Philobiblon

Finally I’ve finished updating the 50-odd pages of my personal website.

When I looked at many of them, and realised that I’d last touched them nearly six years ago, they haven’t done too badly in remaining more or less readable for that long. (It is really only in the last couple of months that I’ve started to get complaints.)

That’s particularly considering that I wrote the whole website on a free-on-the-front-of-computer-mag editor (Hotdog), and with Teach Yourself HTML beside me. (There was a lot of superfluous HTML in there!) And I then didn’t understand what I was doing with sub-directories or FTP, or anything else really; this was the trial and error method of web design. (Which is not to say that I really do now.)

(There’s no need, generally, to update the content, since it is primarily reports and other material that I’ve written in the past but that may still be of use to researchers now.)

Next up is my professional site, due to go live at the end of next week. (For which I’ve already done the main page design, and since it will only be half a dozen or so pages no big deal.)

Then there’s the other little semi-commercial project. Revamping the personal site has taught me one important lesson – with a significant number of pages, you REALLY don’t want to be updating the design by hand, page by page.

So while I see it more as a website – with new pages being added every day or so and an updating front page – I’m thinking about using Typepad, so a blog-type setup. Any comments on this idea – pro or con – most welcome.

… in a headline.

Today’s Guardian: Not baking, but blogging: Mimi Spencer on the new appeal of the Women’s Institute is the tag on the front page of the website. Mmm, I thought, some interesting new blogs; following the link I found the classic worthy but hardly original “the Women’s Institute is not all jam, cakes and Jerusalem” story. The only mention of technology is: “New members are being encouraged to set up workplace meetings or get together virtually, online.”

A classic example of how to annoy readers by using a buzz word that the article can’t deliver on.

A bad day for editors all around, really – the FT’s has resigned, and the Sun’s has been arrested for allegedly assaulting her husband (a soap star). (No, you couldn’t make it up.)

Surprisngly enough, the latter story hasn’t yet made it on to The Times’s website.

UPDATE: The Sun’s editor has been released without charge.

Should you happen to be at the Natural History Museum in London on Sunday, you might bump into Dorothea Bate, or at least the actress who plays her.

This is fame, or at least something like it, and a well-deserved place in the public eye for a wonderful woman, a pioneering scientist, an intrepid explorer and original thinker who, like so many women before and after her, very nearly slipped from history.

Miss Bate might well have said that her real life began on May 1, 1901, when the gently raised Englishwoman – just 20 years old – set foot on the soil of Cyprus, in the port of Larnaca. There, like all of the other passengers, she was carried ashore on the back of a porter – there were no other landing facilities.

Yet this was to be but a minor discomfort in the range of her adventures. For she was here, alone, with £2-worth of palaentological and zoological collecting equipment loaned by the Museum, inadequate finances, and the intention of exploring the previously untouched limestone caves suspected to be rich in fossils. Yet even their location was unknown. She would brave bandits, illness, unsanitary, uncomfortable accommodation and even sometimes lack of food in a singleminded pursuit of her goal.

Miss Bate had knowledge – at least of the fossils of England, and those to be found in the great collection of the Museum, which she had invaded, demanding employment at the age of just 17, without formal education, but already with burning interest. But 50 years later, when at the age of 69 she was made “Officer in Charge” of the museum’s still important annexe at Tring (having been until then, despite decades of labour, only an unofficial scientific worker paid piecework rates) she must have looked back and smiled at the enthusiasm of her young self, and wondered at her self-confidence. Certainly that’s what I felt reading Discovering Dorothea, Karolyn Shindler’s new biography.

In the years in between, Miss Bate had established a new field of study – the special processes of evolution on islands – and found and identified scores of new species, including the pygmy elephant and pygmy hippo of Cyprus that she thought (as would a more recent author) was the origin of the Greek cyclops myth.

In purely scientific terms, perhaps her most important single discovery was the curious Myotragus, the goat-like antelope she found in Majorca and Menorca. In later work in what was then Palestine, she made pioneering steps in trying to understand how changes of climate could be mapped by changes in the fossil record. On this work there are plentiful, if often technical records, in the papers retained by the Museum.

What Shindler has been able to find out about Dorothea’s life is almost entirely professional, her private papers having been being destroyed in a house fire soon after her death. (You can’t but wonder if, had she been a man, better, public, efforts would not have been made to secure them.)

One reviewer complained that as a result,the biography resembles “not so much something from the 1970s as the 1870s, in which it was assumed that a man – and it was generally a man – could be read from the sum total of his public actions”. And certainly, sometimes it feels as though the biographer is scrabbling hopelessly in a great pile of scree in search of a sign of bone.

When Miss Bate was working on Cyprus, aged 22, Jack Wodehouse, 19, a family friend joined many of her expeditions, not previously having shown any enthusiasm for biological subjects. But in the work notebooks he appears purely as a member of the expeditions. And after he left, the surviving diaries never mention him again. Shindler concludes that on this, as a couple of other similar occasions, it is simply now impossible to know what, if anything, was going on.

Yet while some might find this a weakness of the biography, I can’t but feel that this is how Miss Bate might have liked it. She was, after all, a Victorian and a late Victorian at that. And she was as singleminded about her work as her social and family obligations would allow. If she was occasionally also distracted by other personal matters, she might have been entirely happy to have that struck from the historical record.

It is an interesting question for biographers; if you come across information you know your subject would not have wanted known to posterity, what should you do with it? I’m almost glad that Shindler didn’t have to face this question. Dorothea Bate, explorer and pioneering palaentologist, will do for me.

There’s another review here.

PLEASE HELP TO SPREAD THE WORD …

Drumroll … the second Carnival of Feminists is now up on Personal Political. And a very fine job it is too.

It ranges around the world, around the issues, and around the realities of women’s lives, from acid attacks in Bangladesh, to a female basketballer “coming out” in the US, to the history of waitressing. Something for everyone.

Please check it out, and remember that the next one is in two weeks’ time. So get that killer post you’ve been planning to put together out soon!

And if you missed the first carnival, it is here.

(Carnival No 3 will be on Sour Duck – email submissions to duck.sour (at) gmail (dot) com.)

And remember to find out what is happening at any time, check out the Carnival of Feminists home page.

An American women’s magazine called Glamour has made Mukhtaran Bibi, a Pakistani rape victim who has become a campaigner for women’s safety, one of its “Women of the Year”. Of course Mukhtaran Bibi deserves to be celebrated for her bravery, but ….

If you turn this around the other way, she is being used to sell more copies of Glamour. Now possibly this is a positive publication that doesn’t urge women to spend more money than they can afford on possibly toxic cosmetics, to buy clothing made by sweated labour, and encourages women to live full, happy lives the way THEY want to live them, but somehow I doubt it.

Mukhtaran, also known as Mukhtar Mai, shot to prominence three years ago for her court testimony against neighbours who gang-raped her on the orders of a council of elders. The rape sparked international outrage and a legal saga that is now before Pakistan’s supreme court, where 13 men could face the death penalty. US media and civil rights groups have showered Mukhtaran, who is barely literate, with plaudits since she arrived from Lahore last week.

One things I love about old history books – by old I suppose roughly pre-WWII, is that they embrace anecdote with enthusiasm. Modern scholars are trained to treat them with distant suspicion, but they do really help history come alive.

So some snippets from The Growth of Stuart London, Norman G. Brett-James, London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, London 1935.

“Canon Westlake discovered that the lane that led towards the Gatehouse prison was called Thieving Lane some 35 years before the prison was built, and ‘may therefore be taken to attest the character of the inhabitants rather than the nature of the traffic”, always thought to be the origin of the name. p. 129 (This is the Rev H.F. Westlake, author of St Margaret’s 1914)

The Blair government’s drinking problems are nothing new: “An Act of Parliament of I James I, cap. 9, imposed on Churchwardens the duty of going “abroade on Sabbath Dayes according to the antient usuage … to visite the public Tiplinge houses and keep good order in ye Parish”. It was pointed out that the ‘ancient true and principall use of Innes Alehouse and Victuallinge House was for the Receipte Reliefe and Lodging of wayfaring people travellinge from place to place … and not meant for entertainment and harbouringe of lewde and idle people to spend and consume theire Money and their type in lewde and drunken manner.” (p. 133)

In the 1638-9 census of foreigners, the 838 reported in Westminster were mostly “painters, picture-drawers, lymners, engravers, musicians and silver workers”. (p. 141)

Nothing like a spot of illegal building: “In January 1664 there was a petition from the inhabitants of Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the King … to demolish ‘severale wooden houses or shedds,” which had been erected by Thomas Newton under colour of a licence to his later father William Newton. These were employed by him for ‘puppet playes, dancing on the ropes, mountebanks and other such like uses, whereby multitudes of loose disorderly people are daylie drawne together”. (p. 158) (It is still a haven for the street drinkers of London.)

Piccadily was originally “the way to Reading”. The first person building there was Robert Baker, a tailor in the Strand, in 1612. The name came from the words pickadil, pekadel, pekadivela, meaning a collar, hem or skirt – either because of his trade, or because this was the “end of town”. His widow, Mary, had trouble in 1627, because waste from the by now multiple houses was polluting the Whitehall palace water supply. She was hauled before the Star Chamber and the houses ordered demolished. She instead offered to build a conduit to carry the water, but Indigo Jones, Surveyor-General, reported on 27 Jane 1639 that the work had not been done to his satisfaction. She got a fine of £1,000 – probably not paid – and the houses weren’t pulled down; they were still standing in 1651, by then numbering 11. (pp. 180-81)

Coming up in the world: The old Devonian seadog William Burroughs, second in command to Cadiz in 1587 and a ship’s commander against the Armada the following year. “In 1589 we find him furnishing Frobisher’s fleet in the tiny docks of Ratcliffe, and in the same year he married Lady Patricia Wentworth, widow of the Lord of the Manor.” (p. 193)

Roughly where the Heal’s furniture store on Tottenham Court Road is now was Capper’s Farm, inherited by two unmarried daughters “who have left traditions of spiteful conduct behind them; one who delighted in cutting the strings of boys who were flying their kites, and the other who confiscated the clothes of boys found bathing in their ponds”. (Anyone hear the other side of this as an ASBO?)

The farm survived, behind the shops, until 1913. (Probably, I’d guess as a dairy – there was also one off Leather Lane until about the same time.) (p. 403-4)