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Modern Australian architecture in the tropics - going green

October 14, 2014, 12:00 am
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This post was inspired in the first place by the Australian Govern­ment’s own history of modern resid­ent­ial architecture. They noted that architects and builders had to make new and old buildings environmentally friendly and sustainable. The OECD reported that the construction industry consumed 32% of the world's resources with the sector accounting for 12% of fresh water and 40% of total energy consumption. Architects had to account for the use of water and energy in a sustainable way in new projects.

The timing was perfect. Cyclone Tracy was a tropical cyclone that devastated the city of Darwin on Christmas Day 1974, destroying 80% of the city’s houses. Soon after, in 1978, young Adelaide archit­ects Phil Harris and Adrian Welke collaborated on the publication of "Influences in Regional Architecture", Australia's first history of architecture outside the urban arena.

In 1980 Troppo Architects started up, using a Northern Territory Government history grant to research the History of Trop­ical Housing in Australia’s Top End. Soon the practice established offices in Darwin, Towns­ville, Adelaide, Perth and Byron Bay, and has completed projects overseas as well. In every case, the focus was on landscape, climate and natural resources, especially outside urban areas.

The practice became famous due to a Low Cost House Competition org­an­ised by the City of Darwin. Their prototype had to be economical to build, climat­ic­ally comfortable to live in, easy to extend and lim­ited in its use of energy. Similar criteria have been applied ever since, in remote projects like the Kimberleys, Esperance, far-north South Australia, Alice Springs and far north Queensland.

Green Can house, Darwin
by Troppo
completed 1983
dining room (above) and veranda (below)


Troppo significantly shaped the way citizens in the Northern Territory lived by creating housing that integrated indoor living with the outdoors. Troppo looked back to the houses of the 1920s and 1930s which were a] often elevated, b] designed around the concept of a ver­anda and c] used lightweight materials. Their first house, Green Can 1983, was a roofed outdoor room! First built as part of a low-cost housing competition, the house used lightweight material like corrugated iron and was elevated to maximise cross-ventilation, making air-conditioning unnecessary. This was a radical departure from the standard Northern Territory architecture which relied on concrete structures to protect against cyclonic weather, and air-conditioning to make the heat bearable.

Troppo Architects wanted to promote a sense of place in each project via an architecture that responded to the tropical climate and a belief in sustainability. Their design projects eg Darwin Enter­tainment Centre, completed in 1986, showed a simplicity and cons­traint found in iconic early Australian wool sheds and beach houses.

Troppo houses were built on the idea of the vegetation form­ing the outside wall of the house. This cooled the house and stopped the full force of the wind. Troppo houses were surrounded by fantastic tropical gardens. The houses incorporated many environmentally sensitive strategies and tropical treatments for passive cooling and ventilation, and there was an on-site sewerage treatment system using worms as composting agent.

Not surprisingly these architects were selected by the Gagudju Community, administ­rators of the Kakadu National Park, to design park facilities in 1987. Partner Glenn Murcutt won the 2002 Pritziker Prize, seen as the Nobel Prize for archit­ects!

Bluescope gave complete descriptions of Rozak House 2002, a striking house built in steel and glass, perched on a steep ridge in rugged bushland 80 km south of Darwin. The inside out theme of Rozak House showed how to produce comfortable architecture in a hot climate AND how to create a strong affinity with the northern Australian landscape. Linked by decked walkways, two bedroom pav­il­ions leaned to, and made the most of its southern outlook. Twisted corrugated-steel roof planes projected into their surr­ound­ings, evoking stretch­ed fabric canopies.

There were no glass windows. Instead they used plywood walls, tallow-wood shutters, and corrugated iron roofing to keep the house open to fresh air, but insulated from intense heat and protected from strong cyclone winds. Wide eaves sheltered the house from the sun, and tubes along the roof expelled hot air and vertical fins directed cooling breezes into the living spaces. Because the house rests on stilts, air circulated underneath and cooled the floor. The owners did not mind a rough look, as long as the residence worked well.

Rozak House, Darwin. 2002
by Troppo

Since 2010, Troppo has been run by five partners spread out across Australia: Greg MacNamara and Lena Yali (Darwin), Geoff Clark (Townsville), Phil Harris (Adelaide), Adrian Welke (Perth) and Dan Connolly (Byron Bay). And staff.

In 2011 four of these professionals were driving to a site, preparing for a competition for a new sustainable tropical city on the mangrove forest edge of Darwin harbour. The two Darwin architects-directors of Troppo, Greg McNamara and Lena Yali, and urban landscape architect Kevin Taylor of Taylor Cullity Lethlean were killed by a huge emergency vehicle, flashing lights and sirens blaring, that was going through a red traffic light. Only Phil Harris survived the crash. What an unbelievable tragedy :(







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Kelvingrove, Glasgow and Whitney, New York - two impressive exhibitions

October 16, 2014, 12:00 am
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How Glasgow Flourished 1714-1837 was an exhibition that charted the rise of Glasgow from King George I until the start of Queen Vic­tor­ia’s reign. This was a very significant period in Glasgow’s history, a time of dramatic expansion in Glasgow’s boundaries and ambitions.​ 

Glasgow was above all a trading city. So the viewer was invited to examine how Glasgow’s businessmen made their fortunes from trading in colonial goods and through slave labour, and how they manufactured and exported products made in Glasgow, across the world. Nearly 300 years was also when ordinary Glaswegians started coming together in workers’ associations and co-ops to campaign for better working and living conditions for them and their families, thus paving the way for the Trade Union movement. Displays demanding political reform in Georgian Glasgow were an important part of this exhibition.

The 150+ images and objects from Glasgow collections showed how weaving changed from a cottage industry to a full-blown manuf­act­uring industry and green fields were covered over by some of the largest and most advanced dyeing and smelting factories in the world. Visitors could see a reconstructed weaver’s loom, factory engines and dresses and outfits. The processes of production were shown as they progressed from hand-made to mechanised industries.

Other exclusive displays included new portraits of members of one of Glasgow’s wealthiest families, the Glassfords and a newly conserved music organ made by James Watt, as well as the great man’s steam engine with its condenser unit. Of course industrialisation attracted many migrant workers from Ireland and the Highlands, thus creating severe housing problems and overcrowding in the city centre.

Family history was a recurring theme throughout the exhibition. So there were many other pieces from Glasgow Museums’ collection, including art and objects from Glaswegian families. The exhibition ended in August 2014, but an excellent app for ipads and iphones is still available.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum was opened as the Palace of Fine Arts, just in time for the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition. Perfect architecture for an exhibition about a flourishing city.



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Across the Pond in New York is the exhibition Edward Hopper and Photography which ends 19th October 2014.

As Fine Art Photography Studio asks, what if Edward Hopper (1882-1967) had used a camera rather than a paintbrush? A new exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art explores this exact question by pairing Hopper’s paintings from the museum’s permanent collection with the work of contemporary photographers.

The Whitney curators said that by reducing all elements in his composition to their essential geometries and treating light as a palpable presence, Edward Hopper imbued his images of everyday life with what the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson called an “alienated majesty.” One of two perman­ent collection displays on the Museum’s 5th floor mezzanine, Edward Hopper and Photography pairs Hopper paintings from the Whitney’s permanent collection with the work of contemporary photographers who share an interest in elevating everyday subject matter by manipul­ating light. The six photographers represented in this presentation, Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, William Eggleston, Steve Fitch, Todd Hido, and Stephen Shore, record mundane subjects but endow their photographs with emotional poignancy and mystery similar to that in Hopper’s art.

I would ask “who achieved the emotional poignancy and mystery the best – the painter or the photographers?”

Edward Hopper
Second Storey Sunlight, 1960
102 x 127 cm
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York





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British ex-servicemen fight against Fascism - at home!

October 18, 2014, 12:00 am
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In this blog I have discussed the Fascists’ activities in Britain in the 1930s, in particular their infamous battle against London’s East Enders in Cable St in 1936. And I would have expected that Fascism could not continue at home, once Britain, France and their allies declared war against Germany. Indeed most Fascist and pro-Nazi parties in Britain voluntarily closed down immediately at the outbreak of hostilities. But the government was taking no risk. Defence Regulation 18B, dated September 1939, allowed the authorities to detain without trial those believed to be working against the nation!

Yet for some reason, the Home Secretary seemed unprepared to gaol every active Fascist in the country. So Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists continued its so-called Peace Campaign activities, organising mass meetings throughout the Phoney War from Sep 1939 to Ap 1940. And Mrs Diana Mitford Mosley (and her sister Unity) met Hitler as often as possible, soon adopting the policies of the Nazi Party with warm enthusiasm.

enormous Fascist rally at Earl's Court, London 16th July 1939.
War against Germany was declared on 3rd September 1939

It was the collapse of Norway, France and the Low Countries in May 1940 that changed Britain's kid-glove handling of home-grown Fascists overnight. The Home Secretary became particularly concerned over the activities of the rabid Right Club. So in May 1940, Mosley and 747 other BU members were arrested and interned without charge. A number of Fascists were eventually moved to camps on the Isle of Man where they were housed in segregated camps, but Mosley and wife remained in Brixton prison.

Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley were released in November 1943, and spent the rest of the war under house arrest.

Graham Macklin* wanted to know what happened after Oswald Mosley was int­erned in 1940. Did his devoted followers keep the Sacred Flame of British fascism alight? Did his arrest kill off the movement? Was Mosley so humiliated after his Fascist friends in Germany lost WW2 that he never showed his face again? Yes, no and no. There was such a strong spiritual link between Mosley and his followers that gaol during the war years only made them more loyal.

Just after WW2 ended, Victoria and Alexandra Park in London and many other sites across the country were still POW camps for German soldiers. British soldiers and military nurses were flooding home, working class soldiers to bombed-out East London, Coventry, Liverpool, Bradford and Birmingham etc. Many of them had seen the horrors of Fascist regimes in Europe first hand and prayed they would never see Fascism again.

Yet Mosley had no trouble at all reforming his old party into the newly-named Union Movement. As in the 1930s, Mosley and his men whipped up a frenzy of race hatred, aimed at first against the local Jewish population and then against the local black popul­ation.

But this time there really was organised opposition to the British Fascists. Ex-servicemen, who had fought Fascism in Europe and survived, were being demobilised back in Britain by late 1945. They who had sacrificed so much were horrified to see the Fascist movement at home regrow in strength. Worse still, the police seemed to step aside and let the Fascists terrorise ordinary British citizens.

Morris Beckman's book The 43 Group: Untold Story of Their Fight Against Fascism.
first published in 1993.

In early 1946, 38 recently demobilised men and 5 women met at Maccabi House in Hampstead and founded The 43 Group. These people tracked the activities of the Fascist groups and turned up at every anti-Semitic mass rally, defended families against attacks on Jewish homes & shops, infiltrated Fascist groups and attacked the Fascists in street fighting. The 43 Group had no weapons other than knives.

Soon hundreds of non-Jewish soldiers, who had fought to bravely against the Fascist powers during the war, joined The 43 Group to fight Fascism at home. At first just in London, by 1947 they had a thousand members and opened branches in Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham. Vidal Sassoon (1928–2012), not yet famous for his hairdressing, was active in The 43 Group in his local East End of London. Working against the blackshirt thugs who marched through his neighbourhood, Sassoon was still a teenager when was stomped on in pitched battles.

Morris Beckman (born 1921) told how they would attend a Fascist rally and wait for a signal to storm the speaker’s platform. They were, after all, ex-soldiers and were used to tight discipline. Beckman estimated that two thirds of Britain's post-war Fascist rallies were closed down in chaos.

Despite being occasionally successful, especially in Dalston Hackney in 1947, Mosley’s Union Movement no longer had carte blanche to do wherever they wanted. Their defeat at the hands of The 43 Group taught Mosley that there was little prospect of success in Britain. British Fascism might not have to disappear, but it would have to change.

Macklin showed how the old nationalism of the British Union of Fascists gave way to the concept of a European Fascist super-state, a global force connecting right wing Europe and the USA. The work was based on racial values drawn from Europe’s vast, white-ruled, colonial empires. The sacred flame of the new Fascism, explained in Mosley's 1947 book The Alternative, became more involved in stopping black immigration from the old British Empire countries.

So Mosley took his message to Europe. German POWs in Britain were invited to attend British Fascist meetings; on their return to Germany, they agreed to promote Mosley’s books in translation. In June 1949, Mosley went to Spain, where his sponsor was General Franco‘s brother-in-law. Mosley’s books were then translated into Spanish. By 1950, Mosley was in Italy, as a guest of the Fascist Party there. Mosley’s endless funds and personal support were given to bolster Fascist groups in many countries. Germany, Spain and Italy!

Once the Mosley Fascists disbanded in Britain in 1950, The 43 Group disbanded as well. The soldiers were tired - years of fighting against Fascism in Europe and then 5 long years of fighting against Fascism in Britain.

Oswald Mosley decided in 1951 to leave England forever, so he moved first to Ireland and then later to France. He was very busy writing his biographical books until he died December 1980 in France aged 84. His papers are housed at the University of Birmingham Special Collections.

Why did the British government not protect its own citizens from the Fascist thugs from 1946 on? Why do we know far more about Mosley’s values than The 43 Group’s values? Have the opponents to British Fascism been air-brushed out of history? I have cited the following books in this debate and recommend reading them:

Beckman Morris The 43 Group: Untold Story of Their Fight Against Fascism, Centerprise Publications, 1993.

*Macklin, G Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism After 1945, International Library of Political Studies, 2007.

"The 43 Group" in The History Girls




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Boer War - anti German sentiment in Australia

October 21, 2014, 12:00 am
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Your Brisbane tells a sorry tale. Karl Ernst Eschenhagen (born 1850) was a baker who emigrated from Germany in the 1880s and established one of Brisbane's best hospitality businesses. He started in a George St bakery, opened branches in Edward St and Fortitude Valley and lastly opened a Queen St restaurant that could seat 500 diners.

Ernst Eschenhagen had become a famous baker, restaurateur and caterer. His surname was surmounted on the turret, was painted on both windows and was sunk in brass letters into the footpath. Anyone passing could not help but be impressed. Even the inscription "By Special Appointment to His Excellency" above the door was not a commercial boast but a statement of Vice-Regal fact; his restaurant had catered scores of Government House receptions.

Things turned nasty for Eschenhagen at the turn of the century. As a result of Australia's involvement in the Second Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa, anti-German sent­iment ran rampant, leading to a boycott of the Esch­enhagen business. Before this war started, there was no more popular and prosperous caterer to be found in Brisbane. After the Boer War, his shop was a desert. The business did slowly recover, but Ernst Esch­enhagen took his own life in 1906.

Who knows what part was played by the hatred endured during the war years. During the Second Boer War, there were certainly attacks on Germans in the press, in shops and on public transport in Great Britain, but clearly it happened in Australia as well.

Major FWR Albrecht 
ex Prussian Guard Artillery of Berlin 
leading the artillery unit of the Boer republic of the Orange Free State 
photo credit: Blankwaffen Forum

The 2nd Boer War was a major and very bloody conflict to which Britain and her colonies send 450,000 troops. The 16,500 Australian troops made up over half of the number of troops from participating British colonies. I know quite a lot about the connection between the British, the Australians and the Boers, but nothing about the relationship between the South African Boers and Germany.

By 1884 there were German Imperial colonies in Africa, for example in present day Ghana, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Namibia and Botswana. Perhaps that partially explains why, during the second Boer war, there was great German support for the Boer struggle. As The Soldier’s Burden has shown, the Boers were armed with weapons made by Mauser and Krupp. Major FWR Albrecht, the officer commanding the Orange Free State artillery, was a German army man. And note that the German Freikorps of Volunteers and officers fought on the Boer side.

There was no official monetary aid from the German govern­ment. However Boer emissaries toured Germany during the war, collecting funds for Boer soldiers and later for their widows and orphans. Pro-Boer associations met in bars and meeting halls like The Burenwirt, München. I am assuming they were raising money, as well as raising beer steins. Countless postcards were printed in Germany during the war, both to raise funds for the Boers and to make fun of the British. Many books were published during and after the war; Pro-Boer associat­ions, German volunteer combatants and novelist wanted to publish their version of history in the German language.

Boers armed with German made 1896 Mauser rifles posing behind a small mortar
photo credit: The Warfare Historian

In the latter stages of the war, the Kaiser's support waned as he recognised that alienating the British by supporting a small nation on the tip of Africa was potentially more trouble than it was worth. Nonetheless once the war ended, Boers still chose to flee to German South West Africa to avoid surrendering to the British. 

Even if we agree that German support (financial, equipment and volunteers) was vital to the Boer effort, we still have to ask vital questions:

1. How did Australian citizens, going about their daily business in Melbourne or Brisbane, know about semi-secretive German activities on behalf of the Boers? Aus­t­ralian newspaper journalists in South Africa did send back articles that mentioned German soldiers but was that enough to incite anti-German behaviour 10,000 ks away?

2. There was no shortage of Boer supporters in France, Netherlands and Belgium, so why did Australian citizens not seem to develop an antipathy towards these nations and their vast overseas colonies? The nationalistic Transvaal Irish Brigade marched into South Africa to support the Boers and to oppose the British. How did Australians react to Irish immigrants in Australia?

3. Did Australian citizens target all people with German surnames, regardless of how many decades they had been in Australia and whether they were Australian citizens or not? How widespread were the anti-German feelings spread around Australia, particularly in the large communities of German-speakers near Adelaide?

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I still wonder about the surviving Boer fighters and their ongoing relationship with Germany. Note that at the outbreak of WW1, only a decade after the Boer War ended, the Germans equipped the Burenfreikorps and supported Manie Maritz when he went into open rebellion to topple South Africa's Union Government. Even in the 1920s and 1930s there was still a strong Boer force waiting for the moment that South Africa would shake off British influence. Certain sections of Boer society were involved in Right wing organisations that were loosely copied from the Freikorps.





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Dutch pottery, tulips, British royalty and an Australian gallery

October 24, 2014, 12:00 pm
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Early in the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company really did have a vigorous trade with the East and imported beautiful and very expensive Chinese porcelain. Of course only the richest of the rich could afford the early imports.

The Dutch potters did not know about kaolin and could not create porcelain themselves. So they began to imitate Chinese porcelain with whatever technology they had, particularly after the death of the Wanli Emperor in 1620. This was when the supply from China to Europe was interrupted. Delftware was never going to be as fine as real porcelain, but the Dutch tin glazed earthenware pottery was impressive in its own right. It must have worked - by the late 17th century there were 30+ substantial pottery works in Delft alone.

Even middle class Dutch homes in the 17th century aspired to having fresh flowers on their hall stand. If they couldn't afford a constant supply of fresh flowers, they could commission a beautiful painting of fresh flowers in a pottery vase, and put the painting on their hall stand instead. Ambrosius Bosschaert paintings from the 1620s included gorgeous tulips and other flowers in proud display.

Earthenware vase from Delft, 1695
1 metre tall.
Commissioned by Queen Mary II
Acquired by the NGV in Melbourne

In any case by Feb 1637 that tulip traders could no longer find new buyers willing to pay increasingly inflated prices for the precious bulbs. As this realisation set in, the demand for tulips suddenly collapsed and prices plummeted. Tulip Mania ended but the passion for fresh flowers did not.

A tulip vase, that is a vase with spouts that could hold tulips, could actually hold any flowers in an exuberant display. Let me cite Amanada Dunsmore (Gallery Magazine May-June 2014), who is the senior curator of International Decorat­ive Arts in Melbourne’s most important state gallery, the NGV. She described a very important object, newly acquired by the NGV, as a magnificent seven piece pyramidal flower vase. One metre high, the vase was made in the 1690s at one of the famous earthenware potteries in Delft in the Dutch Republic. This is one of those factories’ most technically and artistically stunning works of art.

The vase stood on a hexagonal base moulded as a columned, classical pavilion, topped with recumbent frogs that supported the six tiers above. Each tier comprised a water reservoir adorned with six open-mouthed, animal headed spouts intended to hold a variety of cut flowers, including tulips and roses. The blue and white palette was inspired by imported Chinese porcelain, yet the decoration on this vase was a mix of European and Chinese motifs, Chinese characters and birds on rocks amid flowering plants, a common decorative motif on 17th century Chinese porcelain.

Stadtholder William of Orange and his wife Mary moved from the Netherlands to Britain and began their joint reign as King William III and Queen Mary II in February 1689.

The many amazing vase-structures reflected Queen Mary II’s great patronage of the Delft potteries and their increasingly exuberant product­ions inspired by Chinese porcelain. Queen Mary’s collection of Chin­ese-style pottery at Kensington Palace numbered almost 8,000 pieces. Her china-mania, as Daniel Defoe referred to it, fed the productions of the Delft factories and encouraged the development of pyramidal vases with spouts. They became increasingly grander in scale towards the end of the century and were commissioned by royalty and nobility all over Europe. The vases became symbols of wealth and prestige at the most elite level.

Earthenware vase from Delft, 1690
1 metre tall.
Commissioned by King William III
Royal Collection, Hampton Court

There are several points I would like to raise, not covered by the NGV description. Firstly why were the earlier 17th century tulip vases small­er and less spectacular than those from the 1680s and 1690s? Pottery skills had not advanced throughout the century and passion for pottery vases had, if anything, marginally gone down with the passing decades.

Secondly why did the nation continue to pour money into monumental flower vases, decades after the tulip sensation ended in the Netherlands? And why did the pottery makers have to wait for Queen Mary II for endless royal patronage? Earlier rulers in the newly independent Dutch Republic must have surrounded themselves with both fine art and decorative arts de jour.

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I do know that by the end of the 17th century, Delft faience became very, very popular in the Netherlands. Queen Mary was not alone. Delft potteries were also commissioned by King William III to make impressive tulip pieces to decorate the palaces of his new kingdom across the Channel. Examine (photograph above)  a large tulip vase that was made in the Delft pottery De Grieksche for the stadholder-king, as we can tell from the royal arms.

Earthenware vase from Delft, 1691
1.1 metre tall.
Commissioned by King William III
Royal Collection, Hampton Court

My personal favourite was another tulip vase with the arms of Wilhelm III, 1691. As the photograph shows, it too was made from blue painted faience, is 1.1 m high, and can be found at the Royal Collection, Hampton Court. This vase was more aesthetically pleasing because the spouts were arranged around the vase in horizontal rather in vertical bands, and because the top section resembled a beautiful crown.








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Can People Power save treasured London churches?

October 28, 2014, 12:00 am
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Two thirds of the Anglican churches in the City of London should be closed, said a 1994 commission chaired by Lord Templeman. His com­mission was one of many set up to solve the problems which arose when 36 churches served a small city region, with a permanent residential population of 7,000 and a weekday workforce of 300,000. However Lord Templeman made it clear that churches should not be demolished for lack of a congregation. He said 'the buildings are magnificent. They belong not only to the Church of England, but to the City and to the nation. It is out of the question to pull them down.'

He suggested that only 12 churches be retained in active service. The other 24 churches should be transferred to the Reserve List and could be used for libraries, for music, or for business purposes. The com­mission also proposed that the historic endowments of the City churches be redistributed among all the churches of the diocese. At present, the City Churches Fund has an annual income of 3 million pounds, of which a million is spent on the 36 churches of the City, and the remainder distributed among the 1,000 other churches of the diocese of London. In 1994 the then-Bishop of London, Dr David Hope, said he was totally committed to implementing the lively and bold Templeman report.

Coffered dome and supporting arches
St Stephen Walbrook Church
built 1672-9
by Sir Christopher Wren

Historians and architects paid particular attention to the planned moth-balling of those churches designed and built by Sir Christopher Wren. The Great Fire of 1666 had devastated the centre of London, with a loss of old St Paul's and 86 parish churches. Wren, working with commis­sioners appointed by Parliament, was responsible for rebuilding the cathedral and at least 50 of these parish churches.

I realise that not all Wren churches had survived into the current era. St Christopher-le-Stocks was demolished in the late 18th century so that the Bank of England could be located in a perfect position. (Money 1, God 0). Some were lost to Victorian parish rationalisation. Many were destroyed during WW2. But those (23?) Wren churches that remained were historically precious. The Templeman Report wanted only four of the existing churches (none by Wren) to be retained as parish churches in the City of London. Conservationists were offended.

Painted internal dome pierced by windows
St Mary's Abchurch
destroyed in the Great Fire of London of 1666
rebuilt by St Christopher Wren 1681-86

Could a public outcry save these historical churches from being used as an insurance company or school library?  Friends of Friendless Churches, a charity that saves listed, medieval churches that have been declared redundant in England and Wales, resuscitated itself and launched a vigorous campaign. Regular opening of reserved churches to visitors became possible when responsible persons started watching over them at least weekly. The National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies joined The Friends to organise the watchers serv­ice, starting with St Sepulchre Without Newgate and St Mary Alder­mary. The Friends made repair grants for bells, vestments, pews and visitors’ guides. Signatures were collected, newspaper articles were written and politicians were lobbied. SAVE Britain's Heritage, which itself champions the cause of decaying country houses, redundant churches, old mills and warehouses, town halls, railway stations and asylums, became involved. 

The affected churches also responded. St Lawrence Jewry stopped being a parish church after WW2; instead it became a guild church and the official church of the City of London Corporation. Some of the so-called redundant churches have introduced yoga classes in their spaces - exercise with some of the best ceiling views in London. Others, like St Martin’s, have started jazz nights, one further east offers sea bass and other delicacies in the crypt. One local church, the historic St Sepulchre, is enjoying operatic performances; they love La Traviata apparently. In St Andrews Holborn, the priest set up a counselling service after the financial crisis. St Ethelburga’s Church reopened with a renewed focus and vision; it is now St Ethelburga’s Centre for Peace and Reconciliation. St Andrew Under­shaft, a fine City building dating back to the eve of the Reformation, has been completely refurbished for religious services, bible study classes and an enormous hospitality mission.

St Lawrence Jewry
destroyed in the Great Fire of London of 1666
rebuilt by Christopher Wren between 1670-87.

What is the status of the Templeman Commission Report now? Has People Power finally won? Only one brief mention suggested that "the proposals were dropped following a public outcry and the consecration of a new Bishop of London".




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Art hotels in Hobart, Vancouver and New York

October 31, 2014, 12:00 pm
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Art hotels provide traditional hotel accommodation and amenities, but they also offer something special. They display an interior of creat­ive exhibits, paintings, photos and draw­ings from a particular artist or style. Some art hotels operate on a single theme, while others may have one for each floor or each particular room. Dining areas or lobbies often work as miniature art galleries in themselves and sculptures may be placed in the lobbies or in the garden. 

Whether it is to provide more attractive facilities or to attract a creative clientele appreciative of art culture, art hotels provide a key cultural site where guests can enjoy local art, music and theatrical heritage. Thus these hotels are most likely to be found in major cities with established artistic communities.

Henry Jones Art Hotel
right in the centre of Victoria Dock, Hobart

The first art hotel I ever discussed in this blog was The Hotel Chelsea in New York. The twelve storeys were converted into a hotel in 1905, perfectly located in a centre of the New York art, theatre and music world. But it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that young, creative and avant garde artists took up cheap lodgings here and experimented with modernity, sex, booze and drugs. When they were impoverished, the artists sometimes left works of art in lieu of rent; these art pieces still decorate the hotel today.

But you may not have expected an art hotel in Hobart. Settlers arrived in southern Tasmania in Feb 1804. The settlement grew rapidly, fed by convict labour, thriving whaling and sealing industries. Factories, storehouses and dwellings emerged. But in the 1830s, a severe depression hit the area hard. The whaling industry had collapsed, a new wharf had been constructed across the bay (at what is now Salamanca Place) and the Old Wharf and nearby residential areas were gripped by poverty. Only the brothels and taverns thrived.

But in 1869, businessman George Peacock moved his successful jam making business to newly acquired warehouses on Old Wharf—the best location in Hobart for exporting produce. Henry Jones was not even a teenager when he started his first day of work at George Peacock’s jam factory. After years of long working hours, Henry Jones eventually took over the business, IXL Jams, in 1895.

Over the decades Henry Jones carefully build an international industrial empire with interests in jam, fruit, timber, mining and shipping. There would not have been a kitchen in Australia that did not have IXL jams in the cupboard. As a result, Henry Jones had one of Australia’s most successful businesses. By the time of his death in 1926, he had become the first Tas­manian to be knighted, the biggest private employer in Tasmania, head of the largest private company in Australia and a global exporter of his own product.

 Henry Jones Art Hotel, Hobart
dining room (above)
lobby (below)


The Henry Jones Art Hotel in Hobart became Australia’s first dedicated art hotel when it opened in 2004, based in the old jam factory . This Hobart factory was perfect, both because of its location beside Victoria Dock, offering views of Mount Wellington and Fisherman's Wharf, and because of the amazing 19th century industrial architecture. The block of sandstone buildings that comprise the Henry Jones maintain the building's classic façade, including the Jam Company signage.

Australia's first dedicated art hotel exhibits 300 original contemporary artworks, outside and within the building. The art work, by emerging and established Tasmanian artists, is exhibited in the lobby, the lounge, Henry's Restaurant, IXL Long Bar, Jam Packed Café and bedrooms. The collection includes original paintings, prints, works on paper, photo media, sculpture and design by Tasmanian artists. Most of the artworks are recorded in a catalogue and are for sale.

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Since writing about Hobart’s art hotel, I noted that The Weekend Australian (25/10/2014) reviewed Skwachàys Lodge in Vancouver. Just opened in 2014, this boutique hotel (18 rooms) is Canada’s first Aboriginal arts hotel. Located near Vancouver’s historic Gastown, Skwachàys Lodge is a project run by an housing organisation for First Nations people living in Vancouver from anywhere in Canada. Six diverse artists collaborated with inter­ior designers on the suites e.g a Plains Cree artist from northern Saskatchewan, a Northern Tutchone from the Yukon.

All fixtures incorporate traditional cultural elements. Attention to detail can be seen in the wood-carved feature around each door, designed to resemble the entrance to a longhouse that signifies welcome.

guest bedroom at the
Skwachàys Lodge in Vancouver

There are two ways in which the artists benefit from this Vancouver art hotel. Firstly it is a social enterprise; the Urban Aboriginal Fair Trade Gallery is owned by the Vancouver Native Housing Society. Profits from the hotel and gallery provide the ongoing subsidy for 24 urban Aboriginal live/work studios. Secondly the artists are given studio space at the lodge. There they can produce carvings and other artwork that they can then be sold in the Urban Aboriginal Fair Trade Gallery on the main floor of the lodge.

For a review of some of the world’s other art hotels in Copenhagen, Toronto, Berlin or San Francisco, see The Guardian Newspaper. Perhaps the most unusual is a Victorian hotel in Devon that has its own contemporary art gallery and a 10-acre sculpture park, displaying over 300 sculptures.



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Too many babies, grinding poverty, arsenic poisoning and a hanging in Sydney

November 3, 2014, 11:00 pm
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In the book Last Woman Hanged, Caroline Overington exhaustively researched the case of Louisa Andrews Collins. She was a 41-year-old working-class mother of 10 children who was tried for murder four times and was the last woman to be hanged in NSW. The book, published by Harper Collins, will become available this month. In the meantime, all my material comes from the Sydney Morning Herald, the ABC and Launched into Eternity.

Louisa was born in 1847 in NSW to an ex-convict father and a free-settler mother. She was the second child in a large family and when she reached 14 years of age, she became a domestic servant to a solicitor. She was pretty, dark-haired and plump, and wanted to have some fun. But her parents couldn’t afford to keep her, so married she had to be. Husband Charles Andrews was a boring, old widower.

Wedding day for Louisa and her second husband Michael Collins, 1887

The couple settled down to domestic un-bliss and fun-loving Louisa spent her time being pregnant, delivering and nursing a LOT of children. When the economy fell over, they moved to slum-ridden Botany, in Sydney's south. The rows of workers' cottages were too small for the large families and they had no running water. But they went there because colony's large wool-washing and packing industry was based in Botany. Charles was happy to find work in a wool shed. 

With an ever-growing family and not enough money, the Andrews family had to take 4-6 boarders into their small cottage. Exhausted Louisa found the cycle of loveless domestic drudgery to be grinding, so she liked to drink, and she liked to dance. Alc­ohol abuse was rife. Husbands would also drink and then their fists would fly. 

Neighbourhood thought that Louisa liked the male boarders rather too much, with her favourite being Michael Collins, a handsome and much younger man who worked for the wool sheds, carting the dirty sheepskins across the city to be washed for sale. They became lovers. Her husband found out and threw Collins out of his home, with police assistance. But Louisa kept seeing her young lover, and her children were not adequately cared for.

In 1887 Charles suddenly developed stomach pains, vomiting and diarr­hoea. Louisa wanted to get her husband’s will quickly drawn up and sign­ed, since his estate included a hefty life insurance policy. He died within a week and Louisa immediately caught a tram to Sydney to inform the insur­ance company and the bank.

Locals were not surprised that Collins took up with the very young, very sexy Michael Collins soon after the death of her first husband. The couple partied and danced, and married within three months of Charles Andrews' funeral, with the bride a little bit pregnant. She was in her 40s yet she had to go through another pregnancy - her 10th! 

Alas the new husband fell ill within months of that marriage, displaying the same symptoms as the first husband. But this time, Louisa adored her husband and nursed him with medicine and love. When he too died, an autopsy found the cause of death to be arsenic poisoning. Was Louisa Collins guilty of poisoning her two husbands with arsenic?

Collins was immediately charged with murder. The so-called Borgia of Botany, as the newspapers called her, remained in gaol for two years, through four trials. The first two times she was tried for the murder of Michael Collins, the third time for the mur­der of Charles Andrews, and finally, for the murder of Charles again. Ms Overington discovered all the evidence against Collins was circumstantial, leading the first three juries to return no verdict.

Darlinghurst court house where Louisa was tried, 1887-1889.

Sydney was suffering a rat plague in the 1880s, which meant increas­ing sales for the poison Rough On Rats. Plus evidence was supplied which showed both husbands had excessive contact with arsenic in their jobs as sheepskin tanners.

The Crown went after Louisa relentlessly. The case was not only tried in front of four juries, but the Sydney papers covered the trials in lurid detail. The Premier Sir Henry Parkes led the noisy argument for Collins' hanging on the floor of the NSW Parliam­ent. The letters pages of the Sydney Morning Herald were full of opinions about Louisa. And the women of NSW were mobilising. Petitions and letter-writing campaigns were launched on Louisa's behalf; so were marches in the streets. This was raw C19th colonial history in action.. its gender politics and social conditions!

There was only circumstantial evidence in all the cases, about which the first three juries were underwhelmed. So why did the fourth jury fail her? Overington believes that the colony's male establishment felt threatened. There had been a number of poisoning deaths, and the auth­orities were very concerned because women's position in colonial society was bleak. Most working class women could not get a divorce, and if they managed it, they lost their children. They didn’t have the vote and they received no police protection for marital rape or brutality.

But nothing helped and, having maintained her innocence throughout the four trials, Louisa Collins was brutally hanged in January 1889. The youngest of Louisa’s children were taken into an orphanage where they were lost to the rest of the family.

Women’s marching had not saved Louisa, but it did help energise and focus the women’s movement. Because human rights had to be extended to women in the colony urgently, the Suffragettes started organising themselves soon after her final trial.

The author's important questions: Was Louisa Col­lins a victim of the colony’s political pressure, men's fear and women's push for greater equality? Was she was a drunken slattern who killed consecutive husbands by cruel arsenic poisoning? Was she the wronged mother of 10 children, a victim of a male-run system that conferred on women none of its rights but all of its responsibilities? Was she the inspiration for the colony's embryonic suffragette movement?







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The vexed relationship between Hollywood film companies and Nazi Germany

November 7, 2014, 11:00 am
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In writing about Ben Urwand’s important book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Harvard UP 2013), Taylor Downing agreed that Hitler enjoyed watching films. As we can see from the photo. he watched a film every night after dinner with his men. And in the USA, Hollywood saw Germany as one of its biggest export markets. There was money to be made from dist­rib­uting films there.

It is here that we start Ben Ur­wand’s study of Hollywood’s relationship with Nazi Germany.

Control of the film industry was a central part of Hitler’s and Goebbels’ plan for propaganda in the Third Reich. Article 15 of a law regulating film imports made it clear that Berlin could censor American films or ban foreign film companies from working in Germany, if they produced a film that was offensive to German sensibilities. This gave the Nazi consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, considerable influence. His job was to vet, cut, change or veto if necessary, any film coming out of Hollywood that might be detrimental to German prestige. Apparently this was whether the films were to be shown only in Germany or shown internationally. 

Instead of kicking Gyssling out, Hollywood went out of its way to work with him. Urwand chronicles several occasions in which he was listened to intently. In fact some projects did not happen because of fear of his disapproval. A Paramount film about the sinking of the Lusitania was dropped. A more aggressively anti-Hitler film called The Mad Dog of Europe was scrapped because of fears that it would harm US business interests in Germany. When American films were banned in Germany, such as The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933) because it starred the Jewish actor Max Baer, the studios continued to do business with Germany.

After Kristallnacht, Goebbels produced a blacklist of 60 Hollywood figures whose work would not be allowed in Germany. The studios simply removed their credits from German versions and continued to distribute there up to the time when America entered the war. 

Ben Urwand's book, The Collaboration

The Hollywood studios agreed not to attack the Nazis AND they decided not to defend the Jews when changes were made. In The Life of Emile Zola (1937), for example, references to Alfred Dreyfus being a Jew were removed. Although The Mortal Storm (1940) finally dealt with the Nazi persecution of a minority group, all references to the fact that they were Jews were cut from the final version.

The whole story of how Hollywood made an accommodation with Nazi anti Semitism seems even more bizarre because many of the studio bosses were themselves Jewish immigrants.

So this is a story about German censorship and the more frequent, sin­is­ter self-censorship by Hollywood. The notorious Hays Office put pres­s­ure on studio chiefs like Louis B. Mayer of MGM not to make certain films such as the anti-fascist It Can’t Happen Here, to avoid offend­ing the German government. The word used at the time to des­cribe the relationship between Hollywood film studios and Nazi Germany was "collaboration". By calling his book The Collaboration and implying that Hollywood collaborated with Hitler, Urwand has certainly created a storm in America.

Downing said Urwand’s book was well researched but was rather rambling, repetitious and made some strange statements eg it was daft for Urwand to say that Hitler controlled the German news reel industry, simply because the regime made a few corrections of newsreel scripts. And there was no mention of March of Time, which consistently warned cinema aud­ien­ces of the evils of the Nazi state. Still,  the story should be read by anyone interested in going behind the glamour of 1930s cinema, to study the shady politics of Hollywood.

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I believe Urwand's writing is important because the Hollywood film executives could have stood up Breen and Gyssling, had they been prepared to risk their businesses. And they could have helped their own film-makers show honestly what was happening in Germany and in the occupied countries. Alas they did not. Three studios, Fox, Paramount and MGM, maintained a resolute commitment to the German market. Only Warner Brothers and Universal could hold their heads up with pride. Eventually.

Goebbels ordered Germans to disrupt screenings of All Quiet on the Western Front
photo credit: Daily Mail

I want to pursue two key issues that Taylor Downing mentioned. The word collaborate meant, in Nazi-run countries, locat­ing Jews or resistance fighters in hiding and handing them over to the Nazis for extermination. If Urwand was referring to normal business trans­act­ions (eg writing contracts, negotiating fees, agreeing on foreign language subtitles) between the Hollywood film studios and their markets abroad, that behaviour was VERY far from collaboration. Certainly the Jewish film makers knew, or should have known, that Dachau Concentration Camp opened in 1933 and that Jewish businesses and synagogues were destroyed in Germany during Krist­allnacht in 1938. But that they collaborated with the regime that would wipe out 6 million of their co-religionists was a implication that needed to be corrected by Ben Urwand.

The second is an issue raised by American academics, discussing an era of American history that is not at all familiar to me. Widespread anti-Semitism in the USA, right wing politics and strict censorship laws meant that film writers, directors and producers had very little freedom in their decision-making. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, headed by the above-mentioned and very fearsome Will H Hays, was created way back in the 1920s to ensure all new films would be acceptable to the religious right. The Production Code Administration, headed by Joseph I Breen was even worse. In the 1930s, motion pictures possessed no First Amendment rights.

And if thinly veiled or explicit anti-Semitism was going to be directed at any single industry in the USA, it was going to be most directed at the media and entertainment industry. Ben Urwand’s Hollywood should have been analysed within this very difficult historical context in the USA. 

Urwand's book has become a very controversial area for debate. I recommend interested readers should read these blog discussions:
"Hollywood and Hitler" in Sheldon Kirshner's Journal
"Hitler in Hollywood" in Tweedland, The Gentlemen's Club.
"Hollywood’s Creepy Love Affair With Adolf Hitler" in Tablet.




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Otto Dix and the catastrophic World War One.

November 10, 2014, 11:00 pm
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In July 2014 the Albertinum in Dresden had an exhibition called Otto Dix. The War. The Dresden Triptych. Note the date - the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of war.

Prior to 1914, Expressionism in art was largely apolitical. Artists might have seen themselves as aesthetic progressives but they had no allegiance to a broader social re­volution, beyond feeling a general disdain for The Philistine Bourge­ois­ie. If the early Expres­sion­ists banded together in groups at all, it was only to protect their creative autonomy against an often hostile majority, and not because they shared a strong political belief.

When Germany entered WWI, many of the Expressionists yearned for a more modern, democratic Germany. They did not despise France and Brit­ain, so why did many of them voluntarily enlist in Germany’s armed forces? In the months leading up to the war, young men were exposed to an idealistic recruit­ment mess­age that had been combined with patriotic fervour. Germany was not the aggressor, these messages said, but rather an av­eng­ing angel. 

The artists’ own writings suggested two reasons why educated, thinking young men would go into the army. Many of the artists seemed to have believed that the Great War would actually be the starting point from which many long-overdue changes to their country's social structure would occur. Secondly the artists may have been anxious to experience the affects of war first hand, believing that it would greatly influence their artistic sensitivit­ies. Both motivations turned out to be wrong, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Dix, The Match Seller, 1920
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

When WW1 started, Otto Dix (1891-1969) had not yet been conscripted; he act­ual­ly volunteered to fight and was sent to join a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In 1915 he was ass­igned as a non-commissioned officer of a machine-gun unit in the Western front and took part of the Battle of the Somme. He was badly wounded three times but it wasn’t until 1917 that his unit returned from the Eastern front in the war against Russia. Then Dix was sent back to the western front where he earned the Iron Cross.

In his foreword to a 1919 art exhibition catalogue, Will Grohmann int­roduced Dix’s five paintings: Leda, Pregnant Women, Moon Women, Resurrection of the Flesh and Prometheus. All ugly and threatening.

Dix was profoundly affected by the sights of the war, and later de­scribed a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through hell. Through his art, he returned to the desolated landscape of military trenches strewn with mutilated bodies, brutalised by mechanised warfare. The dead were distorted by decomposition and hidden in gas masks & steel helmets. 

He continued painting well after the war, looking at the surviving soldiers as they tried to integrate back into civilian society. The Match Seller 1920 was a pitiful and mutilated ex-serviceman who had to earn a living, despite losing his limbs and vision in war. His deformities were so visible that normal German civilians ran away from the sight as fast as they could. Only the dog did not flee in horror.

Der Krieg 1924 was a series of  50 etched prints, presumably modelled on Goya’s The Disasters of War series. They were starkly realistic, mundane and horror-filled at the same time. Supporters of Dix believed this body of work was essential viewing and so the series became one of the most powerful indictments of war ever conceived.



Two etched prints from the Der Krieg series, 1924.
Dead sentry in the trench (left)
Stormtroops advancing under gas attack (right)

Dix’s monumental triptych The War (1929-33) is owned by the Galerie Neue Meister in the Albertinum. As one of the most eminent works in which Dix explored the horrors of WW1, it was the star of this exhib­ition. The catalogue reiterated that the uncompromising depictions of wound­ed and dead soldiers were etched into our collective visual mem­ory. The fact that German young men were our enemies was irrelevant – a dead 18 year old lad lying in the mud was some mother’s son, regardless of which side he fought for.

It took Dix four years to complete the four panels in the triptych, a structure that looks at first glance like a church altarpiece. Nothing was left to the imagination. The triptych depicted intol­er­able levels of morb­idity with putrefied flesh, worms and gangrene; the dead and wounded men were no longer human beings.

Perhaps Dix was already reflecting the nationalism that was surging in the increasingly tense political atmosphere of the Weimar Republic during the Depression years. His critics certainly hated what they perceived as his anti-German, hypercritical views of WW1 and the post-war society.

Dix was only one of the artists who depicted the emotional drama and psych­ological intensity of war. Consider George Grosz who volunteered for military service in 1914, in the hope that as a volunteer and not a conscript, he would not be sent to the front. After the war Grosz was accused of insulting the army with his art and was severely punished. Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Conrad Felixmüller, Lovis Corinth, Franz Marc and others also became soldier-artists.

Painted after Ernst Kirchner’s nervous breakdown, Self Portrait as a Soldier 1915 (Oberlin College Ohio) was a small, harrow­ing image that showed a wounded soldier. But this was not just any old soldier with any old wound. This was an artist-soldier who found his painting hand had been blown off by a mortar. I can think of no better way for an artist to express his own pain and loss. Like Dix, Ernst Kirchner clearly had very dist­urbing visions in his head.

Dix, The War triptych, 1929-33
Central panel: width 204 cm x height 204 cm. 
Side panels: width 102 cm x height 204 cm each
Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden

For an amazing collection of paintings by soldier-artists in World War One, see the blog Weimar. Another very useful analysis can be found in the blog My Daily Art Display.



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Chagall Vs Malevich in Vitebsk

November 14, 2014, 11:00 am
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Directed by Alexander Mitta, a film dramatisation of Marc Chagall’s life is being shown at the Australian Centre for Moving Images in Melbourne. The film Chagall-Malevich is based on the era of Chagall's short-lived role as commissar of arts in Vitebsk in 1917-18. During this time he founded the Academy of Modern Art and heard about his contemporary and stylistic oppos­ite, Kazimir Malevich. So it is approp­riate that many art works by Chagall and Malevich were used in creating the film.

But what was the real connection between the two geniuses who both found themselves in Vitebsk after the Revolution?

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) grew up near the Russian city of Kiev, now in the Ukraine. He spent most of his Catholic childhood in agricultural settlements far from centres of culture. At school he knew nothing of professional art, although peasant art had surrounded him in all its genres. It was only by moving north that he, in his mid 20s, could study at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1904-1910.

Malevich had never visited Europe at this stage of his life. In 1915, he founded Suprematism, a new form of Russian art. Suprem­at­ism was an abstract art that was based on “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” rather than on visual depiction of objects. It privileged basic geometric forms and strong colours.

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) grew up near the Russian city of Vitebsk, now in Belarus. His Jewish parents ran small businesses and didn’t have any money, but he was surrounded by books, Chassidic practices and a passion for education. In 1906, he started art briefly at the Vitebsk studio of realist artist Yehuda Pen. There Chagall met other students who later became famous, El Lissitzky and Ossip Zadkine. Then he moved to St Petersburg, the country's centre of artistic life with its famous art schools; Chagall enrolled in one of them and studied there for two years.

Chagall,
Over the Town, 1918
45 x 56 cm
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Chagall lived and worked in Paris from 1911-14. He was influenced by French art and was in close contact with the Paris-based Russian Jewish artists, including his old friends Ossip Zadkine and El Lissitzky, and new friends Chaim Soutine, Pinchus Kremegne and Michel Kikoine. They spoke Russian and Yiddish to each other, and learned French in Paris' coffee shops.

Chagall returned to Russia when WWI broke out, remaining there until 1922. During this period, his home city of Vitebsk directed his life and work. It was there in July 1915 that he married local woman Bella Rosenfeld and they went on to have a daughter. Vitebsk became a fav­our­ite subject for Chagall, as can be seen now in Mos­c­ow’s Pushkin Museum and in the National Russian Museum St Petersburg. He never let go of figurative art, but the elements of cubism were visible in his paintings.

Many Chagall paintings created in Vitebsk were exhibited in April 1916 at the Artistic Bureau in St Petersburg, followed by an exhib­ition in Moscow called Works from the Series Executed in Russia (Vitebsk 1914–1915). Malevich presented many works at the same exhib­ition, called Suprematism of Painting. Although they were close in age, language and career choice, Chagall and Malevich had probably never met before. If anyone was close to Malevich, it was actually El Lissitzky who viewed Malevich as his Suprematism mentor.

In 1918 Chagall was made the Commissar of Plastic Arts for Vitebsk, a position aimed at developing the city’s artistic life, especially urban design. His mandate was to organise art schools, museums, exhibitions and lectures on the visual arts in the entire Province. His first project was the Vitebsk People’s Art College, founded in late 1918. The next year was spent setting up community studios for the product­ion of paintings, sculptures, signs and posters.

The former Russian Empire had abruptly ended, as had its cultural organisations. So Chagall planned to follow the modern model of the Free Studios that had been recently created in St Petersburg and Moscow.

The Vitebsk People’s Art College had teachers from every art move­ment, from the realism of Yehuda Pen (who had trained Chagall and Lissitzky back in 1906), to the Suprematism of recently arrived Malevich. Chagall was organising teachers for applied arts, painting, art history, sculpture and graphic arts. The programme included theoretical study of contemporary art methods; design of applied arts: wallpaper, embroidery, bookbinding, wood painting; and practical courses.

Nearly 200 students enrolled at the People’s Art College and changed Vitebsk from a provincial backwater. Thanks to the October Revolut­ion, revolutionary art was doing very well. Chagall clearly thought of himself as a leftist artist of the avant-garde.

Malevich
Suprematism, 1916-7
32 x 32 in
Krasnodar Museum of Art, on the Black Sea

The peaceful coexistence of the various art trends could be seen in the early photographs where all of the teachers stood side by side, as well as in the formal agreements signed by Chagall and Malevich. In April 1920, Chagall informed art critics that there were young people around Malevich and around himself. Both of them were mak­ing their way to the circle of leftist art, albeit in different ways.

Alas it didn't last. Several times an unhappy Chagall thought of leaving Vitebsk because of bureaucratic harassment and short­ages. But he was happy with the First National Exhib­ition of Paintings by Local and Moscow Artists. The 41 artists included leading avant-garde players: Chagall of course plus Kandinsky, Malevich and Rodchenko.

The young Vitebsk artists became attracted to Malevich’s total com­mitment and his seductive, prophetic speeches. These artists turned away from Chagall and towards the UNOVIS/Champions of New Art, created early in 1920. By May 1920, all of Chag­all’s students had moved to Malevich’s studio, the newly formed School of Contemporary Art.

Chagall officially resigned in June, and was soon in Moscow producing stage sets and costumes for Yiddish plays by Sholem Aleichem at the Jewish Chamber Theatre. For the rest of his long life, Chagall never returned to his beloved Vitebsk.











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Remembering Ruhleben prisoner of war camp, Berlin 1914-8

November 17, 2014, 11:00 pm
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Of course prisoners of war and interned civilians are going to try to keep themselves busy and productive, throughout the years of their captivity. Otherwise they would go insane from mind­-numbing boredom, even before they had the chance to die from starvation or disease.

In 1940 the British government rounded up 75,000 German, Aust­rian and Italian aliens across the UK. Within 6 months, war time tribunals across the country had individually summoned and examined 64,000 aliens, including c1,000 teenage lads. Some of these men were in the armed forces and arrested while on parade. They were taken first to police cells, and then to prison, usually on the Isle of Man.

The German-speakers of Onchan camp (Isle of Man)  were a scholarly lot. There were 121 artists & writers, 113 scientists & teach­ers, 68 lawyers, 67 engineers, 38 physicians, 22 post-grad­uate scientists, 19 clerics & 12 dentists. Theor­etical physicist Walter Kohn, who later won the Nobel Prize in Chem­istry, and expressionist artist Kurt Schwitters, were interned guests of His Maj­es­ty’s govern­ment. As were Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, Lord Weidenfeld, Sir Ch­arles Forte, Prof Geoffrey Elton and RW Tiny Rowland. At the other end of the social scale, but just as important to the British economy, were 103 agricultural work­ers. This was not your usual police round up of uneducated, unemployed louts.

Detainees were subject to dehumanising treatment from officials, but discussions between the prisoners was tolerated and the opportunity for education and entertain­ment emerged. Each Isle of Man camp had its own youth group, organising its own debating society and music sessions. A camp university was led by refug­ee academics who arr­anged lectures and English classes. Every evening hundreds of internees, each carrying his chair to one of the lectures, pursued knowledge and kept depression at bay. Eventually the internees could take part in local farm work, run their own camp newspapers, and set up internal businesses and run an inter-camp football league. Life in the Isle of Man camps took on a productive and quite scholarly air.

But I had not heard of a similar story in WW1!! .In Nov 1914, an order was issued for all British civilian men in Germany to be arrested and taken to an old racetrack in Berlin. 5,000 men, tourists and workers from Britain and the Empire, ended up in what became known as the Ruhleben  internment camp.

In Ruhleben prison camp near Berlin, internees built a Little Britain
1914-1918
photo credit: BBC News Magazine

The internees slept in the old racing stables, often on straw, with no blankets and barbaric latrines. The first winter was miserable, and internees did die of disease or starvation. But since there were 26,000 German nationals interned in Britain in WW1, the Germans HAD to improve conditions for their British prisoners who were civilians, not prisoners of war. There were still 200 German guards but they stayed on the perimeter, allowing the prisoners a measure of home rule. New barracks were built and rations increased. And a proper community had to develop.

Each barracks established a committee because, to stave off boredom, the interned men needed to be useful. Chess clubs and debating societies were formed, then an orchestra and a theatre. Plays by Ibsen, Shakespeare, Shaw, Sheridan and Wilde were performed and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were enjoyed. There were also workshops that taught bookbinding, watch-­making and engraving, a lending library established. There were organised sports, including boxing, cricket and league football teams.

A gift of seeds from the Crown Prince of Sweden in mid 1915 seems to have suggested the idea of gardening. Then in late 1916, a letter was posted to the Royal Horticultural Soc­iety’s offices in London. It announced the creation of the “Ruhleben Horticultural Society”, and asked for bulbs and seeds to be sent to Berlin.

But it was not until 1917 that the British internees asked to expand the central part of the racecourse as a large vegetable garden. That year, with help from London's Royal Horticultural Soc­iety, there was also a series of hortic­ultural lectures and exhibitions, with “prizes” awarded for vegetab­les and gardens. Pests were a big problem at first, manure was not available and the soil was quickly transformed into mud. But the men built frames and greenhouse. Eventually the camp was almost self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables. By 1918, there was almost no food left in Germany so the quality of diet inside the prison fence was probably higher than outside.

organised sport at Ruhleben prison camp 
1914-1918
photo credit: Harvard Law Library

If you can believe it, the British class system reasserted itself inside Ruhleben. Public schoolboys quickly set up exclusive clubs, and even paid other internees to act as formally dressed drink waiters. Hanging around with merchant seamen for four years meant that the habit of swearing spread to the middle-class internees, so they needed a period of “quarantine” before returning home post-war.

During and after WW1, the Ruhleben camp was famous in both Britain and Germany. After the Armistice a number of books were published about the internees’ experience at Ruhleben. But as the full horror of the trenches became clearer, the camp was quickly forgotten. Ruhleben might have been beset by bestial conditions, but it was an idyll compared to what was happening at Ypres or the Somme.

Running until Jan 2015, The Gardens and War exhibition is presenting the Ruhleben story in London. The goal of the show is to display the British at their most resourceful, despite horrible war time conditions. This was story of British ingenuity and practical­ity, via pumpkins and onions. 

The story is also told in A History of Ruhleben, written by Joseph Powell and Francis Henry Gribble (published by Nabu Press, 2010). And in “The Other RHS” by Mark Griffiths, published in Country Life 6th August 2014.







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Daphne du Maurier's Cornwall

November 21, 2014, 11:00 am
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I have cited Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989) twice in recent blog posts. Firstly du Maurier was the cousin of the Llewelyn Davies boys, who served as JM Barrie's inspiration for the characters in the play Peter Pan. Secondly Justine Picardie is the author of four books, including the book on the Ritz Hotel that I reviewed; her most recent novel was about Daphne du Maurier.

Now I want to concentrate on Daphne du Maurier in her own landscape. She was born in London to an artistic, theatrical and literary family. I have no doubt that her close family members helped her in estab­lish­ing her literary career, but if she had stayed in London for the rest of her life, her novels and plays would have looked very different.

Of her c25 novels, short story collections and plays written between 1930 and 1980, I have only read a handful Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938) and My Cousin Rachel (1951) so I will be particularly influenced by Jessica Tooze’s analysis of the books I have NOT read .

Ferryside, Fowey
bought by the du Maurier family in 1926

It is said about many authors that their ability to recreate a sense of place is an important part of their writing. Nowhere is that more meaningful than in Du Maurier’s writing where places were as important as people; her places could be considered characters in their own right.

Du Maurier was a young woman of 19 when she visited Cornwall for the first time and fell in love with the sea, boats, cliffs, harbours, inns and cottages. She learned to sail and fish with the best of them! And except for a few invol­un­t­ary moves (eg during war time), she never wanted to live anywhere else. She died in 1989, in Cornwall.

Set in an area of natural maritime beauty, Du Maurier settled in the town of Fowey (called Foy) which lies along the estuary fac­ing a deep water harbour. The old town has old Geor­gian and Victorian buildings, but it was a cliff side cottage that captured her attention. Promptly named Ferryside in 1926, the cottage was her centre of peace and magic as she wandered around the Cornish countryside.

I have seen Menabilly i.e Manderley from Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca. The grey stone Georgian mansion hidden behind trees was memorable, but it was the long track down to the sea through “tumbled woods, trailing ivy and tangled undergrowth” that captured her imag­ination! The track was indeed dark, but hardly menacing.

Boats on the River Fowey

Perhaps the menacing aspect came from Du Maurier’s knowledge about ship­wrecks along the coast. Or from her knowledge of smuggling. One day she was riding on Bodmin Moor near Fowey and lost in a thick fog, she came across the Jamaica Inn Temperance Hotel. This hotel had been a stop for stage and mail coaches en route to London. Her novel Jamaica Inn (1936) captured the forbidding bleakness of the moor, allegedly one of the most haunted places for smugglers and travellers in the entire country.

Du Maurier's novels were never really Romances since there were few happy endings. And critics have suggested that even her own brand of Romanticism sat incongruously with her books’ moodiness and sinister overtones.

In her short stor­ies, she wrote even less romantically! In fact she used horror as the main theme eg The Birds, Don't Look Now, The Apple Tree and The Blue Lenses.

Sometimes the stories were set in the same geographic area, but in different centuries. The King's General (1946), for example, was set in the two English Civil Wars. The novel Mary Anne (1954) was the story of her great-great-grandmother Mary Anne Clarke; from 1803-1808, Mary Anne had been the mistress of Frederick Aug­us­tus Duke of York, a son of King George III. The Glass-Blowers (1963) traced the du Maurier family’s very real French ancestry. The book gave a colourful description of the French Revolution, before the family moved from France to England.

My Cousin Rachel is full of recognisable Cornwall. Today visitors are invited to go on a My Cousin Rachel Walk that tours the Barton land near Fowey and explores the region, just as the characters in the book did. The long walk affords amazing coastal views, the farmyards, Tregaminion Chapel, Menabilly, Polridmouth and St Catherine's Castle.

the old coaching house, Jamaica Inn

Needless to say, Fowey has thanked its most famous resident at the town’s Literary Centre. Visitors can examine the small exhibition and the film about Daphne du Maurier’s life, and come to their own conclusions about how her novels were shaped by this part of Cornwall.







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Gifts to soldiers in the WW1 trenches, from the royal family

November 24, 2014, 11:00 pm
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Princess Mary  (1897–1965), Princess Royal and later Countess of Harewood, was the third child and only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary, and granddaughter of King Edward VII.

The Sailors and Soldiers Christmas Fund was inaugurated by 17 year old Princess Mary in October 1914 to pro­vide a gift to every service­man, soon after the Great War broke out. The idea was the initiative of Princess Mary herself, so she organised a public appeal which raised the funds to ensure that every sailor afloat and every sold­ier at the front received a Christ­­mas present. Due to the strong pub­lic support for the gift, which saw £163,000 raised, the eligib­ility for the gift was widened to include every person wearing the King's uniform on Christmas Day 1914.

The majority of gifts were for smok­ers and comprised an ornate embos­sed brass box containing tob­acco, cigarettes, a pipe and lighter, Christmas card and a photograph of Prin­cess Mary. For non-smokers writing paper and a silvered pencil were provided. For Indian troops sweets and spices were given instead of, or as well as cigarettes. 

Soldier receiving his gift from Princess Mary
Photo credit: Daily Mail

After Christmas 1914 a surplus of funds enabled the scheme to be extended. A simpler gift was given out to all other servicemen, con­sisting of a pencil in a cartridge case, cigarettes, tobacco and New Year card. In total 426,000 of these tins were eventually distributed to members of the British, Colonial and Indian Armed Forces in late 1914 or early 1915. And as the number of grieving parents, widows and orphans went up. it was decided that widows and bereaved parents should also be included as legitimate recipients.

I imagine the lads, lonely scared and away from home for the first time, found great comfort from the small luxury goods. I also think receiving a thank you photo of a young, lovely princess would have meant more to the soldiers than a photo of an elderly, grumpy looking king.

In total, there were some 2.6 million service people in the British, Colonial and Indian forces, and 2.5 million gift boxes were event­ually made. But not all gifts reached their intended recipients as soon as they hoped. Perhaps this was because the Cunard ocean liner RMS Lusitania was sunk in May 1915, losing large quantities of brass.

The Museum of Victoria’s Princess Mary box was made of brass (37 mm in height and 125 mm wide) with a hinged lid. The lid had embossed decoration: in the centre Princess Mary's head was in profile, surrounded by a wreath and the letter M twice. In each corner of the lid was the name of a British ally; the top horizontal edge of the lid was decorated with a bayonet and scabbard; along bottom edge a plaque bearing Christmas 1914 with the bow of a Dreadnought each side; each vertical edge was adorned with three crossed flags with a disc in front bearing France and Russia.

Brass box. The two packages (tobacco and cigarettes) fitted into the tin with just enough room for the pencil in between.
photo credit: Imperial War Museum 

The card read “With best wishes for a Happy Christmas and a vict­or­ious New Year, from the Princess Mary and friends at home”. When the card had been read and the cigarettes consumed, servicemen in the front lines could then used the tins to carry other small items that were precious to them.

Throughout the 4.5 years of the Great War, young Princess Mary visited hospitals and welfare organisations with her mother, assist­ing with projects to give comfort to British servicemen and help to their families. Her public duties reflected her particular concerns i.e nursing, the Girl Guide movement and the Land Girls. She married in 1922.

**

I imagine that by October 1914, the British Empire armies still thought the war would be over by Christmas. But losses quickly mounted; more than 10,000 were killed, missing or wounded within a month of war breaking out. When Christmas 1914 came and went, thoughts turned towards winter in the trenches. A roaring trade soon developed in gifts for men at the Front, ranging from Fortnum’s hampers (from one to five guineas) and six-shilling silver lighters, a practical present for active service, to simple handkerchiefs, socks and food parcels.


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Viennese refuge Richard Goldner and Musica Viva Australia

November 28, 2014, 11:00 am
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Richard Goldner (1908-1991) moved with his family to Vienna as an infant where he quickly learned to play the violin. After leaving school, he studied architecture at university. But he also  enrolled at the New Vienna Conservatory, where he studied under the Russian viola player Simon Pullman. Did his parents realise what he was doing, at least before Richard received a diploma from the Academy of Music?

Of all the classes, Goldner most enjoyed master classes from Polish violinist Bronisław Huberman. Goldner played the viola in the Simon Pullman Ensemble from 1931-8, and became Pullman's closest colleague. Pullman was later exterminated by the Nazis.

Goldner and his brother were extremely lucky to escape the Nazi camps, arriving in Australia shortly AFTER the start of WW2 in 1939. I say lucky because, despite being designated an “enemy alien” in Australia, Goldner thrived.

Chamber music is instrumental music played by a small ensemble, with each player responsible for his own distinct and equally important part. And no conductor. Distressed to discover chamber music was non-existent in Sydney, he soon became involved in musical life in his new city and founded the Monomeeth String Quartet. But as far back as 1929 the Musicians’ Union of Australia had introduced a ban on membership for non-British musicians. The Union thus excluded all pre− and post−war refugee musicians, displaced persons and other non-British immigrants from membership until they had achieved naturalisation; this would occur after the regulatory five−year residence period. The embargo lasted until the mid−1950s, the exact years when post-WW2 migrants were being encouraged to migrate to Australia.

Because the Australian Musicians Union's restrictions, Goldner could not take up an offer of a posit­ion with an Australian Broadcasting Commission orchestra. So instead he worked as a jeweller with his brother, opening a shop in the Strand Arcade in Sydney.

In 1945 he founded Richard Goldner's Sydney Musica Viva. The group’s first concert was held at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music in Sydney in December 1945, to an appreciative audience. During Goldner's concert there was a power blackout, but the music continued without missing a note, especially for Beethoven’s Great Fugue, which they played in honour of his Viennese teacher (Simon Pullman).

The first Musica Viva chamber music ensemble, Dec 1945.
L to R: Richard Goldner, Eddie Cockman, Robert Pikler and Theo Salzman. 
Photo credit: Max Dupain in the Sydney Morning Herald

The success of the concert inspired Goldner to form an organisation for the promotion of chamber music in all its forms. In this he was supported by Hephzibah Menuhin who had moved to Australia in 1938 and assisted by a fellow refugee named Walter Dullo, a German businessman and musicologist. Together, Goldner and Dullo discovered 17 musicians (mostly central European refugees, and mostly Jewish) and formed them into separate chamber groups under the name Musica Viva in 1945. Dullo also became vice-president of the Sydney Mozart Society and correspondent of the Mozarteum at Salzburg, Austria.

The initial funding for Musica Viva came from Goldner himself. They developed an ambitious schedule throughout Australia and New Zealand, giving 170 concerts and travelling 80,000 ks a year. Al­though they were always financially successful, this schedule became exhausting. This, plus the fact that Goldner had injured his left hand, led to Goldner retiring from playing in 1952, and the group was disbanded. Fortunately it re-formed in 1954.

Goldner had always wanted to teach violin and viola, and to conduct young people's orchestras. In the early 1950s, the Director of the NSW Conservatorium approached him about teaching there, but Goldner was far too busy with Musica Viva's playing schedule at that time. He was again approached in the early 1960s, this time by the new Direct­or, Sir Bernard Heinze, and he was now in a position to accept. He lectured in violin and viola.

In 1966 he spent time in the USA with his former pupil Charmian Gadd. They taught at Pittsburgh and Washington State, married in 1970 when Goldner was 62, and returned to Australia in 1981.

Richard Goldner collected one of the most extensive chamber music libraries in Aus­tralia, which he donated to the NSW Conservatorium. He died in Sydney in 1991, aged 83.

Despite the Musicians’ Union of Australia's nastiness, Goldner was one of the refugees from Nazi-dominated central Europe whose arrival in Aus­t­ralia made a huge difference to our artistic development. In 2011, the Oscar-winning film maker Suzanne Baker published Beet­hoven and the Zipper: The Astonishing Story of Musica Viva. Many thanks to the Musica Viva blog.

CD for the chamber music of Irish composer Sir Herbert Hamilton Harty
performed by Australia’s Goldner String Quartet and pianist Piers Lane
2012

The Goldner String Quartet has widespread and long-standing recognition for excellence, as Australia’s pre-eminent string quartet and as an ensemble of international significance, favourably compared with the best in the world. Launched for the 1995 season at the Wigmore Hall in London, and still retaining all four founding members, the players are all well known to Australian and international audiences through solo performances and recordings. All members have occupied principal positions in organisations such as the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Australian Chamber Orchestra.

As seen in the 2012 CD cover, Goldner's name still lives on in the String Quartet's performances and publications, decades after he passed away (in 1991).



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The Grand Budapest Hotel - film review

December 1, 2014, 11:00 pm
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First let me cite a glowing review that seems to represent the typical published response to Grand Budapest Hotel .  My own response, as you will see, was very different.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote: This delirious operetta-farce is an eerily detailed and very funny work from the savant virtuoso of American indie cinema, Wes Anderson. It is set in the fading grandeur of a preposterous luxury hotel in an equally preposterous pre-war central European country, the fictional Zubrowka. This kind of milieu – the hotel spa or sanatorium occupied by mysterious invalids, chancers or impoverished White Russians – was loved by Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov.

Ralph Fiennes is on glorious form as Monsieur Gustave, the legendary concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel in the early 1930s: a gigantic edifice in the mountains. It's a cross between Nicolae Ceausescu's presidential palace in Bucharest and the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick's The Shining. It is a superb cathedral of eccentricity, with a gorgeous dining hall the size of a football field, a gasp-inducing canyon of a lobby area, with corridors and rooms encircling an exquisitely ornate galleried central space.

Gustave is energetic and exacting, taking a passionate pride in the high standards of his establishment and ruling the staff with a rod of iron. Like them, he is kitted out in a Ruritanian purple livery which matches the hotel's decor. Gustave affects an air of genial worldliness and deferential intimacy with the hotel's grander clientele, and despite the quasi-military correctness of his bearing in dealing with his subordinates, Gustave can also lapse into high-camp familiarity with the guests. Fiennes is absolutely brilliant.

Gustave decides to mentor the hotel's vulnerable lobby boy, orphan immigrant Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori). It is to Zero that Gustave reveals the engine that drives his hotel's wellbeing: his ready, enthusiastic appetite for servicing the intimate needs of thousands of aristocratic old ladies who come back every year.

Guests are greeted at the hotel's reception desk, 1932.
Gustave H in the centre and Zero on the right 

Gustave's greatest amour is the ancient and cantankerous Madame D, played by Tilda Swinton with wrinkly prosthetics and strange pale-blue contacts. The infatuated Madame D infuriates her sinister son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) by leaving Gustave, in her will, a priceless Renaissance portrait belonging to her family. Gustave is thus to face the family's fanatical attempts to disinherit this counter jumper, involving her butler, Serge (Mathieu Amalric) and Zero's courageous fiancee, Agatha (Saoirse Ronan), who works in the local Viennese-style patisserie. And there are numerous other cameos for all Anderson's repertory players.

As ever, Anderson's world is created like the most magnificent full-scale doll's house; his incredible locations, interiors and old-fashioned matte-painting backdrops sometimes give the film a look of a magic-lantern display or an illustrated plate from a book.

Alexandre Desplat's score keeps the picture moving at an exhilarating canter, and the script, co-written by Anderson and his longtime collaborator Hugo Guinness is an intelligent treat. Watching this is like taking the waters in Zubrowka. A deeply pleasurable immersion.


A more balanced review was Carljoe Javier's in GMA News who wrote those familiar with Wes Anderson are familiar with his distinct visual aesthetic - striking colour palettes, formalistically disciplined framing and a clear sense of it being a crafted piece of art. Anderson’s work does not ever attempt realism, but rather he tell fantastic stories (with or without elements of fantasy and the absurd) that communicate so much about the characters' humanity. That being said, some viewers might find the Anderson aesthetic to be overwrought, pretentious and even intolerable.

**

Now my own views. Perhaps I am at a disadvantage, not knowing Wes Anderson’s cinema history. I went to see the film Grand Budapest Hotel because I love a] the old Habsburg cities, b] art deco hotels and c] resorts that used to provide cultural outlets for residents during their summer holidays. So the setting in time (the 1932?) and place (Republic of Zubrowka hmm..Vienna?) was a strange basis for the story of a hotel concierge who teamed up with a junior hotel worker to prove his innocence on a murder charge.

The hotel's salon was very grand in 1932,
a "superb cathedral of eccentricity"

The photography and sets in this film are truly gorgeous. I loved the hotel architecture and decoration, the fincular, baths, dining room, furniture, trams, palaces, snowy mountains, cable cars, palaces and especially the very Habsburg-looking Kunstmuseum. Klimt was used perfectly. Of course the sets were all too decadent for current taste, but then Gustave belonged much more to the late 19th century than to the 1930s, I suspect.

But the gun scenes and chases were too silly for words. Zero helping Gustave escape from Zubrowka's prison by sending stone­mason’s tools hidden inside cakes made by the fiancée Agatha was even sillier. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle reviewed the film saying that the film's sad undertone saves The Grand Budapest Hotel from its own zaniness. Or better yet, elevates the zaniness, making it feel like an assertion of some right to be silly, or some fundamental human expression. Mr LaSalle was almost right. The film’s sad under­tone did save Grand Budapest Hotel from some of its own silliness, but the silliness remained.

The link between this film and Stefan Zweig’s writing, as mentioned in the film credits, was unclear to me. Then I had a brain wave! In 1942, the Zweigs were found dead of a barbiturate overdose in their Brasilian house. Zweig had been despairing at the future of Europe and its culture. He wrote "I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which int­el­lectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom.. the highest good on Earth".

I now agree with Tim Stanley of The Daily Telegraph - the European upper-crust was subversive! The film director understood that the elegance of the Grand Budapest was just a façade; that beneath the glitter was the cancer of greed and fascism. If that was true, Wes Anderson was cleverer and more worthwhile than I thought. Viva Stefan Zweig!



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Medicine and literature - "Riding a Crocodile"

December 5, 2014, 11:00 am
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My husband, a doctor who has been in hospitals and in private practice since 1970, has given me every film and book review that has medicine as its central theme. It does not matter if the story was written in English, French, German or Hebrew. Nor does it matter if the medical setting was in Australia or abroad. The Citadel (1937) springs to mind, as do One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (1992) and The Officers’ Ward (1998). They were all familiar; I too lived for the first five years of my married life in hospital flats.

Joe recently gave me Riding a Crocodile: A Physician's Tale, a novel written by Paul A. Komesaroff and published by River Grove Books in 2014. The Conversation has shown that this was not an ordinary novelist writing about a vaguely medical theme. Komesaroff has a PhD in philosophy and has developed expertise in health care ethics i.e both qualitative and quantitative analyses of the social dimensions of health care. His work is inter-disciplinary, spanning clinical medicine, biomedical research, philosophy, clinical ethics and ethical policy development. He is Director of the international Centre for Ethics in Medicine and Society.

Professor Komesaroff still believes that one of the objects of medical research is to contribute to the improvement of clinical practice and the development of new, more effective social policies. In order to achieve these goals most effectively it is important to draw on a wide range of forms of knowledge and expertise. Did he achieve that goal with his latest novel, Riding a Crocodile?

The way to maintain a clean, efficient hospital ward is to keep those pesky sick elderly out.

The publishers wrote that the character Abraham Nevski was a dedicated and thoughtful professor of medicine at the Royal Prince John Hospital. On returning to work after a break, he became aware of disturbing changes taking place in the hospital – it was a series of suspicious deaths that threw his world into confusion. Nevski's inner turmoil grew and he had to confront the dangers that closed in around him. Riding a Crocodile was both an insider's account of life in a major teaching hospital and a chilling detective story, exploring life and death issues of urgent contemporary relevance.

I suppose it is one thing for hospital management to lay down rules for the medical staff under its control. We laymen can examine those rules fairly easily. But it is totally another thing to see the clinical and ethical challenges that face doctors in normal practice, and to become aware of what goes on in their brains. Or to lurk in the doctors’ staff room and listen to their conversations. The novel actually picked apart Nevski’s brain as if it was in an autopsy.

Fortunately I have no doubt that the cases discussed in the novel were both realistic and chaotic. What happened, for example, when the hospital management became focused on profit-making and cost-reduc­ing? Did the staff doctors buckle under and stop providing the best quality care to needy elderly in-patients who “wasted” so many health dollars?

Ambulance entrance for Casualty and Emergency
Which cases will be admitted and which cases will be put on bypass?

Riding a Crocodile is definitely not a text book. It is a suspenseful detective account of pathos, humour, suffering, indignity, conflict and love that inscribed illness, ageing and death. I loved the description of the story as Hospital Noir. I can see the film version of Crocodile arriving some time in the near future with Clive Owen as the troubled star.

**

This novel is very relevant to me, just now. My mother, frail and elderly, is transfused each week with blood products at her local hospital,  as an outpatient. Is she at risk of cost-reducing decisions in the hospital's office of finance? Might scarce blood resources be better allocated to young people?








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The life and creative times of Dr Samuel Johnson

December 8, 2014, 11:00 pm
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Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was born in Lichfield near Birmingham. The family house, facing the market square, was built by his bookselling father as both a home and a bookshop. He was a very unheal­thy child, deaf in one ear, blind in one eye, a survivor of small-pox and a sufferer of Tour­et­te's syndrome. Samuel’s early years were not easy due to these health issues and his pa­r­­ents’ finan­cial problems, but he must have been a clever lad. His years at Lich­field Grammar School gave him a classical education, and his father’s books opened the rest of the world.

Samuel’s father died a bankrupt, so the young man had to earn an income as best he could from journalism and translation. In Bir­mingham he met the much older widow Elizab­eth Porter whom he married in 1735. She had three adult children from her first marriage.

Samuel and his wife set up a gentlemen’s boarding school near Lichfield, using her money. A friend who lived in the bishop's palace even lent his prem­ises for private theatricals or­ganised by talented local schools. But Johnson’s school failed. Joh­n­son and his wife moved to London in 1737, along with another penniless man of culture, David Garrick.

Georgian townhouse in Gough Square, London
Built in 1700
lived in by Samuel Johnson 1748-59

In London, Johnson’s writing career improved, just in time to benefit from the growth of publish­ing, in Eng­lish and in the classical languages. Within a year Johnson began to write for The Gentleman's Magazine, founded only a few years earlier and still growing. This magazine involved itself in literature, music and par­liamentary debates!

Dr John­son’s London house from 1748-59 was a lovelyGeorgian townhouse in Gough Square, just north of Fleet St. Providing a home and a workplace for Johnson, the site has been res­t­ored to its orig­in­al cond­it­ion, containing pan­el­led rooms, a pine staircase and a co­ll­ec­tion of contemporary furnit­ure, prints and port­r­aits. I recommend that people visit the house, paying particular attention to the parlour-living room, the garret where he worked on a long table, the library that once had 3,000 volumes for Johnson’s reading pleasure and his first floor rooms set aside for lodgers.

The house could not have come at a better time. In 1747 Johnson had already pl­anned a major task: compiling an Eng­lish Dict­ion­ary, with the consent of the Secr­et­ary of State. The work re­qu­ired a keen lo­gical faculty, and an in depth coverage of English lit­­er­a­t­ure of the prec­eding 200 years. After 9 long yrs, and with only 6 copyists assisting him, Johnson completed the mammoth task in 1755. He had written definitions for 40,000+ words, with 114,000 quotations, publ­ished in 2 large folio vol­um­es.

Mrs Johnson became very ill in 1751. When she died, Samuel’s grief was overwhelming. He continued his work as a journalist, editing, writing prefaces and contribut­ing articles to journals. In 1756 Johnson proposed a New Edition of Shakespeare which did in fact appear after a few years. Both Joh­n­s­on and Sir Joshua Reynolds began to write articles for the Idler. But pov­er­ty was never far away. Nor was depression. Being a Man of Letters did not provide a high income. And his loyal wife, once a reliable source of at least some income, had died. In 1759, no longer able to afford his lovely home, Johnson moved into rooms at the Staple Inn.

Samuel Johnson's London house
first floor, for lodgings

Jo­h­n­son had always lived frugally by his writing, until he re­ceived a pen­s­ion of £300/year from King George III in 1762, quite late in his career. The time where he was threatened with debtor's prison were over. He still wrote, but now he could afford to spent time in coffee hous­es in conversation. 

Since his early work on the debates in The Gentleman’s Magazine, Johnson had taken a keen interest in politics. Late 1765, he sup­p­l­ied the parliamentarian William Gerard Hamilt­on with his views on questions being discussed in parl­iament and wrote papers for him. 

The core of his literary life in London was his friendship with Henry and Hes­t­er Thrale, people who made their money from Anchor Brew­house in Southwark. Hester invited her other good literary friends, for her­self and for John­son. In fact Johnson knew the best and the brightest in London, including writers Jam­es Boswell and Fanny Bur­ney; painters Al­l­an Ramsay and Sir Joshua Reyn­olds; Irish playwright Oliver Goldsmith; statesman Edmund Burke; and writer/publisher Horace Walp­ole.

Samuel still had a bit of fun in older age. The Vauxhall Pleas­ure Gardens had been laid out south of the Thames during the 1660s. The whole of cultivated London flocked to the gardens to see a statue erected to their beloved compos­er, Han­d­el. But Johnson’s last years were sad and sickly. He died in 1784, at 75. Later Mrs Thrale published her Ane­c­dotes of the Late Sam­uel Johnson in 1786, as well as her Letters to and from Johnson. Bosw­ell's biog­raphy was published in 1791. In 1791 Westminster Abbey was chosen for Samuel’s monument.

Thomas Rowlandson , an evening concert in Vauxhall Gardens, 1784. 
In the supper box on the left, the diners were James Bos­well, Samuel Johnson, Hester Thrale and Oliver Goldsmith.

For images of Dr Johnson’s beloved house, see British Heritage magazine, April/May 1977 and Discovery Britain magazine, Nov/Dec 2014.




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Lord Haw Haw - Britain's most vile Fascist?

December 12, 2014, 11:00 am
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The rise and rise of Fascism in inter-war Britain was both powerful and nightmarish. I had little trouble researching Sir Oswald Mosley, the BUF and its organised opposition, The 43 Group; the Battle of Cable St in the East End of London; Archibald Ramsay and the Right Club; two of the Mitford sisters; and King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. The elephant in the room was always going to be William Joyce, and that was a story clouded in secrecy. So thank you to The Heretical Press for presenting new evidence.

William Joyce (1906–1946) was born in New York to an Irish Catholic father, and when he was a child the family left the USA and moved back to Ireland, settling in County Mayo. Because the family was very Cons­ervative and pro-Union, they were very unpopular with the local Sinn Fein supporters. Joyce's early life was marked by violence, but luckily for him he was very athletic, strong and brutal.

In 1924, while working as a patrolman at a Conservative Party meeting, Joyce was silently trapped by men in black; he received a deep razor slash that ran across his right cheek to his mouth, leaving a permanent scar. In an incident that he relived over and over in his mind, Joyce claimed his attackers were Jewish communists.

Joyce formally joined the Conservative Party, but left after a short period in 1931. He called the old men of the Con­serv­ative Party weak, grasping and dishonest men, who were betray­ing the nation to the Agents of International Finance. In particularly the Conservative Party failed him by not being anti-Semitic enough.

In 1932, Joyce joined the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and was much admired for being brutal with his knuckledusters in fights against the anti-Fascists. More surp­ris­ingly Joyce became a leading speak­er, praised for his power of oratory. “His speech was elect­rifying, so terrifying in its dynamic force, so vituperative, so vitriolic.

Germany Calling: A Personal Biography of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw was written by Mary Kenny and published by New island Books in 2013.

Two years later, Joyce was promoted to the BUF's Director of Propaganda under Sir Oswald Mosley. But a devastated Joyce was sacked from his paid position in the party by Mosley in 1937. By the time war broke out, Joyce was adamant that Britain was being led into another pointless war and the governments of Neville Chamb­erlain and Winston Churchill were betraying their people.

In Aug 1939 Joyce fled from the UK when tipped off about the government's plan­ned internment of Fascists. He escaped to Germany where friends put him in contact with the Private Secretary to Germany's For­eign Minister von Ribbentrop. Just a fortnight after the out­break of war, he was appointed Editor and speaker for the German transmit­ters for Europe in Berlin.

Joyce became the main German broadcaster in English, and became a naturalised German citizen. The English-language propaganda radio programme Germany Call­ing was broadcast to UK audiences on the mediumwave station Reichssender Hamburg and by shortwave abroad. The programme started in Sep 1939 and continued until April 1945, when the British Army was finally victorious.

Through such broadcasts, the Reich Ministry of Public Enlighten­ment and Propaganda wanted to demoralise both British and British Commonwealth troops and English-speaking citizens, and to spread German propag­anda. For example the German broadcasts happily rep­orted on the loss of Allied aircraft and ships. Allied troops and civilians often felt they had to listen to Lord Haw-Haw's broadcasts because they offered the only details available from behind enemy lines concerning the fate of Allied soldiers.

Lord Haw Haw and his wife Margaret in Germany
photo credit: Daily Mail

Joyce was capt­ured by British forces in northern Germany just as the war ended. He was taken back to Wandsworth Prison in Britain, tried, found guilty and hanged for treason in Jan 1946.

Why did he betray his own adopted British nation? Facing death Joyce wrote “In death, as in this life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war, and I defy the power of darkness which they represent. I warn the British people against the crushing imperialism of the Soviet Union. May Britain be great once again and in the hour of the greatest danger in the west may the Swastika be raised from the dust, crowned with the historic words: You have conquered never­the­less. I am proud to die for my ideals; and I am sorry for the sons of Britain who have died without knowing why”.

Did he believe it was worth risking the lives of 40 million British citizens to exterminate a tiny Jewish population? Or was he admonishing the Allies for fighting a war secretly organised by the Jews? In either case he was being disingenuous! His radio voice suggested he was totally thrilled when London was blitzed and Coventry almost disappeared from the map!

Commentators have since argued that Joyce achieved nothing except a reputation as a comical, almost pathetic, figure in Britain. But this was never true. The Nazis were de­lighted that Joyce’s anti-Semitism never faded in its viru­lence. For his efforts Joyce continued to live a comfortable life in Berlin and in Sep 1944 was awarded the Cross of War Merit 1st Class with a certificate signed by Adolf Hitler himself. And from the other side, there was also an impact. The an­x­ious mood in Britain was well depicted in the wartime film Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), starring Basil Rathbone. In the film, Joyce's broadcasts were shown to pred­ict actual defeats, thus seriously undermining British morale.

Some British media and list­eners used "Lord Haw-Haw" as a generic term to describe all English-language German broad­casters using an unintentionally comic upper-class accent. The same nickname was also applied to some other broad­casters of English-language propaganda from Germany. eg James R. Clark was a young English broadcaster and a friend of British Fascists William Joyce and and Unity Mitford. James Clark's mother Dorothy Eckersley showed great interest in German National Socialism and Fascism, and moved to Germany with her teenage son, enrolling him in a German school. Clark and his pro-Nazi mother were both tried for treason and she was gaoled after the war.

But today the nickname almost always refers just to William Joyce.

I don’t believe in capital punishment in ANY event, but I do understand the British government’s reluctance to let a war-time traitor go on with his role. Even had he been given a life sent­ence with no parole, he would certainly have become a celebrated martyr to the Fascist cause in Britain. I suggest this proves how influential Lord Haw Haw truly was during the war - the British government felt hanging was the only possible outcome. 




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1942 - American soldiers, Australian women, nylon stockings

December 15, 2014, 11:00 pm
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My mother’s final year of high school was 1942, the very year American soldiers and sailors first arrived in Australia. Mum's sole knowledge of American men until that point came from seeing Spencer Tracy and Douglas Fairbanks Jnr at the local picture theatre.

My mother got to meet real live American men in two strange ways. Firstly her high school in Melbourne gave all its football fields over to the American Army, to use as a training camp. The school built a brick fence between the students and the soldiers, but athletic girls managed to climb the fence to check out the talent on the other side.

Secondly my grandmother used to go down to the docks at Port Mel­bourne, before every major Jewish holiday. My grandmother must have been a courageous and determined soul. She asked the ships’ captains to select a small group of their Jewish sailors for the holiday.. and no captain ever refused her. Her goal was to give young sailors a holiday meal, surrounded by a warm loving family, even though they were 10,000 ks from home. Every American sailor or soldier brought a luxury gift that my family had not afforded before – orchids on a stick for my grandmother and nylon stockings for my mother and her two teenage sisters.

Perhaps Australian men were less educated in dating etiquette; the best gift they brought to warm the heart of a date was a chocolate frog for 3d. More likely still, Australian men brought no present at all! Or perhaps the Australian army and navy had paid hopelessly low salaries to its men since August 1939, whereas the Americans paid their men halfway decent military salaries since January 1942.


At least regarding nylons, Smithsonian.com has the answer! Hemlines were rising throughout the 1930s, and stockings, made back then from silk or rayon, had become an essential component to a woman’s ward­robe. The delicacy of the 1930s stockings did not hurt the bottom line; women purchased an average of eight pairs of stockings per year during that decade.

Nylon stockings did not make their debut in the USA until Oct 1939. It happened in Wilmington Delaware because that was the home of Wallace Hume Carothers and the company he worked for, DuPont. Carothers was the chemist who researched in the field of Polymers, producing a fibre that was to replace silk in many clothing garments. [What a shame that Carot­h­ers, nylon’s creator, did not get to see the mania around his invent­ion; he committed suicide in 1936 after battling depression for years].

In fact the first test sale to DuPont employees’ wives took place at the company’s experimental station. Before the 4,000 pairs of stockings sold out, DuPont had had women modelling nylon hosiery at the 1939 New York World’s Fair; they were touting nylon as a synthetic fabric light as air. Intelligent American men soon understood how to win a woman’s heart!

From the moment DuPont realised what kind of stretchy, durable, wash­able, dryable revolution it had synthesised, the company focused on women’s hosiery, a huge potential market. DuPont’s initial sales success in Wilmington was the start of the nylon stocking craze! In May 1940, four million pairs of brown nylons landed on department store shelves across the USA at $1.15 per pair and sold out immediately. Standard silk stockings, which did not stretch, were tough to clean and ripped easily, were quickly supplanted. By 1941, sales in the USA reached 64 million pairs.

Eventually WW2 arrived in the USA. As quickly as nylon stockings had found their way into department stores and boutiques, providing women with inexpensive, longer-lasting hosiery options... the stockings disappeared :( The material was severely rationed and channelled into war efforts. Nylon was permitted only in the manufacturing of parachutes, ropes, air­craft fuel tanks, shoe laces, mosquito netting and hammocks, aiding in the USA’s national defence.

American women had to be inventive to meet their leg-beautifying needs or turn to the black market. However nylon stockings were app­arently present in many GI’s kitbags to impress the glamour-starved women in the overseas countries American soldiers trained in. Did my 18 year old mother and her friends know that? Were Australian women as excited about nylons as American women? It has been suggested (History Today, October 2014) that some of the babies born in Britain and Australia to American soldiers in 1943-5 could be directly traced back to the gift of nylons.

When the war was over and rations were eased, nylon stockings ret­ur­n­ed to American shops and sold quickly. In late 1945 Nylon Riots started up around the USA; tens of thousands of women queued up to try to buy a pair.





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