Deconstructing Dunkirk

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

During the closing scenes of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the journalist says: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”.

Acclaimed British historian Max Hastings examines the reality of the events behind Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster whilst pricking the illusions and delusions of the Brexit balloon. “The irony…is that Churchill himself never saw anything in the least glorious about standing alone”. “Wars” said Winston, “are not won by evacuations”.

“After Brexit takes place I fear that this time around we shall be unable to rely upon the Russians to stage a grand diversion in the East to spare us from the hideous economic, social, cultural, and political consequences of attempting to fight on alone, without the impeccable justification that Hitler has forced such a course upon us”.

Whilst these are Hasting’s principal themes, he also demolishes a couple of common misconceptions. Firstly, the Dunkirk “miracle”, impressive as it was, was not the only major evacuation that harrowing summer. A few weeks later, “some 144,000 British troops, together with 24,352 Poles and 42,000 other Allied soldiers, were brought to England. Only historians are much aware of this “second Dunkirk”. Secondly, soldiers on the beach and commentaries thereafter talk of how the “bloody RAF!” was nowhere to be seen in the skies above Dunkirk. Recent archival research how shown that the RAF was indeed active in the hinterland, suffering heavy losses as it fought to prevent reinforcements and materiel reaching the Wehrmacht and and as it attacked the Luftwaffe before it hit the beaches.

During early 2018, I posted the following on the In That Howling Infinite Facebook page in response to an article in The Independent:

Once more into the breach…on Belgian beaches and parliamentary benches

This article, like many of its recent ilk, is bound to a create a furore among the “make Britain great again” brigade (I loved the Katie Hopkins connection…)
I recently watched Dunkirk and Darkest Hour to back, and they made curiously compelling companions. The best thing about Darkest Hour was Gary Oldman’s  portrayal of Winston, and his delivery of the famous speeches (and I could happily watch loyal stenographer Lily James typing out menus all day long – she gave us a luminous Natasha in the Beeb’s recent and eminently bodacious War and Peace).
Dunkirk was harrowing for its portrayal of the chaos aboard the sinking hospital ship and the other doomed rescue ships, and for the chaos and confusion in the cockpits of the spitfires (is there anything Mad Max Tom Hardy isn’t in these days?)
But both films were quite corny and cartoonish in their representation of the “bulldog spirit” of the brave, plucky , and yes, white Englanders (Kenneth Branagh at his Shakespearean best, and Mark Rylance channeling Foyle’s War – there was, however, a token black chap with a small speaking role during Winston’s apocryphal trip on the London Underground – “Yes, Mister Churchill, we shall never surrender!”; and there was a single Frenchie on the beach, although he was nefariously disguised as a Brit and was outed immediately prior to his  demise – played by Aneurin Barnard, another refugee from War and Peace, but being shell-shocked,incognito, or both, didn’t say a word). And apart from the speeches in Darkest Hour, the script in both films was hamfistedly cliched and clunky, and not much different from a Monty Python movie – or those patriotic Ealing Studios English war films.
Which might, of course, have been the intention.These two films and other nostalgia fests like the Crown and Victoria and Albert are quite in keeping with those Ealing films of old with their high production values, great actors like John Mills and Alec Guinness, stirring music in the Vaughn Williams vein, and hammy but patriotic scripts that were in their day Great Britishly politically correct.

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Splendid Isolation
Max Hastings, New York Review of Books, October 12 2017

Christopher Nolan’s epic movie about the rescue of the British army from the beaches of northeastern France in May 1940 has become a worldwide box office success. This is splendid news for its makers, and can do no harm to American, Taiwanese, or for that matter Rajput audiences. In the eyes of some of us, however, its impact upon the British people is calamitous at this moment in our fortunes.

Dunkirk contains no foreigners except a few understandably grumpy French soldiers. It is a British tale that feeds the myth that has brought Churchill’s nation to the cliff edge of departure from the European Union: there is splendor in being alone. This was most vividly expressed at the time by King George VI, who wrote to his mother: “Personally I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to & pamper.” One of the British officers who escaped with his battalion via the beaches greeted news that the French had surrendered on June 17 by exulting mindlessly to his comrades in the mess: “Thank heavens they have, now at last we can get on with the war.”

Michael Korda, for decades a celebrated New York publisher, was born in Britain in 1933; his father was Vincent Korda, one of three Hungarian-born brothers who were cinema wizards of their day. Now he offers two books for the price of one, interweaving a historical narrative of the events of 1939–1940, climaxing with Dunkirk, and a succession of vivid fragments of autobiography. He describes the flow of Jewish refugees through the North London homes of his childhood: “They had the haunted look of people who have just witnessed a bad accident, people with aggressive charm and formal manners who had grown up with the Kordas in Túrkeve, or had been to university in Budapest with Alex, or loaned him money, or worked with my father on film sets in Vienna, Paris or Berlin.”

Vacationing in France in the summer of 1939, as the world tumbled toward catastrophe, he recalls his actress mother constantly reprising the comic hit song of the day “Tout va très bien, Madame La Marquise,” which tells of an aristocratic woman on holiday who calls home to check that all is well and hears from her servants of one catastrophe after another, each described as “a little incident, a nothing,” culminating in the suicide of her husband and the incineration of her château. Korda writes: “Even as a boy of six, I observed that everybody in France talked about la ligne Maginot reverentially as if it were a holy object.”

He is very funny about his family’s experiences embarking on the film That Hamilton Woman, which eventually became one of Churchill’s favorites: his father, as set designer, failed to grasp that this was a tale of Admiral Nelson. Supposing it to be about General Wellington, he began to create a backdrop for the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels before Waterloo.

Once the European struggle began in earnest with the launch of Hitler’s blitzkrieg, Korda writes, “my mother, when she thought about the war at all, had the cheerful conviction that everything would work out well in the end because it always had for Britain, except for the war against the American colonies, and that was too long ago to matter.” He discerns among Britain’s modern Brexiters the mood that he himself witnessed after Dunkirk.

This comparison seems valid. Boris Johnson, Liam Fox, Michael Gove, David Davis, Iain Duncan Smith, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and their misbegotten Tory kin daily assure the British people that once we have cast off the shackles that bind us to Europe, caravels laden with the spoils of free trade will bring gold, frankincense, and myrrh to our island; as an added bonus, the sun will shine every day. Watching Dunkirk, I half-expected Foreign Secretary Johnson to appear in lieu of Winston Churchill, promising to hurl back the Hunnish hordes led by Angela Merkel, and to show no mercy to such knock-kneed Pétainistes as France’s Emmanuel Macron.

The irony, of course, is that Churchill himself never saw anything in the least glorious about standing alone. In May and June 1940 he moved heaven and earth—even fantastically offering Paul Reynaud’s government political union with Britain—to persuade France to stay in the war rather than sign an armistice. When the Nazis invaded Russia in June 1941, Churchill embraced the tyranny of Stalin, morally hard to distinguish from that of Hitler, and greeted the Russians as comrades in arms. The foremost objective of his premiership was to woo the United States into belligerence.

No man understood better than Churchill that while Britain might somehow avert defeat, without fighting alongside friends it could not conceivably aspire to victory. Only necessity and a supremely courageous willingness to defy reason, which many British politicians and generals felt unable to share, caused him in June 1940 to proclaim his country’s determination to fight to the last.

Our most eminent living historian, Sir Michael Howard, who lived through that era relatively early in his ninety-four years, observed to me recently: “The great lesson of my lifetime is that all difficult problems and challenges are best addressed with partners and allies.” This is the wisdom that the modern Brexiters seek to trample. They find the “Dunkirk spirit” refreshingly bracing, which Churchill certainly did not. “I cannot say that I have enjoyed being Prime Minister v[er]y much so far,” he wrote wryly on June 4, 1940, to one of his predecessors, Stanley Baldwin.

 

And so to the Nolan film. It possesses many of the virtues and vices of Steven Spielberg’s epics, wrapped in a Union flag instead of the Stars and Stripes. It looks terrific, though it is noisier than any battle I have ever attended. It contains some adequate acting, reminiscent of the silent movie era, because the stars deliver few coherent lines, being merely required to look staunch, stressed, and indomitable at appropriate moments.

The film opens with unseen Germans firing on a group of British soldiers in the deserted streets of Dunkirk, killing all but one, Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), whose experiences during the ensuing week, on the beaches and offshore, form a principal theme of what follows. At intervals between being bombed and strafed by the Luftwaffe, Tommy and various companions board ships in hopes of escape, only to find each in turn stricken. Nolan offers some extraordinary sinking scenes: Tommy’s escapes make Leonardo DiCaprio’s misfortunes aboard the Titanic seem tame stuff.

Meanwhile the Royal Navy has commandeered a host of small boats from the harbors of the South Coast and dispatched them to aid the evacuation. One boat owner, named Dawson (Mark Rylance), sets forth with his teenage son, Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney), and a young helper named George (Barry Keoghan). Their first encounter with the war comes when they rescue a traumatized soldier (Cillian Murphy) from a floating hulk. He is so appalled on finding that they are heading for Dunkirk, from which he has just escaped, that he tries to seize control of the boat, hurling George onto a ladder below, which his head strikes with fatal effect—a mawkish moment.

Meanwhile in the air, there are spectacular scenes as three Spitfires duel with the Luftwaffe over the Channel. One RAF pilot (Jack Lowden) ditches in the sea, from which he is rescued by Dawson and his son. As they then approach the beaches amid a throng of such craft, a colonel on the Dunkirk mole (an old term for a pier or jetty) asks the Royal Navy’s Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) what the boats mean. Branagh offers a performance as the elegant, unruffled naval officer that Noël Coward—who played Captain Kinross, based on Lord Mountbatten, in that notable wartime weepie In Which We Serve—might identify with. Bolton answers the colonel laconically: “Hope.” In the cinema where I saw the film, at that moment the audience burst into applause.

The small boats, including Dawson’s, load up with soldiers amid worsening perils—oil from a sunken minesweeper blazes on the water—before setting course for home and a heroes’ welcome. Commander Bolton gallantly lingers on the mole to ensure that some French soldiers can also get away. He remarks wryly that it has been not a bad fortnight’s work to rescue 338,000 British, French, and Belgian troops, when at the outset it was thought that no more than 30,000 could be taken off. Back home, the rescued Tommy reads in a newspaper Churchill’s heroic words to the nation, concluding with the vow that Britain will never surrender.

Most of us would agree that no work of art, whether novel, play, or film, has a responsibility to represent history accurately, any more than Shakespeare did, or David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan opens with a thirty-minute portrayal of the 1944 D-Day landings that is as vivid and realistic as anything we are ever likely to see on screen. Thereafter, however, that film deteriorates into routine Superman stuff that bears no relationship to anything that happened to US soldiers in Normandy. The mini-series Band of Brothers is a superb piece of filmmaking, probably the best ever made about Americans in World War II, but it is suffused with the romanticism that colors all of Spielberg’s work as well as much of that of Stephen Ambrose, who wrote the book from which it derives.

Nonetheless, for the record, we shall consider how far Nolan’s film tells the Dunkirk story like it was. There is no historical background to explain why the British army found itself on the beaches. On May 10, 1940, Hitler invaded France and the Low Countries. The British army, together with a substantial French force, promptly hastened north into Belgium, expecting the Germans to reprise their 1914 Schlieffen offensive.

Instead, however, in fulfillment of the only authentic personal inspiration of Hitler’s career as a warlord, the Wehrmacht’s main thrust pushed through the Ardennes, meeting the French army where it was weakest and bursting across the Meuse. The British found themselves falling back, fighting desultory actions but chiefly making haste to avoid encirclement. When the panzers reached the Channel coast, cutting off the British, the Belgians, and the French Seventh Army from the bulk of France’s forces further south, evacuation became the only plausible, though immensely difficult, option.

The first miracle of Dunkirk was that the German army scarcely interfered with the evacuation, partly because Hermann Goering assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe could dispose of the British, and partly because Churchill’s contingent was marginal alongside the forty-three divisions of the French army still in the field further south. There was no ground fighting in the town or port, so Nolan’s opening scene is spurious.

In the film, all the big ships seeking to rescue troops are sunk in dramatic circumstances, leaving small craft to do the business. This is a travesty. The Royal Navy sent thirty-nine destroyers to Dunkirk, of which only six were sunk, although many were damaged. Two thirds of all the men brought home sailed in big ships, notably including the destroyers, just one third in smaller ones.

The film shows air battles low over the Channel, whereas many soldiers came home full of bitterness toward the RAF because they never saw its aircraft: combat took place thousands of feet above, invisible to those on the ground or at sea. On the British side, it was dominated by Hurricanes, not Spitfires. Nolan shows a fighter floating for some minutes after ditching, whereas the huge Rolls-Royce Merlin engine in its nose would have sent the plane plunging to the bottom within seconds.

The character of Dawson may owe something to Charles Lightoller, a former officer on the Titanic who at the age of sixty-six took his boat Sundowner to Dunkirk, accompanied by his son and a friend, and brought home 120 men. Commander Bolton’s role at Dunkirk was fulfilled in reality by Captain Bill Tennant, who did a superb job as senior naval officer. Oddly enough Tennant, as evidenced by his diary, later became a bitter critic of Churchill’s war leadership.

Onscreen, endless British soldiers perish. Michael Korda suggests that the British army’s rate of loss was “comparable to that in the bloodiest battles of the First World War or the American Civil War, and an indication of just how hard the fighting was.” Yet what was remarkable about the real event was how few men died. In the entire May–June 1940 campaign, including Dunkirk and later episodes, just 11,000 British troops were killed, compared with at least 50,000 French dead.

A further 41,000 British troops were taken prisoner by the Germans, but alongside the 193,000 brought home, the “butcher’s bill” was small. General Sir Harold Alexander, who commanded the rear guard, told Anthony Eden on his return: “We were not hard pressed, you know.” This remark is sometimes cited as an example of his bent for heroic understatement, but was no more than the truth.

Cinema audiences are left to assume that after Dunkirk, the British sat down on their island and prepared to resist the Nazis on the beaches. In truth, in one of Churchill’s more spectacular follies, he promptly insisted upon dispatching another two divisions, one of them newly arrived Canadians, to Normandy and Brittany to show the French government and people that Britain remained committed to fight on at their side.

His chief of staff, Major General “Pug” Ismay, gently suggested to the prime minister that it might be wise for these troops to proceed slowly toward France, since it was obviously doomed. “Certainly not,” replied Churchill angrily. “It would look very bad in history if we were to do any such thing.” Few great actors on the stage of world affairs have been so mindful of the verdict of future generations. On June 13, four days before the French surrender and nine days after the Dunkirk evacuation ended, British soldiers were still landing at Breton ports.

By yet another miracle, within days of arrival in France their commander, Lieutenant General Sir Alan Brooke, persuaded Churchill that they must come home. This time there were no beaches—they embarked through the ports. Many prisoners, tanks, and vehicles, including the entire 51st Highland Division, fell into German hands and there was a spectacular disaster when the liner Lancastria, carrying over three thousand men, was sunk by air attack.

But thanks to Brooke, the prime minister was spared from evil consequences of his reckless gesture. Some 144,000 British troops, together with 24,352 Poles and 42,000 other Allied soldiers, were brought to England. Only historians are much aware of this “second Dunkirk,” and it seems ill-natured to make much of the fact that of 100,000 French soldiers brought to Britain, even De Gaulle at his most sanguine admitted that only one third agreed to serve with his newly created Free French forces, while the remainder preferred repatriation to France.

As for the British people, for the rest of 1940—the mood turned sourer in the following year—they did indeed display a stoicism and even euphoria as irrational as today’s Brexiter exultation. The MP Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary on June 15:

My reason tells me that it will now be almost impossible to beat the Germans, and that the probability is that France will surrender and that we shall be bombed and invaded…. Yet these probabilities do not fill me with despair. I seem to be impervious both to pleasure and pain. For the moment we are all anaesthetised.

The writer Peter Fleming, then an army staff officer, wrote in a similar vein: “It was as though the whole country had been invited to a fancy-dress ball and everybody was asking everybody else “What are you going as?” A latent incredulity [gave]…problems connected with invasion the status of engrossing digressions from the main business of life…. The British, when their ally was pole-axed on their doorstep, became both gayer and more serene than they had been at any time since the overture to Munich struck up in 1937.

Among countless reasons for revering Churchill’s performance in 1940 is that he himself never for a moment succumbed to such silliness. Though he justly described Dunkirk as a deliverance, he also warned the House of Commons and the nation that “wars are not won by evacuations.” He knew that while the men had been brought home, almost all their weapons and equipment had been lost: the British army was effectively disarmed.

Thereafter he and his nation set the world a magnificent example of defiance. But it was an impotent defiance, from which both Britain and democracy were redeemed only by the belated arrival of allies. It was 1944 before Churchill’s soldiers, aided by huge infusions of American men, matériel, and especially tanks, were fit to face a major European battlefield.

In the intervening four years, relatively tiny British forces fought the Germans in North Africa and Italy, and a large imperial army surrendered to the Japanese at Singapore in February 1942. Contrary to persisting British delusions, Hitler’s enmity and ambitions always focused on the East. Because of his invasion of Russia, the British and later the Americans were granted the priceless luxury of being able to prepare at leisure for the belated June 1944 liberation of northwest Europe: the band of brothers of the US 101st Airborne Division, for instance, spent almost two years in uniform before hearing a shot fired in anger.

Michael Korda suggests that thanks to the final triumph in 1945, “Dunkirk was, and remains, perhaps the greatest British victory of World War Two, that rarest of historical events—a military defeat with a happy ending.” This assertion stretches a very large point, not least because Churchill himself regarded the outcome of World War II as anything but happy, since Britain’s voice in the world, not to mention his own, had become so much diminished.

It would be unreasonable to demand that Christopher Nolan should have injected more than a fraction of these realities into his Dunkirk. The most absurd assaults on the film come from India, where critics complain that he does not feature the two companies of Indian service troops who were present on the beaches. This is comparable to the British wailing when Saving Private Ryan appeared that their soldiers were absent without leave from the screen. I wrote at the time that if any nation wants its part in any conflict glorified, it must make the films for itself.

Nolan seems to deserve congratulations for declining to include even a token American, for decades a prerequisite for securing a US audience for a British war movie. Indeed, this imperative so intimidated many British directors and their screenwriters that gallant American characters were often depicted showing the stupid English how battles should be fought.

This latest epic represents a version of history little worse than The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, or The Guns of Navarone. Some of us are grateful that so many schoolchildren are going to see it, because they will at least discover that in 1940 there were beaches, the rescue of an army, and sacrifice and considerable fortitude by their forefathers. Britain’s grown-ups, however, should have been forcibly denied entrance to cinemas at this moment when we are threatened with embarkation upon one of the most self-indulgent, willfully foolish acts of self-harm in the nation’s history.

For all the charm of Michael Korda’s personal reminiscence of 1939–1940, he is on much less sure ground in his narrative of the big events, partly because he is obviously a romantic, and partly because he relies heavily on elderly sources, including the British official history of the campaign in France, much of which is tosh. He is surely right, however, to conclude his book by comparing the emotions of the modern Brexiters with those of the British in June 1940: “There was a national sense of relief…at leaving the Continent and withdrawing behind the White Cliffs of Dover.” After Brexit takes place I fear that this time around we shall be unable to rely upon the Russians to stage a grand diversion in the East to spare us from the hideous economic, social, cultural, and political consequences of attempting to fight on alone, without the impeccable justification that Hitler has forced such a course upon us.

 

The Country Life

Paul Hemphill 4 Comments

Spring is here, spring is here
Life is skittles and life is beer
I think the loveliest time of the year
Is the spring, I do, don’t you? Course you do
But there’s one thing that makes spring complete for me
And makes every Sunday a treat for me…
Tom Lehrer

That music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning, yet long untaught I did not hear, but now the chorus I hear and am elated.  Walt Whitman

It is five in the morning and the sun she’s rising. Old King Koel has been making his lovelorn call for two hours already. As the shadows lift, a lone kookaburra calls. Another answers, and is immediately joined by a choral cacophony. A whip bird calls in the forest nearby, and somewhere therein, a white-chested pigeon commences its hopeful “woo woo”. Just across the way, barrel-chested wongas waddle across the grass, their heads bobbing fore and aft, abd on a dance floor bedecked with festive straw swiped from the garden and blue trophies gathered from all over, a bower bird rasps loudly to a potential lady love who is edging across the garden. As she enters his bower, he sits on a branch and serenades her with a melody that is all sweetness. A mob of spangled drongos chortle and jingle amidst the trees as if they were about to watch the show.

Spangled Drongos and a Regent Bower Bird feeding on a termite swarm

The day brightens and as the nectar warms in the sun, spine-bills, tiny scarlet honey-eaters and lithe wattlebirds flock to the bottle brushes, flocks of red-browed finches twitter in the grass, “Ollie, ollie” oriole carols in the tea trees, the noisy friar bird lives up to his name, and satin and regent bower birds bounce on the grevillia ground cover. The fig birds, all green coats and red eyes, are up early, their minds set on the ripening figs, getting in early before the competition gathers. Through the morning, king parrots squeal as they keep watch over ripening bananas and pawpaws, and yellow robins ring like bells, following us through the gardens as we turn the earth to reveal juicy takeaway. On the forest fringes, a wompoo bassoons his courting carol. Bollocks are blue, bollocks are blue, wom-poo!

Eastern Spinebill and Gymea Lily

The sun moves on, and the day is subdued in the noonday heat. Afternoon reaches for evening and at four o’clock, and as if to schedule, a flight of yellow-tailed black cockatoos cruise in, squarking to each other as they settle into the banksias and casuarinas for a feed. Drongos chuckle and chatter, gamboling and chasing each other through the trees, carrying on like, well, drongos, as they take turns to swoop into the dam for a dip.

Then it is beer o’clock, and as we are sitting here, we hear some serous catbird courting. She’s way down in the valley below, and he, up on the spur, and they’re calling to each other like some Forest Cathie and Heathcliff. Over the next hour, they draw closer and closer together, her call becoming louder and louder, his keener and keener, their calls converging in the forest to our right. And maybe, soon, catbird kittens?

Changeover is upon us, that magical interlude when daytime segues into night-tide and the sounds of daylight and darkness meet, mingle and separate as the one melts and the other flows. Twilight approaches, and there is a flurry of argument and scuffling as birds grab their last snacks and hassle and hustle each other as they retire to their roosts. Mobs of kookaburras squawk like David Bowie’s monkey birds. But the night-tide hunters stir in silence, and tawnies, boobooks and powerful owls depart their shady day-time perches.

And then it is frog time. The generator frog heralds the changeover from day to night. Next, the bleaters start up, followed by the ding dings, the bonk bonks, barkers, and bubble wraps, wark warks and wot wots, and the rubber duckies. And among them, little Peronii, the frog who drops down from the foliage of overhanging trees as the air cools. The music of the night!  We are waiting for the flying foxes to cross the evening sky for the silky oak nectar, and soon they will be slurping and chirping. The fireflies are ascending from the moist gullies, and for a brief time, bob like wandering bands of fairies through the forest that surrounds us; and the mozzies have begun to nip our ankles as we watch he show.

And did I mention the snakes? They’re waking early with these unseasonable Septembers. There’s one that set up home on the veggie garden on the lookout for little meals on legs …

Ah! The country life!

Carpet Python

See below for a picture gallery of our wild friends and neighbours …

Glossy Black Cockatoo

See also: Small Stories – A Tale of Twin Pines and Small Stories – the schools of the Tarkeeth  and Loosing Earth – Tarkeeth and other matters environmental

Postscript – About Bellingen

We  in Bellingen Shire, some ten kilometres west of the seaside town of Urunga on the mid north coast of New South Wales. The forest lies between the Bellinger and Kalang Rivers, and these are connected tidally to the ocean at Urunga – the only place in Australia where two rivers meet the ocean together. The forest rises from the rivers on either side of the Fernmount Range, the easternmost extension of the Great Dividing Range that spans the eastern edge of our island continent. Above and between the two rivers, it is a rain-harvesting, filtration and stabilization ecosystem vital to the waterways and wetlands around them, and is a habitat for bird, reptilian, mammalian and marsupial wildlife, including koalas, wallabies, echidnas, quolls, goannas, owls, fruit doves and cockatoos. The east-west Fernmount Range Trail is an ancient highway called the Yildaan Dreaming Track. It led from the plains beyond the Dorrigo massif to what is now the seaside town of Urunga, known then to the Gumbaynggirr people as a “place of plenty”. The first people would descend the spurs on the north and south flanks of the range to fishing and ceremonies on the riverside. The Tarkeeth Forest therefore contains areas of significant indigenous culture, recalling song lines and stories of the Dreamtime, places of ceremony, of birth and burial, and of atrocity.

We have been visiting Bellingen Shire for the last thirty years, and moved a house onto our bush block over twenty years ago. in the Bellinger Valley on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. Bellingen is well known as a picturesque, well-preserved (founded in 1870) country town. In former times, it was the centre of a thriving dairy and timber industry, and in more recent times, as a popular tourist transit between the university city of Armidale and the country music capital of Tamworth to the west, and the Pacific “holiday coast” of Coffs Harbour, Sawtell, Urunga, and Nambucca Heads, with their sand, surf and sun.

Between the two is the Great Dividing Range, the rolling, high country escarpment of the New England Plateau with its gorges and waterfalls, and the world-heritage Dorrigo National Park with it timeless, untouched rainforests – a “land that time forgot”. And linking them all, the old trunk road, aptly if touristically named Waterfall Way.

Bellingen is popular for its cafes and coffee shops, craft industries and shops, music festivals, and federation facades. It’s visual appeal, and it’s bucolic rural environs have seen the town used on many occasions as a film location. In the seventies, it was a Mecca for young people seeking an alternative lifestyle. The hills thereabout are still scattered with cooperatives and communes, or, in local council-speak, multiple occupancy. In those days, no love was lost between the “hippies” and the farmers and loggers, and politics were dominated by the rural, conservative “born to rule” National and Country Party. Nowadays, it’s heir, the National Party still dominates the political scene, but its clear majorities decrease election by election, and by the turn of the century, there may no longer be a National Party member. But demographics do change, as does society. The hippies’ children and the farmers kids grew up together, attended the high school together, played, partied, and paired, and now, there are grand children and great grandchildren.

As the timber and dairy industry has declined, Bellingen’s economy has changed. Once exclusively agrarian – including a time as one of the prime producers of cannabis sativa – tourism plays a a vital role,  Bellingen advertises itself to visitors and to present and future residents as a clean, green and sustainable shire. Nature’s wonderland, from its golden beaches to its mountain rainforests and waterfalls. Tourist Heaven with a cornucopia of recreational activities for young and old. Lazy bathing and picnicking to energetic rambling and trecking, camping and climbing, canoeing and fishing. Cultural mecca with its cafes, live music,craft and artisan shops, and music festivals.

Two years ago, the online magazine Traveller published a breathless paean to “the bohemian town that is heaven on earth’. Happy traveller Sheriden Rhodes wrote: Some places are so beautiful; it feels like holy ground. For me, Bellingen has always had that consecrated feeling. It’s obvious, given the name the early pioneers gave the Promised Land, a scenic 10 minute-drive from Bellingen’s township itself. Here the land is so abundantly verdant and fruitful; it literally drips with milk and honey. It’s a place so special the fortunate locals that call it home, including its most famous residents George Negus and David Helfgott would much rather keep all to themselves”.

This is the spin. The reality is somewhat different. Bellingen and the “Holiday Coast” generally have seen a large influx of city folk seeking a different lifestyle for themselves and their children, and also of retirees seeking rural or seaside tranquility -in such numbers that Coffs Harbour and its seaside satellites have become in many ways the Costa Geriatrica.

Many newcomers are not fully aware that the Coffs Coast generally is one of the poorest areas of rural New South Wales. Statistics for youth unemployment and senior poverty are among  the highest in the state with all the attendant economic, social and psychological impacts as evidence in high rates of depression, domestic violence and substance abuse. Health and transport services outside the urban centres are  pretty poor. But on the right side of  the ledger, despite the environmental degradation of clear-felling, land-clearing, flammable, monoculture, woodchip-bound eucalyptus plantations that encircle Bellingen, a potential fire bomb primed to explode during one of our scorching, hot dry summers, the generational degradation of the Bellinger’s banks and the graveling up of its once deep depths, and the encroachment and expansion of water-hungry, pesticide and herbicide reliant blueberry farms, we in the Shire are indeed blessed by Mother Nature.

The coastline boasts magnicent headlands and promontories, and long, pristine and often deserted beaches. The World Heritage Gondwana rainforests are a national treasure, and surrounding national parks truly are a natural wonderland. We never tire of the drive from Urunga to Armidale via Waterfall Way, as it crosses the Great Dividing Range and the New England Plateau. The Kalang River as it flows beside South Arm Road and between the Tarkeeth and Newry State Forests is itself one of the Shire’s hidden and largely unvisited secrets, a haven for fishermen, canoeist and all who love mucking about in boats.

Compared to many places on this planet, we’ve really not much to complain about …

For other posts in our Small Stories series of ordinary folk doing extraordinary things, see: The Odyssey of Assid Corban, the story of a Lebanese migrant to New Zealand, and The Monarch of the Sea, the rollicking tale of an unlikely “pirate king”.

twilight

Eastern Spinebill

spinebill

Oreole

bleater

sleepy time time

Wompoo Fruit Dove

Otis Redding – an unfinished life

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Fifty years after his untimely death, a fabulous retrospective of the life, times, and musical greatness of Otis Redding:

Five magnificent years of an unfinished life. 

Singer-songwriter Otis Redding was born on September 9, 1941, in Dawson, Georgia. He became known the voice of soul music. Just as his career was taking off, he died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967. “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” became posthumously his first and only Number One hit in January 1968.

Also, In That Howling Infinite, read:  The Strange Death of Sam Cooke

 

Weighing the White Man’s Burden

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.
Rudyard Kipling

And where the crazy whiteman
And his teargas happiness
Lies dead and long since buried
By his own fantastic mess
Roy Harper

As a young lad in Birmingham, my school chums and I would be enthralled by a world map covered in red – the empire upon which the sun never set. As Britain turns its back on Europe, it would seem that quite a few folk are still enamoured of the defunct Imperium. A 2014 YouGov opinion poll that found 59% British people polled believed the old British Empire was something to be proud of. 34% wished they still had one.

Back in the day, we’d do school projects about cocoa cultivation on the Gold Coast (now Ghana, not our Australian schoolies’ mecca), rubber trees in Malaya and East Africa, and tea plantations in Assam and Ceylon – enhanced by attractive, child-friendly posters and other educational aids provided gratis by the likes of Cadbury, Dunlop and Typhoo. That these household names had factories in our industrial ‘second city’ which encouraged school outings rendered the wonders of empire all the more tangible.

In the Britain of my childhood, the “silent sullen peoples” of Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem were beginning to “colour-up” (pun quite intended) our monochrome, white-bread, demographic cityscape. The bleak and bland streets and suburbs of our English and Irish Birmingham were already rocking with new sounds and flavours, from the ska and reggae beats of Sparkhill to the spicy aromas of Balsall Heath and Alum Rock. There was prejudice, there was discrimination, there was at times violence, but as Britain emerged from the austerity of the war years, as the bombed cities were rebuilt, and a resuscitated economy created a consumer society, labour shortages persuaded politicians to facilitate mass immigration from the empire – and particularly, from the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent

Words like imperialism and colonialism, economics and exploitation, were yet to enter our vocabularies. The colonies and dependencies spread across all continents, and the ‘grown-up’ white ‘commonwealths’ and ‘dominions’ like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and Rhodesia, were the friends, partners, and indeed, children of the mother country.

It was, we perceived, in the innocence of youth and the blinkers of our school curricula, a benign and fruitful partnership of mutual benefit to all. “To serve our captives’ need”, we gave them our civilizing, Judeo-Christian, Anglo-Celtic values, our able and empathetic if patronizing and prejudiced administrators, our gallant soldiers, pious pastors, selfless doctors and inspiring teachers. They in return yielded up their natural resources and an abundance of cheap labour, and when the Empire was imperiled, they despatched their young men in their thousands to perish in our wars.

We were not to know that the mournful notes of the Last Post were sounding across a changing post-war world. The Union Jack was was descending on buildings and parade grounds the world over as unfamiliar new flags were raised in their stead. Tired, broke, and damaged Britain was retreating from Empire, as were France and the Netherlands, and a new imperium was rising in the west. Within a decade, India, and Pakistan and Ceylon were joined by Indonesia, and a score of young nations emerged throughout Africa. France fought long and bloody wars in Vietnam and Algeria to cling on to its colonial patrimony, and it too finally let go of its “fluttered folk and wild”.

And we were not to know the reality of Britain’s “mission civilatrice”. From the seventeenth century, the European colonizing powers were enmeshed by trade, greed, and national aggrandizement in what today we would define as “mission creep”. Distant posts morphed over three centuries into vast bureaucracies, mines and plantations that underwrote the North’s industrial and commercial hegemony, and into societies ruled by white, expatriate elites and segregated by class, caste, clan and colour.

How all this played out in The Raj is described in detail by politician and historian Shashi Tharoor in Inglorious Empire: What the British did in India.  This is reproduced below, together with a video, whilst the full Kipling poem, a song by Roy Harper, and a review by Australian author Christopher Kremmer follows.

Read also my earlier posts on India and the passing of Empire:

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But what about the railways…? The myth of Britain’s gifts to India 

Shashi Tharour, The Gusrdian, March 9, 2017

Holding court ... the lieutenant-general of the Punjab takes tea with maharajas and Rajas in 1875.
The lieutenant-general of the Punjab takes tea with maharajas and Rajas in 1875. Photograph: Popperfoto
Many modern apologists for British colonial rule in India no longer contest the basic facts of imperial exploitation and plunder, rapacity and loot, which are too deeply documented to be challengeable. Instead they offer a counter-argument: granted, the British took what they could for 200 years, but didn’t they also leave behind a great deal of lasting benefit? In particular, political unity and democracy, the rule of law, railways, English education, even tea and cricket?

Indeed, the British like to point out that the very idea of “India” as one entity (now three, but one during the British Raj), instead of multiple warring principalities and statelets, is the incontestable contribution of British imperial rule.

Unfortunately for this argument, throughout the history of the subcontinent, there has existed an impulsion for unity. The idea of India is as old as the Vedas, the earliest Hindu scriptures, which describe “Bharatvarsha” as the land between the Himalayas and the seas. If this “sacred geography” is essentially a Hindu idea, Maulana Azad has written of how Indian Muslims, whether Pathans from the north-west or Tamils from the south, were all seen by Arabs as “Hindis”, hailing from a recognisable civilisational space. Numerous Indian rulers had sought to unite the territory, with the Mauryas (three centuries before Christ) and the Mughals coming the closest by ruling almost 90% of the subcontinent. Had the British not completed the job, there is little doubt that some Indian ruler, emulating his forerunners, would have done so.

Divide and rule ... an English dignitary rides in an Indian procession, c1754. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Getty Images
 Divide and rule … an English dignitary rides in an Indian procession, c1754. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Getty Images

Far from crediting Britain for India’s unity and enduring parliamentary democracy, the facts point clearly to policies that undermined it – the dismantling of existing political institutions, the fomenting of communal division and systematic political discrimination with a view to maintaining British domination.

Since the British came from a hierarchical society with an entrenched class system, they instinctively looked for a similar one in India. The effort to understand ethnic, religious, sectarian and caste differences among Britain’s subjects inevitably became an exercise in defining, dividing and perpetuating these differences. Thus colonial administrators regularly wrote reports and conducted censuses that classified Indians in ever-more bewilderingly narrow terms, based on their language, religion, sect, caste, sub-caste, ethnicity and skin colour. Not only were ideas of community reified, but also entire new communities were created by people who had not consciously thought of themselves as particularly different from others around them.

Large-scale conflicts between Hindus and Muslims (religiously defined), only began under colonial rule; many other kinds of social strife were labelled as religious due to the colonists’ orientalist assumption that religion was the fundamental division in Indian society.

Muslim refugees cram aboard a train during the partition conflict in 1947 ... the railways were first conceived by the East India Company for its own benefit. Photograph: AP
Muslim refugees cram aboard a train during the partition conflict in 1947 … the railways were first conceived by the East India Company for its own benefit. Photograph: AP

 

It is questionable whether a totalising Hindu or Muslim identity existed in any meaningful sense in India before the 19th century. Yet the creation and perpetuation of Hindu–Muslim antagonism was the most significant accomplishment of British imperial policy: the project of divide et impera would reach its culmination in the collapse of British authority in 1947. Partition left behind a million dead, 13 million displaced, billions of rupees of property destroyed, and the flames of communal hatred blazing hotly across the ravaged land. No greater indictment of the failures of British rule in India can be found than the tragic manner of its ending.

Nor did Britain work to promote democratic institutions under imperial rule, as it liked to pretend. Instead of building self-government from the village level up, the East India Company destroyed what existed. The British ran government, tax collection, and administered what passed for justice. Indians were excluded from all of these functions. When the crown eventually took charge of the country, it devolved smidgens of government authority, from the top, to unelected provincial and central “legislative” councils whose members represented a tiny educated elite, had no accountability to the masses, passed no meaningful legislation, exercised no real power and satisfied themselves they had been consulted by the government even if they took no actual decisions.

As late as 1920, under the Montagu-Chelmsford “reforms”, Indian representatives on the councils – elected by a franchise so restricted and selective that only one in 250 Indians had the right to vote – would exercise control over subjects the British did not care about, like education and health, while real power, including taxation, law and order and the authority to nullify any vote by the Indian legislators, would rest with the British governor of the provinces.

Democracy, in other words, had to be prised from the reluctant grasp of the British by Indian nationalists. It is a bit rich to oppress, torture, imprison, enslave, deport and proscribe a people for 200 years, and then take credit for the fact that they are democratic at the end of it.

A corollary of the argument that Britain gave India political unity and democracy is that it established the rule of law in the country. This was, in many ways, central to the British self-conception of imperial purpose; Kipling, that flatulent voice of Victorian imperialism, would wax eloquent on the noble duty to bring law to those without it. But British law had to be imposed upon an older and more complex civilisation with its own legal culture, and the British used coercion and cruelty to get their way. And in the colonial era, the rule of law was not exactly impartial.

Crimes committed by whites against Indians attracted minimal punishment; an Englishmen who shot dead his Indian servant got six months’ jail time and a modest fine (then about 100 rupees), while an Indian convicted of attempted rape against an Englishwoman was sentenced to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment. In the entire two centuries of British rule, only three cases can be found of Englishmen executed for murdering Indians, while the murders of thousands more at British hands went unpunished.

The death of an Indian at British hands was always an accident, and that of a Briton because of an Indian’s actions always a capital crime. When a British master kicked an Indian servant in the stomach – a not uncommon form of conduct in those days – the Indian’s resultant death from a ruptured spleen would be blamed on his having an enlarged spleen as a result of malaria. Punch wrote an entire ode to The Stout British Boot as the favoured instrument of keeping the natives in order.

Political dissidence was legally repressed through various acts, including a sedition law far more rigorous than its British equivalent. The penal code contained 49 articles on crimes relating to dissent against the state (and only 11 on crimes involving death).

Rudyard Kipling, ‘that flatulent voice of Victorian imperialism would wax eloquent on the noble duty to bring law to those without it’. Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images
Rudyard Kipling, ‘that flatulent voice of Victorian imperialism would wax eloquent on the noble duty to bring law to those without it’. Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images

 

Of course the British did give India the English language, the benefits of which persist to this day. Or did they? The English language was not a deliberate gift to India, but again an instrument of colonialism, imparted to Indians only to facilitate the tasks of the English. In his notorious 1835 Minute on Education, Lord Macaulay articulated the classic reason for teaching English, but only to a small minority of Indians: “We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”

The language was taught to a few to serve as intermediaries between the rulers and the ruled. The British had no desire to educate the Indian masses, nor were they willing to budget for such an expense. That Indians seized the English language and turned it into an instrument for our own liberation – using it to express nationalist sentiments against the British – was to their credit, not by British design.

The construction of the Indian Railways is often pointed to by apologists for empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonised to do so. But the facts are even more damning.

The railways were first conceived of by the East India Company, like everything else in that firm’s calculations, for its own benefit. Governor General Lord Hardinge argued in 1843 that the railways would be beneficial “to the commerce, government and military control of the country”. In their very conception and construction, the Indian railways were a colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns double those of government stocks, paid entirely from Indian, and not British, taxes. It was a splendid racket for Britons, at the expense of the Indian taxpayer.

The railways were intended principally to transport extracted resources – coal, iron ore, cotton and so on – to ports for the British to ship home to use in their factories. The movement of people was incidental, except when it served colonial interests; and the third-class compartments, with their wooden benches and total absence of amenities, into which Indians were herded, attracted horrified comment even at the time.

Asserting British rule during the war of independence, also known as the Indian mutiny, 1857. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Getty Images
 Asserting British rule during the war of independence, also known as the Indian mutiny, 1857. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Getty Images

 

And, of course, racism reigned; though whites-only compartments were soon done away with on grounds of economic viability, Indians found the available affordable space grossly inadequate for their numbers. (A marvellous post-independence cartoon captured the situation perfectly: it showed an overcrowded train, with people hanging off it, clinging to the windows, squatting perilously on the roof, and spilling out of their third-class compartments, while two Britons in sola topis sit in an empty first-class compartment saying to each other, “My dear chap, there’s nobody on this train!”)

Nor were Indians employed in the railways. The prevailing view was that the railways would have to be staffed almost exclusively by Europeans to “protect investments”. This was especially true of signalmen, and those who operated and repaired the steam trains, but the policy was extended to the absurd level that even in the early 20th century all the key employees, from directors of the Railway Board to ticket-collectors, were white men – whose salaries and benefits were also paid at European, not Indian, levels and largely repatriated back to England.

Racism combined with British economic interests to undermine efficiency. The railway workshops in Jamalpur in Bengal and Ajmer in Rajputana were established in 1862 to maintain the trains, but their Indian mechanics became so adept that in 1878 they started designing and building their own locomotives. Their success increasingly alarmed the British, since the Indian locomotives were just as good, and a great deal cheaper, than the British-made ones. In 1912, therefore, the British passed an act of parliament explicitly making it impossible for Indian workshops to design and manufacture locomotives. Between 1854 and 1947, India imported around 14,400 locomotives from England, and another 3,000 from Canada, the US and Germany, but made none in India after 1912. After independence, 35 years later, the old technical knowledge was so completely lost to India that the Indian Railways had to go cap-in-hand to the British to guide them on setting up a locomotive factory in India again. There was, however, a fitting postscript to this saga. The principal technology consultants for Britain’s railways, the London-based Rendel, today rely extensively on Indian technical expertise, provided to them by Rites, a subsidiary of the Indian Railways.

Mother and children ... the British left a society with 16% literacy, a life expectancy of 27 and over 90% living below the poverty line.
The British left a society with 16% literacy, a life expectancy of 27 and over 90% living below the poverty line. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

 

The process of colonial rule in India meant economic exploitation and ruin to millions, the destruction of thriving industries, the systematic denial of opportunities to compete, the elimination of indigenous institutions of governance, the transformation of lifestyles and patterns of living that had flourished since time immemorial, and the obliteration of the most precious possessions of the colonised, their identities and their self-respect. In 1600, when the East India Company was established, Britain was producing just 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was generating some 23% (27% by 1700). By 1940, after nearly two centuries of the Raj, Britain accounted for nearly 10% of world GDP, while India had been reduced to a poor “third-world” country, destitute and starving, a global poster child of poverty and famine. The British left a society with 16% literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic industry and over 90% living below what today we would call the poverty line.

The India the British entered was a wealthy, thriving and commercialising society: that was why the East India Company was interested in it in the first place. Far from being backward or underdeveloped, pre-colonial India exported high quality manufactured goods much sought after by Britain’s fashionable society. The British elite wore Indian linen and silks, decorated their homes with Indian chintz and decorative textiles, and craved Indian spices and seasonings. In the 17th and 18th centuries, British shopkeepers tried to pass off shoddy English-made textiles as Indian in order to charge higher prices for them.

The story of India, at different phases of its several-thousand-year-old civilisational history, is replete with great educational institutions, magnificent cities ahead of any conurbations of their time anywhere in the world, pioneering inventions, world-class manufacturing and industry, and abundant prosperity – in short, all the markers of successful modernity today – and there is no earthly reason why this could not again have been the case, if its resources had not been drained away by the British.

If there were positive byproducts for Indians from the institutions the British established and ran in India in their own interests, they were never intended to benefit Indians. Today Indians cannot live without the railways; the Indian authorities have reversed British policies and they are used principally to transport people, with freight bearing ever higher charges in order to subsidise the passengers (exactly the opposite of British practice).

This is why Britain’s historical amnesia about the rapacity of its rule in India is so deplorable. Recent years have seen the rise of what the scholar Paul Gilroy called “postcolonial melancholia”, the yearning for the glories of Empire, with a 2014 YouGov poll finding 59% of respondents thought the British empire was “something to be proud of”, and only 19% were “ashamed” of its misdeeds.

All this is not intended to have any bearing on today’s Indo-British relationship. That is now between two sovereign and equal nations, not between an imperial overlord and oppressed subjects; indeed, British prime minister Theresa May recently visited India to seek investment in her post-Brexit economy. As I’ve often argued, you don’t need to seek revenge upon history. History is its own revenge.

Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor is published by Hurst & Company at £20

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/08/india-britain-empire-railways-myths-gifts#img-2

Rudyard Kipling published his famous poem to salute the US’ conquest of the Philippines in 1899, although he had originally written it to celebrate Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee.

 

    The White Man’s Burden

Take up the White Man’s burden –
Send forth the best ye breed –
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man’s burden –
In patience to abide
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden –
And reap his old reward,
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard –
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah slowly !) towards the light:-
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
“Our loved Egyptian night ?”

Take up the White Man’s burden –
Ye dare not stoop to less –
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.

In 1970, Roy Harper, Britain’s high priest of lyrical angst Roy created a counterpoint with this song from Flat, Baroque and Berserk.

Shashi Tharoor’s indictment of the British in India

Christopher Kremmer, Sydney Morning Herald, August 18, 2017

“Orright,” concedes the leader, Reg, played by John Cleese. “But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the freshwater system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

In Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, Shashi Tharoor, writer, politician and United Nations-based diplomat for 30 years, asks a similar question to the one posed by Cleese’s beleaguered revolutionary.

In doing so, he seeks to remind misty-eyed Raj romantics that colonialism was no joke. As empires go, he says, Britain’s was uncommonly ruthless, devious and rapacious in its quest to enslave a people whose leaders failed to see how free trade, unwisely managed, can undermine a country’s long-term sovereignty and prosperity.

In the process, Tharoor accuses a number of historians, most prominent among them, Niall Ferguson, of being apologists for the racial discrimination, violence, economic sabotage and denial of liberty embodied by centuries of British rule in India.
It all began as a harmless commercial enterprise, Tharoor reminds us. In 1600, the British East India Company was formed under royal charter. Its aim was to compete with colonial rivals such as the French and Dutch for lucrative trade opportunities with India, an industrial and cultural superpower that under its Mughal emperors would account for 27 per cent of the world economy.

Awash with gems, natural resources, shipyards and a sophisticated cultural life, the Mughals were happy to trade. By the end of the century, however, they were tired, divided, and overextended. In 1739, the capital at Delhi was sacked by the Persians.

Meanwhile, in the expanding coastal trading posts, the initial presence of armed guards to protect the company’s staff and premises had evolved into a fully fledged army that by 1757 under Robert “Clive of India” had toppled the independent nawab of India’s richest province, Bengal. By 1800, the company had 260,000 men under arms and a talent for regime change that brought 200 million people under its control.

In 1857, after Hindu and Muslim rebels joined in a bloody revolt, India came under direct rule from London, and the company was eventually dissolved. The new Raj survived two world wars and the Great Depression, extending British rule for another 90 years until Gandhi’s Freedom movement triumphed in 1947, albeit at the terrible cost of Partition.

It is unusual, but not unheard of today to meet Indians who believe their country was better off under the Raj. Muddle-headed history is much more prominent in soon to be Brexited Britain. Tharoor cites a 2014 opinion poll that found 59 per cent of British people polled believed the old empire was something to be proud of. Thirty-four per cent wished they still had one.

Tharoor marshalls a formidable array of research to make the case that such attitudes are anachronistic and poorly informed. All the old chesnuts, for example, that the British modernised India, bequeathed it a tradition of parliamentary democracy and civilised the locals by teaching them the gentlemanly sport of cricket, are lined up and skewered, or at least plausibly challenged.

The company smashed India’s advanced textiles industries, literally by demolishing factories and imposing tariffs of 70-80 per cent on exports to Britain. In doing so, they turned a manufacturing, shipbuilding nation into a source of raw materials with little scope for value adding industries. The railways, he argues, were developed principally to more efficiently ship out those raw materials, and were financed by an elaborate and shonky racket that enriched British investors by inflating the cost of Indian rail track to twice that of Australia and Canada.

Meanwhile, ordinary Indians were taxed 50 per cent of their incomes, far beyond their experience and capacity to pay. Defaulters were tortured and jailed or, in the case of two-thirds of Indians under British rule in the late 18th century, fled their lands.

“The bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India,” as one colonial administrator observed. The treasuries of princely states such as Bengal were systematically looted by coercive and corrupt methods, while prices for basic commodities were driven up by the opulent lifestyles of expatriate Britons.

Indian taxes not only paid the salaries of the British army of occupation, but also of the hundreds of thousands of Indian troops who became cannon fodder for British interests on the Western Front, at Gallipoli, and in Mesopotamia.

Behind the entire rip-off, as Ferdinand Mount, has observed, “lay the hard calculus of the City of London”. The Indian currency was manipulated to British advantage, and its trade with Europe was forced to go through London. Specifications were set to ensure that Indian steel could not be exported to Britain. India did not miss the bus of the Industrial Revolution – it was forcibly prevented from boarding it.

Discrimination against Indians in civil service employment was rife. Even the arch-colonial writer Rudyard Kipling observed that the bureaucracy was “neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service”. The “justice” British rule gave India meant it was almost impossible for a white man to be given a serious term in jail for murdering his Indian servant, which happened rather a lot. The racism of the occupiers gave the lie to the fiction of modern, enlightened and benign British rule. As one viceroy put it, “We are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race”.

Tharoor acknowledges the sincere efforts of many British expats to ameliorate the harsh realities of colonial rule. But even in the 20th century, when the sun was setting on the Raj, enlightenment attitudes took second place to the desire to crush the Indian independence movement. The same people who condemned the nationalist leader Nehru to 10 years in British Indian jail cells also labelled Gandhi’s non-violent campaign for freedom as terrorism. Newspapers that alerted the public to such injustices, particularly the vernacular press, were often censored or shut down.

For all its claims to superiority, the British Empire was in charge in India during no fewer than 11 famines in which 30 to 35 million people died of starvation, Tharoor notes. Ultimately, he believes, Britain’s desire for wealth trumped all other values and considerations. The rhetoric of uplifting the benighted brown man was always a self-serving, grotesque and conceited pose to justify a regime that bribed and murdered, annexed and stole to enrich a certain class of Briton.

This book burns with the power of intellect married with conviction. It ends with Tharoor commenting that the way the Raj ended was its greatest indictment. The collapse of British rule amid devastating sectarian violence and creation of a Muslim “homeland” in Pakistan can be seen as the logical conclusion of 90 years of divide and rule strategies as London clung desperately to power in the subcontinent.

As they washed their hands and packed their carpet bags, the British departed an India in which 84 per cent of people could not read or write their own name in any language. What an achievement. In 1600, Britain produced 1.8 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product, compared with India’s 23 per cent. By the end of the Raj, Britain’s share had multiplied fivefold, while India had been reduced to penury.

But in 70 short years, India’s proud republic has made enormous strides in literacy, numeracy and poverty reduction, and is now the world’s fastest growing major economy.

Yet there are contradictions in the new India’s rise, some with their roots in the British period, like the ruling Hindu nationalist movement’s proclivity to cast the Indian identity in sectarian terms. At times, Tharoor’s determination to resist such trends leads him to downplay the injustices of earlier empires to more graphically illustrate the failings of the British one.

Yet overall, this is erudite, well-written, thoroughly documented and persuasive history that focuses varied sources into a coherent critique of colonialism in the Indian context. Tear up your copies of Ferguson’s neo-liberal mind rot and get angry like Tharoor.

 

Recalling The Mersey Poets

Paul Hemphill 10 Comments

for we had love and each other and the moon for company
when I spent summer with Monica and Monica spent summer with me

June this year saw the fiftieth anniversary the publication of Roger McGough’s wistful verse-memoir “Summer With Monika”, and in October, we celebrate the publication in 1967 of that great anthology The Mersey Sound which showcased the poetry of Liverpudlians McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henry.

Named for the musical revolution that originated in the northern English port city of Liverpool, it became one of the best-selling poetry anthologies of all time, exerting an influence on British poetry well beyond the decade. I bought the slim volume as soon as it came out, and back in the day, guitar in hand, I would set many of its poems to music as it nurtured my nascent song-writing and poetry skills. I recall now Patten’s “Somewhere Between Heaven and Woolworths’, and “Delicate John’ and the tunes I set to them. I still sing McGough’s Great War country-and-western-noir ‘Square Dance’: “Swing your partners dos-y-doed, all around the shells explode”

The poems had an immediacy, a relevance to those breakout times when a young man’s hopes and fears seemed to centre of the availability or otherwise (mostly not) of casual sex with gorgeous dolly birds, the American quagmire in Vietnam, and the imminent threat of a nuclear Armageddon. They spoke in a familiar vernacular, everyday English that we understood and related to about ordinary events and workaday artifacts that acquired a totemic significance upon the printed page. Toasters, teapots and fish ‘n chips. Kardomah cafes and Star of India restaurants. Bus-conductors, postmen, and milk bottles on the doorstep. Schoolyards and superheroes. Miniskirts and monarchy. The northern English weather.

And all this against the soundtrack of some of the greatest popular music that ever was spilling out of radios and record players in the suburban bedrooms and inner city bedsits of teenagers across the land. There wasn’t a great lyrical leap from the songs of the Beatles with their particular Liverpudlian spirit of place to the words, worries and wonderings of our very own British ‘Beat Poets’.

I have visited those days often in these pages. In A Window on a Gone World I wrote:

“This was indeed a decade of change and ferment. Values changed, morals changed, habits changed, clothes changed, music changed (the best music ever). The way people looked at the world and thought about it. We often look back and remark that a supernova of creativity burst over the western world during those years, the likes of which was not seen before and has never been seen again. And nowhere more so than in decadent, decaying, depressing, old England, trapped in tradition, class, and prejudice”.

I browsed through the whole book the other day, and in a way, it was like a reunion party, a meeting and greeting of old friends, a pleasant, nostalgic journey to a gone time. As that well-worn saying goes, the past is indeed another country – we certainly did things different then. The places and the people, the perceptions and perspectives, the preoccupations and the passions. As I read, I’d recognize words, phrases, images, ideas that osmosised into my own verse, particularly poetry I penned in the late sixties and early seventies, and which are gathered up in my Tabula Rasa collection.

It was my habit in those days to scribble little notes in the margins. And there they were now, for me to ponder fifty years on, and to wonder how the world looked when I wore a young man’s skin, and thought with the mind of a raw, inquiring, idealistic youth who had yet to break loose of the ties that bound, of family, school, and town. But the adventure had obviously begun – if only in the imagination, as I read and rehearsed, pondered and prepared for the great escape. An upper sixth, adolescent eclecticism well-illustrated by the picture below of my additions to Adrian Henri’s stream of consciousness nomenklatura:

Like Adrian Henri’s name-dropping, my neatly-written notes list a host of folk living and dead, mostly white and mostly male. Actors, authors and autocrats. Poets, painters, and philosophers. Popstars, policians and television personalities. Most are, even today, remembered and commemorated. Some are long forgotten. There are few on my list that I failed to recognize after  all these years. But praise be to Google! I soon rediscovered that Sean Lemass was Taoiseach of Ireland in 1967; that Frank Mitchell was a notorious ax-murderer killed that year on the orders of the infamous Kray twins; that Manny Shinwell was an MP and trade unionist, and Jack Dash, a communist trade union leader. Bartle Frere was governor of Cape Colony at the time of the Zulu wars, and Dudley Stamp, a celebrated geographer of the British landscape, both included, I believe, because I was doing A Levels in History and Geography at the time, and their names struck a chord of sorts. In the light of my later life DownUnder, one name was particularly prescient: Harold Holt’s short tenure as prime minister of Australia ended in 1967 with a ill-fated swim off the coast of Melbourne. There are now Harold Holt swimming clubs and annual swimathons all over the country.

I will conclude this personal retrospective with a some quotations, poems and recordings:

Brian Patten:

She walks across the room and opens the skylight
thinking, perhaps a bird will drop in
for and teach her to sing

The children who grow old
to who squabble and grow thin
who lick their lips at disaster .
and quietly whisper of sin

Adrian Henri:

I remember
walking in empty squares in winter rain
kissing in darkened hallways
walking in empty suburban streets
saying goodnight in deserted alleyways
in the midnight hour

The Independent recently published an affectionate tribute to Roger McGough on the occasion of this fiftieth anniversary. It includes Roger’s revisiting of one of his iconic poems:

Not for me a youngman’s death
Not a car crash, whiplash
One more for the road, kind of death.
Not a gun in hand, in a far off land
IED hidden in the sand death

Not a slow-fade, razor blade
bloodbath in the bath, death.
Jump under a train, Kurt Cobain
bullet in the brain, death

Not a horse-riding, paragliding
mountain climbing fall, death.
Motorcycle into an old stone wall
you know the kind of death, death

My nights are rarely unruly.
My days of all-night parties
are over, well and truly.
No mistresses no red sports cars
no shady deals no gangland bars
no drugs no fags no rock ‘n roll
Time alone has taken its toll

Let me die an old man’s death
Not a domestic brawl, blood in the hall
knife in the chest, death.
Not a drunken binge, dirty syringe
‘What a waste of a life’ death.

And here is one of my favourites from the Summer of Love:

Summer With Monika

They say the sun shone now and again
but it was generally cloudy
with far too much rain

they say babies were born
married couples made love,
often with each other
and people died
sometimes violently.

they say it was an average ordinary moderate
run-of-the-mill common or garden summer
but it wasn’t

for I locked a yellow door
and I threw away the key.
and I spent summer with Monica
and she spent summer with me

unlike everybody else we made friends with the weather
most days the sun called and sprawled all over the place
or the wind blew in as breezily as ever
and ran his fingers through our hair
but usually it was the moon that kept us company

some days we thought about the seaside
and built sand castles on the blankets
and paddled in the pillows
or swam in the sink and played with shoals of dishes

other days we went for long walks around the table
and picnicked on the banks of the settee
or just sunbathed lazily in front of the fire
until the shilling set on the horizon.

we danced a lot that summer
bossanovaed by the bookcase
or maddisoned instead,
hulligullied by the oven
or twisted round the bed

at first we kept birds in a transistor box
to sing for us but sadly they died
we being to embrace in each other to feed them.
but it didn’t really matter because
we made love songs with our bodies
I became the words
and she put me to music

they say it was just like any other summer
but it wasn’t
for we had love and each other
and the moon for company
when I spent summer with Monica
and Monica spent summer with me.

Castles Made of Sand

Paul Hemphill 6 Comments

A recent article in Newsweek noted:

“More than three-quarters of Palestinians feel their government is corrupt. Asked to name the biggest problem in society, a majority of respondents choose internal ones: poverty, unemployment, corruption and the political schism between Hamas and Fatah. Just 27 percent say the occupation is their largest concern, according to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, the top pollster in the territories. The official unemployment rate in the West Bank is 16 percent, and roughly one in five families lives in poverty. (The actual figures are thought to be higher). Yet the streets of Ramallah are lined with billboards advertising million-shekel apartments. A tenuous middle class has loaded up on consumer debt, which soared from $1.3 billion in 2012 to $2.2 billion just three years later. All of this has served to make Palestinians more risk-averse. The way a CEO of a major bank in Ramallah sees it: “You’re not going to join an intifada when you have to make mortgage payments.”

Meanwhile, the economies of Israel and Palestine are effectively integrated. Israel controls trade The Palestinian market us captive one for Israeli products, whilst Palestinian goods have limited acess to the Israeli market. Al Jazeera has recently published an informative piece this subject.

The following is based on our own observations and knowledge, and these are informed by what we have seen and read, and what we were told by Palestinians we talked to during our travels through the West Bank. We do not profess to be experts – we are neither academics nor professional commentators. And accordingly, we welcome objective comments and contributions that both support and question our observations.

Castles Made of Sand 

Whilst the attention of the international media and of NGOs is focused on Israeli settlements, there is a land rush going on in the cities of the West Bank.

A big surprise in our travels through the Occupied Territories, was the residential construction boom going on in cities fully governed by the Palestinian Authority (PA). We had been aware of this prior to coming to Israel, but not of its scale. To our knowledge, mainstream media has hardly  covered this at all, and when it does, more often than not it is PR rather than critical analysis (see links below). Our guides, for reasons of their own, were reticent about discussing it.

We often hear that development is held back by the Occupation, that buildings without official approval are subject to demolition, and that there is no land available for Palestinians to build on. Likewise, we hear about how the water supply to the Est Bank is severely restricted. Israeli settlements enjoy an abundance whist Palestinian homes endure meagre rations. Indeed, our guides would stand beneath hills covered in building sites and repeatedly tell us all this.

Most certainly, building by Palestinians is severely restricted in Area C (60% of the West Bank, and 4% of its Arab population) which is under Israeli control, and Area B, under the joint control Israel and the Palestinian Authority (22% and 41% respectively).  And water is indeed problem insofar as the aquifers are located in Israel itself, and supply is hostage  to logistical and political exingenices, and also, to an antiquated Jordanian distribution infrastructure vulnerable to regular breakdowns and leaks.

But billions of expatriate dollars are being invested in medium and high density apartment blocks in area A, the 18% of the West Bank controlled by the PA (and 55% of Palestinian Arabs) in Ramallah, the de facto capital, and in Nablus, Hebron and Jenin. It is a common practice throughout the Middle East for expatriates to remit funds to build a house or houses for their families, or to add extra storeys to the old family home (unfinished upper storeys are a familiar feature of Arab towns in the Levant). But since its establishment, the PA has actively encouraged Palestinians who have “made it” overseas to invest in their nascent homeland by repatriating their stash and putting it into the burgeoning property market. The national accounts prepared by the Palestinian Monetary Authorty show that remittances from overseas have risen steadily in recent years. But do not detail where it is ultimately invested

Where does the land available for development come from? Local commentators suggest that families sell their land to developers. There are suggestions too that speculators take advantage of Shariah inheritance laws, whereby a parcel of land or an apartment block is divided up between sons, by targeting the weakest link – the most needy for quick cash, or more easily intimidated by strong arm tactics – and then persuading the other siblings to sell. The PA is regarded by many as notoriously corrupt, and it is not unlikely that government land and land held in trust is transferred into private hands through cronyism, kickbacks and connections. And what better home for trousered cash that cannot be transferred into offshore bank accounts than bricks and mortar?

Whatever the mechanism, the slopes of the hills surrounding the larger cities are adorned with hectare after hectare of high rises. Most are works in progress, and much of those that are completed appear to be unoccupied. And, on the subject of water supply, we observed that the new buildings were not topped by the roof water tanks that are ubiquitous in most Palestinian towns and villages. No water shortages here, it would seem.

We were informed that a small apartment can cost between $60 and $100,000 before fit-out. Add another 10-20% for fixtures and fittings. Most Palestinians cannot afford these modest apartments. Those that do are in paid employment, mainly working for the PA or for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) and the many NGOs that operate here. And they raise the finance through very un-islamic mortgages. Large billboards on highways offer financial advice and funds to affluent-looking young professionals.

imageimage

The irony is that most employed Palestinians depend upon the survival of the PA and indeed, on the continuation of the Occupation. UNWRA, the United Nations agency that caters exclusively for Palestinian refugees employs some 30,000 people, the vast majority of whom are Palestinian (only a few hundred are not), and as such, it is the largest single employer of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank (by comparison, the UN High Commission for Refugees employs only 5,000 to 6,000 people globally).

Should the PA collapse or be abolished, should UNWRA be dissolved, should a Palestinian state be established in the West Bank, the government, and those businesses and agencies that depend upon it for contracts and custom could become insolvent, whilst there is always the possibility that international funding could be reduced or withdrawn. In short, the housing bubble could burst, the property market collapse, and those photogenic young professionals in the billboards, and their families, could lose their jobs and their homes.

The health of the Palestinian economy is also an perennial risk factor. The economy had been improving in recent years, with unemployment in the West Bank falling and and private investment in construction growing. The two might have been working hand in hand, coinciding with commencement of the building boom. But during the past three years, economic indicators have gone backwards owing to the political and economic uncertainty, with falling rates of growth, high inflation, and continuing high rates of unemployment and poverty. Economic recession, therefore, could likewise impact on the property market.

These are worst-case scenarios. But there are other economic implications.

For example, this property boom is speculative rather than productive investment in a Palestinian economy that is heavily dependent – some would argue almost totally – on Israel and on international aid. Whilst aid donors and agencies bankroll roads and essential services like schools, power, water, and the like, some say the money should instead be invested in business startups and entrepreneurial enterprises, developing the fiscal and human capital so that Palestinians can provide for their own welfare. National self-esteem should come from being economically sustainable and not from being an indigent state.

Also, there is growing economic inequality between the haves and the have nots. Before the establishment of the PA, we were told, things were more evenly balanced. Most of the population were on a more or less equal footing. There was a sense of “we are all in it together”. Now there is a palpable sense of every man for himself.

Author’s Note

Reiterating the forward to this post, this is based on our own observations and knowledge, and these are informed by what we have seen and read – we are neither academics nor professional commentators. But, as we sincerely desire to acquire and to present as accurate a picture as possible, we welcome objective comments and contributions that both support and question our observations. Any such insights will be incorporated into the post.

Much of what I have written is covered in this illuminating report by the Jerusalem Centre for a Public Affairs published in November 2015 (the picture gallery is an eye-opener): Luxury alongside poverty in the Palestinian Authority

See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Bank

Photographic Postscript: every picture tells a story

Palestinian developer and billionaire Munib al Masri, so-called “Duke of Nablus” built himself a mansion atop a hill overlooking Nablus. That’s his personal mosque up there. Some locals say he could’ve built one for them in the city instead.

Al Misri's mosque

Al Masri’s mosque

New high-rise buildings look down on a billboard honouring a young shahi-d or martyr.

Those who can, invest. Those who cannot, become martyrs.

Those who can, invest. Those who cannot, become martyrs.

Afterword : The Duke of Nablus and his kin

Relatives Municipal al Masri include his cousin and fellow billionaire, Arab Bank and Paltel chairman Sabih al-Masri, and nephews, developer Bashar Masri, and Jordanian former prime minister Taher al-Masri. The Masris would appear to be the Palestininian Authority’s development choice, and also, Israel’s.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/dream-of-a-palestinian-tiger-boom-times-in-the-west-bank-a-759046.html
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31154138
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/us-govt-funding-313m-mortgages-palestinians-west-bank
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munib_al-Masri
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashar_Masri

 

 

The politics of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

In the wake of controversial production of Shakespeare’s play in New York’s Central Park,  here is an excellent exposition of the politics of this play by American screenwriter, novelist and producer Joseph Suglia. One forgets just how politically sophisticated and daring William Shakespeare was – potentially dangerous and, indeed, deadly during the unsettled and bloody times of the Tudor monarchs.

Dr. Joseph Suglia's avatarSelected Squibs, Scrips, and Essays by Joseph Suglia

Caesar Anti-Trump

by Joseph Suglia

“Nackt kann die Wahrheit vor dem Volke nicht erscheinen.”

—Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Zweiter Band, Kapitel 17

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States of America gives further evidence, if needed, that Americans wish to be led by cartoon characters.  It was not Trump the human being who acceded to the presidency.  It was his screen double, which is all the American electorate has ever known of him.  It was Trump the Rich Man of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992).  It was Trump the Boss of The Apprentice (2004-2015).  It was Trump the Billionaire of Wrestlemania 23 (2007).  Donald Trump is every bit as unreal as Flo the Progressive Insurance Girl or Colonel Sanders—all three of these characters are strategic unrealities.  All are holograms, shadows of living beings rather than living…

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Freedom at Midnight (2) – the legacy of partition

Paul Hemphill 6 Comments

Seventy years ago India and Pakistan came into being, the first of the tumbling dice that were the longtime colonies of European nations. Over the next two decades, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium would retreat from their possessions in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. The importance August 15th 1947 cannot be understated, and its echoes reverberate still.

In an earlier post, Freedom at Midnight (1) – the birth of India and Pakistan, I discussed the process by which this came about. Below are links to two articles published today which examine the legacy of partition, a legacy that, as these pieces demonstrate, it still subject to much debate.

Writing in the New York Times, Pankaj Mishra deconstructs Jawahawal Nehru’s famous declaration of independence on 15th August 1947: “…one can, of course, mourn this August 15 as marking the end of India’s tryst with destiny or, more accurately, the collapse of our exalted ideas about ourselves. But a sober reckoning with the deep malaise in India can be bracing, too. For it confirms that the world as we have known it, molded by the beneficiaries of both Western imperialism and anti-imperialist nationalism, is crumbling, and that in the East as well as the West, all of us are now called to fresh struggles for freedom, equality and dignity”.

Anil Dharker, writing in The Independent, paints a rosier picture. India emerged from the trauma of partition and proposed. prospered. “Seventy years on, that’s something to be proud of. Even more is the fact that the idea of India as one country has survived, in spite of the country’s huge diversity and population, which makes it akin to a continent. Numbers confirm this amazing story: India’s population is now over 1.2 billion, spread over 29 states and seven union territories. There are 22 official languages and very many more dialects. Each state has its own language, culture and cuisine”.

And yet, he concludes, India has not yet realized the ecumenical promise of Nehru’s famous “tryst with destiny”: “Not even the most flag-waving Indian however, will claim that everything is perfect. The caste system refuses to die out; Dalits (the term used for untouchables) still face upper-caste persecution; they and minorities (especially Muslims) remain equal citizens only on paper; conservative and orthodox men still resist women’s fight for equality; the criminal justice system and the police still favour the affluent; reactionary religious elements still create tensions and face the future backwards”.

WH Auden composed a poem commemorating the events of 1947.

Specifically, he wrote of Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the English lawyer appointed by the British government to determine the borders of the new states. It was he who drew the fateful lines on the map of British India. An ironically objective narrative which recounts the story just as Collins and Lapierre tell it in Freedom at Midnight. It is, perhaps by design and intent, reminiscent of a celebrated poem by Dylan Thomas, and indeed, to paraphrase the Welsh Bard, “the hand that signed the paper” felled a city and bred a fever.

Partition

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,
Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition
Between two peoples fanatically at odds,
With their different diets and incompatible gods.
“Time,” they had briefed him in London, “is short. It’s too late
For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:
The only solution now lies in separation.
The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,
That the less you are seen in his company the better,
So we’ve arranged to provide you with other accommodation.
We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,
To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you.”

Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.

The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forget
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

The Strange Death of Sam Cooke

Paul Hemphill 10 Comments

Listening to my good friend Demitri and his King Street Blues combo inspired me to revisit the early soul standards of the late fifties and early sixties. Inevitably the journey took me to Sam Cooke.

Sam Cooke

Sam Cooke (January 22, 1931 – December 11, 1964), born Samuel Cook, was an African-American recording artist, singer-songwriter and entrepreneur. He is commonly known as the King of Soul for his distinctive vocal abilities and influence on the modern world of music. His pioneering contributions to soul music led to the rise of Aretha Franklin, Bobby Womack, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Billy Preston and popularized the likes of Otis Redding and James Brown.

Cooke had 30 U.S. top 40 hits between 1957 and 1964, and a further three after his death. Major hits included “You Send Me”, “A Change Is Gonna Come”, “Cupid”, “Chain Gang”,  and “Twistin’ the Night Away”. And few remember that Herman’s Hermits “Wonderful World” was written and first recorded by Cooke.

He was also among the first modern black performers and composers to attend to the business side of his musical career. He founded both a record label and a publishing company as an extension of his careers as a singer and composer. He also took an active part in the African-American Civil Rights Movement.

On December 11, 1964, Cooke was fatally shot by the manager of the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 33. At the time, the courts ruled that Cooke was drunk and distressed, and that the manager had killed Cooke in what was later ruled a justifiable homicide. Since that time, the circumstances of his death have been widely questioned.  Wiki tells the story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Cooke

Here are some of Sam Cooke’s timeless hits:

And check out King Street Blues at:  https://www.facebook.com/KingStreetBlues