Martin Fone's Blog, page 265
April 9, 2018
The Streets Of London – Part Seventy Two
Millbank, SW1P
Millbank runs from the end of Abingdon Street by the Black Rod Garden along the north side of the Thames to the junction with Vauxhall Bridge Road. Today it is a road lined with impressive buildings overlooking the River Thames, including the Tate Britain gallery, the Chelsea College of Art and design and government offices. It is all rather pleasant and up-market but it wasn’t always so.
The street takes its name from a watermill which was situated near what is known as College Green and owned by Westminster Abbey – it is referred to in John Norden’s map of London, dating from 1593. However, it seems to have been the only redeeming feature in an area that was described as a place of plague pits and a “low, marshy locality” suitable only for having a pop at the snipe which frequented the “bogs and quagmires.”
By the mid 17th century the area was known as Tothill Fields, or Tuttle Fields as Pepys called it, and following Cromwell’s crushing victory at the Battle of Worcester in September 1651, it was used as a holding area for 4,000 Royalist prisoners before their enforced migration to the West Indies to serve on the sugar plantations. The area was so insanitary that around 1,200 prisoners died before they could be shipped off. During the Great Plague of 1665-66 it served as a communal burial ground for the victims. Pepys noted in his Diaries, “I was much troubled this day to hear at Westminster how the officers do bury the dead in open Tuttle Fields, pretending want of room elsewhere.”
The mill was demolished by Sir Robert Grosvenor around 1736 to make way for a grand house, which was itself demolished in 1809 to make way for the world’s first modern prison, reconnecting the area with incarceration. The design was unusual, with its walls forming an irregular octagon, enclosing seven acres of land. There was a stagnant moat running around the walls, the vestiges of which can be seen in the ditch running between Cureton Street and John Islip Street. Within the walls there were six buildings running off like spokes from the central hub which was the Governor’s house. The idea was that the design made it easier for the warders to keep an eye on what was going on but the labyrinthine corridors meant that they often got lost! And the marshy conditions caused considerable engineering difficulties which racked up the costs.
The prison opened for business on 26th June 1816, its first batch of prisoners being women, later joined by the first group of men in January 1817. Its primary purpose was to serve as a staging post for those prisoners who were to be transported to Australia – one origin of Pom is that it is an acronym of Prisoner of Millbank. Along the riverside you can still see some of the capstans to which the prison vessels were moored. Transportation officially ended in 1868 but by then Millbank had been superseded by the latest in prison design that was Pentonville, opened in 1842.
Dickens, in David Copperfield, described the exterior of the prison as “a melancholy waste … A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls” while Henry James, in his novel, the Princess Casamassima, published in 1886, went one better by describing the interior as having “high black walls whose inner face was more dreadful than the other’, ‘grey, stony courts’, ‘steep unlighted staircases’ and ‘circular shafts of cells.” The inmates, he wrote, were “dreadful figures, scarcely female.”
The prison closed in 1890, demolished two years later. Tate Britain was built on the site in 1897, across the road from the Royal Army Medical School where the first typhoid inoculation was developed, reinforcing the area’s link with disease, and some of the bricks from the prison were used between 1897 and 1902 to build social housing for over 4,000 residents on the Millbank estate. The angularity of the modern streets in the area are a testament to the old prison and the rather splendid Morpeth Arms is worth a visit, built originally for the prison warders and underneath which run a warren of tunnels used to ferry prisoners from the river to the prison and back. It is even said to be haunted.
A fascinating area.
April 8, 2018
Stunt Of The Week (3)
I’m just sorry that my busy schedule does not allow me to make a visit to Detroit Zoo next Saturday.
The Detroit Zoological Society are holding a GreenFest celebration, something I would ordinarily avoid like the plague, but for the lucky first thousand visitors who visit their anaerobic digester display, I discovered this week, they are giving a bucket with 5lbs of animal manure. I suppose they have to attract visitors somehow.
The deregister converts 500 tons of animal manure and other organic stuff each year into a methane-rich gas which is used to power its hospital. The poo, dubbed Detroit Zoo Poo (natch), is a by-product of the process and is supposed to be good for your roses.
It might have caused me a bit of trouble getting it back home on the plane, though.
April 7, 2018
Discovery Of The Week (8)
You never know what you might find when you go rooting around.
Tracy Wood and her father, Brian Russell, were digging out the rockery of their garden in Guernsey when they struck metal. After some further patient excavation work, they unearthed a chassis, engine block, front bumper, window frames and other automotive parts which have since been established as belonging to a Daimler dating from the 1940s or 1950s.
Quite how it got there is unclear but the most popular theory is that the previous owner of the house started to do the car up, got bored with it and put a rockery over it to hide it, as you do.
Brian is looking for someone to cart it all away.
Still, this find is not as valuable as that made by Robert Warren as he was rooting around a cupboard in the Hoyt Sherman Place art gallery in Des Moines, Iowa in 2016, on the search for a couple of Civil War flags, as you do.
Wedged between a table and a plaster wall he came across a wood panel painting, water stained and badly damaged. Now it has been cleaned up and restored – a job that took four months – it turns out to be Apollo and Venus by the Flemish painter, Otto van Veen, conservatively valued at $4 million.
It seems that the painting was donated to the Des Moines Women’s Club in 1923 but the subject matter, a naked cherub and Venus de Milo’s unclothed posterior, may have been too racy for the good folk of Des Moines and so it was hidden away.
April 6, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (174)?…
Teetotal
Don’t worry, I haven’t signed the pledge but I was musing over teetotal, the description for complete abstinence from alcohol the other day, and realised I hadn’t a clue where it came from. So, with a glass of vino by my side, I decided to find out.
The standard textbook answer, and a tombstone testifies to the story, is that it was the brainchild of one Richard Turner, an illiterate fish hawker. In 1832, half-cut he attended a local temperance meeting in the Lancashire town of Preston, as you do. He was so impressed with what he heard, he signed up and, indeed, was one of the founding Seven Men of Preston who advocated total abstinence, not just foregoing spirits. In a tub-thumping speech he delivered to a meeting in September 1833, Turner is reported to have said, “nothing but the tee-total would do.” Whether he had a stutter, as some of his opponents claimed, or whether in his fervour he added a t at the beginning of the word as an intensifier is unclear but the word caught on in temperance circles. The Preston Temperance Advertiser attributed the neologism to Turner and when he died in 1846, his tombstone recorded his gift to the English language.
Charming as this story is, I can’t help there is a touch of H L Mencken and the bathtub about it. My problem is that there was an adverb, tee-totally, in popular usage before Turner got on his steady hind legs. The first example to support this argument is to be found in the Chester Chronicle of 7th September 1810. There we find the correspondent reporting; “Mr Plane said, he differed tee-totally from the attorney in his last assertion.” The Irish newspaper, the Waterford Chronicle, reported on 23rd February 1828; “They should put one into Parliament that would put down the Corporation tee totally..” The Dublin Evening Post of 27th November 1832 reports verbatim a speech in which the orator said, “therefore it is that I pronounce it to be tee totally impossible to procure an honest man in the Corporation.”
That it was used in colloquial Irish speech is evidenced in this verbatim description of a dust-up, reported by the Limerick Evening Post of 30th November 1832; “in which I received this black eye, and had the skirts reefed tee totally off the cover-me-decently..” And we come across the word as an adjective rather than an adverb in the 17th September 1832 edition of Saunder’s News-Letter, a Dublin periodical; “I know every bird that comes to the coast, and this is a tee-total stranger.” Just four years later, tee-totally made an appearance in the Nova Scotian writer, Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker, where he wrote; “I hope I may be tee-totally ruinated, if I’d take eight hundred dollars from him.”
So what are we to make of all this? Many of the examples cited predate Turner’s supposed usage and suggest that teetotal and teetotally were part of colloquial speech, particularly amongst the Irish, around that time. Teetotally means completely and utterly and was used in a range of contexts without any specific or even vague reference to alcohol. Turner may have been the first to use the word in the context of the temperance movement and the added emphasis given to the word by the intensifier tee would have perhaps suited his rhetorical style but it is clear that he didn’t invent it. Perhaps more relevant is the fact that it was used in the proceedings of the Irish Trades’ Political Union in late 1832 of which northern working men, whether literate or not, would have been aware.
Sorry to pour a bucket of cold stout over a charming story.
April 5, 2018
Some People Are So Poor All They Have Is Money – Part Two
A temple in the clouds
It is easy to get templed out on an extensive tour around the south of India.
As a confirmed agnostic I find Hinduism no more appealing than any other religion on offer, although its chaotic brand of polytheism – there is a god to suit every situation – and the lack of a formal timetable for religious observance does make it seem more of a way of life than a strict religion. On the other hand, it is socially conservative and too much power invested in the hands of priests can never be a good thing. And the prospect of doing without beef is too much to contemplate.
But from an architectural standpoint, I did find that I got a very good sense of the development of what is known as the Dravidian style of architecture, the temples being dramatically different in design and appearance from others to be found in other parts of the sub-continent. Indeed, the southern Indians claim to have a different ancestry – more directly from Africa – from their fairer skinned Indo-Aryan brothers up north, whom one dismissively referred to as Afghan invaders.
The starting point chronologically, if not on our itinerary, was the breath-taking Mahabalipuram on the Coromandel coast, about 60 km south of Chennai. Here are to be found the Pallava cave temples which are reputed to be amongst the oldest surviving specimens of Dravidian architecture. Essentially, they consist of mandapas or verandahs with rows of pillars bearing lions at their foot, the symbol of the Pallavan dynasty. The walls have carved depictions of scenes from Hindu mythology, the standout items for me was the Krishna Mandapa with the eponymous god holding up a hill to protect his people from the torrential rains and the astonishing Descent of the Ganges. There is evidence that some of the carvings were decorated.
Further along are the five structures that make up the Pancha Rathas, each meticulously carved out of a single enormous slab of granite, built around the second half of the 7th century CE. Each structure takes the form of a chariot – ratha – and it is mindboggling to think of the time and effort that went on to create these structures from an enormous rock. Slightly unfortunately, the untimely death of Narasimhavarman the First meant that these structures were never consecrated. Be that as it may there is nothing quite like them anywhere else in India.
Standing precariously by the shoreline is the slightly later Shore Temple, built in the early 8th century CE from blocks of granite, hauled from a nearby quarry. A pyramid structure that stands some 60 feet high it faces east and the sun’s early morning rays shine directly on to the Shiva Linga, the shrine to the main deity.
The biggest temple we visited was the Meenakshi temple that occupied the centre of old Madurai. It had five gateways and enormous Vimana or pyramidic structures, decorated with thousands of stucco carvings, each gaudily painted. The interior was almost like a cathedral and reminded me of the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, with its separate shrines. It came with its own temple elephant who in return for a note which it took up in its trunk would pat you on your head.
The Kapaleeshwar Temple in Chennai was another favourite, built, supposedly, on the site of an original Pallavan temple dating from the seventh century CE, but the present manifestation was started in the 16th century. It had two enormous gopura, gatehouses, the larger of which stands 40 metres high and was built as recently as 1906.
And here I saw a guy wearing a tee-shirt which provided the strap line to this series. You only get profundity like this in India!
April 4, 2018
Book Corner – April 2018 (1)
Ancient Worlds: An Epic History of East and West – Michael Scott
There is a tendency, at least here in the West, to view ancient history as being principally about the Greeks and the Romans. After all, their achievements had some resonance in the Victorian mind with the British Empire, bringing the so-called benefits of (ahem) civilization to underdeveloped parts of the globe and the concept of democracy. Rightly, modern historiography seeks to bring to the attention of the general reader and student what was going on in more far-flung parts of the world such as the Indian sub-continent and what we now know as China at around the same time. This is Michael Scott’s attempt.
Scott takes three significant dates and tries to establish a connection between what was going on in the Mediterranean basin and the East. Firstly, he picks out 508 BCE which is when the seeds of what became the Athenian democracy were sown, when the structure of the Roman republic was established and when, in China, Confucius was at the height of his influence. Then we move to 218 BCE and the titanic struggle between Rome and Carthage, Hannibal et al, and when China and India saw empires emerging from periods of bloody and brutal internecine strife. The third significant date in Scott’s thesis is 312 CE when Constantine converted to Christianity (if he really did) and when Buddhism and Hinduism became the dominant religions in their respective territories.
The book is a very agreeable read and Scott displays his intellectual prowess in an engaging fashion, although there are too many recaps and repetitions for my taste. There are many interesting parallels in development in different parts of the globe which Scott points out and he is persuasive that there was much more interconnectivity between three worlds than we might have thought hitherto. Having tramped around southern India I was aware of the trading reach of the Greeks and Romans and silks and ceramics from the Orient were prized in the Roman Empire. Peter Frankopan in the Silk Roads has already argued persuasively, in my view, that the trade routes running from East to West were a sort of information super highway along which ideas as well as artefacts moved from one culture to another.
What troubles me and Scott doesn’t establish conclusively is whether these contemporaneous developments were just the result of happenstance or whether there was really a meaningful exchange of theories and influences. After all, as Scott admits, there is no real evidence to suggest that the Greeks and Romans were aware of what was out there in the east until the 4th century BCE so that pretty much defeats his argument in respect of political developments. It may be that in settled communities, however defined, there is a natural tendency to structure governance, religious thought and warfare that seems to best suit the circumstances at the time. No more or no less.
If we start to look for bigger pictures and greater connectivity than might otherwise have been there, we end up with a reductio ad absurdum that there is one controlling entity that structures the affairs of humans and their communities and we don’t want to go there.
Scott’s book is thought-provoking and taught me much I didn’t know about the development of Hinduism and Buddhism. I enjoyed the first part the most, perhaps because I was more familiar with the period. But as for Scott’s overriding thesis, I think the jury is out. If I was sitting in the agora of Athens I would cast my psephos against it.
April 2, 2018
There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part Seventy Nine
Cecilia Payne (1900 – 1979)
The stars I see twinkling at night on the few occasions they are not hidden by clouds are a constant source of wonderment to me. Those of a more enquiring mind might wonder what they are made of and a few, a very few, would take the trouble to find out. One such is the latest inductee into our illustrious Hall of Fame, the British-born astronomer and astrophysicist, Cecilia Payne.
But her contribution to our understanding of stars which should have assured her a stellar career was for decades hidden under the penumbra of male chauvinism that pertained in the groves of academe at the time. Cecilia was a bit of a brain-box and read botany, physics and chemistry at Newnham College in Cambridge in the early 1920s but she did not get a degree as the University only started awarding them to the fairer sex in 1948. She did, however, listen to a lecture by Arthur Eddington which sparked her nascent interest in astronomy.
Winning a scholarship, Cecilia moved to the United States in 1923 and enrolled in the graduate programme run by Harvard College Observatory, specifically established to encourage women to study there. She was encouraged to write a doctoral dissertation and in 1925 Cecilia became the first woman to receive a PhD from Radcliffe College, which is now part of Harvard, for her dissertation, entitled A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars.
And some contribution, it was too.
I will not bore you with the details – the precise findings and analytical processes that she used go way above my head – but in essence Cecilia concluded that whilst the stars shared the same elements to be found in the Earth, hydrogen, by a factor of one million, and to a degree helium was the most abundant element in stars and by extension the Universe. Later astronomers were to call her work “undoubtedly the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy”. But Cecilia’s problem was that she had made her discovery in 1925 and it flew against the then received wisdom that the composition of sun and the stars was no different from that of the Earth.
The villain of the piece, Henry Norris Russell of Princeton University, now enters our story. He was assigned the task of reviewing Cecilia’s dissertation. Because the findings were contrary to the commonly accepted theories he declared them “clearly impossible” and Cecilia, bowing to the pressure exerted by the eminent professor, amended her conclusions and stated that the calculated abundances of hydrogen and helium were “almost certainly not real.”
But something about Payne’s conclusions intrigued Russell and he conducted his own investigations, concluding four years later in 1929, in a short paper, that the principal constituent of the sun and starts was hydrogen. Russell magnanimously acknowledged Payne’s contribution but in popular and academic circles he was recognised as the person who established this ground-breaking fact.
Cecilia spent most of her career studying stars but was forced by the conventions of the time to accept low paid, low grade academic positions. It was only in 1956 that she was able to break through the glass ceiling when she was appointed a professor at Harvard.
To add to the irony, Cecilia was awarded the Henry Norris Russell Prize for her contributions to astronomy in 1976. She was typically phlegmatic, commenting at the time, “the reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something.”
For discovering the composition of the sun and stars and being ignored, Cecilia, you are a worthy inductee into our Hall of Fame.
If you enjoyed this, why not try Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone which is now available on Amazon in Kindle format and paperback. For details follow the link https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=fifty+clever+bastards
For more enquiring minds, try Fifty Curious Questions by Martin Fone
April 1, 2018
Sporting Event Of The Week (11)
My attention was diverted, albeit briefly, last Saturday by the ninth annual Varsity Goat Race, held at Spitalfields City Farm in London’s E1.
Two pygmy goats, Hamish and Hugo, sported the favours of the the two ancient universities, the former representing Oxford and the latter Cambridge, lockeinghorns before a sizeable crowd. There was even a bookmaker, Billy Hill (natch), on site for those who fancied a flutter, and the crowd was warmed up with live music.
Unlike that sporting relic of the distant past, the Boat Race, where Cambridge romped to victory, Hamish stormed into an unassailable lead, winning the coveted prize for the other University.
A good time was had by all, I kid you not. And I have no reports that there was a warming stew served after the contest.
A race of an altogether different sort is being planned by conservationists in New Zealand to raise funds for the endangered bird, the stitchbird or hihi. If they are unsuccessful, it will doubtless be known as the bibi.
For what is being known as the Great Hihi Sperm Race they have collected sperm from male birds from four different colonies and punters are invited to place a ten dollar bet on which of the 128 sperm samples swims the fastest. Winning punters will receive prized donated by sponsors.
For anyone interested there is a form guide, describing the attributes of each of the sperm donors. Quite what that will tell you about the speed of their sperm is anybody’s guess.
Still it has raised the profile of the bird’s plight and got my attention.
March 31, 2018
Innovation Of The Week (5)
A soggy burger is a first world problem if there ever was one.
But it may soon become a thing of the past, if an innovation I came across this week takes off.
American based Emily Williams, co-founder of Bo’s Fine Foods, has come up with a dry version of the condiment that is tomato ketchup that people will insist on slapping on their food.
She stumbled across the idea when she eschewed the normal method of making ketchups and condiments which entails braising vegetables and then throwing them away. Appalled at the amount of waste the traditional method entails, she chose to mix, grind and dry the vegetables into flat slices, not unlike those horrible slices of processed cheese that are readily available.
Instead of using preservatives and high fructose corn syrup that go into the traditional ketchup, she has used healthier ingredients. This seems to me to be counter-intuitive. No one chooses to eat a burger for its health benefits.
Anyway, the ketchup slices come in a sachet of eight and can be carried around conveniently and don’t need to be kept in the fridge.
Whether it will take off is anyone’s guess but the resourceful Emily is trying to raise some dosh via Kickstarter.
Ketchup in a sachet is messy, for sure, and there seems to be an inexhaustible appetite for the stuff. I had a pre-packed breakfast picnic provided for me in India recently which consisted of a cucumber sandwich, two muffins and a bowl of fruit together with two sachets of liquid tomato ketchup. I couldn’t work out which of the three dishes it was supposed to go with but, in any case, splashing it around in a moving car would have proved problematic. If I only I had had a dry version.
Emily’s idea may be a solution looking for a problem but more power to her elbow, I say.
March 30, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (173)?…
The whole shebang
Often in these etymological excursions I find that a word just seems to spring up into common usage, seemingly from nowhere, and there is little in the way of consensus as to where it came from. One such example is the noun shebang which is used in everyday speech today accompanied by whole and means the whole thing or all of it. But what is a shebang?
The word first appeared in print in America in the 1860s and already had assumed two slightly separate connotations. The poet Walt Whitman, writing in his Journal entry for the period 23rd to 31st December 1862 and describing the appalling conditions of the survivors of the battle of Fredericksburg, described “their shebang enclosures of bushes.” Given their parlous state, these shelters could have only been temporary shelters from the elements.
Contemporaneously, the Annual Report of the US Department of Justice for 1862, noted near a particular reservation; “an inn or shebang is established, ostensibly for the entertainment of travellers, but almost universally used as a den for supplying liquor to Indians.” The link to an establishment serving alcohol has suggested to many that its origin is to be found in the Irish noun shebeen which was used to describe an unlicensed and often disreputable drinking den, often run by women. The Irish word sibin meant illicit whiskey and in turn came from seibe which meant a mugful. That there were many migrants from Ireland flooding into the States around that time is indisputable and about the only things they had to bring with them was their language and traditions.
But almost at the same time the word had taken a broader meaning as shown by Samuel Bowles’ helpful definition in Across the Continent, published in 1865. Shebang is described as being “any kind of an establishment, store, house, shop [or] shanty.” These were more substantial structures than the bivouacs of the survivors of Civil War battles but only just and the word was probably used to describe any mean or rough and ready building. This meaning is not at odds with the drinking shack – it just has a broader connotation. As the Marysville Tribune of November 1869 revealed in its list of The Idioms of Our New West, published in March 1869. “shebang is applied to any sort of house or office.”
By the time Mark Twain got to use it in Roughing It, published in 1872, its meaning had changed once again, this time to describe a vehicle. “You’re welcome to ride here as long as you please, but this shebang’s chartered..” This vehicular sense has led some to consider it as a variant or corruption of char-a-bancs, the French term used to describe a vehicle with benches as seats which was Anglicised by deleting the hyphens. I don’t find this convincing as the two words are quite dissimilar and, anyway, we need only consider it to be another example of the speed at which shebang, once had it had been let loose into the world, accumulated meanings.
That this must be the case is illustrated by its usage in the Sedalia Daily Democrat in June 1872; “Well, the Democracy can flax – this meant to beat up – the whole shebang, and we hope to see our party united.” This is the first recorded usage of the whole shebang and it seems to have its modern sense of the whole thing. The phrase came into its own from the 1920s but it is remarkable to see how its meaning changed so dramatically in the course of ten years. And for what it is worth, I think it owes its origin to shebeen.
