I interviewed Tim Flannery some 15 years ago, when he was an up-and-coming scientist with a surprising message – Australia’s sustainable population was about 4 million. (Population now 20 million.) He was a lone voice then – he’s now one of Australia’s most prominent public intellectuals. So I was reassured by this:

Dr Flannery said the world still had “one to two decades” to take action to reduce global warming, despite Professor Lovelock’s warning that billions would die by the end of the century, and civilisation as we know it would be unlikely to survive.
”It seems to be that [Professor] LoveLock’s pessimism about things is due to the pathetic political response we’ve had from the US, Australia and some of the other polluting nations,” said Dr Flannery, who is director of the South Australian Museum and author of climate book The Weather Makers.
”I respect him immensely, and I can understand Lovelock’s pessemism, but I don’t agree with it. You just have to keep up hope.”

… well sort of reassured …

For more depressing news, it seems that great English symbol, the hedgehog, is in trouble. Regent’s Park is their last London refuge (I’ve never seen one, although I walk there ever morning, but I guess they’re in the fenced-off, gorsed bits, away from all the dogs), and they are “dying out at a rate of about a fifth of the population every four years. By 2025, they will be gone.”

Sorry to be so depressing; for some light relief, look on the face of Lady Jane Grey … well, it might be.

… and, at last, someone with a platform is making a call for sanity over Britain’s paedophile panic.

In 1904, in a small, ragged parlour in a house in the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, nearly 40 years after the official abolition of slavery in America, a mismatched group of black people are struggling to find a way to survive and thrive in a white world.

Solly Two Kings (Joseph Marvell), profession dog-shit collector, looks like a buffoon, until he explains that his stick is notched 62 times, for each slave he helped guide to freedom on the Underground Railroad. He sums up the predicament these ex-slaves and younger freeborn Blacks face: “Freedom. I got it, but what is it? I still aint found out.”

Eli (Lucian Msamati), his friend and comrade, is building a wall around this house, hoping to keep its inhabitants safe, with the help of an intruder, the ironically named Citizen Barlow (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), who looks like a man with problems. He’s tried to find a decent, fair-paying job, and failed, but the weight on his shoulders is more than that.

Always in the house is Aunt Esther Tyler (Carmen Munroe), who claims to be 285 years old, and certainly is regarded, almost worshipped, as a seer and problem-solver. She’s also fervently religious – but does this really help the people she guides? Caring for her is Black Mary (Jenny Jules – who is notable for a really stunning stage presence), who has fled the “Uncle Tom” ways of her bullying brother Caesar (Patrick Robinson), who has chosen to carve out a place for himself by enforcing the white men’s law.

The play is Gem of the Ocean, the work of August Wilson, who died last year at the tragically young age of 60, and one of a cycle of ten that, decade by decade, tell the story of the black experience in America. It is the fifth of his plays to have UK premieres at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, that northwest London theatre jewel. READ MORE

Way back in July 2004, when I was a total blog neophyte, with my second-ever post I asked about a pamphlet that I’d stumbled across in the British Library:

The Confessions, Prayers, discourses and last dying sayings of Mr Edward Harrison, who was try’d and convicted and deservedly sentenced the Sixth and Ninth of this Instand April 1692, for the late unheard of Murder of Dr Clench, and accordingly Executed in Holbourn, on Friday the Fifteenth following … this Day about the Hour of Eleven, carried from Newgate to Holbourn, against Furnivals-Inn, where a Gibbet was Erected.”

I wrote then: “The execution site is about 50m from where I live, so I couldn’t help being interested, although the pamphlet reads like it was written entirely by the Ordinary of Newgate, being full of pious injunctions to friends and other young males not to follow in his footsteps. Frustrating it contains no information about him and his crimes. Does it ring any bells out there?”

This was typical of my early posts – this blog was initially going to be about snippets of historical research only – and now look at the monster ….

But anyway, would you believe it? On the Head Heeb Jonathan has just posted the whole story, and it was indeed no ordinary London murder. The victim was a distinguished member of the Royal Society, and he was lured out one night with a tale of a patient urgently needing his services …

As the coach proceeded through the city streets, the passengers twice ordered coachman John Sikes to stop and run errands, ostensibly for things that would help in the patient’s cure. When the coachman returned from the second errand, he found the mysterious gentlemen gone and Dr. Clenche motionless in his seat. In an attempt to revive him, Sikes “pull’d him, and cried, Master, Master, for I thought he had been in Drink,” but it soon became clear that the doctor was dead. …
His murderers had placed the coal against his windpipe and then fiendishly garrotted him with the handkerchief. The killers were, of course, no longer around to be questioned; both men had fled into the night, leaving passers-by with but a fleeting glimpse of their faces.

But, just like in bad novels, that handkerchief was to prove the murderer’s undoing ….

Jonathan posted this in conjunction with his plan to host the first Internet symposium on the Old Bailey online database. It contains: “The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London 1674 to 1834: A fully searchable online edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing accounts of over 100,000 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.” And the project now has funding to extend the digitisation project up to 1913.

This stupendous resource – one which I wrote a story for The Times in 2004 – certainly deserves to be highlighted and celebrated in this way.

You might not be a historian, but if you’ve read this far you’re almost certainly interested in history. This symposium is meant to be broad-ranging: maybe you’d like to do a little research for it, or maybe if you write fiction you might want to use one of its tales as a foundation, and thus participate in the symposium, which is to be on February 12?

Just picking out today’s trial, as possible inspiration (there is one case featured on the site each day):
Joseph Taylor (otherwise Cutler otherwise Turner) was sentenced to death for “having been found at large in the city of London before the expiration of the term for which he had received sentence to be transported”. You might think that a tough sentence, but there was more to it. A city centre resident testified:

“I live at the corner of the Old Jewry in the Poultry, on Sunday evening the 15th of January, I saw the prisoner and another man at my back door, I observed the prisoner endeavouring to open my door; I collared him, after some struggle he was secured and took to the Compter; there was a picklock in my door and eight or nine more found in his pocket.”

The convict himself testified that he’d been to Philadelphia, where the city authorities had put him on a ship back to Bristol. His must have been quite a life-story.

*I invented the term blogography (no, I didn’t spend hours dreaming it up), after an earlier similar cross-fertlising research development, about the Mary Lady Broughton widow and Keeper of the Gatehouse Prison. I have had accepted for publication my first-ever academic article about this phenomenon. The (online) journal was due out in the middle of last year, so I’m hoping it will be published soon …

A fascinating pamphlet from World War II America: Do you Want Your Wife to Work, from the GI Roundtable Series It is a curious melange, showing clear signs of being assembled by a committee, lurching from extremely reactionary to entirely reasonable:

But women are not made only for having babies. They have hands and brains and even in a man-made world have acquired innumerable skills. Women, therefore, have capacity for a work function similar to that of men. It would seem that the core of the “woman problem” consists of the difficulty in combining an outside job with homemaking and motherhood.

Plus ca change …

Then there’s: Can War Marriages be Made to Work, containing the remarkably sensible advice:

The “fifty-fifty” marriage, the kind in which neither husband nor wife orders the other around but in which they share equal authority and parallel responsibility, seems to have the best chance of success. There are persons who like to be bossed and others who enjoy bossing. If such individuals happen to pair off, the marriage may be a success. But in general American women are not by temperament or by training inclined to play the role of door mat in marriage any more than American men.

Reading that, I couldn’t help thinking that large parts of fundamentalist America would today find that simple statement unacceptably radical. Would it appear in an official federal publication today? I doubt it.

Found on the wonderful History Carnival No XXIII, just up on Old is the New New.

Expect to see my history blogroll augmented soon …

Another afternoon of Green canvassing, enlivened in part by the “help” of the Green Party-supporting cat. At least he accompanied me along a whole row of terraces, and often mieouwed in sympathy as I was talking into entry-phones. You might say he was just hoping someone would open the door, but I think he was a Green really.

And I found a whole street that would almost unanimously consider voting Green – there really is a groundswell out there.

The war is over; now celebrate. We’ve all seen images of what the end of a war – a real, nation-threatening war – looks like: complete strangers kissing fervently in the street, dancing in the fountains, a general state of euphoria.

Yet a war leaves scars, and covers over problems that will now re-emerge. That’s as true in the victorious Sparta as John Ford’s The Broken Heart opens, as it was in Britain in 1944, and so the staging of the play in 1940s dress in a new production at the White Bear Theatre comes to make perfect sense.

With all of its surging hormones and thwarted passions this is a play suited to a mostly young cast, yet it is still a brave project for Secret Centre Theatre to take on with a group of actors just out of drama school.

Yet this is a successful production, even a triumphant production. These grand, tragic characters (it is easy to see why the early 19th-century Romantics loved this play) are played not as archetypes, but as real humans wrestling with their problems – if often spectacularly unsuccessfully. A few of the minor characters in the cast of 17 struggle with the Caroline language, but generally it is delivered with verve and pace, carrying the audience along with it. READ MORE