children with an opportunity to spend their free time in an absorbing and valuable way, far from the electronic media, as well as to foster a sense of togetherness and spirit of comradeship – abandoning the focus on “me” and concentrating on “us.” Handing the cultural values down to the children is coupled with the generational transfer and observation of typical Carinthian customs. Apart from the typical Carinthian dances such as Kreistanz, St. Veiter and Grafensteiner, the children also learn dances from other Austrian states as well as the German-speaking Alpine region. These use basic steps of ländler, mazurka, polka, waltz and Boarischer. The most interesting and popular dance is Schuhplattler, whose original form was a lively courtship dance, which a number of literati and researchers used to compare to blackgrouse displaying and calling. The authors of the dance were simple men – peasants, hunters, woodcutters. Awkward and inept in their manner of expression, which was the result of their poor education and hard physical work done on a daily basis, they tried to impress women with brawn, fitness and stamina in their dance. Hence the distinguishing steps and gestures. The ensemble is accompanied by the band playing the accordion, guitar, glockenspiel and transverse flute. Performing at numerous concerts and festivals the ensemble has visited France, Belgium, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Croatia. Beatrix Mischkot is the ensemble manager.
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Wielka – Polska Lipnica Wielka – Poland ORAWIANIE IM . HERÓDKA Lipnica Lipnica Wielka to gmina malowniczo rozciągająca się u podnóża Babiej Góry. Łagodne wzgórza, rozległe polany, szumiące lasy, bystre potoki, ciepli i gościnni mieszkańcy, żywy folklor, bogata historia – to wszystko można odnaleźć w tej orawskiej gminie, która liczy ponad 5500 mieszkańców. Lipnica Wielka położona jest w tzw. beskidzkiej części Górnej Orawy. Dolna część gminy sięga Jeziora Orawskiego i leży na wysokości 600 m n.p.m., a górna wznosi się ku szczytowi Babiej Góry (1725 m n.p.m.). Dziecięcy Zespół Regionalny „Orawianie” im. Heródka działa od 1974 przy Szkole Podstawowej nr 4 w Lipnicy Wielkiej. Do zespołu należy ok. 35 dzieci, co stanowi prawie 1/3 szkoły. Założycielem zespołu był rodowity Orawianin dr Emil Kowalczyk. Zespół brał udział w licznych przeglądach, konkursach i festiwalach zdobywając wiele nagród i wyróżnień, m.in. Złotą Jodłę w Kielcach, główną nagrodę w konkursie tańca ludowego w Rzeszowie, Medal Grafiady w Szczecinie, Złotą Spinkę w Bukowinie Tatrzańskiej, Wielki Zbyrcok na Święcie Pasterskim na Orawie, nagrodę publiczności na festiwalu w Rabce. Prezentował się również na przeglądach i festiwalach w Turcji, Bułgarii, Słowacji i Niemczech. Nagrał kilka audycji radiowych i telewizyjnych oraz filmów folklorystycznych. Zespół prezentuje folklor autentyczny. W swoim repertuarze zawarł głównie doroczne obrzędy ludowe, zabawy pasterskie, przyśpiewki i pieśni orawskie, rymowanki, porzekadła i zagadki dziecięce. Na Święcie Dzieci Gór zespół przedstawi program „Pastyrskie Świynto Na Polanie”, związany ze świętem pasterzy w dniu św. Jana, kiedy to dzieci jeden raz w roku zapominały o trudach związanych z wypasaniem krów i oddawały się wspólnej zabawie i tańcom. Na tę okazję rodzice przygotowali szczególny poczęstunek, aby dzieci wiedziały że ich całoroczny trud jest doceniany. Pasterze przygotowywali się na to wydarzenie przez cały rok. Wybrali ładną polanę, postawili kolebę na wypadek deszczu, przygotowali ognisko, umyślili w co się będą bawić, upytali też Ujka, czy może przyjdzie też zagrać? Wtedy byłoby naprawdę wesoło! Kierownikiem zespołu jest Janina Karkoszka, a instruktorem i choreografem Eugeniusz Karkoszka.
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Lipnica Wielka is a commune beautifully situated at the foothills of Babia Góra. Gentle hills, vast meadows, rustling forests, swift brooks, warm-hearted and hospitable inhabitants, living folklore, rich history – all this can be found in this Orava commune, whose population exceeds 5,500 inhabitants. Lipnica Wielka lies in the so-called Beskid part of Upper Orava. The lower part of the commune reaches the Orava Lake and sits at the altitude of 600 metres, while the upper one rises up to the peak of Babia Góra (1,725 metres). The Heródek ORAWIANIE children’s folk ensemble was founded in 1974 at Primary School No. 4 in Lipnica Wielka. It is comprised of 35 children, which constitutes nearly 1/3 of the school. Dr Emil Kowalczyk, a native of Orava, was the ensemble founder. ORAWIANIE has taken part in numerous reviews, contests and festivals, and has won many awards and honourable mentions. e.g. Złota Jodła [Golden Fir] in Kielce, the main award at the folk dance contest in Rzeszów, Medal Grafiady [Grafiada Medal] in Szczecin, Złota Spinka [Golden Badge] in Bukowina Tatrzańska, Wielki Zbyrcok [Great Cowbell] at Święto Pasterskie [Shepherd Feast] in Orava, the audience award at the Rabka Festival. Also, the ensemble has performed at reviews and festivals in Turkey, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Germany. It has recorded several radio and TV broadcasts, as well as folklore films. The ensemble presents authentic folklore. Its repertoire is composed mainly of annual folk customs, shepherd games, occasional songs, Orava songs, rhymes, adages and children’s riddles. At the Festival the ensemble is going to present the programme “Shepherd Feast in a Clearing,”organized on the Feast of St John, the day when children, once in a year, would forget about the cattle grazing toil and get carried away in common fun and dance. For this occasion the parents have prepared a special meal so that the children know that their year-long effort is appreciated. The shepherds have been preparing for this all year: they have chosen a fine clearing, put up a shelter in case of rain, prepared a fire, thought of some games, as well as asked the uncle to come and play some music. So it looks like it’s going to be a very merry occasion! Janina Karkoszka is the ensemble manager, and Eugeniusz Karkoszka is the instructor and choreographer.
FUNDACION DANZAS TEMERI Guanare - Wenezuela / Guanare - Venezuela Fundacja Danzas Temeri (w języku Indian Temeri jest pierwotną nazwą rzeki Rio Portuguesa) działa w mieście Guanare, w stanie Portuguesa, który jest jednym z 23 stanów Wenezueli, położonym w zachodniej części kraju i uważanym za „spichlerz” Wenezueli, dzięki produkcji znacznej ilości płodów rolnych. Miasto Guanare, liczące ponad 235 tys. mieszkańców, jest otoczone górami oraz plantacjami trzciny cukrowej. Jest to najważniejsze miasto regionu, siedziba instytucji politycznych i administracyjnych, jak również „duchowa stolica” Wenezueli. Znajduje się tutaj Świątynia Matki Boskiej z Coromoto, dzięki czemu miasto to stało się centrum życia religijnego kraju i celem pielgrzymek, także tych zagranicznych, które przybywają odwiedzić Sanktuarium Patronki Wenezueli, poświęcone przez Ojca Świętego Jana Pawła II w roku 1996. Zespół został założony w 1982 roku i od samego początku jego zadaniem było nauczanie tańca, jak również promowanie wiedzy o tańcu w jego trzech odmianach praktykowanych w Wenezueli: taniec ludowy, taniec współczesny oraz taniec klasyczny. Obecni i byli członkowie zespołu to w sumie ok. 100 osób. Zespół uczestniczył w licznych festiwalach w kraju i zagranicą, m. in. w Festival Folklórico de la Frontera de Música Llanera (1994), Reinado Internacional del Joropo. W 2009 roku Danzas Temeri uczestniczył w festiwalu w Saint Maixent l’Ecole we Francji, w Gauargi „Enfants et Dance du Monde” w Kraju Basków oraz Międzynarodowym Festiwalu Folklorystycznym w Bidasao. Repertuar zespołu obejmuje tańce najbardziej reprezentatywne dla różnych stanów Wenezueli, m. in. Calipso de Guayana (ze stanu Bolívar), La Culebra de Ipure (stan Mongas), Los Sones de Negro o el Tamunangue (stan Lara), San Juan de Curiepe (stan Miranda), Los Vasallos de la Candelaria (stan Mérida), El Vapor Meta (stan Bolívar), Diablos de San Hipólito (stan Llanero Barinas), Los Locos de Timote (stan Mérida), La Parranda de San Pedro (stan Guatire). W skład kapeli wchodzi 8 muzyków grających na następujących instrumentach: bandola, cuatro, quinto and sexto (typowe wenezuelskie instrumenty strunowe); tambor golpero, tambor de parranda, mumbac, mina (rodzaje bębnów), marakasy; campana, guira metálica i charrasca (metalowe instrumenty perkusyjne); marimbola. Ana Dolores Orozco de Gómez jest kierownikiem zespołu, Eliezer Alvarado jest kierownikiem muzycznym, a Tatiana Patricia Gómez Orozco i Luisa Teresa Gomez pełnią rolę choreografów.
The foundation Danzas Temeri (Temeri is the original Indian name of the Rio Portuguesa) operates in the city of Guanare, in the Portuguesa State, which is one of the 23 states of Venezuela. The state is situated in the west of the country and is considered Venezuela’s granary owing to the considerable amount of agricultural produce. The city of Guanare (population over 235,000) is surrounded by mountains and sugar cane plantations. It is the major city of the region, a political and administrative centre, as well as the spiritual capital of Venezuela. It is the centre of religious life and a pilgrimage destination for both Venezuelans and foreigners, who come to visit the National Shrine of Our Lady of Coromoto, which was consecrated by Holy Father John Paul II in 1996. The Virgin of Coromoto is the Patroness of Venezuela. The ensemble was established in 1982 and its objective has been to teach dance and popularize the knowledge of the dance in its three varieties practised in Venezuela: folk dance, modern dance and classical dance. The past and current members of the ensemble total around 100. The ensemble has taken part in a number of festivals, e.g. Festival Folklórico de la Frontera de Música Llanera (1994) and Reinado Internacional del Joropo. In 2009 Danzas Temeri participated in the festival in Saint Maixent l’Ecole in France, Gauargi „Enfants et Dance du Monde” in the Basque Country, as well as in the International Folk Festival in Bidasao. The repertoire comprises the most representative dances of various states of Venezuela: Calipso de Guayana (from the Bolívar state), La Culebra de Ipure (Mongas), Los Sones de Negro o el Tamunangue (Lara), San Juan de Curiepe (Miranda), Los Vasallos de la Candelaria (Mérida), El Vapor Meta (Bolívar), Diablos de San Hipólito (Llanero Barinas), Los Locos de Timote (Mérida), La Parranda de San Pedro (Guatire). At the Festival the eight-piece band is going to play such instruments as the bandola, cuatro, quinto and sexto (typical Venezuelan stringed instruments); tambor golpero, tambor de parranda, mumbac, mina (all kinds of drums), maracas; campana, guira metálica i charrasca (metal percussion instruments); marimbola. Ana Dolores Orozco de Gómez is the ensemble manager, Eliezer Alvarado is the music manager; Tatiana Patricia Gómez Orozco and Luisa Teresa Gomez are the choreographers.
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- Polska Szczyrk - Poland KLIMCZOK Szczyrk Zespół KLIMCZOK pochodzi ze Szczyrku, miejscowości turystyczno-rekreacyjnej leżącej w dolinie rzeki Żylicy płynącej przez Beskid Śląski. Umiejscowiony jest w środku trójkąta łączącego Żywiec, Wisłę i Bielsko-Białą. Nad miejscowością górują dwa szczyty: Skrzyczne i Klimczok. Oba cieszą się dużą popularnością wśród turystów. Ponadto okolice Szczyrku są poprzecinane licznymi szlakami wędrownymi, co przyciąga rzesze piechurów. Już od momentu założenia Szczyrk był osadą międzynarodową, ponieważ oprócz Polaków, zawędrowali w to miejsce koczownicy z Bałkan, czyli Wołosi. Kiedy dołożymy do tego trochę szlacheckiej krwi niemieckiej i austriackiej, żołnierskiej z Węgier oraz słowackiej i czeskiej po sąsiedzku, to Szczyrk objawi się jako zalążek zintegrowanej Europy. Jako że Szczyrkowianie byli ludem spokojnym i bogobojnym zajmowali się uprawą ziemi, karczowaniem lasów, pasterstwem, hodowlą i myślistwem, a także wyrobem sukna z owczego runa. Dzisiaj Szczyrk jest popularnym ośrodkiem sportów zimowych; posiada dobrą infrastrukturę i dysponuje trasami narciarskimi o długości w sumie ponad 60 km, dzięki czemu jest centrum treningowym dla polskich olimpijczyków zimowych. Szkolny Regionalny Zespół KLIMCZOK powstał w 1985 roku przy Szkole Podstawowej nr 2 w Szczyrku. Poprzez pieczołowite kultywowanie tradycji przodków przez ponad 25 lat wychowało się w nim wiele dziewcząt i chłopców, w sercach których zakorzeniły się głęboko ludowy śpiew, taniec oraz obrzędy. Dzięki temu młodzi ludzie z wielkim szacunkiem dla pokoleń górali szczyrkowskich prezentują rodzimy folklor w swoim środowisku, w kraju i za granicą. Pracując w trzech grupach wiekowych zespół wypracował repertuar, na który składają się tańce górali żywieckich, śląskich, górali Skalnego Podhala, a także tańce takie jak polonez, krakowiak, mazur i kujawiak. W okresie Bożego Narodzenia zespół prezentuje kolędy i pastorałki, a także okolicznościową poezję. Na Festiwalu KLIMCZOK zaprezentuje program „Na pasionku”. Dzieci pasące gęsi i krowy spotykają się na pasionku. Zaczynają śpiewać i bawić się. Przyłącza się do nich przechodząca nieopodal kapela. Zaczynają się tańce. Kierownikiem zespołu jest Małgorzata Hołdys, a kierownikiem muzycznym Mieczysław Stec.
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The ensemble KLIMCZOK comes from Szczyrk, a tourist and spa town located in the valley of the Żylica River, which runs through the Silesian Beskid. Szczyrk sits in the middle of the triangle that connects the towns of Żywiec, Wisła and BielskoBiała. Two mountains tower of the town: Skrzyczne and Klimczok, and they are both popular with tourists. Besides, the areas surrounding the town are crisscrossed by a network of hiking trails, which attracts crowds of hikers. The moment Szczyrk was established, it became an international settlement, for apart from Poles, it drew some nomads from the Balkans – the Vlachs. Add some blood of the German and Austrian nobility, some of the Hungarian military and some of the neighbouring Slovaks and Czechs, and Szczyrk will turn out to be the starting point for the united Europe. Since the Szczyrk inhabitants were placid and God-fearing folk, they were committed to farming, forest felling, pasturing, hunting and making cloth from sheep’s fleece. Today Szczyrk is a popular winter sports centre; it boasts good infrastructure and ski runs that add up to more than 60 km, which has made the place a training centre for Polish winter olympic athletes. KLIMCZOK school folk ensemble was established in 1985 at Primary School No. 2 in Szczyrk. Thanks to the painstaking preservation of the forefathers’ traditions many girls and boys have received a good upbringing over the 25 years. Folk song, dance and customs have taken deep roots in their hearts. Owing to this the youth present the native folklore in their own environment, in the country and abroad, showing due respect for the generations of the Szczyrk highlanders. The ensemble is divided into three age groups, and has developed a repertoire comprised of dances typical of Żywiec, Silesia and Rocky Podhale highlanders. KLIMCZOK also dances polonez, krakowiak, mazur and kujawiak. At Christmas time the ensemble presents carols and Christmas shepherd songs, as well as Christmas poetry. At the Festival KLIMCZOK is going to present the programme “In the Pasture.” While grazing geese and cows the children meet in the pasture. They begin to sing and amuse themselves. After a while they are joined by a band that is passing by. Dances begin. Małgorzata Hołdys is the ensemble manager, and Mieczysław Stec is the music manager.
MEI LING HOLISTIC ACADEMY Nei Hu District – Tajwan / Nei Hu District – Taiwan
Dziecięcy zespół Mei Ling został założony w 1990 roku w Tajpej,
The children’s ensemble Mei Ling was founded in 1990 in the
stolicy Tajwanu. Głównym założeniem było od początku rozwi-
capital of Taiwan – Taipei. The main objective of the ensemble
janie u dzieci poczucia rytmu, umiejętności tanecznych i śpie-
is to develop rhythmic, singing and dancing skills of the children
waczych, a także poznawanie innych kultur. Zespół występował
and to become familiar with other cultures. The ensemble has
dotychczas w wielu miastach Tajwanu oraz w kilku krajach azja-
performed in many cities of Taiwan and some Asian country,
tyckich, takich jak Japonia, Singapur, Chiny. Dzięki zaproszeniu
e.g. Japan, Singapore, China. This year thanks to the Festival
na Święto Dzieci Gór w Nowym Sączu, zespół ma okazję po raz
of the Children of Mountains in Nowy Sacz, the ensemble has
pierwszy odwiedzić Europę, prezentując kulturę tajwańską.
an opportunity to visit Europe for the first time and present the
Repertuar Mei Ling obejmuje elementy różnych kultur: pierwot-
Taiwanese culture. In its repertoire Mei Ling includes elements
nych mieszkańców, kultury Min-nan, kultury Hakka, starożytnej
of many different cultures, e.g. the culture of the original inhab-
kultury Chin, jak również współczesnej kultury synkretycznej.
itants, culture of Min-nan, culture of Hakka, ancient Chinese cul-
Program przedstawiony w Nowym Sączu będzie się składał
ture and modern syncretic culture. The programme presented
z tradycyjnych piosenek, pieśni Aborygenów tajwańskich, tańca
in Nowy Sącz will feature traditional songs, songs of Taiwanese
tygrysa i smoka, tańców dramatycznych, jak również z utworów
aborigines, the tiger and dragon dance, dramatic dances, as well
wykonywanych na instrumentach tradycyjnych.
as the performance of traditional instruments.
– Słowacja Raslavice - Slovakia RASLAVIČAN Raslavice
Zespół Raslavičan jest jednym z czołowych zespołów regio-
Raslavičan is one of the leading folk ensembles in Slovakia. It
nalnych na Słowacji. Został założony w 1931 roku i od samego
was founded in 1931 and has been very active ever since its in-
początku działa bardzo aktywnie. Raslavičan regularnie uczest-
ception. Raslavičan regularly participates in local events, as well
niczy w lokalnych wydarzeniach kulturalnych, jak również
as projects of regional and national character. On numerous oc-
projektach o charakterze regionalnym i krajowym. Wiele razy
casions it has represented Slovakia abroad, visiting such coun-
reprezentował Słowację za granicą, występując w takich kra-
tries as Poland, Hungary, Latvia, France, the USA. Raslavičan is a
jach jak Polska, Węgry, Łotwa, Francja, Stany Zjednoczone. Jest
two-time winner of the national review of folk ensembles. It has
dwukrotnym zwycięzcą krajowego przeglądu zespołów regio-
given performances for the Slovak Television, and recorded a CD.
nalnych. Występował dla słowackiej telewizji oraz nagrał płytę
Anton Kontura is the ensemble manager, and Stanislav Baláž is
CD. Kierownikiem zespołu jest Anton Kontura, a kierownikiem
the music manager.
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ONI JUŻ TU BYLI…
THEY HAVE ALREADY BEEN HERE 1992 LES DRÔLES DE SAINTONGE – Francja / France I PICCOLI – Włochy / Italy BEZAČIK – Słowacja / Slovakia JAKOB ALJAŽ – Słowenia / Slovenia ŐRDŐGSZŐVŐ – Węgry / Hungary KAROLINKA – Białoruś / Belorussia ORAWIANIE im. HERÓDKA – Lipnica Wielka / Poland BUKOWE GRONICZKI – Brenna/ Poland JAWORZYNA – Międzybrodzie Żywieckie / Poland SĄDECZOKI – Nowy Sącz / Poland MALI ŚWARNI – Nowy Targ / Poland MAŁE LACHY – Nowy Sącz / Poland
TĘCZA – Ukraina / Ukraine MAŁE PODEGRODZIE – Podegrodzie / Poland DOLINA NOWEGO SOŁOŃCA – Złotnik / Poland TURLICKI – Nowy Targ / Poland GRONICEK – Gilowice / Poland KROKUSY – Jeleśnia / Poland MAŁE PODHALE – Jabłonka, Jurgów / Poland 1995 VONIČKA – Czechy / Czech Republic DORULETUL – Rumunia / Romania ARTE NATIVA LAGOA VERMELHA – Brazylia / Brazil EL CIMARRÓN – Argentyna / Argentina JANAVAK – India / India KARAGOUNA – Grecja / Greece ZAWATERNIK – Leśnica – Groń / Poland TATRY – Ratułów / Poland DUNAJCOWE DZIECI – Nowy Sącz / Poland TRZY KORONY – Grywałd / Poland KROPIANKA – Rabka / Poland ORAWSKIE DZIECI – Lipnica Wielka / Poland
1993 MAŁY SKALNIK – Kamionka Wielka / Poland ZORNICA – Zakopane / Poland DZIECIĘCY ZESPÓŁ REGIONALNY im. ZOŚKI GRACY – Biały Dunajec / Poland RAJCUSIE – Rajcza / Poland MAŁY KONIAKÓW – Koniaków / Poland ATAKÖY FOLKLOR VE SPOR KULÜBÜ – Turcja / Turkey MALI SPISZACY – Łapsze Wyżne / Poland LA ESTEVA – Hiszpania / Spain TURIEČ – Słowacja / Slovakia SCUOLA MEDIA STATALE GIUSEPPE TOMASI di LAMPEDUSA – Włochy / Italy PŁAMACZE – Bułgaria / Bulgaria ZESPÓŁ KRAJOWEJ EKSPERYMENTALNEJ SZKOŁY TWÓRCZOŚCI NARODOWEJ – Rosja / Russia
1996 SAYYAH – Azerbejdżan / Azerbaijan HALICKA WIESIEŁKA – Ukraina / Ukraine BRAVO – Baszkiria / Republic of Bashkortostan KITKA – Macedonia / Macedonia JADLOVČEK – Słowacja / Slovakia KIS LELLE – Węgry / Ungary SZAROTKI – Kamesznica / Poland ZAWATERNIK – Leśnica-Groń / Poland MALI GROJCOWIANIE – Wieprz MANIOWIANIE im.ks. ANTONIEGO SIUDY – Maniowy / Poland MAŁE LACHY – Nowy Sącz / Poland MALI TONIECNICY – Krempachy / Poland
1994 ZVIR – Chorwacja / Croatia SAARENKYLÄN KALEVAN NUORET – Finlandia / Finland 29 NOVEMVRI – Macedonia / Macedonia KORUKO AMA BIRJINAREM ESKOLA – Hiszpania (Kraj Basków) / Spain (Basques) AIA – Gruzja / Georgia
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1997 DZIECIĘCA GRUPA MUZYCZNA Z SAPPORO – Japonia / Japan SKORUŠINA – Słowacja / Slovakia PARAGUAY ETE – Paragwaj / Paraguay TRANSILVANIA – Rumunia / Romania LOS CHENITAS – Chile / Chile DZIECIĘCA GRUPA TANECZNA Z BANGKOKU – Tajlandia / Thailand ORAWIANIE im. HERÓDKA – Lipnica Wielka / Poland PIECUCHY – Nawojowa / Poland TRÓJCZYCE – Trójczyce / Poland MALI ŚWARNI – Nowy Targ / Poland TURLICKI – Nowy Targ / Poland JURAJSKIE IGRASZKI – Myszków / Poland 1998 ISOLA DEI DIOSCURI – Włochy / Italy RADOST – Bułgaria / Bulgaria PORIRUA COOK ISLANDS CULTURAL GROUP – Nowa Zelandia / New Zeland PERKHULI – Gruzja / Georgia HALAS – Węgry / Ungary JASKÓŁECZKI – Chiny / China PIĄTKOWIOKI – Piątkowa / Poland MALI SZFLARZANIE – Szaflary / Poland MAŁE FLISOKI – Sromowce Niżne / Poland POLANY – Kościelisko / Poland POGÓRZE-KORONECZKA – Bobowa / Poland JUZYNA – Zawoja / Poland
1999 DŻERELCE – Ukraina / Ukraine MARGARET ROSE GROUP – Szkocja / Scotland LOZIOARA – Mołdawia / Moldova ARODAFNOUSA – Cypr / Cyprus LOS MAIPUCITOS – Chile / Chile NITRAČEK – Słowacja / Slovakia MALI MSZALNICZANIE – Mszalnica / Poland MANIOWIANIE im. ks. ANTONIEGO SIUDY – Maniowy / Poland MAŁA ELEGIA – Rudnik / Poland MALI GROJCOWIANIE – Wieprz / Poland MAŁE KĘTY – Kęty / Poland ROBCUSIE – Rabka / Poland 2000 NRUTYESHWAR – Indie / India JEDINSTVO – Chorwacja / Croatia CIHANGIR COLLEGE – Turcja / Turkey DETI GOR – Północna Osetia / North Ossetia STAR FLINT – USA / Unites States of America EUN YUL MASK DANCE DRAMA – Korea / Korea MALI MYSTKOWIANIE – Mystków / Poland MALI SIEDLECANIE – Siedlec / Poland MAŁY HAŚNIK – Żabnica / Poland DUNAJEC – Niedzieca / Poland MALI WIERCHOWIANIE – Bukowina Tatrzańska / Poland RACIBORZANIE – Racibórz / Poland 2002 ZANIG KENTI – Inguszetia / Ingushetia NAMORES SENSACIÓN DEL CORACIÓN – Angola / Angola SZANGHAJSKI ZESPÓŁ TANECZNY – Chiny / China LOLA – Bośnia / Bosnia DŻERELCE – Ukraina / Ukraine CITLAXOHITL – Meksyk / Mexico
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2005 ROZMARIJA – Słowacja / Slovakia DJIDO – Serbia / Serbia SARDARAPAT – Armenia / Armenia AL ZYTON – Izrael / Israel WESOŁE HUCULĘTA – Ukraina / Ukraine JUNG YEON HEE – Korea Południowa / South Korea KURPIE – Ostrołęka / Poland RZEPIOKI – Rzepiennik Suchy / Poland MAŁE PODEGRODZIE – Podegrodzie / Poland JEDLICKI – Pewel Wielka / Poland MAJOWY WIERCH – Kacwin / Poland POLANY – Kościelisko / Poland
MAŁE LACHY – Nowy Sącz / Poland MAŁY KONIAKÓW – Koniaków / Poland MALI CZHOWIANIE – Czchów / Poland MALI SZCZYRZYCANIE – Szczyrzyc / Poland MALI HAMERNICY – Kraków / Poland MALI BOCHNIANIE – Bochnia / Poland 2003 GIUNESZ – Dagestan / Dagestan RASLAVIČANIK – Słowacja / Slovakia OGUZKAAN KOLEJI – Turcja / Turkey SZCZĘŚLIWE DZIECIŃSTWO – Tataria / Tartary COSÄUL – Rumunia / Romania DŻERELCE – Ukraina / Ukraine PIĄTKOWIOKI – Piątkowa / Poland MALI GRONKOWIANIE – Gronków / Poland PILSKO – Żywiec / Poland MALI OTFINOWIANIE – Otfinów / Poland MALI ŚWARNI – Nowy Targ / Poland HULAJNIKI – Milówka / Poland
2006 BIAŁY ORZEŁ – Kanada / Canada JAN PIRREWIT SCHOTEN – Belgia / Belgium MAGURÁČIK – Słowacja / Slovakia PA’NTLIKA – Węgry / Hungary DENIZLI – Turcja / Turkey ZANZAREE – Indie / India MAŁE LACHY – Nowy Sącz / Poland PILSKO – Żywiec / Poland MALI ŚWARNI – Nowy Targ / Poland MALI MOGILANIE – Mogilany / Poland ZIEMIA CIESZYŃSKA – Cieszyn / Poland TRYBSKIE DZIECI – Trybsz / Poland
2004 RAHOWCZE – Bułgaria / Bulgaria ILIKCZAAN – Jakucja / Sakha (Yakutia) Republic DAINAVA – Litwa / Lithuania RANGA KALA – Sri Lanka / Sri Lanka LA ESTEVA – Hiszpania / Spain ABORIGINAL FOLK DANCE – Tajwan / Taiwan PIECUCHY – Nawojowa / Poland MAŁY HAŚNIK – Żabnica / Poland NIECIECZANIE – Nieciecza / Poland MALI SŁOPNICZANIE – Słopnice / Poland MALI SIEDLECANIE – Siedlec / Poland MALI SAFLARZANIE – Szaflary / Poland
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2007 CUNUNA ARDEALULUI – Rumunia / Romania RANCHO FOLKLORICO INFANTIL E JUVENIL DE BALASAR – Portugalia / Portugal USMEV – Czechy / Czech Republic TARKSKI – Łotwa/ Latvia ZAACBE – Meksyk /Mexico VESNYENOCHKA – Ukraina / Ukraine MAŁA HELENKA – Nowy Sącz / Poland MAJERANKI – Rabka Zdrój / Poland MALI LIPNICZANIE – Lipnica Wielka / Poland MALI ISTEBNIOCY I ZGRAPIANIE – Istebna / Poland BIAŁODUNAJCANIE – Biały Dunajec / Poland OTFINOWIANIE – Otfinów / Poland
2009 LOLA – Bośnia i Hercegowina / Bosnia and Herzegovina ZELTA SIETINS – Łotwa / Latvia KROG – Słowenia / Slovenia SABINIK – Słowacja / Slovakia GYIMES – Rumunia (Czangowie) / Romania SMP AL-IZHAR PONDOK LABU – Indonezja / Indonesia MYSTKOWIANIE – Mystków / Poland MALI BIAŁCANIE – Białka Tatrzańska / Poland MAŁA ZIEMIA SUSKA – Sucha Beskidzka / Poland PNIOKI – Sadek-Kostrza / Poland GRONICEK – Gilowice / Poland MALI JASTRZĘBIANIE – Jastrzębia / Poland
2008 ERRO BAT – Francja / France DOBRUDJA – Bułgaria / Bulgaria ELEONI – Gruzja / Georgia CITTA’ DEI TEMPLI – Włochy / Italia KOCO RACIN – Macedonia / Macedonia DANZA E IDENTIDAD – Ekwador / Ecuador PIĄTKOWIOKI – Piątkowa-Nowy Sącz / Poland MALI FRYDMANIANIE – Frydman / Poland MALI SIEDLECANIE – Siedlec / Poland MALI GROJCOWIANIE – Wieprz / Poland Grupa Regionalna MICHALCZOWA – Michalczowa / Poland MALI HAMERNICY – Kraków / Poland
2010 ALTUNİZADE HAFİZE ÖZAL İLKÖĞRETİM OKULU FOLKLOR GRUBU – Turcja / Turkey CUNUNA CHIOARULUI – Rumunia / Romania GORIS – Armenia / Armenia DYNAMIC ACADEMY OF LIBERAL ARTS – Indie / India PESNOHORKI – Rosja – Kraj Ałtajski / Russia – Altai Krai GABROVCHE – Bułgaria / Bulgaria PIECUCHY – Nawojowa / Poland HONAJ – Dursztyn / Poland MALI SŁOPNICZANIE – Słopnice / Poland MAŁY HAŚNIK – Żabnica / Poland ZASADNIOKI – Zasadne / Poland ZBÓJNIK – Skawica / Poland
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XIII OGÓLNOPOLSKIE WARSZTATY INSTRUKTORSKIE PRZY MIĘDZYNARODOWYM FESTIWALU DZIECIĘCYCH ZESPOŁÓW REGIONALNYCH ŚWIĘTO DZIECI GÓR Warsztaty towarzyszą festiwalowi od roku 1998. Swoją formą nawiązują do szkoleń folklorystycznych , które narodziły się pod koniec lat siedemdziesiątych XX wieku przy Karpackim Festiwalu Dziecięcych Zespołów Regionalnych w Rabce-Zdroju, a które trwają do dziś. Naszym staraniem jest, aby wiedza i zdobyte podczas warsztatów umiejętności taneczne pomocne były w opracowywaniu programów z udziałem dzieci, z dostosowaniem do ich wieku, możliwości, z zachowaniem dziecięcej naturalności i spontaniczności. Dlatego w programie szkolenia obok zajęć tanecznych znajduje się inny ważny element: udział we wszystkich koncertach festiwalowych i omówieniach programów zespołów prowadzonych przez uznanych specjalistów w poszczególnych dziedzinach folkloru. Ta forma szkolenia – wielokrotnie sprawdzona – daje znakomite rezultaty. W dotychczasowej historii sądeckich warsztatów przewinęło się ponad 300 osób – instruktorów zespołów folklorystycznych dziecięcych, dziecięco-młodzieżowych oraz dorosłych z terenu całego kraju. Tematyka zajęć z lat ubiegłych: 1998 • Problemy wykonawcze przyśpiewek ludowych z wybranych regionów Polski • Artystyczne opracowanie tańca regionalnego dla dzieci na przykładzie tańców z wybranych regionów 1999 • Formy umuzykalnienia dzieci w zespole • Metodyka prowadzenia zajęć w dziecięcym zespole regionalnym • Artystyczne opracowanie tańca regionalnego dla dzieci na przykładzie tańców z wybranych regionów – cz. 2 2000 • ABC RUCHU
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2002 • Krakowiak – taniec dla dzieci 2003 • Tańce zabawowe i zabawy w regionie Lachów W kolejnych latach tematem zajęć były tańce kilku regionów w opracowaniu dla dzieci i młodzieży: 2004 – Lachy szczyrzyckie, 2005 – Spisz, 2006 – górale żywieccy, 2007 – Podhale, 2008 – Orawa, 2009 – POLSKIE TAŃCE NARODOWE (część I), 2010 – POLSKIE TAŃCE NARODOWE (część II) Tematem tegorocznych zajęć warsztatowych będą TAŃCE PIENIŃSKIE W OPRACOWANIU DLA DZIECI I MŁODZIEŻY. Warsztaty poprowadzi Pan Artur Majerczak, instruktor tańca w dziecięcym zespole „Mali Sromowianie” ze Sromowców Niżnych, „Sromowianie” ze Sromowców Wyżnych oraz kierownik kapeli góralskiej „Białopotocanie” z Krościenka nad Dunajcem.
THE 13TH ALL-POLAND INSTRUCTORS’ WORKSHOP AT THE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF CHILDREN’S FOLK ENSEMBLES FESTIVAL OF THE CHILDREN OF MOUNTAINS The all-Poland Instructors’ Workshop has been part of the Festival since 1998. Its form refers back to the folk workshops that were originated in the late 1970s as part of the Carpathian Festival of the Folk Ensembles in Rabka Zdrój, and which are still organised. It is our aim and hope that the knowledge and dancing skills acquired during the workshop will be instrumental in the preparation of programmes involving children. Hopefully, the new programmes will allow for children’s age, abilities as well as will retain the childlike naturalness and spontaneity. That is why, apart from the dancing classes, the workshop programme includes another two vital elements: the participation in all Festival concerts and the discussion of each of the ensembles’ programmes. The latter will be held by renowned specialists in specific fields of folklore. This form of workshop has been tried many times and found to be extraordinarily fruitful. To this day the workshop has been attended by over 300 instructors running children’s, teenage and adult folk ensembles from all over Poland. In the past years we have covered the following subject areas: 1998 • Difficulty of performing folk intro-songs from some Polish regions • Artistic rendition of a regional dance as illustrated with dances from some Polish regions 1999 • Forms of developing musical aptitude in children • Methods of running classes with a children’s folk ensemble • Artistic rendition of a regional dance as illustrated with dances from some Polish regions – Part 2 2000 • Basics of Movement
2002 • Krakowiak as a dance for children 2003 • Play and plaful dances in the region of the Lachs The subsequent years brought the workshops on some regional dances rendered for children and teenagers, and so the following regions were covered: 2004 – the Szczyrzyc Lachs 2005 – the Spiš region 2006 – Żywiec region 2007 – the Podhale region 2008 – the Orawa region 2009 – Polish National Dances (Part I) 2010 – Polish National Dances (Part II) The theme of this year’s workshop is PIENINY DANCES RENDERED FOR CHILDREN AND TEENAGERS. The workshop will be run by Artur Majerczak, dance instructor in the children’s ensemble Mali Sromowianie from Sromowce Niżne, Sromowianie from Sromowce Wyżne, as well as the folk band leader of Białopotocanie from Krościenko nad Dunajcem.
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Fot. Lucyna Witkowska
Miasto festiwalowe
Miasto położone w widłach rzek Dunajca i Kamienicy, płynących przez Kotlinę Sądecką, która opiera się o trzy pasma górskie – na zachodzie Beskid Wyspowy, na południu Beskid Sądecki, a na wschodzie Beskid Niski. Na północy Kotlina Sądecka przechodzi w Pogórze Rożnowskie, w obrębie którego znajduje się Jezioro Rożnowskie. Dzięki tak ciekawemu położeniu i ukształtowaniu terenu Ziemia Sądecka jest jednym z najciekawszych regionów turystycznych Polski. Piękne góry, wartkie rzeki, bogactwo flory i licznych wód mineralnych, mnogość szlaków pieszych (tutaj koncentruje się 25% polskich szlaków turystycznych), rowerowych, wyciągów narciarskich, gospodarstw agroturystycznych i sadów oraz bogactwo etnograficzne tworzą podstawy całorocznej działalności turystycznej. Nowy Sącz, zwany królewskim grodem, szczycie się drugim największym – po krakowskim – rynkiem w Małopolsce. Liczy ok. 85 tys. mieszkańców i jest ważnym ośrodkiem kulturalnym, edukacyjnym i turystycznym południowej Polski.
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The Town is situated at the confluence of the Dunajec and Kamienica rivers. These run through the Sącz Valley, which in turn nestles among three mountain ranges, Beskid Wyspowy to the west, Beskid Sądecki to the south and Beskid Niski to the east. To the north the Sącz Valley is bounded by the Rożnów Hills, within which lies the Rożnów Lake. Thanks to such an attractive location and the lie of the land the Sącz District is one of the most interesting tourist regions in Poland. Glorious mountains, swift rivers, luxuriant fauna, therapeutic mineral waters, numerous hiking and cycling routes (25% of all Polish tourist trails are here), skilifts, eco-tourism farms, orchards as well as a treasure trove of ethnography all make for all-year-round tourist activity. Nowy Sącz, which is called the Royal Town, boasts the second biggest old market square in Małopolska, the biggest one being that of Kraków. It has the population of about 85 000 and is a major cultural, education and tourist centre in southern Poland.
KRYNICA ZDRÓJ Od dwóch niemal wieków Krynica należy do najbardziej znanych kuratorów Europy Środkowej. Modernizowana i rozbudowywana, zachowała do dnia dzisiejszego malowniczą, drewnianą architekturę willową i dawne budynki uzdrowiskowe. W okresie międzywojennym stanowiła również ważny ośrodek sportów zimowych – w 1931 odbywały się tutaj mistrzostwa świata w hokeju, a w 1935 mistrzostwa Europy w saneczkarstwie. Na stokach Jaworzyny (gdzie obecnie znajduje się nowoczesna kolej gondolowa), działa Alpejska Szkoła Narciarska. Życie turystyczne Krynicy koncentruje się wzdłuż bulwaru, przy którym usytuowane są domy zdrojowe, pijalnie, muszla koncertowa i stacja jednej z atrakcji Krynicy – kolejki linowej na pobliskie wzgórze – Górę Parkową, z której roztacza się wspaniały widok na całe miasto. Zachodnia strona bulwarów to głównie szereg drewnianych willi-pensjonatów, wśród nich turkusowa Romanówka, w której umieszczono bogatą kolekcję prac miejscowego prymitywisty Nikifora – jednej z najbarwniejszych postaci dawnej Krynicy.
For almost two centuries Krynica has been one of the most popular health resorts in Central Europe. Continually modernised and extended, its picturesque wooden villa architecture and old mineral water drinking buildings have been in a good state of preservation. In the twenty years of the inter-war period Krynica was a major winter sports centre. In 1931 it hosted the Ice Hockey World Championships and in 1935 the European Sledging Championships. The hillsides of the Jaworzyna mountain, which today hold a state-of-the art Gondola lift, used to be the home of the Alpine Skiing School. The focus of tourist life is along the Krynica Boulevard, which is lined with spa facilities, mineral water drinking houses, a concert bowl and the cable-car station, where one can being the ascent of the Parkowa Góra, which commands a breathtaking view of the whole town. The western side of the Boulevard holds mainly wooden villas, which serve as guesthouses. The turquoise Romanówka is unquestionably the most famous one, for it houses a rich collection of paintings by Nikifor, a legendary primitivist artist and Krynica’s most flamboyant personage.
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Miasto festiwalowe
BARDEJOV Miasto festiwalowe
Bardejów jest uzdrowiskiem leżącym w północno-wschodniej Słowacji, w regionie Szarysz. Liczba mieszkańców wynosi 33 tys., a samo miasto może się poszczycić licznymi zabytkami zupełnie nienaruszonej zabudowy średniowiecznego centrum. Stąd też Bardejów został wpisany na listę światowego dziedzictwa UNESCO. Mocno ufortyfikowane w XIV wieku, miasto stało się centrum handlu z Polską. Ponad 50 cechów czuwało nad prężnie rozwijającą się gospodarką. Do najważniejszych zabytków należy duży kościół św. Idziego. Ta trzynawowa bazylika, posiadająca kilka kaplic została ukończona w XV wieku. W jej wnętrzu znajduje się 11 mających dużą wartość gotyckich ołtarzy z ruchomymi skrzydłami i malarstwem tablicowym. Główny skwer miasta, który w średniowieczu służył jako rynek, jest otoczony dobrze zachowanymi gotyckimi i renesansowymi kamienicami. Znajdujące się tu wody mineralne posiadają właściwości lecznicze i są szczególnie cenione przez osoby z chorobami nowotworowymi, problemami z krążeniem i chorobami układu pokarmowego. Miasto posiada również skansen architektury ludowej.
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Bardejov is a spa town located in north-eastern Slovakia, in the Šariš region. Its has 33,000 inhabitants, and exhibits numerous historic monuments in its completely intact medieval town centre. Consequently, it is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Heavily fortified in the 14th century, the town became a center of trade with Poland. More than 50 guilds controlled the flourishing economy. Bardejov is dominated by the monumental church of St Giles. A three nave basilica with multiple chapels was completed by the 15th century. It hosts eleven precious Gothic winged altars with panel paintings. The central square, which used to be the town’s medieval marketplace, is now surrounded by well-preserved Gothic and Renaissance burghers’ houses. The town’s therapeutic mineral water springs are claimed to be beneficial to people with oncological, blood circulation, and digestive tract problems. It also hosts an open air museum of folk architecture (skansen).
ŁĄCKO
Ziemia Łącka leży w Beskidzie Sądeckim i jest malowniczą doliną nad brzegiem Dunajca. Łącko – „stolica krainy sadów” słynie z nowoczesnego sadownictwa, bogatego folkloru, także z oryginalnej śliwowicy. Miejscowość ma charakter turystyczno-wypoczynkowy. W XIII wieku wieś znalazła się w rękach księżnej Kingi, wdowy po Bolesławie Wstydliwym, która zakładając zakon Klarysek w Starym Sączu obdarowała go kluczem łąckim. Klaryski były w posiadaniu tych terenów, aż do kasaty zakonu przez Austriaków w końcu XVIII wieku. W 1835 Łącko nabył od władz austriackich hrabia Seweryn Drohojewski. On to zainicjował poszukiwanie legendarnego łąckiego złota. Po kilku latach poszukiwań prace wstrzymano, gdyż nie przyniosły oczekiwanych wyników. W 1875 r. ziemie łącką nabył wielki przemysłowiec pochodzenia żydowskiego, Michał Ader, który stworzył początki przemysłu drzewno-meblarskiego, zakładając w Jazowsku tartak i fabrykę mebli giętych. W Łącku rozwinął handel i zakłady przetwórstwa owoców m.in. produkcję łąckiej śliwowicy. Okres międzywojenny to intensywny, trwający do dzisiaj rozwój sadownictwa, a także rozwój kultury ludowej tego regionu. Doroczną atrakcją gromadzącą rzesze sympatyków jest Święto Kwitnącej Jabłoni, odbywające się w maju. Po raz pierwszy impreza ta została zorganizowana w 1947 r. i od tej pory cieszy się niesłabnącą popularnością. Udział w niej biorą zespoły regionalne, orkiestry dęte oraz znani artyści scen polskich.
The Łącko grounds are situated in the region of Beskid Sądecki and they cover a picturesque valley on the bank of the Dunajec river. Łącko, “the capital of the land of orchards” is famous for modern pomiculture, rich folklore, as well as its genuine slivovitz. The village is a holiday resort of tourist attractions. In the 13th century, the village fell into the hands of duchess Kinga, Bolesław the Chaste’s widow, who setting up the convent of St. Clare in Stary Sącz presented it with the key to Łącko. The nuns of St. Clare owned the area until the convent was liquidated by the Austrians in the end of 18th century. In 1835, count Seweryn Drohoyewski bought Łącko from Austrian authorities. It was him who initiated the search for the legendary gold of Łącko. The quest was stopped after a few years, as the results were not satisfactory. In 1875, a great industrialist of Jewish origin Michał Ader, who bought the land of Łącko, started wood and furniture industry, setting up a sawmill and bentwood furniture factory in Jazowsko. He developed trade and fruit processing plants in Łącko, producing among others the slivovitz of Łącko. The interwar period was a time of intense growth of fruit-growing and regional folk culture, still continued today. An annual event attracting wide audience of fans is the Apple Blossom Festival, taking place in May in the beautiful amphitheatre on the Jeżowa Mountain. The event was held first in 1947 and has been extremely popular ever since with local musical groups, brass bands and well-known Polish Artists taking part.
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Fot. archiwum Urzędu Miasta i Gminy Łącko
Miasto festiwalowe
MUSZYNA Miasto festiwalowe
Fot. Andrzej Klimkowski
Miasto i Gmina Uzdrowiskowa Muszyna to górski zakątek położony na pograniczu polsko-słowackim nad rz. Poprad. Muszyna rozwinęła się w średniowieczu dzięki położeniu przy trakcie Węgierskim. W latach 1391-1772 tworzyła samodzielną jednostkę administracyjną zwaną Państwem Muszyńskim. O jej historii świadczą zbiory muzealne i zabytki: ruiny zamku, zespół dworski, średniowieczny układ urbanistyczny Rynku, barokowy kościół obronny oraz drewniane cerkwie. Obecnie, prężnie rozwijające się uzdrowisko, proponuje liczne sanatoria i obiekty SPA oferujące leczenie schorzeń cywilizacyjnych oraz regenerację i przywracanie sił witalnych. Na turystów czekają tu pijalnie wód mineralnych, ponad 4000 miejsc noclegowych, liczne szlaki piesze, konne, rowerowe, wyciągi narciarskie, korty tenisowe, baseny, skatepark, boiska sportowe, trzy rezerwaty i niezliczona ilość pomników przyrody, a w okresie letnim cotygodniowe imprezy kulturalno-rozrywkowe. Emocji sportowych dostarcza czterokrotny Mistrz Polski w siatkówce kobiet.
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The spa town and commune of Muszyna are a mountain beauty spot sitting close to the Polish-Slovak border and on the Poprad River. Muszyna developed in the Middle Ages owing to its location on the Hungarian trade route. In the years 1391-1772 it was an independent administrative unit called the State of Muszyna. The museum collection and the historical monuments testify to its history: the castle ruins, the court complex, medieval urban development of the old market square, the Baroque defensive church, as well as wooden Orthodox churches. Currently, as a thriving spa town, Muszyna offers a number of sanatoriums and spa hotels providing lifestyle disease treatments, recuperation and “battery recharging.” Tourists can find here mineral water houses, over 4000 accomodation places, numerous hiking, horse-riding and cycling trails, ski lifts, tennis courts, swimming pools, a skate park, football pitches, three nature reserves and innumerable natural features of historic importance. In the summer season the place offers cultural and entertainment events. Sporting emotions are aroused by the women’s volleyball team Muszynianka, a four-time champion of Poland.
MICHAŁ PIOTROWSKI WYSTAWA MICHAŁ PIOTROWSKI EXCHIBITION Michał Piotrowski Urodził się w Jaworznie na Śląsku w 1970 roku. Swój pierwszy aparat fotograficzny otrzymał w prezencie z okazji Komunii Św. i tak zaczęła się jego pasja. Ukończył studia z zakresu fotografii na Wydziale Artystycznym Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej w Lublinie. Od 2001 r. jest członkiem Krynickiego Towarzystwa Fotograficznego. Pierwsze zdjęcia zaprezentował w 1986 roku na wystawie pt. „Kwiat róży”, która była pierwszą z cyklu wystaw łączących prezentację poezji i fotografii. W 1997 r. przeprowadził się do Nowego Sącza i tu kontynuuje swoja pasję pracując z dziećmi w Szkole Podstawowej w Marcinkowicach. Dzieci pod jego kierownictwem zdobywają liczne nagrody i wyróżnienie w różnych konkursach fotograficznych. W Nowym Sączu startuje retrospektywną wystawą „FOT.N.A – Fotografia Niekoniecznie Artystyczna” (2004 r.). Wystawa ta prezentuje różnego rodzaju zdjęcia – począwszy od zwierząt poprzez przyrodę, a kończąc na ludziach. Ewenementem tej wystawy był układ przestrzenny ukazujący śmierć fotografii analogowej i narodziny cyfrowej. Od tej pory Fot.n.a. staje się jego znakiem rozpoznawczym. Od 2004 roku włącza się do grupy fotografików dokumentujących festiwal „Święto dzieci Gór”. Owocem tego jest siedem wystaw, które zorganizował w latach 2005–2011 w Nowym i Starym Sączu, Tropsztynie i na Słowacji. Zdjęcia Michała Piotrowskiego były prezentowane na przeszło 30 wystawach zbiorowych w kraju i zagranicą. Niektóre zdjęcia
Michał Piotrowski was born in Jaworzno, Silesia, in 1970. His first camera was a gift received on the occasion of the First Holy Communion, and thus his passion began. He took his degree in photography at the Faculty of Arts at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. He has been a member of the Krynica Photographic Society since 2001. He presented his first photographs at the „Rose Flower” exhibition in 1986. It was the first of a series of exhibitions which combined poetry and photography. In 1997 he moved to Nowy Sącz, where he has been pursuing his passion teaching children at a primary school in Marcinkowice. Under his guidance the children win numerous awards and honourable mentions at photography contests. In Nowy Sącz he started out with a retrospective exhibition “FOT.N.A – Fotografia Niekoniecznie Artystyczna” [Photography Not Necessarily Artistic] (2004), which presented various photo themes, ranging from animals, nature to people. The remarkable thing about the exhibition was the spatial arrangement showing the demise of analogue photography and the advent of the digital one. Ever since “FOT.N.A” has been his signature project. In 2004 Michał Piotrowski joined the group of photographers who documented the Festival of the Children of Mountains. As a result, he came out with 7 exhibitions mounted in Nowy Sącz, Stary Sącz, Tropsztyn and Slovakia in 2005-2011. Michał Piotrowski’s photos have been presented at over 30 collective exhibitions in the country and abroad.
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można oglądać w Internecie na stronie http://www.fotna.co.cc. Tam też znajdują się informacje o aktualnych wystawach.
Some of his works can be seen at http://www.fotna.co.cc, where you can find information about current exhibitions.
Na pytanie czy jest fotografikiem odpowiada: „Istnieje pewien moment, w którym światło, przestrzeń i nastrój współgrają ze sobą w doskonałej harmonii; miejsce w kosmosie, w którym rytm natury wyłania się przed obiektywem aparatu” (Rolfe Horn). Naciskając spust aparatu wiem, że sacrum łączy się z profanum. Gdy zrobię zdjęcie, które odda transcendencję tej chwili będę wiedział, że pokonałem wszystkie swe ułomności. Wtedy nazwę się fotografikiem.
Asked if he considers himself a fine art photographer, he answers: “There is a moment when light, space and atmosphere interact in perfect harmony; the place in the cosmos where the rhythm of nature looms in front of the camera lens” (Rolfe Horn). Pressing the shutter release, I know that sacrum combines with profanum. When I take the photo which gives justice to the transcendence of the moment, I will know that I have overcome all my deficiencies. Then I will call myself a fine art photographer.
Święto Dzieci Gór MICHAŁ PIOTROWSKI FOTOGRAFIA wystawa towarzyszy XIX Międzynarodowemu Festiwalowi Dziecięcych Zespołów Regionalnych
Festival of the Children of Mountains MICHAŁ PIOTROWSKI PHOTOGRAPHY the exhibition accompanies the 19th edition of the Festival of the Children of Mountains
4-31 LIPCA 2011 r., Galeria SOKÓŁ Finisaż wystawy odbędzie się w dniu 31 lipca 2011 r. o godz. 12.00
4-31 July 2011, SOKÓŁ Gallery The finissage will take place on 31 July 2011, 12am
Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej BWA SOKÓŁ w Nowym Sączu Małopolskie Centrum Kultury SOKÓŁ – Instytucja Kultury Województwa Małopolskiego 33-300 Nowy Sącz, ul. Długosza 3, tel. +48 18 534 06 60 www.mcksokol.pl, www.bwasokol.pl
BWA SOKÓŁ Gallery of Contemporary Art in Nowy Sącz SOKÓŁ Małopolska Culture Centre – Cultural Institution of Małopolska Province 33-300 Nowy Sącz, Długosza St 3 tel. +48 18 534 06 60 www.mcksokol.pl, www.bwasokol.pl
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AUTOGRAFY PRZYJACIÓŁ MY FRIEND’S SIGNATURES
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AUTOGRAFY PRZYJACIÓŁ MY FRIEND’S SIGNATURES
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AUTOGRAFY PRZYJACIÓŁ MY FRIEND’S SIGNATURES
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AUTOGRAFY PRZYJACIÓŁ MY FRIEND’S SIGNATURES
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An American mathematician, who engaged in a mail bombing campaign that spanned nearly 20 years, killing three people and injuring 23 others, by what name is Ted Kaczynski popularly known? | Ted Kaczynski (Mathematician) - Pics, Videos, Dating, & News
Ted Kaczynski
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Theodore John "Ted" Kaczynski Ph. D, also known as the "Unabomber", is an American terrorist, mathematician, social critic, anarchist, and Neo-Luddite. Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski engaged in a nation-wide bombing campaign against modern technology, planting or mailing numerous home-made bombs, killing three people and injuring 23 others. Kaczynski was born in Chicago, Illinois, where, as a child prodigy, he excelled academically from an early age.… Read More
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Huffington Post - Sep 27, 2016
' \nIt\'s hard to know where Norwegian author Unni Turrettini\'s life will take her next. Her book, \"The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer: Anders Behring Breivik and the Threat of Terror in Plain Sight (Pegasus Books, November 16, 2015) about the tragedy of the 2011 Norway attacks, is receiving excellent reviews. In September, she came to Boston and gave a talk about her work at the prestigious Chilton Club. This November 5th, she\'ll be presenting a TEDx event at Institute Le Rosey, Switze...
The Unabomber Letters: A Yahoo News Special Report
Yahoo News - Jan 25, 2016
'From his prison cell, <mark>Ted Kaczynski</mark> â the âUnabomberâ who terrified the nation in the 1980s and early 1990s â has carried on a remarkable correspondence with thousands of people all over the world. As the 20th anniversary of his arrest approaches, Yahoo News is publishing a series of articles based on his letters and other writings, housed in an archive at the University of Michigan. They shed unprecedented light on the mind of Kaczynski â genius, madman and murderer.'
Pentagon's Plan To Close Guantanamo Expected In Coming Week
Huffington Post - Nov 08, 2015
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The States With The Most Serial Murder
Huffington Post - Oct 30, 2015
' From the infamous targeting of prostitutes by Jack the Ripper in London during the 1880s to the Beltway sniper attacks in the Washington metro area in 2002, serial killing is not a recent phenomenon nor is it isolated to any single geography. In the United States â the country with by far the most documented cases of serial killing â there have been approximately 2,625 serial killers, who have together killed many more victims. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), seri...
Learn about the memorable moments in the evolution of Ted Kaczynski.
CHILDHOOD
1942 Birth Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942, in Evergreen Park, Illinois, to second-generation Polish Americans Wanda (née Dombek) and Theodore Richard Kaczynski. … Read More
At six months of age, Kaczynski's body developed a severe case of hives. He was placed in isolation in a hospital where visitors were not allowed, as physicians were unsure of the cause of the hives. He was treated several times at the hospital over an eight-month period. Read Less
1943 1 Year Old His mother wrote in March 1943, "Baby home from hospital and is healthy but quite unresponsive after his experience." … Read More
Kaczynski attended grades one through eight in Evergreen Park District 124 Schools. As a result of testing conducted in the fifth grade, which determined he had an IQ of 167, he was allowed to skip the sixth grade and enroll in the seventh grade. Kaczynski described this as a pivotal event in his life. He recalled not fitting in with the older children and being subjected to their bullying. As a child, Kaczynski had a fear of people and buildings, and played beside other children rather than interacting with them. His mother was so worried by his poor social development that she considered entering him in a study for autistic children led by Bruno Bettelheim.<br /><br /> He attended high school at Evergreen Park Community High School. Kaczynski excelled academically, but found the mathematics too simple during his second year. Sometimes he would cut classes and write in his journal in his room. During this period of his life, Kaczynski became obsessed with mathematics, spending prolonged hours locked in his room practicing differential equations. Throughout secondary schooling, Kaczynski had far surpassed his classmates, able to solve advanced Laplace transforms before his senior year. He was subsequently placed in a more advanced mathematics class, yet still felt intellectually restricted. Kaczynski soon mastered the material and skipped the eleventh grade. With the help of a summer school course for English, he completed his high school education when he was 15 years old. Read Less
TEENAGE
1958 16 Years Old He was encouraged to apply to Harvard University, and was subsequently accepted as a student beginning in 1958 at the age of 16. … Read More
While at Harvard, Kaczynski was taught by famed logician Willard Van Orman Quine, scoring at the top of Quine's class with a 98.9% final grade.<br /><br /> In his sophomore year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a personality assessment study conducted by Henry Murray, an expert on stress interviews. Students in Murray's study were told they would be debating personal philosophy with a fellow student. Instead, they were subjected to a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment". During the test, students were taken into a room and connected to electrodes that monitored their physiological reactions, while facing bright lights and a one-way mirror. Each student had previously written an essay detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations: the essays were turned over to an anonymous attorney, who would enter the room and individually belittle each student based in part on the disclosures they had made. This was filmed, and students' expressions of impotent rage were played back to them several times later in the study. According to author Alston Chase, Kaczynski's records from that period suggest he was emotionally stable when the study began. Kaczynski's lawyers attributed some of his emotional instability and dislike of mind control techniques to his participation in this study. Furthermore, some have suggested that this experience may have been instrumental in Kaczynski's future actions. Read Less
TWENTIES
1962 20 Years Old Kaczynski graduated from Harvard University in 1962, at age 20, and subsequently enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he earned a PhD in mathematics. … Read More
Kaczynski's specialty was a branch of complex analysis known as geometric function theory. His professors at Michigan were impressed with his intellect and drive. "He was an unusual person. He was not like the other graduate students," said Peter Duren, one of Kaczynski's math professors at Michigan. "He was much more focused about his work. He had a drive to discover mathematical truth." "It is not enough to say he was smart," said George Piranian, another of his Michigan math professors. Kaczynski earned his PhD with his thesis entitled "Boundary Functions" by solving a problem so difficult that even Piranian could not solve it. Maxwell Reade, a retired math professor who served on Kaczynski's dissertation committee, also commented on his thesis by noting, "I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it." Read Less
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In 1967, Kaczynski won the University of Michigan's Sumner B. Myers Prize, which recognized his dissertation as the school's best in mathematics that year. … Read More
While a graduate student at Michigan, he held a National Science Foundation fellowship and taught undergraduates for three years. He also published two articles related to his dissertation in mathematical journals, and four more after leaving Michigan. Read Less
In late 1967, Kaczynski became an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught undergraduate courses in geometry and calculus. … Read More
He was also noted as the youngest professor ever hired by the university, but this position proved short-lived. Kaczynski received numerous complaints and low ratings from the undergraduates he taught. Many students noted that he seemed quite uncomfortable in a teaching environment, often stuttering and mumbling during lectures, becoming excessively nervous in front of a class, and ignoring students during designated office hours. Read Less
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Without explanation, he resigned from his position in 1969, at age 26. … Read More
At the time, the chairman of the mathematics department, J. W. Addison, called this a "sudden and unexpected" resignation. In 1996, vice chairman Calvin Moore said that, given Kaczynski's "impressive" thesis and record of publications, "He could have advanced up the ranks and been a senior member of the faculty today." Read Less
In mid-1969, Kaczynski moved into his parents' small residence in Lombard, Illinois. … Read More
Two years later, he moved into a remote cabin he built himself just outside Lincoln, Montana, where he lived a simple life on very little money, without electricity or running water. Kaczynski worked odd jobs and received financial support from his family, which he used to purchase his land and, without their knowledge, would later use to fund his bombing campaign. Read Less
1971 29 Years Old In 1971, he moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water, in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient.
THIRTIES
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Theodore John "Ted" Kaczynski (born May 22, 1942), also known as the "Unabomber", is an American domestic terrorist, anarchist, and mathematical prodigy. Read Less
Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski engaged in a nationwide bombing campaign against people involved with modern technology, planting or mailing numerous homemade bombs, ultimately killing a total of three people and injuring 23 others. … Read More
He is also known for his wide-ranging social critiques, which opposed industrialization and modern technology while advancing a nature-centered form of anarchism.<br /><br /> Kaczynski was born and raised in Evergreen Park, Illinois. While growing up in Evergreen Park he was a child prodigy, excelling academically from an early age. Kaczynski was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 16, where he earned an undergraduate degree. He subsequently earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan. He became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 at age 25. He resigned two years later.<br /><br /> As a Harvard undergraduate, Kaczynski was among twenty-two students who were research subjects in ethically questionable experiments conducted by psychology professor Henry Murray from late 1959 to early 1962. Read Less
In 1978, he worked briefly with his father and brother at a foam rubber factory, where he was fired by his brother, David, for harassing a female supervisor he had previously dated and who had refused him as a boyfriend for not "sharing much in common." … Read More
Kaczynski's original goal was to move out to a secluded place and become self-sufficient so that he could live autonomously. He began to teach himself survival skills such as tracking, edible plant identification, and how to construct primitive technologies such as bow drills. After watching the wild land around him be destroyed by development and industry, he decided it was impossible to live in nature. He performed isolated acts of sabotage and initially targeted the developments near his cabin. The ultimate catalyst which drove him to begin his campaign of bombings was when he went out for a walk to one of his favorite wild spots, only to find that it had been destroyed and replaced with a road. About this, he said: <br /><br /> He began dedicating himself to reading about sociology and books on political philosophy, such as the works of Jacques Ellul, and also stepped up his campaign of sabotage. He soon came to the conclusion that more violent methods would be the only solution to what he saw as the problem of industrial civilization. He says that he lost faith in the idea of reform, and saw violent collapse as the only way to bring down the techno-industrial system. Regarding his switch from being a reformer of the system to developing a means of taking it down, he said: Read Less
Kaczynski's activities came to the attention of the FBI in 1978 with the explosion of his first, primitive homemade bomb. … Read More
Over the next 17 years, he mailed or hand-delivered a series of increasingly sophisticated explosive devices that killed three people and injured 23 more.<br /><br /> The first mail bomb was sent in May 1978 to materials engineering professor Buckley Crist at Northwestern University. On May 25, the package was found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with Crist's return address. The package was "returned" to Crist, but when Crist received the package, he noticed that it was not addressed in his own handwriting. Suspicious of a package he had not sent, he contacted campus police officer Terry Marker, who opened the package, which exploded immediately. Marker required medical assistance at Evanston Hospital for injuries to his left hand.<br /><br /> The bomb was made of metal that could have come from a home workshop. The primary component was a piece of metal pipe, about in diameter and long. The bomb contained smokeless explosive powders, and the box and the plugs that sealed the pipe ends were handcrafted from wood. In comparison, most pipe bombs usually use threaded metal ends sold in many hardware stores. Wooden ends lack the strength to allow significant pressure to build within the pipe, explaining why the bomb did not cause severe damage. The primitive trigger device that the bomb employed was a nail, tensioned by rubber bands designed to slam into six common match heads when the box was opened. Read Less
FORTIES
1985 43 Years Old Hugh Scrutton, a 38-year-old Sacramento, California computer store owner, was killed in 1985 by a nail-and-splinter-loaded bomb placed in the parking lot of his store. A similar attack against a computer store occurred in Salt Lake City, Utah on February 20, 1987. … Read More
The bomb, which was disguised as a piece of lumber, injured Gary Wright when he attempted to remove it from the store's parking lot. The explosion severed nerves in Wright's left arm and propelled more than 200 pieces of shrapnel into his body. Kaczynski's brother, Davidâwho would play a vital role in Kaczynski's capture by alerting federal authorities to the prospect of his brother's being involved in the Unabomber casesâsought out and became friends with Wright after Kaczynski was detained in 1996. David Kaczynski and Wright have remained friends and occasionally speak together publicly about their relationship. Read Less
FIFTIES
1993 51 Years Old After a six-year break, Kaczynski struck again in 1993, mailing a bomb to David Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale University. … Read More
Though critically injured, Gelernter eventually recovered. Another bomb mailed in the same weekend was sent to the home of Charles Epstein from the University of California, San Francisco, who lost several fingers upon opening it. Kaczynski then called Gelernter's brother, Joel Gelernter, a behavioral geneticist, and told him, "You are next." Geneticist Phillip Sharp at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also received a threatening letter two years later. Kaczynski wrote a letter to The New York Times claiming that his "group," called FC (an acronym that stood for "Freedom Club") was responsible for the attacks. Read Less
1994 52 Years Old In 1994, Burson-Marsteller executive Thomas J. Mosser was killed by a mail bomb sent to his North Caldwell, New Jersey home. … Read More
In another letter to The New York Times, Kaczynski claimed that FC "blew up Thomas Mosser because... Burston-Marsteller helped Exxon clean up its public image after the Exxon Valdez incident" and, more importantly, because "its business is the development of techniques for manipulating people's attitudes." Read Less
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Seventeen years after beginning his mail bomb campaign, Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times on April 24, 1995 and promised "to desist from terrorism" if the Times or the Washington Post published his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future (the "Unabomber Manifesto"), in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization. … Read More
The Unabomber was the target of one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's costliest investigations. Before Kaczynski's identity was known, the FBI used the title "UNABOM" (UNiversity & Airline BOMber) to refer to his case, which resulted in the media calling him the Unabomber. The FBI (as well as Attorney General Janet Reno) pushed for the publication of Kaczynski's "Manifesto", which led to his sister-in-law, and then his brother, recognizing Kaczynski's style of writing and beliefs from the manifesto, and tipping off the FBI. Kaczynski tried unsuccessfully to dismiss his court-appointed lawyers because they wanted to plead insanity in order to avoid the death penalty, as Kaczynski did not believe he was insane. When it became clear that his pending trial would entail national television exposure for Kaczynski, the court entered a plea agreement, under which he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. He has been designated a "domestic terrorist" by the FBI. Some anarcho-primitivist authors, such as John Zerzan and John Moore, have come to his defense, while also holding some reservations about his actions and ideas. Read Less
This was followed by the 1995 murder of Gilbert Brent Murray, president of the timber industry lobbying group California Forestry Association, by a mail bomb addressed to previous president William Dennison, who had retired. … Read More
In all, 16 bombsâwhich injured 23 people and killed threeâwere attributed to Kaczynski. While the devices varied widely through the years, all but the first few contained the initials "FC." Inside his bombs, certain parts carried the inscription "FC," which Kaczynski later asserted stood for "Freedom Club." Latent fingerprints on some of the devices did not match the fingerprints found on letters attributed to Kaczynski. As stated in the "Additional Findings" section of the FBI affidavit (where a balanced listing of other uncorrelated evidence and contrary determinations also appeared): <br /><br /> One of Kaczynski's tactics was leaving false clues in every bomb. He would make them hard to find deliberately to mislead investigators into thinking they had a clue. The first clue was a metal plate stamped with the initials "FC" hidden somewhere (usually in the pipe end cap) in every bomb. One false clue he left was a note in a bomb that did not detonate which reads "WuâIt works! I told you it wouldâRV". A more obvious clue was the Eugene O'Neill $1 stamps used to send his boxes. One of his bombs was sent embedded in a copy of Sloan Wilson's novel Ice Brothers. Read Less
In 1995, Kaczynski mailed several letters, including some to his victims and others to major media outlets, outlining his goals and demanding that his 50-plus page, 35,000-word essay Industrial Society and Its Future, abbreviated to "Unabomber Manifesto" by the FBI, be printed verbatim by a major newspaper or journal. … Read More
He stated that if this demand were met, he would then end his bombing campaign. The document was a densely written manifesto that called for a worldwide revolution against the effects of modern society's "industrial-technological system". There was a great deal of controversy as to whether the document should be published, but the United States Department of Justice, along with FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno, recommended publication out of concern for public safety and in hopes that a reader could identify the author. Bob Guccione of Penthouse volunteered to publish it, but Kaczynski replied that, since Penthouse was less "respectable" than the other publications, he would in that case "reserve the right to plant one (and only one) bomb intended to kill, after our manuscript has been published." The pamphlet was finally published by The New York Times and The Washington Post on September 19, 1995. Penthouse never published it. Read Less
Before the publication of the manifesto, Ted Kaczynski's brother, David Kaczynski, was encouraged by his wife Linda to follow up on suspicions that Ted was the Unabomber. David Kaczynski was at first dismissive, but progressively began to take the likelihood more seriously after reading the manifesto a week after it was published in September 1995. … Read More
David Kaczynski browsed through old family papers and found letters dating back to the 1970s written by Ted and sent to newspapers protesting the abuses of technology and which contained phrasing similar to what was found in the Unabomber Manifesto.<br /><br /> Before the manifesto was published, the FBI held many press conferences asking the public to help identify the Unabomber. They were convinced that the bomber was from the Chicago area (where he began his bombings), had worked or had some connection in Salt Lake City, and by the 1990s was associated with the San Francisco Bay Area. This geographical information, as well as the wording in excerpts from the manifesto that were released before the entire manifesto was published, persuaded David Kaczynski's wife, Linda, to urge her husband to read the manifesto.<br /><br /> After the manifesto was published, the FBI received over a thousand calls a day for months in response to the offer of a $1 million reward for information leading to the identity of the Unabomber. Many letters claiming to be from the Unabomber, were also sent to the UNABOM Task Force, and thousands of suspect leads were reviewed. While the FBI was occupied with new leads, David Kaczynski hired private investigator Susan Swanson in Chicago to investigate Ted's activities discreetly. The Kaczynski brothers had become estranged in 1990, and David had not seen Ted for ten years. David later hired Washington, D.C. attorney Tony Bisceglie to organize evidence acquired by Swanson, and make contact with the FBI, given the likely difficulty in attracting the FBI's attention. Read Less
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In February 1996, Bisceglie provided a copy of the 1971 essay written by Ted Kaczynski to the FBI. … Read More
At the UNABOM Task Force headquarters in San Francisco, Supervisory Special Agent Joel Moss immediately recognized similarities in the writings. Linguistic analysis determined that the author of the essay papers and the manifesto were almost certainly the same. When combined with facts gleaned from the bombings and Kaczynski's life, that analysis provided the basis for a search warrant.<br /><br /> David Kaczynski had tried to remain anonymous at first, but he was soon identified, and within a few days an FBI agent team was dispatched to interview David and his wife with their attorney in Washington, D.C. At this and subsequent meetings, David provided letters written by his brother in their original envelopes, allowing the FBI task force to use the postmark dates to add more detail to their timeline of Ted's activities. David developed a respectful relationship with the primary Task Force behavioral analyst, Special Agent Kathleen M. Puckett, whom he met many times in Washington, D.C., Texas, Chicago, and Schenectady, New York, over the nearly two months before the federal search warrant was served on Kaczynski's cabin. Read Less
David Kaczynski had once admired and emulated his older brother, but had later decided to leave the survivalist lifestyle behind. He had received assurances from the FBI that he would remain anonymous and that his brother would not learn who had turned him in, but his identity was leaked to CBS News in early April 1996. … Read More
CBS anchorman Dan Rather called FBI director Louis Freeh, who requested 24 hours before CBS broke the story on the evening news. The FBI scrambled to finish the search warrant and have it issued by a federal judge in Montana; afterwards, an internal leak investigation was conducted by the FBI, but the source of the leak was never identified. Read Less
In 1996 the Evergreen Park Community High School District No. 231 was also placed on lockdown while FBI agents searched Kaczynski's school records. … Read More
At the end of that school day, students were greeted by reporters asking how they felt about going to the same high school the Unabomber had attended. That night the news story was released to public.<br /><br /> Paragraphs 204 and 205 of the FBI search and arrest warrant for Ted Kaczynski stated that "experts"âmany of them academics consulted by the FBIâbelieved the manifesto had been written by "another individual, not Theodore Kaczynski". As stated in the affidavit, only a handful of people believed Kaczynski was the Unabomber before the search warrant revealed the cornucopia of evidence in Kaczynski's isolated cabin. The search warrant affidavit written by FBI Inspector Terry D. Turchie reflects this conflict, and is striking evidence of the opposition to Turchie and his small cadre of FBI agents that included Moss and Puckettâwho were convinced Kaczynski was the Unabomberâfrom the rest of the UNABOM Task Force and the FBI in general: Read Less
FBI agents arrested Kaczynski on April 3, 1996, at his remote cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, where he was found in an unkempt state. … Read More
A search of his cabin revealed a wealth of bomb components, 40,000 handwritten journal pages that included bomb-making experiments and descriptions of the Unabomber crimes; and one live bomb, ready for mailing. They also found what appeared to be the original typed manuscript of the manifesto. By this point, the Unabomber had been the target of one of the most expensive investigations in the FBI's history.<br /><br /> After his capture, Kaczynski was among the several individuals who had been suspected of being the unidentified Zodiac Killer. Among the links that raised suspicion were the fact that Kaczynski lived in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1967 to 1969 (the same period that most of the Zodiac's confirmed killings occurred in California), both individuals were highly intelligent with an interest in bombs and codes, and both wrote letters to newspapers demanding the publication of their words with the threat of continued violence toward others if the demand was not met. However, his whereabouts could not be verified for all of the killings, and the gun and knife murders committed by the Zodiac Killer differ from Kaczynski's bombings, so he was not further pursued as a suspect. Robert Graysmith of San Francisco, author of the 1986 book Zodiac, said the similarities are "fascinating" but undoubtedly purely coincidental. Read Less
In 1996, a docudrama was produced titled Unabomber: The True Story, featuring actors Dean Stockwell as Ben Jeffries, Robert Hays as David Kaczynski and Tobin Bell as Ted Kaczynski. … Read More
In this film a determined postal inspector was followed as he tracked down the suspect and also centered on Kaczynski's brother, who played a key role in the investigation.<br /><br /> Kaczynski's lawyers, headed by Montana federal defender Michael Donahoe and Judy Clarke, attempted to enter an insanity defense to save Kaczynski's life, but Kaczynski rejected this plea. A court-appointed psychiatrist diagnosed Kaczynski as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, but declared him competent to stand trial. Kaczynski's family said Ted would psychologically "shut down" when pressured. In the book Technological Slavery, Kaczynski recalls two prison psychologists, Dr. James Watterson and Dr. Michael Morrison, who visited him almost every day for a period of four years, who told him that they saw no indication that he suffered from any such serious mental illness, and that the diagnosis of his being paranoid schizophrenic was "ridiculous" and a "political diagnosis." Dr. Morrison made remarks to him about psychologists and psychiatrists providing any desired diagnosis if they are well paid for doing so. Read Less
A federal grand jury indicted Kaczynski in April 1996 on 10 counts of illegally transporting, mailing, and using bombs. … Read More
He was also charged with killing Scrutton, Mosser, and Murray. Initially, the government prosecution team indicated that it would seek the death penalty for Kaczynski after it was authorized by United States Attorney General Janet Reno. David Kaczynski's attorney asked the former FBI agent who made the match between the Unabomber's manifesto and Kaczynski to ask for leniencyâhe was horrified to think that turning his brother in might result in his brother's death. Read Less
1998 56 Years Old Eventually, Kaczynski was able to avoid the death penalty by pleading guilty to all the government's charges, on January 22, 1998. … Read More
Later, Kaczynski attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, arguing it was involuntary. Judge Garland Ellis Burrell Jr. denied his request. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld that decision.<br /><br /> The early hunt for the Unabomber in the United States portrayed a perpetrator far different from the eventual suspect. The Unabomber Manifesto consistently uses "we" and "our" throughout, and at one point in 1993 investigators sought an individual whose first name was "Nathan", due to a fragment of a note found in one of the bombs. However, when the case was finally presented to the public, authorities denied that there was ever anyone other than Kaczynski involved in the crimes. Explanations were later presented as to why Kaczynski targeted some of the victims he selected. Read Less
LATE ADULTHOOD
2005 - 2006 2 More Events
2005 63 Years Old In a letter dated October 7, 2005, Kaczynski offered to donate two rare books to the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University's campus in Evanston, Illinois, the location of the first two attacks. … Read More
The recipient, David Easterbrook, turned the letter over to the university's archives. Northwestern rejected the offer, noting that the library already owned the volumes in English and did not desire duplicates. Read Less
2006 64 Years Old On August 10, 2006, Judge Garland Burrell Jr. ordered that personal items seized in 1996 from Kaczynski's Montana cabin should be sold at a "reasonably advertised Internet auction." … Read More
Items the government considers to be bomb-making materials, such as writings that contain diagrams and "recipes" for bombs, were excluded from the sale. The auctioneer paid the cost and kept up to 10% of the sale price, and the rest of the proceeds must be applied to the $15 million in restitution that Burrell ordered Kaczynski to pay his victims.<br /><br /> Included among Kaczynski's holdings which were auctioned are his original writings, journals, correspondences, and other documents allegedly found in his cabin (for example, a copy of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style). The judge ordered that all references in those documents that allude to any of his victims must be removed before they were sold. Kaczynski challenged those ordered redactions in court on First Amendment grounds, arguing that any alteration of his writings is an unconstitutional violation of his freedom of speech. Read Less
2009 67 Years Old …
The auction concluded in June 2011, and raised over $232,000. <br /><br />Kaczynski is serving eight life sentences without the possibility of parole as Federal Bureau of Prisons register number 04475-046 at ADX Florence, the federal Administrative Maximum Facility supermax in Florence, Colorado. When asked if he was afraid of losing his mind in prison, Kaczynski replied: <br /><br />Kaczynski has been an active writer in prison. The Labadie Collection, part of the University of Michigan's Special Collections Library, houses Kaczynski's correspondence from over 400 people since his arrest in April 1996, including carbon copy replies, legal documents, publications, and clippings. The names of most correspondents will be kept sealed until 2049. Kaczynski has also been battling in federal court in Northern California over the auction of his journals and other correspondence. Read Less
On January 10, 2009, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco rejected Kaczynski's arguments that the government's sale of his writings violates his freedom of expression. … Read More
His writings, books, and other possessions were sold online, and the money raised was sent to several of his victims.<br /><br /> Kaczynski's cabin was removed and was to be destroyed. Kaczynski said he gave it to Charlotte Holdman, an investigator on Kaczynski's defense team. It was seized by the U.S. government and is on display at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. In a three-page handwritten letter to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Kaczynski objected to the public exhibition of the cabin, claiming it was being exhibited despite victims' objections to the generation of publicity connected with the UNABOM case. Read Less
2012 70 Years Old On May 24, 2012, Kaczynski submitted his current information to the Harvard University alumni association. … Read More
He listed his eight life sentences as "awards" and his current occupation as "prisoner." Read Less
2016 74 Years Old Ted's brother, David Kaczynski, published his memoir in 2016 titled Every Last Tie: The Story of the Unabomber and his Family, detailing what it was like to grow up with Ted, as well as the difficult decision that he and his wife faced when they grew to suspect that Ted was the Unabomber.
Original Authors of this text are noted on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski .
| Ted Kaczynski |
Which football club pipped Paris Saint Germain to win the French League 1 title in 2012? | Sixth Sense Technology--Projection Interface Device--MUST SEE!!, page 1
I'm sorry for the caps, but this is RIDICULOUS.
6th sense technology will CHANGE OUR WORLD FOREVER!
This incredibler new device, which will be available within 5 years, will be cheaper than our current most expensive cell phones (current build cost while in development is roughly 350$.) and will totally revolutionize the way we see the world and connect to things.
Please watch the video to have your mind blown!
Here is a link to read further.
Basically, Sixth Sense is a mini-projector coupled with a camera and a cellphone—which acts as the computer and your connection to the Cloud, all the information stored on the web. Sixth Sense can also obey hand gestures, like in the infamous Minority Report.
However, instead of requiring you to be in front of a big screen like Tom Cruise, Sixth Sense can do its magic—and a lot more—everywhere, even while you are jumping hysteric over Oprah's sofa.
The camera recognizes objects around you instantly, with the micro-projector overlaying the information on any surface, including the object itself or your hand. Then, you can access or manipulate the information using your fingers. Need to make a call? Extend your hand on front of the projector and numbers will appear for you to click. Need to know the time? Draw a circle on your wrist and a watch will appear. Want to take a photo? Just make a square with your fingers, highlighting what you want to frame, and the system will make the photo—which you can later organize with the others using your own hands over the air.
But those are just novelty applications. The true power of Sixth Sense lies on its potential to connect the real world with the Internet, and overlaying the information on the world itself. Imagine you are at the supermarket, thinking about what brand of soap is better. Or maybe what wine you should get for tonight's dinner. Just look at objects, hold them on your hands, and Sixth Sense will show you if it's good or bad, or if it fits your preferences or not.
Now take this to every aspect of your everyday life. You can be in a taxi going to the airport, and just by taking out your boarding pass, Sixth Sense will grab real time information about your flight and display it over the ticket. You won't need to do any action. Just hold it in front of your and it will work.
The key here is that Sixth Sense recognizes the objects around you, displaying information automatically and letting you access it in any way you want, in the simplest way possible.
Clearly, this has the potential of becoming the ultimate "transparent" user interface for accessing information about everything around us. If they can get rid of the colored finger caps and it ever goes beyond the initial development phase, that is. But as it is now, it may change the way we interact with the real world and truly give everyone complete awareness of the environment around us.
Watch another video here.
Thoughts?
Can be used on ANY surface, can interact with ANY surface. This is the only real reason I see a benefit in cloud computing.
~Keeper
link
Originally posted by CREAM
Controlling technology with gestures is already being done but Im guessing we'll see more of it. I really doubt this device with the projector thing will catch on, I'd much rather have a small device I can hold. I also dislike the name and this trend towards interweaving technology in your life, people already spend too much time on their cell phones imo...
Did you watch the video? There is nothing that is out there right now for consumer use that is like this.
Besides i'ts going to be very small, no bigger than your average black berry or iphon device once it's completed.
Holding the device would hinder it's capabilities, especially for the projection part, the beautiful thing is that it can display anything onto any surface, and instantly make it interactive.
Think of educational possibilities alone, it's very profound.
~Keeper
We already have a "sixth sense" in life.
It is the combined five senses, touch, taste, smell, hear, and sight, we were born with, working in tandem, through our cognitive ability to interpret.
We see this type of stuff in movies all the time now.
From Minority Report to The Island it is thrown in there to tease us.
Intel "Minority Report" Touchscreen Display
The Island: Wish There Was More
Quote from : Wikipedia : Extrasensory Perception
Extrasensory perception (ESP), also commonly referred to as the sixth sense, involves reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses but sensed with the mind.
The term was coined by German psychical researcher, Rudolf Tischner, and adopted by Duke University psychologist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic abilities such as telepathy and clairvoyance, and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retrocognition.
ESP is also sometimes casually referred to as a sixth sense, gut instinct or hunch, which are historical English idioms.
The term implies acquisition of information by means external to the basic limiting assumptions of science, such as that organisms can only receive information from the past to the present.
Parapsychology is the study of paranormal psychic phenomena, including ESP.
Parapsychologists generally regard such tests as the ganzfeld experiment as providing compelling evidence for the existence of ESP.
The scientific community does not accept this due to the disputed evidence base, the lack of a theory which would explain ESP, and the lack of experimental techniques which can provide reliably positive results.
If of course you believe in that of course it is supposed to work.
Quote from : Wikipedia : Sense
Senses are the physiological capacities within organisms that provide inputs for perception.
The senses and their operation, classification, and theory are overlapping topics studied by a variety of fields, most notably neuroscience, cognitive psychology (or cognitive science), and philosophy of perception.
The nervous system has a specific sensory system or organ, dedicated to each sense.
While I find the video fascinating, the use of that name, "Sixth Sense" is nothing more than a clever marketing ploy, to me, since I have noticed a rise of the "conspiracy theory" genre in the mainstream.
We see the History Channel talking about "Alien History of Earth", and whoever else, tapping into our genre, not to assist us and or take us seriously, but to utilize a proper marketing strategy, to squeeze out money.
Personally, the use of the name, while a marketing strategy, is insulting.
What is "cloud computing" because I've never heard of this tothetenthpower?
I think of this when I hear those two words together.
Super Mario Galaxy - Rolling in the Clouds
Think I will remain skeptical until you have fleshed out this thread a lot more.
New technology is of course fascinating and interesting to me.
But when the world is going down in flames due to the elite stealing all of our money, ushering in the cashless society, I really could not give a damn.
Cloud computing, is kind of scary in a sense, practically it's a wonderful idead.
Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid.
Cloud computing is a paradigm shift following the shift from mainframe to client–server in the early 1980s. Details are abstracted from the users, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them.
[1] Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption, and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet[2], and it typically involves over the-Internet-provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources.[3][4]
It is a byproduct and consequence of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet.[5]
Source
Cloud computing was just an idea until like 10 years ago. Now Microsoft wants to develop a PC platform using it. I dont' agree with their ideas, but CLOUD computing would make information more easily available in larger ammounts.
I agree the name is clever marketing, but you have to admit that it will certainly integrate us more with the WWW and fundementally change our use of technology.
~Keeper
Originally posted by Maddogkull
Finally have gotten internet that is not dial up.
That video is amazing. She said though in 10 years maybe. So I guess it will be longer then 5 years like you said. Great video S&F. Make way for augmented reality
[edit on 26-6-2010 by Maddogkull]
Hmm, There was another video from a year or so ago where the main inventor dude said 5, but that's ok, even if it is only in 10 years.
It's also going to be open source, therefore you could program your build and make it do crazy ridiculous things.
This is the kind of technology that I am excited about.
~Keeper
reply to post by dragonsmusic
I'm not sure if it's this video, but they show one where he walks up to a person, and word cloud appears on them, with everything that is that person in regards to online information, whether it be social network common friends, or interests, based on that persons device's preferences.
Very cool either way, I really other than the Cloud Internet aspect cannot see a negative to this sort of device in real world usage.
For paramedics, having access to all relevent data which they can project on the ground if need be, to crisis situations where everybody can pull up emergency procedures guides, to anything else possible.
~Keeper
Sounds a whole Hell of a lot like connectivity between the Internet and Wi-Fi.
The problem with this is the ease of use is a surrender to slavery.
Information is easily accessed as well as easily hacked.
Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean
Amazon Review :
With evangelical fervor, Gelernter's book-length essay paints a future where software technology, now isolating people, brings them into impersonal proximity through "mirror worlds."
These computer models of reality let users descend to greater depths of detail at will, meet other explorers, and generally get the "big picture" of what's going on.
However, Gelernter's own appraisal of the value of computers seems inconsistent and extreme: he claims they are valuable just sitting unused on the coffee table but then insists that the uninitiated will be forced to "sink or swim" (i.e., learn to use computers) in the information sea computers create.
His casual style gives the book the feel of a lecture transcript, and his metaphors (e.g., "jettisoned floating landscapes in tuple space") demand considerable hardware and software knowledge to link them with reality.
For collections emphasizing computer science.
- Doug Kranch, Ambassador Coll. Lib., Big Sandy, Tex.
The book was done back in 1991 and Gelernter had a huge fan.
Well, I would not call him so much as a fan, but an obsessed individual.
And he resides in prison now, maximum security, you might remember him.
Quote from : Wikipedia : Theodore Kaczynski
Dr. Theodore John "Ted" Kaczynski (pronounced /kaˈt͡ʂɨnski/; born May 22, 1942), also known as the Unabomber (University and Airline Bomber), is an American mathematician and social critic, who engaged on a mail bombing spree that spanned nearly 20 years, killing three people and injuring 23 others.
He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where, as an intellectual child prodigy, he excelled academically from an early age.
Kaczynski was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 16, where he earned an undergraduate degree, and later earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan.
He became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley at age 25 but resigned two years later.
In 1971, he moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water, in Lincoln, Montana, where he began to learn survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient and where he lived like a recluse.
He decided to start a bombing campaign after watching the wilderness around his home being destroyed by development.
From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent 16 bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23.
Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times on April 24, 1995 and promised "to desist from terrorism" if the Times or The Washington Post published his manifesto.
In his Industrial Society and Its Future (also called the "Unabomber Manifesto"), he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization.
The Unabomber was the target of one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) most costly investigations. Before Kaczynski's identity was known, the FBI used the handle "UNABOM" ("UNiversity and Airline BOMber") to refer to his case, which resulted in the media calling him the Unabomber.
Despite the FBI's efforts, he was not caught as a result of this investigation.
Instead, his brother recognized Ted's style of writing and beliefs from the manifesto, and tipped off the FBI.
To avoid the death penalty, Kaczynski's lawyers were court appointed, but he eventually got rid of them because they wanted to plead insanity and he did not believe he was insane.
Once it was sure that he would be defending himself on national television the court entered a plea agreement, under which he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Theodore Kaczynski has been designated a "domestic terrorist" by the FBI.
Several anarchist authors, such as John Zerzan and John Moore, have come to his defense, while holding some reservations over his actions and ideas.
David Gelernter found out the hard way that some people will do anything.
After a six-year hiatus, Kaczynski struck again in 1993, mailing a bomb to David Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale University.
Though critically injured, he eventually recovered.
Another bomb mailed in the same weekend was sent to the home of geneticist Charles Epstein from University of California, San Francisco, who lost multiple fingers upon opening it.
Kaczynski then called Gelernter's brother, Joel Gelernter, a behavioral geneticist, and told him, "You are next."
Geneticist Phillip Sharp at Massachusetts Institute of Technology also received a threatening letter two years later.
Kaczynski wrote a letter to The New York Times claiming that his "group", called FC, was responsible for the attacks.
So the current Internet connecitivity might not be where it is if not for Ted.
Or is it the TED is your original video?
One has to wonder if they are marketing everything after E.S.P. and Kaczynski.
Careful of what you wish you because you might just get it.
[edit on 26-6-2010 by SpartanKingLeonidas]
TED is where I found it originally, there are several other videos floating around.
Your fears of censorship are certainly warranted, but in reality it would be no different than what is available today, there would still be static hard drive space and servers, the "cloud" would simply be another branch of the internet, where everything is connected and anything uploaded expends the cloud further.
I would go as far as saying that limiting the information available to the device would do the overall experience a diservice. It would obviously operate better with way more information.
I don't really see how hacking the device or limiting the information would do anything that would benefit somebody.
Yes, it would use Wi-Fi, from what I've read the new fiber optic connections currently being installed all over the US would be plenty of infrastructure to run it properly without delays.
I also think that this sort of device might help make Wi-Fi and free internet in general a reality, as more people require it for the tech to work there will be pressure to have widely available and a cheaper and cheaper rate.
~Keeper
It is not a fear of censorship in the least tothetenthpower.
It is the usage of this "access" to the Internet being used against us.
When everything is so easily "connected" the cost is freedom.
In order to connect to that level our freedoms will have become lost due to the digital network, where our cars sync up through OnStar, triangulating to the closest cell phone tower, and the free Wi-Fi at McDonalds.
Then we are into the pre-crime nonsense where they predicative issues fly.
Quote from : New Technology Can Be Operated By Thought
ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2007) — Neuroscientists have significantly advanced brain-machine interface (BMI) technology to the point where severely handicapped people who cannot contract even one leg or arm muscle now can independently compose and send e-mails and operate a TV in their homes.
They are using only their thoughts to execute these actions.
...and...
Quadriplegic's mind able to control matter Mind reading a success for quadriplegic
Matthew Nagle had only to imagine that his arm was moving a cursor across the computer screen -- and the cursor obeyed.
Paralyzed from the neck down but connected to a computer by a wire implanted into the top of his brain he used his thoughts to draw a rudimentary circle on the video monitor to pick up objects with a robot arm and even to play simple video games -- chatting with researchers while he did so.
BrainGate Lets Your Brain Control the Computer
This will eventually get the system into our heads whether we like it or not.
Minority Report Commercials
Quote from : Wikipedia : Precrime : Precrime
The term "precrime" refers to events and motives before an offense has been committed.
In pop culture, the word "precrime" was popularized by the 2002 movie Minority Report which was adapted from science fiction writings of author Philip K. Dick (1956 short story "The Minority Report"), as well as other sources: in the film the plot concerns determining whether or not someone is planning to commit a crime.
The term precrime has also been used in relation to techniques for so-called "profiling" to determine likelihood of future offenses being committed.
Who the Hell wants to be convicted before ever committing a crime?
I am not speaking of considering a crime but of being within the vicinity.
It will come eventually down to the simplicity of people giving up their freedoms.
For anyone who knows the history of Hollywood and the U.S. Government in regards to propaganda driven initiatives during WWII, or who pays any sort of attention to the subtle details of the technology advancement in movies this will be something to you may have already noticed or come across in some regard to and pondered about it yourself.
Watching two movies in particular, Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix , and any of the Star Trek shows or movies with the Borg in them you will get my meaning of the term "Jacked In" and assimilation to the Hive Mind .
Keanu Reeves plays the starring role of two movies people are controversial heroes, which get a device inserted into the back of their heads in order to access information, a faster way to assimilate knowledge.
Think of it if you will of reverse psychology through programming that in order to defeat the "evil" (insert your bad guy here) you have to be willing to accept the fact of "being plugged in" to an information database, the backbone being the now named Internet, which used to be named the ARPANET, created by D.A.R.P.A.
Johnny Mnemonic (Theatrical Trailer #1)
...and...
Matrix - I Know Kung Fu
No thanks.
The cost is allowing Government physically into our heads.
And I trust them in there as far as I trust shoving a rattlesnake up my butt.
And that it will not bite me.
For those of you who have not the historical knowledge nor the attention to detail when it comes to technology, you just might be in for a wild ride when following the White Rabbit down that funky Wonderland rabbit hole within this post. When it comes to technology it is like a magnet to me because it always catches my eye and as a curious and knowledge seeking teenager Popular Science and Popular Mechanics kept my occupied for hours on end through reading and re-reading articles and then cross-referencing those articles at the library in regards to the civilian, military, or international corporations.
This was so I could learn more about their applications, and as well the historical origins of the devices and the current uses and through all of that it usually assisted me in seeing where the technology was heading.
If you know any of these particular technologies and you love watching movies this will be simple to follow, if not or you disagree, please feel free to refute me.
If you have seen the new movie Gamer yet, or you know anything about the old Roman Flavian Amphitheatre , and the gladitorial games , the many types of battles, and the bread and circuses of politics then you are going to love this post and how the "gamer" is being targeted.
"Gamer" - Official Trailer [HQ HD]
Quote from : Wikipedia : Gamer (Film)
Gamer is a 2009 science fiction thriller film written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor.
The film stars Gerard Butler as an unwilling participant in an online game in which participants can control human beings as players.
Gamer was released in North America and the United Kingdom on September 16, 2009.
The film is rated R for strong violence, sexual content, nudity and language.
Gamer Official Movie Trailer (HQ)
In "a near future", mind-control technology has taken the world by storm.
Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) has revolutionized the gaming industry with his invention of self-replicating nanites.
The nanites colonize in the brain, gradually replacing the existing brain cells and allowing full control of all motor functions by a third party.
When it comes to our minds it is our last refuge against invasion.
Because when they can physically get into your mind by you accessing the system, they can upload just about anything they want to, or download just about anything they want to, convict you of some arbitrary nonsense, and if the "mind crime" is high enough, shut off your brain.
I can only speak for myself but I do not want to be a puppet either physically or digitally, because we are not unfortunatley in control of our Government's, they are in control because of our lack of political knowledge.
reply to post by SpartanKingLeonidas
I see where your coming from, but this technology would be a VERY small stepping stone toward something like Minority Report, I don't even think you can put them in the same category.
It's also in it's infancy as far as the technology goes, the input/output would be the same of any normal hardware such as a PC, just a different means of interactivity.
~Keeper
What your original post covers though, the video about the new technology, is exactly how they get everyone hooked on this crap, the "newest" technology, to keep up with the "Joneses" in the community.
Digitally speaking, it is like becoming an alcoholic or drug addict, after a while.
And when you're not keeping up with the "Joneses" you get the DT's.
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Developed sometime before 1915 by a bartender named Ngiam Tong Boon, which cocktail contains Gin, Cherry Heering, Benedictine,and fresh Sarawak Pineapple juice? | Singapore Sling - Singapore | WorldAlcohols | Blipfoto
By WorldAlcohols
Singapore Sling - Singapore
The Singapore Sling is a cocktail. This long drink was developed sometime before 1915 by Ngiam Tong Boon, a Hainanese bartender working at the Long Bar in Raffles Hotel Singapore. It was initially called the gin sling, - a sling was originally an American drink composed of spirit and water, sweetened and flavoured.
The Times has described the "original recipe" as mixing two measures of gin with one of cherry brandy and one of orange, pineapple and lime juice.
Recipes published in articles about Raffles Hotel before the 1970s are significantly different from current recipes, and Singapore Slings drunk elsewhere in Singapore differ from the recipe used at Raffles Hotel.
The current Raffles Hotel recipe is a heavily modified version of the original, most likely changed sometime in the 1970s by Ngiam Tong Boon's nephew. Today, many of the Singapore Slings served at Raffles Hotel have been pre-mixed and are made using an automatic dispenser that combines alcohol and pineapple juice to pre-set volumes. They are then blended instead of shaken to create a foamy top as well as to save time because of the large number of orders.
Being poor travellers we opted for a pre-mixed bottle from 7eleven! The contents are: pineapple juice, gin, grenadine syrup, cherry brandy, Cointreau, Benedictine and Angostura Bitters.
Amusingly, this bottle was produced in Austria for True Heritage Brew Singapore Pre Ltd
26 views
| Singapore Sling |
Which single-word title is shared by songs in the musicals 'The Sound Of Music' and 'West Side Story'? | Drink recipes - The Taste of the World...
The Taste of the World...
Contact
BUBBLE TEA
This bubble tea recipe makes a drink called bubble tea, also known as boba tea or pearl milk tea. It's mainly composed of tea, large tapioca balls (or pearls), fruit, and milk. You use a large straw to suck up the pearls as you're drinking. It's quite fun!
The idea of this drink originated from Taiwan in the 1980's, then moved to the west and became quite popular. The bubble refers to the bubbling of tea used in certain bubble teas. The black tapioca balls at the bottom are referred to as pearls.
Many kinds of tea can be used for bubble tea recipe. The most popular ones are green tea, black tea and jasmine tea. The fruits added in range from strawberry, banana, mango, watermelon, papaya, taro, and many others.
RECIPE
Ingredients (2 to 3 servings):
2 green tea bags
3/4 cup to 1 cup large black tapioca pearls
8 cups of water
sugar syrup or maple syrup
1 cup fresh fruit (strawberry) OR bubble tea powder (taro)
1/2 cup of milk or 1 tablespoon cream (optional)
ice cubes
bubble tea straw (large straw)
How to....
Part 1 (10 min)
Fill up the boiler with water and set it to boil. Meanwhile, fill a large pot to with 8 cups of water, set on high heat, cover and wait for water to boil. The water in the boiler should be boiling by now, add 2 cups of boiling water to the teabags in a large glass or measuring cup and let it sit for 10 min. Move on to part 2 while the tea is soaking.
Part 2 (40 min)
Once the water boils, add 1 cup of tapioca pearls to the pot. To prevent them from sticking together, stir constantly for 5 min. Reduce to medium heat, cover the pot and simmer for about 15 min. During this time, throw out the teabags in the measuring cup and place the tea in the fridge. After the tapioca pearls are done simmering, uncover the lid, turn the heat off and let them sit in the cooking water for another 20 min. Transfer them to a strainer and wash them with cold water briefly.
Part 3 (10 min)
Per 1 serving, add 3 to 4 tablespoons of the cooked tapioca pearls to a glass. Add 2 tablespoons of sugar syrup to the glass. Add 3/4 cup of the tea from the fridge to the glass and stir until syrup dissolves. Blend about 1 cup of fresh fruit. Add it to the glass and mix. Add cream or milk (optional).
SINGAPORE SLING
The Singapore Sling is a cocktail that was developed sometime before 1915 by Ngiam Tong Boon (嚴崇文), a bartender working at the Long Bar in Raffles Hotel Singapore. The original recipe used gin, Cherry Heering, Bénédictine, and fresh pineapple juice, primarily from Sarawak pineapples which enhance the flavour and create a foamy top.
Most recipes substitute bottled pineapple juice for fresh juice; soda water has to be added for foam. The hotel's recipe was recreated based on the memories of former bartenders and written notes that they were able to discover regarding the original recipe. One of the scribbled recipes is still on display at the Raffles Hotel Museum.
Recipes published in articles about Raffles Hotel prior to the 1970s are significantly different from current recipes, and "Singapore Slings" drunk elsewhere in Singapore differ from the recipe used at Raffles Hotel.
RECIPE
3/4 oz fresh lime juice
2 dashes real pomegranate grenadine
1 dash Angostura bitters
Real maraschino cherry, for garnish
Pineapple wedge, for garnish
Orange wheel or twist, for garnish
How to...
Combine all except soda in an iced shaker. Shake, and strain into a collins or highball glass with a few lumps of ice. Top with a splash soda water.
Garnish with a cherry, a pineapple slice, and orange.
Makes 1 cocktail.
Great way to quench that thirst...
BANDUNG (Rose syrup with milk)
Bandung is a favourite beverage in Malaysia, especially among Malay communities. It is usually served during wedding receptions with foods such as nasi beriani or rendang. Modern innovations include adding grassjelly or soda water.
Street vendors began the custom of adding pink food colouring to help buyers avoid confusing the drink with teh tarik. As a result, bandung now only comes in pink.
It may be bought pre-mixed or made at home.
"Bandung" was available as early as in the 1960s where it is most favourable within the Malay community.
RECIPE
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On the 1st. January 2012, which artist was appointed to the Order of Merit? | Forest | David Hockney appointed to Order of Merit
Headlines > David Hockney appointed to Order of Merit
David Hockney appointed to Order of Merit
Sun 1st January, 2012
Artist David Hockney, a prominent smokers' rights campaigner, has been appointed a member of the Order of Merit by the Queen.
The Order of Merit is presented to high achievers in the arts, learning, literature, science and other areas such as public service.
Hockney said he was glad his campaign for smokers' rights had not worked against him. Asked for a response he said: "No comment – other than it's nice to know they are not prejudiced against the older smoker."
Sources: BBC News (1 January 2012), AFP (2 January 2012)
Note: David Hockney is a member of Forest's Supporters Council and has attended several Forest events in support of smokers' rights.
Previous story
| David Hockney |
The son-in-law of a British Prime Minister and the father of a former Minister of Defence, which Conservative politician served as the last Governor of Southern Rhodesia? | Artist David Hockney's Order of Merit investiture - Artlyst
/ Art Categories Art News , News / Art Tags David Hockney , Queen Elizabeth / / / / /
The Yorkshire born, Internationally renounced artist David Hockney was appointed a member of the Order of Merit ,by the Queen, at Buckingham Palace last week. The award recognises distinguished service in the armed forces, science, art, literature, or for the promotion of culture, and is limited to 24 living recipients at one time from commonwealth countries plus a limited number of honorary members. Established in 1902 by King Edward VII, admission into the order remains the personal gift of its Sovereign – in this instance, Queen Elizabeth II.
Hockney, 74, has said he turned down the chance of a Knighthood because he “does not care for a fuss”.”I don’t value prizes of any sort. I value my friends,” he said.
Born in Bradford in 1937, David Hockney attended Bradford School of Art before studying at the Royal College of Art from 1959 to 1962. Hockney’s stellar reputation was established while he was still a student; his work was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries, which heralded the birth of British Pop Art. He visited Los Angeles in the early 1960s and settled there soon after. He is closely associated with southern California and has produced a large body of work there over many decades. David Hockney was elected a Royal Academician in 1991.
When asked last year to paint a portrait of the Queen, Hockney replyed; “The Queen would make a “terrific subject” but I prefer to paint people I know.” The Artist has been busy organising his Landscapes exhibition, due to open early in January 2012, at the Royal Academy,The palace declined to comment on the story, but it is understood from an interview on Front Row, BBC radio 4 that the 74 year old was “very busy”. He added; “When I was asked I told them I was very busy painting England actually. Her country”. Hockney was offered a knighthood in 1990 but turned it down. He was furious when the information leaked out, particularly as he has since accepted being made a Companion of Honour. He told the local paper in Bradford: “I don’t value prizes of any sort. I value my friends. Prizes of any sort are a bit suspect. I turned it down because at the time I was living in America, but in the end I changed my mind because you have to be gracious.”
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Which team finished eight points clear of Bayern Munich to win the Bundesliga title in 2012? | Bayern Munich in a League of Their Own After 4th Consecutive Bundesliga Title | Bleacher Report
Bayern Munich in a League of Their Own After 4th Consecutive Bundesliga Title
By Clark Whitney , Chief Writer
May 8, 2016
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Matthias Schrader/Associated Press
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Bayern Munich wrapped up the 2015-16 Bundesliga title on Saturday, as they edged Ingolstadt 2-1 at the Audi Sportpark. The result put Pep Guardiola's men eight points clear of Borussia Dortmund with one game left to play, leaving the record champions decisive victors.
It took longer for Bayern to clinch the league title than in recent years thanks to a resilient BVB that will end the season as history's best second-placed team. But although their victory came somewhat late, Bayern have been almost flawless; their 85 points in 33 matches means they will have the third-best points haul in Bundesliga history.
And having conceded just 16 goals, their defensive record will set a new league record provided they allow no more than one goal in their final match of the campaign against Hannover on Saturday.
What Bayern have managed to do in the last four Bundesliga seasons is truly extraordinary. They've recorded the three best points tallies (and barring a miracle performance from Hannover, the three best defensive records) in league history.
It's been a story of complete dominance to the extent many teams hardly bother to show up and some players literally opt not to appear—there were some instances when it appeared players got themselves suspended to avoid playing Bayern, although only Werder Bremen duo Zlatko Junuzovic and Clemens Fritz admitted it, per ESPN FC .
Yet for all their domestic dominance, this isn't the best Bayern Munich team in history. That honor goes to the side that won three consecutive European Cups between 1974 and 1976 and contained such legends as Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Muller, Sepp Maier, Paul Breitner, Hans-Georg Schwarzenbeck, Uli Hoeness and a young Karl-Heinz Rummenigge.
Four-in-a-row! Bayern Munich are the Bundesliga champions pic.twitter.com/ufChZSPQtl
— Bleacher Report UK (@br_uk) May 7, 2016
Although the current Bayern team managed to win the UEFA Champions League in 2012-13, it hasn't progressed to the final since despite obtaining similarly dominant domestic results. Nor has this Bayern looked to be among the top two or three teams in the competition. In 2014 and 2015, they were humiliated by Real Madrid and Barcelona respectively. This year, they lost respectably to Atletico Madrid and truly might be among the top two or three teams, although Juventus pushed them to the brink as well.
Regardless of their level, it's clear Bayern have not enjoyed sustained continental dominance as they did in the 1970s. Frankly, their team in recent years hasn't been as stocked with legends of the game. Jerome Boateng and Robert Lewandowski may be great, but Beckenbauer and Muller were among the best players football has seen in their respective positions.
The difference we see between the 1970s and today comes down to the strength of the Bundesliga relative to that of the rest of Europe. Bayern only won the Bundesliga once during the spell in which they claimed three European Cups, and that time (in 1974), they only edged Borussia Monchengladbach by a point.
The German top flight was strong overall at the time, and Gladbach won the league three consecutive times from 1975 to 1977—even as the best Bayern ever dominated Europe.
Now, there is a different scenario, one that sees the rest of the Bundesliga struggling, as Bayern are the only side that can reliably perform in the Champions League. They aren't the best team in the world and haven't been since 2013. Yet they are miles ahead of the rest of the Bundesliga. Dortmund had a truly remarkable 2015-16 season but still effectively lost the league long before Bayern clinched the title.
The simple truth is Bayern are in a league of their own in terms of prestige, squad strength and financial might—all of which are interrelated. The success of previous decades brought prestige that helped recruit players and win the support and sponsorships that produced enough financial success to build sustained status as a superpower.
CHRISTOF STACHE/Getty Images
Based on figures from Fussball-Geld , one can calculate that Bayern's revenue (excluding transfers) after the 32nd matchday of the 2015-16 season was 49 percent more than the closest runner-up (BVB), 77 percent more than the next (Wolfsburg) and twice as much as the fourth-richest side, Schalke. Bayern's non-transfer income was more than two-and-a-half times that of the average Bundesliga side and just under eight times those of promoted sides Darmstadt and Ingolstadt.
All the while, Bayern's spending continues to soar. Their wages have ballooned this season, with Thomas Muller, per Bild , and Manuel Neuer, also per Bild , signing record contracts worth €15 million per year and Jerome Boateng being given a raise to €12 million. The club has also given David Alaba and Javi Martinez bumper contracts. Seeing some €100 million or more of talent on the Bayern bench every week is evidence enough the Bavarian giants are simply on another level to the rest of the Bundesliga.
That, perhaps, is why the idea of a European "super league" is something Rummenigge is considering. The Bayern president dismissed the idea in 2013, according to the ECA , but in January, he admitted to reporters it is an option. His rationale was to maintain competition with the Premier League following its mega TV deal, but in fairness, the rest of the Bundesliga could support the super league with similar reasoning.
For now, the Bundesliga exists with Bayern a part of it. But in truth, the Bavarians are one of several clubs around Europe that have broken clear of the rest and are worthy of creating a league of their own.
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Found in birds, reptiles and some fish and insects, what name is given to the specialised stomach with a thick, muscular wall used for grinding up food? | Bundesliga crown stays in Dortmund - CNN.com
Bundesliga crown stays in Dortmund
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Updated 1920 GMT (0320 HKT) April 21, 2012
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Shinji Kagawa celebrates after scoring Dortmund's second goal against Monchengladbach at Signal Iduna Park on Saturday.
Story highlights
Borussia Dortmund clinch second successive German league title on Saturday
Jurgen Klopp's team beat Borussia Monchengladbach 2-0 in front of home fans
Victory seals championship with two rounds of the Bundesliga remaining
Second-placed Bayern Munich win ahead of Champions League semifinal trip
Bayern Munich may be leading Germany's bid for success on European football's main stage, but Borussia Dortmund rule the roost domestically after winning the Bundesliga title for the second successive season on Saturday.
Champions League semifinalists Bayern made sure their rivals would have to get a result in the late kickoff by snatching a last-gasp 2-1 win at Werder Bremen, but Dortmund retained the crown with two matches to spare in front of their home crowd after a 2-0 victory over Borussia Monchengladbach.
It put Jurgen Klopp's team eight points clear of Bayern, who go to Spain on Wednesday holding a 2-1 advantage over Real Madrid with the added incentive of a final at Munich's Allianz Arena on May 19.
Dortmund failed to make it past the group stages of Europe's top club competition this season, but have won 23 of 32 matches in the German league and will face Bayern in the final of the German Cup on May 12.
Croatia midfelder Ivan Perisic opened the scoring in the 23rd minute with a header from Marcel Schmelzer's free-kick, while Japan international Shinji Kagawa settled any nerves of the 80,720 sellout home crowd at Signal Iduna Park with the second goal on the hour mark to seal the club's eighth title since forming in 1909.
Dortmund fans also cheered the return of 19-year-old Germany international Mario Gotze, who made his comeback as a substitute in the final 15 minutes having been sidelined by injury since mid-December.
The victory extended Dortmund's unbeaten league run to 26 matches, and ended Bayern's slim hopes of a first title since 2010 and 23rd overall.
Jupp Heynckes' team needed a stoppage-time goal from Franck Ribery, who followed up his opener against Real last Tuesday by dealing a major blow to eighth-placed Werder Bremen's hopes of Europa League football next season.
Brazil defender Naldo put the home side ahead in the 51st minute, but diverted a cross by substitute Ribery into his own net with quarter of an hour to play.
Ribery had been rested along with Arjen Robben -- who the France international reportedly fought with during the halftime break against Real and was fined, according to German reports.
But Ribery struck in the final seconds to put Bayern 10 points clear of third-placed Schalke, who travel to fourth-bottom Augsburg on Sunday.
Monchengladbach stayed a point behind Schalke, and facing an uphill battle to qualify for the Champions League.
Stuttgart drew 1-1 at third-bottom Cologne and stayed in fifth ahead of Bayer Leverkusen, who won 1-0 at Hoffenheim.
Second-bottom Hertha Berlin's hopes of staying in the top flight suffered a big blow after a 2-1 home defeat by already-relegated Kaiserslautern.
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