TimeGhost History
Published 28 Jul 2021There’s no business like show business and in the spring of 1924, you can see why. Buster Keaton and Hollywood as a whole are producing some iconic films, the British Empire is putting on a massive exhibition, and there is even talk of a death ray.
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July 29, 2021
Buster Keaton, British Imperialism, and the Era of Spectacle | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.23 Spring 1924
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Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, the Mecca of free speech
In Tuesday’s NP Platformed, Colby Cosh pays tribute to one of the holy places of free speech, Speakers’ Corner:
“Speakers’ Corner – Hyde Park – London” by Manolo Blanco is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
We detect a slightly surprising absence of international media commotion over a dreadful event that happened Sunday: a woman giving a critique of Islam at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park was slashed in the face by a fanatic. The victim, 39-year-old Hatun Tash, is said to be a familiar figure at the Mecca of free speech. And, yes, NP Platformed uses this geographic metaphor intentionally.
Probably every country has sites consecrated to its distinctive political ideals. Speakers’ Corner is different: it represents the ideal of absolute free speech for, and to, the entire world. A non-American visiting the Lincoln Memorial is there to honour the memory of a great man; if he visits the Washington Monument, it’s probably for the purpose of making phallic-themed jokes. But for 150 years, non-Englishmen visiting Hyde Park, from Lenin to Bishop Tutu, have been awestruck by the freedom that radical speakers enjoy at the original among the world’s many Speakers’ Corners.
Few Londoners pay it much mind anymore — not since the 19th century, when the nigh-inviolable freedom of speech enjoyed on the corner actually served to endanger governments and give impetus to liberal social change. Since about 1900, it has mostly been a place, almost a rehearsal space, for the tireless cranks of any given moment: dietary Savonarolas, village atheists, suffragettes, Trots and syndicalists and Maoists. They have been joined by generations of Muslims preaching various Islamic doctrines or far-out varieties of the faith.
Foreigners, however, have often been astonished to discover that Speakers’ Corner mostly lives up to its ideals, or that any place could. The British state really lets those people say those things in public without locking them up. The park has seen plenty of affrays in its time, but fights have become rare as the ritual purpose of the space has become universally understood.
Rare, too, are the United Kingdom’s infringements on its inviolability. After the Bloody Sunday shootings of 1972, three Irish republicans were arrested under the Treason Felony Act of 1848 for having proposed war against Britain in Hyde Park. They were found guilty of lesser charges, sentenced to time served and sent back across the Irish Sea, but Irish nationalists rightly dined out on the incident for many years, and the criminal offence of “treason felony” has never since been heard of in any English courtroom.
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QotD: An opera called Margaret
Margaret Thatcher had a great deal of time for Andrew Lloyd Webber. In August 1978, while she was still Leader of the Opposition, her speechwriter Ronnie Millar took her to see Evita. “It was a strangely wondrous evening yesterday leaving so much to think about,” she wrote to Millar the next day. “I still find myself rather disturbed by it. But if they [the Peronists] can do that without any ideals, then if we apply the same perfection and creativeness to our message, we should provide quite good historic material for an opera called Margaret in thirty years’ time!”
Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory, 2015.
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July 28, 2021
QotD: Lawrence and the Hejaz railway
Christian Wolmar, Engines of War: How Wars Were Won & Lost on the Railways, 2010.
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July 26, 2021
QotD: British Expeditionary Force (BEF) leadership in France, 1940
Gort was not a lone offender in Alanbrooke’s opinion. The latter believed that most of his fellow senior officers lacked Conceptual Skill. He suggested that the lack of strategic ability amongst British senior commanders was due to the best thinkers of his generation being lost in the Great War. Alanbrooke’s theory is questionable, for the Germans also lost many talented officers in the Great War, yet between the wars, actively promoted intellectual stimulation amongst its officer corps. Amongst the leading thinkers were Heinz Guderian, often regarded as the father of Blitzkrieg, although in his own book, Panzer Leader, is the first to admit that he took British ideas and developed them into something that worked. The British, it seems, were less stimulated by their own initial thinking on modern war.
This does not imply the Germans were unequivocal masters of big thinking. Many German army commanders were as locked into traditional thinking as their Allied opposite numbers. Guderian asserts that the sole reason the BEF was allowed to escape from Dunkirk was because the German Army High Command issued repeated halt orders to Guderian’s panzer corps, allowing the British the breathing space needed to avoid total defeat.
Both sides suffered in this area [interpersonal skills], and the problems arose mainly at senior level. Despite many British commanders speaking good French, the respective commanders on each side of this coalition had radically different opinions of how operations should be conducted and coordinated. There was virtually no attempt to ensure interoperability before May 1940 and the Anglo-French coalition was, at best, a well-mannered but reluctant partnership which did not stand the test of high-tempo operations well.
The lack of trust between the Allies ultimately drove Gort to contradict direct orders and use his last reserves to shore up the BEFs northern flank, rather than fritter them away in a joint counter-attack with the French that was dead in the water before it was launched. By the 25th May, just two weeks after the opening of combat operations, the Anglo-French coalition was crumbling. Bizarrely, this decision by Gort to abandon the French actually testifies to his one great moment of Conceptual Skill. He realised he was essentially committing career suicide when he ordered his troops towards the coast, but he also had the foresight to realise that the battle for France was already lost and that his sole duty from then on was to save Britain’s army.
Andy Johnson, “Dunkirk: Leadership Lessons in a Hard School”, The Wavell Room, 2017-08-01.
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July 24, 2021
A new history of Anglo-Saxon England
At First Things, Francis Young reviews The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England by Marc Morris:
The art of telling stories will always be closely associated with the Anglo-Saxons. Beowulf, the era’s best-known epic poem, begins with a word that is difficult to translate, summoning an audience to attention: “Hwæt!” The same word opens another great poem of early medieval England, The Dream of the Rood, in which the wood of the Cross speaks and narrates a uniquely Anglo-Saxon Passion — a reminder that it was the Anglo-Saxons who built Christian England.
These people, as Marc Morris observes, were tellers of tales; and yet, until now, there has been no modern narrative history that weaves together the insights of archaeologists, historians, and literary scholars. Morris has risen to the task, tracing the journey of the English-speaking inhabitants of the island of Britain from tribal warbands to a highly sophisticated medieval kingdom on the eve of the Norman Conquest.
This is a triumph of historical storytelling, woven together from the scattered evidence of archaeology, numismatics, chronicles, charters, and many other sources. The narrative that emerges from these difficult sources is, of course, contentious; after all, even the use of the term “Anglo-Saxon” is now debated by scholars. But the narrative is also compelling, rooted in the primary sources, iconoclastic of received interpretations, and — most importantly — the product of a commanding historical imagination. This is an account of the Anglo-Saxons that will inform our perception of them for years to come.
It would be perfectly possible to challenge virtually every one of the author’s interpretations: As Morris notes, “The less evidence, the more contention,” especially when it comes to the chaotic documentary void of the fifth and sixth centuries. (By comparison, by the mid-eleventh century there is a comparative richness of documentary sources.) The first question is about the nature of Germanic immigration after the departure of the Roman legions at the beginning of the fifth century. Morris leans toward a more traditional “replacement” model in which Germanic settlers took the place of the Britons in the landscape. Morris places a great deal of weight on the linguistic evidence, which shows that Brittonic (the language of the Britons) had little influence on Old English. If the Anglo-Saxons had largely assimilated the Britons, rather than replacing them, we might expect many more Brittonic loanwords.
According to Morris, “The broken Britain that the Saxons found … had no allure.” Post-Roman Britain was “in every sense a degraded society, sifting through the detritus of an earlier civilisation.” Morris follows in the tradition of Bede by viewing the Britons as decadent, but this is by no means the only possible view of post-Roman society. Recent scholarship by Miles Russell and Stuart Laycock has drawn attention to Britain’s failure to become Romanized in the first place, raising the question of whether the abandonment of urban life in the early fifth century should be seen as a sign of decline, and Susan Oosthuizen has argued that rural Britain continued to prosper in the absence of urban settlement; it simply thrived on its own terms as a non-urban society.
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Boris Johnson as a character-brought-to-life from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop
In The Critic, Robert Hutton explains why so many members of the British press find Waugh’s satire of their trade so compelling:
Boris Johnson, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs at an informal meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council on 15 February 2018.
Photo by Velislav Nikolov via Wikimedia Commons.
For a British reporter, Scoop is the holy text of the job. One of the enduring mysteries of journalism is that a trade which employs large numbers of skilled writers, and puts them into interesting situations every day, has been the subject of so few really good novels. Scoop was written as satire, but eight decades after it was published, and after the industry has gone through two technological revolutions, it remains the best description of UK journalistic life.
While parts of the job have changed — copy is no longer filed in an abbreviated telegramese to reduce transmission costs — much remains the same. Anxious newspaper executives still live in terror of capricious proprietors. Reporters still enjoy a strange fellowship of simultaneous competition and cooperation. Entertaining readers remains as important as informing them.
So how does the current British PM fit into all of this? Well, Boris had been a journalist:
Which brings us to Boris Johnson. As well as being Britain’s most successful politician, the prime minister has long been one of the country’s highest-paid journalists, a job he did entirely in the Scoop mould. His sympathetic biographer, Andrew Gimson, describes how, posted to Brussels, Johnson delighted in producing stories that were more entertaining than accurate. It was not that he was opposed to writing accurate stories, but he didn’t see it as in any way essential.
The Scoop character Johnson most resembles isn’t the hero — Boot is too naïve, his reports too close to reality. Nor is the press corps regulars, Corker, Shumble, Whelper and Pigge, who huddle in the same hotel, lest they will be beaten on a story. Johnson, both as journalist and politician, has generally preferred to hunt alone. We must look to the man Boot replaced at the Beast, foreign correspondent Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock.
Like Johnson, who was hazy on the outcome of the Battle of Stalingrad, Sir Jocelyn is more confident than he should be about history (“He was wrong about the Battle of Hastings,” says Lord Copper. “It was 1066. I looked it up”). He hides in his hotel room before filing an entirely imaginary interview — something else for which Johnson has form. Sir Jocelyn was, pleasingly, modelled on Sir Percival Phillips, a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, which would later employ Johnson.
Sir Jocelyn’s fabrications didn’t hold him back, and Johnson’s propelled him to the front rank of journalism, then into politics, where he exhibits the same behaviour: the pursuit of a higher “truth” unburdened by facts, the deadline mentality, the reluctance to correct mistakes, the assumption that someone else should pick up the bill. Johnson was neither the kind of journalist nor a prime minister who would read a study on, say, pandemic preparedness. A leaked document from his first months in the job showed him describing Cameron as a “girly swot” for wanting to show that MPs were hard at work.
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July 23, 2021
Panic is infectious, and the dying media are a primary vector
In City Journal, John Tierney looks at the two lethal waves of contagion the world has suffered since 2019, the Wuhan Coronavirus itself and the media-driven panic that almost certainly resulted in far more deaths than the disease that triggered it:
Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.
Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom — and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research.
If, as seems increasingly plausible, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, it is the costliest blunder ever committed by scientists. Whatever the pandemic’s origin, the response to it is the worst mistake in the history of the public-health profession. We still have no convincing evidence that the lockdowns saved lives, but lots of evidence that they have already cost lives and will prove deadlier in the long run than the virus itself.
One in three people worldwide lost a job or a business during the lockdowns, and half saw their earnings drop, according to a Gallup poll. Children, never at risk from the virus, in many places essentially lost a year of school. The economic and health consequences were felt most acutely among the less affluent in America and in the rest of the world, where the World Bank estimates that more than 100 million have been pushed into extreme poverty.
The leaders responsible for these disasters continue to pretend that their policies worked and assume that they can keep fooling the public. They’ve promised to deploy these strategies again in the future, and they might even succeed in doing so — unless we begin to understand what went wrong.
The panic was started, as usual, by journalists. As the virus spread early last year, they highlighted the most alarming statistics and the scariest images: the estimates of a fatality rate ten to 50 times higher than the flu, the chaotic scenes at hospitals in Italy and New York City, the predictions that national health-care systems were about to collapse. The full-scale panic was set off by the release in March 2020 of a computer model at the Imperial College in London, which projected that — unless drastic measures were taken — intensive-care units would have 30 Covid patients for every available bed and that America would see 2.2 million deaths by the end of the summer. The British researchers announced that the “only viable strategy” was to impose draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine arrived.
This extraordinary project was swiftly declared the “consensus” among public-health officials, politicians, journalists, and academics. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, endorsed it and became the unassailable authority for those purporting to “follow the science”. What had originally been a limited lockdown — “15 days to slow the spread” — became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world. A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?
The most prominent early critic was John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford, who published an essay for STAT headlined “A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data.” While a short-term lockdown made sense, he argued, an extended lockdown could prove worse than the disease, and scientists needed to do more intensive testing to determine the risk. The article offered common-sense advice from one of the world’s most frequently cited authorities on the credibility of medical research, but it provoked a furious backlash on Twitter from scientists and journalists.
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‘Armoured’ and ‘Unarmoured’ Carriers – Survivability vs Strike Power
Drachinifel
Published 2 Jan 2019In which we try to unpick the somewhat thorny issue of armoured vs unarmoured flight decks in WW2 carrier design.
Want to support the channel? – https://www.patreon.com/Drachinifel
Want to talk about ships? https://discord.gg/TYu88mt
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July 22, 2021
QotD: Nelson
Nelson was one of England’s most naval officers, and despised weak commands. At one battle when he was told that his Admiral-in-Chief had ordered him to cease fire, he put the telephone under his blind arm and exclaimed in disgust: “Kiss me, Hardy!”
By this and other intrepid manoeuvres the French were utterly driven from the seas.
W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman, 1066 And All That, 1930.
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July 21, 2021
Tank Chats #116 | Churchill III | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 15 Jan 2021The Tank Museum’s Historian David Fletcher discusses the Second World War British Churchill Mark III. The Mark III was the first Churchill to receive the upgraded and more powerful 6 pounder gun. The Museum’s Mark III* also mentioned, is now an incredibly rare variant, and was converted from an AVRE and given the even more powerful 75mm gun.
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QotD: The expansion of the English vocabulary (through plundering French)
Yet the best of English somehow managed to avoid both these fates. It retained its grammar, it held on to its basic words, it kept its nerve, but what it did most remarkably was to accept and absorb French as a layering, not as a replacement but as an enricher. It had begun to do that when Old English met Old Norse: hide/skin; craft/skill. Now it exercised all its powers before a far mightier opponent. The acceptance of the Norse had been limited in terms of vocabulary. Here English was Tom Thumb. But it worked in the same way.
So, a young English hare came to be named by the French word “leveret“, but “hare” was not displaced. Similarly with English “swan”, French “cygnet“. A small English “axe” is a French “hatchet“. “Axe” remained. There are hundreds of examples of this, of English as it were taking a punch but not giving ground.
More subtle distinctions were set in train. “Ask” – English – and “demand” – from French – were initially used for the same purpose but even in the Middle Ages their finer meanings might have differed and now, though close, we use them for markedly different purposes. “I ask you for ten pounds”; “I demand ten pounds”: two wholly different stories. But both words remained. So do “bit” and “morsel”, “wish” and “desire”, “room” and “chamber”. At the time the French might have expected to displace the English. It did not and perhaps the chief reason for that is that people saw the possibilities of increasing clarity of thought, accuracy of expression by refining meaning between two words supposed to be the same. On the surface some of these appear to be interchangeable and sometimes they are. But much more interesting are these fine differences, whose subtleties increase as time carries them first a hair’s breadth apart and then widens the gap, multiplies the distinctions: just as “ask” has evolved far away from “demand”.
Not only did they drift apart but something else happened which demonstrates how deeply not only history but class is buried in language. You can take an (English) “bit” of cheese and most people do. If you want to use a more elegant word you take a (French) “morsel” of cheese. It is undoubtedly thought to be a better class of word and yet “bit”, I think, might prove to have more stamina. You can “start” a meeting or you can “commence” a meeting. Again, “commence” carries a touch more cultural clout though “start” has the better sound and meaning to it for my ear. But it was the embrace which was the triumph, the coupling which was never quite one.
That’s the beauty of it. That was the sweet revenge which English took on French: it not only anglicised it, it used the invasion to increase its own strength; it looted the looters, plundered those who had plundered, out of weakness brought forth strength. For “answer” is not quite “respond”; now they have almost independent lives. “Liberty” isn’t always “freedom”. Shades of meaning, representing shades of thought, were massively absorbed into our language and our imagination at that time. It was new lamps and old; both. The extensive range of what I would call “almost synonyms” became one of the glories of the English language, giving it astonishing precision and flexibility, allowing its speakers and writers over the centuries to discover what seemed to be exactly the right word.
Rather than replace English, French was being brought into service to help enrich and equip it for the role it was on its way to reassuming.
Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English, as quoted by Brian Micklethwait, “Melvyn Bragg on England’s verbal twins”, Samizdata, 2018-12-23.
July 20, 2021
An unlikely survivor in India, His Highness the Prince of Arcot
Ned Donovan explains why there is still a Prince of Arcot, despite the Indian government having abolished all the titles and privileges of the nearly 600 “Maharajas, Maharanas, Rajas, Nawabs, Khans and so on” of the Princely states that were incorporated into modern India after Partition in 1947:
A significant amount of effort was taken during the process of independence to integrate these princely states into the newly independent countries. Almost all of the rulers acceded quickly and peacefully in return for recognition of their symbolic status and titles by the new republics who also promised perpetual large annual payments to sweeten the deal. A handful of princely states were stubborn and were integrated by force, with issues as a result to this day, such as Jammu and Kashmir.
As a result, for the first few decades of independent India, there existed a class of royals recognised within the republic, with privileges and financial support not that different to what they received during the period of British rule. But in 1971 this came tumbling down.
The then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi amended the Indian Constitution to abolish all privileges and titles, along with any financial subsidies. She believed the whole system to be at odds with the secular socialist republic she was attempting to perfect. The move also had financial benefits: the large princely subsidies stopped being a drain on the Indian treasury while much of the royals’ gold and property were seized by the Government in the process. In 1972, Pakistan followed suit and similarly abolished its remaining princes’ titles.
But the title “Prince of Arcot” somehow escaped to carry on to the modern day … thanks to an unusual historical situation and the presentation of letters patent from Queen Victoria:
In 1855, the 13th Nawab of Arcot died without children. The British, influenced by the East India Company, declared the kingdom had lapsed as a result and annexed it entirely. As a token compensation, Queen Victoria in 1870 gave the last Nawab’s uncle a pension and the title of “His Highness the Prince of Arcot” for him and his descendants in perpetuity. This was granted in a type of royal charter, known as letters patent.
As there was no land still to rule, the Princes of Arcot existed in a strange realm of being kings without a kingdom but with significant influence and prestige. The title continued to pass down through the original holder’s family and they built a large palace, Amir Mahal, in Madras that became a centre of culture instead of one of government.
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
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July 19, 2021
George Orwell: The Uncompromising Visionary
Biographics
Published 29 Nov 2019This video is #sponsored by NordVPN.
Credits:
Host – Simon Whistler
Author – Morris M
Producer – Jennifer Da Silva
Executive Producer – Shell HarrisBusiness inquiries to biographics.email@gmail.com
Source/Further reading:
Britannica’s Orwell Bio: https://www.britannica.com/biography/…
Excellent, very informative ONDB biography (paywall for non-UK users. UK users need only enter library card number to access): https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.109…
Spanish civil war: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/conten…
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-h…
Orwell’s mistakes on the Spanish Civil War: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201…
Orwell at the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainmen…
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July 18, 2021
QotD: Rules of wars in the Eighteenth Century
This Treaty was a Good Thing and laid down the Rules for fighting the wars; these were:
(1) that there should be a mutual restitution of conquests except that England should keep Gibraltar, Malta, Minorca, Canada, India, etc.;
(2) that France should hand over to England the West Indian islands of San Flamingo, Tapioca, Sago, Dago, Bezique and Contango, while the Dutch were always to have Lumbago and the Laxative Islands;
(3) that everyone, however Infantile or even insane, should renounce all claim to the Spanish throne;
(4) that the King (or Queen) of France should admit that the King (or Queen) of England was King (or Queen) of England and should not harbour the Young Pretender, but that the fortifications of Dunkirk should be disgruntled and raised to the ground.
Thus, as soon as the fortifications of Dunkirk had been gruntled again, or the Young Pretender was found in a harbour in France, or it was discovered that the Dutch had not got Lumbago, etc., the countries knew that it was time for the treaty to be signed again, so that the War could continue in an orderly manner.
W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman, 1066 And All That, 1930.
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