Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Friday, 5th March, 2010: The Ham & High is crap

Someone did well to get together an obituary - half a tabloid page - for Michael Foot, albeit a cut-and-paste job, from freely-available sources. This was an important local story: Foot lived and died in the patch, in a fine terraced house stuffed with books, books, and books, as the archetypal Hampstead intellectual.

Foot's morning dander, with the shaggy Dizzy leading, out of Pilgrim's Lane, past the children's playground, and onto the Heath was a feature of Hampstead life. As was finding him on the 24 bus, with senior citizen's pass, on the way to Parliament. Virtually a door-to-door service.

Then, twice in the obituary we read the same error:

In 1949 he married his sweetheart and faithful supporter Jill Craigie, with whom he had three children...

Mr Foot was predeceased by his wife Jill Craigie and is survived by his three children.

That must come as a surprise to the three imaginary children.

For the record, Jill Craigie had a daughter by her first marriage to Claude Begbie-Clench. While still married to her second husband, Jeffrey Dell, she and Foot had a ten-day stay in the Negresco, Nice, and Jill became pregnant . She had an abortion, and was unable to conceive thereafter.

When the Ham & High had Gerald Isaaman as editor, it was the finest in the land, famously, the only "local" with a foreign policy.

Standards continue to slide.

Now it is little more than a resting place for Lib Dem hand-outs.
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Noticed anything lately?


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Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

In a different context, Malcolm was considering the contribution of the historian E.H.Lecky (1838-1903). For anyone with a TCD background, that's familiar territory: a seated statue, a library and a professor of history with his name.

Scanning the Dictionary of National Biography entry about Lecky, Malcolm hit on this:

He saw Gladstone as an honest man with a dishonest mind who, by skilful casuistry, could persuade himself that he was in the right, and then, his moral nature taking fire, act as if under a divine impulse.

That seemed uncannily descriptive of a much later, quite recent, occupant of 10 Downing Street. Sphere: Related Content

A homophone to start the day ...

From the morning flyer for Labour List:

After the coup: the PM is giving out election roles and hints he will "reign in Ed Balls."

Hail, the king-in-waiting? Sphere: Related Content

Political fiction

For once (and after a long, dreary period of drought), Iain Dale drags a better bucket from the well, inviting his window-lickers to improve on his "Top Ten" of Westminster novels.

Predictably, this being Dale and Torydom, the general tendency is dross of the airport fiction genre. And, apparently (since he includes Buy it HERE hot links) another Dale money-spinner. The only yeurgghh! missing is "Lord" Archer.

Fame is the Spur

Malcolm felt motivated to suggest what has to be the ultimate Labour political novel: Howard Spring's Fame is the Spur, originally from 1940. Hamer Shawcross rises from the slums of Ancoats (with a flash-back to Peterloo) to cabinet rank, a home in Westminster and the red benches of the House of Lords. On the way he betrays most of his principles, and his best friends. The title is, of course, from Lycidas:

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of Noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes.

[Oh, the subtle joy of being able to reproduce Milton's spelling, without it being pointed as a "typo"!]

Spring's book may be better known as an adequate BBC serial from the early '80s or as an unsatisfactory 1947 Boulting Brothers' film (script by Nigel Balchin). The New York Times' reviewer at the time largely approved of this film, and gave a generous account:

The irony of a liberal leader who forsakes his youthful ideals and finally abandons his old constituents as he acquires political power is the theme of a long, episodic and unmistakably allusive British film, "Fame Is the Spur,"... Even though boldly directed to British interests and memories, this life story of a political turn-coat should prove widely fascinating over here.

For its subject, a British labor leader, is not only made to bear a strong resemblance to the late Ramsay MacDonald, which makes for taut insinuations by itself, but he is drawn to a definite human pattern that is generally prevalent and recognized. He is the type of individual who bravely and loyally proclaims the rights of the working classes while he himself is poor but loses his high enthusiasm when his own way begins to grow smooth. He is the hot and reckless rebel who thumps for Freedom in his youth but who drifts into cold conservatism as he moves into high and responsible realms.

Based on a Howard Spring novel, this chronicle of a man's life begins with the impoverished youth of the subject in a sleazy Manchester slum and takes him to fame and a title—and a lonesome old age—in a London home. On the way, it observes him agitating for the welfare of the laboring class in the grim and depressing environment of nineteenth century industry; it follows his romantic marriage to a sincere blue-stocking girl and his rise as a Laborite in Parliament to the first Labor government in 1924. And it ends with his bleak surrender to the corrosive influences of fame and his denial of the interests of those who loved him and made him the champion of their weal.

In its sharp pictorialization of the aspects of the Labor movement and British politics in a period of historic ferment, this John and Roy Boulting film has vivid authority and fascination. Some of its episodes, such as a Welsh strike meeting and demonstration, are explosive and exciting to the full. And some of the scenes between the leader and his wife are emotionally fine. Particularly does one sequence, in which the husband permits his wife to be arrested and hauled from a meeting in which he is speaking because she shouts for the woman's vote, make as taut and revealing a personal crisis as a film such as this could contain.

But, unfortunately, a full comprehension of the principal character in this tale is missed in the broad and extended panorama of his life that is displayed. Yes, we see him as a youngster, turning in his romantic mind the glowing legend of the Peterloo massacre, as his grandfather has told it to him. We see him abandoning the project of storming a lock-out factory's gates when one of the braver demonstrators is suddenly and shockingly killed. We see him submitting to the flattery of a manifest Tory's wife. But we do not get from these appearances a clear discovery of why the man is what he is.

The moral weakness of Hamer Shawcross, the failure to discover why the man is what he is, is integral to the sophistication of the novel itself, but is implicit in that Milton quotation.

The MacDonald connection

Every reviewer seems to identify Shawcross with Ramsay MacDonald. Malcolm suggests he is a hybrid of MacDonald and Philip Snowden. Snowden, incidentally, this last week, was rescued from his obscurity by Andrew Alexander in the Daily Mail, using him as a bench-mark for George Osborne:

Chancellors who care little about their image are rare birds. Indeed, one has to go back, coincidentally, to the early Thirties era to find such an unusual creature: Philip Snowden, who became Chancellor in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Government of 1929.

Now, Malcolm has struggled for several days to respond to that (the propensity for Wordpress to lose his Great Thoughts is why we are back on Blogger). So, a bit down the line we may have that rehearsed here.

Howard Spring

Writers come into and slip out of fashion, almost with the changing of the tide. Spring is one such present victim.

He is a writer of classical orthodoxy, telling a story in well-honed prose, thoroughly readable, but — apparently, for modern tastes — too measured and wordy. He was born in Cardiff, as the son of a jobbing gardener from the County Cork: his soon-to-be-widowed mother brought up a Victorian brood of nine children by working as a washerwoman and menial floor-scrubber. At the age of twelve, Spring was at work as a butcher's boy. A job in an accountants' office introduced him to the typewriter, and from there it was a small jump to a local newspaper. The old stand-by of evening classes gave him the basis of an education; and he moved on to being a reporter, in Yorkshire and finally to a berth on the Manchester Guardian. Poor health restricted his war service to the ASC, rising to a Warrant Officer in the Intelligence Corps. He witnessed the outbreak of the Irish Civil War, and the destruction of the Four Courts.

By the 1930s he was a book-reviewer for the London Evening Standard (then a publication of some quality: his predecessors were Arnold Bennett and J.B.Priestley), and his novels were accepted by Collins. He was now financially able to remove himself to Cornwall for the remainder of his life.

Out of the blue, in August 1941, he was commissioned to undertake a mission, and found himself aboard HMS Prince of Wales, off the coast of Newfoundland, as a witness to the summit between Churchill and FDR.

Novels continued regularly until a stroke in the early '60s. When he died in 1965, he had a useful corpus of work to show. These (especially Fame is the Spur and Shabby Tiger) became a staple of BBC televised serials, possibly because of their "Upstairs, Downstairs" mixture of the genteel drawing-room and the "grim oop north" working-class roots.

If there were a British "social realism" school of writers, Spring would qualify as its doyen. Sphere: Related Content

Moral amazements

1. Salt in the wound

Irish Catholicism is in crisis over the child molestations: this is a continuing agony that will not quickly go away.

Now, what could the Irish government possibly do to exacerbate the issue? Ah, yes! Pass a blasphemy act.

As is the common view up the Rathgar Road: "Jaysus, Mary and Joseph!"

2. A Major intervention

John Major, of famed repute, has uttered his view, according to the BBC:

Former Prime Minister Sir John Major has criticised Tony Blair's handling of the Iraq war and his presentation of the case for invasion in March 2003...

He told the BBC the argument that Saddam Hussein was a bad man and must be removed was an "inadequate" one.

A "bad man"? Phew! strong language! Obviously, Saddam should have been sent to sit on the naughty step.

Niceties of international law apart, and ignoring the gargantuan failure to plan for the aftermath, what is objectionable about dethroning a bloodstained totalitarian dictator, whose penchant for genocide of his own minorities is well-attested? In Major's utterance one hears the echoes of the Tory appeasers (a majority of the Party for too many years) of the 1930s.

Now, consider Major's own record in Iraq. Did he condone the mass-extermination that was Highway 80? Did he approve of the decision to lewave Saddam in power, to continue his pogroms and murders?

Blair was, and remains a controversial figure: that is a measure of his stature. e e cummings got Major bang to rights: an arse on which everything has sat, except a man.

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Words, idol words [sic]

Brian Murphy was then Education Officer of the TUC. It was in his home that Malcolm first saw the coming wonders-of-the-age: CEEFAX and PRESTEL. So that means we are back in the mid-1970s.

Brian and Liz Murphy's home in Woodland Rise, Muswell Hill, had no obvious need of wallpaper. Every unglazed, undoored, vertical surface was book-shelved. And the shelves were over-populated.

Even the loo.

To Malcolm, that was Paradise enow.

Now, the higher authority at Redfellow Hovel insists books or magazines are not to be left in the jakes. That makes the works of Ben Schott, so portable and episodic, the ideal companion to necessary moments of evacuation.

And so, by a commode's vicus of recirculation, we arrive at Malcolm's point.

Schott has become a minor, but highly successful industry. Apart from the annuals, the ever-ready solution to "What shall we give Grandad?", he crops up with spreads in the Times and elsewhere. However, he has found a regular home at the New York Times, where he introduces us to the new vocabulary:There is little original about the concept. Every lexicographer has been both kept in useful employ and plagued by the propensity of the populace to devise, adapt and discard words. Each new technology that comes along invents and re-invents a peculiar dialect. "Dot Wordsworth" is doing something very similar to Schott for The Spectator.

No, it's not the same thing that the Oxford English Dictionary, and its rival heavy tomes, attempt to do: they are more reflective, more considered. What Schott and Co are doing is grasping at the Zeitgeist, that we may momentarily reflect on modern instance, as it is plucked fresh and raw. Many of the fleeting terms that Schott describes will be forgotten in days or, at most, weeks: they are, or were little more than metaphors conceived in some fertile brain to explicate or decorate a gossamer moment.

What is intriguing about Schott at the New York Times (go see for yourself) is just how politically he manages to concoct his ingredients: recent entries have been:

• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's incendiary use of cruel and repressive racist regime to describe Israel's policy to Palestine;
• the so-called “pottery shop” argument – we [the Coalition Forces] owned Iraq because we (helped) break it;
• Nursery of Terrorism: the Nickname for Azamgarh, a district in Uttar Pradesh, India, which is the birthplace of a significant number of people arrested for suspected involvement in terrorism.
• A Gathering Storm: The title of a “religious liberty ad campaign” challenging same-sex marriage, released by the National Organization for Marriage.

And many more.

Young Ben Schott is getting away with murder at the Gray Lady. Long may he be licensed liberally to do so.

Lefties and people of a strong liberal disposition might be well advised to catch him now before they shut him down.

Brian Murphy would have raised a glass (or three) of malt to cheer him on. Sphere: Related Content

... and Ulster will be wrong

The annual file-fest that is the release of State Papers got its brief hour of publicity. This fills up newsprint between the stale turkey and the New Year's Honours (more turkeys). For most sub-editors it is a delight because it can all be pre-processed. The real dirt takes longer (and the commitment of some ambitious PhD student).

Malcolm found the gem of the 1976 State documents (as so far revealed) was the Wilson memorandum, more particularly his fears over a Unionist putsch and UDI.

To show that little changes in the minds of some folk, we should refer to Eric Waugh in the Belfast Telegraph as recently as 7th December.

Waugh proposed “an independent state of Northern Ireland”. Typically, as Unionist parlance since 1921 has had it, he confuses “Northern Ireland” with “Ulster”. Malcolm finds it somewhere between irritating and incredible that he repeatedly needs to clarify that Ulster (Uladh) comprises nine counties, six of which are "Northern Ireland" (though the most northern county of Ireland is not in "Northern Ireland").

Waugh's tissue of speculation is that some statelet could opt out of the Union, out of the island of Ireland, out of the European Union, and survive as a tax-haven. His model is the Isle of Man (population something like 78,000).

Meanwhile, the rest of us would be expected to contribute generously, for “the new state would require bolstering for up to 20 years by the UK, the EU - and possibly the US and even the Republic”. That, of course, ignores the continued tax revenue bled away by this parasitical "new state". Let's put that into proportion. Government expenditure in Northern Ireland is something in the region of £16B, which exceeds by a degree the £780M of gross expenditure by the Manx government.

Malcolm suspects that Waugh's ideal would be more modest: pulling the wagons into a circle around the defensible Protestant heartland of Antrim, Down and Portadown, perhaps. This nicely unhitches the Nationalist baggage train, and leaves Dublin and Europe to pick up the pieces in the high unemployment areas.

Wilson was a pragmatic (one of his own favourite words) politician: Malcolm expects his oft-maligned reputation will enhance with time (for one example and modern comparison, in denying Washington's pressure to engage in Vietnam). His opinions and fears remain relevant and should not be lightly discounted (as they were then by those omniscient mandarins of Whitehall, who managed to get things so "right" in the intervening thirty years).

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