McGoohan’s Blues – sunbathing in the rain

May 28, 2023May 28, 2023Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

All along the ancient wastes the thin reflections spin
That gather all the times and tides at once we love within
That build the edges round the shrouds that cloud the setting sun
And carry us to other days and other days to one
Roy Harper, The Same Old Rock

It must’ve been May 1969. A cold, wet and windy day in Hull, Yorkshire. I’d hitch-hiked from Reading in Berkshire to London and then northwards on the A1 to visit an old school chum in the Humberside port city. And it is there, in a student share house that I first dropped Mescaline, a derivative of peyote, an hallucinogenic psychotropic favoured by Mexican shamans of yore. In our circles, it was prized for its visual and aural delights rather than the more ”head trip”, mood-manipulating and psychologically unpredictable and potentially unsettling lysergic acid. And that evening, headphones on, I first listened to McGoohan’s Blues.

This eighteen minute digression from the concept if not the plot of an iconic if indecipherable ‘sixties’ television series (that’s the featured picture), was the penultimate track on Folkjokeopus, the third album of English folk singer, songwriter and acoustic guitarist extraordinaire Roy Harper. The song was indeed the whole point of Folkjokeopus – its raison d’être- the rest of the album was predominantly light-weight, comedic psychedelia – with the exception of the bleak and bitter but nevertheless captivating “love gone wrong” song She’s The One.

Wikipedia and generic music sites tell us that Folkjokeopus was released in June 1969, but more hip sources reckon it was released on May Day – and my memory concurs with that because Spring sprung as I was hitching homeward, and I revelled in the record all summer long.

Though I’d been going to folk clubs for several years, I’d not heard much of Roy Harper apart from a throwaway hippie-vaudeville track from his second album on The Rock Machine Turns You On, one of the many popular ”sampler” albums of that. The best was CBS’ double album gatefold Fill Your Head With Rock (loosely defined – it included Leonard Cohen and Laura Nyro).

Sunbathing in the rain …

So, there was I, on Humberside in a space “somewhere between Heaven and Woolworths”, to borrow from contemporary Mersey poet Brian Patten, who I was into at the time, listening to a sprawling and bawling, angry, eighteen minute solo acoustic guitar-driven folkie rant against capitalism, consumerism, hedonism, religion, conformity, ignorance, deceit, hypocrisy, the system, the establishment, the plutocracy, the banks, the media, the baubles and bibles, modern life … everything really. You can’t fight the manipulated, oppressive, powerless, pointless and utter futility of it all – as the song unfolds, you start out questioning but you end up obeying.

The singer had indeed become the eponymous Prisoner, trapped in a deceptively bucolic and scenic and yet sinister “village” that is in reality an open-air jail with all attempts at escape foiled. It was in fact filmed in Portmeirion in North Wales, a town that has developed a robust tourist industry on the back of the cult classic.

Roy Harper was twenty eight years of age and already a jaded veteran of the folk-circuit and ad bitter divorcee with heavy personal baggage, a wee son he dotes on and chips on both shoulders (well-balanced, I suppose) raging against the machine. His is a seemingly nihilistic anomie with no direction home, denouncing “the deceit of my friends the betrayals of which I am part …” He sees himself as an outsider, “the festive consumer who end up consumed by the feast, but nevertheless questioning “the rules and the codes and the system that keeps them in chains, which is where they belong with no poems, no love and no brains”.

This is reflected in many of his songs from that era, most particularly those featured on his fifth and to many, his best album, Stormcock, released in May 1971; and this led me then and always to regard him a kind of high priest of Anglo angst.

He had a few more years on the clock than me. I was twenty. A naïf, ingenue, whatever, at the end of the beginning of my journey. I was optimistic, adventurous, devil-may-care, inexperienced with people and their variegated behaviours, untainted by pride and prejudice, and in retrospect unfamiliar with the bitterness and vitriol that he injected into his song. But I guess I “got it”, understood what he was saying to me through those headphones in the sanctum of my “trip” – yeah, that’s where I was at that point in time, for the want of a better description. Though I was aware of what he was preaching, I’d had precious little direct experience – those lessons were down the road apiece, and not that far away either. But that’s another tale … long story short, I was radical when I first heard the song. I remain so half a century hence. And. I still “get it”!

The title of this article, by the way, is taken from an entertaining an informative book by Welsh author Gwyneth Lewis: Sunbathing in the Rain – a cheerful book about depression. This is not to suggest that Roy Harper is actually a depressive – but he’s certainly a master of writing excruciatingly sad, depressing and borderline nihilistic songs and delivering them with an angry, emotional intensity. Having seen him perform live many many times over the following five years, I recall that many times he would deliver rambling and even disjointed introductions and extended soliloquies that taxed his audience’s patience and forbearance. The songs did indeed mirror the man.

Roy in his seventies, still rockin’ in the free world

But, back to Hull and my headphones …

Having ridden the rollercoaster through Roy’s rant for some ten minutes, he imperceptibly segues into a lyrical, calmer (though still edgy) and quieter mood, a dreamy, trippy vision of hope and resilience, suggesting that despite all the difficulties and diversions, the compromises and cop outs that went with being being enveloped, embedded, trapped even, in the system, there is still hope for a better future. And climaxes in a folk-rock coda cum apotheosis.

The band kicked in – and so did the mescaline. In my minds eye, I can still recall the multicoloured images that flashed across bay closed eyelids. Disneyesque “Fantasia” forms of many ebbed and flowed, shape-shifted and morphed with the music and the lyrics. Rivers and rainbows, fairies and fires, sunrise and sunset, galaxies and stars.

Under the toadstool lover down by the dream
Everything flowing over rainbows downstream
Silver the turning water flying away
I’ll come to see you sooner I’m on my way
And there’s a mirror that I’m looking straight through
And I get it
And there’s a doorway that I’m ducking into
To forget it
But flashing just beyond the sky
The shattering midnight gathers
And reminding me behind my mind
The earth quakes, the sun flakes flutter

Over the mountain fairground
Candy flies stay
Under the moonshine fountain
I’m on my way
Lemon tree blossom ladies
Poured my tea
After the blue sky breezes following me
There’s a river that I’m making it with
And I know it
And I’m floating to I don’t care where
I just go it
But flashing just beyond the sky
The shattering midnight gathers
And reminding me behind my mind
The earth quakes, the sun flakes flutter

Daffodil April petal hiding the game
Forests of restless chessmen life is the same
Tides in the sand sun lover watching us dream
Covered in stars and clover rainbows downstream
And the question in the great big underneath is forever
And the fanfare that I’m forcing through my teeth answers “Never”
But flashing just beyond the sky
The shattering midnight gathers
And reminding me behind my mind
The earth quakes, the sun flakes flutter …

But it was not Roy’s way to end on a brighter note. As with all trips, there is often a comedown:

The pumpkin coach and the rags approach
And the wind is devouring the ashes

Words and images such as those McGoohan’s apotheosis were commonplace back in those days, when Marc Bolan could warble “My people were fair, and had sky in their hair, but now they’re content to wear crowns stars on their brows“. We thoroughly understood that and empathized. And we marveled at the Scottish bard who could pen ‘The Minotaur’s Song‘ and ‘Job’s Tears‘, and then run off with Old Father Hubbard. But then didn’t we all in the days when Tolkien was king, and elves and ents walked amongst us. So when Roy went gambolling through toadstools and daffodils, fairgrounds and fountains, that was just the way it was back then in that Middle Earth between Shangri La and the real world that we’d have to re-enter sooner or later – which I did adventurously two years later.

… down through the years

I dropped mescaline and acid many times over the next few months but though I longed to repeat it, never again did I recreate that very first journey. By year’s end, I’d done with both, and by the end of the eighties, was done with dope. But I remember it still over half a century down the road and I still get flashbacks and glimpses of those fantastical images … How does the great song by that Irish band go?

Unicorns and cannonballs, palaces and piers
Trumpets, towers, and tenements, wide oceans full of tears
Flags, rags, ferry boats, scimitars and scarves
Every precious dream and vision underneath the stars
Yes, you climbed on the ladder with the wind in your sails
You came like a comet blazing your trail
Too high, too far, too soon
You saw the whole of the moon …

And what happened next? I graduated, travelled, moved on, and following Roy’s lead, wrote lengthy, opaque songs well over ten minutes long with sonic, narrative and lyrical transitions just like he had done on Folkjokeopus and Stormcock. These include London John and Christopher Columbus in the seventies, and in latter days In That Howling Infinite which gave its name to this blog, an allegorical saga of a Mad Sea Captain and a White Whale , the dystopian E Lucivan le Stelle, and the irreverent O Jerusalem. Roy Harper is eighty one, with some thirty albums under belt. He was still touring in 2019, but is now officially ‘retired’, and living in a secluded corner of Ireland,

The complete lyrics of McGoohan’s Blues follow the song below.

Postscript

I’ve harked back to Roy Harper in several posts in In That Howling Infinite. There’s this https://howlinginfinite.com/2022/03/26/when-the-old-cricketer-leaves-his-crease/ , a eulogy to one of my oldest friends, an avid cricketer who passed last year; and this: Back in the Day https://howlinginfinite.com/back-in-the-day/ , a chronicle of roots and fruits. And for more stories like these in In That Howling Infinite, see Tall Tales, Small Stories, Eulogies and Epiphanies

McGoohan’s Blues

Nicky my child he stands there with the wind in his hair
Wondering whether the water the wind of the where
I fear that someday he might ask me if mine is the blame
And I’ve got no reply save to tell him it’s all just a game
And Heather and I lay together and I was in love
She weighted up the gains and the losses and gave me the shove
The fear of mankind’s untogetherness pounds in my heart
The deceit of my friends the betrayals of which I am part
And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see my two feet standing here questioning

And I’m just a social experiment tailored to size
I’ve tried out the national machine and the welfare surprise
I’m the rich man the poor man the peace man the war man the beast
The festive consumer who ends up consumed in the feast
And my fife eyed promoter is clutching two birds in the bush
He’s a thief he’s as bad as the joker they’re both in the rush
He’s telling me Ghandi was handy and Jesus sold his ring
(Dunno who to, God maybe)
“And everyone knows dat dis dough’s gonna make me de king”

And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see my two feet standing here questioning

Meanwhile the ticket collectors are punching their holes
Into your memories your journeys and into your souls
Your life sentence starts and the judge hands you down a spare wig
Saying: “Get out of that and goodbye old boy have a good gig”
And the town label makers stare down with their gallery eyes
And point with computer stained fingers each time you arise
To the rules and the codes and the system that keeps them in chains
Which is where they belong with no poems no love and no brains

And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see my two feet standing there questioning

Meanwhile the TV commercials are sweeping the day
Brainwashing innocent kids into thinking their way
The wet politicians and clergymen have much to say
Defending desires of the sheep they are leading astray
And Ma’s favourite pop star is forcing a grin he’s a smash
Obliging the soft-headed viewers to act just as flash
The village TV hooks its victims on give away cash
The addicts are numbers who serve to perpetuate trash

And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see my stupid poetry shuffleing

And the bankers and tycoons and hoarders of money and art
Full up with baubles and bibles and full of no heart
Who travel first class on a pleasure excursion to fame
Are the eyes that are guiding society’s ludicrous aim
And the village is making its Sunday collection in church
The church wobbles ‘twixt hell and heaven’s crumbling perch
Unnoticed the money box loudly endorses the shame
As the world that Christ fought is supported by using his name

And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see my stupid poetry burbling

And the pin-striped sardine-cum-magician is packed in his train
Censoring all of the censorship filling his brain
He glares through his armour-plate vision and says “Hmm, insane”
The prisoner is taking his shoes off to walk in the rain
And the luminous green prima donna is sniffing the sky
She daren’t tread the earth that she’s smelling her birth was too high
Her bank balance castle is built on opinion and fear
Which is all she allows within three hundred miles of her ear

And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see my stupid poetry burbling

And I’ve seen all your pedestal values your good and your bad
If you really believe them your passing is going to be hard
And I’ve thought through our thought and I know that its blind silly season
Occurs when our reasoning is trying to fathom a reason
And if you really know it’s all a joke but you’re just putting me on
Well it’s sure a good act that you’ve got ‘cos you never let on
But if all of that supersale overkill world is for real
Well there’s nowhere to go kid so you might as well start to freewheel

And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see my two feet standing there burbling

And I had this dream in here same time as standing awake
These various visions rushed through as I giggled and quaked
The distant guns thunder my end and I duck for a while
Auntie Lily is handing me candy she chuckles I smile
And our village is where I was born and it’s where I will die
And I’ll never be able to leave it whatever I try
The ebb and the flow of the forces of life pass me by
Which is all that I’ll know from my birth to my last gasping sigh

And O how the sea she roars with laughter
And howls with the dancing wind
To see the dying lying there obeying

My age and my time
The blood fire wine and rhyme
That fills my dream reminds me of an atom in a bubble on a wave
That held its breath for one sweet second then was popped and disappeared
Into fruitful futilities meaningless meaning
Meaningless meaning

Under the toadstool lover down by the dream
Everything flowing over rainbows downstream
Silver the turning water flying away
I’ll come to see you sooner I’m on my way
And there’s a mirror that I’m looking straight through
And I get it
And there’s a doorway that I’m ducking into
To forget it
But flashing just beyond the sky the shattering midnight gathers
And reminding me behind my mind the earth quakes the sun flakes flutter

Over the mountain fairground
Candy flies stay
Under the moonshine fountain
I’m on my way
Lemon tree blossom ladies
Poured my tea
After the blue sky breezes following me
There’s a river that I’m making it with
And I know it
And I’m floating to I don’t care where
I just go it
But flashing just beyond the sky the shattering midnight gathers
And reminding me behind my mind the earth quakes the sun flakes flutter

Daffodil April petal hiding the game
Forests of restless chessmen life is the same
Tides in the sand sun lover watching us dream
Covered in stars and clover rainbows downstream
And the question in the great big underneath is forever
And the fanfare that I’m forcing through my teeth answers “Never”
But the flashing just beyond the sky the shattering midnight gathers
And reminding me behind my mind the earth quakes the sun flakes flutter

The pumpkin coach and the rags approach and the wind is devouring the ashes

I am the enemy you killed – Wilfred Owen’s solemn testament

April 23, 2023April 25, 2023Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Poet Wilfred Owen died on 4 November 1918 – seven days before the guns fell silent in the war that people though would end all wars – as it turned out, the Treaty of Versailles became the peace that ended all peace.

That “old Lie,” from which his most famous poem Dulce et Decorum Est takes its title, comes from the Roman poet Horace. No bitter irony was intended, though, as Horace beseeched Romans to embrace the cleansing fire of a noble death.

In a brief article in the e-zine Quillette, titled The End of War Poetry, Simon British stand-up comic, satirist, writer, and broadcaster Simon Evans wrote: “Privately, I still find the idea of young men gladly ploughing themselves back into the earth of their homeland unbearably moving. But after Owen, recreating such an ecstatic embrace of death in the service of a greater cause became as impossible as nailing Christ back onto the cross, or rather, nailing that cross back onto the wall”.

As Evans observes, the First World War at least gave us some of the most cherished and painfully beautiful verse in our history. “Poetry bubbled from the trenches in France as abundantly as methane, oaths, and blisters … [and] central to earlier war poetry was the tension between the terror, devastation, and death on one hand, and the opportunity for virtues like loyalty and honour on the other”.

Contemplating explanations, he writes that a junior officer’s prospects of survival were considerably worse than those of his men. According to one account, as little as six weeks. That might explain the poetry. Such a violently diminished life expectancy must have focused the mind wonderfully. World War Two was—on that score at least—considerably more democratic and egalitarian … By 1939, the culture had shifted for officers and men alike. The practice of soldiers carrying a slim volume of Browning or Keats, and of aspiring to emulate whoever was in their pockets, had passed. In 1914, the available persona of the poet was still vital—or seems so now, in sepia vignette. He was the sensitive man quietly scratching a wet match against sandpaper and putting it to a candle, careful not to wake the slumbering cattle. Ignoring the grotesque shadows that leapt in the dug-out, he would unfold his notebook, its neat ruled lines like trenches in which the words would hunker, later pressed against his breast as a Talisman once returned to his pocket. Working slowly through his exhaustion and his tobacco ration, setting down his impressions in bottled ink, striving with purpose to resolve the lunacy and the oceans of spilt blood just a few dark yards away”.

Second lieutenant Wilfred Owen, 25 years of age, was one of the last to die in a war that claimed 20 million dead and 20 million injured. At least for the past half-century, his poems have served as a prism through which the so-called Great War is viewed. But, despite being anthologised by his friend Siegfried Sassoon in 1920 and Edmund Blunden a decade later, they did not enter popular parlance until pacifist composer Benjamin Britten incorporated some of Owen’s most potent verses in his War Requiem, written for the 1962 inauguration of the restored Coventry Cathedral

Gassed, John Singer Sargent 1919

Owen entered Britain’s national curriculum during the 1960s, and eventually the high school curricula of Commonwealth nations, which is where I first encountered him – and I was shocked by his visceral descriptions and implicit denunciations of war. He did not dwell on the causes but seemed to suggest that the sheer awfulness of military conflict between nations had stripped away all justifications.

“There had been many wars before, of course, but none where the poet was the soldier and, therefore, the intimate witness. This war was the rendering of wounds, both flesh and spiritual, by words”.

We republish below two excellent articles on Wilfred Owen and the poets of the First World War.

Othe posts in In That Howling Infinite: Dulce et Decorum est – the death of Wilfred Owen. A Son Goes To War – the grief of Rudyard Kipling and November 1918 – the counterfeit peace

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Sacrifice -Rayner Hoff, Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney

War poet Wilfred Owen: sweet and honourable lie

Artwork: Sturt Krygsman.

Mahir Ali, Weekend Australian, 10th November 2018

During a visit to London in 1920, Bengali poet, philosopher and polemicist Rabindranath Tagore received an unexpected letter from a Mrs Susan Owen. She wished to share some information about her favourite son.

“It is nearly two years ago, that my dear eldest son went out to the War for the last time,” she wrote, “and the day he said Goodbye to me … my poet son said these wonderful words of yours … ‘when I leave, let these be my parting words: what my eyes have seen, what my life received, are unsurpassable’. And when his pocket book came back to me — I found these words written in his dear writing — with your name beneath.”

Tagore was something of a celebrity in Britain at the time, a white-bearded Indian sage who bore a resemblance to the then recently deceased Leo Tolstoy. He had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 on the strength, essentially, of Gitanjali, a collection of poetry he had translated from the original Bengali with the assistance of William Butler Yeats, which is the source for the aphorism that appealed to Owen’s son. That son, Wilfred, is likely to have perceived rather differently from Tagore the context of what each of them considered “unsurpassable”.

It is equally likely that the young Englishman was unfamiliar with Tagore’s thought-provoking critique of nationalism as well as the poem, composed on the last day of the 19th century, that demonstrates a remarkable prescience about the maelstrom that sneaked up on Europe shortly afterwards:

The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance The hungry self of Nation shall burst in a violence of fury from its own shameless feeding For it has made the world its food …

A plate from <i>Poems by Wilfred Owen </i>(1920).

A plate from Poems by Wilfred Owen (1920)

Wilfred Owen’s final foray into that maelstrom came in August 1918. He won a Military Cross shortly afterwards. But while the Armistice Day bells pealed on November 11, his family received a telegram informing them that Wilfred had been killed a week earlier — 100 years ago last Sunday — while leading the men under his command across the Sambre-Oise canal at Ors.

The second lieutenant was 25, his longevity abbreviated by a year even in comparison with the life span of his favourite predecessor poet, John Keats.

Unlike all too many of his contemporaries, though, Owen did not exactly die in vain. At least for the past half-century, his poems have served as a prism through which the so-called Great War is viewed. But, despite being anthologised by his friend Siegfried Sassoon in 1920 and Edmund Blunden a decade later, they did not enter popular parlance until pacifist composer Benjamin Britten incorporated some of Owen’s most potent verses in his War Requiem, written for the 1962 inauguration of the restored Coventry Cathedral.

Coincidentally, about the same time, a fellow composer appropriated a contemporary young poet’s verses as the centrepiece of his 13th symphony: Dmitri Shostakovich immortalised Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar, which catapults from a reflection on an egregiously atrocious component of the Judeocide that accompanied World War II into a searing condemnation of anti-Semitism. It also serves as a reminder that the “war to end all wars” not only did nothing of the kind but in fact sowed the seeds for an even more outrageous bloodbath.

Owen entered Britain’s national curriculum during the 1960s, and eventually the curricula of Commonwealth nations, which is where I first encountered him and was blown away by his visceral descriptions and implicit denunciations of war. He did not dwell on the causes but seemed to suggest that the sheer awfulness of military conflict between nations stripped away all justifications.

The alliteration and onomatopoeia of the sonnet Anthem for Doomed Youth made a powerful impression, but so did the realisation that “those who die as cattle” were by no means restricted to Gallipoli or the Somme, and that “the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle” continued to “patter out” all too many “hasty orisons”.

Dulce et Decorum Est stands out not only for nailing Horace’s destructive untruth about the value of patriotic sacrifice but also because gas attacks against unsuspecting victims remain par for the course on Middle Eastern battlefields — notably in Syria, where chlorine, used to such devastating effect in World War I, continues to serve as a favourite weapon for the Assad regime and some of its opponents.

Owen pictured a gas attack on a retreating column of comrades in which just one fails to fit “the clumsy (helmet) just in time”. “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning,” he declares, comparing the soldier’s “hanging face” to “the devil’s sick of sin”, before going in for the kill, so to speak:

The Latin translates as “it is sweet and honourable to die for one’s country”, and Owen’s oeuvre offers incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.

He goes much further in Futility, whose title has been cited by scholars as a key to framing contemporary conceptions of the conflict. Yet in this poem Owen is questioning not just the war but the very point of life on earth. Again, it’s based on a single casualty, a human being the sun can no longer manage to revive after having roused it for so many years. “Was it for this the clay grew tall?” the poet asks: “O what made fatuous sunbeams toil / To break earth’s sleep at all?”

Then there’s Strange Meeting, a reinforcement of the trope whereby warriors in the battlefield come up against a foe who is a doppelganger, as in Bob Dylan’s relatively obscure early song John Brown, where the narrator informs his mother: “But the thing that scared me most was when my enemy came close / And I saw that his face looked just like mine.” In Owen’s case, the resemblance is not physical but spiritual, in a poem replete with the half-rhymes that distinguished his style; groined/groaned, moan/mourn, spoiled/spilled, mystery/mastery and so on.

He escapes “down some profound dull tunnel” to a “sullen hall”, and by the “dead smile” of an inmate who greets him “with piteous recognition in fixed eyes” knows that “we stood in Hell”. Back in the day, those social democrats (synonymous at the time with socialists and communists) who had not fallen into the patriotic trap tended to describe a bayonet as “a weapon with a worker at both ends”. Owen sees a blade with a poet at both ends: “Whatever hope is yours, / Was my life also,” his new acquaintance tells him. “I went hunting wild / After the wildest beauty in the world … For by my glee might many men have laughed, / And of my weeping something had been left, / Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, / The pity of war, the pity war distilled.” The poem concludes thus:

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now …

In The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, meanwhile, Owen subverts a key narrative from the Old Testament to formulate his angst. An angel intervenes as Abraham prepares to murder his firstborn, Isaac, and offers a ram instead. “But the old man would not so, but slew his son / And half the seed of Europe one by one.” It’s unlikely he would have quarrelled with American “singer-journalist” Phil Ochs’s declaration almost a half-century later: “It’s always the old to lead us to the war / It’s always the young to fall / Now look at all we’ve won with the sabre and the gun / Tell me is it worth it all …”

It wasn’t, of course, just the seed of Europe that perished in the early 20th-century carnage. We never cease to be reminded how Australia answered the call — and paid proportionately a higher price than any other country in what purportedly served as a nation-building cull. Its effort was voluntary, a precursor to almost every Western-waged war through the 20th century and beyond — from Korea to Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq — to which our nation has contributed its young blood, chiefly as a means of ingratiating itself with its imperial “protectors”, and partly by regurgitating “the old Lie”.

But plenty of countries that were still colonies in 1914 also contributed their spawn — a million men in India’s case, as reflected in Trench Brothers, a play premiered in Brighton a couple of weeks ago. Besides, the Ottoman Empire was a participant, on Germany’s side, in the Great War, so substantial parts of the Middle East were not immune to the conflict. And the war’s last shots were fired in southern Africa, where the imperial urge had drawn several European nations, including Britain and Germany.

Owen wasn’t a conscientious objector by nature. As a Shropshire lad he was deeply religious, to the extent that initially the liturgy trumped his second love, poetry, and for a time he was expected to join the clergy. But better sense prevailed, and he was teaching in France when the war broke out. He returned home, joined up and underwent training, but wasn’t cast into the cauldron until January 1917. He was back home by midsummer, after having been blown out of a trench into a well. He recuperated at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh, a facility for the shell-shocked, or those with what today would be designated as post-traumatic stress disorder.

It was there that he encountered Sassoon, an army captain who had been dispatched partly as means of silencing his increasingly trenchant anti-war propaganda.

Owen was familiar with the poetry of Sassoon, who was six years older, and tentatively approached him for an autograph before sharing his own efforts at wartime verse. In response, Sassoon combined constructive criticism with a great deal of encouragement, and soon enough the pent-up poems began pouring out of Owen.

Almost all of his best-known poems surfaced during the year or so between then and his demise, most of them emotions recollected during the relative tranquillity of sojourns in his homeland. Among the first was The Send-Off, in which he compares soldiers on an outward bound train, their “faces grimly gay”, with “wrongs hushed-up”. He goes on to ask: “Shall they return to beating of great bells / In wild train-loads? / A few, a few, to few for drums and yells, // May creep back, silent, to village wells, / Up half-known roads.”

In Exposure, we encounter frozen corpses as: “The burying-party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp, / Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice, / But nothing happens.” In Mental Cases, there is the devastating verse: “Surely we have perished/ Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?”

In a draft preface to a planned 1919 collection of his verse, Owen wrote: “Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry. The subject of it is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All the poet can do to-day is to warn.’’

Less than 30 years later, Wilfred Burchett, the Australian who became the first Western journalist to witness the devastation of Hiroshima, prefaced his account with the words: “I write this as a warning to the world.”

Unheeded warnings remain one of the driving forces of history’s chariot wheels, clogged as they are with much blood, but who can sensibly argue that they ought not to have been articulated? Who can say when we will ever learn, but it’s unlikely Owen would have disputed his contemporary Robert Graves’s reflection on November 11, 1918:

When the days of rejoicing are over,
When the flags are stowed safely away,
They will dream of another ‘War to end Wars’
And another wild Armistice Day

Poets in action: How writers captured the horrors of the Great War

Warwick McFadyen, Sydney Morning Herald 2nd November 2018

One hundred years ago today, Wilfred Owen, poet and soldier, had 24 hours to live. On November 4, 1918, Owen and his men were trying to cross a canal near Ors in France. As Owen was walking among his men, offering encouragement, German machine guns burst into action. Owen fell. He was one of the last to die in a war that claimed 20 million dead and 20 million injured. He was promoted to lieutenant the next day.

In the cruellest twist, Owen’s mother in Shrewsbury received the telegram of his death on November 11, Armistice Day, as the bells were ringing for peace.

A generation of young men marched to the front in World War I, often singing and with cheerful abandon, at least in the beginning, to be slaughtered.

Poetry would mourn the loss of a singular talent, whose star was just beginning to light the sky. Owen had seen but a handful of his poems in print before his death, aged 25. He had written all we have, in little more than 12 months, from August 1917.

The first collection, edited by Siegfried Sassoon, was published in 1920, and then in 1931 appeared an expanded collection. In the latter edition, editor Edmund Blunden wrote that Owen “was a poet without classifications of war and peace. Had he lived, his humanity would have continued to encounter great and moving themes, the painful sometimes, sometimes the beautiful, and his art would have matched his vision.”

Wilfred Owen had seen but a handful of his poems in print before his death, aged 25.

Apart from what are regarded as classics such as Anthem for Doomed Youth and Dulce Et Decorum Est, it is Owen’s preface to the collection that is as famous as the poems: “Above all I am not concerned with Poetry/ My subject is War, and the pity of War/ The Poetry is in the pity/ Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory/ They may be to the next/ All a poet can do today is warn/ That is why the true Poets must be truthful.”

The First World War was a charnel house. A generation of young men marched to the front, often singing and with cheerful abandon, at least in the beginning, to be slaughtered. Poetry, unlike any time before or since, was the vehicle for their voices and those of bystanders. At first, it was celebratory, but as the days of carnage rolled on and on, truth came to be heard.

There had been many wars before, of course, but none where the poet was the soldier and, therefore, the intimate witness. This war was the rendering of wounds, both flesh and spiritual, by words.

Robert Giddings, in The War Poets, writes that “before 1914, when poets dealt with war it was to render it exotically or historically removed from immediate experience. War, in the hands of Macaulay, Tennyson, Arnold, Newboult and Aytoun, had all the conviction of modern television costume drama. There were two outstanding exceptions – Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy.”

<i>Anthem for Doomed Youth</I> by Wilfred Owen is regarded as a classic. — *Anthem for Doomed Youth, World Archive*

The primacy of the poet in people’s lives a century ago can be seen in the immediate bringing into action of writers to support war aims. On September 2, 1914, only five weeks after war was declared, The Times, published a letter from the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, in which he likened the good soldiers of empire fighting the Devil. The image of the soldier as Christ was popular in these early stages, as was the theory that war was a necessary purification of nations. The government’s Propaganda Bureau enlisted writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle and G.K. Chesterton to promote Britain’s war aims. It took the pre-eminent war poet Sassoon to use the figure of Christ in a heightened awareness of spirit, flesh and suffering that had nothing to do with patriotism.

Professor Tim Kendall, in Poetry of the First World War, writes that during the war “poetry became established as the barometer for the nation’s values: the greater the civilisation, the greater its poetic heritage”. He believes that the “close identification of war poetry with a British national character persists to the present day”.

Siegfried Sassoon was among the poets who showed that there was art in death and suffering. — Siegfried Sassoon

As to Australia’s war effort in poetry, despite more than 415,000 men enlisting (from a population of fewer than 5 million) with 60,000 killed and more than 150,000 injured or taken prisoner, the results hardly trouble the margins of anthologies.

As Geoff Page noted in Shadows from Fire: Poems and Photographs of Australians in the Great War, the literary efforts of those Australians with direct experience in the war were less than memorable. His intention with the book was to juxtapose recent poems “with Australians poems actually written during the conflict”.

“On closer examination, however, I found the quality of these latter poems to be depressingly low – especially when contrasted with those of the English war poets: Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg . . . It rapidly became apparent that a much more appropriate and powerful record of the conflict could be found among the contemporary photographs held by the Australian War Memorial. These speak with a directness and truth seldom attempted, at that time, by our poets.”

By the end of 1914, two anthologies of wartime verse had been published. Many poets in the early years were no more than writers of patriotic doggerel. The Georgian movement, of pastoral whimsy, and gentle beauty, had found a cause in which to celebrate England. The modernism that had slowly been growing in Europe had not permeated English literary minds, but in the aftermath of the war it blossomed, seen no more so than in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922.

Dominic Hibberd and John Onions, in their book The Winter of the World, cite the work of historian Catherine Reilly in which she records 2225 British writers who experienced the war, and published poems of their experience. A quarter of the writers were women. By contrast Westminster Abbey honours 16 poets of WWI, all men: Richard Aldington, Laurence Binyon, Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke (“If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England”), Wilfred Gibson, Robert Graves, Julian Grenfell, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Robert Nichols, Owen, Sir Herbert Read, Isaac Rosenberg, Sassoon, Charles Sorley and Edward Thomas.

Since suffering and death were universal there were no frontiers in the writing of it, geographically, with Austrian Georg Trakl, German Alfred Lichtenstein, Italian Giuseppe Ungaretti, Canadian John McCrae and Frenchmen Guillaume Apollinaire and Henri Barbusse, or in gender, Edith Sitwell, Margaret Sackville, Alice Meynell and Vera Brittain, whose Testament of Youth is regarded as a masterpiece of the period.

This was the flowering that has not been captured again. The poets of the Second World War do not go much beyond Keith Douglas and Paul Celan.

It seems curious and strange now, but the biggest barricade to the acceptance of the war poets in the immediate years after came from the towering figure of Nobel Laureate W.B. Yeats.

The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935, published in 1936, was edited by Yeats. It contained nothing from the war. Yeats defended his decision thus: “In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made suffering their own. I have rejected these poems . . . passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies, in Greece the tragic chorus danced. If war is necessary, or necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering, as we do the discomforts of fever, remembering our comfort at midnight when our temperature fell.”

Yeats was wrong, comprehensively so. But the glory was that Owen, Sassoon, Thomas, Rosenberg et al showed that there was art in death and suffering. The war poets found in the desolation of France and in the ruined bodies and spirits in hospital wards, a voice transcendent. Theirs was the fundamental expression of what it meant – still means – to be human. And there was a warning, but as history turned, no one was listening.

“Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to death;/ Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,/ Pardoned his spilling mess tins in our hand./ We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,/ Our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe./ He’s spat at us with bullets and he’s coughed/ Shrapnel. We chorused when he sang aloft;/ We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.” (The Next War, Wilfred Owen)

Siegfried Sassoon wrote in his diary of November 11: “The war is ended. It is impossible to realise. I got to London about 6.30 and found masses of people in streets and congested Tubes, all waving flags and making fools of themselves – an outburst of mob patriotism. It was a wretched wet night, and very mild. It is a loathsome ending to the loathsome tragedy of the last four years.”

The Rite Stuff – the coronation’s pomp and circumstance

April 23, 2023May 3, 2023Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

… remember in this country of yours that every man, woman and child who sees you will remember it with joy – remember it in the words of that 17th century poet who wrote these lines, “I did but see her passing by and yet I’ll love her till I die”.
Australian Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies to Queen Elizabeth, Melbourne, 1963.

Watching a coronation is the constitutional equivalent of visiting a zoo, and finding a Triceratops in one of the enclosures.
British historian Tom Holland

The United Kingdom is alone in Europe in marking the accession of a new monarch with a coronation. Indeed, no monarchy can lay claim to a longer lineage – one reaching back it is said to the Bronze Age and rooted in history and religion, and also magic and superstition. Inside Westminster Abbey, audiences will be encouraged to follow six phases of what is essentially a medieval rite, some of it dating back to Anglo-Saxon kingship: the recognition, oath, anointing, investiture (which includes the crowning), enthronement and homage. Britain is indeed the only European monarchy to retain a religious ceremony.

So, anyone expecting that the upcoming coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla would be a thoroughly modern affair suited to the 21st Century is likely to be disappointed.

One significant innovation, however, is that millions of other Commonwealth citizens attending coronation events and watching on television will be asked to cry out and swear allegiance to the King with the public given an active role in the ancient ceremony for the first time in history.

King Charles III’s coronation service – the first for a British monarch in 70 years – has been modernised to include the first-ever Homage of the People and will also include faith leaders from Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and Buddhist communities to better represent the make-up of modern Commonwealth countries. A new homage was written to allow “a chorus of millions of voices” to be “enabled for the first time in history to participate in this solemn and joyful moment”, Lambeth Palace – the office of the Archbishop, announced. The Archbishop of Canterbury will call upon “all persons of goodwill in The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of the other Realms and the Territories to make their homage, in heart and voice, to their undoubted King, defender of all … a great cry around the nation and around the world of support for the King” from those watching on television, online or gathered in the open air at big screens.

…. our strength in ages past

As these two highly entertaining and most informative articles makes clear, whilst the guest list is much shorter than that of past right royal enthronements, in the interests of public health bad safety, we are told. There will be no silk stockings and knee breeches for the King or any of the peerage; the number The length of the ceremony has been shortened, for economy and impatient news cycle. The banquets and street parties have been exhorted to eat quiche, a nod to HM’s vegetarianism. The old times are by no means a’changin’. But, rites and rituals historically and hysterically archaic and arcane will prevail as will the imprimatur of the deity, the unctuous sanction of the demographically diminished Church of England and the rights and privileges of the theoretically hereditary aristocracy are upheld in time-honoured, anachronistic fashion.

The first is written by Australian constitutional expert Anne Twomey who has taken time off from her busy day-job explaining defending the coming referendum on the Indigenous and Torres Strait Island Voice to Parliament. the second, by Observer columnist Catherine Bennett describes the amazing and unforetold apotheosis of soon to be Queen Camilla, Charle’s longtime paramour.

But first, a brief forward from celebrated/celebrity Anglo-Australian barrister and author Geoffrey Robertson. He is no fan of royalty, and is possessed of a sharp pen and a wit to match:

“In London, plans for the coronation of the King and Queen of Australia proceed apace. The ceremony is entirely unnecessary because Charles has been our lawful king from the moment of his mother’s death. This event has no meaning in law; it is merely a superstitious rite whereby God is supposed to anoint the King to run the Church of England, a church to which, according to our last census, only 9.8 per cent of Australians adhere. [Indeed, some 40% of Britain’s profess to having no religion, whilst Christianity accounts for a large diminishing proportion of believers in a celestial deity]

But sadly we will not see the most important bit, the spiritual centre of the ceremony, which the palace has decided must be censored. This is the divine appointment itself. Suddenly, in a Pythonesque moment, into the abbey will rush a team of Knights of the Garter carrying a large tent, which they will erect to cover the King and Queen, the Queen’s hairdresser, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Inside, unseen by the public, the King will change into a white shirt and be anointed with holy oil – on his head, his breast, and his hands – ladled from the coronation spoon. The holy oil has already been mixed in Jerusalem, with the traditional ambergris eliminated reportedly because the King supports “save the whales”.

The Queen is then anointed on her head, and the royal hairdresser steps forward to clean her up. The King quick-changes back into his purple robes, and the divinely appointed monarchs step out of the canopy and back into view for Charles to swear the coronation oath, “to maintain the Protestant Reformed religion and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England”. The King is at last allowed to sit on his throne (it’s only built for one) holding his orb and sceptre, to “receive homage” from the audience. It is uncertain whether Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will manage to swear to be “your liegeman of life and limb and of earthly worship, to live and die against all manner of folks, so help me God”.

Amen!

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/in-a-land-far-far-away-a-silly-ritual-will-hand-us-our-new-king-and-queen-20230426-p5d3c9.html

Meanwhile, down under …

On Saturday, when the Archbishop of Canterbury conducts the coronation at Westminster Abbey, he will not just be crowning Charles as the King of England, but the King of Australia as well – though we Aussies will not be granted a three day holiday for the occasion like our British cousins.

Australians should never underestimate Charles III’s deep emotional connection to this country.

When the late Queen was crowned in 1953, she promised “to govern the peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon, and of [Her] Possessions and the other Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs”. These were the nations which at the time were British dominions, and constituted what is still called “the Realm”, i.e. the countries which recognised the sovereign as their head of state.

The words of the coronation oath that Charles will take are briefer. As there are now 15 Realm nations (of which Australia is one), it has been decided not to list them all individually. His majesty’s promise will be to govern “the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, [His] other Realms and the Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining”.

And thereafter, to reprise, we will be exhorted to pledge homage “in heart and voice, to our undoubted King, defender of all … “

On matters monarchical, read also in In That Howling Infinite, The Crown – the view from Down Under; Beyond Wolf Hall (1) – Revolution Road, Beyond Wolf Hall (2) – Icarus ascending, and Bringing it all back home – the missing mosaic and other ‘stolen’ stuff

Expect arcane pomp during King Charles III’s coronation

Anne Twomey, The Weekend Australian, 22nd April 2023

What can we expect from Charles’ coronation? Picture: AFP

The right to brandish a wand, bear a golden spur or produce a right-handed scarlet glove is more likely to conjure associations with Hogwarts than Westminster Abbey. Yet these rights have been bitterly fought over by British families for centuries, leading to a tense wait for the email summons to fulfil their dynastic destinies at the upcoming coronation.

The Sovereign’s Orb was made from gold in the 17th century. — The Sovereign’s Orb, made from gold in the 17th century.

St Edward’s Crown will be used to crown the King. It was made for King Charles II in 1661, as a replacement for the medieval crown which had been melted down in 1649. — St Edward’s Crown, used to crown the King was made for King Charles II in 1661
to replace the medieval one melted down in 1649 under Oliver Cromwell.

For King Charles III, it will be quite the dilemma. Does he cut out the historical rights and duties of ancient British families to perform particular services at the coronation, such as the King’s Champion, so he can present a modern, relevant monarchy to the world? Or would doing so set the monarchy adrift from the history that justifies its existence?

It seems he is taking a halfway approach, with some of the eccentric pomp and drama surviving, while other roles have been swept away into the dustpan of history.

The golden spurs

One of the most fought-over roles has been to carry the golden spurs and present them to the King, touching them against his ankles.

The gold, leather and velvet spurs symbolise knighthood, and they were altered in 1820 for King George IV. — The gold, leather and velvet spurs symbolise knighthood

Spurs were first presented at the coronation of Richard the Lionheart at Westminster Abbey on September 3, 1189. They symbolised his chivalry and his valour as a knight. John Marshal was accorded the honour of presenting them, and this honour has been passed down to his descendants.

The chronicler of Richard’s coronation recorded that there were “evil omens” at the service, including a bat that swooped around the king during the ceremony and a mysterious pealing of bells. Richard survived another decade until dying from battle wounds in 1199.

But the evil omen may have attached itself to the bearer of the spurs, as his line of descendants was sometimes disrupted, with one heir suffering summary execution after having been accused of sorcery in the 14th century and another being killed in a tournament. Second marriages and failures to produce male heirs resulted in disputes about which branch of the family had inherited its coronation rights.

Queen Elizabeth II on her Coronation Day, 1953 by Cecil Beaton.

In the 19th century, the role was dominated by the redoubtable Barbara, Baroness Grey de Ruthyn, a notable fossil collector and geologist, who carried the spurs with aplomb at the coronations of George IV, William IV and Queen Victoria. But her two marriages and a surfeit of daughters who were co-heirs led to a messy chain of inheritance, with four families fighting for the coronation honour ever since.

These disputes were resolved before each coronation by a court of claims, where barristers armed with large scrolls of family trees would battle it out before eminent judges. In 1902, the court held that none of the three claimants had proved their right to carry the spurs at the coronation of Edward VII, and left it to the king to decide. He diplomatically decided that Baron Grey de Ruthyn could carry one spur and the Earl of Loudoun could carry the other. The same division was applied at the coronation of George V.

But in 1936 the coronation court of claims inconveniently found that three claimants had established their claim – Lord Hastings, the Earl of Loudoun and Lord Churston. King George VI, probably wishing he had three legs, found he could not divide two spurs into three and appointed Lord Hastings and Lord Churston to carry one spur each. The same decision was made in 1953 at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

So who would win the right to carry the golden spurs at the coronation of King Charles III? The elderly Lord Churston died in February and the role instead has gone to Lord Hastings, a retired actor and farmer, along with the Earl of Loudoun, an Australian who lives in Wangaratta in Victoria. Each will carry one of the golden spurs.

As the Earl of Loudoun presents his spur, he might indulge a passing thought about how it could have been him on the throne. Some historians have argued that King Edward IV was illegitimate and that the throne should therefore have been passed down a different line to the current Earl of Loudoun.

But while his family still claims the right to present the golden spurs at the coronation, it does not make any claim to the throne.

Coronation of George IV in Westminster Hall: The Champion's Challenge, 1897. Picture: Print Collector/Getty Images — Coronation of George IV in Westminster Hall: The Champion’s Challenge 1897.

The King’s Champion

If the earl did challenge the King’s right to the throne, he could have to face in mortal combat a retired accountant and farmer, Francis Dymoke, who is the King’s Champion. This role, which he traces back to an ancestor who aided William the Conqueror, is actually attached to the ownership of his family home, the manor of Scrivelsby. Anyone who owns the land is the lord of the manor and is therefore the King’s Champion.

It would be interesting to see how a real estate agent would price this unusual land attribute, but as the Dymoke family has held on to the land for many centuries the role of King’s Champion has remained in the family.

Originally it entailed wearing full armour and riding a horse into the coronation banquet in Westminster Hall. The champion would throw down a gauntlet three times in a challenge to anyone who disputed the king’s title. If the challenge was accepted, there was an obligation to fight to the death. The sight was so impressive, however, that no one ever challenged the champion, although one wonders whether any “sovereign citizens” today might take up the gauntlet.

British Bangladeshis welcome the King and Queen on a visit to Brick Lane in February. Picture: Reuters/The Times — British Bangladeshis welcome the King and Queen on a visit to Brick Lane in February

The greater challenge for the champion was to find a horse that could back out of Westminster Hall without facing its rear-end towards the king, knocking over any tables or defecating over the diners. The last champion to perform this feat at the banquet hired a circus horse that had been trained to walk backwards. But it is claimed that as soon as the horse heard applause from the guests, it assumed it was in the circus and started performing circus tricks, much to the consternation of the man in armour seeking to maintain his balance and the solemnity of the occasion.

As the banquet is no longer held, this picturesque role has ceased. But the King’s Champion was instead given the duty of carrying the Standard of England in the 1937 coronation and the Union Flag at the 1953 coronation.

While the current champion filled in his online form to claim his place, the most recent announcement by the Coronation Claims Office (which replaced the coronation court of claims) made no mention of a role for the King’s Champion. Perhaps the champion’s day is done, or maybe he will get back on the horse.

Queen Camilla. Picture: Imageplotter/Alamy/The Times — Queen Camilla. The Times

The scarlet glove

Another duty that attaches to the ownership of land is to provide a scarlet glove for the King’s right hand and to support his arm while he holds the royal sceptre during the coronation ceremony. This duty attaches to the lord of the manor of Worksop. From the coronation of Charles II, the owner of the land was the Duke of Norfolk, but in 1840 part of the land was sold to the Duke of Newcastle.

There was a dispute about whether he owned the right part of the land to claim the glove duty, but in 1902 the court of claims decided that he did, and the duke’s family fulfilled this role in the coronations of 1902, 1911 and 1937.

But by 1953 the duke had passed ownership of the land to a family company. The court of claims decided that only an individual, as lord of the manor, could provide the glove and support the king’s arm, so the Duke of Newcastle was excluded.

The manor of Worksop was later sold and it is unknown who owns it and whether they have made a claim to exercise their glove duty. If a prominent footballer, Russian oligarch or a pop singer is seen propping up the King’s elbow during the coronation, you will now know why.

Wands

Elizabeth II holds the royal sceptre at her coronation in 1953. Picture: Topical Press Agency/Getty/The Times — Elizabeth II holds the royal sceptre at her coronation in 1953

The most dramatic moment at the end of the funeral rites for Queen Elizabeth II was when the Lord Chamberlain broke his wand of office and placed it on the queen’s coffin as it was interred.

But a coronation marks the beginning of a reign, so there are plenty of wands, rods, batons and sticks on display, including St Edward’s staff.

So far, we know that the Lord High Constable of Scotland, the Earl of Erroll, has won his right to carry a silver baton tipped at each end with gold.

The Sovereign's Sceptre with Cross. — The Sovereign’s Sceptre with Cross.

The Sovereign’s Ring, left, and Queen Consort’s Ring.

The Lord Mayor of London, who traditionally carries the crystal mace, will participate. In addition, the Usher of the White Rod (as distinct from the Usher of the Black Rod, who is a parliamentary officer, and the Ushers of the Green Rod, Scarlet Rod, Blue Rod and Purple Rod who serve the royal household) has been invited to attend.

As for the white wand, it is traditionally wielded by the Lord High Steward of Ireland, but the Coronation Claims Office may have exercised the modern-day equivalent of the disarming spell Expelliarmus, leaving him wandless. We must await the coronation spectacle to find out.

Anne Twomey is a professor emerita at the University of Sydney and a constitutional expert.

As Charles is bestowed with mystical powers, so much for a secular coronation

Catherine Bennett, The Guardian, 16th April 2023

The Church of England is doing its best to turn the new king and queen into latter-day deities

In 1996 more than half of England’s bishops thought Camilla and Charles should never marry. When, in 2005, they did, in a register office, 73% of those polled were opposed to her becoming queen. Although the late queen then denied Camilla the bespoke name checks in Anglican worship enjoyed (until their withdrawal in 1996) by Charles’s first wife, she did enjoy inclusion in regular state prayers for “all the royal family”, followed by her 2022 orison upgrade, one that can still shock unwary congregants out of a spiritual reverie: “Almighty God, the fountain of all goodness, we humbly beseech thee to bless Camilla the Queen Consort.

Now, after a transformation that might in more primitive times have been considered miraculous, the Church of England invites us in its new booklet, Daily Prayers for the Coronation of King Charles III, to celebrate Camilla’s “calling to a life of public service”. Church of Ireland liturgists beseech – or challenge – God, in another Camilla prayer, to “make her an example of virtue and godliness”. If this dismays Diana loyalists unable to forget the rottweiler years, Camilla’s acolytes could reasonably argue that a similar delay in St Augustine’s calling only added to his appeal. There may be hope, yet, for Prince Andrew.

Whatever the final shape of the coronation, traditionalists who fear – as recently reported – that Charles wants some all-faithsy sort of variations on the old template, should surely take heart from the conviction, as testified by feats of prayer-composition alone, with which the Church of England has assumed ownership of the rite. (Not forgetting the king’s probable awareness that a more modest or ecumenical coronation would likely come at considerable cost in Camilla homage.)

While the palace states, vaguely, that the ceremony “will reflect the monarch’s role today”, a letter from the archbishops of Canterbury and York reminds clergy that the ornate enthronement is a religious event: “through it we receive from Jesus”. Though, in a more easily observable transaction, it also receives from the king, in visibly enhanced status, while his mystical authority is, in return, supplied by the clergy in a style that might have verged on the obsequious at the Restoration.

In today’s new coronation prayer we are invited to pray, for example, on behalf of “thy chosen servant Charles our King and Governor”, “that we and all his subjects (duly considering whose authority he hath) may faithfully serve honour and humbly obey him”. A prayer for journalists, in particular, to remember, next time they are denied information on whatever finances he hath concealed.

Repeated arguments for a much edited or secular coronation, citing dwindling Christian belief as well as protagonists less obviously creditable than was Elizabeth in 1953, appear to have dented neither the church’s coronation ambitions nor the palace’s matching enthusiasm for spiritual choreography and knick-knacks. Only the Koh-i-noor has been sacrificed, to be sensitively replaced at the religious ceremony by the largest diamond in the world, the South African Cullinan. With decorative crosses over them, such jewels “remind us”, the prayerbook explains to the untutored, “that Jesus Christ is king over all”.

A royal guide to the “sacred regalia” confidently ignores the possibility that the non-religious, now outnumbering Christians in England and Wales, might find its inventory of treasures, if not absurd, roughly as meaningful as museum labels speculating on the importance of some prehistoric grave-good. Which is not to say that I wouldn’t like my own eagle-shaped chrism-dispenser with convenient removable head; “the oil is poured through an aperture in the beak”.

Non-believers must simply accept that, say, Camilla’s 3ft ivory rod with a dove “symbolic of the Holy Ghost” is too critical to national reverence to allow substitution with a replica more suited to the same nation’s acquired aversion to ivory. That this rod was brand-new on its introduction in 1685 merely underlines, to the devout, the still greater sacredness of an older spoon used in the anointing process. And that this year’s olive oil is literally from the Mount of Olives demonstrates, says the archbishop of Canterbury, “the deep historic link between the Coronation, the Bible and the Holy Land”.

If these links fail to convince younger, more secular, more republican-minded subjects, they may not automatically impress older ones whose presumed pro-Charles tendencies are potentially offset by long memories. Anyone who can recall him, aged 32, smirking “Whatever ‘in love’ means” at the 19-year-old Diana, may think there are worthier objects of prayer. And when did the virtuous Camilla, famously lazy and still a sucker for £735-a-night wellness retreats, start reminding clerics of King Solomon? Or is the deep religious message of the coronation one that the last queen’s conduct helped for so long to obscure: that with heredity in charge, the Church of England is never safe from supreme governance by a future version of Prince Andrew?

Either way, even given the accepted difficulties of picking spiritual leaders, it might have been wise for a church dedicated to the poor to invite fellow professionals to share the responsibility of anointing an irascible billionaire, however docile Charles might currently appear.

No wonder some of the coronation prayers read like a cry for help.

Day 27, “Self-control”: “As we remember the important tasks set before our King, and the challenges he will face, we pray that the fruit of self-control, which informs all our actions and decisions, will give him patience and strength…”

Amen.

Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist

The great outdoors – camping days

February 20, 2023February 22, 2023Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.
Clancy of the Overflow, AB (Banjo) Paterson

Sleeping under the stars, close to nature and exposed to the elements has a timeless allure, whether under canvas or on a bedroll or in a swag. It’s almost atavistic – a harking back to simpler and indeed, primeval days, a retreat albeit temporary from the workaday world and the ties that bind us to it, and a genuine pleasure of the open road.

For those with a drop of vagabond blood in their veins, and the echoes of a gypsy soul, it’s a sure cure for those “summertime blues”!

The Travelling People

Countries where the nomadic life has long been consigned to history and where the sedentary lifestyle is regarded as the civilised norm, individuals and authorities have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a rite of passage, a route to self-improvement. But whilst some camp for leisure and pleasure, for many, it is a economic and social necessity that has often been condemned as uncivilised, unsanitary, indigent, and even criminal – and it has also served as a proxy for disputes about race, class, discrimination and rootlessness.

For centuries, sleeping outside has been embraced or condemned, depending on who’s doing it. A recent book on the history of camping in the US explores what, exactly, camping is, and how the pursuit intersects with protest culture, homelessness, and identity. A excellent review in The New Yorker is republished below.

In some countries that are seeking to modernise rapidly, heavy-handed authorities have endeavoured to curtail the wandering life by regulation and resettlement, at times, by brute force. Recall the sad conclusion to James A Michener’s novel Caravans, set in Afghanistan, and the its movie adaptation, and also British historian Vincent Cronin’s The Last Migration (1957), a account of the Pahlavi shah’s regime’s repression of the Falqani nomads in the name of “progress”. I can’t recommend it enough. It is tragic and beautiful, and authentic in every finely drawn detail, like a Persian miniature on ivory. Closer to our western consciousness and consciences, is the savage repression and dispossession of the Native American and Australian First Nations. It is historically and culturally ironic that a loop-hole in Australian law decreed that camping was permitted on the lawns of Old Parliament House in Canberra, the Australian capital provided no more than twenty tents were erected. So it was that on Australia Day, 26th January 1972, indigenous activists established an Aboriginal Tent Embassy to protest against the the Australian government’s refusal to recognize indigenous land rights. It is there to this day, drawing national attention to unresolved indigenous issues. Read about the Aboriginal Tent Embassy HERE

The early light is breaking
The morning sun is waiting in the sky
And I think I’m gonna break away
And follow where the birds of freedom fly
Caravans, Mike Batt

Aboriginal Tent Embassy 26th January 1972

The big backyard

As a nipper in Birmingham back in the late fifties, we had a very large backyard, with a lawn, apple and pear trees and a huge veggie garden. And one of our pleasures during the few warm months of school summer holidays was to erect a tent on that lawn. My brothers and I would spend our days outdoors, with a picnic and an old wind-up phonogram record player, until ordered in at sundown. We’d always wanted to spend the night there but our folks wouldn’t let us. We never understand why – we were perfectly safe in our own garden, and in our suburban backyard, there were none of the wild things we encounter in the wild. Looking back, I surmised that it had a lot to do with social norms. The folks grew up in rural Ireland, and probably associated camping out with the peregrinating ‘travellers’ who were regarded very much as unsightly and shady – a prejudice that persevered into their new lives in Birmingham. Back then, we had other names for them, for which I’ve been called to order on many a Facebook post.

In those days, “the travellers” would camp with their caravans and lorries on the “waste land” (yes, that what we called it, for reasons that were never explained – there was a lot that was not explained back the but was just taken for granted) that used to be homes and factories before the Luftwaffe destroyed them over ten years before. They had Irish accents, and this created an affinity with these itinerant folk as our parents and relatives were Irish immigrants, and we lived in an Irish world of Irish history, politics and music – as a young teen, I loved Ewan MacColl’s beautiful song Freeborn Man of the Travelling People, and it was the very first folk song I ever sang in public – in a billet in Southall during an Easter CND march.

As teens, we joined the Boy Scouts – where camping was deemed not only acceptable when under the auspices of the institution, but also, character building, and a means to learning resilience, self-reliance, and of acquiring valuable Baden-Powell bushcraft skills. To my folks, this gave camping the tick of respectability. The annual summer camp became a permanent fixture of my early adolescence, with its cooking over fires, washing in cold country streams, and singing jolly scouting songs around a roaring fire of a summer evening (I still remember them, and snatches often pop into my memory unannounced). We’d see parts of our land that few of us had the means to travel to, and experience a rural England that city folk had long lost touch with. On overnight hikes we’d tote our backpacks along country lanes and byways, compass and ordinance survey map in hand, and set up a flimsy tent in an open field when the sun went down. The following hazy pictures were taken at a combined South Birmingham troop scout camp in Echternach, Luxembourg, on the German border. We were an eclectic crew – it even included a trio of Sea Scouts (incongruous as Birmingham was a long way from the sea). Of its time – nowadays, such a group shot would be so much more cosmopolitan. That’s me, arms folded.

Echternach Scout Camp, August 1963

As I grew to manhood – and outgrew scouting, I remained accustomed to sleeping out. At music festivals in rural England in the late sixties, it was a given that we would bed down on site come all weather – as the lovely pictures of the retro-medieval fayres provided by my good friend Charles Tyler show (Charles in the lad with the guitar in the featured photograph). I would often sleep on the side of the road when hitchhiking throughout the land. I’ve slept under the stars in England and Scotland, in Greece and Yugoslavia, Syria and Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

I’ve awoken covered in snow near the Culloden battlefield outside Inverness; been moved on by Yugoslav police when I’d mistakenly turned in for the night next to a military base outside Niš; settled down in a shabby park by the Sea of Galilee, wary of scorpions; slept on a precarious ledge high above the rose city of Petra in Jordan; bedded down in the desert on the border between Iran and Afghanistan; and battled mosquitoes on the banks of the Hawkesbury River. In latter years, on safari in Tanzania, we awoke in the night in our tent by the Rufiji river to see a big eye staring at us through the flimsy window as an old tusker proceeded to do his business right beside our tent; and sat around a fire of acacia sticks in a makeshift bush camp on the Serengeti savanna.

Just the other day, I was browsing through my travel diary for 26th August 1971 and came upon the description of my nighttime arrival in the outskirts of Amman, Jordan, on my way to Petra and Aqaba – a night I had long forgotten: “In my lostness, I came upon a policeman. And soon, three traffic cops were crashing the ash and buying me tea and bread. At last, they took me to a park, where King Hussein had a palace, and bade me sleep – under their protection. Come morning, I was gently awoken by the coppers who bought me breakfast and commandeered a taxi to take me into the town centre (where) again, police assisted me by asking a taxi driver to take me to the Aqaba road”. We took risks, we travellers of “the Overland” back in the day, and many times we were blessed with the charity and caring of our fellow humans.

My hitching days are now long gone, and so is the urge to set up camp in the great outdoors – apart from that African journey, when there was little alternative. And yet, I still love the great outdoors and being close to nature. Living off-grid on a rural property far from the madding crowd and surrounded by forest, with birdsong by day and frog song by night, I reckon I have have the best of both worlds.

Barsham Faire 1973

Meagan Fair, Pembrokeshire, 1975

The Confounding Politics of Camping in America

For centuries, sleeping outside has been embraced or condemned, depending on who’s doing it. A recent book by the historian Phoebe S. K. Young explores what, exactly, camping is, and how the pursuit intersects with protest culture, homelessness, and identity.

Dan Piepenbring, The New Yorker April 27, 2022

An illustrated scene of many people camping

Illustration by Sally Deng

Just a drop would do, though. Early campers didn’t wish to be mistaken for actual vagabonds, and the line between the two was easily smudged. In 1884, Samuel June Barrows, an outdoors enthusiast and, later, a one-term congressman, warned that a traveller carrying a “motley array of bedding, boxes, bags, and bundles” might arouse “suspicions of vagrancy”; to distinguish oneself from the riffraff, it was best to pack a “de luxe” tent and fashionable attire. Barrows’s anxiety underscored the contradictions of recreational camping, which he described as “a luxurious state of privation.” One of its luxuries was that it was temporary. In the name of leisure, well-heeled campers sought out the same conditions that, in other contexts, they condemned as uncivilized, unsanitary, or criminal.

In “Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement” (Oxford University Press), the historian Phoebe S. K. Young finds that Americans have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a means of survival, a rite of passage for the nuclear family, a route to self-improvement, and a form of First Amendment expression. In Young’s account, it becomes a proxy for disputes about race, class, and rootlessness—all the schisms in the American experiment.

As Barrows slept beneath the stars, countless workers were forced to do the same. In the eighteen-seventies, a boom-and-bust economy and a burgeoning network of railroads compelled laborers to crisscross the nation, following the cycles of the market. The “tramp problem” vexed those of means. Allan Pinkerton, the founder of the ruthless, union-busting Pinkerton National Detective Agency, blamed the Civil War for giving men a taste of “the lazy habits of camp-life.” In 1878’s “Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives,” Pinkerton detailed the “grotesque company” tramps kept by moonlight, writing that debauchees would doze “in a stupid sodden way that told of brutish instincts and experiences.” Scarier than the encampments was the fear that some Americans might find them appealing, retreating from society to enjoy “the genuine pleasure of the road.”

The travel industry soon recognized those pleasures by making tramping an aesthetic, something that campers could slip into and shuck off as they pleased. A writer for Outing, a magazine aimed at moneyed outdoorsmen, preferred to “rough it in the most approved ‘tramp’ style—to abjure boiled shirts and feather beds and dainty food, and even good grammar.” As Young points out, the quotation marks around “tramp” raised a barricade between the imitation and the original. Real tramps led a precarious existence, subject to arrest, surveillance, poverty, and ostracism. When élite campers wore their costume, they shrugged at a world in which, as Pinkerton wrote, “a man may be eminent to-day and tomorrow a tramp.”

The double standard was especially glaring in Native communities. White Americans, including Barrows, saw tribal settlements as the epitome of savagery. The U.S. Office of Indian Affairs hoped that Native populations would disavow their “barbarous life” and take up “a distaste for the camp-fire.” Such goals were presented as matters of public health, but the message diverged sharply depending on the audience. Although Native groups “learned that the only way to prevent consumption was to give up camp life,” Young writes, “recreational campers read that exposure to fresh air and sunlight” could cure the illness. The government forced Native children to attend boarding school and subjected adults to dehumanizing reëducation projects. Meanwhile, Outing, as it had with tramps, presented Indianness as an identity to be adopted and discarded on a camper’s whim. One contributor confessed that summer gave him “an irresistible desire” to “live the life of a savage in all of its most primitive simplicity.”

In the early twentieth century, the automobile allowed legions of new drivers to flock to the countryside. Camping shed some of its élitist pretensions, but its popularity exposed new rifts. Eager for traffic, many towns constructed no-frills auto camps at their outskirts, where entry was often free, at least until the camps attracted hordes of families and their Model Ts. These “tin-can” tourists, as Sunset magazine called them, ate canned food heated on the engine—or, more boldly, by a camp stove connected to the exhaust pipe. Camps couldn’t keep such people away; now that the backcountry, or even the frontcountry, was within reach, Americans intended to pitch their tents wherever they could. From 1910 to 1920, national parks and monuments saw a fivefold increase in visitors, reaching a million a year; by 1930, that figure had jumped to more than three million. The deluge was unmanageable. In addition to arresting vistas and pristine forests, campers expected generous amenities—firewood, electric lights, running water, garbage collection—and they were not in the habit of leaving nature as they found it. California’s redwoods, in particular, were so frequently, heedlessly beheld that their roots began to choke underfoot.

To save the trees, Emilio Meinecke, a plant pathologist for the U.S. Forest Service, conceived a template still in use today: a one-way loop road with short “garage-spurs,” each of which functioned as parking for a designated campsite. By presenting campers with private, manicured spaces, Meinecke hoped to spare the surrounding plant life, reminding visitors that they were “guests of the nation.” Intentionally or not, his campsites had the flavor of the suburbs—the land, once for farming, was now to be savored as a consumer, and every family had its plot. The New Deal funded the “Meineckizing” of almost ninety thousand acres of federal campgrounds, about half of which were new, signalling the rise of what Young calls “the campers’ republic.” “Mixing leisure with nature,” she writes, “became a potent way for citizens to demonstrate national belonging.”

But all was not well in the republic. The Great Depression had pushed record numbers of Americans into homelessness: by one estimate, during one day in the spring of 1933, a million and a half people were sleeping outside or in public shelters, and the actual number was likely higher. Because camping was so popular, budget-minded vacationers were sometimes cheek by jowl with the down-and-out. Who could say which was which? Manufacturers of camping trailers went out of their way to disclaim the use of their products as “a permanent address.” Others argued that campgrounds were too affordable or unsupervised. In 1940, J. Edgar Hoover, never one for understatement, alleged that roadside tourist camps had become “dens of vice and corruption” for “gangs of desperados.” Even Meinecke, for all his talk of hospitality, did not look kindly on extended stays at national parks. In an internal report, he complained that some visitors, “evidently camped for a long time,” had given one of his campsites a “ ‘used,’ second-hand look,” spoiling it for “decent people who are not slum-minded.”

Black visitors, too, found that the ordinary recreational privileges did not apply to them. The National Park Service couldn’t fathom how to attend to the needs of African Americans, so it simply dissuaded them from coming. “While we can not openly discriminate against them,” the minutes of a 1922 conference read, “they should be told that the parks have no facilities for taking care of them.” The numbers of Black visitors were low, which the N.P.S. took to mean that Black people had no interest in going; in fact, it was evidence that the agency’s deterrents had been effective. If there was wariness among Black communities on the subject of camping, it was, Young notes, well deserved: Black travellers had often been forced to camp in degrading conditions when inns and hotels refused to host them. Like many New Deal agencies, the N.P.S. was obligated to welcome all Americans equally, but parks in Southern states deferred to “local custom,” building segregated bathrooms, campgrounds, and picnic areas. When this policy was finally reversed, in the nineteen-forties, some Southern workers used just enough paint to cover the signs for “Negro Areas” without making them illegible. The discrimination remained, thinly veiled.

If the U.S. has dithered about the basics of camping—who can do it, where, and for how long—it’s been outright bewildered by camping as political speech. Could anyone have a message so urgent that it can be delivered only by sleeping outdoors? The answer is yes, as thousands of protesters have made clear, but the government has seldom taken them at their word, instead casting them as devious freeloaders or closet indigents. Occupy Wall Street, which famously enjoined its participants to bring tents, honed an approach popularized after the Civil War, when the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans’ group, camped near the Washington Monument to raise awareness of their sacrifices. In 1932, the Bonus Army—thousands of out-of-work veterans seeking their service bonuses—followed suit, encamping in plain view of the Capitol. For weeks, the public debated whether the soldiers were heroes or hobos. President Herbert Hoover, deciding on the latter, ordered the clearing of the camps, resulting in a fiery conflict that claimed at least one life.

But a tent makes a forceful statement: someone is here, and that someone intends to stay. When Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference wanted to show Washington the true toll of poverty, they decided that camping was the only suitable action. The Poor People’s Campaign brought more than two thousand people to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in May, 1968, a month after King’s assassination. Known as Resurrection City, the encampment lasted for six weeks, drawing support and ire. A concerned citizen wrote to President Lyndon B. Johnson that “a hoard [sic] of locusts” was abusing “hallowed ground.” Calvin Trillin, writing for this magazine, noted the irony: the poor had intended to show America that they were “sick, dirty, disorganized, and powerless—and they are criticized daily for being sick, dirty, disorganized, and powerless.” By June 24th, the camp had dwindled to five hundred, and police fired tear gas to expel those remaining. A demonstration about homelessness, it seemed, was no different than homelessness itself.

Just three years later, Vietnam Veterans Against the War began planning to camp near the Capitol, and the Nixon Administration, fearing a repeat of Resurrection City, refused to give them a permit. The V.V.A.W. requested a stay on the ban, and the case went to court. Determining the legality of protest encampments, Young writes, “required finding an elusive balance between Constitutional freedoms and public safety.” The N.P.S. would allow only a “simulated” camp on federal grounds: no fires, no tents. John Kerry, who argued for the V.V.A.W., maintained that a real campsite was the only way to “tell our story to the people of this country.” The judge hearing the case, meanwhile, felt that to camp was essentially to sleep and was an act that couldn’t “express a single idea”—and that couldn’t claim First Amendment protection. He upheld the camping ban; the Court of Appeals reversed it; the Supreme Court reinstated it. The V.V.A.W. decided to camp anyway, and, not wanting a public-relations disaster, Nixon let them be. The Washington Post quoted a Park Police officer who, looking over a National Mall clotted with sleeping bags, waxed philosophical: “What’s the definition of camping? You tell me. I don’t know.”

The ensuing decades did little to answer that question. By 2012, Congress was holding hearings on the subject, in which Trey Gowdy, a House member from South Carolina, grilled Jonathan Jarvis, the director of the N.P.S at the time. “What is the definition of camping?” Gowdy demanded. Occupy D.C. had been staying in McPherson Square, in downtown Washington, for months, and Jarvis had been reluctant to say that the protesters were camping—their actions were a means to an end, not the end itself, which was reason enough to avoid enforcing the N.P.S. ban. Gowdy seemed to understand the Occupiers as recreational campers in disguise; their politics were a cover story for a good time, and taxpayers were footing the bill. But the Occupiers emphasized that they weren’t camping at all. (“WE ARE NOT CAMPING,” signs on their tents read.) Campers slept outside for the joy of it; Occupiers wanted “a redress of grievances.” Gowdy couldn’t compute how people camping “for fun” were permitted only in certain areas, while those “pitching a camp in protest of fun” were welcomed by the National Park Service. Without a clear distinction between camping and not-camping—the distinction that generations of Americans had tried and failed to make—he felt that “the fabric of this republic” was “going to unravel.”

Gowdy is now out of the House, but his comment echoes through a nation where camping, in its many forms, remains vital and perplexing—an emblem not just of our freedom but of its limits. Last summer, national parks saw a record number of visitors, leading to overcrowding and abundant litter. The housing crisis continues to deepen; researchers estimated that, on a single night in 2020, roughly five hundred and eighty thousand people were homeless. And Young’s central insight—that camping both reflects and challenges notions of “national belonging”—is borne out in new ways every summer. In June, 2020, in Forks, Washington, residents mistook a mixed-race family for members of Antifa. The family, unemployed because of the pandemic, had been living in a modified school bus, and had hoped to spend a few nights nearby while the bus underwent repairs. Instead, they were accosted by “patriots” in a supermarket parking lot, and then trailed into the woods by men driving trucks and A.T.V.s. At the family’s campsite, they heard bursts of gunfire, and found their escape route blocked by felled trees. According to Wired, Shannon Lowe, one of those harassed, later said, “They looked us right in the eye, and didn’t believe we were camping.”

Bringing it all back home – the missing mosaic and other ‘stolen’ stuff

February 10, 2023May 24, 2023Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

“Old stuff. The Old World is full of it. But objects speak.They tell us things”.

The word “loot” derives from from the Hindi lūṭ or “booty” either from Sanskrit loptra, “booty, stolen property” orluṇṭ, “to rob, plunder”. It is one of the many words that entered into the anglophone vernacular in the wake of European imperial expansion. Charles James’s “Military Dictionary, London 1802, defines it as “Indian term for plunder or pillage”, and “goods taken from an enemy”. Like the very concept of empire itself, the word is a loaded one, loaded with historical memories, with national identities, and with differential moralities. Are goods taken in war by the victors as reparations or recompense for blood and treasure spent? Are they stolen goods that the perpetrators have a moral obligation to return to their rightful owners – or, as is the case with most of the inheritors of once imperial patrimony, the current territorial powers that be.

These questions loom large in the commentatary of an entertaining if lightweight, and yet, most informative programme running on the ABC at the moment, called, provocatively, Stuff the British Stole.

In this Australian-Canadian production Marc Fennell, the affable host the ABC’s Mastermind, trots the globe recounting the stories of the artefacts that ended up in British and Australian museums, galleries and churches during the days of Empire. Arriving in the wake of global protests that have seen statues ripped down and colonial legacies scrutinised with renewed vigour, the series offers an accessible beginner’s guide to the British empire’s long shadow and sticky fingers. Along the way, he encounters academics and diasporic communities for whom these objects, and the dispossession, death and cultural erasure they represent, have been open wounds for generations.

Each artefact acquired during the age of Empire is a reminder of colonial rule, be this benign or oppressive as determined from the perspective of the observer. For a long time, Britain’s best excuse for having nicked and then held on to many of these priceless antiquities has been that in a world of chaos and destruction, its institutions have long been the safest place to keep its ill-gotten treasures. The programme asks rhetorically in commentary and actually to museum curators: “is there an honourable way of handing in to your stolen stash?” Shouldn’t you be handing it back to its people? “Is this loot” asks the narrator of the director of the Art Galley of NSW. It is a public art gallery”, he replies.” … it belongs to the people of NSW … it’s there for education and discussion … I think it’s best not to use words like this right away … it was coming out of the rubble in the middle of a war zone … its a bit problematic”.

Britain was not the sole perpetrator of plunder, mind. A lot of loot of found its way into the museums of other European empires and and also the United States and Russia. And it was acquired in much the same way, in a mix of altruism, academic inquiry, subterfuge and outright banditry.

In our own travels, Adèle and I encountered an amusing tale of imperial skulduggery. When we were in Damascus, we stood by the modest catafalque of the celebrated Muslim war lord Salah ad Din al Ayubi, known in the west as Saladin, as our guide recounted the story of how before the First World War, the German Kaiser visited the Levant, then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Whilst visiting the Old City of Damascus, Wilhelm cast covetous eyes over the famous sultan’s casket. It is said that his entourage attempted to poach Salah ad Din’s tomb and spirit it back to Germany, but was intercepted by the Sultan’s police. By way of contrition, the emperor presented Damascus with a gaudy new catafalque more suited, he reckoned, to the last resting place of a renowned warrior. The two monuments now sit side by side in Salah ad Din’s small mausoleum beside the looming Roman wall of the splendid Umayyad Mosque, and pilgrims weep beside them. Our guide, a Syrian Kurd, upbraided elderly fellahin visiting from the countryside for praying at the empty fake – “don’t you know that Salah ad Din al Ayubi was not Arab but Kurdi, and he is in that tomb, not this one!”

But I digress …

Marc Fennell with Stuff the British Stole

A stone and a rock, a statue and a shirt …

Episode One kicks off a tad earlier than Imperial age, and closer to home with Scotland’s Stone of Scone, the big brick upon which Scottish kings were crowned until Edward I took it home to Westminster as a symbol of Sassenach conquest. It has seated the arses of British monarchs ever since, and though it was sent back home to Edinburgh in recent times as a recognition of Scottish nationalist sympathies, it will doubtless be lent to London for the enthronement of Charles, Third of His Name.

But the usual imperial suspects follow. There’s the Koh i Nor Diamond “gifted” to Queen Victoria from an adolescent Duleep Singh, maharajah of the independent but defeated state of Punjab, along with his empire, in the mid-19th century It is now in Britain’s Crown Jewels, tucked away in the vaults of Tower of London (the ones on show to the public are replicas). Once the centrepiece of the Great Exhibition, the diamond is now set in a crown that Queen Consort Camilla may or may not wear at her husband’s coronation in May. Britain’s royals have amassed a Smaug-like treasure trove of bling that might featured in future lists of Stuff the British Stole.

The Peking Shadow Boxer is an ancient bronze statue “rescued” from the ruins of war by a British sea captain during the Boxer Rebellion at end of the nineteenth century and now somewhere in the storerooms of the Art Gallery of New South Wales – the rebellion was one of Australia’s first overseas war. Then there is the story of a ceremonial war-shirt once worn by Native American Blackfoot chief Crow Foot, his “uniform’ or regalia, if you will, “gifted” (no one really knows how or why) to the Mounties during treaty negotiations when Canada was a British Dominion, and now, “in a place where it does not belong”, in London’s V&A Museum. This episode was particularly visceral. Coming almost contemporaneously with the recent revelations of what happened in Canadian “residential schools” that endeavoured to “take the Indian out if the Indians”.

We’ve heard that one in Australia too as we still struggle to come to terms with our past. As Mark Twain quipped, history might not repeat, but sometimes it rhymes. And it is passing ironic that the final episode is a brief, sadly predictable chapter in Australia’s frontier war in the early Nineteenth Century.

The hunt for Yagan’s head

Yagan was warrior and Noongar man whose people lived by what is now the Swan River near Perth in Western Australia. Settlement land grabs and tit for tat robberies and murders, and revenge for the deaths for his brother and father provoked him to violence. The colonial authorities put a price of his head, dead or alive, for a payback killing in 1834-35 and he was shot in the back by two young settlers. His head cut off and was paraded around the colony to send a message to his people.

It took over a century to track down Yagan’s head. Ken Colberg, a Noongar war veteran and elder, made it his mission to find it. He traced it to a house in London – a colonial lieutenant had brought it back to England and endeavoured to sell it to a surgeon who was interested in such “trophies “. The surgeon declined to purchase it so the soldier conveyed it to Liverpool where he flogged it to Liverpool Museum. Over a century later, on the instructions of the museum, it was buried in Everton Cemetery near Liverpool in an unmarked common grave along other with other remains including 22 still born babies interred by a local hospital. Two English archaeologists agreed to assist Ken in his quest, tracing the location of the grave and negotiating with the authorities and descendants of the deceased children to effect Yagan’s exhumation.

It was handed over to a Noongar delegation in Liverpool Town Hall on 28th August 1997 – the day Princess Diana died in Paris. Ken made a passing reference to this during the ceremony: “That is how nature goes … Nature is a carrier of all good things and all bad things. And because the Poms did the wrong thing, they now have to suffer”. That went down well in the. Australian media, his comment prompted a media with newspapers receiving many letters from the public expressing shock and anger. Ken later claimed that his comments had been misinterpreted.

Yagan’s remains were finally laid to rest in Australian soil, on the banks of the Swan River on Noongar country.

And so concluded the first season of Stuff the British Stole. But there’s more to come – season two is promised and is already available as a podcast. It includes Tipu Sultan’s mechanical Tiger from Bengal, India, presently in the British Museum, commissioned by the sultan and depicting a tiger munching down on a prostrate English soldier. That one was taken when Tipu met his doom at the hands of Clive (of India, that is, and looter in chief of Indian artefacts). There’s there’s a revered chalice from Cork from a time when catholic worship was banned by British authorities; the Gweagal Shield acquired by Captain Cook when he hove to in Botany Bay; and the Makomokai tattooed heads from Aotearoa. And, of course, the most celebrated of artefact of all, the Elgin Marbles that most folk associate with the British Museum rather than with the Athens Parthenon which has served successively as a temple, church and mosque before Venetian ships bombed it in the seventeenth century – and from whence the eponymous Lord Elgin lifted them on the dubious pretext of preservation and plonked them down in perfidious Albion.

The return of Yagan. Ken Colberg is in the centre

Which brings us to the mosaic …

This is the story that enticed me into Stuff the British Stole and thence, into this post. Having enjoyed half a century of interest in the Middle East, I was immediately sucked in. And as with Yagan’s los head, it too has as Australian connection.

It is April 1917, during the second battle of Gaza, and British General Allenby’s army of soldiers from Britain and its empire is pushing northwards across the Negev Desert towards Ottoman-ruled Gaza and thence Jerusalem. It’s not officially called Palestine yet – the old Roman name, favoured by theologians, romantics, and British tourists and politicians, would not enter world politics and controversy for a few years yet. The Reverend William Maitland Woods is chaplain of the Australian and New Zealand Anzac division, and soldiers of a Queensland brigade of the Australian Light Horse are digging trenches at Besor Springs, near Gaza. The Reverend is an amateur archeologist and made a habit of entertaining the troops with stories about the Holy Lands where they were campaigning. The soldiers uncover the remnant of a 6th Century Byzantine mosaic dating from 561-562, during the reign of Emperor Justinian. A excited chaplain seeks professional advice from curators at the Cairo Museum and is given permission to organise a group of volunteers to uncover and remove the remains. Sapper McFarlane of the New Zealand Wireless Troop was given the job of drawing what they uncovered. That’s him in the picture below.

The reverend convinces his higher-ups that the mosaic must be saved, and sixty three crates are sent to Cairo. Egypt at the time was a British “dependency “ (good word, that).

There then commenced a tussle between British high command in Cairo and the Australian defence department. By September 1917, the Australian Records Section was feverishly collecting battlefield trophies. Charles Bean the official ANZAC historian liked to call them “relics”, consistent with the reverential language of “spirit”, “sacrifice” and “the fallen” he afforded his soldiers. The British : “It’s not a trophy of war – you cannot have it – it may be returned” or words to that effect. TheAussies: we wanted stuff for our prospective Australian War Museum, and anyhow, we’ve shed blood in this fight”.

And so, what would be called the Shellal Mosaic ended up in Canberra. Most of it, anyway. Other fragments found their way to St James Church in the Sydney CBD and in a church in Brisbane. It is believed that some diggers took pieces too. In 1941, when the War Memorial was under construction, an appeal was sent out to ageing members of the light horse regiments to return the bits they’d souvenired, but there were few, if any, volunteers.

Concerned, with very good reason, that the treasure might not get all the way Down Under, Woods gathered up several baskets of tesserae from the site, the individual fragments from which a mosaic is made, and commissioned an artisan to fashion an exact replica of the inscription headstone, one metre by half a metrre. He gave this to a friend, a Colonel John Arnott who at war’s end, returned to his family property at Coolah in rural New South Wakes and embedded itinto his garden steps. The farmhouse and its steps are with the family today.

Ancient History interlude: What makes the Shellal Mosaic such a significant archaeological find? For one, it was a Christian chapel from the Byzantine period when Hellenic pagan culture was giving way to Christianity. For two, the mosaic was made of marble, an expensive material and not commonly used other than by the very wealthy. And for three, the use of exotic animals from different lands, such as lions, tigers, flamingos and peacocks, common images in Byzantine art, all paying homage to a central chalice, could point to other pagan races and lands embracing Christianity.

The Shellal Mosaic

Yet, the tale gets curiouser and curiouser …

During the excavations, Maitland Woods discovered a chamber beneath the mosaic. It contained human bones lying with its feet to the east and its arms closed on the chest. The bones and inscriptions on the mosaic got the reverend quite excited, more so than the more mosaic itself as a rough translation of the inscription suggested to him that let him they were the bones were those of St George – of England and dragon fame, not the Dragons.the league football team of the eponymous suburb in southern Sydney which was not established until 1920. They were not, however. Saintly George lived in intolerant pagan Roman times and was martyred for his faith. More likely, they belonged to a local bishop time called as George. Woods feared these would be sent to England in perpetuity so he packed them up and gave a ‘parcel’ to his friend, Reverend Herbert Rose, for safe keeping, and this found its way to Rose’s home parish of St Anne’s in Strathfield in Sydney’s inner west, where they are interred in the floor in front of the church’s communion table. Woods’ fears were justified. During the delivery of the remaining bones from Cairo to London, George’s skull disappeared, never to be seen again.

As Yagan would aver, heads do that.

For further history stories in In That Howling Infinite, see Foggy Ruins of time – from history’s back pages

For stories about the Middle East, see A Middle East Miscellany

For stories about Australia and also the Frontier Wars, see Down Under – Australian history and politics

Bronze, stone and possum fur

Song of the Road (2) – The Accidental Traveller

February 7, 2023April 13, 2023Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

In a highway service station
Over the month of June
Was a photograph of the earth
Taken coming back from the moon
And you couldn’t see a city
On that marbled bowling ball
Or a forest or a highway
Or me here least of all
You couldn’t see these cold water restrooms
Or this baggage overload
Westbound and rolling taking refuge in the roads
From Joni Mitchell’s Hejira

When the Beatles and their partners, with Donovan and Mia Farrow in tow, travelled to India to sit at the well-kissed feet of the Maharishi, they would’ve travelled by BOAC jetliner. But hundreds if not thousands of young people from Europe and North America were already making their own own way, by boats, trains, trucks and automobiles, motorbikes and bicycles, and in extremis, shank’s pony, some ten thousand kilometres and more to the end of the line, be this Kathmandu, Kolkata (where I ended up), South East Asia (Tim Page, a recently departed friend, ended up there as a war photographer in America’s “crazy Asian war) or Australia (that’s where my uni pals washed up – see below). Other adventurers set out in the opposite direction from conservative Australia and New Zealand-Aotearoa heading for Britain, the “old country” and a wider world. The numbers would swell during the seventies and the “overland” as it was then called became the well-travelled “Hippie Trail” – until the Iranian Revolution and the Afghan wars effectively blocked it to all but a resolute and crazy-brave few.

The Beatles in India

I’d never intended to hit the hippie trail back in the day. In the northern summer of 1971, I didn’t even know it existed.

I’d just finished my final exams, graduating with a good degree, but after three exciting and formative years, it was as if everything had suddenly ground to a halt. Uni was over; a romantic relationship was on the rocks; I was footloose and free, floating and feeling the urge to escape elsewhere, somewhere, anywhere. I’d no idea at all what I would do next, other than an inchoate plan to undertake post-graduate study – guided by my tutor and mentor exiled Hungarian academic Tibor Szamuely, my academic interest was Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but that was to be down the track.

When the finals results came out, I spent the evening at the student union with friends, unwinding and getting pissed; and the very next day, I walked into the Student Travel office and booked a one-way air ticket to Athens (only my second time on an aeroplane), passage by steamer from Piraeus, Athen’s port, to Alexandria, Egytpt, via Limassol, Cyprus, and back from Egypt to Piraeus and thence to Tel Aviv, Israel, with no bookings for onward travel.

Seized by the idea of visiting the two principal antagonists of the almost recent Six Day War, I’d a naive and uninformed notion to view both sides of the Arab-Israeli puzzle (and we’re no nearer a solution today, and I’ve spent half a century since watching and waiting – but that is another story). Within a few weeks, I’d bought a second-hand rucksack and sleeping bag, converted my savings to traveler’s cheques – there were still currency restrictions in the UK on how much cash you could take out of the country – packed a few things, and in the words of Cat Stevens, I was “on the road to find out”.

That road took me through the Middle East, and on and on, until I reached Kolkata in Bengal. What was planned as but a two month holiday to “clear my mind out”, to quote that Cat song again, extended to over six months as the appetite grew with the eating.

I traveled through lands of which I knew very little, picking up fragments of history and heritage, parables and politics as eastwards I roamed, through the lands of antiquity and of empire: Greece and Cyprus; Egypt and Israel; the Levant (old French for the lands of the rising sun – Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan); Iraq before Saddam, and Iran under the Shah; Pakistan and India, who went to war with each other as I crossed their frontiers (a story for another time); and then back to Britain by way of Turkey and the fabled Pudding Shop.

I stood beside the great rivers of ancient stories – the Nile and the Jordan, the Orontes and the Yarmouk, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and the Ganges. I traveled though deserts and mountains, the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. I climbed through the Kyber Pass, immortalised by imperial endeavour and hubris, and the valley of Kashmir, a betrayed and battered paradise. I crossed Lake Van, in the shadow of Mount Ararat, and the Bosphorus, from into Europe. I stood atop ancient stones in Memphis and Masada, Baalbek and Babylon, Jalalabad and Jerusalem.

On my return, my plan to specialize in Soviet Studies evaporated as I resolved to learn more about these lands, their peoples, and their histories, and this I did. The Middle East has long-since captivated and colonized much of my intellectual life, imbuing it with a passion that has found expression in my persona, my politics, my prose, my poetry, and my songs.

See: East – an anthology and Song of the Road (1) – my hitchhiking days

Broken statues, empty tombs.
Ghosts of commoners and kings
Walk the walls and catacombs,
The castles and the shrines,
Marking lives and story lines,
Lie the ruins and the bones,
The ruins and the bones,
Ruins and bones.

Through the desert to the beyond …

I was at the end of the beginning. Having travelled through Egypt and Israel, I’d decided, for many reasons, that I wasn’t ready to return to England as planned, and recalling the advice of a fellow traveler I’d met in Cairo, I resolved to head east …

In early 1972, I wrote in an empty1962 diary: “Friday 20th August 1971, a fateful day indeed, when manifold and manifest destinies unfolded, when plans were forgotten and begotten, when the past was shelved and the future postponed. To the desert. Through the desert. To the beyond. To see. To decide. To move forever onwards with no direction home. With no grip of time to defeat me or dictate to me …”

Less prosaically, my actual travel diary recorded on that day:

“Arriving in Nicosia from Tel Aviv at 15.15 after a neglectful and body-shaking El Al flight, I headed straight into town from.an almost deserted airport. How much Anglo, how much Greek, how empty. Hot and boring in my mobile mood. Bought a ticket to Beirut and headed straight out again on the six o’clock Air Liban Boeing 707. A highly hospitable fifty five minute flight and by seven o’clock I was passing through Lebanese customs … “

The following day, I wrote:

Saturday, 21st August 1971, Beirut
“Now for a calculation space … I have £55 in travelers’ cheques and £25 in cash. Eighty quid in all. How far will that go? Syria? Iraq? Jordan? Afghanistan, Iran? Then home? Visas, maybe five quid? Amman to Baghdad, four? Damascus Amman Two? Amman to Baghdad, Teheran, Kabul 10 quid? That’s £21 all up. Kabul to Istanbul, £13, so £34 in all. £3 max in each for contingencies? £15 or £49. Leaving about 30 quid by Istanbul. Cutting Jordan, could save four. India? There is time, but little money … Even if the three quid were cut and Jordan too, that would leave £19 from Kabul to Delhi – but I must eat, I must eat somewhere – hence, no India…this time … “

But the appetite grew with the eating and the road led on and on …

Life on the road …

People will tell you where they’ve gone
They’ll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you never really know
Where some have found their paradise
Others just come to harm
Amelia, it was just a false alarm
Joni Mitchell, Amelia

Traveling was sooo different back then in the days before ubiquitous air travel, the Internet and mobile phones. On the road, our destinations were set, but these were fluid in their timeline and attainment. Much of our information came by word of mouth from other travellers on the road. You’d head to places other people had recommended, without having seen pictures and read descriptions on the internet. You couldn’t book a hotel room in advance so we often never knew where we’d sleep. You’d find a bed for the night once we’d arrived in a city, town or village or if you were in the information loop, you’d rock up at well-frequented hostelries like Amir Kabir in central Teheran, Mrs Dunkeley’s Guest House in the heart of New Delhi, and the famed houseboats on Dal Lake in Kashmir. Often, you slept on floors, in railway station waiting rooms, in constant fear of robbery, or beneath the stars. You’d spend long hours waiting in the post office to place a call home, and sometimes the operator didn’t know where that was. Letters would take an age to reach their destination. I wrote letters to England from Amir Kabir, and picked up the replies on my return journey months later. You’d work out how to deal with banks and money changers to convert travelers cheques to the local currency – and keep a close count of every cent because these were limited, and you were constantly worried about being ripped off.

Hotel Amir Kabir, Teheran

Like many on the road, I travelled on the cheap, crowded onto local buses, struggling to grab a third class seat on packed trains, eating street food. watched every dinar and dollar, rial and rupee. To supplement my diminishing funds, I washed dishes – and sold blood twice, to the Red Crescent in Jerusalem’s Old City (risky) and In New Delhi (in hindsight, potentially suicidal).

I’d only intended to be out of the country for about a month, but had cleaned out my bank account. I’d worked on building sites in Birmingham during the summer breaks from University, and had earned enough to keep me in books and records and other “luxuries” and also for travel. And I got to India and back to Istanbul before I ran out of cash and had to get my folks to wire me enough for a ticket home. My university pals who took The Overland a year later washed up in Darwin stoney broke and had to work their way all the way south to Bondi Beach, where they’d resolved to rent a flat overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Of the five who roved out, three returned to England, but two remained, establishing careers, marrying “sheilas” and raising children and grandchildren – by happy circumstance, I too settled in Australia six years later, and John (RIP) and Christian became my oldest friends in Australia.

Most of us travelled without cameras and so relied on travel diaries and memories. I had a dinky old Kodak and couldn’t afford a lot of film – I sold some for extra cash somewhere along the way – so I had had just a few pictures on a couple of rolls. And I had to wait until my return to England to take them to Boots Chemist for processing. And looking back, perhaps it was easier and also most adventurous in those days to be present, to live in the moment, and to be surprised over things you hadn’t seen before, not even in books and photographs. So many everyday things are now very practical with ATMs and mobile phones and travel advisories to hand, whilst our mobile phones and tablets absorb so much of our attention. In some ways these take away much of the vicarious risks and also, magic. I’m sure glad to have experienced travelling in the old-fashioned way.

If you never go, you’ll never grow

I’ll conclude this story by observing in the present how in all my journeying, I never came to harm, whether by mishap or misadventure, malice or malignancy.

The accidental journey was driven by a combination of whim, thrift, expedience, and necessity, but also, by a sense of romantic adventure – buoyed by what seems in retrospect, a naive feeling of dare-devil invulnerability.

Passers-by, and local people I’d meet would often ask where I was going and why I traveled thus. They’d tell me it was dangerous, that there were men out there who would rob me or do me harm. When I returned home, folk would ask if I faced danger and if I was afraid. Yet, we who traveled the world before jumbo jets and cruise ships understood that bad things could happen and that they sometimes did whether you journeyed by thumb, van, bus or train. In hotels and hostels from Beirut to Baghdad, Kabul to Kolkata, you’d pick up word-of-mouth “travel advisories”, warnings and “war stories”. In India, I’d been told of a chap who’d been robbed and stranded in Afghanistan, and I actually met him when I bunked down in a backpackers’ in Sultanahmet, Istanbul, on my way back to Britain.

As I journeyed “there and back again”, I took risks on rickety buses and in reckless cars. I’d walk alone through slums and shanty towns and eat food sold on the streets. I risked typhoid and cholera outbreaks, caught “Cairo belly”, sold blood in “third world” clinics, and ran from thrown stones and the sound of gunfire. I was arrested for spying on the Aswan Dam in upper Egypt (though released soon afterwards) and handcuffed as a “joke” in a Beirut police station. I’d crossed a battle-scarred landscape between Syria and Jordan on foot, and watched the military buildup in Kashmir as the Indo-Pakistan war was breaking out.

So yes, there always was a risk; but if you think too much about it, you’d never go, and if you never go, you’ll never grow.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
Walking Song, JRR Tolkien

My road in pictures

The brown fedora, Giza 1971

By the rivers of Babylon, August 1971

Srinegar, October 1971

Luxor, Egypt 1971

Me and the gang, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 1971

Layers, Damascus 2009

Salah ad Din al Ayubi, Damascus 2009

Sun al Hamadiyya, Damascus 2006

Bakdash ice cream parlour, Damascus 2009

Cruising the Golden Horn, Istanbul 2014

The Sulaymaniya Mosque, Istanbul 2014

Jerusalem the Golden

Bondi or Bust

The morning after the night before …
In late summer 1972 we housemates threw an all-night farewell party before going our separate ways. Christian, Brendan, John, Mike and Eric embarked on the hippie trail across Asia and ended up in God’s Own Country. Having recently returned from that same odyssey, I remained in London, but destiny saw me washed up DownUnder five years later. The first picture portrays the laid-back lethargy of that morning in East Finchley. Chris is in the shot so Brendan must’ve taken the photograph. The second is taken when we got it all together for a more formal tableau with Chris behind the camera.

Shortly thereafter, the five pioneers set off for Dover and the East. Many years later, Christian revealed these pictures from their journey. The first is of John and Chris soon after landing in northern Australia. The others are pictures of Chris’ tote bag. He still has it.

From the foggy ruins of time – our favourite history stories

December 30, 2022December 30, 2022Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

I wear the weave of history like a second skin,
I wake with runes of mystery of how we all begin,
I walk the paths of pioneers who watched the circus start,
The past now beats within me like a second heart.
Paul Hemphill. E Lucivan Le Stelle

Whilst its scope is eclectic and wide ranging in content In That Howling Infinite is especially a history blog. It’s subject matter is diverse. Politics, literature, music, and memoir are featured – but it is at its most original and informative, a miscellany of matters historical, gathered in Foggy Ruins of Time – from history’s back pages – yes, an appropriation of lyrics from two Bob Dylan Songs.

In compiling the annual retrospective for 2022, I decided I would put together a list of my favourite posts in each of the categories described above, beginning with the history ones. My primary criteria were not so much the subject matter, which is diverse, as can be seen from the ten choices (shown here in alphabetical order) but firstly, what I most enjoyed writing and secondly, those I considered the most original insofar as I referenced and republished few other voices, other than direct quotations from the sources I was consulting and books I was reviewing.

A cowboy key – how the west was sung

Outlaw songs and outlaw gothic are as much apart if the mythic Wild West as cowboys and gunslingers. A nostalgic canter through some of my personal favourites on records and in movies.

Androids Dolores and Teddy enjoy the Westworld view

Al Tariq al Salabiyin – the Crusaders’ Trail

Western folk, long on romanticism and short on historical knowledge, associate crusades and crusaders with medieval knights, red crosses emblazoned on white surcoats and shields and wielding broadswords battling it out with swarthy scimitar-swinging, be-turbaned Saracens. Here, we widen that orientalist perspective.

The Crusades

A Short History of the Rise and Fall of the West

“… one thing is for certain: we all love a good story. As they say, in Arabic, as indeed in all tongues, times and places, “ka-n ya ma ka-n bil ‘adim izzama-n wa sa-lifi al aSri wa la-wa-n”‘ or, “once upon an time”. An original, idiosyncratic and not strictly accurate journey through those foggy ruins of time.

Somewhere in Syria

Beyond Wolf Hall – Icarus ascending

We know how the story of Thomas Cromwell ends. It’s how Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel gets us there that matters. Our questions here are whether Thomas could sense where it was all headed, and whether he could have quit while he was ahead.

Beyond Wolf Hall – Revolution Road

“A wide-ranging rural road trip through England’s green and pleasant land takes the traveller by antique and desolated abbeys and monasteries, their ageing walls crumbling and lichen covered, their vaulted pediments open to the English elements. The celebrated poets of the romantic era immortalized these relics in poetry, and even today, when one stands in grassy naves, gazing skywards through skeletal pillars, one can almost feel an ode coming on”. A brief dissertation on Thomas Cromwell’s English revolution.

Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis as Tom and Hal

Martin Sparrow’s Blues

It is late summer in 1806, in the colony of New South Wales. After he loses everything he owns in a disastrous flood, former convict, failed farmer, and all-round no-hoper and ne’er-do-well Martin Sparrow heads into the wilderness that is now the Wollemi National Park in the unlikely company of an outlaw gypsy girl and a young wolfhound. Historian Peter Cochrane’s tale of adventure and more often than not, misadventure, set on the middle reaches of the Hawkesbury River at time when two culturally and spiritually disparate peoples collided.

Roman Holiday – the perils of a poet in Nero’s Rome

In the First century, the Roman Empire was a far-ranging and cosmopolitan polity extending from the shores of the Atlantic to the borders of Persia. As far as we can ascertain from the historical record, Meniscus Diabetes was born in Rome in 25 CE. His father was a Greek slave in the Imperial Household of Tiberius Caesar, Emperor of Rome. These were turbulent times for Rome and Romans, but our hero managed to navigate through them.

The Sport of Kings – CE Morgan’s “Great American Novel

The Sport of Kings’ is not a history book – nor is it an historical novel. But it is most certainly about history. And about identity. As Morgan puts it: “You would never escape the category of your birth”. It is also about memory and myth: “Repeated long enough, stories become memory and memory becomes fact”. It is both a meditation on race, on slavery – America’s “original sin” – and a bitter inversion of the American dream.

The Twilight of the Equine Gods

An illuminating canter through the story of the “Centaurian Pact” between humans and horses. it is at once a ride andrevelation, and a reminiscence of my short-lived ‘cowboy’ days. The horse” has been man’s most important companion – forget cats and dogs – and the most durable of historical alliances, and yet, over the span of a few decades, a relationship that endured for six millennia went “to the dogs” – excuse my awful pet-food pun. And it happened almost unremarked, unnoticed, and unsung.

Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey

Our forest neighbour, recently deceased and internationally acclaimed English photojournalist Tim Page ran away from boring ‘sixties Britain to the exotic East at the age of seventeen, taking the ‘overland’ route that decades later would be called ‘the Hippie Trail’. He washed up in the great war of our generation, and left it critically injured and indeed clinically dead in a medivac chopper. This is the story of a war, and a young man who wandered into that war.

The quiet tea time of the soul

November 28, 2022January 22, 2023Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Some folks put much reliance
On politics and science
There’s only one hero for me
His praise we should be roaring
The man who thought of pouring
The first boiling water onto tea

Once in a while, I go on a ramble, a stream of consciousness jaunt. The following was inspired by one of my very best Facebook friends, a resident of Oklahoma, who posted a picture of a mug of Twinings Irish Breakfast Tea, and the comments I made regarding that post.

In my opinion, I wrote, the best tea is Irish – and the best Irish tea for me is Barry’s, although Bewley’s is also excellent. Taylor’s Yorkshire Tea, from Harrogate in, yes, Yorkshire, is also very delicious. I don’t like my tea too strong or “stewed”. At home, we drink Barry’s Gold which we buy it in our local supermarket – we used to be able to buy Bewley’s, but that was before the British Shop in the Sydney CBD closed down over a decade ago. With such a large Anglo-Celtic population here, there’s a strong nostalgia market for British food products DownUnder, whether it’s for tea, McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits, Marmite or Bassett’s Licorice Allsorts.

Eteaquette

Tea is served traditionally in a tea pot (and you must heat the pot first), and drank languidly, leisurely, and ideally with the morning newspaper – online these days- and with a plain biscuit which you might like to dunk in it. Milk rather than cream is how Poms and Paddies like it. Some prefer it without – “black tea”. With or without sugar. I like it not too milky , and never with cream – cream is for coffee, though personally, I don’t like that either. And never over-brew it! The Brits call that “the barely bloody drinkable”, “barely bloody…” for short. I’ve learned that trades people generally like it strong with one lump of sugar. And on the matter of the Irish, a wee drop of whisky in the tea is nice. We used to be given it when visiting our Irish relatives.

Tea without milk is called black tea. Some take a slice of lemon in it, which some purists call poncified, and others like sugar or honey. My wife prefers her morning tea black, in a Doctor Who telephone box tea pot, and prefers Earl Grey and Russian Caravan. But I’m not into “fancy” teas like these – and the Chinese Lapsang Souchong smells and tastes like old shoes – it has actually been banned in Europe because lapsang is potentially carcinogenic if smoked for too long (I mean smoked over a pinewood fire and not rolled like a joint). But I do drink camomile tea when under the weather or need to cut down on caffeine, and mint tea on occasion, for the same reason. But these are never my first tea choice.

I prefer hot tea to water or coke after a hard slog on the property as it is very refreshing when the weather is hot. Don’t ask me how that works. But it is very popular in high summer in the Middle East. Hot tea is also comforting when it’s very cold. In fact, any time is right for a cup of tea. With that biscuit, preferably.

Russians like it black and well-brewed. It’s an old tradition (samovars and all that). Arabs like their tea black with sugar. Indians boil theirs’ with milk and sugar. They call it shai, which is not the chai that hippies and present day wellness advocates go for – and which I do not like at all. The Chinese have their own type of tea, weak, light and fragrant, as do the Japanese – who have developed elaborate ceremonies for serving it, and indeed people have committed ritual suicide when they have stuffed it up.

Eteamology

We are all floating somewhere on a full tide of tea.
JB Priestley, English Journey, 1933.

Back in the day, when I was a lad, there was whole etymology around tea, There was the English tradition of High Tea, a posh afternoon “tea” (as in “teatime”) with pots of tea and little pastries and quarter-cut salad sandwiches on white bread. One would “take tea” at places like Harrods and Fortnum and Masons – many “posh” hotels here in Australia persist with the pretentious practice. Variations on the theme are “cream teas” with scones, strawberry jam and cream (on the scones, not in the tea!) and a more downmarket High Tea of bacon and egg, baked beans and chips (that’s potato“fries” to you), described on café menus as a “mixed grill” that I used to love on Boy Scout camping excursions and on Wednesday and Saturday evenings in university halls of residence.

When I was growing up, our evening meal was called “tea time” (“dinner” was called lunch). Hence the kiddies’ refrain “what’s for tea! Mom?”. “Heinz baked beans” was the refrain in The Who’s Sell Out album, and they featured on the cover. Decades, later, I love Heinz baked beans on toast, and I still call our evening meal “tea” which irritates my wife no end because she was bring up proper!

Roger Daltrey bathes in beans

By the way, tea should not be confused with a golf tee and draftsman’s T square, or with the phrase “teed off” as in “I’m getting quite annoyed with you!” – which is a polite way of saying “you’re beginning to get on my t##s”.

Teastory

Tea is regarded as a particularly English thing. In his celebrated wartime essay on Englishness, The Lion and the Unicorn, famed, left-wing author George Orwell placed the beverage near the top of those favourite things that Brits cleave to “when the dog bites, when the bee stings” and when Mister Hitler’s bombs and rockets rained down on British towns and cities – and you can read his instructions on how to best brew it below. During the Cold War, sixties, English folk revival luminary Leon Rosselson prophesied that when the Big One dropped, we’d “stand firm” and “duck down in our hidey holes and drink cups and cups of tea”. And when Britain was locked down for months and months during the worst days of Covid-19, and tens of thousands of people perished, folk recalled that old “Blitz spirit” and I wager sales and consumption of tea went through the roof. Orwell observed that it was a palliative pleasure shared by all social and economic classes, a national characteristic on a par with the “stiff upper lip”, “shoulders to the wheel” and “seeing it through”.

It’s not just an English thing. Irish folk regard a hot cup of tae as an important social custom, indeed, arguably as as important if not more so than the bottle, and is enjoyed at all hours amongst family and friends in greater volumes than alcohol. It has traditionally been a symbol of hospitality, camaraderie, and friendship, and not only is it a great way to cheer up and keep warm on a bleak and rainy day, but it brings people together too. This said, the worst cup of tea I have ever tasted – and I’ve been around the figurative tea bush many times – was actually in Ireland. In New Ross, County Wexford, actually, en route from my ancestral home of Enniscorthy to Waterford and the west coast. I reckon someone must have just squezz out a dishcloth into a cup and added milk.

Predictably, the British and Irish took their tea all over the world. Here in Australia, it has long been the most popular beverage. It was a tea manufacturer who came up with the first line of our most well-known song. In the early 20th century, a copy of the song was included in packets of the popular Billy Tea, as a promotional stunt. The tea manufacturers were concerned that the song ended on a pretty grim note, so the word “jolly” was added to the opening line. To liven things up a bit. Shocking, isn’t it? That one word changes the whole feel of the thing, elevating the swag man from an impoverished, homeless man, hounded to death by police, to a happy-go-lucky bush scamp. Yet the only reason the word is there is so the song would work better as an ad.

Songs have been written in praise of tea, most particularly the English song A Nice Cup of Tea, wrttien by a member of parliament and first performed in 1937 but made famous by Gracie Fields, England’s wartime ‘sweetheart”. A “nice cup of tea”, as we’ve noted, is a traditional panacea for stressful situations – it got Brits through two world wars, and will probably do the same in the next one.

Foreigners often make fun of the English for their fondness for a “cuppa”. The French cartoon strip Asterix, set in Roman Gaul, portrays the Britons as drinking cups of hot water with milk – because tea hadn’t been invented in Roman days.

But the Poms didn’t invent it – I believe that was the Chinese who worked.out that leaves can be not just tasty but also therapeutic – but the Brits’ fondness for that nice cup of tea was one of the reasons they decided to conquer India, and they managed to rule the place for over four hundred years by drinking gallons of it – but they nevertheless they still died of malaria, dysentery, alcoholism and mutiny by the score.

Tea helped Britannia rule the waves and most of the world, but Britain lost America on account of it. Americans reckon that is why they prefer coffee, but the famous Boston Tea Party was a bit more complicated than colonists dressed in red indian garb dumping crates of the stuff overboard.and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the contemporary American “Tea Party” Republicans and their MAGA heirs. But, the first tea bag was invented – by an American, a century or so ago, and this is now the most convenient and hence most popular way to “take tea” (a peculiarly English way to describe having a cuppa). Indeed, whenever we go on holiday, we take with us a swag of tea bags “just in case ..”

For more yarns in In That Howling Infinite, see: Tall Tales, small stories, eulogies and epiphanies

Tea sellers, Ramallah, Palestine, in traditional Ottoman garb

George’s Nice Cup of Tea

Published on the 12th of January, 1946 by the Evening Standard. George Orwell lets us all know how to enjoy hot flavored water best.

If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.

This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden:

First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea.
Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities — that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad.
Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.
Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly.
Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.
Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.
Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold before one has well started on it.
Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.
Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.
Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tealover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.Some people would answer that they don’t like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.

These are not the only controversial points to arise in connexion with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how subtilized the whole business has become. There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tealeaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet. It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one’s ration the twenty good, strong cups of that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent.

George’s nice cup of tea

And in conclusion, here is that song in full:

And that song …

Some folks put much reliance
On politics and science
There’s only one hero for me
His praise we should be roaring
The man who thought of pouring
The first boiling water onto tea
I like a nice cup of tea in the morning
For to start the day you see
And at half past eleven
Well my idea of heaven
Is a nice cup of tea
I like a nice cup of tea with me dinner
And a nice cup of tea with me tea
And when it’s time for bed
There’s a lot to be said
For a nice cup of tea

You can talk about your science
And your airships in the sky
I can do without the wireless
And you’ll never see me fly
The public benefactor of the universe for me
Is the genius that thought of pouring water onto tea

I like a nice cup of tea in the morning
For to start the day you see
And when I get the breakfast in
Well my idea of sin
Is a fourth, or a fifth, cup of tea
I like a nice cup of tea with me dinner
And a nice cup of tea with me tea
And when it’s time for bed
There’s a lot to be said
For a nice cup of tea

They say it’s not nutritious
But still it is delicious
And that’s all that matters to me
It turns your meat to leather
But let’s all die together
The one drink in paradise is tea

I like a nice cup of tea
In the morning
For to start the day you see
And at half past eleven
Well my idea of heaven
Is a nice cup of tea
I like a nice cup of tea with me dinner
And a nice cup of tea with me tea
And when it’s time for bed
As I think I may have said
I’d like a nice cup of tea
You can talk about your liberties
They talk of women’s rights
I don’t want to make no speeches
Because the one that does is trite
And anyone can have my vote and chuck it in the sea
But golly there’ll be trouble if they try to touch me tea

I like a nice cup of tea with me dinner
And a nice cup of tea with me tea
And when it’s getting late
Almost anything can wait
For a nice cup of tea

The work, the working, the working life

November 24, 2022May 11, 2023Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Ironically, one of my favourite songs about working, Bruce Springsteen’s Factory, was written by a bloke who by his own admission has never done a day’s manual labour for wages in his life. But as for myself, I sometimes feel that I have worked all my life. When I’m busily shoveling soil into a wheelbarrow and tipping it into our garden beds, I imagine that I was born with a shovel in my hands. After all, that’s what my Irish father was doing on the building sites of Birmingham while I was being conceived, gestated, born, and brought up in the first decade of my life.

The Cubs and Boy Scouts’ Bob A Job Week taught me the basics of “working for others” and getting paid for it. Weeding and cleaning and shopping, mostly. I hated it, not least because it took up most of our Easter school holidays, but it was an early lesson in duty and toiling for a cause.

As a schoolie in sixties I just had to have hit parade LPs and singles and Airfix kits and the pocket money provided by my folks did not go that far. So while other kids did paper rounds and helped out in local shops, I worked Friday nights and Saturday morning stacking shelves and cutting boxes in a Sainsbury supermarket on Stratford Road. Later, when my existential needs extended to clothes, books, and beer, a school chum got me a gig on Saturdays and school holidays in the food hall of the now defunct Rackhams department store – it was snobbishly upmarket for Brum, being a division of the famous Harrods of London, and us weekend lads had to wear naff little white waiter’s jackets which did not flatter my then portly (by sixties standards, but relatively svelte today) physique.

Rackhams in the Sixties

On the recommendation of my uncle, I worked for Sheldon Industrial Cleaning on Sundays at various Midlands motor plants, cleaning toilets and floors before the beginning of the weekday shifts. Willing hands would stand outside the Sheldon office in Digbeth hoping to be selected by the foremen and bussed to our workplace, be that in Brum, Coventry or Rugby. Come the long summer school break, when the motor industry workers took their holidays, I and other students would be hired to help with the annual stock-take at the huge Austin plant at Longbridge. One time, I was assigned to help demolish a computer room that was being renovated and upgraded. The old computer was the size and shape of a larger container, and the new one wasn’t much smaller. The iPad I am writing this piece on has probably more processing power.

The Austin, Longbridge, Birmingham

By 1967, I was a fit and adventurous eighteen year old, but still in need of cash. Summertime in the outdoors was an attractive prospect, and labourers’ pay on building sites was excellent for the times – up to fifty quid a week depending on the work, and which, I soon found out, included “danger money”.

So, for four summers in a row, I spent three months a year working as a laborer on the new housing estates that were going up all over the fringes of suburban Brum, and most conveniently, near where we lived, on the new estate on what was the old Bromford Race course near Castle Bromwich – high rise flats for Briant on the Bromford, system-built houses on the Chelmsley Wood estate (built on a redundant wartime airfield – there is still a Spitfire Way leading into the estate), and finally on the M1-M6 motorway link at Castle Bromwich with Marples Ridgeway. Inspired by the Clancy Brothers’ folk song, I wanted to join McAlpine’s Fusiliers, but that mob were working down the emerging motorway in what was to become Spaghetti Junction whilst M-R was operating right in from of my parents’ house, building the elevated motorway right on top of the River Tame. I built muscles, risked life and limb, and acquired a great sun-tan.

It might just be symptomatic of our forever changing times, the reality that nothing stands still or lasts for ever, or simply the short term quality and durability of buildings that were built so quickly, so widely, and literally “thrown up” to meet the post war Britain’s need for affordable social housing, but many of the blocks of units that I lived near in those days, and indeed, worked in and around, have been or very soon will be history.

The picture below shows a demolition expert watching the twenty storey Chillingholme Tower on the Bromford’s Hyperion Road collapsing on January 29 2008. The tower was a great monolith standing at the end of our road, Papyrus Way. I lived there in the late sixties when it was first built; it overlooked that motorway I worked on. A short distance down the estate were Bailey Tower and Stoneycroft Tower. They were demolished in 2011, and I am informed that new houses are being built where they once stood. Warstone Tower and Holbrook Tower, two of several 13 storey blocks to their east, have also hit the dust. In the summer of 1967, I worked as a labourer on two of them for Briant. All of my hard work for nothing?

The demolition of Chillingholme Tower, 2008 I Emma Lee, BirminghamLive

Bromford Bridge Racecourse

System-built housing on Birmingham’s fringes. I lived in one of these.

“High rises” on the Bromford.
In 1967, I worked on two of the smaller ones

Chelmsley Wood council estate as God would have seen it

Another God’s eye view of Chelmsley Wood council estate

Work “on the buildings” was hard, and the hours were long, and I got to meet some great blokes and some right arseholes – my workmates came from all over the United Kingdom – particularly the Emerald Isle, the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean -the language was colourful and and conversation was often what we’d now describe as as racist and misogynist. I unloaded bags of cement and thousands of house-bricks by hand, dug trenches, and sledge-hammered survey stakes and learnt many things that most students did not, like using kangos and jackhammers, driving tractors, pouring skips of concrete and fixing reinforcement steel.

But those were dangerous days on the construction sites. There was minimal health and safety regulation – helmets were optional and hi-vis had yet to be invented – I witnessed many accidents during my stints on the sites, many serious and some fatal, and I narrowly missed a few myself. Job security was tenuous – most of us “navvies” were hired “on the lump”, and could be “put off” on the spot, and if it rained, we weren’t paid. The term “navvies”, by the way, derived from “navigator” the name given to the Irish labourers who came over to mainland Britain in the nineteenth century to build the canal system.

Building the M1-M6 link motorway through north Birmingham

My folks were none too happy about it. My dad had come over from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland in the late forties and had worked on building sites in Birmingham for years before finding work in the motor industry. He still bore the scars and the aches and pains. Having worked so hard to give me and my brothers an education and opportunities that they never had, it was a disappointment for them to see my brother and I head off every morning in work clothes and with lunch boxes, and returning ten hours later tired, dirty and aching with blistered hands, tired limbs and sore feet. They couldn’t fully comprehend that we did it for quick money and not for a living.

But the money was good, and during my uni years, I was able to spend up big on books and clothes, booze and dope, with enough left over to finance my travels to the Mediterranean and then overland to India and back – it lasted until I finally reached Istanbul, when I had to call my folks for money to ge me back to England.

But that is another tale …

For more biography in In That Howling Infinite, see: Tall Tales, small stories, eulogies and epiphanies

Postscript

My days “on the buildings” inspired many of my songs, poems and prose, though few recordings and documents now exist. One song that has been uploaded to SoundCloud is The King of the May, and is published below. It tells how in the early ‘seventies, a man staged a ‘sit-in’ atop a tower crane. High over London Town, he was protesting against ‘the lump’, that exploitative form of casual labour then in use on British building sites as I noted abi ‘‘em there was no compo, no OH&S, no rights. They were tough times – men died. I was there. The title comes from Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Kral Majalis’. Allen was actually crowned thus in Czechoslovakia – before the Prague Spring of 1968 too. And thank you to WH Auden for the loan of his lyrics. I republish also below two poems I wrote about work when I was on the nine-to-five hamster wheel in Sydney during the eighties. And below two are two prose pieces I wrote about working on the Chelmsley Wood housing estate in 1969. They reflect on the kind of work I was doing, the people I worked with, and the stare I’d mind I was in at the time – which was decidedly under the influence of my politics and also my acid.

My short career as a labourer effectively ended on the motorway. In the years that followed I entered into clerical and then professional employment in the public and private sectors, although between jobs and also, to make some extra money, I cleaned, gardened, and even worked as a hired hand at Persian carpet auctions holding up beautiful artifacts that I could never afford for punters to lay their money down … And I sang and played my songs across Australia and Britain, including many about my work, my work, my working life …

Early in the morning factory whistle blows
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light
It’s the working, the working, just the working life
Bruce Springsteen

Poems and Prose ; Chelmsley Wood – London John and Engineers https://howlinginfinite.files.wordpress.com/2022/11/chelmsley-wood.pdf ;

On the hamster wheel – two poems

Better Read Than Dead – the joy of public libraries

August 19, 2022January 15, 2023Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

In 1839, in the midst of a half-century of post-Napoleonic political ferment and incipient revolution, English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton coined the adage “the pen is mightier than the sword”, implying that the written word is more effective than violence as a tool for communicating a point. It’s no wonder that the straighteners, the autocrats and the fundamentalists want to ban and even burn books. In his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953 at the height of America’s McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunts, Ray Bradbury wrote: “The problem in our country isn’t with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them”.

But, encouragingly, reports of the demise of the written word in the form of the humble published book are exaggerated and premature.

Which brings us to keepers of the flame – the torch of knowledge and not the bearers of the fore-brands, the people who look after our public libraries. Oscar-winning documentary-maker Michael Moore once said admiringly that librarians were a more dangerous group than he had realized: “You think they’re just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They’re, like, plotting the revolution, man.”

To the American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, libraries were temples of learning and self-improvement. “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people,” said Carnegie, who put his money where his mouth was. By 1929, he had paid for the construction of more than 2500 libraries, most of them in the USA.

Back in the day …

I reckon I was visiting libraries even before I could read, but that could well be my mind playing tricks on my memory. But once I commenced grammar school, the local library, but a short walk away, was a world of wonders. Yardley Wood Library, in south Birmingham on the quiet northerly extension of busy Highfield Road, between a small housing estate of postwar prefabs on the east and a large expanse of recreation field at its rear, was the fount of my early education and my general knowledge of the outside world. As a teen, I’d stay weekends at my Aunt Mary’s house in the inner city on the border of Moseley and Balsall Heath, and the Victorian grandeur and shadowy interior of Balsall Heath Library became yet another “garden of earthly delights”. This library is the featured picture of this post. The tall chimney on the left belongs to the immediately adjacent Balsall Heath swimming baths, where my uncles and aunts who shared our home would take their weekly baths (even if they didn’t need them, as the old saw goes), where I’d go in my weekend sleep-overs,and where when struggling with my Boy Scout swimming test, I’d push myself through the pool. Although I now live in a land blessed with beautiful beaches, I still hate being in water any deeper than my bath!

Yardley Wood Library, Birmingham

I’d browse the stacks, thumbing through art books and atlases, encyclopedias and illustrations, and I’d always have three or four books on loan, with a particular interest in history, biographies and historical fiction. My reading was eclectic ab initio, from the early adolescent “he went with … “ great explorer adventures by Louse Andrews Kent and the many books of H Rider Haggard, both quite politically incorrect and vulnerable to ‘cancellation’ in today’s prescriptive cultural climate, to the relatively anodyne French ‘soft-porn’ of Anne Golon’s Angélique series to Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don and its sequel The Don Flows Home to the Sea, which introduced me to Russian history and politics and a youthful dalliance with The Communist Manifesto and the Communist Party.

Eventually, as I studied for A Levels in the late ‘sixties, I entered Birmingham’s cavernous Central Library in the heart of the Second City. Opening in 1865 and rebuilt in 1882: it was a magnificent edifice within and without. I recall it when I rewatch the Game of Thrones episode in which would-meister Sam Tarly enters the Citadel in Old Town for the first time. This Victorian relic was replaced by a brand new, brutalist building in 1974 (which I never saw), and this too was closed in 2013 and replaced by the present Birmingham Library – which I visited when I was in Birmingham two years later.

Birmingham Central Library

The interior of Birmingham Central Library

The William Shakespeare Room reconstructed atop the new BirminghamLibrary, 2015

My alma mater, Moseley Grammar School boasted a small but diverse library that beckoned during lunch breaks, with its high, wooden-beamed ceiling, it’s wrought iron balcony and the spiral staircase that led up to the landmark school tower in subsequent years, the library was closed for safety reasons, but a recently completed renovation project has brought it back into use as the photo of former pupils gathered therein on the occasion of Heritage Day 2022 shows.

I’ve written fleetingly of this library before: “ It was one of those beautiful late-spring evenings that you would get in the England of youthful memory. The evening sun poured through the gothic stained glass windows of the school library – it was one of those schools. A group of lower sixth lads, budding intellectuals all, as lower sixth tended to be, gathered for a ‘desert island disks” show-and tell of their favourite records. Mine was Wishin’ and Hopin’ (by (Dusty Springfield). Then it was on to the next. Clunk, hiss, electric guitar intro, and: “My love she speaks like silence, without ideas or violence, she doesn’t have to say she’s faithful, but she’s true like ice, like fire…” I was gone, far gone. So was Dusty”. From Whats Bob Got To Do With It?

It is one of those instances of serendipity we encounter on our journey through life that the first serious love of my life was studying to be … drum roll! …a librarian, and in time became the chief librarian of a major English university, whilst one of my oldest London friends rose to a that position in the university I attended in the ‘seventies. How about that?

Moseley Grammar School, Birmingham

Moseley Grammar School library, 2022

Here in the now …

In Australia, if attendance figures are any indication, the public library is our most valued cultural institution. In the year to July 2018, about 7.6 million people visited Australian libraries – more than went to museums (6.7 million), art galleries (6.3 million), plays (3.9 million) or musicals and opera (3.5 million). But it was the return rate that really set libraries apart. Whereas at least half of those who visited museums or the theatre went only once in the year, three-quarters of library visitors went back at least three times, and one-third visited more than 10 times. Australians make about 114 million visits to public libraries annually.

Here where I now live in Australia, on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Coffs Harbour library is the mother ship with satellites at the outlying townships of Woolgoolga and Toormina – latter is named for Taormina in Sicily, the site of one of the most famous theatres of Greek antiquity. Our own shire has libraries in Bellingen, Dorrigo and Urunga.

I get to the library every time I’m in Coffs Harbour, just to browse the stacks (there is something there for everyone) and check out the history books – as ever – and the large collection of cds. I almost always come away with something I had not intended to read or listen too. It’s a calm and peaceful space, with friendly and helpful staff, and yet always quite busy – particularly at its free computer and wi-fi benches.

As a volunteer with Settlement Services International, before Covid 19 closed our office and cut the flow of refugees to Australia, I often took newly-arrived refugee families there as part of their orientation. I’d help them enroll and give them a brief tour of the facilities, and particularly the computers and the children’s section (which hosts regular and free storytelling and craft sessions for preschools kiddies), and encourage them to return – it’s such an excellent introduction to our language, society and culture.

Coffs Harbour Library

As the following essay shows, libraries are much much more than their books and their educational and technical resources and facilities. They are not just a reference service but also a place for the vulnerable and the lonely, a “shelter from the storm” for people of all ages and circumstances. In a world where social and community services are being ground down, and loneliness and isolation are endemic, libraries provide vital lifelines for all manner of folk. from elderly people who value the human interaction with library staff and with other visitors, to the isolated young mother who enjoys the support and friendship that grows from a baby rhyme time session, to people who want to play the ukulele (visitors can actually borrow ukuleles as one would borrow books), to people like me just seeking time out time in a peaceful and welcoming space.

Postscript

I wrote recently about Moseley Grammar School in an article on JRR Tolkien:

“Learning more about the author, I was to discover that he’d grown up in Birmingham, my home town, first in leafy Edgbaston (the home of Cadbury and the Warwickshire County Cricket Club), where he’d attended the prestigious King Edward’s Grammar School – my own school, Moseley Grammar, was not in its league. He lived near Sarehole Mill, in present day Hall Green, around the turn of century, between the ages four and eight, and would have seen it from his house. The locale at that time was rural Worcestershire farmland and countryside and not in the Birmingham ‘burbs. He has said that he used the mill as a location in The Lord of the Rings for the Mill at Hobbiton: “It was a kind of lost paradise … There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill … “ Sarehole Mill was just down the road from my school, and our sports field and cross country tracks were adjacent to it. On many a wintry, cold, wet and windy Wednesday afternoon, I’d stagger past it on a muddy track. How I hated wet Wednesdays; dry ones were for rugby, and I hated them too!” From: One ring to rule us all – does Tolkein matter?

For more stories like this one in In That Howling Infinite, see Tall tales, small stories, eulogies and epiphanies, and on books and reading generally, see Better read than dead – books, poetry and reading.

One for the books: the unlikely renaissance of libraries in the digital age

With the rise of the internet, public libraries were supposed to be on borrowed time. But they’re thriving – their renaissance as much about community as the literary riches they contain. It’s enough to make you Dewey-eyed.

By Jane Cadzow, Sydney Morning Herald, September 28th 2019

Don Royce had an exceptionally happy marriage. “I was the luckiest person I knew,” says the 72-year-old former school principal. When his wife, Laura, died in 2016, Royce felt as if the ground had gone from beneath his feet: “We had been together for nearly 50 years, and suddenly my life … It was like I went over a cliff.” What saved him, or at least cushioned his fall, was his local library.

Australia has about 1500 public lending libraries. Royce, who lives in the Victorian city of Geelong, is one of the nine million of us – more than one-third of the population – who are card-carrying library members. When Laura was alive, he would duck in, grab a few books or magazines, and head home. After her death, he was in less of a hurry. “I wasn’t loitering at the library,” he says, “but I was spending more time there than I had.”

He discovered that his library and others in Geelong offered free tuition on a range of subjects, from tracing family history to efficiently operating a laptop, and he started signing up for classes: “They were useful information sessions. And they were valuable distractions.” Having somewhere to be at a particular time forced him out of bed in the mornings, and into the world. “It just got me up and about.”

Since then, Royce has recovered his equilibrium. He is back to being an occasional rather than constant visitor to the library, but whenever he goes, he is struck anew by how cheering the place is. “Young mothers with their babies meet there,” he says. “I walk past the open windows and see some old guy with a bunch of young people playing chess.” What Royce understands is that local libraries have many different purposes. People go to them for company as well as for literature. They’re centres for research, for recreation, for respite from the daily slog. They’re refuges for the broken-hearted. “They’re really important,” he says.

If attendance figures are any indication, the public library is our most valued cultural institution. In the year to July 2018, about 7.6 million people visited Australian libraries – more than went to museums (6.7 million), art galleries (6.3 million), plays (3.9 million) or musicals and opera (3.5 million). But it was the return rate that really set libraries apart. Whereas at least half of those who visited museums or the theatre went only once in the year, three-quarters of library visitors went back at least three times, and one-third visited more than 10 times. Australians make about 114 million visits to public libraries annually.

“Thirty years ago, people were thinking libraries wouldn’t survive the internet – that they’d just die out,” says NSW State Librarian John Vallance, who supervises NSW’s public library network. “A lot of city planners and council planners were actually planning for a future without local libraries, because the assumption was that everyone would be at home looking at their screens. It’s hard to imagine pundits getting something more wrong.” Far from losing relevance, “libraries are undergoing a renaissance”, says Vallance. It turns out that people love being around books. “And around other people. In fact, I would say the people are just as important as the books. That’s something the planners never really understood.”

Being with people in a pleasant indoor setting usually carries a price of admission, whether it’s $5 for a cup of coffee in a cafe or $100 for a theatre ticket. Even in shopping malls, security guards are likely to ask you to move on if you look like hanging about indefinitely without spending money. “The public library,” says Vallance, “is the one place where absolutely everyone – regardless of their background, their wealth, their status – can be assured of a respectful welcome and a friendly reception.”

Entry to the library is free. You need a (free) library card to borrow items, but anyone can amble in and stay for as long as they like, reading the newspapers, browsing through the books, using the computers, cramming for exams or just occupying a comfortable chair. “You don’t have to buy anything,” says Patti Manolis, chief executive of the Geelong Regional Library Corporation, who, like most librarians she knows, is driven by the conviction that every member of the community deserves access to knowledge and culture. “In Geelong, just under 40 per cent of our members are on incomes of less than $30,000,” Manolis says. “That makes me really happy, because it means our services are reaching those who I believe need them most.”

Oscar-winning documentary maker Michael Moore once said admiringly that librarians were a more dangerous group than he had realised: “You think they’re just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They’re, like, plotting the revolution, man.” Manolis laughs when I remind her of the quote. “That’s right!” she says. “That’s us.” Chris Buckingham, president of Public Libraries Victoria, agrees that when it gets right down to it, libraries are about people power: “The pursuit of a just and fair society sits at the very core of what we do.” Buckingham thinks of librarians as subversives with big hearts. And a lot of patience. “I mean, they get a thousand questions a day.”

Some of which aren’t easy to answer. “The other day someone came to the desk and asked, ‘How do you have a good life?’ ” says Monica Dullard, who works at inner Melbourne’s St Kilda Library. The inquirer was a middle-aged woman. The librarians on duty found her some books and articles they thought might be enlightening. Also, “they had a nice chat to her,” Dullard says. “The thing is, we take the time.”

People phone with questions, too. “We had someone ring up and ask us how to make chicken soup, because he was feeling a bit poorly,” Dullard says. “We’ve got a huge collection of Jewish cookbooks, so we got a recipe from one of the books we knew was really good and talked this bloke through it, step by step. He made the soup and came in the next week saying he felt much better.”

Even now, in the digital age, the thousands of volumes that line a library’s shelves are its greatest asset. As NSW State Librarian John Vallance likes to point out, “the most cost-effective, long-lasting and energy-efficient form of data storage is paper”. People with library cards have the option of downloading digital versions of books, magazines, music or movies to their electronic devices. But of the 41 million loans a year from NSW public libraries, less than 5 per cent are in digital format. “People still love having something that they can hold in their hands,” Vallance says.

If it’s a real page-turner, all the better. The most borrowed books in Australian libraries in the 12 months to March were The Midnight Lineand Night School, both by bestselling British thriller writer Lee Child. (It was the third year in a row that Child topped the chart.) Next came two Australian novels: Tim Winton’s The Shepherd’s Hut and Jane Harper’s Force of Nature. The most borrowed non-fiction book – the 10th most popular book overall – was The Barefoot Investor, by money-management adviser Scott Pape

For those who visit libraries to use the computers and free WiFi – one in seven Australian households aren’t connected to the internet – the bonus is having someone on hand to help with, say, navigating a job-search website, preparing a resumé or filling in an online citizenship application form. Through necessity, librarians have become tech experts, says Dullard. “At Mother’s Day and Christmas, we get a flood of people coming in, 65-plus, who have been given an iPad as a present and don’t know how to use it. They’re too embarrassed to tell their children, so they sneak into the library and we teach them how to set it up.”

Sometimes staff have to intuit what it is that customers require. Hobart librarian Ryan Burley was shelving books one afternoon when a man who looked to be in his late 20s asked where he could find something to read on anger management. Burley led him to the right area and pulled out a few titles. Sensing that the man wanted to talk, he asked him if he was okay. The customer said he had lost jobs and girlfriends because of his inability to control his anger. Burley said he himself had suffered from depression. The ensuing conversation was long and candid, and by the end of it, the man seemed relieved. “It was like he had actually been heard for the first time,” Burley says. “One key thing stands out to me: libraries are safe spaces. We don’t judge. We don’t discriminate. What that guy needed was empathy, and to know that he wasn’t alone.”

At Burwood Library in inner-western Sydney, librarian Helen Kassidis formed an instant bond with a woman who, after asking for information on divorce, confided that she was going through a painful marriage break-up. “I said to her, ‘Look, I know how you feel,’ ” says Kassidis, who had been through a divorce of her own. Library visitors spill out their troubles quite often, in Kassidis’s experience. “Sometimes there are tears, theirs and mine. Sometimes all I can say is ‘I’m sorry’. ” But usually she can point them toward a possible source of assistance – be it a book title, a website address or the phone number of a government agency. Librarians are in the business of helping people make informed choices, she says. “Whether it’s a kid who chooses that they’re going to read Harry Potter or Enid Blyton, or somebody who’s making massive life decisions, you are, in a small way, empowering them.”

Burwood Library, like others around the country, has customers who practically live there. “Our regulars have formed friendships among themselves,” Kassidis says. “They read the papers and they all have a chat. It’s super-cool.” Over the years, this loose-knit band has contained some colourful characters. “One person we called Cardboard Man, because he made sleeves and collars out of cardboard and wore them every day. He also wore a black cardboard moustache, beard and eyebrows. We totally understood why he never came to the library in a downpour.”

The tide of humanity that washes in and out of the library engenders both fondness and fascination in Kassidis. “I think a lot of people are lonely,” she says. “And working in a library, there is the privilege of helping somebody not feel so lonely, even if it’s just for a couple of minutes.” Basically, she regards her job as a gift. “People and books! It doesn’t get much better than that.”

NSW State Librarian John Vallance: “The most cost-effective and energy-efficient form of data storage is paper.” — NSW State Librarian John Vallance

When John Vallance was a boy in Sydney, lending libraries were parsimonious with their books. “You weren’t allowed to borrow more than three at a time,” the NSW State Librarian says. Similar restrictions applied in Brisbane, where I grew up. My mother, a former librarian and voracious reader, would be at the library to swap her books for new ones the minute the fortnightly borrowing period elapsed. When my uncle died, my aunt kept the news from the library so that he could take out books on both their library cards. These days, the sky’s the limit for borrowers. When Vallance visited the NSW Hunter Valley town of Raymond Terrace, which is serviced by a mobile library, he saw an old man with a suitcase leaving the converted semitrailer. “He opened the suitcase and there would have been about 50 books that he’d borrowed,” Vallance says. “The suitcase was so heavy that he had it in a wheelbarrow.”

I admire that fellow’s style. The thrill of knowing I can borrow anything I like hits me every time I walk into my local library. I’m usually there to collect a book I have reserved online, having read a review of it somewhere, but I can rarely resist picking up a couple of extras. What’s most exhilarating is that the system runs on trust: I take the books on the understanding that I will return them on time, in good condition, for others to enjoy. The library lifts my spirits because it makes me feel that I live in a civilised society.

Most people do bring books back by the due date, says Public Libraries Victoria’s Chris Buckingham, who applauds a trend to abolish fines for late returns. The sums may seem low – about 25¢ a day – but some people are on such tight budgets that every cent counts, Buckingham argues, and if they forget to return a book, racking up a few dollars’ debt, it can be enough to stop them going back to the library. In places where financial penalties have been scrapped, he says, the number of people borrowing books has risen.

It seems to Jenny Thompson, of Wollongong City Libraries, that library patrons overwhelmingly want to do the right thing: “There’s a lot of respect there from most people.” In Wollongong, south of Sydney, the central library’s most loyal customers gather outside each morning, waiting to be admitted. On the days it doesn’t open, they have to find somewhere else to go.

“But one public holiday, something went wrong and the electronic doors opened anyway,” Thompson says. “The regulars were able to come in, even though the library was supposed to be closed.” The absence of librarians was barely noticed: “The people who use the computers just went upstairs and got themselves onto the computers. The newspaper-reading guys sat down and started the newspapers. It was really quite funny.”

Though well-ordered – the Dewey Decimal classification system still holds sway – libraries are less hushed and hidebound than they used to be. “We call it the community living-space,” says Monica Dullard, who doesn’t blink when backpackers use the bathrooms at the St Kilda Library to have a wash and rinse out their underwear, then emerge fresh and clean to Skype their parents on the computers. She loves that people now eat in libraries, even sending out for takeaway if they forget to bring a snack: occasionally a pizza delivery guy appears at the desk and asks loudly who ordered the margherita. “Sometimes you see people cooking,” she says. “There are power points all over the place, and we have people who heat up rice, or two-minute noodles.”

So relaxed is the atmosphere that when someone produced a foot spa, plugged it in and started using it, others presumed this was a new service the library was offering. According to Dullard, a queue quickly formed at the counter. “People were saying, ‘Where’s my foot spa?’ ”

Australians make about 114 million visits to public libraries each year.

To the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, libraries were temples of learning and self-improvement. “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people,” said Carnegie, who put his money where his mouth was. By 1929, he had paid for the construction of more than 2500 libraries, most of them in the US.

Six years later, a report funded by the Carnegie Corporation painted a bleak picture of the situation in Australia. We had subscription libraries, but they charged membership fees and their collections were pitifully inadequate (“Wretched little institutes which have long since become cemeteries of old and forgotten books”, the report called them). We had a public reference library in each state capital – the oldest and grandest being Melbourne’s, with its magnificent domed reading room – but borrowing from these was not permitted. The books had to be read on the premises. In all of Australia, there were fewer than half a dozen free lending libraries.

Concerned citizens responded to the report by founding the Free Library Movement, and in 1939 NSW became the first jurisdiction to take decisive action, introducing legislation that promised state government financial backing to local councils that opened free lending libraries. As a nation, we haven’t looked back. In the US, the Trump Administration has proposed eliminating almost all federal library funding. In the UK, funding cuts by the Conservative government have seen more than 800 libraries closed or handed to volunteers to run. Here, though, public libraries are not only surviving but thriving. Total government expenditure on libraries has risen to more than $1.2 billion a year, or just less than $50 per person. “In Australia, we’re actually in a very good position,” says Sue McKerracher, chief executive of the Australian Library and Information Association.

Even though libraries offer digital downloads, the vast majority of items borrowed are still in hard-copy form.

Librarians aren’t by nature publicity-seekers. “They go to work each day in the knowledge that they make a difference in people’s lives, and for them that’s enough,” says Public Libraries Victoria president Chris Buckingham. “They’re not necessarily big on making a lot of noise about it.” But when word goes out that this piece is being written, library staff across the country contact me, eager to pass on anecdotes.

From Port Stephens, north of Newcastle on the NSW coast, I get a message about Les, the library regular who brings a bunch of flowers for the desk each week, and Lorna, who brings the librarians baked goods, and Frank, the keen gardener who presents them with home-grown produce. From Tasmania comes the tale of John, the retired butcher, who asked the library for help earning to read and write. Assigned a voluntary tutor, John made good progress. Within a couple of years, he was whipping through Agatha Christie novels and writing his life story for his grandson to read.

From Darwin comes news of a refugee couple who took their daughter to story-time sessions at the library and asked if they could celebrate her birthday there, because the place meant so much to them. “They brought a cake and the father gave a speech and thanked everyone,” says Karen Conway, executive manager of library services in the Northern Territory’s capital city. Obviously there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

I get emails about libraries that host concerts, book club meetings, knitting circles, author talks, English-language classes, puppet shows and Girl Guides’ sleep-overs. Several correspondents impress on me that libraries are havens for the homeless – cool in summer, warm in winter and dry when it rains. Tracy Fraser, a librarian at Broken Hill, in far-western NSW, talks enthusiastically about the Outback Letterbox Library, a scheme that delivers parcels of books to people living in remote settlements across a 240,000-square-kilometre swathe of inland Australia. “We get letters saying it’s like Christmas every time the books arrive,” Fraser says.

Ed Oberg and Nathalie Fritzen met in the library at Thirroul, a suburb of Wollongong. Ed, a retired mechanical and industrial engineer, had long been an almost daily visitor to the library. On this particular morning, he arrived with his laptop a little later than usual and found all the tables already occupied. He asked Nathalie, an unfamiliar face, if he could share her table. She agreed, though he has since learnt she wasn’t happy about it. “She wanted to be working there by herself,” he says.

Ed noticed that Nathalie’s laptop was a Toshiba, like his. That was an excuse to strike up a conversation, during which he discovered she was visiting from France. “She had a few issues with her computer and I was able to help her,” he tells me. Romance blossomed, and 18 months later, in 2016, the two invited the Thirroul librarians to their wedding. Ed still spends most of his time at the library. Nathalie often joins him. “It’s fantastic,” he says. “We typically know everybody there, she and I.”

SMH pictures, credit: Jennifer So.

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