From the BBC News website:

BREAKING NEWS We have a hung
parliament. There is now no chance of the
Conservatives winning a Commons
majority.

At the behest of the late Reverend John Ebenezer Brown, the congregation will now rise and sing:

Now thank we all our God,
With heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom his world rejoices ...

Perhaps, after all, the British are ready for Home Rule.
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Clown Prince Dave's disunited kingdom

Black moods in the Black North

Malcolm has spent too long snickering about the collapse of the great UCUNF project. The scoresheet for this epic project amounts to a total debacle:

• the only UUP MP (Lady Hermon) has gone AWOL and then been gifted a ticket to ride by the DUP;
  
• she has taken with her a distinguished Assemblyman;
• the South Armagh UCUNF candidature is still up for grabs, after Tory and UUP factions black-balled each other's nominees;
• the Fermanagh-South Tyrone and South Belfast constituencies are still bickering over a joint Unionist candidate, lest the Unionist vote be split to allow a nationalist the free ride.

The net result is that, in this moment of DUP weakness, the UUP faces a Westminster whitewash.

Hence Malcolm's persistent, spiteful, gleeful heh-heh (alternating with the sneezing of a foul cold).

A Glasgow kiss

There would seem to be problems, not wholly dissimilar from the South Antrim/North Down fusses, in Glasgow. This from today's Herald:

A leading Scottish Conservative has quit as a general election candidate amid claims that senior party members were like a “nest of vipers”.

Heather MacLeod, who resigned after a “bitter and bloody” feud with fellow Tories, said she felt “complete and utter disgust” with a section of the Scottish Conservatives.

She also accused the Scottish party of failing to match leader David Cameron’s progress and said she had concerns about an allegedly inappropriate relationship between two senior Tories.

There is yet another angle. Mrs MacLeod is under intra-Party attack because:

... some Tories raised questions about Mrs MacLeod’s financial background.

According to Companies House, Mrs MacLeod has been a director of companies that have gone into liquidation.

A Reigate chop

Meanwhile, perhaps stirred by the update from the latest issue of Private Eye, in deepest East Surrey, there is similar discontent:

David Cameron was hit by a Tory race row last night amid claims that up to 100 activists have signed a petition demanding the deselection of one of his leading black candidates.

Party sources say Sam Gyimah, a 33-year-old entrepreneur chosen to fight the safe seat of Surrey East, has faced smears over his business interests.

Allies of Mr Gyimah, a member of Mr Cameron’s ‘A-List’ of preferred candidates, claim the campaign to throw him out is racially motivated.

Tears before bed-time

David Cameron's "nasty Party" seems to be a somewhat "broken society". And that's even before Mr Grayling salts the wounds. Sphere: Related Content

Roarin’ out of Harlan,
Revvin’ up his mill,
He shot the gap at Cumberland,
And screamed by Maynordsville

No, let's ignore Robert Mitchum from 1958, and start with 1624, and Captain John Smith, of Pocahontas fame. Smith was a devious and unreliable bugger. He got many things spot on, though, including:

... as Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion, so History without Geography, wandreth as a Vagrant without a certaine habitation.

That is a truism; and googling "influence of geography on history" will produce a thorough time-line of the concept, all the way back to Strabo and Claudius Ptolomy.

If there is one place in the modern United States where geography and history collide, it has to be 1600 feet up in the Appalachians, where Virginia debouches onto Tennessee and Kentucky. Nancy Kriplen is saying just that in this week's New York Times travel section. That article prompted these thoughts from Malcolm.

Across the second great divide

The width of the Atlantic was the first barrier, both physical and psychological. Then the English colonies found themselves chained in by the Appalachian mountains. In 1750 Doctor Thomas Walker followed an animal track and Indian path which opened a route across the mountains, which he named Cumberland Gap.

While one key moment in 1776 decided the former Colonies' political destiny, another in March 1775 was crucial in determining culture and ethos. That was when Daniel Boone led 30 pioneers across Cumberland Gap to establish a settlement at Boonesborough. It was when the former colonials broke the barrier of the Appalachians, and became set on a "manifest destiny'" stretching from "from sea to shining sea." Mountain-men set about moving the frontier ever westward, and French and Spanish, who coveted and claimed the interior, didn't stand a chance thereafter.

Boone (right, aged 70: the only image from life) had been recruited as a guide by Colonel Richard Henderson, founder of the Transylvania Company. The place-names alone tell a story. Dr Walker had named "Cumberland Gap", patriotically, for "Butcher" Cumberland, George II's younger son and Whig hero who had suppressed the Jacobite rebellion. "Boonesborough" is a clearly named on the pattern of all of those bawns the Presbyterian Scots established across Ulster, who transferred the coinage to their new plantations across the Appalachians. For, in Boone's footsteps, came between one and two hundred thousand Ulstermen and their womenfolk.

Daniel Boone, despite some claims to the contrary, was not of Ulster stock. Boones had arrived with a contingent of (mainly) Catholic gentry on board The Ark and the Dove in 1633, to provide one basis of the Maryland colony. Daniel Boone, though, was the fourth son (and sixth child) of Squire Boone (born near Exeter, Devon, who emigrated in 1717) and Sarah Morgan (of a Welsh Quaker family). Perhaps we should not tell the UDA of that, for Abbot Gardens in Newtownards, in the County Down, has (or, until recently, had) a fine mural of Daniel Boone, on horseback, with his monogrammed rifle, depicted as he:

Led the Ulster-Scots Pioneers into Kentucky.

The mural's concept, including the fetchingly-represented brown-and-white hound, is doubtless borrowed from George Caleb Bingham's version (at the head of this blog entry).

Among those early Scots-Irish pioneers would have been Partons. Their scion, born at Sevierville, Tennessee, is Dolly Rebecca, "the Queen of Country Music". She'll make a token appearance here in a moment.

Keep travelling

Take I-75 south from Boonesborough. After a couple of hours one is in Tennessee. Come off I-75 at exit 122, and head for Clinton. Not far beyond Clinton is Oak Ridge, Tennessee. 150 miles from Boonesborough.

Another bit of Appalachia where history and geography collide.

When France was occupied in 1940, 31 tons of uranium ore, from the Belgian Congo, property of Union Minière, was secreted in the arsenal at Toulouse. The American liberators, and in particular Lt-Col Boris T. Pash, sent it to Oak Ridge. By early 1945 the top-secret Clinton Engineer Works, which General Leslie Groves had built at Oak Ridge, as part of the Manhattan Project, was refining it into the 42kg of U-235 that would destroy Hiroshima. Oak Ridge (which didn't formally exist until post-war) remains a centre for US nuclear and security work. There, too, the American people crossed a great divide.

Pigeon Forge

And Dolly Parton? Definitely not "a carkasse without motion".

If you'd stayed on I-75, switched to TN-66, you'd have found Dollywood, Ms Parton's own theme-park.

And, according to some reports, nowhere near as tacky as it sounds.

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The not-so-good and not-so-great, number 13

Unlucky for some: William Burke

He was born near Strabane in 1792, and (for the son of a Catholic cottier) well-educated. As a boy, he served in the local Manse, then as a baker and weaver, before some seven years in the Donegal militia. By then he was married, with two children. He quarrelled with his father-in-law over rights to a piece of land, and did a bunk to Scotland, leaving wife and children behind.

Burke found employment as a navvy on the Union Canal; and set up house with Nelly McDougal. Since both partners had living spouses Burke, as a Catholic, was excommunicated, and Nelly, a Presbyterian, denounced from the pulpit.

By 1827 Burke was in Edinburgh, trading in second-hand clothing, when he lost everything in a fire at his lodgings. He and Nelly went out of town, to work on the harvest at Penicuik, where they became drinking pals with William Hare and his doxy, Maggie. Hare may have done for Maggie's husband, to get possession of the lodging house business as well as the lady.

Burke and Hare

The career for which Burke and Hare became famous began on 27 November 1827. A pensioner in Hare's lodgings died, owing Hare £4. To recoup the debt, the two sold the corpse for £7 10 shillings to Professor Robert Knox, for use as a dissection specimen. Realising they were onto a winner, Burke and Hare refined their operation. Live specimens were intoxicated and smothered (Hare covered the mouth, Burke applied a body press). At least 15 more corpses were delivered to Professor Knox, at sums between £8 and £14 each.

The last of their victims was a Mary Campbell (or Doherty), done to death on 31 October 1828. Neighbours' suspicions reached the police, who found the body in a box in Knox's cellar. Hare turned king's evidence, and was acquitted.


Sir Walter Scott was in the throng to witness Burke's public hanging (see left) in the Lawnmarket on 28 January 1829. It was further ordered that Burke's corpse, too, be dissected: souvenirs of his skin were distributed quite widely. His skeleton is still on display in the anatomy museum of Edinburgh University.



Some vocabulary

Out of that came the verb "to burke", meaning as the OED has it:

To murder, in the same manner or for the same purpose as Burke did; to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim's body for dissection.

By 1830, in one of the Last Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb is using the word to describe the schoolboy's Saturday Night scarifying, as he is made ready and presentable for Sunday:

Cleanliness, saith some sage man, is next to Godliness. It may be; but how it came to sit so very near, is the marvel... But to be washed perforce; to have a detestable flannel rag soaked in hot water, and redolent of the very coarsest coarse soap, ingrained with hard beads for torment, thrust into your mouth, eyes, nostrils positively Burking you, under pretence of cleansing substituting soap for dirt, the worst dirt of the two making your poor red eyes smart all night, that they might look out brighter on the Sabbath morn (for their clearness was the effect of pain more than cleanliness), could this be true religion?

From there it is a small leap in metaphor to a secondary meaning:

To smother, ‘hush up’, suppress quietly. Also, to evade, to shirk, to avoid.

That, again according to the OED, is current by 1835, when John Arthur Roebuck is writing a pamphlet on the Dorchester Labourers. We might recognise those better as the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Roebuck complained that their defence statements went unpublicised:

Those who spoke in favour of the poor men, were what the reporters call burked.

One expression that definitely does not derive from William Burke is "to look (or feel) a right Burke". This is often, and more correctly spelled as "berk". As Eric Partridge, in his marvellous 1937 Dictionary of Slang, showed, this is abbreviated from the rhyming slang "Berkeley hunt". As Partridge had it:

Berkeley, the pudendum muliebre: C. 20. Abbr. Berkeley Hunt.

Yes, there was and is a Berkeley Hunt:

The Berkeley Foxhounds are the oldest pack of foxhounds in the country and can be traced back to the 12th century when they were used to hunt both the stag and the fox until the late 18th century onwards when they hunted the fox alone. The 5th Earl of Berkeley could hunt his hounds from Berkeley Castle to Charing Cross in London. He had kennels at Berkeley, Broadway, Nettlebed, Gerrards Cross and Cranfield. The season would start at Berkeley and progress to each of his kennels to London and then in stages back to Gloucestershire.

That would suggest the Berkeley was the hunt operating closest to the Londoner's experience. How he changed the pronunciation to match the spelling is another matter. However, in view of the rhyming argot, it is as well to know:

THE BERKELEY HUNT WILL ONLY BE CONDUCTING LEGAL ACTIVITIES!

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Norfolk Haggis?

Malcolm is, almost famously,

Norfolk born, Norfolk bred:
Strong in the arm, and weak in the head.

He was, therefore, delighted by the enterprise shown by James Rutland, eponym of M&M Rutland butchers, of Melton Constable, Norfolk.

His firm is exporting making and exporting haggis (hagges? haggises?) to Scotland. The product even passes muster for the Black Watch.

Inevitably there had to be someone to rain on the parade. Step forward pouting, feisty Catherine Stihler, MEP, of the Kingdom of Fife,

who was part of the Save Our Haggis campaign, has made a fresh call for Euro laws to be brought in to protect the Scottish national dish from foreign imposters.
She added: "It shows the need for stronger rules so consumers know what they are eating and where it has been made."

That's if one reads the Scottish Daily Record.

The Norwich-based Eastern Daily Press (on which Malcolm was raised: he particularly appreciated the herring landings reported at Yarmouth, which is why he can measure a "cran") has it somewhat differently:

Mrs Stihler said: “A geographic indicator is maybe one route we should go down for haggis, but at this time there should just be clarity on the label.”

She added that having holidayed in Norfolk as a youngster, mostly on the Broads, she was a great fan of the county and had nothing against Norfolk or M&M Rutland butchers.

More to the point:


Malcolm, married to a sprig of Ulster, has an on-going problem. What he calls a swede, she calls a turnip. And vice-versa.

As a result of this domestic war-t0-the-knife, he never gets served swede.

After years of earnest lobbying, he is now occasionally allowed parsnip, however.

Now, Nich Starling, a.k.a. Norfolk Blogger, get up to speed.

These are the real issues that matter in the world.


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