Category Archives: London

Arts Books History London

Notes from Chaucer: A European Life

p. 27 In 1304 a list of aliens (foreigners) who protected about paying a tax demonstrates that they were living in only eight of the 24 wards. Vintry Ward had the most immigrants, mainly from Gascony, the hub of the wine trade. Adjoining Dowgate was the home of Hermans and people from the Low Countries; those from Spain, Italy and Povence lived in the wards of Cordwainer, Cheap and Langbourn. WHile there are certainly cases where we see Londoners closing ranks against foreigners, we can also find cases in which European immigrants were treated with notable equity. One case, centering around the nonpayment of money owed for wine, which should have been paid on a quay in the Vintry, involved a Gascon merchant and a London apprentice. It went before a jurt deliberately comprised half of Gasons, before doing to the arbitration of four members of the vintners’ guild, and the decision was in favour of the Gascon merchant.

p. 91 Deschamps, a poet whose life and career paralleled Chaucer’s closely …he wrote … on the benefits of sleeping along (he discusses how annoying it is when your co-sleeper takes all the blankets”

p. 96 A great deal of high culture crossed borders with ease: painters and ministrels travelled from court to court, beautiful objects were sold and given within trade networks and beteern allies and spouses, and educated men and women across Europe read much of the same literature and valued the same leisure occupations. At the same time, this was the century of the vernacular, when local languages flourished as the languages of literature, gaining a dominance that they were never to lose. The year 1366.. was the year of the Statutes of Kilkenny, which banned the Anglo-Irish from using the Irish language, playing Irish sports, or intermarrting with Irish women. These statutes were not effective or enforced, but they reveal English political anxiety”

p. 98 Hainault was a county in which is now northern France and Belgium, incorporating the cities of Valenciennes, Mons, Cambrai and Charleroi, an independent feudal state within the Holy Roman Empire… Chaucer numbrered many Hainuyers , including of course his wife’s family, amongst his closest associates, and he certainly read the work of Hainault poets, some of whom he knew personlly. Without Hainault, English political and cultural life in the mid-14th century would have looked very different.”

p. 100 Queen Philippa’s influence on English court culture was wide-ranging. The poets Jean de la Mote and Jean Froissart came to England in her wake. She gave her husband gifts such as a silver cup and ewer decloated with the Worthies, including Charlemagne, Arthur, Roland, oliver, Gawain and Lancelot, and a manuscript that shows evidence of the labour of both English and Hainault text workers… Philippa herself helped to found an Oxford college, and she also commissioned a startlingly unusal tomb sculpture from a Brabancon artists, Jean de Liege, who depickted her in individual and realistic form.”

p. 103 “Paon’s connections with the ruling house of Hainault allowed him to place two of his daughters, Katherine and Philippa, in the households of the queen of England and her daughters-in-law. Katherine de Roet worked for Blanche of Lancaster in the 1360s and was governess to her children by John of Gaunt; in the 137s she was to become John’s mistress, mother of the Beaufort line, and, eventually, duchess of Lancaster. We do not know how Philippa’s career started. She may or may not be the Philippa Pan who appears in Elizabeth de Burgh’s household accounts alongside the teenage Chaucer… but by 12 September 1366, Philippa de Roet had become Philippa Chaucer and is mentioned in the roal accounts as a lady of the queen’s chamber.”

p. 112 In Navarre, Jews were a proinent part of the cultural mix. They lived alongside Muslims and Christinas, in a border country in which groups including Gascons, Basques, Navarro-Aragnese, and Castileans, all mingled. Many Jews worked as moneylenders, but they also did a huge rang eof other jobs: they were silversmiths, embroiderers, vets, doctors, irrigation specialists, grape growers and mill owners. Charles II had a trusted Jewish physician nad his favourite juggler was a Jew… their oaths had full value, and if a Jew went to court, he or she took a Jewish witness and obvserver. Although they also suffered many injustices, such as heavy taxation and sometimes violence, their position was better than it was or had been in most other parts of medieval Europe.”

p. 129 In choosing to write in English, he may have been inspired by Hainuyer poets’ penning poems for the Hainault patroness, and have elected to complement this trend at the English court by writing an English poem for an English prince, about his dead English wife. It might have been a way of marking himself as part of a group of contemporary poets and yet claiming his own ground. .. He chose to write a poem that is in many ways a homage to writers such as Machaut and Froissart, a poem dependant on the forms developed by those poets, positions Chaucer as a participant in a sophisticated and cosmospolitan poetic milieu, not as a combative little Englander”

p. 158 Chaucer’s visit (1372) although we do not know exactly what Chaucer was doing in Glorence, Edward had his fingers in more than one Florentine pie at this particular historical moment. Chauver’s mission was almost certianly financial and involved negotiating with the wealthy merchant companies of the city – companies that were also fundamentally connected with the extraordinary artistic revolution that had taken place in the city earlier in the century. Chauver arrived in Florence at a time of Dante fever, when members of literary, civiv and mercantile circles were likely talking about their new plan to hobour their great vernacular poet… while there is no evidence that Boccaccio and Chaicer met, Chaucer may at this point have encountered some of his poetry, as well as that of Dante.

p. 189 The surviving doccuments tell us fragments of fascinating tales: the collectors’ accounts for 1380-81, for instance,… include payments made by “Affrikano Petro” (African Peter), who was transporting wool on John Double’s ship.”

p. 205 Three years agter he started work at the Customs House, his daughter became a nun at St Helen’s Bishopsgate, a stone’s throw from Chaucers Aldgate apartment, and Elizabeth remained there for four years … thinking about Chaucer’s daughter remins us of the diverse social networks, many of them facilitated by women, in which he was embedded in his London years.”

p. 261 There is a thingly quality to medieval money lacking from our banknotes today. Indeed, thinkers have commented on premodern culture’s different valuation of things in general. Most notably, Bruno Latour argues that the scientific revolution of the 17th century involved an intense focus on dividing subject from object, people from things and nature, as man asserted his (and it was usually his) separation from the matter hthat he tested and upon which he worked. More recently, there has been a reaction against this separation, an acknowledgement that there is a continuum between human and things, and between culture and nature. Labour argues that there are asoects of the premodern mentality that are more in tune with the enmeshing of people and things than the Enlightenment mentality tends to be. He writes about premodern people’s “obsesssive interest in thinking about the production of hybrids of Nature and Society, of things and signs, their certainty that transcendences abound, their capacity for conceiving of past and future in many ways other than progress and decadence, the manipulation of types of nonhumans.”

p. 275 Increasingly, London put on spectacles, pageants, mummings and elaborate gift-giving ceremonyies, often for courtly guests. While there had in the past been formal entries into London, these had not been accompanied by the kind of performative spectacle that now became the norm. Indeed, the last quarter of the 14th century marked the behinning of a steady increase in urban spectacle, as city oligarchies gained in power and status, and cities expressed and formed their identities through cultural display. In 1382, a summer castle was erected in Cheap (probably reused from 1377) and three virgins leaned out of it to scatter leaves; there were also ministrels, elaborated painted ornaments and accessories such as “silverskins”. .. provided work for many skilled craftsmen.”

p. 301 Parliament of Fowls … in this legalistic poem, densely packed with the technical language of law and politics. the word “eleccioun” stands out: this may be the first occasion when this word is used for the formal nomination of a political representative – its primary meaning for us today

p. 305 In the last quarter of the 14th century we see a dramtica increase in the production of ‘newsletters’, ephemeral pamplets circulated for general consumption . For the first time, newsletters were produced about parliaments’ some texts were probably produced by clerks of parliament, some pamphlets may have had their origins in the households of great nobles, who found it worth their while to circulate propoganda…. The public fascination with news – and particularly with Parliament – was a novel development.”

p. 349 IN the middle of the 1380s there were two major sex scandals at court. Elizabeth of Lancaster, Philippa’s younger sister, had been formally betrothed to John Hastings, heir to the earl of Pembroke and several years her junior. In 1385, she was about 21 and he was 13. She embarked on an affair swith Sir John Holland son of Joan of Kent and therefore older half-brother to Richard II) and became pregnant before the summer of 1386. They were hastily married… At the same time Robert de Vere, now at the height of his influence as Ruichard’ intimate friend, was involved in an affair with one of the queen’s ladies, Agnes Lancrona. De Vere was already married to PHilippa de Courcy… De Vere offered a serious insult not only to his wife but also to her uncles when he repudiated her and began lobbying for a divorce; meanwhile, he married Agnes, possibly by force.”

p. 428 “The idea of a centralized nation, with inomportant and backward margins, where power circled only around London and Westminster, would not have made sense to Chaucer. Not only were the regional courts of magnates vital and diverse economic and cultural centres, but the king himselve travelled widely.

p. 461 “This aspect of social positioning is quite different from the emphasis on gentilesse, which becomes so important in the Canterbury Tales. Across several tales, Chaucer makes the point that social orgins, age and gender nare surface attributes, and are irrelevant to true gentilesse.. one of the most significant aspects of Chaucers intellectual development in the Canterbury Tales years.

p. 487 “A poem written around 1400, London Lickpenny, vividly descibes the experience of a countryside dweller arriving in the crowds of Wstminster. The poem is structured around the refrain “For lacke of money, I may not spede”. Immediately at the doors of Westminster Hall are crowds of immigrant Flemings, trying to sell him “felt harts” and “spectacles”; at the gate are the victuallers with food and drink on offer.”

Books Early modern history Feminism History London Politics Women's history

Notes from The Many-Headed Hydra – Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic


P. 36 Sir Walter Ralegh “developed a historical interpretation of Hercules.. Helped to establish kingship, or political sovereignty, and commerce, under the dominance of a particular ethnic group, the Greeks. He served as a model for the exploration, trade, conquest and plantation of English mercantilism: indeed a cult of Hercules suffused English ruling-class culture in the 17th century.” Some Ralegh noted “apply his works historically to their own conceits”

P. 44 “An Act of Parliament of 1600 made it possible for big shareholders in the fens to suppress the common rights that stood in the way of their drainage schemes… King James organized hundred in the draining and enclosure of parts of Somerset in the early 17th century, turning a commoning economy of fishing, fowling, reed cutting, and peat digging into a capitalist economy of sheep raising…. The ‘battle of the fens’ began in 1605 between capital owners such as Lord Chief Justice Popham (“covetous and bloodie Popham”) and the fowlers, fenmen and commoners. The terms of battle ranged from murder, sabotage and village burning on the one hand to protracted litigation, pampleteering and the advanced science of hydraulics on the other.. Sporadic outbursts of opposition…. Often led by women, attacked workmen, ditches, dikes and tools in Hatfield, on the Isle of Axholme, and elsewhere in the late 1620s and 1630s.”

P. 64 “In 1607 ‘Captain Dorothy’ led 37 women wielding knives and throwing stones against the enclosures of Kirky Malzeard in the North Riding of Yorkshire… Armed women also spearheaded food riots, in 1595 seizing food corn at Wye, in 1605 marching on the Medway ports to prevent the export of grain, and in 1608 going so far as to broad grain ships in Southampton to keep their cargo from being shopped away. During the Western Rising (1629-31) women again led food riots, this time in Berkshire and Essex.”

P. 65 Thomas Edward’s Gangreana describes his “combat against the ‘three bodied Monster Geryon, and the three headed Cerberus,” and “that Hydra also, ready to rise up in their place”.

P. 72 “an extraordinary text about a woman named Francis, a “blackymore maide” who, as a member of a radical religious congregation in Bristol during the 1640s provided leadership especially to the women of the congregation. The text was written by a church elder, Edward Tertill, which means that ours cannot be a simple story.. She was black: he was white. She was a woman: he was a man. She was a sister in the congregation; he was an elder of the church.. Helps to illuminate the dynamics of race, class, and gender in the English Revolution and to show how the radical voices were ultimately silenced. The outcome of the English Revolution might have been dramatically altered: the commons might have been preserved: values other than those of market society and commodity production might have triumphed: work might not have been seen as the condition of human salvation; patriarchy in the family might not have been saved, nor the labor of women devalued; torture and terror might not have survived in the law and its practice; popular assemblies might have proliferated and become open; mutual subsistence rather than individual accumulation might have become the basis of economic activity; and divisions between master and slave might have been abolished.”

P. 82 Francis “asks a sister in the congregation to carry her message to the whole assembly, not to “loose ye glory of God in their families, neighbourhoods or places where God casts them.” She recognises that a neighbourhood may be international, a notion of shipmates, a family of oceanic passages. Francis understands community without propinquity. .. She would have known about slavery and the struggle against slavery. On May Day 1638, for instance, the first African slave rebellion in English history took place in Providence Island. From the wharves, Francis would have brought Atlantic news to her congregation.. We do not know where Francis lived before Bristol.”

P. 112 “On July 7, 1647, a Neopolitan fisherman named Masaniello led a protest by the market women, carters, porters, sailors, fishermen, weavers, silk winders, and all the other poor, or lazzaroni, of the second- or third-largest city in Europe.. Producers rural and urban discovered that the Spanish viceroy had levied a new gabelle, or tax, on the city’s fabled fruit (Goethe believed that the Neapolitans had invented lemonade)… the price of bread fell to rates consistent with a moral economy… Although it lasted only 10 days, the revolt of Naples in July 1647 marked the first time tha the proletariat of any European vity seized power and governed alone… English merchants had recently eclipsed their Italian counterparts in Levant shipping and now sent as many as 120 ships and 3,000 sailors to Naples each year, with attendant desertions and turnovers. Sailors were a major source of information about the the revolt.. In 1649 T.B. published a play entitled The Rebellion of Naples”.

P. 116 “If the Masaniello revolt and the Putney Debates of 1647 represented a high point of revolutionary possibility, the downfall began in 1649…execution of the King and ..

“The execution by firing squad of Robert Lockyer, a soldier, on April 27, originated in the grumblings of unpaid soldiers against what they called the ‘cutthroat expedition’ to Ireland, which escalated into mutiny at Bishopsgate in April … Cromwell, fearing a general rising of ‘discontented persons, servants reformadoes, beggars’ rode to Bishopsgate with Fairfax to lead the suppression of the mutiny, .. When the moment of execution came, Lockyer disdained a blindfold and appealed to his executioners, brother soldiers, to put down their guns. They refused, fire and killed him. Thousands, wearing green (the colour of the Levellers and of Thomas Rainsborough) thronged the streets of London at his funeral.”

P. 150 “The expansion of the merchant shipping industry and the Royal Navy during the third quarter of the 17th century posed an enduring dilemma for the maritime state: how to mobilize, organize, maintain and reproduce the sailoring proletariat in a situation of labor scarcity and limited state resources … one result was a fitful but protracted war among rulers, planners, merchants, captains, naval officers, sailors, and other urban workers over the value and purposes of maritime labor. Since conditions aboard ship were harsh and wages often two or three years in arrears, sailors mutinied, deserted, rioted, and altogether resister naval service… the state used violence and terror to man its ships and to man them cheaply.. For sailors, the press-gang represented slavery and death: three out of four pressed men died within two years, with only one in five of the dead expiring in battle. Those lucky enough to survive could not expect to be paid, as it was not uncommon, writes John Ehrman.. For a seaman to be owed a decade’s wages”.

P. 151 “Even though the Navigation Act of 1651 stipulated that three fourths of the crew importing English goods were to be English or Irish… English ships continued to be worked by African, Briton, quashee, Irish and American (not to mention Dutch, Portugese and lascar ) sailors. Ruskin was therefore correct in saying, “The nails that fasten together the planks of the boar’s cow are the rivets of the fellowship of the world.” .. William Petty “Whereas the Employment of other Men is confined to their own Country, that of Seamen is free to the whole world.”

P. 154 “The multilinguality and Atlantic experience common to many Africans was demonstrated by a back man in the Comoros ISlands of the Indian Ocean in 1694, who greeted pirate Captain Henry Avery, the ‘maritime Robin Hood’, in English. The man, as it happened, had lived in Bethnal Green, London.”

p. 228 [In America] “Multiracial mobs helped win numerous victories for the revolutionary movement, especially, as we have seen against impressment. .. In 1765, “Sailors, boys, and Negroes to the number of above Five Hundred” rioted against impressment in Newport, Rogode Island, and in 1767 a mob of “Whites & Blacks all arm’d” attacked Captain Jeremiah Morgan in a press riot in Norfolk… the motley crew led a broad array of people into resistance against the Stamp Act, which taxed the colonists by requiring stamps for the sale and use of various commodities… Boston’s mob took angry action agains the propoerty of stamp distributor Andrew Oliver of August 14, 1765, then 12 days later turned an even fiercer wrath against the house and refined belongings of Thomas Hutchinson, who cried out at the crowd, ‘You are so many Masaniellos!”

P. 232 “I found myself surrounded by a motley crew of wretches, with tethered farments and pallid visages,” wrote Thomas Bring as he began his imprisonment in 1782 anoard the notorious hulk Jersey, a British man-of-war serving as a prison ship in the East River of New York… Amid the hunger, thirst, rot, gore, terror, and violence, and the deaths of seven or eight thousand of their fellow inmates during the war, the prisoners organised themselves according to egalitarian, collectivist, revolutionary principles. What had once functioned as ‘articles’ among seamen and pirates now became ‘a Code of By-Laws… for their own regulation and government.” Equal before the rats, the smallpox, and the guard’s cutlass, they practiced democracy, working to distribute food and clothing fairly, to provide medical care, to bury their dead. On one ship a common sailor spoke between decks on Sundays to honor those who died ‘in vindication of the rights of Man.” A captain who looked back with surprise on the self-organization of the prisoners remarked that the seamen were “of that class.. Who are not easily controlled, and usually not the most ardent supporters of good order.” But the sailors drew on the traditions of hydrarchy as they implemented the order of the day: they governed themselves.”

P. 246 The failure of the motley crew to find a place in the new American nation forced it into broader, more creative forms of identification. One of the phrases often used to capture the unity of the age of revolution was ‘citizen of the world’. J. Philmore described himself this way, as did others, including Thomas Paine. The real citizens of the world, of course, were the sailors and slaves who instructed… the middle- and upper-class revolutionaries. This multiethnic proletariat was ‘cosmopolitan’ in the original meaning of the world. Reminded that he had been sentenced to exile, Dioegenes, the slave philosopher of antiquity, responded by saying that he sentenced his hudges to stay home… The Irshman Oliver Goldsmith published in 1762 a gentle critique of nationalism entitled Citizen of the World featuring characters such as a sailor with a wooden leg and a ragged woman ballad singer… James Howell, historian of the Masaniello Revolt, wrote in the 17th century that ‘every ground may be one’s country – for by birth each man is in this world a cosmopolitan’.

P. 250 “Blake’s ‘Satanic Mills’ were the Albion Mills, the first London steam-powered factory.. Erected in 1791, this flour mill had been burned to the ground that same year, as part of the anonymous, direct resistance to the industrial revolution.”

P. 272 “Edward and Catherine Despard reached London in the spring of 1790,… found a country where workers had embraced the cause of abolition. Seven hundred and 69 Sheffield cutlers had petition Parliament in 1789 against the efforts of the pro-slavery lobby. “The cutlery wares made by the freemen .. being sent in considerable quantities to the Coast of Africa, and dis[sed of, in part, as the price of Slaves – your Petitioners may be supposed to be prejudiced in their interests if the said trade in Slaves should be abolished. But your petitioners having always understood that the natives of Africa” – and here they would have remembered Olaudah Equano’s talks with them as he lectured on the abolition circuit- “ have the greatest aversion to foreign Salvery. Claiming to “consider the case of the nations of Africa as their own”, and putting principle before material interest, the cutlers took an unusual public stand against slavery, something no English workers had done in almost a century and a half. Joseph Mather, the poetic annalist of proletarian Sheffield, sand,

As negroes inVirginia,

In Maryland or Guinea,

Like them I must continue – 

To be both bought and sold.

While negro ships are filling

I ne’er can save one shilling,

And must, which is more killing,

A pauper die when old.”

Sheffield was a steel town, manufacturing the sickles and scythes of harvest, the scissors and razors of the export markets, and the pike, implement of the people’s war. The secretary of the workers’ organisation, the Sheffield Constitutional Society (formed in 1791), explained its purpose: “To enlighten the people, to show the people the reason, the ground of all their complaints and sudderings, when a man works for 13 or 14 hours of the day, the week through, and is not able to maintain his family; that is what I understand of it; to show the people the ground of this; why they were not able.” The Constitutional Society also declared itself against slavery, much like the London Corresponding SOciety, which.. Was founded early in 1792 is discussions of ‘having all things in common’ and committed to equality among all, whether ‘back or white, high low low, rich or poor.”

P. 292 “ In the modern era, jubilee was employed by the English revolutionaries of the 1640s, including James Nayler and the early Quakers and Gerard Winstanley and the Diggers, as a means of resisting both expropriation and slavery. It remained a living idea after the revolution, to be carried forward by John Milton, John Bunyan and James Jarrington (Ocean).. In 1782 Thomas Spence wrote “The Jubilee Hymn”… born in 1750 in Newcastle. Growing up on the waterfront as one of 19 children… young Spence joined the congregation of John Glas, a Presbyterian schismatic who followed the tenets of the primitive Christian as he understood them.. The bourgeoisie was then seeking to seel of lease 89 acres of the town common, a plan thwarted by the commoners, who pulled down the lessee’s house and drove his cattled away. Inspired by the victory, Spence in 1775 wrote a lecture that he delivered before the Newcastle Philosophical Society, wherein he proposed the abolition of private property.”

P. 302 “the Spa Field Riots in England were led by Spenceans and waged by canal diggers, porters, coal and ballast heavers, soldiers, sailors, dockworkers and factory workers. Among the leaders was Thomas Preston, a Spencean who had travelled to the West Indies”

P. 305 Lord Byron’s maiden speech in the House of Lords (on February 27, 1812, when he was 24) was on a bill providing the death penalty for Luddites: “You call these men a mob,” he said, “desperate, dangerous and ignorant, and seem to think that the only way to quiet the ‘bellua multorum capitum’ is to lop off a few of its superfluous heads.’ He reminded the peers that those heads were capable of thought. Moreover, “it is the mob that labour in your fields and serve in your houses – that man your navy, and recruit you army – that have enabled you to defy the world, and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair.”

P. 311 “By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, roughly a quarter of the Royal Navy was black, and the proportion was probably only a little smaller in both the English and American merchant shipping industries. John Jea, born in Calabar before being enslaved to a New Yorker, was himself working as a ship’s cook aboard the Isces of Liverpool when it was captured by the French in 1810. The black cook was so common as to become a stereotype in nautical fiction, reaching its apogee in Frederick Marryat’s Mr Midshipman Easy (1836). This figure, who was as important to pan-African communication in the age of sail as the sleeping-car powerer would be in the age of rail, carried the news of jubilee.”

P. 321 [Robert] “Wedderburn’s conception of the proletariat arose from the experiences of a life spent in the port cities of Kingston and London. James Kelley would write in 1838 that in Wedderburn’s native Jamaica ‘sailors and Negroes are ever on the most amicable terms.’// Everyone knew Tom Molyneux, the black American sailor and heavyweight boxing champion. Othellor was performed by African American sailors in Dartmoor Prison in 1814.”

P. 332 “The emphasis in modern labour history on the white, male, skilled, waged, nationalist, propertied artisan/citizen or industrial worker has hidden the history of the Atlantic proletariat of the 17th, 18th and early 19th century. The proletariat was not a monster, it was not a unified cultural class, and it was not a race. This class was anonymous, nameless… was self0active, creative; it was – and is – alive, it is onamove.”

P. 338 Thomas Hardy “On March 8, 1792, he wrote to the Reverend Thomas Bryant of Sheffield, ‘Hearing from Gustavus Vassa that you are a zealous friend for the Abolition of that accursed traffic denominated the Slave TRade I inferred from that that you was a friend to feedom on the broad basis of the Rights of Man for I am pretty perswaded that no Man who is an advocate from principle for liberty for a Black Man but will strenuously promote and support the rights of a White Man & vice versa.” Equiano opened for Hardy the doors to the steel and cutley workers of SHeffield. The Reverend Bryant led a congregation that would soon be labelled the ‘Tom Paine Methodists’ and many of its members were up in arms. In June 1791, 6,000 acres of land in Sheffield and its vicinity had been enclosed by an act of Parliament. The commoners, the colliers and the cutlers reacted in fury, releasing prisoners and burning a magistrate’s barn.. Jonathan Watkinson and the masters of the Culters Company calculated their compensation and decreed that 13 knives henceforth be counted to the dozen, since among the 12 ‘there might be a waste’… The people sang in protest:

The offspring of tyranny, baseness and pride,

Our rights hath invaded and almost destroyed,

May that man be banished who villainy screens:

Or sides with big W__n and his thirteens…

But justice repulsed him and set us all free,

Like bond-slaves of old in the year jubilee,

May those be transported or sent for marines

That works for the big W–n at his thirteens.”

Books Environmental politics History London

Notes from Night Trains: The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper by Andrew Martin

p. 23 “I travelled on Eurostar on the second the day of its operation. It was November 1994.  I picked up a leaflet headlined ‘What Next’ which boasted ‘In early 1997 night trains will be introduced travelling from Scotland, the North West , South Wales and the West into Paris. .. Passengers can enjoy a good night’s rest in comfortable accommodation and arrive refreshed in the morning .. The Nightstar never materialised, although they were built, with both day and night carriages -and a new service depot at Manchester sprouted a billboard reading “LE Eurostar est icic”. But the business case was killed off by the budget airlines … The trains were eventually sold to Canada… their journey south would have taken them via Stratford in east London and the only reason Stratford station was built – and the reason it is called Stratford International – was to serve these trains.”

p. 75 In 2010 another sleeper train began running between Moscow and Nice via Warsaw. The Nice Express is operated by Russian Railways, RZD: it provides the longest continuous train journey available in Europe, and runs only in summer. The second longest is also provided by RZD; from Paris Gare de l’Est to Mscow, which runs all year round, and started in 2011. Russia has a broad gaueg and both trains switch gauges at Brest.

p. 134 “ On 4 October 1883, the first Express d’Orient – as the train was known until 1891, when its name was changed to the Orient Express, in acknowledgement that the British and Americans were its main customers – departed from Gare de l’Est (or the Gare de Strasbourg, as it was then known.) This very first trip was oner a special, provisional route. It went Strasbourg-Munich-Vienna-Budapest-Bucharest, then to Girgiu on the Danube in Romania. Passengers would cross the Danube by ferry to Rustchuk in Bulgaria, where they took a train to Varna on the Black Sea … from there they would begin a 14-hou voyage to Constantinople…the journey took 81 hours and 40 minutes eastbound and 77 hours 49 minutes the other way… The rail connection between Paris and Constantinople would not be completed until 1889.

p. 153 “Speaking at the Hay Festival in 2015, Jean Seaton, official historian of the BBC, said that George Howard, who was the BBC chairman from 1980 to 1983, had claimed expenses for using a prostitute on the Orient Express. The expense form was found in a safe by a newly appointed secretary. The previous incumbent, Jean Seaton said, had suffered a nervous breakdown, and he (this was a male secretary) had deliberately left the expenses form lying about as a warning that his successor ‘would have to deal with the chairman and he had to be managed around these young women’.”p. 195 The Sud Express “The service started by Nagelmackers in 1887, running from |Calais to Lisbon via Irun in northern Spain. .. Nagelmackers also inaugurated the Nord Express from St Petersburg in 1896 with the idea of connecting it to the Sud, the fulcrum being his home town of Liege, but the through link was never forged into one train, and the Russian Revolution, and the descent of the Iron Curtain, would kill the project.

Books Feminism History London Women's history

Notes from British Boarding Houses in Interwar Women’s Literature: Alternative Domestic Spaces by Terri Mulholland

p. 3 “Women living in boarding houses are diverse characters. They are not only widows and elderly spinsters, they are also younger working women, such as T.S. Eliot’s ‘typist home at teatime’ in The Waste Land, who must make her room serve as both bedroom and living space, with her ‘food in tins’ alongside her ‘drying combinations’. They may inhabit similar rooms, but their experiences are very different. There is Miriam Henderson, a young dental secretary, in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915-67_ series, embracing her independent life and her own ‘triumphant faithful latchkey’ and Mary Datchet in Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day (1919), an active member of the women’s suffrage movement who is portrayed working with purpose in her single room. They provide a sharp contrast to the middle-aged and unnamed protagonist of Storm Jameson’s novella A Day Off (1933), who lives a precarious life of uncertainty, waiting for money from her lover to pay the rent on her bed-sitting room. Boarding house rooms and the men who pay for them are also features of Jean Rhys’s interwar novels, where her female protagonists not only occupy spaces outside the family home, they also enact roles outside the domestic ideal, merging the boundaries between the wife in the house and the prostitute on the street. There are also the women who run boarding and lodging houses, as depicted in Stella Gibbon’s novel Bassett (1934), who experience the conflicts between the home as both commercial and family space. A common theme throughout all these novels is poverty; even those in paid employment struggle to make ends meet on their meagre salaries.”

“Life for women in Britain between the two World Wars has been retrospectively defined by its contradictions: increasing independence and greater opportunities outside the home, contrasted with a dominant ideology which maintained that a woman’s place was firmly within the familial structure. Census data for England and Wales shows the number of single women over the age of 25 increased from around two million in 1911 to over two and a half million by 1931, far outnumbering the number of single men whose numbers had not even reached two million.”

p. 8 “Between 1861 and 1911 female clerical workers in London increased from 279 to 569,850. There were around five million female workers at the beginning of the century making up 29 per cent of the total workforce…. Accommodation for the professional woman included the Ladies Residential Chambers on Chenies Street (built in 1888) and York Street (built in 1892) and Sloan Gardens House (built in 1889), which was run by the Ladies’ Associated Dwellings Company. However, these … had a long waiting list. They were also relatively expensive: the Chambers ranged in price from 30 to 90 pounds per year making it too expensive for the majority of working women. Sloane Gardens House was more affordable at 10 shillings per week for an unfurnished room, compared to between 18 and 25 shillings per week in a private ladies’ boarding house. In an article in The Contemporary Review in 1900, Alice Zimmern suggested that a woman would need to earn at least one pound per week to afford around 15 shillings on board an lodging and suggests that: “The lady who earns less presents a problem for the wages rather than the housing question”.

p. 126 “Writing in 1937, the American Mary Ellen Chase observes how on early Sunday evenings the streets of Bloomsbury ‘are punctuated by Americans traversing the distance from their rooms in boarding-houses and a hundred small hotels to the nearest red pillarboxe3s to post their Sunday letters home’.

p. 128 “For those women without the money to socialise in the more affluent circles, the metropolis did not necessarily foster the supportive community of expatriates they had envisaged. The New Zealand writer Jane Mander made a frugal living as a writer and editor in interwar London nad had a wide circle of acquaintances, but her compatriot Robin Hyde did not thrive in her new environment, and her ill health, depression and lack of money led her to commit suicide in her Kensington boarding house in 1939 … As Louise Mack herself acknowledged …”There are three grades of homelessness in London – Boarding-house, Apartments, Flat. If you live in Boarding-houses you cannot be known. If you live in Apartments you can go and see your friends. If you have a flat your friends can come and see you.”

p. 130 “Nancy Wake, an Australian who became famous for her work as a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War, travelled to London in 1932 and took up residence in a ‘cheap boarding house’ on the Cromwell Road. Like many of those growing up as part of the British Empire, Wake’s initial reactions to England, and particularly London, were mediated through the representations absorbed in childhood that had become as familiar to her as actual experience .. grown up in Australia singing a rhyme about Big Ben: I am Big Ben/Hear what I say/All other clocks/Get out of my way”. The implied message of British domination in this childhood rhyme was adopted unquestioningly by wake once she was in London. London’s history ‘made Sydney look infantile in comparison’ and Wake ‘felt a little sniffy when she gazed back on the tired old life she imagined her friends and family must be living in Sydney’.

Books

Louise Mack An Australian Girl in London

Sara Jeannette Duncan An American Girl in London

Louise Closser Hale An American’s London (1920)

Books London Politics

Throw away the keys and lose the fear – no gates, no CCTV please

I was really pleased when residents in my block of flats voted recently against becoming a gated community – or at least against locking the gates we already, unfortunately, have installed. I don’t want to live in something that feels like a prison, when you have to rattle keys to get to your front door, with the gate clanging shut behind you as you walk towards it. And I think that having people around in the communal garden, a pleasant, social environment, as we have now – I regularly say hello to at least 20 of my neighbours, and know some people who use it as a walkthrough – is much better security than a lockdown that screams “something to fear here!”.

I found academic backing for that instinct in Anna Minton’s Ground Control, in which she concludes (talking here about the awful One Hyde Park in London where apparently the penthouses have bulletproof glass, iris scanners, purified air and panic rooms) “no matter how much military hardware is installed, the aim of creating a maximum security environment to make people feel safer is doomed to failure because … security is as much an emotional as a physical state”. (p. 66) (Even the attempt by owners to secure themselves against stamp duty has apparently failed.)

There’s evidence, as Minton wrote recently in the Guardian, that CCTV makes people feel less secure. I’d very much like to get rid of the one in our garden – and not just because of its recent controversy. Minto: “One of the most important studies is by criminologist Jason Ditton, who carried out a study for the Scottish Office of CCTV in Glasgow, which found that recorded crime actually increased after CCTV had been installed …. the majority of people supported its introduction and believed that it would make them feel safer, but the findings after CCTV was put in showed that there was no improvement in feelings of safety.” (p. 169)

She reports on the case of a Dutch architect brought to Liverpool astonished by public housing estates surrounded by walls and CCTV. Hans Van der Heijiden, she reports, worked for six years with local people in Fazakerley, consulting on a proposed scheme, more continental in design and relying on the presence of people for security, but the “Secured by Design” certificate was unlikely to be granted on this basis, so the scheme fell through, the architect was sacked, and a new one built a “traditional”, prison-like structure. His words on consultation are telling: “The consultation process was a big book with procedures we had to follow with boxes to tick. An enormous amount of money was spent on it – venues were rented and bus services were provided.” But their support for his scheme was ignored.
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Books London Politics

Powerful testimony on politics and architecture

I haven’t time now to provide a full account of Owen Hatherley’s A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain, which is a pity, since his unique form of exploring politics through architecture, as shown in his previous A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, is well worth time.

But I will note a strong testimony to the Green Party, and particularly Caroline Lucas, in it. in his chapter on Brighton, noting that it is the first city to elect a Green MP, Hatherley says: “It would be churlish and sectarian for anyone on the left to object to this: as a parliamentarian, Lucas has proved herself far more of a Social Democrat – hell, far more of an Opposition – than practically anyone in the Labour Party.” (p. 150)

There’s also lots of personal interest to me, both about my own political work, and more broadly as a resident of Camden.

I often cycle past the dreadful Central St Giles in Holborn – or what the marketers are trying to awfully call “Midtown”. This is Hatherley’s take: “… an atrocious botch-job, a bunch of extremely dense, stocky and inelegant blocks crammed into the site, with a grim postage stamp of public space in the middle; in order to distract attention from this act of violence, Piano decided to colour the entire thing in lurid yellows, oranges and greens”. (p. 346) Couldn’t agree more!

He also draws attention to a (sadly lost) campaign to which I devoted a lot of time and energy, including testifying to the Commons Science and Technology Committee, against the then UKCMRI (UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation), now Crick Institute, behind the British Library. He describes Somers Cross and King’s Cross as an area “undergoing severe gentrification”, noting that the Crick “was fiercely opposed by local campaigners who pointed out that the site was zoned as social housing”. (p. xxxvii) Yep – we were fiercely opposed indeed – and with it just getting out of the ground now, its full horrors have yet to be revealed.

But he’s vert positive, interestingly, about the new London headquarters of Unison, just around the corner from me. I agree with him in quite liking the office building that fronts Euston Road – it has a sense of calm, stability and permanence not found in most of the corporate, clearly temporary and cheap glass horrors being thrown up all around. And as he notes, it has “impeccable environmental credentials” – and it sounds as though, unlike another building labelled with that epithet, which it was my misfortune to briefly inhabit, the workers are enjoying the experience.
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