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elizabeth, originally uploaded by natalieben.

This is from the front cover of The Friendly Almshouses; Elizabeth died, aged 110, in 1838.
No details are given of her life, but some other examples of the society’s many deserving cases of 1830 are.
For example: “Sarah Bunny, widow, aged 83 … a very respectable woman, who has seen better days; in her husband’s life they kept a public-house in St James’s, but giving too much credit to the soldiers, they failed; he then had a situation in the docks, but his trouble broke his spirits and his health, and he did not long survive, leaving her in poverty; she has now only 1s per week from the parish, and some sacrament money allowed her by the chaplain of the London Hospital.” (p. 16)

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DelacroixLiberty1830, originally uploaded by natalieben.

Finally! I think I’ve worked out this photo-posting business. (I found “Hello” utterly incomprehensible, but flickr seems straightforward.)
This week, Delacroix seems to provide an appropriate first image; The first time I went to the Louvre it was my favourite artwork. Now I’m older it seems a bit heavy-handed, but maybe the time to be obvious in one’s convictions is returning.

On January 20, 1802, the Friendly Female Society was instituted. It was still going strong in 1939, when, as the Friendly Almhouses, it provided homes in Brixton and Camberwell (London) for 68 women, with “a room, a small garden, the use of a kitchen, coal in winter and eight guineas a year”, and pensions of £3 to £10 a year for women living in their own homes who needed extra help.

But by 1939, already the name of the founder of this modest but no doubt to its clients greatly valued institution had already been lost. Hilda Martindale, the author of a booklet obviously designed to solicit funds for it, wrote that all which could be established was that the first committee meeting was held in Haberdashers’ Hall in Staining Lane on February 3, 1802. “A woman was in the chair and 15 were present.”

That chair must have been pretty well connected, since the first item on the agenda announced that: “The Duchess of York had graciously condescended to become the patroness.”

At the first general meeting in Chancery Lane on April 7, 1802, Dr J.H. Hunter told the gathering: You have wisely taken the management of this great concern into your own hands. You stand in no need of male assistance. You need no law to regulate your conduct but the law of mercy to the miserable and the law of kindness among yourself.” (He must have known a lot about committees with that last point.)

The organisation seems to always have been run by women, with the unusual note: “Gentlemen wishing to vote are requested to send their proxies by ladies who are subscribers.”

Only two women organisers appear by name in this short history: Mrs Lloyd, treasurer from 1814 for 20 years and Mrs Courthorpe, who held the office for more than 30 years, until her death in 1865.

Somehow you get the feeling that if this had been run by men, the names of the founders and subsequent dignitaries would have been blazoned all over its history.

There’s also, however, a remarkable pensioner, Elizabeth Love, who died in 1838 at the age of 110. (Her picture is on the cover.)

This is from one of my E-bay impulse buys – well for £1 who could resist? (H. Martindale, The Friendly Almshouses, Unwin Brothers, Bride St, 1939)

… and then I am going to try very hard to forget about it for at least 24 hours. (Tomorrow I’m going to do lots of housekeeping-type stuff, look at a possible flat to buy and then go to a seminar on women and pets 1100-1550, which I hope will be a perfect antidote.)

But, since misery loves company, I was really glad to find lots of other people at work were just as depressed as I was – although we did agree it should sell more (moderately left-wing) newspapers.

What really, really depresses me is not just the return of Bush/Cheney, but the fact that 55 million people, give or take, were imbecilic enough to vote for them.

I’m almost tempted to think that the greenhouse effect this administration will accelerate might be a good thing after all – nature can wipe out all of the Homo sapiens and have another go at producing an intelligent species.

A Leunig cartoon – from another Australian election disaster – found by Barista, pretty well sums it up.

…that’s what I feel like doing this morning. It looked so positive early on last night, but I woke with a feeling of dread this morning, and when I worked up the courage to switch on the radio that was confirmed. How can the human race, en masse, be so blind, so stupid, so gullible?
Last night I was reading Barbara Tuchman, who was quoting “President Eliot of Harvard in 1896”. She says:
“I was writing about the founding tradition of the United States as an anti-militarist, anti-imperialist nation, secure within its own shores, having nothing to do with the wicked armaments and standing armies of Europe, setting an example of unarmed strength and righteousness. … I found in a newspaper report these words of Eliot, which I have not seen quoted by anyone else: ‘The building of a navy,’ he said, ‘and the presence of a large standing army mean … the abandonment of what is characteristically American … The building of a navy and particularly of battleships, is English and French policy. It should never be ours.'”(p.35)
(Congress, however, had authorised the building of the first three American battleships in 1890.)

From B.W. Tuchman, Practicing History: Selected Essays, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1981. Ironically enough my recently purchased abebooks copy is ex-Dallas Public Library. Perhaps they should have kept it.

I stumbled across Barbara Tuchman (which undoubtedly shows my earlier ignorance) by accident in the British Library, and immediately felt that I had to buy her book of essays about how to write history.

The attraction is partly personal – she is also a journalist turned historian, although I gather her “journalism” was always distinctly at the highbrow end – but also because of her theories of how to write history for a popular audience. She’s into narrative, anecdote and above all humanity rather than theory.

e.g. “The very process of transforming a collection of personalities, dates, gun calibres, letters and speeches into a narrative eventually forces the ‘why’ to the surface. It will emerge of itself one fine day from the story of what happened. It will emerge of itself one fine day from the story of what happened. It will suddenly appear and tap one on the shoulder, but not if one chases after it first, before one knows what happened.” (p. 23)

… and one of the best apologies for history I have read:
“Why is it generally assumed that in writing, the creative process is the exclusive property of poets and novelists? I would like to suggest that the thought applied by the historian to his subject matter can be no less creative than the imagination applied by the novelist to his. And when it comes to writing as an art, is Gibbon necessarily less of an artist in words than, let us say, Dickens? Or Winston Churchill less so than William Faulkner or Sinclair Lewis?” (p. 45)

She’s also very good on the importance of an efficient filing system … something that I must personally really improve! Now I’m off to try to find notes from a recent conference that might make a newspaper piece ….