Monday 21.7.2014 at 12.01 hrs: 1940s schooldays in Oxford:
Last Friday morning on our way back to Corby from seeing “Wolf Hall” at The Aldwych the previous evening, I skimmed over the copy of The Week in the upstairs waiting room at St Pancras and read the page about “The main stories and how they were covered”. There was an item headed “Paedophiles in Parliament” with a section on “What the commentators said” with a reference to Geoffrey Dickens MP (who died in 1995)’s disclosures, with parliamentary privilege, and to him not sharing the relevant era (the sixties)’s startling indifference to what was then called “kiddie-fiddling”. And it struck me that that expression exactly covered what went on in my school days at Christ Church Cathedral Choir School, Oxford. But it was the very late 1940s or very early 1950s, not the subsequent decade. The last lesson of the day in the end classroom of three in the main teaching block - the one with the raised ‘stage’ for performances when the partitions were drawn-back. The class was taken by the scout master and maths teacher, Mr Smyles (not his real name - though he must be dead now). I was aged 8 or 9, I suppose. And Mr Smyles would sit with the boys in the back row of the class - as opposed to providing ‘chalk and talk’ at the front of the class. We were ‘getting on with private studies or homework’ and when I turned round, there he was smiling while ‘kiddie fiddling’ with the boys at each side of him. And at that age I didn’t realise it was even wrong, and said nothing about it at home. Until I was an adult. David Cameron says that his intended new legislation on the subject will make it an offence to fail to report such things. Times have moved-on. This was only about 5 years after WWII, and we were all recovering from that catastrophe. An immense sense of relief was manifest. What was done superbly at Christ Church was music. The end-of-term concerts on that same platform included the prodigy pianist Colin Sherratt, aged about 12, playing Mendelssohn’s ‘Lieder ohne Worte’ opus 67 No.4 (presto in C-major - ‘The bee’s wedding’) with wonderful precision and musicianship. That has stayed with me throughout the subsequent six decades of my life, providing an infinitely positive and spiritually good memory, beside which the less-good of the other has faded into insignificance.
Saturday 26.7.14 at 10.59 hrs at St Pancras station: human nature:
"Bring up the Bodies" at The Aldwych last night shed immense new light on the "Blood and Thunder Henry VIII” stereotype. Yes, yes. Ghastly things done. Ghastly even in those times. But it was all caused by human nature and the political system of the time. The king was the government. The government was stable only if the nobles were peaceful. The nobles instantly started rioting if the king suddenly died (eg in the tilts) or (less instantly) if he didn't have an heir. Or if he was 'weak' and didn't cut off enough heads now and again. That's the way the people were. That's how they thought and acted. That was "us" my friends. Yes, you and me. Not in person. But in ancestor. So you'd better get used to it. Ideas have changed a bit since then. But it goes back to times like the Iron Age when it was necessary to defend yourself against raiding parties not from abroad but from down the road, for whom violent seizure of goods was a way of life and much easier than growing or making them yourself. So violence such as dropping rocks on raiders from the castle walls was the norm.Since those times we have evolved better ways. Gentler ways. Ways involving the people via Parliament. Whereby the chance question of a son is no longer relevant. As indeed it never was really, as Queen Bess showed in 1609. And although our present Parliamentary system has many defects, at least it is not so open to abuse as in Thomas Cromwell's days.
FGM has been in the news. Ghastly facts. Man's inhumanity to women. And in the name of religion. But also embodying man's tendency to form groups or tribes or cliques. Badges of distinguishment. Human nature again. Not pretty. An indictment of us all. No escaping it. A strange tendency of our species. And rightly to be condemned. And, so it seems to me, not in principle to be distinguished from MGM as practised on boys in my young days. Circumcision. A word unknown to me when I encountered the question at Christ Church at about age 7: "Roundhead or Cavalier?". And assumed it was something that 'just was' one or the other. Like many other things in life that 'just are so' and therefore to be accepted. And were at that age. Though not something that I had suffered. (Ends.26.7.14).
Monday 4th August 2014 at 14.28 hrs: (100th anniversary of the outbreak of The Great War 1914-1918):
This day, exactly 100 years ago, so Archer-family tradition passed onto me by my Aunt Nora Archer (my father’s younger sister), many years ago, has it that ‘Aunty Blake’ heard of the outbreak of war and, knowing that the family (presumably my father, Fred, age nearly 9, his sister Nora, age 6, and their elder brother Arthur, age 12, but presumably not their twin sisters Gladys and Olive, aged merely 6 months, and their father, Grandpa William) were catching a train at Oxford station for a family day out somewhere, rushed to the station just in time to ‘sweep them up and return them safely to their home’ at 64 Kingston Road (a continuation of Walton Street), Oxford, thereby saving them from almost certain extinction at the hands of those bloodthirsty Germans, who would doubtless be likely to be ready for instant war in England’s heartland. Well, well. The event seems entirely possible. I can picture Aunty Blake in black bombazine and ready to argue-the-toss with all-comers! Actually, I have no information as to whether she was a bit of a latter-day Victorian martinet. She may have been a sweet lady. Certainly, she had come up in the world with the business success of her husband (Grandpa William’s employer), Mr George Blake, house-furnisher and cabinet-maker, formerly ‘carpenter’ of Eynsham, Oxfordshire. And thus, the Archer family was saved from devastation by the ‘Great War’ 1914-1918. Indeed, to the best of my present knowledge, the only family member to serve in that great conflict (I can hardly believe that this can be correct) was a member of the Gilder family (and thus a direct relation to Aunty Blake and Grandma Lizzie, the mother of the children in this little story), who was killed in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. (Added 01.09.2014): And 19 days after 4th August 1914, the uncle of the man (Bill Dykes) whose firm (UD&L) Phil Archer would be a part of, a Lt. Colonel in the British Expeditionary Force, died at Le Cateau in France, in those ill-fated early days of the great conflict, see: http://www.kingsownmuseum.plus.com/dykes01.htm
From The Merchant of Venice
(posted by: The President of the Rutland branch of the Anti-Blather League):
Bassanio:
Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more
than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two
grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you
shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you
have them, they are not worth the search.
Saturday 6th September 2014 at 18.02 hrs: the ‘Battle of the Marne’:
Today is, to the day, the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Marne, in which the course of the First World War changed from an inevitable German occupation of Paris and likely early victory after little more than one month of war, and which had been a war of rapid troop movements, involving cavalry charges and conventional set-piece battles, to the well-known trench warfare which lasted four years. The Germans had dominated the first month of the war, sweeping through Belgium and much of France, and committing attrocities blamed on the activities of ‘franc tireurs’ in both countries, which had much effect on international public opinion and did much to cause the later intervention of the US against Germany. The British Expeditionary Force’s part in the first month of the war was apparently not a distinguished one, according to Barbara W. Tuchman’s book “The Guns of August”, published in 1961/2. The British commander-in-chief Sir John French apparently did little more than seek to preserve the BEF from any serious action in case it be destroyed. It did fight however in The Batlle of the Marne, and may have played an important part in that, though the Tuchman book ends just before that battle so there is not a detailed account of it, except to refer to the fact that it is also known as “the miracle of the Marne”. And so it was, in terms of the reversal of fortunes that it effected. Mostly, it seems, on account of the brilliant leadership of the French general Gallieni.
Anyway, with that as the background, and serving to provide vastly more information than I was aware of before reading the Tuchman book, I now come to the relevance of all this to this family’s history, which boils down to a story told by my mother Gwen Archer. Click HERE to go to the page providing my mother’s own words recorded on 08.01.2002 together with the relevant part of the Wells family tree, showing Harold Wells who she refers to.
The whole point of this story is this. On or about 6th September 1914, my mother Gwendolen Penfold was aged 5 years and 2 months, and she had probably heard her family talking about the war that had started a month before, on 4th August. Then suddenly she hears her Uncle Harold saying: “The Germans have crossed the Marne”. No doubt she had an idea that “ The Germans” were the enemy. The attrocities committed in Belgium were international news. And her senses told her that they were near. And she was terrified. And she ran. Just ran. Anywhere. To get away. Through the gardens of the chrysanthemum nursery to the London Brighton and South Coast Railway company’s railway line. And there they found her. Not injured, but affected by the terror caused by the ‘War of the Frontiers’ as the first month of WW1 came to be called.
In the family, we lost Percy Gilder who was killed in the Battle of the Somme, which began on 1st July 1916, and in the Dykes family whose firm I worked for and as part of, in the 1980s and 1990s, Lt Colonel Alfred McNair Dykes was killed at Le Cateau, France on 23 August 1914.
I have much more to add to this site from Gwen Penfold.Archer my mother, by way of recollections about WW1, including the bands playing on the front at Brighton, the injured soldiers convalescing in the hospitals in Brighton, their terrible and terrifying injuries, and the duties her father Frank Penfold performed as a ‘warden’ (that may not be the exact term) after Zeppelin bombing raids in London, not to mention the ways in which civilians could escape the ‘call-up’ by becoming proprietors of businesses.(pba.ends.6.9.14.at.22.57.hrs).
Tuesday 9.9.2014 at 15.37 hrs:
IN DEFENCE OF GRATIANO: (I think the quotation in red below about ‘Sir Oracle’ the funniest thing in all Shakespeare. What a wonderful way to puncture the pride of pompous bladders.pba.):
Gratiano. Let me play the fool:
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come,
And let my liver rather heat with wine
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.
Why should a man, whose blood is warm within,
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?
Sleep when he wakes and creep into the jaundice
By being peevish? I tell thee what, Antonio—
I love thee, and it is my love that speaks—
There are a sort of men whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond,
And do a wilful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be dress'd in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit,
As who should say 'I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips let no dog bark!'
O my Antonio, I do know of these
That therefore only are reputed wise
For saying nothing; when, I am very sure,
If they should speak, would almost damn those ears,
Which, hearing them, would call their brothers fools.
I'll tell thee more of this another time:
But fish not, with this melancholy bait,
For this fool gudgeon, this opinion.
Come, good Lorenzo. Fare ye well awhile:
I'll end my exhortation after dinner.
Friday 12th September 2014:
In Today’s Guardian:Page 37, in the piece: “As Sweden goes to the polls, are cracks starting to show in the Nordic model?”, amazing figures for politics in “The famed Nordic model, mixing universal welfare and strong unions with an open economy and free trade” are shown.
These include 9.5% public support in Sweden for the Green party (average of polls), which makes it the fourth largest party after the (left of centre) Social Democrats at 30%, the far-right Sweden Democrats at 10.5%, and the centre-right coalition government Moderate party at 22%.
As regards voter turnout, Sweden is third in the EU at 84.6% after Malta at 92.9% and Denmark at 87.7%, with the UK sixth at 65.1% after France at 79.5% and Italy at 75.2%. And on the ‘UKIP-aggravating’ question of ‘Non-nationals’ in the population, UK is equal with France at 12%, below Germany (13%) and Sweden and Spain, both at 15%.
And as regards ‘Migrant misconceptions’ (the percentage-point gap between actual and perceived migrant percentages), UK is (of course) TOP at 19% with Sweden at 3%, Germany at 7%, France at 13% and Italy at 16%. Well done Nigel Farage and David Cameron. You’ve done such a good job in getting the Right message over to the population at large.
And if the Scottish referendum does go to the ‘Yes’ camp on 18th September, that ‘amputation’ of such a vital part of the UK will be looked back on as all part of the ‘small-is-beautiful’ ‘little-Englanders’ and ‘ anti-EU’ madness that afflicts our politics just now and which may well undo the work and progress to which so many lives and decades have been given.
What gives cause for hope then? Answer: (again today’s Guardian): page 41, the article on “Windpower restores Hull’s fortunes, putting the hum back into Humber”, which gives an account of the plans for “Hull Green Port”, a service hub for giant wind farms being built in the North Sea, for which Siemens will be investing £310M in a wind turbine facility in the city (Hull) that will build and service the UK’s massive Round 3 offshore wind programme. Each of the wind turbines will ‘stand taller than the Eiffel Tower’. How wonderful. How encouraging. How forward-thinking. Thank goodness for such heart-warming news. And we are doing our little bit. Two air-sourced heat pumps are being installed here. One of these is already in use. They will effectively produce totally-clean heat from the North Sea electricity which we buy from “Good Energy”.
17.9.2014:Amateur Radio:
My Uncle Raymond (Raymond Frank Penfold) was a radio amateur whose call sign was G3DHZ. He was my mother’s younger brother - and my hero for many years! I was always going to be a radio amateur like him up to and including my days in Manchester at UMIST. He had an amazing ‘roomful’ of radio equipment including a home-made TV set in the days before anyone had TV. His wizardry with a ‘side-swiping’ morse-code key was a source of wonderment to me - though the fact that his work in the forces in the 1939-1945 war involved the technical and practical side of radar and radio really explained it all. In many ways, this website is my answer to my long-felt need to do 'communications-stuff' like that. I must post on this site some pages from his autobiography about his radio hobby.
09.10.2014: Delius’s “Song of Summer”:
Song of Summer is, for me, charged with all the poignancy of life itself, and that poignancy is of the essence in the ’nearly-lost-life-memories’ of this website. Song of Summer is available to be listened-to with accompanying beautiful images on U-tube at: click here and then click on “skip this advert” and go to full screen - for the best effect. (10.12.14: no longer available. YouTube notice: "
"Frederick Delius: ..." The YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated due to multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement."
13.10.2014 at 09.52hrs: The Tories and UKIP:
Just been listening on iPlayer to Boris Johnson interviewed by Andrew Marr in The Andrew Marr Show about the results of Douglas Carswell’s recent success for UKIP in the Clacton by-election. Boris Johnson said (and I quote): “Beloved Kippers….It doesn’t seem to me that there’s a lot between us…” (so come back home to the Conservative Party). Of course, he has to say that because all tories are worried that UKIP will take a significant slice of their vote and they won’t get an overall majority in the 2015 general election. But to have it from such an influential tory that “there isn’t a lot between the tories and UKIP” is an amazing admission when you think of some of the childish policies of UKIP on immigration and Europe, people with HIV, climate change - see (**) below, and so on. As it said in the Guardian on Saturday, the ‘Dad’s Army’ animated diagram at the start of the programme showing little Union Jack spearheads confronting corresponding Nazi ones across the channel is effectively a statement of UKIP policy: “Brave little England confronting the world on its own”. As with many things, you don’t really find out about something until a particular situation crops up (like the current Tories/UKIP clash) to show what has been kept hidden behind the scenes.
(**) (pasted from Wikipedia 14.10.14): "Energy, environment and climate change[edit]
UKIP are sceptical of man-made climate change and oppose the creation of wind farms and investment in other renewable energy sources.[129] In 2010, UKIP stated that they would seek to have a Royal Commission investigate whether or not climate change is man-made, to scrap wind farm subsidies, ban the showing of the global warming film An Inconvenient Truth in schools, and ban use of public money by local authorities on climate change-related efforts.[132] UKIP's 2013 energy policy document states that global warming is part of a natural cycle: "the slight warming in the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles".[133]
On Any Questions, Nigel Farage described plans to increase the use of wind energy as "loopy" and said it would lead to Britain being covered "in ugly disgusting ghastly windmills" that would not satisfactorily provide for Britain's energy needs.[133]
Then UKIP spokesman Christopher Monckton said that the intention of a proposed United Nations climate treaty was to "impose a communist world government",[133] and stated that UKIP was the only option for those who disbelieve in climate change as "all the major parties have decided to sign up to the eco-fascist agenda".[132]
13.10.2014 at 14.36hrs: Rembrandt and the human condition:
From the Guardian’s review of “Rembrandt: The Late Works” at the National Gallery, London, from 15.10.2014:
“Rembrandt learned so much from his failures, his humiliations. He learned that we are all equal. The shadows of death gather around us like the black ink that overwhelms his etching of the crucifixion, but we can be heroes in love, in truth.
Here is the human condition laid bare by a man who never painted to reassure. No artist has ever been more modern than Rembrandt, if modernity means looking with total frankness at the darkness and the light.” (Rembrandt’s dates are 1606 - 1669 cf Shakespeare: 1564 - 1616, pba).
14.10.2014 at 11.51hrs: Germany: Memories of a Nation. At the British Museum London, from 16.10.14 to 25.01.15.
(From this morning’s Guardian): The exhibition examines 600 years of German history using objects which evoke memories pretty much all Germans share. Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum said: “It is a completely impossible task, an absurd task” but an important one. It is part of what we are about. The museum was set up to understand the world, and you can only do that by thinking what the world looks like from somewhere else. The way you do that is by thinking how do those people consider their past.”
18.10.14 at 11.04 hrs: Musings:
Been reading a little from a printed copy of “The Guns of August” by Barbara Tuchmann after listening twice to the audiobook. It has (as the reviewer in the Guardian this summer said it did to her) changed entirely my perception of the First World War. It was always a monstrous abomination, inexplicable and looming over recent history. Now, what actually happened (as opposed to popular myth) is much clearer to me, and it occurs to me that WW1 simply shows that we live in a mad mad world, as others have said. If WW1 could happen, then anything whatever could happen. Man’s folly knows absolutely no bounds. The existence of sane and clever and caring people has little or no effect on the madness. And once you’ve accepted that simple fact, all the day to day foolishness that constantly confronts one in daily life becomes more acceptable, or anyway explainable: ‘Oh well, it’s just more of the same old madness, and there’s nothing you can do about it’.
24.10.14 at 15.32 hrs: Afghanistan and Nonsense:
What tripe is talked about the reasons for the army being in Afghanistan and Iraq. Terrorism. ‘International strategy’. The actual reasons were Blair sucking-up to Bush, and the 67 Brits killed in 9/11. And now it’s much the same and something for the army to do. And do we know what it costs to have an army in Afghanistan? Something of the order of 300 to 400 Billion pounds to date. No one takes the slightest notice of such COLOSSAL expense. “Its OK”. “It’s the army”. “It’s approved”. So it doesn’t need to be even thought about. Not even when it makes the sums spent on membership of the EU (which the Murdoch Press get so excited about and ditto all their readers) look like small change. Germany and France don’t need (or want) to be in Afghanistan. Nor do we. It’s nonsense. Infinitely expensive post-colonial nonsense. No one, not Blair, nor Bush, nor 007, nor Scotland Yard, nor the SAS can prevent a lone determined terrorist from acquiring a rapid-fire gun or a bomb and going down into Oxford Street tube station in the rush-hour and causing mayhem. It doesn’t need any planning. Or phone calls. Or anything. It has no link to Afghanistan. It can be done - provided the person is mad enough. And there is no shortage of that commodity. And as for the loss of life that is caused by terrorism, the world’s biggest act was 9/11 which caused of the order of 3K lives to be lost and led to Iraq and Afghanistan. Do we ever recall how many lives are added to the world every day? Answer: about 220,000 net (= 70 times 9/11 every day). That’s after subtracting the daily deaths. No one ever mentions this. It DWARFS everything else. The world has to make room for them. There isn’t really room. Nor food. Nor work. Nor water. And we’re doing nothing. Not even talking about it. Because we don’t know what to do. And even if we did, we’re unwilling to do anything except put up barriers. It’s like climate change. Ignore it and it’ll go away. Such things always do. Except sometimes they don’t. An inconvenient truth which our grand-children will rightly blame us for.
26.10.2014 at 17.02 hrs: Jack Cade and Inclusiveness:
From Henry VI part 2, in the Magdalen College School production of which in about 1958, I was prompter and Pemberton, school captain of rugger, played Jack Cade:
- Jack Cade. So, sirs: now go some and pull down the Savoy;
others to the inns of court; down with them all. - Dick the Butcher. I have a suit unto your lordship.
- Jack Cade. Be it a lordship, thou shalt have it for that word.
- Dick the Butcher. Only that the laws of England may come out of your mouth.
- John Holland. [Aside] Mass, 'twill be sore law, then; for he was
thrust in the mouth with a spear, and 'tis not whole
yet.2630 - Smith the Weaver. [Aside] Nay, John, it will be stinking law for his
breath stinks with eating toasted cheese. - Jack Cade. I have thought upon it, it shall be so. Away, burn
all the records of the realm: my mouth shall be
the parliament of England
What a wonderful symbol that play can be seen to be, of the inclusiveness of MCS in the 1950s. I love that ‘My mouth shall be the parliament of England’. The non-elitism was what made MCS what it was.
And you that love the commons, follow me.
Now show yourselves men; 'tis for liberty.
We will not leave one lord, one gentleman:
Spare none but such as go in clouted shoon;
For they are thrifty honest men, and such
As would, but that they dare not, take our parts
5.11.2014 at 14.09hrs: EU Migrants:
Click here for the piece from today’s Guardian: “UK gains 20 BN from EU Migrants - Tax payments far outweigh welfare”. This completely pulls the rug on Farage and Cameron over immigration quotas/vetoes. And it’s from an authoritative source. But of course they wil ignore it. Rightly. Because the facts are irrelevant to them. They are only interested in politics. Ditto the arguments for leaving the EU. Total madness. Foreswearing the inclusiveness of membership of the greatest success story since alliances began.
11.12.2014 at 16.19 hrs: Windpower:
Yesterday’s Guardian has a wonderful inside-page-piece (click here to see) showing that “Last Sunday about 43% of Britain’s homes were powered by wind”, and that “an average of 7.315 GW of power were produced by wind farms, setting a new record for the UK”. Nothing to do with ‘total reliance on windpower’. Total reliance is a total irrelevance. But ‘an important part of the energy mix’. That’s real already. That’s enormous progress. Totally carbon-free. No carbon dioxide whatsoever.
18.12.14 at 17.23 hrs: Peter and Sarah and Olivia Archer:
Delighted to be back in touch properly with Peter (my cousin Ann’s son) and Sarah and Olivia. Last saw them at Olivia’s Christening on 10.6.2011 at Drayton. Olivia is five now. Getting very grown up and off to school of course. They are at Disneyland Europe today but we had a brief ‘FaceTime’ chat and they sent me a couple of recent snaps of Peter and Sarah, and of Olivia’s first day at school (click here).
13.01.2015 at 11.48 hrs: Charlie Hebdo and all that: Been reading the Guardian on why UK editors of newspapers have opted not to reprint some of Chalie Hebdo’s cartoons. The Guardian says their refusal to publish such cartoons cannot be adduced as proof of cowardice, nor as a sign that they capitulated to intimidation. It should be seen (says the Guardian), as editors, as they do daily, taking account of the effect of what they publish. In essence, they had to ask themselves if they should gratuitously insult a religion and its adherents, because a very small group of fanatics had misused its teachings in order to justify murder. Indeed, would publication of the offending cartoons serve only to provoke others to take retaliatory action or, at the very least, encourage yet more alienation of Muslims in British society? This is why I read the Guardian. Well, well. And I have refreshed my recollection of the basics of Islam, which is really a compilation of some Christian and Jewish teachings, re-presented via an arabic-only-speaking prophet and God, with a founding narrative including much detailed stuff about local quarrels in those far-off times. Well, well. Enough said, so far as I am concerned. Religion is all about spiritual health and what helps you to live (and die) in spiritual peace with yourself and your neighbours. Some people need it and believe these things, and others don’t. It is such a sensitive topic that, often, the less said, the better.
1.02.2015: Click here to go to a follow-on page of this blog: