Our resident bard, Gillian Southgate has once again triumphed in The Oldie's poetry competition but rather than relive that triumph on the blog she wishes to spread her stylistic wings with this offering:-  

ANIMALS AT PRAYER

 

 

At the service for pets, a boy brought in a gerbil,

Confused, but trusting, in its tiny cage. A woman led a lurcher,

Slender on its length of lead, the meek eyes lowered in humility.

A tabby cat, unsure, uncomfortable, stared out from a basket

With widened eyes, and only once gave out a tiny mew.

It was as if they knew why they were there, but just like us

Had other matters to distract them. The gerbil stood up suddenly,

Glancing about him with an urgent air, and the small boy

Bent to calm him. The lurcher stretched his paws, 

Smooth limbed, heraldic, motionless; the tabby swung her gaze

When to her line of vision a rabbit was presented, big flat feet

Resting on its owners arm, its head against his shoulder.

And so each one was blessed, and each, uncomprehending,

Was carried out of church. The rector, spotting a beetle

Which unremarked, had crossed the old stone floor,

Looked gravely down, and blessed it on its journey.

And as they left, the spider hanging thirty feet above them

Praised the morning sun that warmed his chamber,

And stepped into a mortar crack above a stained glass window.

 

 

Lucky Dip - Memoir or Autobiography? Richard Thomas C.M.G. 16/6/23

 

Lucky Dip – Memoir or Autobiography?

Richard Thomas C.M.G.

16/6/23  

It was with great pleasure that the Lit. Soc. welcomed back one of its former luminaries with lifelong roots in Winchelsea to discuss his recent book, Lucky Dip, in which his diplomatic career is scrutinised by that most unforgiving instrument, the retrospectoscope. Immediately our speaker drew the audience’s attention to the intrinsic tension in the title, a dynamic etymological equilibrium destined to tilt tantalisingly one way or the other during his talk even sometimes inviting the emphatically rhetorical question – “Does it matter?”. He ruminated on the wide spectrum in the final assessment of diplomatic careers, from the celebrity glitterati of the ambassadorial circuit to the unsung, industrious pit ponies tasked with collecting the material beneath the surface.

  Richard’s first 18 months of life were spent in Petronella’s Plat, offering an inspiring view of the splendid architectural torso which currently constitutes, St. Thomas’s Parish Church only for this quintessentially English idyll to be disrupted by an enforced evacuation to Canada with the outbreak of World War II.  His teenage memory bank yielded the angular shade of Vita Sackville-West in suitably masculine garb, her horticultural enthusiasm signalled by secateurs in the top pocket of her shirt.  The redoubtable grande dame of Sissinghurst shared a belief with Richard’s parents in the revitalising effect of the country air of the High Weald on the deprived urban youth of London’s East End and they co-operated on this project for several years. Next came Oxford, the Civil Service Exam and a first posting to the Commonwealth Relations Office and an ambience of striking informality – afternoon tea with the minister and his secretary sometimes graced with the presence of the latter’s husband, a serving mounted policeman wont to tether his horse to the Office railings.  As Earl Grey receded in his professional rear view mirror, a posting to Accra in Ghana landed Thomas in the tense atmosphere of decolonisation where he succeeded in facilitating the defection of a dissident Hungarian journalist and in deploying his burgeoning diplomatic charm to finesse from a rather hostile Ghanaian government his marriage service, and an enduring partnership with Catherine; a flame initially lit at an ANZAC Day party at the Australian Embassy there.  The roll of the diplomatic dice was to take him to the excitement of N.A.T.O. headquarters in Brussels during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Aid Section in New Delhi and the friendship of the celebrated BBC correspondent, Mark Tully and a career development stint at the Royal United Services Institute before alighting as no. 2 at the Prague Embassy in 1979, only to be given the run of the place as the Ambassador cashed in four and a half months of banked home leave.  This was an intoxicating challenge and the Ambassador’s return left our hero a bit deflated.  By successfully surfing a wave of managerial restructuring within the service, Richard beached in Iceland as head of a “mini mission”.  Although this assignment initially instilled gloomy foreboding in the Thomas family, Iceland’s long winter nights were successfully absorbed in their biorhythms, the lively polyglot president much admired and the anomaly of the huge N.A.T.O. base at Keflavik in a nation with no army duly factored in.  In the dog days of the Soviet Empire, Richard took on the role of Ambassador to Bulgaria as this most loyal of Moscow’s satellites was busily expunging its residual Ottoman legacy by ethnically cleansing its Turkish minority.  Soon, Western diplomats were able to declare Victory Day, in what they considered a Righteous Conflict, with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact although the Communists in Sofia managed another year in power, rebranded as the Socialist Party.  After 1400 years of alternatives Bulgaria finally glimpsed the sunlit uplands of democratic pluralism and 96 new parties were ready to try the experiment.  Unfortunately, the sun revealed a dystopic system of State orphanages to which a host of disabled children had been consigned.  Catherine joined in the challenge of rehabilitating the system’s victims.  After a busy but rewarding 5 years in the Balkans, one final posting in the Caribbean beckoned before compulsory retirement at 60. Retirement was to bring a detached, delectable dilettantism, lecturing on cruise ships and submitting articles to journals and blogs when touched by a suitable Muse. 

So, at the end, how did the speaker’s etymological equilibrium between memoir and autobiography fare and did it even matter?  The audience was entertained by a series of vignettes of diplomatic life and the equilibrium was judiciously maintained, sparing the listeners a plunge into the narcissism of small differences. 

Ian McEwan in Conversation with Jon Cook 19.5.23

 

Ian McEwan’s latest novel “Lessons”

Explored in conversation with Jon Cook.

19/5/23    

For the second time this Spring the Lit. Soc. had to seek out a larger venue to accommodate those attracted by the prospect of hearing the celebrated and prolific novelist, Ian McEwan, discussing his latest novel “Lessons” with Jon Cook.  They might have mentally echoed Disraeli in the Commons “We come here for fame” although in this case Fame resided in the aura enveloping McEwan. 

In a relaxed exchange with his interlocutor, our guest laid out the lines of his novel’s plot with any risk of “spoilers” likely outweighed by the attraction of his fluent, elegant prose and intriguing ideas. The book incorporated some autobiographical elements as it followed the central character, Roland Baines, through a life whose span neatly mirrored the author’s own with real events intruding at various junctures in the narrative.  McEwan’s inversion of two topical themes commands the reader’s attention.  At boarding school, the teenage Roland is groomed by the attractive, dominating female piano teacher and the pair embark on a two-year long affair.  As a consequence, the boy becomes sexually restless and has difficulty forming stable relationships with women.  Later in life, he tracks his former lover down and confronts her with the grooming and abuse but finds he is suffering from some variant of Stockholm Syndrome and his love for her stops him making a formal accusation. 

His personal sexual odyssey reaches a temporary haven in marriage to a German woman who, in another example of role inversion, abandons him and their baby to pursue a literary career in Germany.  The pair briefly meet in Berlin as the Wall comes down and she presents him with a copy of her first novel which he realises is a work of genius and that she is destined to be Europe’s leading novelist; an achievement that would have been impossible had she remained in South London as Roland’s wife.  Recognising that she is ill and that her death is imminent, he ponders on the realisation that her literary legacy will outlive them both and on the mediocre level of his own attainments. 

As always at literary events, there was intense interest in the technical elements of the writer’s creative process.  Ian told us that he did not approach his writing with a play book but allowed the plot to unfold as he wrote.  He took issue with Virginia Woolf’s assertion that character was dead (contradicted by her own “Mrs. Dalloway”) and observed that Roland’s character in part changed with time but other features remained the same throughout “Lessons”.  Further tips on creative writing were elicited as our speaker patiently fielded a battery of questions from an engaged and enthusiastic audience.  Judging from the queue for book signings at the end, few attendees would have echoed the Gryphon in “Alice in Wonderland”; “…. they’re called lessons …. because they lessen from day to day.”     

Members' Evening Friday 21st April 2023

 Our next gathering will be on Friday the 21st April in the Lower Court Hall, at 7 for 7.30pm.  This will be a Members' Evening with the theme being Women Writing, so feel free to bring your individual contributions; anything from the measured, matronly austerity of Jane Austen to the halcyon days of chick lit and the boisterous, bonhomie of Bridget Jones.  For those aligned with Wordsworth and who wish their powerful feelings to overflow spontaneously, poetry offerings are also encouraged.  Concerns over stage fright might be allayed by a preliminary free glass of wine!  Looking forward to seeing you all there.

To the Life - A Reminiscence with Charles Moore 24/3/23

 

A larger, more secular congregation than usual was shepherded into St. Thomas’s Church to hear the distinguished journalist, editor and author Charles Moore discuss his experiences in the writing of his acclaimed, prize-winning, 3-volume authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher.  A religious setting may have been particularly apposite for a subject who had been styled “The Blessed Margaret Thatcher, the Leaderene”, by the playfully camp, intellectually adroit, if arguably tactless Norman St. John – Stevas.  Given the political alignment of the publications with which our speaker has been associated, audience members attuned to the season’s Scriptural offerings might have speculated on whether they would be hearing “a disciple’s tongue”.  In 1997, while editing the “Daily Telegraph”, Moore was invited to write the authorised biography of the former Prime Minister, an unsought, if attractive, offer for which he had to set aside his verdict on political biographies as being generally “stodgy”.   He did express an admiration for Boswell’s “Life of Johnson”, particularly from the point where the Great Lexicographer first encounters his amanuensis.

The plethora of source material was an early problem.  Mrs. T. herself was still alive and Charles felt that knowing and being able to meet with his subject was on balance an advantage.  In 1990 she had “written her own memoirs” in conversation with a series of ghost writers which were unhelpful and were worryingly indicative of a disorganised mind.  The subject’s personal and Government papers were also available for study and the most useful insights into the workings of the former Premier’s mind came from her own notes and under- linings on the official documents.  Lady Thatcher did not seem to understand the fact gathering nature of the historical interview, seeing it more in terms of a continuation of political combat.  In addition, she was latterly in evident cognitive decline and could not be considered an altogether reliable witness.  There were numerous media interviews, newspaper articles and a host of living oral sources to be scrutinised.  Civil servants proved most useful among this group in that they had minds trained to remember detail while politicians, notably Michael Heseltine, were rather cavalier in handling facts.  An exception was John Major whom this biographer felt demonstrated a “natural” civil servant’s mind-set.  So numerous were the oral sources that the interviews with over 500 of them in North America had to be contracted out to an assistant.

This wealth of material created a challenge when it came to building a narrative “architecture” but our speaker laid down some useful ground rules; hold a firm chronological line and avoid the distraction of “flashbacks”, eschew partisanship and antagonism, try to understand the subject’s motivation and to move as close as you can to the well springs of their thought and action.  Baron Moore detected a discernible difference between the public and private Margaret Thatchers.  While the relative contributions of Marxism and Methodism to the genealogy of the Labour Party remain a steady staple of political debate, our visitor felt that Margaret Roberts’ father’s auxiliary vocation as a Methodist lay preacher was crucial in engendering a “work hard, make money and donate some of it” mentality in his offspring.  Margaret emerged from the local grammar school with a place at Oxford studying Science, both unusual destinations for a woman at that time.  The only instance when the interviewee’s veracity came into question was on the topic of boyfriends: - the party line was that the far from handsome Denis was the only one but our intrepid representative of what Denis, in his “Private Eye” incarnation as the author of the “dear Bill” letters, would have termed “the reptiles of the press” unearthed the detail that his subject was managing to entertain 3 swains concurrently before Denis swam into her ken. 

 The congregation filed out, uplifted by an inspiring sermon and fortified by the Final Blessing, but possibly divided into true votaries with heads bowed in silent prayer for the canonisation of Blessed Margaret and perennial sceptics wondering whatever happened to that famous Downing St. Mission Statement from the prayer of St. Francis: -

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.

Where there is despair, may we bring hope.      

Tristan and Me; 9 December 2022 talk by Martin Handley

 

The assembled Lit. Soc. who gathered for the Wagner-themed evening in the reassuringly warm space of the Court Hall were gratified to hear our speaker, Martin Handley, approvingly liken it to the Gibechung’s Hall which received Siegfried’s corpse in the Ring Cycle. He was to regale us with the account of the role played by the eponymous hero of the opera Tristan und Isolde in his own life.   Something of a musical Renaissance man, Handley has merged his violin and piano playing, conducting and acting skills into a love of that marriage of music and theatre which is opera.  An Oxford-born, Cambridge graduate Martin started his professional musical career as a répétiteur in Germany for 6 years, following that with 3 years as Chorus Master and conductor at Australian Opera before a 6-year stint as Chorus Master with English National Opera.  This laid the foundation for a national and international career as a freelance conductor and he took his first steps on his road to broadcasting on the BBC’s World Service.  1997 saw him begin a 2-year spell as Conductor of Music for Royal Danish Opera. 

Tristan und Isolde began as light relief for Wagner from the rigours of penning both the libretto and the music for the Ring Cycle but became hugely influential; inspiring Mahler, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg and Britten and according to our speaker exerting a wider cultural influence on a par with the contemporaneous Das Kapital of Marx and Darwin’s Origin of Species. We were told the work is an inscape, a drama of the soul. The libretto was based on a 12th century account by Gottfried von Strassburg although oral versions were thought to have been around for centuries before that. The tale is set in a triangular, Celtic twilight of Ireland, Brittany and Cornwall and is a commitment to love and sexual passion with the eponymous protagonists experiencing the Liebestod or erotic death and then eternal union in death in a Valhalla of the lovestruck. The cast comprises kings, warrior knights, noble women and dynastic marriage arrangements which are strained by an emotional cocktail of revenge, atonement, duty and love all further complicated by the substitution of a potent and highly efficacious love potion for a lethal draught. These plot lines may have echoed Wagner’s own love life at the time when, in Swiss exile, his growing disenchantment with his first wife, Minna, was further fuelled by his infatuation with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a Zurich silk trader, and the presence of his future mistress and wife, Cosima von Bülow, in the wings. Martin interspersed music from the opera to add colour to the narrative.

We then learnt of Martin’s more personal involvement with this opera.  As an adolescent at his co-educational boarding school, his first love, Sally, and he were wont to retreat to the school’s “listening room" on Sunday afternoons to listen to a box set of Tristan und Isolde and we were treated to the pair’s favourite track from Act II:

Isolde: Herz an Herz dir, Mund an Mund      (Heart on your heart, mouth on mouth)

Tristan: eines Atems ein'ger Bund  (The single bond of a single breath)

Together: Niewiedererwachens wahnlos hold bewusster Wunsch (The sweetly conscious undeluded wish never again to waken)

At the end of this duet, Tristan and Isolde collapse onto a flowery bank but Martin did not reveal how he and Sally closed the scene.  The school clearly had an enlightened attitude to developing higher culture among the more cerebral pupils, but you have to admit the German Department must have been outstanding.   

Tristan und Isolde has a reputation in the world of opera similar to the Scottish play in the world of drama and it duly brought our speaker bad luck when he was called on at no notice at all to substitute for an indisposed Tristan on the production’s first night in Copenhagen.  He told us he managed to soldier through the ordeal and thinks he actually enjoyed about 2 minutes of the unsought assignment.  The Swedish dramatic soprano, Birgit Nilsson, has appeared in 33 productions as Isolde and admits the role made her famous, so Martin recounted how he managed to cajole her into granting him an interview when she retired to her native Skane district, north of Malmö.  Birgit had emulated another Swedish diva, Greta Garbo, in her dedication to post-retirement solitude and Handley had to follow a complex set of instructions, more like a demonstration of “tradecraft” for a le Carré novel, before finally coming face to face with his quarry.  He did learn that she felt Wagner required thoughtful, patient and methodical people and that the secret to singing Isolde was “comfortable shoes”.

As befits a Radio 3 presenter Martin wove the thoughtfully selected musical excerpts expertly into his very personal narrative leaving the audience suitably educated and entertained.

William Doherty       

Literary Agents; an author's and an agent's perspective

 In her November talk to the Literary Society, on Crime Writing, Aline Templeton touched on the role of a Literary Agent, which gave rise to some discussion. As I thought it might be of wider interest I asked Aline to write a piece on the role of an agent, from the writer's perspective, and a Literary Agent, Holly Faulks,  to write one from the agent's perspective. LY

The Literary Agent, by Aline Templeton

Being able to drop the words ‘my agent’ into a conversation for the first time – very casually, of course – is a great day for an author.  This is a rite of passage: up to that point you may in your heart believe you’re a good or even a great writer, and your mother and perhaps even some indulgent friends may go along with that, but when an agent offers you her – or his - time, advice and expertise for nothing because she considers that it will pay her to do it, you have the most convincing form of professional approval.

Her judgement may, of course, be wrong.  Her high opinion may not be shared by publishers, but even so many agents persist because they still believe in the book and work tirelessly with their author to get it into print.

It’s an enormously important relationship and there are as many different ways of conducting it as there are authors and agents, and there are bad ones as well as good.    I have had several agents in my time; the first one who approached me on the basis of some short stories I had written gave me such bad advice that I only got my first book published after I left her, and she was later thrown out of the Association of Authors’ Agents.

My next one was wonderful.  I approached her and she would only take me on after very hard work and accepting a lot of criticism on the next book, but the pain was worth it. More books followed, but she made everything enormous fun too.  When one of my books was coming unstuck, she said, ‘Come and stay. We’ll work hard all day to get it into shape, and then we’ll drink and gossip all evening.’  We did,  the book was sorted out and then the other books followed.

All her clients adored her and we were devastated when she decided to retire.  I’ve been grateful to agents since, but I’ve never had that sort of closeness with anyone else.

I’m not good at talking about what I’m planning to write. I have author friends who talk over their plans with their agents before they write them and look to them for plot suggestions but after outlining in some detail the book I was planning on one occasion, I found the drive had dissipated when I sat down to write it and the book never got itself written.  I’ve never done that again.

It's once it’s safely in manuscript form that I look to my agent to be cruel enough to tell me what’s wrong with it and how to put it right.  I hate this stage, but I know I need it; I have also learned to ignore the first paragraph says that she absolutely loves it and it’s brilliant,  and go straight to the ‘But..’ in the second one.  I had one agent who was neither cosy or supportive but I was grateful for the talent she had for spotting exactly what was going wrong and spelling it out despite my squirming. 

Not being meticulous by nature, I need an agent when it comes to checking contracts with publishers and dealing with the intricacies of foreign rights.  Then after publication, the  agent acts as a buffer between you and your publisher; when you’re quite sure that your assigned editor is completely wrong, and the changes being demanded will ruin your book, it is your agent’s job to convince the publisher that he’s wrong, or alternatively to convince you that you are – possibly using the phrase, ‘The person who has the chequebook is one who’s right.’

That brings us to one of agent’s most important duties -  getting the publisher to pull out that metaphorical chequebook, and haggling about what should be written on it. A fair bit of that involves explaining that the book is so brilliant that he can’t afford to miss it and with luck managing to lure other publishers into a bidding war; that’s the highest degree of agenting skill – and then the sky’s  the limit.

It hasn’t happened to me so far, but a girl can dream.  I have no doubt about their value to an author and have no doubt that the percentage taken off my earnings in agents’ fees has been more than covered by the rewards their skills have brought me.

The Literary Agent, by Holly Faulks

A literary agent is involved in every step of an author’s career. When we first take on a client they may only be at the very early stages of an idea. We work together with the author to prepare their work for submission to publishers. This might be a proposal for a non-fiction book or the complete manuscript of a novel. We will then draw up a list of editors at the various publishing houses that we think might be interested in the work. A big part of our job is staying up to date with all the editors and knowing what exactly they’re looking for. We send the author’s work to the editors along with a submission letter and with luck we receive an offer of publication (or more than one offer!) for the author. We then negotiate with the editor(s) to ensure the author is given the best possible offer and guide the author through the process of selecting their new publishing house. We will then go on to negotiate the full contract between author and publisher. At this point, the author will begin to work directly with the publisher’s editorial, marketing, publicity and sales teams to prepare the book for publication, but we will continue to support them through this process, especially if there are difficulties or disagreements between the author and the publisher. We will also ensure that the author is paid correctly and promptly by the publisher, chasing advance payments and checking royalty statements. This support continues beyond the publication of the first book as the author’s career grows. We try to help authors achieve their long-term career goals whether that means negotiating new contracts with an existing publisher, seeking out a new editor when necessary or changing writing direction entirely. Literary agents will also aim to sell translation rights in the work throughout the world as well as TV and film rights. Some agencies will do this directly and others will work with co-agents and sub-agents. Literary agents may also act as speaking or broadcast agents and can handle all sorts of non-book work for their clients.

My Life in Crime by Aline Templeton 18 November 2022

After her aborted visit last winter, victim of severe weather in the south-east, the Lit. Soc was delighted to welcome the acclaimed “Crime Czar” of Small-Town Scotland, revealing her life in crime. Like a mistress of the trade of crime fiction, she set the scene for the audience with a reading from the opening chapter of her novel “The Devil’s Garden” whose pace and intrigue swiftly evoked the requisite uneasy, dramatic tension. Her first faltering steps on the pathway to entry into the contemporary canon of Scottish crime fiction began at age 6 with a fierce grasp of the pencil and learning to fashion printed script. Mystery intruded even in this account of the prototype Mr. Wiz and Mrs. Woz’s weekend in Paris leaving her early readership to ponder on how this adventure was received by the travelling couple’s respective partners. The urge to write has turned out to be a lifelong compulsion. Aline was always a bibliophile and still regards her introduction to her local lending library as a foretaste of Heaven. Reading and writing were her thing although a summer placement in her local library, prior to reading English at Cambridge, proved a mixed blessing. Staff had the privilege of access to the “blue” books, literature deemed unsuitable for an undiscriminating public to consume, and thus the opportunity to thoroughly round off their liberal education but also the burden of hunting down and matching the missing tickets which formed the basis of the classification system in that pre-computer era. Our speaker recounted the discomfiture of the prim chief librarian who eventually yielded to an insistent customer’s demand to see the blue books and his confusion when confronted with this treasure trove of forbidden literary fruit. The engaged citizen had merely been requesting the Government Reports which always bore blue covers!

After graduation and her entry into the teaching profession, she continued to be a slave to the impulse to write. Initial published success was modest with articles in magazines and newspapers but convincing publishers to support her work was a heroic enterprise. She was drawn into crime fiction, an expanding field channelled and amplified by a plethora of crime programmes on television and the conviction among a growing proportion of the population that crime fiction reflected the inherently unfair nature of life. Wigtown Book Festival, the Scottish equivalent of Hay on Wye, provided the launch pad for her first book, honed for the market by the advice of a ruthless agent. Her first 6 books were set in England, but her Edinburgh base and her direct experience of the Scottish Legal System as a Justice of the Peace prompted a switch to rural Scottish settings. Eschewing the fashion for flawed detectives – alcoholics, drug addicts, victims of bipolar disorders – she summoned D.I. Marjory Fleming from her imagination; a farmer’s wife with 2 teenage children and a stable personality. The nine novels in which Fleming is the central figure are set in Galloway, the neglected south-west corner of Scotland, where an impressive backdrop of sea and hills fails to forestall the social devastation caused by the collapse of the fishing industry and an influx of part absentee second home owners. The centralising of the previously regionally based Scottish Police Service demanded a new main protagonist, the maverick DCI. Kelso Strang, a bereaved widower, and former Army officer who can be “parachuted” into remote Scottish locations on an ad hoc basis. Aline acknowledged a transition in her work with the later books being character driven. The abiding impression left from her time with the Law was of the “criminal stupidity” of many of the delinquents; admittedly she only saw the ones who allowed themselves to be caught. It will be intriguing to observe how the reset of her work-life equilibrium after her recent move from Edinburgh to Tenterden affects her literary output. Will the rugged, remote Scottish literary universe she created survive immersion in the soft South?

The evening closed with a Q&A in which the writer divulged she was not a tightly planned, detailed spreadsheet author but one who wrote linearly, allowing the plot flexibility as the characters increasingly took on a life of their own. The books are written to entertain and carry no hidden message and our speaker approvingly endorsed the definition offered by Miss Prism, the governess in Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”, “The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” Pressed to choose a favourite from her work she opted for “The Devil’s Garden” and “Evil for Evil”. Our evening ended happily with a loose scrum forming round the speaker’s table as the audience invested in samples of the Templeton oeuvre, thoughtfully provided in a variety of formats.

William Doherty

TS Eliot: Into the Waste Land, and The Four Quartets - BBC iPlayer (Reviewed by Richard Thomas)

These two programmes were dished up for our delectation by BBC 4 a month or so ago, complementing BBC 2’s "Return to T S Eliotland" (reviewed separately, below).  They will be available on BBC iPlayer for another eleven months.  The first is in “Talking Heads” format, while the second is a televisual version of the solo recitation of the whole of The Four Quartets which Ralph Fiennes has been performing in various theatres in recent months.  Both are well worth watching.

The main thrust of "Into The Waste Land" is that knowledge gained from the release in 2020 of Emily Hale’s letters from their 50 year embargo has made it clear that the poem is built around a strong current both of romantic longing and of the poet’s agony, brought about by his disastrous inability to bring the longing to fruition – which indeed, in the opinion of some of the talking heads, together form the poem’s main genesis.  It is not, as had been the view hitherto, an abstract threnody for the past, accentuated by the horrors of the first world war.  It is a love poem – or rather a failed love poem – magnified into that threnody, and not really abstract at all.

This had long been the hunch of the main talking head, the academic and biographer Lindall Gordon, who had surmised in one of her earlier books on Eliot (three of them) that the key to the poem’s angst was lost or failed love, presumably for Emily Hale, whom Gordon had identified as the “hyacinth girl”.  This supposition had been derided at the time by a number of eminent critics, but she had stuck to it, determined to live long enough (she is now in her eighties) to be able to prove it right as soon as the embargo was lifted.  And sure enough she was at the gates of the Princeton Library at that very moment, and the content of hundreds of the newly accessible letters soon vindicated that long-held hunch.  The poem was the result of an emotional breakdown.

Eliot had then many years later left a posthumous time-bomb, designed to coincide with the lifting of the embargo, in the form of a lengthy and emphatic denial of any serious connection, emotional or literary, with Emily Hale.  He had also ensured that all her letters to him had been burnt.  These two posthumous interventions had more or less confirmed the “guilt”, or desperate regret, that had underlain his composition of the poem.  For, after all, he had declared his love for Hale, immediately before leaving for England and Oxford, where he had then almost instantly met and married Vivienne (or Vivien- she used both versions) Haigh-Wood, a surprising and impetuous act that led inexorably into a miserable failed marriage, with Vivienne’s gradual descent into the mental illness that led, in 1938, to her commitment to an asylum, where she died in 1947.

But the programme is not only about the poem’s emergence from Eliot’s Hale-induced emotional breakdown.  It is a skilful and wide-ranging exegesis of the whole poem, exploring the origins and identities of the various incidents and characters, such as the drive in the car and the “echt Deutsch”, and demonstrating how much both Vivienne and Ezra Pound edited and improved the text.  The talking heads, who include biographers, academics, actors, poets, a composer and a drag model, are wise and instructive.  I only wish, however, that they could be identified more than once, as there are too many of them to remember throughout a fairly intense ninety  minute programme.

Simon Russell Beale reads the excerpts beautifully, and there are plenty of helpful illustrations.  It is a pity however that most of them are displayed as though under rippling water, presumably to render them as “memories” – an irritating and unnecessary affectation.

There is not much that needs saying about the Ralph Fiennes programme, entitled Four Quartets.  It is simply a brilliant tour de force.  Over eleven hundred lines, delivered from memory, perfectly.

Sipping Nectar by Douglas Reid Skinner

 

The first precision atomic clock 

was built in 1955

by Louis Essen and Jack Parry.

It was accurate measuring down

to a millionth of a billionth of a second

and worked by counting the number of times

an atom of caesium-133

flipped from one state to another.

Defined this way, a second is the time it takes

for nine thousand, one hundred and ninety-two million,

six hundred and thirty-one thousand,

seven hundred and seventy spin flips

to have happened in your atom,

which on any one day is much the same time

as an Amethyst Woodstar hummingbird

requires for the eighty wingbeats that keep

it hovering in place and sipping nectar

from a delicate floral trombone.

(From A Short Treatise on Mortality, uHlanga Press, 2022. £7.50, copies available from the author.

Contact: douglas.cranerivieras@me.com)

T S Eliot, by Richard Thomas

 The literary and broadcasting world is awash with Eliot just now. Books and articles galore have appeared, prompted by The Waste Land’s centenary, and the BBC has treated us to three excellent television programmes: T S Eliot: Into the Waste Land, Four Quartets, and Return to T S Eliotland. The first two will be available on iPlayer for another eleven months, but, annoyingly, the third will be there for only another week or so. So perhaps I should address it first, and come back to the other two later.

Return to T S Eliotland is a literary travelogue in which we are introduced by A N Wilson to the significant places lived in or visited by Eliot, and shown both how he used them as building blocks and how he was influenced by them, figuratively or literally, in his poetry: St Louis (childhood home, with its mighty Mississippi); Gloucester, Massachusetts (summer home, with the sea and sailing); Harvard (during his time there he first met his muse Emily Hale); Merton College Oxford (and during his time there he met his first wife, Vivienne Haig-Wood); London (Lloyds Bank and breakdown; Margate and Lausanne (recovery); London again (marriage failure, interaction with Ezra Pound, publication of The Waste Land, editorship at Faber and Faber, Second World War, second marriage – to his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, Nobel Prize); Burnt Norton and Little Gidding (visited, with Emily Hale); East Coker (also first visited with Emily Hale – and where he, and many years later, Valerie were buried). 

Wilson is an engaging and highly informative guide, with plenty of lateral, but always relevant, digression on, for instance, rivers (Mississippi, Thames, Ganges, Styx) and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Wilson regards The Waste Land as the greatest poem in the English language of the twentieth century (followed, though only by implication, by the Four Quartets), and he tells us why in an engrossing programme. But he is not starry-eyed. He is outraged by Eliott’s antisemitism and racism, and puzzled and saddened by the way he treated both Vivienne and Emily – in the latter case even posthumously, with a meretricious and wounding disclaimer of even the slightest degree of influence or affection, left to coincide with the release by Princeton University of his letters to her fifty years after her death, which occurred just two years before The Waste Land centenary. (He had already ensured that all her letters to him were burnt.) This programme neatly complements the other two, to which I shall revert shortly. What a pity that it cannot remain with them on iPlayer for a whole year.

Richard Thomas

The King's Touch, by Dr Stephen Brogan: 3 September 2022

 

The Lit. Soc. broke new ground, drilling down on the specialist literature of the distant past when Dr. Stephen Brogan presented his study of Adenochoiradelogia, the 1684 text on the presentation and treatment of scrofula with particular reference to the application of the King’s Touch. The enigmatic title stands firmly in a tradition of medical neologism drawn from the Classical languages and is a three volume anatomick-chirurgical treatise on glands and swellings which explains their nature, describes the clinical presentation and discusses the therapeutic efficacy of contemporary treatments. For both speaker and audience, attention was centred on a specific treatment, the Charisma Basilikon or Royal Touch. The author, one of King Charles II’s surgeons, Thomas Browne, had a ringside seat at the application of the Royal Touch. Scrofula would now be technically described as tuberculous cervical adenitis i.e., the spread of tuberculosis to the lymph glands in the neck, with Dr Brogan attributing the infection to the ingestion of unpasteurised milk from cows with TB. The affected glands could present as swellings which increased in size and became red and tender before sometimes rupturing to form a sinus, a tract from the abscess cavity which opened onto the skin surface and along which pus was intermittently discharged. Nowadays an uncommon clinical condition to encounter but our speaker gave some insight into the medical challenge it posed with a display of 19 th century photographs and watercolours of afflicted patients.

Dr. Brogan emphasised the importance of context in considering illness and healing in the 17th century. Disease was then considered providential, sited at an intersection of religion, health and medicine; a philosophy which may explain the wide spectrum of healers on offer – physicians, apothecaries, barber-surgeons, cunning men, diet advocates and lifestyle coaches.

Tactile healing was not an exclusively royal preserve and the Irish 

J.P., Valentine Greatrakes,attracted thousands of supplicants following his arrival in London in 1665. The busiest monarchical adept of the King’s Touch was Charles II whose production line of medical ministrations followed a seasonal calendar of Easter and Michaelmas, the latter coinciding with harvest time. During these 10-day seasons, the Merry Monarch touched 300 sufferers each morning and the events were trailed with advertisements in The London Gazette. Before participating in one of these sessions, the patient required a referral letter from his vicar confirming the scrofula diagnosis with the vicar being obliged to record the names of those he had referred. To attend the actual ceremony the patient had to collect an admission token from the surgeon’s house beforehand and we can only speculate at the febrile atmosphere which must have prevailed there from the diarist John Evelyn's description of seven deaths in the crush at one surgeon’s door. Lest we imagine that those submitting to the cure were drawn from a gullible underclass, aristocrats also underwent the process although they could avoid the frenzied scramble to acquire an admission token, being favoured with a domiciliary visit and personal delivery. The surprisingly modern bureaucracy which attended presenting yourself for the Touch was inspired by the contemporary fear of masterless men roaming the countryside and possibly, horror of horrors, becoming a charge on the Poor Law although two thirds of victims were actually women. The ceremonial choreography was thoughtfully arranged; the venue was the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall, in front of which the King’s father had been executed by Cromwell’s regicidal republicans in 1649. Father and son shared a belief in the Divine Right of Kings, hankered after a French-style absolute monarchy and saw the ruler as the Lord’s Anointed, leaving only a small step to crediting him with supernatural powers; so, dispensing the Charisma Basilikon was a political endeavour for the Stuarts. Charles also took the religious element seriously as well, topping up the royal reservoir of spirituality by taking Communion beforehand and having prayers from St. John’s Gospel intoned throughout with the inspiration for the whole ceremony drawn from St. Mark: they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. St. Mark 16, v.18 (KJV) The king duly laid his hands on the lesions for 15 – 20 seconds. At a second phase of the ceremony the patient was given a gold coin known as an Angel, to be worn from a ribbon round the neck, which contained more of the royal metal, gold, than any other coin in circulation at that time. Nowadays one can fetch anything from £1,000 to £4,000 on eBay. On one face there was a depiction of St.Michael the Archangel killing a wyvern, representing the triumph of good over evil and by extension health over disease, while the obverse showed a ship at full sail coming towards the viewer, signifying a healthy body politic following the true course. The coin’s rubric read "Soli Dei Gloria" – The Glory of God

Alone. Charles II took Touching seriously and is estimated to have touched 100,000 people in his lifetime, probably seeing it as a conservative reaction to the regicide Republic/Commonwealth and the political malaise he felt accompanied it. Browne’s text reports a 75 patient case series, 5 of whom were healed within 2 to 3 days and another 30 improved over 4 to 6 weeks. As in modern medicine, managing expectations was important. Many sufferers were not expecting an overnight cure but wished to be heard on the subject of their misfortune and were prepared to settle for even a slow, incremental improvement. Evidence for a political dimension comes from the refusal of the Calvinist William III or the House of Hanover to continue the practice despite its revival under Queen Anne and its impressive historical lineage, dating back to Edward the Confessor.

As ever, the Lit. Soc. audience rose to the challenge of novelty, firing in a series of intelligent questions in the Q & A.

William Doherty

The Glass Rainbow, by James Lee Burke, reviewed by William Doherty

 The literary dictatorship to which Book Group members voluntarily submit can sometimes corral them onto strange, previously unexplored pastures which they vow to try.  Last month my group chose to eschew the avant-garde, the English Classics and those watershed texts which signposted major changes in the tastes of the reading public, in favour of the well-trodden path of American crime fiction.  Strictly speaking, James Lee Burke’s The Glass Rainbow did not qualify as "pastures new" for me as I had previously read at least a dozen of Burke’s works. Treating this as an exercise in Critical Reading gave me the chance to view this novel with fresh eyes.

The narrative structure follows a conventional third person path, albeit leavened with copious passages of earthy, direct speech.  The central character, Dave Robicheaux, has featured in 17 earlier novels which have a contemporary, American setting.  After a varied working life in law enforcement, he is now a mature deputy sheriff in New Iberia in South-West Louisiana.  Place is critical in shaping the cultural contours of these stories.  The town lies near Bayou Teche, a 135 mile stretch of water which was once the course of the Mississippi before the river opted to turn sharp left then right and empty into the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans, thereby creating a setting that even unfettered geography has elected to avoid.  The town sits in the administrative subdivision (parish) of Acadia which reinforces the distinctive ethnic framing of Robicheaux as a Cajun, a group with their own unique cultural, linguistic, musical and gastronomic heritage. Acadie was a 17th century French colony in what are now the Atlantic Provinces of Canada and was named after the Peloponnesian region which became a mythological symbol of an idealised pastoral wilderness.  The Yin and the Yang of 18th century European wars saw them becoming British subjects by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and then being largely ignored until their expulsion in the 1750s as the British laid the groundwork for their conquest of France’s St. Lawrence-based North American settler colony.  Scattered along America’s Atlantic seaboard, thousands of these Acadiens made their way to the French colony of Louisiana and settled on its Gulf coast. The transformative, corrupting power of speech has turned them into Cajuns.  Their precipitous flight from Nova Scotia meant few arrived in the slave colony of Louisiana with the capital to enter the dominant plantation economy and they were destined to join the ranks of the poor whites.  The Louisiana Purchase saw the huge nominally French Mississippi - based colony of Louisiana sold by Napoleonic France to the USA in 1803.  The Cajuns were further scarred by the defeat of the Confederacy in the American Civil War which pitched their state into a military occupation, the aborted Reconstruction project, murderous racial strife (the Colfax Massacre), the Jim Crow laws and 150 years as one of the poorest states in the Union.  Our hero draws on this emotive backdrop, making reference to historical incidents, and Burke exploits the unsettling topography and climatic conditions to inject disruptive dramatic notes into the narrative melody.  Water courses move slowly through swamp, harbouring alligators and deadly cottonmouth snakes, and fashion the distinctive landscape of bayous, levees and coulées with the whole intermittently transformed by violent thunderstorms suddenly sweeping in from the Gulf.  The sense of place is more powerful than Morse’s Oxford or Taggart’s Glasgow and is consciously introduced as a pillar to support the narrative. 

Robicheaux, tuned in to all these nuances, is a sure-footed traveller through this landscape, driven by a strong, if understated, moral imperative; he is aware of, but immune to, racial and social distinctions and has an innate ability to spot a delinquent, even those fêted by wider society.  His ancestry frees him from guilt as either an engineer or beneficiary of the racialised social structure of Louisiana.  Flawed like so many modern heroes, he is a recovering alcoholic, a Vietnam vet. subject to post-traumatic stress disorder, taking the form of wartime flashbacks, and a protective family man, a role which can morph into a vulnerability when the family becomes a target.  The partner is often a necessary adjunct in serial detective novels and Clete Purcel adds further ethnic colour to the novel’s cast.  He is descended from the Irish “navvies” brought to dig New Orleans'  Basin Canal in the 19th century and combines alcohol addiction with an explosive irascibility but like Robicheaux at bottom has a strong moral core.  The duo’s outspoken natures and willingness to verbally engage with the rogues’ gallery in the plot results in vivid, lengthy passages of dialogue whose sexual, anatomical inventiveness might draw plaudits in the changing room of a University Rugby team but might dissuade more fastidious readers from engaging further with the story.  Setting a story in the Deep South always gives an author licence to draw his villains from the Grand Guignol section of Central Casting and the varied ranks of the book’s malefactors range from the physically and morally repellent to those clothed in an ominously sinister detachment.  Briefly, to avoid issuing a spoiler alert, the plot hinges on our two protagonists’ investigation of the murder of two teenage girls whose backstories differentiate them from the prostitutes and drug addicts who constitute the rest of this file.  This takes them on a Dante-esque journey through circles of evil and the bodies pile up with the dispensing of contrapassi   The pace of the tale markedly quickens in the violent, detailed recounting of the action sequences.  Notoriously, the Ku Klux Klan wore white bed sheets to symbolise the ghosts of the Confederate dead whom they believed  rode with them and the author draws from this well of eccentric Southern spirituality as the ghost world seems to summon Robicheaux when, in  moments of danger, he feels seduced by the quasi-suicidal hallucination of a 19th century Mississippi paddle steamer complete with Southern belles and ship’s officers on deck, an audible orchestra and an insistent ship’s horn, all drawing him to submit to crossing over to a nether world.  The title The Glass Rainbow echoes two instances in the book where a character comments on the transformative effect of viewing people in light which has passed through stained glass and conceivably, by extension, how our judgement on someone can be influenced by the filter we use on the lens through which we view them.  This would apply to the spectrum of characters from the atypical murder victims to the socially prominent but deceptive villains.   

Some of Burke’s descriptive writing verges on the lyrical, inviting comparisons with Le Carré raising the spy thriller to an art form and the text is liberally sprinkled with intermittently perceptive, introspective philosophising.  This and his tendency to luxuriate in verbal and physical violence makes for an increasingly tenuous relationship with the plot lines.  It is almost as if his Muse has been transformed into a literary Frankenstein’s Monster careering round the script and inserting characters and incidents purely as vehicles to display the author’s virtuosity.  More stringent editing could have made this more than the decent read that it is, leaving this reader to ponder if Burke’s literary canon should be added to the South’s Lost Cause myth.    

A Short Treatise on Mortality, by Douglas Reid Skinner: An Appreciation by Stephen Wrigley

 

In “A Short Treatise on Mortality”, the eighth poetry collection by the South African Douglas Reid Skinner, the reader will discover many interesting, arresting, enjoyable and also challenging poems. Published by Uhlanga Press in South Africa, the collection is well presented in attractive covers where front and back are generously leafed which allows one to easily keep one’s place when reading through. The cover photo artwork of a peopled coastal scene by Revel J Fox is appropriate and to me, evocative of a South African shoreline.

44 poems feature, divided into three sections - Poetry, After and Sunday. Amongst them are a villanelle, four sonnet length poems and a small number of rhyming ones. Doug writes mainly in four line verse form, in an iambic voice and his poems rarely exceed 40 lines: regarding the latter, are modern poets influenced, I wonder, by current poetry competition line limitations, or a production acceptability by poetry magazine editors, one of whom is the author himself who edits Stanzas, a prominent SA poetry mag?

Throughout Doug writes most coherently and accessibly and is a master, it seems to me, of poetic techniques - simile, metaphor, alliteration and, as I have noticed in his earlier books, the effective use of repetition, for example here in Two Minutes where he repeats the first and last verses –

 

We tend to think about things

on the limited scale of our lives,

which are not much more than hamlets

in the wide and dark landscapes of time

 

which comes over as an early indication of the book’s tone. He also has a layout technique of presenting a poem’s last line separately, for emphasis I think, and in this book uses it eleven times: a fond habit.

Although not always commented on in poetry reviews, the titles of poems the author uses here are both effective and challenging; I had to look up Bricolages (def - something constructed or created from a diverse range of things) but it worked well for the poem. Also In The Labyrinth (about a medical condition) and Traces (ostensibly and movingly about ploughing with a horse but possibly something much deeper) are other examples of his skill in this aspect. Occasionally, unforced rhymes appear but in this mostly unrhymed verse and from a poet of Doug’s calibre, I would expect that.

In the first section, Poetry, Doug presents the reader with his take on how he handles the poetic impulse, his frustration when it proves elusive, the personal cost involved in writing; after I had read the poems here more closely, I detected (hopefully correctly) that “she” appearing from nowhere in the fifth verse of Two Minutes was/is in fact a Muse; he then refers to her more explicitly in a later poem, same section, An Epistle to T Voss in Sydney, in the seventh verse as “... the language queen.” In that poem, which I really admire, Doug compares the contents of an Australian poetry anthology to “...a great, big busy beehive,” its “...sweetness inside,”

“...the words, each ready to sting

whoever is trying to get at the honey,

each ready to die for the language queen.”

Which does include Douglas, I think.

Other poems in Poetry which I liked were The Placeholder (about a book marker!), again Traces, beautifully written and as I say, probably on two levels, ie learning to plough but also learning to write. Other poem titles accurately introduce the reader to the art of writing - Out of the Blue, Words, Uninvited and Tightrope. It’s all there, what writers experience.

The second section, After, I found to be the challenging part where many of the poems are written to or with reference to particular literary figures - CJ Driver, Elizabeth Bishop, Eugenio Montale, CP Cavafy, Pliny, Geoffrey Hill. Nothing wrong with this, of course, since no doubt they are Doug’s own reference points, but the average reader might not have sufficient knowledge to appreciate the inferences Doug wishes to make. (So go and look them up, I hear him say!) But all at

 

 Winchelsea LitSoc members should have no difficulty recognising Doug’s teasing in A Riposte of Jonty Driver where the latter’s favoured use of iambics is tellingly portrayed as, I guess, a humorous joust between old friends. “Challenging” aside, I did enjoy Ovid in the Cape (a fragment); Ovid, as readers may know, was banished by the Emperor Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea; Doug sympathetically explores that exile, and perhaps knowledgeably too, being like his friend Jonty, a white South African.

Readers may find the third section, Sunday, the most accessible.

Who Now Regards...? is a short, delightful, rhyming poem about small and humble things. The Tool explores archaeological discovery, blunt in its vocabulary - “...killed by a blow from behind.”

In On a Conversation Never Had, tears sprang to my eyes as Douglas talks, possibly, to his mother. Lovely.

Thirty-Four South, Eighteen East” to me, as an ex-mariner, is an excellent title and as the poet refers to in his Notes at the end, the geographical location of Cape Point, SA. VG.

The last poem of this balanced and thought provoking collection is Sunday. Here, at his most conversational - there are four, eight line verses each featuring a first and last line-end rhyme - Doug deploys his considerable skill in the contemplation of, as in the book’s title and first poem, mortality. Here is his skill in line repetition, used twice -

“I’d so much planned for Sunday” and “I’d been before, I knew the way”

and in so doing, talks to the reader in a quiet and intimate way, in a tone we can all relate to “...so much planned” but then he finds he “...cannot stir” and indeed, he recognises that soon he may not at all. The title of the poem is both understated and astute but Douglas ends, believing

“... I must rise into the air

towards the promised recompense,

the saviour’s hands and heaven’s glow.”

Beautiful poetry, a good example of this well compiled collection.

To conclude, it seems to me that Douglas does indeed confront mortality - the condition of being mortal - not just head on as in his first and last poems, but throughout in and by his poetic expression. We live our lives, he writes, often on a tightrope but stuff can indeed come along out of the blue. There will be time to joke with a friend or again, sadly to contemplate a banishment. If one failed to talk to someone whom we loved, then a poem perhaps can offer redemption. If the medium we use to come to terms with mortality is through verse, then there will still be a cost and a price to pay through effort, but occasionally the gift of happenstance occurs. Death came, Doug writes, long ago to early man using a tool, it nods to us in the labyrinth of life, and might even allow the respite that a drug offers. But if you are prepared as Douglas observes, and far more adroitly on the page, to pause awhile and stand in the buffeting wind, then life itself, despite our insignificance, continues and will allow us to sense what is going on; its deep and musical beat keeps on playing.

Stephen Wrigley

Jonty Driver has some copies for sale. Email him on jontydriver@hotmail.com and he'll tell you how to pay (£10 for the book, £2 for p&p)

LOOT: Britain and the Benin Bronzes talk to Winchelsea Literary Society, by Barnaby Phillips, 17 June 2022

Preconditioned by the June heatwave, former BBC West Africa hand Barnaby Phillips revisited the Lit. Soc. with another tale from that corner of the Dark Continent.  On his first visit, his account of the two forgotten West African divisions of Lieutenant-General Slim’s forgotten XIV^th Army, Another Man’s War, had been enthusiastically received.  On this occasion he was to dissect the issues around contentious imperial cultural acquisitions and the practicality and morality of their restitution in his exploration of Britain’s relationship with the Benin Bronzes. 

The Berlin Conference of 1885 effectively fired the starting pistol for European imperialism’s Scramble for Africa.    The British were stripped, spikes on, crouched on their blocks, eyes fixed on the finishing tape and determined to take first place.  Already familiar with the West African littoral from their 18^th century immersion in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, they had more recently been working their way inland along the rivers of present-day Nigeria in search of resources.  In keeping with a 300-year tradition, they set up the Royal Niger Company to co-ordinate the commercial, administrative and military arms of the enterprise.  Some independent kingdoms still survived in Nigeria’s interior and the largest of these was Benin, home of the Edo tribe and ruled by a king or Oba from the centrally located capital, Benin City.  Benin had a long historical heritage and in previous centuries Portuguese and Dutch traders had admired the extensive, sophisticated earthworks of Benin City and the impressive display of the Oba’s processions.  These kingdoms enjoyed significant agency and exported palm oil directly to Liverpool.  Like the Chinese, the former North American colonists and the Germans before them, the Edo found the allure of Britain’s commercial religion of Free Trade easily resistible.  Undeterred, the British, hearing the secret harmonies of some subliminal, imperial waltz, executed their practised dance steps – establishing a Protectorate on the Niger Coast and inducing the Oba to sign a protection treaty.  This did not protect the Oba from complaints by British traders that he was an impediment to their penetration of the interior.  Deliberating on these, the Consular Service in the Protectorate accepted “something must be done”.

The ”something” proved to be one of those quixotic, ultimately inexplicable tragedies destined to exercise colleagues and future historians indefinitely.  In the absence of the Consul General on extended leave in England, his deputy, James Phillips, a 33-year-old product of public school and Cambridge described by contemporaries as “keen”, had decided that the Oba should be removed and had written to Prime Minister Lord Salisbury telling him of his intention to do that.  In what was to transpire as a posthumous reply as far as Phillips was concerned, London vetoed his plan.  Phillips informed the Oba by letter that he was planning to visit and would be coming unarmed, before setting out with 8 other Britons and 240 native bearers.  En route, Phillips received and ignored the Oba’s reply which advised him to postpone the visit for 2 months until after Ague, a religious festival involving human sacrifice. Phillips did send the military band that was accompanying him back to base.  The mission departed by boat from Calabar on the coast, sailed up the Benin River before branching off to a tributary to Ughoton where they disembarked, intending to complete the journey with a day’s march through the jungle to Benin City.  A few hours later they were ambushed by the Edo, armed with flintlock muskets and machetes.  True to Phillips’ word,  the British were unarmed with the revolvers being carried in wooden cases by their African porters. Seven Britons and an undetermined number of porters were killed but two wounded Britons escaped to safety.

When news reached London, a punitive expedition was quickly organised, arriving in the Niger Delta on 9 February, barely 5 weeks after Phillips’s death.  After a 9-day journey through the jungle where they were subject to constant attacks, an advance guard of 540 soldiers and 840 bearers successfully breached the stockade at Benin City and the Edo fled into the bush to escape the withering fire of the British Maxim guns.  Benin City had succumbed for the first time in 1,000 years.  The victorious expeditionary force found themselves in a veritable slaughterhouse.  There were hundreds of recently decapitated native cadavers, possibly Phillips’s porters and prisoners from other tribes, sacrificed to propitiate native gods as the threat of the impending British assault loomed over the Edo.  Some unfortunates seemed to have suffered ritual execution in quasi-crucifixions while other corpses were unsolicited testimonials to the lethal rapid-fire Maxim guns.  Exploring the conquered city, the British uncovered hundreds of “bronze” plaques, ivory carvings and cast metal heads and statues which were distributed among the British officers according to seniority.  Groups posed for photos beside their loot.  The narrative of a city of blood was shaped by the arrival of Illustrated London News correspondent, Henry Seppings Wright, who in the manner of Catch 22’s entrepreneurial Milo Minderbender arrived with a section of Harrod’s Food Hall in his train. He produced a 13-page Benin supplement replete with florid descriptions of a Golgotha of skulls inviting comparison with modern humanitarian interventions.     Some of the bronzes were given to institutions like the British Museum but most were sold to private collectors and foreign museums when they reached England.  The craftsmanship of the works elicited responses ranging from scepticism to frank disbelief that these pieces could be the work of Africans and Portuguese or Arab influences were initially proposed.  It was to be several decades before Africa received due credit.  While Britain was borne along on the high tide of imperialism during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, others had growing anxieties about this cultural pillage.  The Hague Convention of 1899 prohibited it and made no distinction between civilised and uncivilised nations.  Britain was one of the 51 signatories.  These were the first faltering steps on the road to considering restitution. 

Kenneth Murray, a Balliol College drop-out and grandson of the Oxford English Dictionary’s first editor, arrived in Nigeria to teach Art in 1927 and gradually took on the role of first curator of Nigerian culture.  Officially supported by appointments as Surveyor then Director of Antiquities in the 1940s, he set up the Nigerian Museum system and busied himself with attempts to repatriate the bronzes, especially for the new National Museum in Lagos.  As the question of restitution loomed larger in the arena of cultural debate and the glow of imperial greatness dimmed, descendants of members of the 1897 punitive expedition came forward to personally restore bronzes to Nigeria while high profile returns have come from President Macron, Chancellor Merkel, Aberdeen University and Jesus College, Cambridge. Britain’s custodians of culture have temporised with the V&A’s Tristram Hunt waffling about universal museums (in London, of course).  Individual bronzes have sold at auction recently for millions of pounds. 

It must be acknowledged that Nigeria has not helped its case by allowing its state museums to drift into dereliction since independence with many items being stolen and sold on the private market.  Someone who clearly did not get the memo was 1973 head of state General Gowon, the military victor of the Biafran civil war, who presented a restored bronze to Queen Elizabeth on a state visit.  Many Nigerians accept that conservation and presentation of antiquities is expensive, demanding substantial technical and financial resources which their country lacks and reluctantly conclude that the artefacts would be better served abroad. 

Barnaby covered the historical facts and the current debate round the bronzes in a thorough, balanced manner and his audience showed their appreciation in the most tangible way by stepping up in numbers to buy the new paperback edition of his book.

William Doherty