Philobiblon

My father has spent most of his life in the building trade, so I was exposed young to its many downsides, as well as the odd upside. (The home-made plum brandy from his Greek brickies was something to taste.)

But mostly it is a harsh, unforgiving, indeed unfair, industry. Huge financial crashes take out not only the big boys, but huge swathes of their sub-contractors underneath them; hideous disabling injuries are caused not just by corporate mismanagement but also a general culture among the workers that rejects safety provisions; often horribly dangerous and polluting materials are used, and abused, with scant attention to the environment or those who will live and work in the structures.

So I was intrigued to hear about a book by John Abrams,The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community and Place, which tells the story of his South Mountain Co. Operating now for 29 years in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, he says that its aim is not so much to make money as to make good things: fine houses, suited to the people who will live in them, constructed from environmentally sound materials, by workers enjoying their work.

One example of an entirely untraditional way of doing business: the company had two relatively poor, single women who wanted it to build houses for them, but no matter how the budget was pared they could not find quite enough money. A deal was eventually struck with another client, a wealthy couple who wanted the South Mountain Co. to build a house designed by someone else, which it doesn’t normally do. So an open, agreed, bargain was struck. The wealthy couple would pay extra, with the money going to supplement the cost of the houses of the poorer women. It is a lovely image of social equity, and a great story.

So too is the account of how the firm gets much of its timber supplies: “Our salvage wood comes from many sources, including wine and beer tanks, pickle and olive barrels, whiskey barrel racks, water towers, dismantled barns and warehouses, logging leftovers, driftwood, river bottoms. The sources of supply provide interesting stories and compelling histories that give the wood a new kind of life. Our clients are taken with these stories; they become part of the soul of the houses.”

The firm is also part-owned by its staff; long-term employees being offered a stake and votes on the board of directors. Abrams describes the way this developed, and how staff came to terms with the sudden new anxieties and challenges or realising the true complexities of the business in which they had a stake. It is an interesting structure:
“The employee-owners are the board of directors of the company and they make all policy decisions. Only employees may serve on the board. Ownership is inextricably tied to employment upon termination of employment or retirement, an owner’s share must be sold back.”

Much of the minutiae of the company’s operation reminds me of some of the better workplaces in which I’ve been employed in the media. Abrams describes a quite formally organised coffee break, where workers from all levels and specialties get together and informally interact:

“It nurtures something nontrivial in our process and business culture. It is an informal declaration of mutuality and shared decision making at our core. It is a place where multiple bottom lines can mingle relax, breathe, and find their own happy medium.”

I know how valuable that can be; at a small paper that I worked on, printers, office staff and journalists were strongly encouraged – read told – to attend morning tea, and while it split into smokers and non-smokers, it did encourage understanding of each others’ problems and skills – helpful when the pressures of producing seven newspapers in five days provoked the odd explosion.

So this is a book that covers, in a gentle, anecdotal way, much of the same ground as the classical business texts of the MAKE YOUR MILLIONS THROUGH SMART MANAGEMENT! style. But as well as being considerably better written, it also offers a different image of business – you might call it the anti-Wal-Mart model.

It is a lovely image – rather close to a Utopian “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” model. It is the ideals of the 1960s working in the realities of the Noughties. And this within the capitalist frenzy of America.

It would be nice to think this is an infinitely replicable model. Unfortunately, I’m not so sure about that. Martha’s Vineyard, with its wealth and social makeup, is hardly your classic American community. Still perhaps any business owner could get some positive ideas of how to make a more humane, productive workplace from it, even one in the hurly-burly of the traditional building trade.

Books, Builders

An interesting post over on Blogcritics about Men Who’ve Had “Too Much Breast Milk” drew me into a comment that turned into a post. DeLilah writes:

Men have been coddled and protected in a skewed effort to protect their manhood and ego. I know countless men who are products of this type of rearing – a rearing where in the majority of cases, the custodial parent, dominant parent or primary disciplinarian in the household was the mother. These were strong, resilient, hard-working mothers – who often times were single-handedly raising multiple children. These mothers subconsciously reared their daughters to be clones of themselves (self-sufficient, hardworking, ambitious and determined) and simultaneously raised their sons to be more reliant and expectant than dependent.

I think she’s right about the condition, wrong about the timing and causes. I don’t think single mothers are a cause; I think this goes back at least to the early post-WWII situation, when early marriage – teens or early 20s – suddenly became the norm. (Historically a very unusual situation.)

So virtual children got married. The women were, however, forced to grow up when they had children (often _very_ soon after the marriage) because caring for babies and small children demands responsibility, attention to the needs of others, self-discipline i.e. being grown up.

The men, however, without this pressure, became “extra children” in the family, never really taking responsibility (except _sometimes_ financial, which may bear no relation to personal responsibility). This was certainly the situation I saw growing up in Australian suburbia in the Seventies – it was a standing, somewhat bitter joke among my mother’s friends that they had an extra child – who took no responsibility for anything, from the trivial e.g. picking up their own dirty socks, to the deeply serious, e.g. co-operating in caring for their children and making personal sacrifices (eg giving up watching a football game for the purpose).

They’d married as emotional or actual teenagers, and they’d never grown past that self-centred condition.

There’s a parallel in this in the extended family structures found particularly on the Sub-Continent – at least that’s the area I know something about. Male children are cossetted and protected, never forced to do chores or make any contribution to the family. Women are brought up to be much tougher, both because they are (sadly) less valued, but also because there is an awareness that when they move to their husband’s family’s house they are going to need emotional toughness, self-discipline and general life skills.

One of the theories of a thesis I wrote about the female prime ministers of South Asia (which I am really, really going to post soon), is that this prepared the women of elite families for the often (very) rough and tumble of politics much better than the men were prepared.

So a tougher upbringing is in many ways an advantage. And I think this is undoubtedly a factor in divorce rates. Women, now increasingly if still inadequately – with other economic choices before them, decide they’d be better off without the extra, unchosen “child”.

I bought my godson a goat for Christmas last year – not to run about his suburban Sydney garden, but to help a family in Africa. I hadn’t realised I was buying that year’s fashionable present, as defined by the Guardian. But having had years of exposure to the aid community, it seemed like a better bet than other forms of charitable giving. But, the Guardian is asking, is it?

Livestock restocking projects have been around since at least the famines of the 1970s and early 80s, and what quickly emerges is that successful schemes are nowhere near as simple as turning up, presenting a grateful family with a frisky goat or two and flying home again. “Two-thirds of the 2.3 billion people in the world live on less than $2 a day and most depend on livestock,” says Heffernan, who in the process of cowriting a manual of best practice studied 85 projects and interviewed representatives from more than 30 NGOs involved in restocking. She found that the road to best practice was strewn with the wreckage of misguided and/or badly run projects, but none the less, gifts of goats, cows or chickens “can have a massive positive impact if you get it right”. Getting it right involves detailed, local, committed investment of time and resources and an almost masochistic appetite for a challenge.

This is an excellent, nuanced report that gives a qualified “yes”, and stresses well the difficulties of aid, which almost inevitably brings together, in the giver and the recipient, two utterly different world views, and sets of skills, experiences and motivations. Matching those up – and seeing the gaps and bridging the misunderstandings – requires great skill and sensitivity.

“One woman says later that she’s grateful the goats came because having to feed them three times a day means she spends less time gossiping at the village well, which means she implicates her neighbours in fewer scandals, and her husband beats her less often. Instead they spend their time discussing how to look after goats and what they will do with the money.”

I bet that wasn’t in the charity’s list of aims and objectives for the project.

An emailed question from a researcher about my Diaries of a Lady of Quality reminded me that I hadn’t posted a block of my research, particularly that drawn from: Wynnstay and the Wynns: A Volume of Varieties (Put Together by the Author of the Gossiping Guide to Wales). The British Library copy has written after that in pencil “Askew Roberts”. Published in Oswestery by Woodall and Venables, 1876, it is also available in a 1998 fascimile edition.

They were a family line who seemed to have specialised in marrying well. In the 16th and 17th century, on the Williams side of the family, there is a long list of marriages to “the daughter and heiress of … ”

Sir Watkin, the fourth baronet and MP for Denbighshire, married on August 6th, 1769, Lady Henrietta Somerset, “fifth daughter of Charles, Fourth Duke of Beaufort. She died after a few months, and he married his second wife Charlotte, daughter of the Right Hon. Geo. Greville, Prime Minister of England and sister to the Marquis of Buckinghamshire on December 21, 1771.

There’s an anecdote about this: “‘How flexible are the affections of some men,’ says Mrs Delany, in recording the event. Sir Watkins Wynn is the happiest of men: and so he was not many months before with Lady Hart.”

When this Sir WW had come of age in April 1770, he had a banquet at Wynnstay said to have been attended by 15,000 guests. He was a man who liked to be centre stage. “Mr Wright in his Caricature History of the Georges records Sir WW’s appearance at Mrs Cornelly’s masquerades where he represented a Druid. In 1773, we are told in Leslie’s Life of Reynolds ‘the jolly Sir Watkin produced great effect (at a masquerade in the Pantheon) by riding in as St David, mounted on a Welsh goat.”

In 1775 he was elected member of the Dilettanti Society (which sounds about right), but he died in 1789 aged only 41, and his mother erected a memorial obelisk in Wynnstay Park.

I think it must have been his father whose address to the electors of Denbighshire was preserved in The Gentleman’s Magazine of April 1742. The gossiping Welshman says: “had he lived in our days he would doubtless have been claimed as a liberal”. His death was caused by a fall from his horse while hunting at Acton in the sumnmer of 1749.

So he wasn’t as tough as his second wife, Frances, “daughter of George Shakerley Esq”, who when a fire broke out at her family home “was saved with difficulty after clinging for some time to a water-pipe outside her window. She survived her husband many years and lived into the present century.” (So my diarist must have known her well.)

And that must be Frances Williams Wynn, my diarist’s, grandfather. It was her brother, the fifth baronet (born 1772), who liked playing at least at being a soldier. “After he came of age he raised a regiment of yeomen, gazetted in 1794 as the ‘Ancient British Fencibles’, and in 1798 assisted in quelling the memorable Irish Rebellion.”

In 1814 he established a regiment of militia “and at its head marched to France, arriving just too late for the battle of Toulouse”. But they didn’t go to Waterloo. (Still this shows why Miss Williams Wynn was so interested in Napoleon.)

But it wasn’t all war – in 1810 “when Lancastrian schools were founded”, he gave a building in Wrexham “sufficiently large enough to educate 500 poor children”, and he also founded a regular agricultural fair. In 1817 he married Lady Henrietta Antonia Clive, and “in autumn 1832 Wynnstay was honoured with a royal visit – Sir Watkin entertained his future queen.”

Then, it is with tragedy that my Miss Williams Wynn enters the picture: “In 1840 he died, driving with his sister from Wynnstay to Nat-y-belan. They were thrown out of a pony carriage and Sir Watkins Wynn was picked up insensible. Erysipelas set in and he never recovered. He was buried in Rhiaton Church and the number of persons at the funeral was estimated by newspapers of the time at 10,000.”

As I’m not reading ahead as I publish the diary, I don’t know if this will be covered by it.

My latest appearance is on the Carnival of Computing v1.0.4. (Love the numbering system). In between lots of posts about Linux, Windows, and lots of other names I don’t even recognise, there’s my review of The Gender Politics of ICT.

Hopefully, that will get the issue out into a new audience.

To visitors from there, welcome! To Andrew, thanks.

After 14 years of civil war, Liberia is having an election – cause enough for celebration, but what could be even more important is that one of the two candidates in the run-off is a woman. This is not the aspect of the story that has received most Western (or at least European) attention, since her opponent is the ex-star footballer George Weah, a man who did not complete his school education and who has no administrative or political experience.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, by contrast, is a Harvard-educated economist, who has considerable high-level UN experience and has previously been a Liberian government minister.

Women’s eNews reports that she would be Africa’s first elected female president.

Now I’m lary of suggestions that women are likely to be more competent and less corrupt than men (it is a very large claim, and assumes some fundamental gender difference I doubt is there – think of Imelda Marcos). And in the corrupt, dangerous world of Liberian politics, no one is entirely “clean”; questions have been asked about the people behind Weah, while Johnson-Sirleaf did briefly back the hideous warlord Charles Taylor.

But given Africa’s enormous governance problems, something different is surely worth a try.
Women, Africa, Liberia