ART and ARCHITECTURE, mainly

Last Children of the Raj: British Childhoods in India was edited by Laurence Fleming and published by Radcliffe Press in 2004. This book is a collection of retrospective reminiscences contributed by people late in their lives, the 120+ story tellers having all spent most of their childhood and adolescence in British India, the Princely States or Burma. The most evocative stories were the personal accounts of powerful emotional experiences while growing up in India - the sights, smells and sounds of India, their homes, families, staff, schools and holidays.

The book was presented in two volumes, perfect for history bloggers who tend to read only one chapter at a time. The first volume (1919-39) was organised by geographic regions of India and grouped all of the stories of the children by those areas. The second volume (1939-50) was arranged chronologically, covering WW2 and soon after. Most of the contributors’ stories were split up and were divided into a few sections. An index would have made it possible to go back and forward, within each individual’s story.

British military family arriving in India

Photo credit: thedrumming.org

These children’s fathers were railway engineers and other professionals, army officers, teachers, members of the Indian Civil Service, plantation owners and businessmen. In India during the last 30 years or so of British rule, the fathers' careers were important since they were the very men who were there to develop and modernise India.

Plus the fathers’ careers meant the children grew up in a society even more stratified than Britain by income and occupation. Inevitably these children grew up with the nice houses, good schools and plenty of household staff that were the distinctive features of life in British India. A comfortable life-style, but one unprotected from epidemics, vicious heat, mosquitoes, snakes and wild animals. [I was not coddled as a child, but one sight of a scorpion in my bedroom would have got me into a ship home, the NEXT morning].

Unless forbidden to do so by their English-speaking nannies, many of the contributors in this book had spoken Indian languages as children. Since picking up Indian languages from doting servants, some children spoke English almost as a second language.

These children, born in 1914-40, provided a social history during the last decades of the British Raj that occurred during a hectic era: world war, self-rule movements and the violent birth of independent India and Pakistan. Nonetheless these privileged children of the Raj remembered an exciting and exotic childhood. Still we have to ask: did they fully acknowledge being a part of expatriate life in both countries – an expat in India and in the UK? Where was “home”?

Last Children of the Raj book

One of the most disruptive experiences described was that of being sent home on long, lonely trips to Britain at an early age… for a Proper Education. Perhaps we can understand why it was so important for most British families in India to send their young children, especially boys, home to Britain, given that formal education was critical for their futures. But it broke my heart reading how they had to be sent home alone, or occasionally with their mothers. They boarded at school during term, and with grandmothers or aunts during school holidays. They might have seen their mothers once a year and their fathers even less frequently.

Separation from family was a dominant theme, even for those children sent to distant schools within India’s hill stations eg Simla. Those children who went to boarding schools in the hill stations were taught together with Anglo-Indians and Europeans born in India. At least those educated in India were only separated from their families for 10 months each year. But it came at a price. The children who stayed in Indian schools would not have had access to the lessons and examinations that groomed lads towards the best career paths.

When WW2 erupted in 1939, many children who were in school in Britain were recalled to India, moving into temporarily-created schools in India. In 1940, in one convoy the P&O troopship Stratheden carried at least 200 children back to India. Dangerous to be sure, but at least the parents got their sons and daughters safely by their sides. As WW2 went on, the older sons joined up as officers in the British and Indian armies.

Many suffered emotional traumas; children of the Raj had needs and feelings of their own that were not being listened to! But according to the stories in the book, most children adapted to their predicament - this was a cost of Empire and of keeping the family in its appropriate class position. Even more, the Raj made them proud to be British; history had given them a special role in the world.

Upon retirement, Raj families had to face a reduced income and important decisions about where to live out the rest of their days. I felt very sad for those families, even though I never lived in any colonial service. Losing the one home a family had lived in for a generation ..was always tragic.

Of course the Raj was about rule, not about power sharing. So Indians could only serve the Raj as servants or friends; Indians could never be central to the events in their own nation. For as long as the Indians were not governing their own country, they could only show their true feelings within the various independence movements. So the alternative name of the book, Orphans of the Imperial Dream, probably reflected the times better.

I have not seen Elizabeth Buettner's Empire Families (2004), and Margaret MacMillan’s Women of the Raj: The Mothers, Wives and Daughters of the British Empire in India (2007) but they seem to touch many of the same themes found in the Fleming book.

In 1968 I saw Daniel Cohn-Bendit on tv and decided straight away who I would marry. The man of my dreams would have to be a red-head, Jewish, European-born and educated, politically left wing and a great Bridge player. In 1969, I met my now-husband Joe who was a red-head, Jewish, European and great at Bridge. Only in politics could Joe have been more active – much more active!

Now let us look at 1968, as described by David Del Testa* and Sean O’Hagan*. Paris was the place where political action and utopian fantasy came together in the most spectacular fashion. The 1968 protesters initially comprised a few student activists at the Nanterre University in Paris. Protests began against the lack of facilities on their bleak suburban campus. Extraordinarily, the authorities called the French riot police to quell the small demonstration, and suddenly politicised students joined the rebels.

They had a leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (b1945). Born in Monatuban in southern France, he was the son of German citizens who had fled the Nazi machine before WW2 started. He moved to Germany with his parents in 1958 and attended high school near Frankfurt. Cohn-Bendit took out German citizenship, then returned to France in 1966 to study sociology at the Nanterre University.

Cohn-Bendit was soon called Danny the Red by the media, a reference to his ginger hair as much as his politics. Cohn-Bendit's grin and non-dogmatic radicalism made him the antithesis of dour theoretical Marxists.

After another sit-in at Nanterre, they closed the university and ordered Cohn-Bendit to appear before a disciplinary board. Thus the protests shifted to the centre of Paris where media crews were already assembling to cover the imminent Vietnam peace talks. The students were now becoming an embarrassment to President De Gaulle. He sent police into the Sorbonne to arrest 600 students and ordered the university’s closure.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit

Paris demonstration, May 1968

It ended in near-revolution. The government banned all demonstrations in May when Cohn-Bendit was due to be disciplined. Yet 1,000 students accompanied their leader to the Sorbonne, where they passed through French riot police armed with shields and clubs. The media followed.

The police charged, leaving students unconscious on the cobbled street. The students regrouped and fought back around the Sorbonne, overturning cars and building barricades for hours. These were people who knew nothing of revolution; there was no organisation, no planning.

As news of the uprising spread, young people from all over Paris arrived to support the students. Petrol bombs and Molotov cocktails lit up the streets as night fell. 600+ protesters were injured in one day and about half as many police. The rioting continued for another week and images of the clashes with police were everywhere.

On the streets of Paris in those few weeks, people from different backgrounds came out in support of the students. Groups of Parisians gathered around the barricades to organise and agitate. Posters appeared across the Left Bank and beyond. The two main Parisian art schools combined to form the Atelier Populaire, producing hundreds of silk-screened images in an impressive outpouring of political graphic art. The real 1968 represented liberation and a sense of community. Order and authority were challenged.

Cohn-Bendit, who would soon receive a deportation order from the French government for his involvement, had gone from "local student activist" to "international figurehead for revolution". In just three weeks Danny the Red was famous all over the world. And in my heart.

The catalyst for Danny the Red’s fame in 1968 was TV. Two technological innovations transformed news broadcasts: a] use of cheap, reusable videotape, instead of film; and b] same-day broadcasts. While the Left argued over the meaning of the unrest, Cohn-Bendit did not care about its meaning. But he did care that images of rebellion were quickly disseminated.

Cohn-Bendit asks for silence, so poet Louis Aragon can talk to students on a megaphone

Photo credit:Blind Flaneur

Anti-Vietnam War protests
Images of frantic battles in the Vietnam war were quickly broadcast to the USA, a nation who were not used to seeing their soldiers killing civilians. The carpet bombing, napalm and American massacres of Vietnamese families shocked, then angered viewers. In late 1967-1968, c30 colleges a month were protesting with sit-ins and street marches.

In Germany a strong anti-Vietnam war movement had grown on campuses in 1967. By April 1968, highly organised rioting started in Berlin, following the attempted assassination of left-winger Rudi Dutschke. Students and activists directed their ire at the right-wing Springer Press organisation in Berlin, laying siege.

In Poland the government closed down eight university departments in Warsaw, and imprisoned 1,000 students after protests against state censorship. In Italy the University of Rome was shut down for two weeks after violent demonstrations against police brutality. In Spain students marched against the Fascist regime of General Franco, so he closed Madrid University for a month. In Brasil protesters were killed during marches against the military junta. In France, just as the Nanterre protests gathered momentum, thousands marched against the war in Paris. Then 10,000 German protesters gathered in West Berlin. Worst of all, Soviet troops rumbled into Czechoslovakia, abruptly ending the brief Prague spring of reforms.

By then, the spirit of 1968 had dimmed in France, too. To the astonishment of both students and government, the French trade unions had called for a general strike for more pay and better conditions. France ground to a halt to the horror of the beleaguered President De Gaulle. It looked as if France would undergo another revolution, but the unlikely alliance of students and workers did not last. Cohn-Bendit himself admitted that the workers and the students were never properly together.

After the May Riots, Cohn-Bendit’s political opponents took advantage of his German passport and had him expelled from France as a seditious alien. He became active in Frankfurt instead.

That youthful unplanned idealism, carried for a while by a surprising momentum, quickly faded. 1968 ended with De Gaulle still in power, President Nixon was now president and the Vietnam war escalating. In Mexico hundreds of young people in the student movement were slaughtered by the Olympic Battalion in Tlatelolco Square in Oct 1968.

The youth revolution might have been over, but 1968 remained the epicentre modern protest and the dawn of a new geopolitical order. It was also the beginning of the many struggles that followed, especially Women's Liberation. Cohn-Bendit, hero of May 1968, is now a Green Party leader in the European parliament.

*See Government Leaders, Military Rulers and Political Activists by David Del Testa and Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian, Jan 2008.

Thomas Guthrie was born in Arbroath Scotland in 1803, 12th child of his father David, a merchant and banker. The young Thomas went to Edinburgh University at 12 where he studied as a divinity student, then studied surgery and anatomy. In 1829 Guthrie was appointed to a parish where he introduced classes for young people every Sabbath. He also started a village library.

In 1837, Guthrie became minister at the Old Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh where he saw at first hand the ragged children who lived by begging and stealing. Presumably he knew of Sheriff Watson in Aberdeen who had formed his Industrial Feeding School in 1841. Guthrie converted a room beneath the church as a kitchen and he soon had his first class going. Within a year he had started three Ragged Schools in Edinburgh! In his 1847 pamphlet Plea for Ragged Schools, Rev Guthrie described a unique curriculum - education, meals, clothes, industrial training and Christian instruction. Pupils learned cobbling, tailoring and cooking. And by doing jobs for local shops, the children could earn a small wage and learn its value. The effect was to clear the streets and prisons of young beggars.

Ragged Schools provided free education for children too poor to receive it elsewhere but they were not pretty. Charles Dickens thought a particular London Ragged School was the most wretched place he’d ever seen. By 1841 c2 million people lived in London, but without compulsory schooling only a fraction of them had attended school. The Empire was expanding, but much of London was still impoverished.

Barnardo's Hope Place Ragged School,

Edinbugh Castle Mission, London 1909

Docklands and East London Advertiser

The London City Mission was founded in 1835 by Scottish missionary David Nasmith and his colleagues to bring free education and Christian good to London’s children. In 1840 the Mission received financial and political support from the reformer Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftsbury. Reports were from the Children’s Employment Commission were read in Parliament, detailing the horror of child labour in Britain: low pay, long hours & dangerous work conditions experienced by children working in mines and collieries.

Field Lane Ragged School opened in 1842. The school consisted of two or three miserable rooms where ragged, filthy children huddled together on a bench. Not to be trusted with books, the pupils were taught orally by a voluntary teacher. By the 1850s Field Lane consisted of a day school, which taught reading, writing, counting and the Bible; two night schools, one for vagrant adults and another for boys who were employed during the day. There were classes in shoe-making and tailoring for boys, and sewing classes for girls. Field Lane also fed and clothed its students, ran a night refuge and a weekend Bible school. Evangelical Christianity was at the heart of Ragged schooling!

In 1844 the Ragged School Union was founded as a movement of individual schools, sustained by charity or government grants. In under a decade, 300+ free schools for poor children were established in Britain. London, Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh of course, but Manchester, Liverpool and other cities became equally important.

There was criticism. Dickens thought the movement was not secular enough.

In 1850 journalist Henry Mayhew noted ongoing juvenile delinquency. In his 1851 report, London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew noted the Mudlarks who traipsed along the banks of the Thames looking for coal, copper and rope scraps to sell. Few of these children had been to church or school. Indeed, due to their acts of petty theft brought about by hunger, they were often in prison.

Many poor families believed the classes on offer were irrelevant, so the Ragged School Union began to establish Brigades for boys in 1857. These groups provided certified jobs in street vending or shoe shining, with a proportion of the boys’ earnings being placed in a personal bank account. The police approved.

statue of Rev Thomas Guthrie,

Princes Street Edinburgh

Ragged Industrial Schools were intended to help destitute children who had not as yet committed any serious crime. They’d remove the children from bad influences and teach them a useful trade. Under the 1857 Industrial Schools Act, magistrates could send children who had been found in the company of criminals or were begging, to attend residential Ragged Industrial Schools for two years.

Were the Ragged Schools popular among the poorest in society? In the Ragged School Union’s Annual Report for 1857, only 21,500 out of London’s half a million children had attended their lessons. Eventually Parliament agreed that Ragged schooling alone would not solve the problems. The introduction of universal, compulsory schooling in London under the 1870 Education Act finally arrived.

The Jews' Free School in Spitalfields, in London’s East End, taught c20,000 pupils between 1856-1907. By 1900, the school had 4,250: it was the largest school in Europe. .Since my grandmother lived in Whitechapel, sharing the two rooms with the 12 other people in her impoverished family, I must investigate her Jews’ Free School detailed records. Grandma went on to become a singer/dancer in the three Yiddish Theatres AND in the English-speaking pantomimes. So for at least my family, the Free School did a great job.

Jews' Free School

Spitalfields, London

Ragged School Museum

Copperfield Rd, London

When Thomas Barnardo left Dublin for London in 1866, intending to be a doctor/missionary in China, he found a city where disease was rife, overcrowding were endemic, and educational opportunities for the poor were still inadequate. Thousands of children had to sleep on the streets and others were forced to beg after being maimed in factories. Worse still was the cholera epidemic that swept through the East End, leaving 3,000 Londoners dead.

He gave up his medical training to pursue his local missionary and philanthropy works and in 1867 opened his first ragged school, Copperfield Road School in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Copperfield Road School (and his other properties in the East End) educated tens of thousands of children over the years. It only closed in 1908 when enough government schools were available to serve the local families (although the Factory Girls’ Club lasted until 1916). Was this the last Ragged School to close?

A group of 3 canal-side buildings once formed the largest ragged school in London, Barnardo’s. These 3 buildings later went through a variety of industrial uses until they were threatened with demolition in the early 1980s. Local people joined together to save them and The Ragged School Museum opened in 1990. Visitors can see lessons taught in an authentic Victorian classroom; and they can inpsect the recreated Victorian kitchen with no electricity or running water.

Australia invented surf life saving, pavlova, rotary clothes hoists, plastic bank notes and black box flight recorders. But now I want to concentrate on cochlear implants.

How did the deaf communicate? Before the French priest Michel de l’Epée devised sign language in the C18th, the deaf were written off as useless citizens. For the first time, the priest had demonstrated that deaf people were no less intelligent than their peers. The C19th saw the creation of the world’s first hearing aids, based on Alexander Bell’s telephone. They were clumsy, and although there have been enormous improvements with time, hearing aids could not reproduce high frequencies - they could only amplify residual hearing. The result was that many deaf people continued to use sign language, combined with lip reading.

This was the situation until the early 1980s when Dr William Gibson became aware of the cochlear experiments. Now we need to read Bill Gibson: Pioneering Bionic Ear Surgeon written by Tina Allen, 2017.

Bill and his identical twin were born (in 1944) in the British city of Devon, into a family of doctors. Their father was still fighting the war in France! Bill Gibson eventually decided he wanted to be a doctor, moving to study in London in the 1960s. Later, as a medical graduate, he specialised in London in otology-ear surgery. Gibson was eventually one of the top Ears, Nose and Throat consultants in the UK.

There was already a primitive version of the bionic ear available in Britain but it provided only a dot-dash sort of sound. Developing this into a multi-channel device that could convert sounds into electronic impulses that the brain could hear was progress.

Cochlear implant in a young child

photo credit: SCIC Cochlear Implant Programme, NSW

Bill knew about Australia’s Prof Graeme Clark's research into cochlear implants, work that was largely dismissed in the UK. In particular, Prof Graeme Clark and his team in Melbourne University’s Otolaryngology Department swere examining ways of using new technology to help deaf people. They focused on the cochlea, the part of the ear that passed sounds to the brain.

Understanding the potential of the Melbourne work, Gibson saw the opportunity to join his surgical skills to the device. The Gibson family emigrated to Australia. It was great that Prof Graeme Clark was very supportive of the recent British arrivals and it was great that Bill’s twin brother had already married an Australian.

In Australia, Julia Patrick noted, the Melbourne ENT hierarchy regarded Prof Clark as eccentric and his work futile; apparently they considered the idea of following speech without lip reading and signing to be silly. Fortunately the University of Sydney was open to individual research, so Gibson applied for, and accepted the first Professorship of Otolaryngology/ENT at Sydney University.

Encouraged by a small group of perceptive supporters at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (spouse’s alma mater), Gibson received the green light to go ahead: two patients successfully received the first cochlear implants in 1984.

Surgically inserted in the ear of these two patients, the implants did not actually cure deafness; it was a prosthetic substitute for hearing that did the work of the damaged hair cells of the inner ear, the cochlea, to send sound signals to the brain. When it worked, there was a great excitement, seeing the joy on the face of deaf patients when they realised they were part of a hearing world.

There were inevitable failures as the medical teams learned more about distinguishing between patients who were suitable for implants and those who were not, but the profession noted clear progress. The device became compact and Gibson developed a way to implant it.

The first generation of recipients were people who had lost their hearing in adulthood, because they understood the concept of spoken communication. Gibson believed that while restoring hearing to adults was important, the focus should be on youngsters who had been deaf from birth and had never learned to speak. By the age of 7, their speech organs would have effectively atrophied.

By 1986 the cochlear team in Sydney had successfully carried out 20 implants for adults and Gibson was ready, willing and able to perform the surgery on congenitally deaf children. If they received an implant from 9-18 months of age, speech would naturally follow hearing. Gibson chose a four-year-old girl for an implant in 1987, which involved convincing medical regulators that the process was ethical and practical. She was the first paediatric recipient of the Australian-designed bionic ear in the world. This brave little girl learned to both understand and use speech.

When Dr Gibson controversially decided to implant cochlear devices in children, he received many letters criticising the plan. One group in particular, The Signing Deaf Group, believed that congenital deafness should not be seen as a disease to be cured. Instead the focus should be on signing, itself a valid alternative language.

Gibson’s goal was now to identify babies born deaf, allowing them to have an implant. With Gibson’s persuasion, NSW initiated a successful early-detection programme, now Australia-wide. With a cochlear implant, children born congenitally deaf could go to a regular school and lead the life of a normal child. Between 1984 and 2014, he performed the bionic ear operation 2000+ times!

Bill Gibson: Pioneering Bionic Ear Surgeon

written by Tina Allen,

published by NewSouth Publishing in 2017.

More recent progress
Dr Gibson helped establish Cochlear Implant Club and Advisory Association, a group that enabled implant recipients to meet regularly, providing support to each other and feedback to doctors. And to obtain funding for specialist facilities and post-op therapy.

The vital personal accounts of 40 of Professor Gibson’s patients are included in the Australian chapters of the biography. The book also considered the issues Dr Gibson experienced in establishing a top class cochlear implant programme, known today as the Sydney Cochlear Implant Centre. The twelve branches of the Centre were one of the many legacies of his career. Another success was the small incision he developed for cochlear implant surgery, to reduce wound breakdown to practically zero. Plus he advised a NSW Ministerial Committee on the best screening test to be used in hospital on new-born infants.

Prof Gibson is now overseeing research into the cause and cure for the debilitating Menière’s Disease. This condition of the ear has resisted medical knowledge since the condition was first identified in France in 1861 by Prosper Menière. Sydney now has the first laboratory in the world dedicated solely to Menière’s Disease Research.

Thank you for the nominations. Let me know which you enjoyed most.

BRITAIN & EUROPE
The late Norman “Little Malvern Priory Church” was ready in 1171. In 1480 the Church & lodgings were ruined, so Bishop Alcock had the site repaired. See Cherie’s Place.

"The Literal Bones of the World" is in Myths 'n Monsters.

“Cold Sea Bathing in the Georgian Era” is in Geri Walton. Its therapeutic properties were most helpful for those who indulged in idleness or debauchery. The salt was important.

In A Visitor's Guide to Victorian England, “Victorian Crime: Murder in the Suburbs” noted that crime was low. Yet in the early 1880s, there were two Manchester murders that had an uncanny link with shocking events c30 years later.

“Meet the Man Who Saved Kenilworth Castle” is in English Heritage Blog. Sir John Siddeley bought the castle in the 1930s and made it public. See his story and see the exhibition of Armstrong Siddeley’s cars and planes.

The British royal family dropped their German surname in 1917 and refashioned themselves. The equivalent anti-German campaign in South Australia is in “The Centenary of the House of Windsor 1917–2017”, in History Matrix.

“Fitzrovia, London” in To Discover Ice tells of the suburb that became a artistic and bohemian community. Centred around Fitzroy Square, the area celebrates historic pubs, restaurants, media companies and literary homes.

In Heritage Bulletin, “Tothill Street, our first Headquarters” showed how the Women’s Voluntary Services for Air Raid Precautions was founded in 1938. The hidden histories of one million wartime women have been digitised.

Little Malvern Priory Church

"Material Culture from Below" in the many-headed monster. An Early Modern Europe Conference talked of methods used in material cultural history of the gentry-aristocracy. But what about the common people?

The blog Dirty, Sexy History has a] "I Thought they Had Been Nuns: Great Wine & Failed Sexual Transactions", b] "Fanny Burney and Her Mastectomy" and c] "Sex, Contraception, and Abortion in Medieval England".

AMERICAN HISTORY
By 1775 rebellion entered New York’s Albany County. Armed night watches and prisons intimidated British loyalists."In Addition to Disarming Them...” in Historical Nerdery.

"New England’s Darkest Day" appears in The New York History Blog. “Solar Eclipse Tips From John Quincy Adams” is published in Plodding Through the Presidents.

See The Secret Victorianist for “Governors Island: Castle William NYC”. Built to stave off British attacks that never occurred, Castle Williams became barracks for Civil War Union soldiers. Then it had new uses.

Regarding the popularity of cycling in 1900 and the laws that the riders broke, see"Breaking the Law on Two Wheels" in The Chemung County Historical Society.

In Mental Floss see “A Forgotten George Gershwin Musical just made its American Debut”. In 1982, crates of musical manuscripts by Porter, Rodgers & Gershwin were discovered in New Jersey. His 1924 musical Primrose was discussed.

“Webster Hall Will Return” was published in The Bowery Boys. From 1886, the hall hosted the Greenwich Village Ball till the 1930s, a dancing bacchanalia for artists, bohemians and drag queens. It's now a New York City landmark.

“Laundry Methods During the American Revolution” is in 17th Regt. of Infantry in America. See a] formal guides to washing laundry b] civilian & military notations about laundering in the American colonies, and c] personal observations.

With Jim Crow restrictions, African Americans were barred from mainstream holidays. From 1890-1960s, special coastal resorts arose, a haven against racism! "Summer Resorts Once Offered African Americans” is in Edwardian Promenade.

Naomi Clifford wrote “The Eruption of La Soufrière on the West Indian Island of St Vincent” in 1812. Alas the British were preoccupied with imminent naval war against the US. Worse, St Vincent was the centre of the Anglo-French War.

“A Montesorri School, Tchaikovsky and a Murder” is in Daytonian in Manhattan. The Queen Anne style, 4-storey brick-stone dwellings were in West 74th St NY. Read of the different owners, illegal speakeasies and a 1932 murder.

144 W 74th St, Manhattan

Massachusetts Historical Society’s Center for Teaching History hosts workshops for teachers seeking to incorporate primary sources and contemporary historical scholarship. See "Teaching #HistSex" in Medical Heritage Library

MUSEOLOGY Blog of the Courtier talks of “Finding fakes: new museum confronts old problem head-on”. With newer scholarship, San Francisco’s Mexican Museum has discovered that some of its prize possessions may be unreliable.

“Who should own the Koh i Noor Diamond?” is in Art and Architecture, mainly. Nations in Central Asia will be in court over this diamond. When does an historical treasure need to be repatriated abroad? And to which country?

WAR “The Barge Canal: New York’s Patriotic Contribution to WWI” appears in The Friends of Schoharie Crossing.

The Second World War Research Group has a] "French Recruitment of Colonial Soldiers in Morocco after German Occupation of Paris”; b] "When Britain meets Free France: Coalition Warfare in French Equatorial Africa" and c] “The Italian Navy and Japan: Strategy and Hopes, 1937-1942”.

Read From Balloons to Drones for a] "Air Power in Technicolour", and b] "Blinded by the Rising Sun? American Intelligence Assessments of Japanese Air Power, 1920-41".

Mark A. Landis (born 1955) was born in Virginia but was constantly on the move with his Navy father. At age 17, the young man suffered a schizophrenic breakdown when his beloved father died. Art therapy helped, so Mark enrolled in School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then San Francisco Art Institute. But neither lasted for long.

Landis became a forger who tricked 50 unsuspecting museums across 20 American states. He covered the USA, donating counterfeit art to museums, but not to enrich himself or to ridicule the establishment. Instead his goal was to be viewed as a philanthropist, gaining family respect. I must admit that to be a convincing forger, Landis must have been a talented artist in his own right . He "created" works in oil, watercolour, pastels, chalk, ink and pencil, making most of his copies from museum or auction catalogues that provided dimensions and information on the originals.

Associated Press said that Landis, who has occasionally dressed as a Jesuit priest or posed as a wealthy donor driving up in a red Cadillac, apparently never took money for his forgeries and has never been arrested. Eventually his works were collected into their own satirical exhibit called Faux Real which was held on April Fools' Day 2012 at the University of Cincinnati.

Educating people about forgery and letting people know about Landis was the only way to stop him, said the director of the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette La. This museum had been duped in 2010 with a Landis donation of a work supposedly painted by American Charles Courtney Curran.

He bestowed gifts under different names such as the Father Arthur Scott, the alias he used at Hilliard. In that case, he told officials that his dead mother had left works including Curran's 1894 oil-on-wood painting Three Women and that he was donating it in her memory. Museum employees became suspicious when Landis kept changing the subject under questioning and quickly concluded it was a forgery.

Portrait of a woman by Mark Landis.
Supposedly a work by C19th French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau.
The fake was shown at the University of Cincinnati exhibition.

Landis vaguely acknowledged his trickery. He told The Associated Press he made his first forgery donation to a California museum in 1985. "They were so nice. I just got used to that, and one thing led to another. It never occurred to me that anyone would think it was wrong." Oh really??

The Cincinnati exhibit of 40 works given to 15 museums grew to c100, as soon as Landis donated 60 pieces he possessed, along with his priest's outfit. The Faux Real show depicted famous art forgers, details of how Landis made donations and ways of detecting fakes. Visitors could view some works under ultraviolet light that caused sections to glow, if they contain contemporary ingredients.

Art experts said not accepting payment for his forgeries helped keep Landis from ever being charged with a crime. However museum officials said there was a real price to pay - forgeries hurt their reputation and cost time and money researching suspected fraud.

Landis typically targeted smaller museums that did not have the resources to thoroughly check donations. While museums did not pay Landis, some treated him to receptions and gifts, before realising the works were fakes.

The exhibit used Landis’ story to show how forgeries occurred and demonstrated that institutions and the public should not take art at face value. The exhibit didn't increase the value of Landis' works — considered worthless except as educational tools on forgery — and the curators heard no objections to spotlighting his works. Landis was thrilled.

Supposedly Portrait of a Young Woman by Jean-Honoré Fragonard c1769 Actually painted by by Mark Landis.

Intent to Deceive: Fakes and Forgeries in the Art World (2015) was a ground-breaking exhibition at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art that highlighted 60+ works by some of the world’s most notorious con artists. It illuminated their dubious legacies and examined how their talents, charm and gall ensnared the art world of the C20th. Several ingenious forgers were profiled in this show, representing some of the most infamous scandals of our times. The exploits of Han van Meegeren, Elmyr de Hory, Eric Hebborn, John Myatt and Mark Landis had shaken the art world at various times, gathering each of them worldwide notoriety.

Included in each forger’s profile were their original works, personal effects and ephemera, photos, film clips and representations of the material and techniques used to create these convincing fakes. Also included were original works of art by modern masters such as Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Paul Signac and others, shown alongside several of the world’s most accomplished art forgers - to test the viewers' perceptions of authenticity.

Landis may be the most famous art counterfeiter who never committed a crime. But Landis implied the works were by Old Masters, he falsified documents and he used aliases. I think the exhibition of fakes was an excellent idea, but not for the reason given i.e. “to educate the public about art forgery”; “to ensure that institutions and the public don't take art at face value”. We should be asking if, as long as a talented artist didn’t explicitly lie about his works coming from Old Masters, "have his fakes nonetheless devalued the Old Masters"?

The Jacobites, supporters of King James II, were the original opponents of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Act of Union in 1707 had led to the creation of Great Britain, with a single parliament at Westminster. Scotland did not adapt easily to this new relationship because, for many Scots, the union delivered misery and economic disadvantage. So half the nation wanted to return to the independence of Stuart Scotland.

For landed and business-minded Scots who had increased access to a new British trading empire, the Union was loved. And Presbyterian Scots, who were still fearful of popery, certainly did not want to see another Stuart king in Scotland.

The Stuarts’ main strongholds remained in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. By the early C18th the Highlanders were not the only people looking to overthrow the British government; unhappy citizens on both sides of the border, including persecuted Irish Catholics and unhappy English Tories, shared the goal. And the Jacobite cause received support from France, Spain, Sweden, the Papacy and Russia, all of whom wanted to weaken the British government.

Charles Edward Stuart aka Bonnie Prince Charlie (1720-88) was born in Rome, where his family had been living in exile. He was the grandson of the deposed Catholic King James II who’d escaped the Protestant William of Orange's takeover in 1688. James’ grandson soon became the popular focus of the Jacobite cause. However to the British government, the Young Pretender was just another rebel insurgent.

In 1745, Charles left France for the Scottish Highlands to enlist the clans in rebellion against the proper Hanoverian British King George II. Charles’ plan was to make his father, James Francis Edward (1688–1766), the British king.

At first the few clan chiefs Charles contacted showed little interest in the Stuarts. But the social structure of the Highland clans allowed him to raise a sizable body of men. At first the Stuart campaign went well. After the capture of Edinburgh and assuring his forces that support was on its way from France, Charles marched south. They defeated the British government’s army in East Lothian, then crossed into England and successfully laid siege to Carlisle then Derby. The “invaders” caused great anxiety in the south.

Once it became clear that no help was coming from France, Charles retreated to Scotland. After several more battles, in Ap 1646 they fought at Culloden Moor, near Inverness. The Duke of Cumberland’s 9,000-strong force immediately destroyed the Jacobite army of 5,000 Highlanders.

silver travelling canteen

made by Ebenezer Oliphant in 1740-1
height 165 mm

After the Rebellion, the Hanoverian British government decided to permanently end the Jacobite threat. Many Jacobites were imprisoned or executed; estates were forfeited, the clan system dismantled; weaponry, traditional dress and bagpipes were outlawed. The powers that had underpinned the authority of clan chiefs over their clansmen were abolished. Charles survived the Battle of Culloden but became a fugitive for five months. He eventually escaped to France and never set foot in Scotland again.

Once Bonnie Prince Charlie was permanently gone, the Jacobite cause quickly became a nostalgic theme, expressed through poetry and song, especially in Scotland.

The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh has a large exhibition from May-Nov 2017. The Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites Exhibition includes 300+ objects, plus a selection of works on rare loan from the Vatican.

the separate elements of the travelling canteen

My favourite exhibit was a silver travelling canteen, filled with every implement a prince could possibly need. The outer case of the canteen was decorated with the 3-feathered badge of the Prince of Wales, while the lid was chased with bands of linked thistles, a figure of St Andrew and Charles’ motto. Because the so-called Prince of Wales was made a Knight of the Thistle shortly after his birth, the collar and badge of the Most Nobel Order of the Thistle was prominent. This was the highest honour in Scotland.

The canteen set contained 31 pieces, including a perfectly fitted: wine-taster, cruet, teaspoon and marrow scoop, corkscrew, nutmeg grater, salt and pepper shakers, wine beakers, drinking bowl and a knife-fork set. The outer case, a beautiful example of rococo craftsmanship, was decorated with bands of linked thistles, flowers and leaves, representing the collar of the Order of the Thistle.

Charles brought the canteen with him to Scotland in 1745. When the Rebellion ended in Ap 1746 with the defeat of the Jacobite army at Culloden, the canteen was lost. The victorious government commander, William Duke of Cumberland, captured the canteen and gave it to one of his aides, George Kepple, later the Earl of Albemarle. The silver canteen remained in his family until 1963; after a successful fundraising campaign to prevent it being sold abroad, it was finally acquired by the Museum in 1984.

Who made the canteen? The entire extended family of Edinburgh goldsmith Ebenezer Oliphant were dedicated Jacobite soldiers or Jacobite lay supporters. This elaborate travelling set, made by Ebenezer Oliphant in 1740-41, seemed to have been a 21st birthday gift for Prince Charles.

The Stewart Society was very proud of Oliphant who ended his apprenticeship in 1737. He had learned the skill from James Mitchellson, his master and the most gifted goldsmith in Scotland. I have seen other Oliphant silver art from the 1740s, largely clean, minimally decorated silver footed bowls, tea pots or salvers. By 1753 Ebenezer had prospered so well that he was able to help the family buy back the estates which had been forfeited after the 1746 defeat. Did he continue with richly decorated silver, like the canteen? Or was this a one-off art work, specially designed to proclaim Prince Charles’ right to the British throne?

Alan Ramsay’s previously lost portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie,
1745
Scottish National Portrait Gallery

There are two ironies in this story. Firstly after having spent a total of only 14 months in his “homeland”, Prince Charles eventually escaped to France and never set foot in Scotland again. Secondly the greatest gold and silver artists EVER were Protestant Huguenots expelled in 1685 from France by the Catholic king, Louis XIV. How ironic that when Catholic Prince Charles wanted the best silver art in 1740, he had to commission the pieces from British silver artists.

I never liked King James II, the Old Pretender, the Young Pretender or any part of the Jacobite cause, but I would sell my house and the beloved spouse’s soul to own that piece of Jacobite silver art.

Melbourne has become renowned as Australia’s cultural capital. Note Southbank’s Arts Precinct located next door to Southgate, stretching from the Yarra to the end of Sturt Street. Over the years it has become home to performing arts companies, venues and galleries. This pedestrian-friendly Arts Precinct includes Sidney Myer Music Bowl (1959), the newest National Gallery Victoria building (1968), the city’s premier concert venue Hamer Hall (1982), Arts Centre Melbourne (1984) and its spire, Malthouse Theatre (1990), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2002), Melbourne Recital Centre (2009) and Melbourne Theatre Company’s Southbank Theatre (2009).

The Melbourne Arts Precinct Blueprint 2014 is a co-ordinated approach to the future development of the precinct. The study has been co-ordinated by the key arts stakeholders: City of Melbourne, Arts Victoria and State Government. Whilst each individual organisation has its own plans for the future, the Blueprint sees the precinct as a coordinated plan for this part of the city. A vibrant Southbank precinct needs mixed-use activities with a strong arts focus, vibrant street activity and energy. And as ever, tree-lined streets and beautiful Victorian buildings were/are well preserved.

Was Melbourne’s Art Precinct based on the ideas of the City Beautiful Movement, imported from an overseas city? In the C19th, I might have examined the Vienna’s Ringstrasse. But in the C20th, I would be looking instead at Benjamin Franklin Parkway Philadelphia.

St Kilda Rd, part of the Arts Precinct

Melbourne

At first Philadelphia’s Parkway was a bold dream by the architects who wanted urban planning that could make Philadelphia very special. Fortunately some institutions were already in place. The Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, head church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, had been built on Logan Square, as far back as 1846-64 (by Napoleon LeBrun). As had the Academy of Natural Sciences had opened in 1876 (architect James Windrim).

A formal Parkway plan was developed in 1907 by Horace Trumbauer, Clarence Zantzinger and Paul Crét for the Fairmount Park Art Association. It was a region of educational activities grouped around Logan Square as the central anchor, an artistic centre developed around the Fairmount Plaza, at the entrance to Philadelphia’s best park. Work started in 1917, cutting a very wide (160’) corridor through Fairmount’s residential housing. Philadelphia had thus created a Champs Elysee-like boulevard that connected the centre city to Fairmount Park.

Fortunately Philadelphia celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1876 with America's first World's Fair. And the Philadelphia Museum of Art was originally chartered in 1876 for the World Fair. The City Council funded a competition in 1895 to design a new museum building, and by 1907 architectural plans from Zantzinger and Charles Borie started construction in the Fairmount Parkway. The main museum building opened in 1928. Across from the Museum’s main building, a newly renovated and expanded building opened in 2007.

The Town Hall was completed in 1901. Designed by architects John McArthur, John Ord and Bleddyn Powell, it was the largest municipal building in the USA.

The main branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia opened its main branch doors alongside Logan Square in 1927. The first section of the Pennsylvania Museum was opened in 1928 on the Parkway, designed by architects Borie, Trumbauer and Zantzinger. It was renamed Philadelphia Museum of Art ten years later.

The Rodin Museum opened on Parkway in 1929. The architects were Crét and Jacques Gréber.

Designed by John Windrim, the Franklin Science Institute opened its new building on the Parkway in 1934-38, after 110 years in other Philadelphia locations. Note the imposing statue.

As much time was put into transforming the Parkway outside (sculpture, gardens) as was put into the individual buildings’ architecture eg Swann Memorial Fountain was designed by sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder and completed in 1924, as the centrepiece of Logan Square.

I wasn't very interested in the secure detention Youth Study Centre which was constructed on the Parkway in 1952 (by J Roy Carroll, John Grisdale and William Van Alen). But I was fascinated in 2009 when the youth centre was demolished to make way for the Barnes Foundation which had been in Merion for decades. It opened in 2012.

Moore College of Art and Design moved to its new campus on the Parkway in 1959. And was expanded in 2000.

Other American cities were planning similar projects during those years, creating America's first important contribution to urban design, the City Beautiful Movement. The city planners wanted a model of an orderly, classical metropolis, crossed by boulevards and dominated by contemporary Beaux-Arts and neoclassical buildings. Philadelphia could rightly claim it met the urban challenges of the new era, with a grand boulevard evoking the energy of the C20th.

Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul
Philadelphia

Washington Monument Fountain, Philadelphia
facing down the Parkway.

Philadelphia Museum of Art

In 2009 critic Anthony Tommasini noted that if a sprawling multi-disciplinary performing-arts complex were proposed in a big city today, it would probably never be built. Talking about the Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts in New York, he said the community assumed that orchestras, opera companies, ballet troupes and theatres would gain a lot by becoming partners in a centralised complex. But, he asked, is that still true? Firstly the promise of arts organisations working together can become a daily grind of competing boards. Secondly such complexes tend to result in an arts ghetto, away from the broader community. He concluded that because an Arts Precinct allowed arts lovers to travel from their suburbs, dine, attend a performance and return home, it placed functional convenience above the desirability for the arts to be owned by the community.

I am not sure his arguments are valid in Melbourne or in Philadelphia, so now is time to read Richard Carreño's Museum Mile: Philadelphia's Parkway Museums, 2011. It tells how and why the Benjamin Franklin Parkway eventually hosted at least 12 major cultural institutions of national.

Once Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany’s 572,000 Jews faced catastrophe as was made perfectly clear in Peter Nash's book Escape From Berlin (Impact Press, 2017). So how did some European Jews receive visas to the Far East? Just as the German industrialist Oskar Schindler saved the lives of 1200 Jews in Poland, three less-known diplomats helped Jews to get to Shanghai.

In 1940 Chiune Sugihara was the Japanese consul general in Lithuania. He issued visas to 6000 Jews, against his Tokyo superiors’ instructions, allowing Jews to transit through Japan. When he ran out of authentic visas, Sugihara threw signed sheets of paper stamped with his consular seal to the Jews as the train left Lithuania to take him back to Japan.

Ho Feng-Shan was Chinese consul general in Vienna. After the Anschluss in 1938, the only way for the 200,000 Austrian Jews to escape was to get an entry visa from a foreign nation. Against the orders of his superior in Berlin, Ho issued thousands of visas for refugees going to Shanghai. Until he was ordered to return to China in 1940.

Tadeusz Romer was the Polish ambassador to Japan. When many of Sugihara's Jews reached Japan, they could still have been sent back to Nazi-occupied Poland. So Romer intervened, granting them new passports and visas to neutral countries. When the Polish embassy was shut down in 1941, “his” Jews were sent to safety in Shanghai.

Nachemstein/Nash family
Born in Berlin in 1936, three-year-old Peter Nachemstein and his parents were forced to escape Nazi Germany by fleeing to Shanghai. The SS Scharnhorst was a German liner that they boarded in Genoa in April 1939. They almost missed the boat. When the Nachemsteins were served with an eviction notice straight after the infamous Kristallnacht destruction in Nov 1938 Herbert and Ingeborg wanted tickets to Argentina. When that failed, Ingeborg's father saved them.

The voyage took Peter (aged 3) and his family through the Suez Canal with stops at Colombo, Manila and Hong Kong before the ship finally docked at Shanghai. Despite their fine surroundings on the Scharnhorst, the Nachemsteins were in fact "boat people". They were persecuted refugees who had fled their homeland with little more than their clothes. And they were disembarking, without visas, funds or language, at a Chinese port that had been invaded by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1937. Fortunately in those final few months before Hitler invaded Poland in Sept 1939, Shanghai was an open treaty port, a haven that accepted refugees without an entry visa.

Peter's friends, the Witting family, fled Berlin and arrived in Shanghai in May 1939 on the SS Conte Verde. The Wittings were met by Jewish representatives and taken to the Heime/-former refugee camps military barracks. Although 30 people packed into double bunk beds, the Wittings were fortunate. Relatives in South Africa sent money, allowing them to rent a single room in Hongkew, for eight years.

Today this massive Chinese city is glamorous for tourists. In WW2, less so. Shanghai was divided into four distinct zones along the northern banks of the Yellow River: a] Old Chinese City, b] French Concession, c] International Settlement and d] Chinese Districts which had most of the city's 4 million population.

New arrivals were issued with a blanket, sheets, tin dish, cup and spoon, and access to a soup kitchen. There were various Shanghai Relief Aid Committees which received funds from overseas donors, especially the American Joint.

The trickle of European refugees that began in the mid 1930s had become a flood by late 1939. Meanwhile thousands of impoverished Chinese were pouring into Shanghai, seeking work. Beggars were everywhere. Death was everywhere; coolies pushed carts around, picking up Chinese bodies.

The Jewish Designated Area,
Hongkew

A Jewish coffee shop, White Horse Cafe

Hongkew 19139-49

The small room had 2 beds, sink, stove, table and cupboard. The Nachmensteins shared an unsewered toilet and a bathtub with two other families. Every morning Chinese workers arrived and cleaned out the toilets. The tap water had to be boiled.

Fortunately the women could collect food each day from the Heime kitchens. Survival in Shanghai was risked by poor diet, bad sanitation and low resistance to tropical diseases, but it was much better than any alternative. Compared to Europe’s death camps, Shanghai was a haven of safety.

Any Jewish refugee who could raise enough money would leave the Heime. Most hoped to settle in Hongkew in the International Settlement, which had been partially destroyed by 1937 bombs. As streets were cleared and houses rebuilt, Hongkew offered the Nachemsteins one single, subsidised room in a terraced house in Hongkew.

By Nov 1940, the Shanghai authorities were trying to stem the tide of refugees by issuing entry visas. Just in time, Ingeborg's sister and brother in law took the only escape route - they caught the train from Berlin to Moscow, the Trans-Siberian Express to Vladivostok and a boat to Shanghai. Then Hitler declared war on Soviet Union and escapes ended.

The Shanghai Jews did not have to face anti-Semitism. Neither the Chinese nor the Japanese, Confucianist or Buddhist, treated Jews any differently to other foreigners. Life was stable until Dec 1941 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour. Suddenly Shanghai was swamped with Japanese military and civilian personnel searching for housing. A very polite Japanese family moved into the Nash’s terrace house, occupying the entire first floor. The Japanese only targeted American and British nationals. Some Sephardic Jews from the Middle East or India had British passports and were treated brutally, but only because they were British!

The real change didn't come until Mar 1943. Under pressure from senior Nazis, the Japanese agreed to move all the stateless refugees into a Designated Area i.e Shanghai Ghetto in Hongkew, patrolled at night. The one villain was the brutal Japanese commander of the Designated Area, Kanoh Ghoya.

At its peak, Shanghai had a Jewish community of c35,000 people with a school, synagogue, hospital, refugee hostels and bakeries. Both Nash and Witting attended the Shanghai Jewish Youth Association School, established by the famous Kadoori family, Middle Eastern Jews who’d had a commercial base in Shanghai.

Shanghai was liberated by US troops in Aug 1945. Peace freed 3.5 million Chinese residents in this city, 6,000+ foreign citizens interned in the Civil Assembly Centre and 23,000 Jewish refugees in the Shanghai Ghetto. Most of the Shanghai Ghetto residents re-applied to the countries where they had originally wanted to go, back in 1939.

Shanghai had been the Nash family’s sanctuary, albeit a chaotic one. They left Shanghai for Australia in Feb 1949, as soon as their application for entry was finally accepted. For 60 years, the Shanghai survivors in Australia shared regular Hongkew newsletters and reunions.

In 2015 thePeople’s Republic of China and the World Jewish Congress commemorated the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Shanghai Ghetto and the end of WW2. The photo credits belong to WJC. Jewish Refugees in Shanghai was displayed at Sabes Jewish Community Centre in Minnesota in 2015. The Prague Jewish Museum opened an exhibit on the Jewish Refugees living in Shanghai ghetto in 2016. The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museumis always worth visiting.

Peter Nash, now 82, retired after a successful career in the textile industry. He launched his book Escape From Berlin at the 2017 Sydney Jewish Writers Festival. Thanks Australian Financial Review for some of the details in this post.

The Jewish Museum of Australia in Melbourne had a fine exhibition in the 1990s called The Story of a Haven: The Jews in Shanghai. To read of the earlier waves of émigrés, see a] Jews fleeing persecution in Czarist Russia who arrived just before WW1, settling in Shanghai's French Concession and b] German speakers who arrived after the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933.

Brave New World: Australia 1930s is a special exhibition at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV in Melbourne until mid Oct 2017. The 1930s was a turbulent time in Australia’s history. Major world events, including the Depression and the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe, shaped our nation’s evolving sense of identity during this decade.

See a multitude of artistic styles, both progressive and reactionary, which were practised during the 1930s: fashion, commercial art, architecture, industrial design, film and dance. The exhibition presents a detailed picture of this dynamic time and reveals some of the social and political concerns that were pertinent then.

The life saver and the Sydney Harbour Bridge

Celebrating the bridge's opening in 1932

The exhibition charts the themes of technological progress and its antithesis in the nostalgia for pastoralism; the emergence of the New Woman; nationalism and the body culture movement; mounting calls for Indigenous rights and the increasing interest in Indigenous art; the devastating effects of the Depression and the rise of radical politics; and the arrival of European refugees. During the very turbulent 1930s high-rise buildings, fast trains and engineering marvels like the Sydney Harbour Bridge were up against the Great Depression, conservatism and a looming WW2.

The Brave New World Exhibition is accompanied by a top quality, fully-illustrated hardback publication, featuring essays by leading writers on each of the exhibition themes.

Artist and Designers
The exhibition presented 200+ works spanning photography, painting, printmaking, sculpture and décorative arts as well as design, fashion, film and dance. Abstraction, Surrealism and Expressionism emerged, and women artists arose as trailblazers of modernism. Consider modernist artist Grace Cossington Smith with her flat colours and abstracted forms. And Hilda Rix Nicholas.

Modernism in architecture, interior design, industrial design and advertising was becoming fashionable. In Melbourne a group of designers was the first to pioneer modern design in Australia eg furniture designer Fred Ward at his home-furniture workshop in Eaglemont. In 1932 Ward opened a shop in the City, selling furniture, linens and Scandinavian glass. Fabrics for curtains and upholstery were printed by Australian designer Michael O’Connell with bold designs.

When Robert Menzies (later Prime Minister) proposed the formation of an Australian Academy of Art, Melbourne modernists were concerned that their departure from conventional art would be marginalised. Especially when Menzies opened the Victorian Artists' Society show in April 1937 and singled out for attack a wall of modernist art.

It took time before design and architecture became closely integrated with the changing realities of contemporary life... when the last vestiges of the conservative art establishment were unpopular.

Fashioning the modern woman
In the 1930s the new Modern Woman emerged as a more serious version of the dizzy 1920s flapper. A working woman, she often lived alone in a new block of flats, visited night clubs and showed less interest in traditional marriage and child rearing. And she valued loved urban living, freedom and equality. With clothes introduced by French couturier Jean Patou in 1929, her lean body type was enhanced by lengthened hemlines and defined waists. In addition to the clothes, the Modern Woman was fashioned through her gestures, behaviours, beliefs and self presentation (eg smoking casually).

The Modern Woman became one of the most potent images of 1930s life, being celebrated in women’s magazines like "Australian Women’s Weekly", launched in 1933. Such magazines congratulated the Modern Woman and promoted new consumer goods to her, yet at the same time she was criticised by conservative commentators.

Portrait of modernist artist Peggie Crombie,

painted by Sybil Craig

1932, NGV.

Sun and Surf

The beach was a complex location in the Australian creative imagination. It was a democratic site in which the trappings of wealth were abandoned as people stripped down to their bathers. It was a place of hedonistic pleasures that offered sensuous engagement with sun and surf, where natural forces restored exhausted city bodies.

Note artist/photographer Max Dupain’s iconic depictions of the Australian body and beach culture. It was a tourist play ground that was considered distinctively Australian. Male lifesavers were used by artists in promoting Australia to tourists: a poster commemorating the Sydney Harbour Bridge opening in 1932 cited the lifesaver as the quintessential representative of Australian manhood and virility. His muscles were as strong as the steel girders above.

The lifesavers that helped protect the beach-going public were regularly praised as physical exemplars who could build the eugenic stock of the nation. As WW2 approached, the connection of these trained lifesavers to military servicemen became painfully apparent.

The body beautiful
The terrible physical losses and psychological traumas of WW1 changed Australian society and prompted anxiety about our strength. For some this meant an inward-looking isolationism, a desire that Australian culture should develop untouched by the degenerate influences of Europe. The search for rejuvenation involved explorations of the vulnerabilities of the human body. For artists, corporeal forms came to symbolise nationhood, often expressed via Classical Greek art. So the evolution of a new Australian type was proposed – a white Australian drawn from British stock, but with an athletic and streamlined shape honed by years spent swimming and surfing on local beaches.

Enthusiasm for body culture with its undesirable fascistic overtones is now seen as problematic.

Dance in Australia

Modern dance embodied the 1930s’ restless vitality and the quest for a different kind of subjectivity and expression. To many, modern dance was the pivotal art form for a mid C20th concerned with plasticity, the expressive body and tensions between the individual and its collective formation.

The 1930s were framed by the 1928–29 tour of Anna Pavlova’s Dance Company and the three tours of the remnant Ballets Russes companies (1936–40) that excited many aspiring modernist artists. These tours predicted subsequent ballet narratives in Australia, because the eruption of war in 1939 meant that Ballets Russes dancers, including Helene Kirsova and Edouard Borovansky, stayed here and established ballet companies.

Aboriginal Art and Culture
During the 1930s the Australian Government continued to enforce a divide and rule assimilationist policy. Determined by eugenics, this entailed removing Aboriginal people of mixed descent from their families and reserves, and absorbing them into the dominant Anglo society. Increasingly, Aboriginal people formed their own organisations and agitated for full citizenship rights.

The exhibition explores artists’ responses to the call for Indigenous rights during the 1930s. Albert Namatjira astonished Melbourne audiences at his first solo exhibition at the Athenaeum Gallery in 1938. His 41 watercolour paintings sold in three days! The following year South Australia’a Art Gallery purchased one of Namatjira’s works. Indigenous art also inspired non-Indigenous artists like Margaret Preston, who appropriated design elements in their works, to travel to the outback to appreciate Indigenous history.

Australia tuned into the world by radio
Radios in the 1930s at a time when this new method of communication became an integral part of every home. They reflect the rapid spread of the streamlined style to Australia from Europe and the USA, where industrial designers applied machine-age styling to everyday household appliances. The use of new synthetic plastics (Bakelite) and mass production helped to make radios affordable for ordinary people, even during the Depression, and radio transmission brought the world into every Australian home.

Colourful and elegant radios of the 1930s are now loved as core examples of Art Deco styling, and one of the first expressions of art meeting industry. Alas the exhibition’s radios were too high for my grandchildren to see, to change channels and to listen to an old news broadcast.

The Great Depression and the brave new world of cities
Unemployment rate rose to 32% by 1932, second only to Germany in awfulness. The photographer F. Oswald Barnett displayed powerful images of impoverished inner Melbourne suburbs, with hungry children and decrepit houses. In paintings we see similar images, firstly in the works of emigres Danila Vassilieff and Yosl Bergner. Then Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker became committed to depicting Australia’s unemployed workers and destitute families.

The towering Manchester Unity Building emerged in Melbourne
in 1932, giving employment to Depression-hit workers.

Efficiency and speed depicted modernity. Many artists celebrated the city and technological advancements in works utilising hard-edged forms, flat colours and dynamic compositions. The engineering marvel of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, opened in 1932, fascinated artists, as did city buildings, industry and modern transport.

The skyscraper was THE powerful symbol of modernity, once the Great Depression seemed to stop progress. In 1932, as the Depression hit rock bottom, Melbourne’s tallest building was opened: Manchester Unity Building. With its ornamental tower and tall spire, the building became a new symbol of enterprise and confidence, and provided much-needed employment during the Depression.

Efficiency, speed and great design depicted modernity

Poster of The Victorian Railways, 1937

Australia's pastoral cult
A national myth evolved around the Australian bush. Although most Australians lived in cities, the post-WW1 nation learned that the bush was a nostalgic touchstone of traditional values. The classical pastoral ideal of a land in which only sheep and cattle roam became a dominant theme in landscape art. Elioth Gruner depicted the Australian bush as a respite from the frenetic pace of modern city life.

Pastoral landscapes were admired above all as representing the antithesis of decadent modern life. Conservative gallery director JS Macdonald said such art would point the way in which life should be lived in Australia, with the maximum of flocks and the minimum of factories. Of course such works affirmed white landownership.

The Museum of Manufactures and the Government School of Design were located in Marlborough House, an impressive Pall Mall residence. When a new home for this Museum (later Victoria & Albert) had to be found in South Kensington, they used the estate bought by the Commissioners for 1851’s Great Exhibition. The Museum was established in 1852 with 3 founding principles i.e to make works of art available to all; to educate working people; and to inspire British designers and manufacturers. All plans had to be approved by Prince Albert, including approval for Sir Henry Cole (1808–82) to become first V & A Director. The financial surplus from the Great Exhibition went to the V & A!

The South Kensington site architect was Captain Francis Fowke (1823-65), Inspector of Science and Art. Instead of Gothic architecture, Fowke proposed to focus on a North Italian Renaissance style, two storeys high, with a grand Lecture Theatre complex as centrepiece.

In 1861 designer Godfrey Sykes (1824-66) was invited to London by Henry Cole to assist with the horticultural gardens and arcades. The decorative schemes in the North and South Courts were mainly Sykes’ work, especially the choice of terracotta as the decorative medium.

In the showpiece Lecture Theatre building’s main feature was the red brick, terracotta and mosaic-faced façade, three large recessed arches and terracotta columns bearing figures. Portraits of key members of the Museum team, and names from the arts and sciences, appeared in the mosaic panels, lunettes and door panels.

Gamble Room with pianist

The Gamble, Poynter/Grill & Morris/Green Rooms were to be the interlinked Museum’s restaurants. Although they were to be functional spaces, these restaurants would highlight the Museum's lavishly decorated public face. Victorian designer William Morris had been Pre-Raphaelite friends with architect Philip Webb, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1861, all partners in the interior decorating-furnishing business. Henry Cole was truly avant-garde in his determination that these three eating rooms should reflect the simplicity of Morris Company's designs.

A] The walls and columns of the Gamble Room, influenced by Prince Albert's Frogmore Dairy of 1858–61, were faced with Minton majolica. The lofty and light room was opened in 1867, and The Building News in 1870 found the room bright and cheerful, like a richly adorned cafés of Paris. BHO noted that John Everett Millais (1829-96) selected the colours. But in 1874–5 the plaster ceiling was replaced by the Enamelled Iron Company with one of sheet-iron enamelled in colours suggested by the metal ads on railway stations. Visitors ate at attractive tables.

Opposite the Museum’s main entrance, the Gamble Room was the visitor's first view inside. The amazing decoration was part of Cole's concept of a “museum restaurant as a way of getting people to enjoy culture”. The windows and frieze were full of Victorian sayings on the joys of eating and drinking. Ventilation grilles in the ceiling of the Gamble Room were surrounded by heavy enamelled-iron railway-type plates. The ceramic tiled walls and columns were provided a hygienic, washable site for eating.

Edward Poynter Grill Room

B] The smaller flanking rooms needed other decoration. Edward Poynter (1836-1919), so successful at the Royal Academy, was invited in Nov 1865 to tender for the decoration of the eastern restaurant, the Grill Room-Poynter Room. Designed by Poynter himself, the tile panels were painted in a tile-painting class for female students at the Schools of Design. For women to be engaged in so public a commission was very progressive. This radical spirit at South Kensington found popular expression in the alternative Arts and Crafts designs of the 1880-1910 era.

And he designed the windows and the iron-brass grill. The décoration of the meat grill, particularly in the applied brass, looked modern. The room was opened in 1867.

The Poynter Room was furnished with small iron tables with white marble tops. The catering contractor offered a long breakfast menu, divided according to social standing. The 1st class menu was elaborate and expensive; the 2nd class menu was more limited and cheaper. The 3rd class menu was only available to workmen at the Museum. In a related theme, the V&A was the first public museum in the world to be artificially lit. Workers could come in the evenings, “furnishing a powerful antidote to the Gin Palace”, and giving working families culture instead of booze.

This room shows that in the later C19th many designers were influenced by Japan. The wave patterns on the stove doors, the peacocks on the frieze tile panels, and the flower motifs on the blue-and-white tiles … all come from the east.

C] The western most room, the Green Dining Room-Morris Room, was designed by Morris. The subdued gold and greens colours of the scheme show that he was still under the sacred influence of the Gothic Revival. He decorated the walls with Elizabethan wooden panelling, below a section of green plaster with olive branches in low relief. And the stained-glass windows had female figures painted by Edward Burne-Jones and Philip Webb. Each table had matching myrtle-green Burleigh crockery.

In 1864 the Museum bought some stained glass from Morris, Marshall & Faulkner Co. The estimate for the windows was accepted in Sept 1866 and the estimate for the ceiling and panelled dado was accepted in Oct 1867. The work was finished in 1868–9. Burne Jones' dado rail art displayed the signs of the zodiac and his designs for the windows showed medieval domestic tasks.

William Morris Green Room

The rest of the decoration was by Morris' friend, architect Philip Webb. Webb took his inspiration from medieval and Ecclesiastical sources eg a font in Newcastle Cathedral for the frieze, and medieval manuscripts for the ceiling decoration. The four hanging lights were designed much later, from a drawing by Philip Webb, and were installed in 1926. Morris’ pattern-making was in the plaster-work on the walls – Tudorish leaves, flowers and berries.

Sir Henry Cole retired in 1873 but by 1889, public opinion demanded that Museum work be somehow completed. The Victoria and Albert Museum was built from 1899 and opened in 1909, representing a return to the idea of the museum of priceless treasures in marble halls. The lavishly decorated, historic refreshment rooms that stunned and delighted visitors in the Victorian era were way beyond my personal taste, but these treasures are still well worth visiting today.

Nigel Cawthorne’s book Sex Lives of the Kings and Queens of England (Carlton Publishing, 2004) proposed that there was more to fascination with royal sexual antics than mere prurience. Throughout history, the sexual partners of royals could be a matter of life or death. Political alliances were often made on royal marriages, so the success of a marital relationship could influence the nation’s foreign policies. Yes the British royal family no longer enjoys the power it once did, given that the constitutional monarchy is only a Head of State. Yet he also proposed that gross sexual misconduct by any of them could seriously undermine the position of the monarchy. How could those views compatible? I would have loved the author to provide his sources.

Prince of Wales' great love affairs. Photo credit: Daily Mail

I loved every chapter, but my favourite was The Greatest Love Story Ever Told that dealt with the Edward Prince of Wales (1894-1972). During WW1, the Prince was taken to a Calais brothel where he found the sight of female genitalia revolting. He had his first sexual experience in Amiens, then took up with a courtesan in Paris.

Back in London, the Prince courted Lady Sybil Cadogan, his sister’s best friend, and wanted marriage in 1917. The next affair was with Lady Rosemary Leveson-Gower, a society beauty who the prince wanted to marry in 1918. Edward loathed his parents, incensed that they prevented him from marrying Lady Rosemary. Anyhow she married William Ward, 3rd Earl of Dudley, in March 1919.

Then Edward chose married woman - the still-married Marian Coke, his much adored lover Freda Dudley Ward (divorced wife of an MP who was vice chamberlain of the Royal Household) and the married American heiress Audrey James. Best of all was Lady Thelma Furness, the daughter of an American diplomat who eloped at 16, divorced and then married the shipping magnate Viscount Furness. Thelma joined the Prince in Kenya in 1928 where the two fell passionately in love.

In time Thelma complained her royal lover had been poorly endowed and was a lacklustre performer. Did Thelma’s lack of excitement come from the Prince’s homosexual preferences, as described by the writer Lytton Strachey (1880–1932)? Luckily Thelma soon met the well-endowed playboy Aly Khan, son of the Aga Khan.

Louis Mountbatten drew up a list of 17 eligible young royals, including Greek Princesses Margarita and Theodora, and 18-year-old Princess Ingrid of Sweden who arrived in London in 1928. But for the Prince of Wales in his mid-30s, there was little of interest amongst these royals.

Note that Thelma Furness’ best friend was the American Wallis Simpson whose first husband had been the sadistic, bi-sexual navy flier, Earl Winfield Spencer (married 1916). To make married life less miserable, Wallis had affairs with foreign diplomats. In Shanghai and in Peking she enjoyed delightful affairs with wealthy American men, then a fine lesbian affair with Admiral FH Sadler’s wife. And Italian men must have been very attractive to Wallis Simpson since she went out with the Italian Naval Attache Alberto de Zara and with the married Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son in law & Italy’s Foreign Minister.

Wallis returned to the USA and met British shipping executive and Coldstream Guards officer, Ernest Simpson. As both Wallis and Ernest were married to other people, they had to arrange hasty divorces. They married in 1929 and returned to Britain to live. Soon Wallis travelled to France with Consuela Thaw and Gloria Vanderbilt, who was in the middle of a torrid, gay affair with another aristocrat.

Freda Dudley Ward, Prince Edward, Viscountess Furness, Prince George of Hanover 1932. Photo credit: Daily Mail

By 1935 King George V was alarmed that his son was having an affair with Wallis Simpson, but the Prince didn’t care.

Wallis noted the extreme lack of virility that Thelma Furness had complained so explicitly about years ago and it is doubtful whether the couple ever had sexual intercourse. Wallis taught him erotic games based on nanny-child scenes in which he was happily submissive.

Although Wallis was entertaining Edward's foot fetishes, she still had her own needs. While Nazi Germany was invading the demilitarised Rhinelands, Wallis was having an affair with Germany’s ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Ribbentrop believed that the Prince of Wales would eventually dictate British foreign policy, so he convinced Hitler that the Nazis had the Prince's support. How much did the German ambassador know from the Prince of Wales himself, and how much did he learn in bed from Wallis?

Wallis made it clear in her letters that she did not love her Prince, but she enjoyed her power over him. He was a masochist who liked being degraded, as Freda Dudley Ward had also noted.

Prince Edward admired Hitler's economic and social reforms, infuriating the British government by saying that Britain should offer the Nazis friendship. Edward wanted to speak privately with Hitler and claimed he would abandon his eventual throne, if the British Prime Minister declared war on Germany.

In Jan 1936, King George V died & Edward was crowned King Edward VIII, still determined to marry Wallis! A divorce was speedily arranged for Mrs Simpson, but prime minister Stanley Baldwin said it wouldn’t help – the king could never marry a multi-divorced foreigner. When the scandal broke in the British newspapers, Wallis fled to France. But King Edward abdicated in Dec 1936 anyhow, after only one year. Wallis’ divorce was finalised in May 1937.

The Duke and Duchess with Adolf Hitler, 1937

The Duke of Windsor finally got married in June 1937. Cut off from the British royal family, the Duchess became the closest friend of Diana Mitford, wife of the British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley. Diana’s sister Unity, an intimate of Hitler's, had introduced Diana to the Fuhrer back in March 1935. Note that Lady Mosley’s marriage took place in Joseph Goebbels’ home, with Adolf Hitler as guest of honour.

Edward wanted to become a figurehead for an international movement for peace on Hitler's terms, meeting the Fuhrer at his mountain retreat of Obersalzberg. He also met Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess twice, planning to see him re-installed as puppet monarch, if the Nazis invaded Britain.

In 1947, Cawthorne reported, the Duke was involved in a torrid affair with Jimmy Donahue, New York heir to the Woolworth fortune. Noel Coward, who became a close friend of the Windsors after the abdication, also liked Jimmy Donahue. The Duke, Duchess and Donahue travelled together, but the menage a trois foundered because of the growing entourage of rent boys.

So I don’t mind if Edward was straight, gay, celibate, submissive or a pole dancer. No do I mind that Wallis was divorced, foreign and sexually exotic. But I do care that both of them were close to Nazi politics, social policy and economics. They had an association with the British Union of Fascists, Oswald and Diana Mosley, Hitler, Goebbels and Hess, and planned to retake the British throne on behalf of the Germans.

The Early Years

Richard Bruno Heydrich was director of Halle Conservatory of Music and Theatre which he had founded in 1901. He composed and performed choral works, songs, orchestral works and operas a la Richard Wagner. Heydrich’s wife Elisabeth taught piano at the Halle Conservatory and Elisabeth’s father had been the director of the Dresden Royal Conservatory. Clearly the Heydrich family was a very culturally and financially important family!

Reinhard Heydrich (1904-42) was born in Halle NW of Leipzig, son of Richard and Elisabeth. Music was an integral part of family life; the young lad developed a passion for the violin and cello. He excelled in science and athletics at the Reform-gymnasium. But he was whipped by his mother and bullied by children for his high voice and possible Jewish ancestry.

Too young to fight in WWI, Heydrich got lucky. WW1 ended with Germany's defeat in 1918. In Feb 1919, strikes and clashes between left and right-wingers took place in Halle, so a right-wing paramilitary unit was formed under the Defence Minister and ordered to control Halle. Tall, teenage Heydrich joined the Volunteer Rifles.

Because of the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation spread across Germany and incomes collapsed. By 1921, few townspeople in Halle could afford a musical education at Bruno Heydrich's conservatory. As the family struggled economically, strikes and street battles in Halle meant revolutionary chaos surrounded young Reinhard. A relatively late convert to Nazism, he joined the anti-Semitic National German Protection & Shelter League.

But instead of fulfilling his father's dream to study music, Reinhard joined the navy in 1922. Impressed by the security, free education and pension it offered, he became a naval cadet at Kiel, Germany's primary naval base. In 1924 he was promoted and sent to officer training at the Naval Academy Mürwik.

Naval officer Heydrich specialised in signals and communications. And he specialised in sexual affairs. In Dec 1930 he met Lina von Osten at a sports club ball. They soon announced their engagement, so he left another senior naval officer’s daughter to whom he had been engaged. A military court of honour found him to have dishonoured the officer corps of the Reich Navy and forced him to resign his commission in 1931. Heydrich’s dismissal was terrible; he was suddenly unemployed. In Dec 1931 he married Lina, already a convinced Nazi Party supporter, and went on to have four adorable children.

Reinhard Heydrich

Robert Gerwarth's book
published by Yale University Press, 2012

Naval officer Heydrich specialised in signals and communications. And he specialised in sexual affairs. In Dec 1930 he met Lina von Osten at a sports club ball. They soon announced their engagement, so he left another senior naval officer’s daughter to whom he had been engaged. A military court of honour found him to have dishonoured the officer corps of the Reich Navy and forced him to resign his commission in 1931. Heydrich’s dismissal was terrible; he was suddenly unemployed. In Dec 1931 he married Lina, already a convinced Nazi Party supporter, and went on to have four adorable children.

THE SS

Heydrich was introduced to SS chief Heinrich Himmler in Munich. Seeking to create an internal intelligence service for the Nazi party, Himmler was so impressed by Heydrich's proposals and his Aryan characteristics that he brought him into the SS. By Jan 1933, the Intelligence Agency/SD under Heydrich's leadership had become an important agency in the Nazi party.

29-year-old Heydrich played a leading role in the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, leading to further promotion within the SS. In 1934 Heydrich was given command of the Berlin Gestapo, a position that suited his very skilful brutality. Under his leadership, they compiled complete details about potential spies and enemies.

The SD entered Austria after the Anschluss in March 1938; and then entered the Sudetenland after itsannexation in Oct 1938. They quickly secured intelligence and arrested Germany’s enemies. In Nov 1938 SD experts and police provoked the violence of Kristallnacht throughout Nazi Germany, exclusively directed against Jewish synagogues and homes. In the wake of this pogrom, they implemented the first roundup of c30,000 Jews.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, six Einsatz-gruppen Mobile Killing Units moved into Poland behind the front-line troops. They killed thousands of members of the Polish nationalist and cultural elite.

Hitler and Himmler

comforting Heydrich's sons

at the Berlin funeral, 1942

After Germany invaded Poland, Himmler formally linked the Security Police and SD by establishing The Reich Main Security Office/RSHA in Sept 1939, under Heydrich's command. Like Himmler, Heydrich had to “guarantee the security and survival of the German race” and they did it by suppressing all internal and external enemies of the Nazi state: World Jewry, Marxists (Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists), churches who opposed the regime (eg Jehovah's Witnesses), traditional nationalists & Freemasons. The Gestapo incarcerated these groups in camps.

When the previously dormant Czech communist resistance movement started carrying out acts of sabotage, Hitler dismissed Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath (Germany’s ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs). Instead he appointed Heydrich as Acting Reich Leader of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia from Sept 1941 on.

Heydrich first ordered a terror campaign against real and possible leaders of the Czech communists. In Oct-Nov 1941, German Protectorate courts had 342 people executed and gave 1,289 to the Gestapo. Heydrich opened Theresienstadt camp-ghetto in Nov; under his rule 14,000 German and Austrian Jews, plus 20,000 Czech Jews, were deported from Theresienstadt. The Butcher of Prague’s role was to stamp out all Czech rebellion via terror and mass executions.

Nonetheless I was surprised to read that Heydrich became known as one of the main architects of the Final Solution. In Jan 1939 Hermann Göring authorised Heydrich to develop plans for a Final Solution to the Jewish Question in the German Reich. By Jan 1942 Heydrich had invited key officials from various Reich Ministries to a conference at a villa on the Wannsee Lake, in SW Berlin. At this Wannsee Conference he presented plans, authorised by Hitler himself, to coordinate a European-wide Final Solution. Heydrich and the SS had to coordinate the resources of the Reich, and submit the final plan. To guarantee success, he requested the active participation of all Ministries represented at Wannsee.

The Special Operations Executive/SOE was an espionage and reconnaissance unit created by Winston Churchill in June 1940. The BBC reported that the British SOE planned the assassination of Heydrich in Prague. In the top-secret Operation Anthropoid, the SOE trained a group of Czech resistance members to kill Heydrich. Operation Anthropoid reported to Winston Churchill and to Edvard Benes, President of the Czech-government-in-exile.

Heydrich was so self-confident that he travelled around Prague in an open vehicle. In May 1942, as he was travelling to the airport to fly to Hitler's headquarters, two Czech partisans rolled a hand grenade under Heydrich's car. The grenade splinters throughout his body led to an infection that killed him a week later.

Hitler was so enraged by Heydrich’s assassination that he ordered murderous reprisals against the Czech population; the SS troops captured the two Czech towns of Lidice and Ležáky, executing every man and destroying every home. At Heydrich’s state funeral in Berlin, both Hitler and Himmler mourned one of their best Final Solution Executors, a skilled killer of the Enemies of the Reich.

Bodies of the adult male civilians of Lidice,

murdered in reprisal for the assassination of Heydrich. 1942

Conclusion
Heydrich, the man from a cultured, educated family, oversaw Occupied Czechoslovakia and the murderous death squads. His utter brutality was high even by Nazi standards. The details of the British SOE's involvement in his assassination are still unclear.

Thanks to Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich by Robert Gerwarth and The History Place.

The 1889–1890 Flu Pandemic was similar to the great Spanish Flu pandemic and might have prepared doctors and armies in WW1. It was first noted in different countries: China (1888); Athabasca in Canada (May 1889); Greenland (summer 1889), Tomsk in Siberia and Bukhara in Uzbekistan (Oct 1889), St Petersburg in late Oct 1889, and expanded rapidly via railway across Europe. In Paris, the first cases were recorded on 17th Nov; in Berlin and Vienna on 30th Nov; in London in mid Dec, and in southern European countries in late Dec. The flu spread overseas to Boston and New York in Jan 1890. And then throughout North and South America, Africa, Asia and Oceania by mid 1890. The most tragic period was between Dec 1889 and Jan 1890; the majority of the million deaths were older than 50.

So how different was the Spanish Flu Epidemic of WW1? Even before the arrival of air travel, Spanish flu swept around the world in just 3 catastrophic months from Oct 1918 to Jan 1919 - and killed more people than WW1 had.

The 1918 flu came in two waves. The first wave was a benign bout that began in March 1918 in Spain. The epidemic was remarkable for the millions of victims struck down; high temperatures; aching limbs; headaches and sore throats. Mostly the illness quickly passed and few deaths occurred.

An early pandemic occurred in the British military base at Étaples (1916–1917) in North France. This military base, situated near sea marshes with migratory birds, was occupied by 100,000 soldiers within 12 sq ks. Presumably the epidemic came from a mixture of very crowded soldiers, ? infected birds and mutagenic war gas. Or perhaps the virus originated with pigs kept near the British troops at the camp, and then jumped species over to humans.

As France lost its own men in The Great War, hundreds of thousands of troops in indigenous army units were organised in the French colonies in Africa, Asia and Oceania. Of the 50,000+ Indo-Chinese soldiers sent from the old Annam kingdom (now Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia) to France, half of them were assigned to active battalions, or as nurses and lorry drivers on the Front. But was there a connection with flu?

Medical records reported that an American flu epidemic began in Feb 1918, in Sing-Sing Prison in New York. Others mentioned an acute infectious outbreak among young farmers in Haskell County in Kansas. This too occurred in Feb 1918, especially once these young farmers enlisted and were incorporated into Kansas’ Funston military camp. The later link to the Spanish Flu in Europe might have been explained in terms of the Chinese workers in Kansas i.e to the new combination of viruses of Chinese and Indochinese origin

Camp Funston, Kansas, 1918

Photo credit: Kansas WW1

The Paris ASSA archives affirmed that the first cases of flu in France appeared in the Third Army in Villers-sur-Coudun and in the Fère-Briange training field in April 1918. At the same time, flu broke out in the American army which was based in the outskirts of Bordeaux. And there were flu cases reported in 1st and 2nd battalions of the British army in France, in the German army at the Western front, and in the Military Hospital of Cabour in Belgium. Without a vaccine or antibiotics, public health authorities watched as the pandemic raged. People best avoided infection via face masks and staying away from crowds.

But after a period of calm in mid 1918 the virus mutated, becoming extremely virulent. This more deadly second wave probably first started in Spain. Thus the label “Spanish Flu”. Spain had been neutral in the Great War, but it permitted the passage of Portuguese troops, workers and merchandise towards France. This important communications hub between the Iberian Peninsula and Paris was in the Basque Country, at the outlet of a marshy bird-filled river - a frontier region that could have been one of the places in which the virus mutated and became invasive.

From Oct 1918 on, the flu moved to the general population across Spain, eventually affecting Portugal, then French and Italian cities. Frightening mortality quickly emerged. Fluid entered the lungs; faces turned blue; the cough brought up the blood-stained sputum and the feet turned black. The lucky victims quickly drowned in their own lungs. The unlucky victims developed bacterial pneumonia as an agonising secondary infection. In the morning, the dead bodies were stacked about the morgue. But between the speed of the flu outbreak and effective military censorship in WW1, families didn’t know what had happened to their loved ones.

The Allies had been boosted by hundreds of thousands of strapping young American recruits pouring into France aboard every trans-Atlantic troopship. How tragic it was that these fit young men who appeared most susceptible to the flu virus; in the crowded troop ships and training camps they fell ill and dropped dead. In October 1918, while 50,000 Americans died in battle, 70,000 of them were hospitalised with flu, of whom 32% died. The Allied offensives almost ground to a halt because so many soldiers were sick. Had the Allies known it, the starving Germans were worse off.

Australian Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment members,
working as flu doctors in Sydney, 1918.
Photo credit: Australian War Memorial

The Great War, which had ravaged Europe for four years, was ending. But in the week in which The Armistice was signed, 11th Nov 1918, flu deaths in Europe reached their peak. British prime minister and US president, who met in Paris to design the Treaty of Versailles, both caught the flu and lived. But Sir Mark Sykes, whose Sykes-Picot Plan was to carve up the Middle East, died from flu.

I thought snow protected citizens against the flu, but the Spanish flu reached Sweden in June 1918, and a one-third of the population became infected. c34,500 persons died from flu during the pandemic or from acute pneumonia.

A milder third wave occurred in early 1919, while the fourth wave spread during early 1920. The majority of those who died were young, healthy adults aged 15-44 but mortality rates varied between countries. By the end of the epidemic, in less than 2 years, 50+ million people had died worldwide.

Summary
The Spanish Flu pandemic was inextricably linked to the millions of young men in army barracks, military camps and trenches; this is where the Flu virus developed, became virulent and spread worldwide in Oct-Nov 1918. Soldiers and workers, from Europe, Asia, America, Africa and Oceania, mixed on French soil. The causal factors were poor living conditions, stress, fear, war gases used indiscriminately, shocking winters, and contact with birds and pigs.

Thanks to the main references: "Origins of the Spanish Flu pandemic (1918–1920) and its relation to the WW1" by Anton Erkoreka and "When the World Sneezed" by Nigel Jones in History Today magazine, 5th May 2009.

I’ll soon be seeing Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, directed by Alexandra Dean, at the Jewish Film Festival. The festival programme says: Known for her striking looks and electric onscreen persona, Lamarr’s fans never knew she possessed such a beautiful mind. An Austrian Jewish émigré who acted by day and drew mechanical and electronic inventions by night, Lamarr came up with a secret communication system to help the Allies to beat the Nazis. Bombshell is for lovers of history, film and science. But locating the truth about her life was tricky. All the facts below come from Encyclopaedia of World Biography.

Hedwig Kiesler (1913–2000) was born in Vienna. Her parents were Jewish and cultivated; her father Emil Kiesler was a Bank of Vienna director and her mother Gertrud Lichtwitz a concert pianist from Budapest. Hedwig attended schools in Vienna then was sent to a Swiss finishing school.

After an unsuccessful audition with her acting teacher and stage director, Max Reinhardt, Hedwig moved into films. Her screen career began in 1930 with two Austrian films.

Hedy Lamarr and Clark Gable
Comrade X, 1940

She had several other small German-language roles, but it took controversy for Hedwig to be famous. In 1932 she made the film Ecstasy in Czechoslovakia, released in 1933. The film told of a young woman whose husband was impotent, causing her to seek a younger man. Two scenes were responsible for the film's notoriety and bans: a] Hedwig ran nude through a sunlit forest and b] a sex scene in which she experienced an intense orgasm.

Ecstasy attracted the attention of millionaire Austrian arms dealer Fritz Mandl, whom teenage Hedwig met in Dec 1933 and then married. Mandl had converted from Judaism to Catholicism in order to be able to do business with Germany's fascist regime, and Lamarr also converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1933. Apparently Mandl tried to buy and destroy every outstanding copy of the film Ecstasy. Whether out of revulsion to her husband's politics or not, Hedwig packed a case with jewellery, drugged her maid and fled to Paris, London and New York in 1937.

Hedwig began negotiating with producer Louis B Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who wanted new exotic European talent. Hedwig had refused Mayer's dismal contract offer in London, but by the time the ship docked in New York she had a handsome MGM contract and the brand new name of Hedy Lamarr. Mayer called her The Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

Lamarr's first American film was Algiers (1938) opposite French actor Charles Boyer. A successful launch for her American career, this film was followed by two flops, Lady of the Tropics (1939) and I Take This Woman (1940), co-starring Spencer Tracy. The actress's fortunes improved in 1940 with Boom Town starring Clark Gable, and Comrade X, an anti-Communist romance.

During WW2 Lamarr was an American sex symbol and star with Come Live with Me (1941), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), The Heavenly Body and the steamy White Cargo (both 1943), in which Lamarr played a mixed-race prostitute on an African rubber plantation. In 1943 Lamarr wanted the Casablanca role that eventually went to Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman.

Lamarr also appeared in celebrity gossip columns. She dated silent comedian Charlie Chaplin in 1941, and had flings with Burgess Meredith. Lamarr married producer Gene Markey in 1939, then divorced. Then she was married to English actor John Loder and had children. Later Lamarr was married three more times.

Hedy Lamarr and Victor Mature
Samson and Delilah, 1949

Modernist American composer George Antheil also played an important role in Hedy's life. Antheil was as well-connected as Lamarr; he met & in 1925 married Hungarian Boski Markus, niece of Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler.

Lamarr knew maths very well and had cleverly picked up practical munitions-engineering knowledge from Mandl. In 1940 she “solved” the problem of controlling a radio-guided torpedo. Electronic data broadcast on a specific frequency could easily be jammed by enemy transmitters, so Lamarr suggested rapid changes in the broadcast frequency. Antheil, who had experimented with electronic musical instruments, devised a punch-card-like device that could synchronise a transmitter and receiver.

The pair were jointly awarded a patent for their important discovery. But credit did not help the frequency-hopping idea; it was never applied by the military during WW2. The real payoff of frequency-hopping came only decades later, when it became integral to the operation of cellular telephones and Blue-tooth systems that enabled computers to communicate with peripheral devices. Too late for Lamarr and Antheil's patent.

Experiment Perilous (1944) was a great film. As was the Cecil B DeMille film Samson and Delilah (1949), with Victor Mature and Lamarr as the stars. The film combined a Biblical evangelical Christian moralism combined with hot sex!

Lamarr made several films in the 1950s, outside the Hollywood system. In the Italian-made feature The Loves of Three Queens (1954) she played Helen of Troy, and then Joan of Arc in The Story of Mankind (1958). But her heyday was past. In 1950 she auctioned off her possessions and retired from films.

raunchy poster for White Cargo, 1943

In 1967 she published an autobiography, Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman, but sued her ghost writers, claiming that the book was scandalous. She complained that she’d had a $7 million income but was now subsisting on a grotty pension. More litigation followed in 1974.

Lamarr was reclusive in her last years. The story of her radio transmission invention became widely publicised and she received an Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1997. She died in Jan 2000 and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

For a biography that focused on Lamarr's scientific skills, see Richard Rhodes' book Hedy’s Folly (Doubleday).

**

Now my own questions. Undoubtedly Hedwig fell for Fritz Mandl’s charming personality, and was very impressed with his business acumen. But if Mandl's ties to Mussolini and Hitler were very close, how did Hedy’s Jewish parents allow their teenage daughter to marry him? And if Mandl’s own parents were Jewish, how did Hitler agree to buy the Nazis’ munitions from him? How did Hedy keep her Jewishness a total secret throughout her American life? Why was it only after her death that her children learned they were Jewish.

Why did Mussolini and Hitler attend lavish parties at the Mandl home during their marriage? If one of Mandl's favourite topics at these gatherings was the technology surrounding radio-controlled missiles and torpedoes, did the American government acknowledge Hedy’s military knowledge and want to exploit it? If Lamarr was involved in a system that would allow American torpedoes and guided bombs to always reach their Nazi targets, were the Germans interested in how much knowledge she took with her to the USA after 1937? And in how much expertise she was developing with George Antheil in the USA?

We were often told that Eugene von Guerard (1811–1901)’s Australian landscapes of the 1860s and 70s were indebted to the romantic art of Caspar David Friedrich, two generations earlier, or that there was an affinity between his work and that of American landscape painters like Frederic Church. But Christopher Allen (The Australian 8th Oct 2017) wrote that if von Guerard’s style was distinctive, the sociocultural milieu within which he worked in Australia was also significantly different from that of the Americans to whom he was sometimes compared.

The USA established the core of its identity as a nation around the Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1776. The founding fathers of the new nation were men of the Enlightenment. A century later, America was a great modern industrial nation that had absorbed many more influences, including romantic sensibility and religious revivalism. So by the time Church and his colleagues painted their luminous, sublime landscapes, America was already an established nation with a strong sense of its own identity. Their landscapes evoked westward expansion, and the discovery of the wilderness as a spiritual symbol.

In von Guerard’s time Australia had not yet reached a comparable level of national identity. Federation (1/1/1901) was still more than a generation away and post gold-rush colonial society was growing rapidly, with a boom in urban population. Australia was still transitioning from a collection of small colonies.

Bourke Street West, 1886, by Tom Roberts,
Credit: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Down on his luck. 1889, by Frederick McCubbin
Credit: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Two decades later, in the 1880s, the Heidelberg School was named after an area in outer Melbourne where they started painting en plein air. Frederick McCubbin (1855-1917), Tom Roberts (1856–1931), Arthur Streeton (1867–1943), Walters Withers (1854—1914) and sometimes Charles Conder (1868–1909) achieved a more confident sense of belonging. Admittedly drawing on naturalist and Impressionist ideas, they turned from inspiring subjects to farming settings. They sought to capture Australian life, the bush and the harsh sunlight that typified this country, and a more confident sense of settlement.

Some of the loveliest pictures done by the Heidelbergers were the little oil sketches on cigar box lids that composed the famous 9 x 5 Impression Exhibition in Melbourne in 1889. Note the use of the term Impressionist here, as explained in Table Talk magazine in June 1889.

So why did the 2007 exhibition at the NGV, Australian Impressionism, call the most loved group of Australian artists “impressionists”, not “Heidelbergers”. The title of the 2007 exhibition reflected the view that Heidelberg School art was a credible Australian expression of the move towards naturalistic, plein-air painting that was popular in France, across Europe and in North America. Australians were part of internationalism and modernity!

Even as recently as 2016, the National Gallery of Australia sent Australia’s Impressionists Exhibition to London’s National Gallery. But British critics were puzzled. Streeton’s Fire’s On! (1891) was far from what they thought of as Impressionism, and Roberts’s A Break Away! (1891) could not be fitted into a European framework.

I created the same mix-up in this blog, absorbing the specifically Australian Heidelberg School into International Impressionism. “By 1901, Elioth Gruner’s first work was accepted for hanging in the Society of Artists Spring Show. See the small oil sketches of Sydney beaches 1912-4, very much in the tradition of the 9 x 5 Impressions shown at Buxton’s Rooms in Melbourne in Aug 1889. Gruner claimed his big influence was Roberts, possibly explaining why he was eventually seen as the heir to the Impressionist pastoral tradition of Australian art of the Heidelberg school”.

Now Allen is asking us to understand the specificity of C19th Australian art, distinguishing it from the superficially comparable Impressionism in Europe or the USA. Consider the times. In 1870-71, France was humiliatingly defeated in the Franco-Prussian War, Emperor Napoleon III abdicated, the republic was proclaimed and Paris was besieged by the German army. Then it was taken over by a radical movement called the Commune 1871, which was quickly put down in a bloody repression.

There was little sign of any of these traumatic events in the Impressionists’ art. French Impressionism was specifically reacting to historical circumstances by avoiding the pain. Their emphasis was on the personal, authentic experience of transient phenomena. In Claude Monet’s idyllic Le bassin d’Argenteuil (1872), the emphasis was on delight in the clearing clouds and dawn light. French Impressionism wanted nothing to do with nationalist themes.

The Heidelberg painters, on the other hand, were intimately connected to the nationalist spirit in pre-Federation Australia. For example see Roberts’s portrait of a young Australian woman, An Australian Native (1888). And Streeton’s Golden Summer Eaglemont (1889) was an early morning scene with long dawn shadows and moving shade. The emphasis here was about inhabiting this land. The rising sun covered the Australian land in typical baking hot heat.

Charles Conder was never as clearly focused on nationalist identity as Roberts or Streeton. But Conder still contributed to the theme of being at ease in a new land, in works like The Yarra Heidelberg (1890).

Australia’s Impressionists exhibition in London, 2017
Credit: National Gallery London
Fire’s On, 1891, by Arthur Streeton is on the right hand side. See it more clearly in Australian Bush Fires in Art

Of course these images had little in common with Monet and the other Impressionists’ palette. Rather than a high-keyed French palette, most of the pictures were tonal a la JAM Whistler. And they were less often studies of natural effects and more about modern life in Melbourne or in the rural outer suburbs, the booming economy and travel.

Allen made a couple of exceptions. The late paintings of McCubbin and turn of the century work by Emanuel Phillips Fox, Ethel Carrick Fox, John Peter Russell and Tudor St George Tucker were more directly taken from French Impressionism, but only because those artists had direct contact with the French. I agree. Phillips Fox had no major social or political theme, and the leisured life he depicted was not particularly Australian. Phillips Fox left Australia in 1887, before the inspiration of the Heidelberg artists’ camps had fully developed. And he was outside Australia during all the nationalist excitement leading up to Federation. Like Mary Cassatt, Auguste Renoir and Berthe Morisot, Phillips Fox’s long white Edwardian dresses captured the light and atmosphere of a summer's day anywhere.

The exhibition "Australian Impressionism" is open at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra until the end of Oct

Dr Henry Lew wrote Smitten by Catherine, the story of Catherine Rachel Mendes da Costa (1678-1756). Lew was strolling through an auction house looking at furniture, and noticed a special C18th watercolour copy of a Rubens oil painting, attributed to Catherine da Costa. Since I am particularly interested in the era when Jews were permitted to return to England in mid C17th, my question became: who was this little known artist?

Lew started the story back in Spain and Portugal, from where the Jews were expelled in the 1490s. The author focused on the strength of Manasseh Ben Israel whose family had fled to Amsterdam from Madeira in Portugal. In his 1652 book, The Hope of Israel, Manasseh noted that countries tolerant of Jews were also those that flourished economically. Manasseh had tried to find a solution to counteract the Christian concept of the oppressed homeless Jew; he reminded Whitehall that Jews always displayed civic loyalty. Manasseh was a man of grand vision, and had his portrait done by Rembrandt in 1636. But the man was a realist - he had to accept less favourable terms for Jews, if they were to be tolerated in England eg synagogues would only be permitted inside private homes.

Catherine’s father, Fernando Mendes (born 1647), came from the town of Trancoso in Portugal, which had a Jewish community surviving as crypto-Jews. Under difficult circumstances, Fernando eventually moved from Portugal in c1660, first to France and then to England. His timing was excellent; Oliver Cromwell had allowed Jews to be readmitted as recently as 1656.

Henry Lew's book cover

The Victorious Hero... Concludes Peace, 1723

by Catherine da Costa

Fernando Mendes was sent to study Medicine at Montpellier University in 1666, graduating with his Doctorate in 1668. In 1669 he returned to London and went into business with his very wealthy first cousin, Alvaro Rodrigues da Costa. Alvaro was a man who was hugely successful trading inside the East India Company. So clearly Dr Mendes never had to rely on Medicine as his sole source of income. The quid pro quo for a successful life was that neither men could be Jewish - Fernando was a Catholic and Alvaro became a Protestant.

Catherine de Braganza came from a senior noble house in Portugal, and lived there until she married King Charles II of England in 1662. An article of the marriage treaty was that Queen Catherine was allowed freely to practise her faith; her chapels in St James’ Palace and Somerset House were the only two places in London where Catholics could legally worship. Once again timing was critical. In 1678 Dr Fernando Mendes was appointed physician to King Charles II and Queen Catherine de Braganza. Mendes was paid a salary, and was provided with his own apartment in Somerset House, the Queen’s royal palace in London.

Dr Mendes married Isabel Rodriques Marques, daughter of a devout Jewish merchant. Their first baby was born in Somerset House in late 1689. Queen Catherine, who could not have any babies herself, was delighted with the little girl, had her baptised in the palace and asked that she be called Catherine. Even after King Charles’ death in 1685, Dr Mendes remained in the Dowager Queen’s service. And Catherine Mendes remained the god-daughter of Queen Catherine.

I am sorry we learn so little about Catherine’s values, hopes and goals in the book. We DO know that she became a pupil of the famous miniaturist Bernard Lens III (1682-1740), a painter at the courts of kings George I and George II. In 1707 Lens became the first British artist to replace vellum, the most common material for miniatures, with ivory. (As Catherine did later). Catherine’s copy of Lens’ painting, The Victorious Hero Takes Occasion to Conclude Peace, must have been very influential on the young woman.

In 1698 Catherine married her cousin Anthony Moses da Costa, a young merchant, and had three children. Like his father, Anthony became a leading figure in East India trade, and in banking. He was admired by Voltaire, rejected by the Russian Company because of being Jewish and was appointed commissioner for the new American colony of Georgia.

Top: Bernard Lens, Portrait of a Lady called Mary Queen of Scots (1720)

Middle: Catherine da Costa, Self Portrait (1720)

Bottom: Catherine da Costa, her son Abraham (born 1704)

Anthony and Catherine lived in two lovely homes in London. She was exposed to the impressive operas and oratorios of contemporary George Frederick Handel. And she read the Enlightenment philosophers Locke and Hume. Yet Jewish life in England was ambivalent. Catherine knew that Jews often hid their Jewish identity, that inter-marriage and conversion were common, allowing access to important national organisations. Moreover Catherine witnessed impoverished Sephardi Jews, still fleeing persecution. These Jews could become the subject of anti-Semitic stereotypes in England.

Why would a Jewish artist paint a Madonna and Child? Henry Lew reiterated that Portuguese Marranos had been living as Christians since the 1490s. And remember that Catherine’s father Fernando and her father-in-law Alvaro were both committed Christians. Perhaps Catherine saw Sofonisba Anguissola’s Madonna and Child (1556, p65) and adored it.

Catherine’s oeuvre was worth examining. Her Self-Portrait was my favourite (1720, p64); the well-dressed artist was busy working at her easel. The Portrait of her Father Dr Fernando Mendes showed a well dressed gentleman in a wig, in front of his impressive library (1721, p46). And her portraits of her son Abraham da Costa (1714, p66) and her Double Portrait of Two Children were sensitive (not dated, p68). Only the portrait of London merchant Francis Jacob Salvador (1720, p67) was, in my opinion, not very sensitive.

Dr Lew, an opthamologist for 40 years, authored 6 other books. For Smitten by Catherine, he has published a limited edition of 500 copies in hardback. This beautiful book was complete with plates of Catherine’s art, works by her teacher Bernard Lens III, and the original painting by Rubens that Catherine copied. Readers might like to locate an old catalogue of the exhibition Jewish Artists in England 1656-1956, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Nov-Dec 1956.

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Coal was essential for military production during WW2; somehow Britain had to match the quotas needed to keep factories churning out the munitions required at the front. And as Britain was unable to import coal in wartime, the production of coal from local mines had to be increased. But how? 36,000 miners were already conscripted for army duty and had left their collieries.

Ernest Bevin, wartime Minister of Labour and National Service and a former Trade Unionist, believed the shortage could be remedied by using conscripted men to fill the vacancies in the mines, keeping production at the rates required. In Dec 1943 he announced a scheme in Parliament.

A ballot would take place to put a fixed percentage of conscripted men into the underground collieries rather than into the armed services. “We need 720,000 men continuously employed in this industry. This is where you boys come in. Our fighting men will not be able to achieve their purpose unless we get an adequate supply of coal.” Any refusal to comply with the Direction Order would result in a heavy fine and/or imprisonment under the Emergency Powers Act in force back then.

Bevin Boys' first day down the mine
Photo credit: Express

Bevin boys training with a pit pony
Photo credit: Bevin Boys Photo Grallery

Every month, 10 numbers were placed in a hat; 2 numbers were drawn and those whose National Service registration number ended with those numbers were directed to the mining industry. Along these ballotees were the optants, men who had volunteered for service in the coal mines, rather than the armed services. From 1943-8, 48,000 young men between the ages of 18-25 were conscripted for National Service Employment in British coal mines.

After medical examinations, travel warrants & instructions, the men had to report to one of the thirteen Government Training Centre Collieries in England, Wales and Scotland. Accommodation was provided in either a purpose-built Miners Hostel similar to an army camp, or billeted out to a private home at £1.25/week from a weekly wage of £3.50.

Each new miner was taught mining in a 6 weeks training course: classroom lectures, surface-and-underground training and physical fitness. Only a minority of Bevin Boys were actually employed cutting coal on the coal face, and others worked as colliers' assistants, filling tubs or drams. The majority worked on maintaining haulage roads, or controlling underground conveyor belts. The few who had previous electrical or engineering experience were given similar work in the collieries.

This alternative to army service caused much dismay; many of the Bevin Boys wanted to join the fighting forces, or felt that as coal miners they would not be valued.

The Bevin Boys came from a range of backgrounds and skill sets. A few were true conscientious objectors who were being conscripted for essential but non-military work. Some were sons of privilege, and many were lads from big cities who had never even seen a coal mine. Whatever their background, by Dec 1943 one in ten conscripts found themselves in the mines instead of at the front.

6 weeks of training for each intake of conscripts
in classrooms, via vigorous physical training and in the underground mine
Photo credit: PressReader

A large proportion of the 48,000 Bevin Boys sent to Britain's collieries disliked their time spent there. This was partially because they had been hoping to join the army, as noted. Plus many suffered vicious taunts from by-standers; coal miners wore no distinctive uniform so moral judgements were often made about the lads “shirking” from war service. Even the police would stop and question men of military age, if they suspected the men had avoided conscription.

Finally a large number of reserved occupation miners also disliked the Bevin Boys. They saw the lads as a threat to their livelihoods and also as dangerous liabilities, given that most did not come from mining backgrounds. Worse, the local mining families had already seen their own sons conscripted into the armed services, only to be replaced by very young, reluctant outsiders.

Unlike the ordinary miners, who wore their own clothes, Bevin Boys were issued with overalls, safety helmet and working boots. But it was unfortunate that Bevin Boys a] were not given an identifiable war service uniform and b] were not released from their coal mines until several years after the war ended. This was long after their counterparts in the armed forces had been demobbed.

The mine-work was done in appalling conditions with no toilet facilities, working in areas that were hot, cold, wet, dusty or dirty. The constant noise of machinery was deafening. And there was always the fear that there could be an explosion resulting in fire or rock fall. [I am claustrophobic. That would have been my worst fear].

The ballots were suspended in May 1945, with the last of the 50,000 conscripts working in the coal mines. The Bevin Boys had all been demobbed in 1948. A small number stayed in mining after the war, but most couldn't wait to leave.

Unlike other conscripts, they had no right to go back to their previous occupations, they received no service medals, demob suit or even a letter of thanks. And because the official records were destroyed in the 1950s, former Bevin Boy ballotees could not even prove their service, unless they have kept their personal documents.

Bevin Boys in Durham
They were just teenagers, away from home for the first time
photo credit: WW2inColor

Recognition
Many men who spent their war on the so-called underground front went unrecognised for almost half a century. Perhaps they were still embarrassed about not serving on the front. In any case, some men did eventually form the Bevin Boys Association in 1989 in Dorchester Dorset. The first official Bevin Boys reunion was held at the former Chatterley Whitfield Mining Museum in 1989.

It took until 1995 for the British government to formally recognise the contribution of these men, by then old age pensioners. The Queen made a speech and unveiled the Home Front Memorial in Coventry. And in 2007, the Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that a special honour was to be presented to all conscripts who served in the mines. This was on the 60th anniversary of the last Bevin Boy being demobbed. Any living Bevin Boys are now officially allowed to take part in the Remembrance Day service at Whitehall.

Many thanks to The Forgotten Conscripts by Warwick H Taylor and the BBC’s The Coal Industry in Wartime by Dr Martin Johnes.

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Michael Barclayinvited us to share his sensitive obituary. Gordon Downie (1964-2017) was born near Kingston Ont, to Lorna & Edgar. He was the 4th of 5 children, the one who played goalie for Amherstview’s successful hockey team.

Downie moved to Kingston to attend Kingston Collegiate Vocational Institute. Coming from a rural area, his outsider status became part of his public identity: the poet in the bar band; the rock star slumming it with indie kids while cosying up to intelligentsia; the artist with a commercially successful cushion who thrived on challenging himself with new collaborators and varied disciplines like dance, painting and acting. The rest of the Tragically Hip were scions of the Kingston elite. Downie could at least boast that he was connected to hockey royalty.

He joined a punk band called The Slinks; their friendly rivals at the school were a Grade 13 group The Rodents, featuring bassist Gord Sinclair and guitarist Robbie Baker. A young drummer, Johnny Fay, watched with interest. Four of those five young men played their first gig as the Tragically Hip in Nov 1984, in a small white room at the Kingston Artists Association. Paul Langlois, son of the school's sports coach who Downie befriended, joined a year later; by that time, Downie was studying film at Queen’s and drinking.

In the band’s first three years, they played ’60s cover songs by the Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and the Monkees. Downie’s on-stage improvisations were a main part of the band’s appeal, though he was not yet a lyricist. As original material slowly seeped its way into the set, it was Gord Sinclair who wrote most of the lyrics. It wasn’t until the 1991 release of the band’s second album, Road Apples, that Downie seized the lyrical reins entirely.

The Tragically Hip released their first EP in Dec 1987; a year later they headed to Memphis to record Up to Here. It became one of two Hip albums to eventually sell more than a million copies in Canada. They tapped into rock-n-roll’s primal energy in ways that had been largely forgotten by the late ’80s: they were a dressed-down, no-frills roadhouse bar band whose videos were rejected by MTV, a band whose sound was far removed from the era’s pop stars, stadium rock, ageing Boomers, newer bluesy bands. And they were too traditional and aspirational to be Alternative.

It was their live performances, where Downie’s unusual charisma electrified everyone who saw them. No other act back then was embraced with the fervour that Hip fans displayed toward Downie as a performer, but it was his lyrics that inflamed his fans. In a genre prone to cliché, outright nonsense and occasional misogyny, Gord Downie wrote memorable lyrics.

Canadians watched him command 40,000 people at outdoor appearances during the 1990s, singing songs that were summer soundtracks for an entire generation. Video clips didn’t do justice to the energy in the room generated.

Downie’s specifically Canadian references were all but alien on radio playlists. He prized the anomaly - he’d arrive on stage and make strange Canadianisms, for no discernible reason. But there were likely to be as many American references as Canadian ones in Tragically Hip songs. So it’s telling that the album on which he made the most Canadian references was also their most commercially successful: Fully Completely 1992.

Gord Downie

His first solo, Coke Machine Glow 2001, had songs his Hip bandmates had rejected and works culled from an accompanying book of poetry. And it set sales records in a corner of the publishing industry. The album was raw, experimental and far removed from the rock radio world the Hip inhabited: droning organs, atonal guitar screeches and accordions competed for sonic space with Gord’s vocals atop opiated folk-country songs. The press and music industry were baffled; among his peers, and especially among non-Hip fans, it remained a beloved and influential record.

Solo albums were a pressure-release valve for Downie in the early 2000s, as the Hip became elder statesmen in danger of being taken for granted. Record sales and radio play declined somewhat. Later in the decade, he pushed the band to record two albums with Bob Rock and he helped broaden their sonic palette. His later solo records, including a rollicking, punkish 2014 album recorded with the Sadies, were remarkably conventional compared to Coke Machine Glow. Downie loved to make rock records!

And Downie directed his attention to environmental issues, specifically those endorsed by Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, a Canadian water charity. Downie’s political awareness had been tweaked in 1993, when the Hip invited Australia’s Midnight Oil on a summer Canadian tour; that band’s singer, Peter Garrett, was an outspoken activist who later served as an Australian minister. Garrett and his bandmates became invested in the fight against clear-cutting in BC, and convinced the Hip to join them. Years later, when he decided to be more vocal, Downie relied on research and science rather than on his celebrity.

By 2016, when he released his Secret Path project to address the legacy of residential schools, he knew his celebrity was now his best asset: he had the country’s attention. The reluctant nationalist used it to focus specifically on an issue he felt was a glaring stain in Canada’s history. He quickly transformed the old tale of a 12-year-old boy who froze to death running away from residential school in 1966 into a current concern. This tragic symbol launched a Canadian conversation about compassion.

Though he relished his role on stage, Downie’s approach to celebrity was always tenuous. He rarely granted interviews, and generally eschewed red-carpet events. The entire band valued their privacy, and Downie even more so: perhaps because of the adulation directed his way, but also because of the way he was raised. It was, in a way, a very Canadian approach to celebrity.

In 2015 the Huffington Post ran a rare piece of celebrity news about Downie, who’d steadfastly shielded his four children and wife from the public eye. That year the couple had separated, prompting the sale of his Toronto home. And his beloved father, Edgar, was ailing; Gord spent a lot of time with him in Kingston while recording the Hip’s Man Machine Poem at a nearby studio. Edgar died in Nov 2015.

The Tragically Hip, in London

2015

3 days after dad's funeral, Gord had a seizure. The hospital diagnosed a primary glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. Months of surgeries and therapies followed. The band broke the news in May 2016, while simultaneously announcing a tour to promote the new album.

It would be the last. Lead singer Gord Downie performed with band members Paul Langlois, Gord Sinclair, Johnny Fay and Rob Baker at the Memorial Centre to launch the band’s latest Man Machine Poem tour. Once the show hit the road, there was a public outpouring that few could have predicted: a year of Downie transforming from an aging rock star to tragic hero.

Here was a man wrestling with notions of mortality in his work for years. He was the poet who once asked “When are you thinking of disappearing? When are you falling off the map?” This was a man inviting us to his own wake. Everyone was prepared for the funeral at any moment.

He made it. The final Tragically Hip show at the K-Rock Centre in Kingston in Aug was broadcast live on the CBC to 11.7 million viewers, with 20,000 people from across the continent assembled in Springer Market Square to celebrate. Then three more live shows, in Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax.

In his last public appearance, Downie appeared at a WE Day event as part of Canada150 in Ottawa, once again calling on Canadian youth to reckon with the legacy of residential schools. A children’s choir sang The Stranger, and the emotion and pride on Gord’s face was palpable.

Downie’s lyrics imbued Canada’s music scene with mystery and magic and presented them, poetically, to a wide mainstream audience. Do the work. Create the spark. When he finished, Gord Downie left an eternal flame. He passed away in Oct 2017.

Michael Barclay's The Never-Ending Present: Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip will be released Ap 2018.

I have never been to Romchamp and didn't know that Le Corbusier designed a 1950s chapel. But I was eavedropping on two Francophiles in a Melbourne espresso bar, and after buying them a cheesecake each, got the following brilliant blog post. Many thanks sisters, for your passion and for your European Traveler article by Henk Bekker.

Ronchamp (pop 3000) is in the French region Franche-Comté, 418 ks SE from Paris, on the Swiss border near Belmont. In 1950, Swiss/French architect Le Corbusier(1887-1965) was commissioned to design a new Catholic church in 1950. He initially declined the invitation, but apparently became inspired by the site on a hill top that offered views in all four directions. Like the original stone C4th pilgrimage chapel that was bombed during WW2, Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut de Ronchamp was to sit among a wooded terrain, 150m above the rest of the village.

Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut de Ronchamp

consecrated 1955

When Corbusier agreed to design Ronchamp, it had to be modern, not just in its materials and designs, but because it would function as a religious sculpture. The Church leadership wanted to get rid of the chapel’s old decadence and ornament by embracing modern art and architecture. The chapel needed to be rebuilt as a meditative and reflective space void; spatial and religious purity thus became one of Corbusier’s main focuses.

The walls were mostly stark, whitewashed concrete, because restricted access required most of the structure to be produced onsite. Stones from the former church were used in the construction. Up to 2.7m thick, the southern wall was pierced by 27 windows of various sizes in glass. These window frames were like small tunnels that allowed soft light to be reflected at a variety of angles throughout the day. There was no connection to stained glass; Le Corbusier considered that this form of illumination was too closely bound to old, Romanesque and Gothic architectural notions.

The curving walls acted as a practical method of supporting the concrete and masonry construction, as well as the massive curvilinear mushroom roof which appeared to peel up to the heavens. The curve of a massive grey roof of the chapel seemed to be a mirror of the curve that the chapel sat on. It rested on embedded pillars hidden in the walls, rather than on the walls themselves, giving the impression of the roof floating 10cm in the air. The clerestory windows, fitted between the top of the walls and roof, helped provide the interior with more light.

The Le Corbusier-designed chapel was consecrated in 1955. It had an interior space for one altar, three chapels and c200 worshippers. The concave eastern wall had a second outdoor altar which allowed services for 1000 outdoor worshippers.

As today's visitors always note, the light enters into the chapel where it appears inside as a washed-out, ethereal atmosphere. The effect of the light evokes emotional qualities that create heightened sensations in tune with the religious activities. We know Corbusier designed small puncturing apertures on the façade that amplified the interior light by tapering the window well in the wall cavity. Each wall became illuminated by these differing window frames, which in conjunction with the stark white washed walls, still gives the walls luminous qualities punctuated by a more intense direct light.

Above the plain altar, the east wall has several pinhole-windows and one substantial window with the Madonna and Child in silhouette.

Lunimous light coming over the pews from 27 differently angled windows

On the wall behind the altar in the chapel, the lighting effects create a speckled, starry pattern. And there is a larger opening above the cross that emits a flood of light, creating a powerful religious and emotional experience.

The church has three towers of between 20 and 27 m high. These provide space for the side altars inside the church and are lit through windows fitted below the cement canopies. The chapel has no bells. The light is what gives meaning to the chapel.

Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut de Ronchamp's interior has very limited décorations. The main nave is 25 x 13 m with the floor following the natural uneven slope of the hill towards the main altar. Eight rows of wooden benches were added at the insistence of the church authorities – Le Corbusier would have preferred worshippers to remain standing. Clearly this design was not typical of Le Corbusier’s rational, rather boxy functionalism; instead it was to be an early postmodern design in a sculptural style, a modern response to a religious site. Still maintaining Le Corbusier’s principles of purity and openness, this is one of the most instantly recognisable designs of the mid C20th.

The whitewashed concrete post-modern Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut is still a popular site for religious pilgrims and architecture lovers. The large enamelled door in this wall is used only for special pilgrimage events such as Assumption of Mary Aug 15th and Nativity of the Virgin Mary Sept 8th. Three thick white walls curl inwards from the outside to create smaller chapels at the sides of the main space. Two sit on either side of the north entrance and one in the south-east corner next to the main entrance.

Ronchamp has been on UNESCO's World Heritage List since 2016. The Le Corbusier chapel is privately owned and thus one of few places of Christian worship in France that charges admission fees. Buy guidebooks in the bookshop.

See the small Pyramid of Peace designed by Le Corbusier and mostly constructed from rubble from the previous church. It is a memorial to the soldiers who died during the liberation of Ronchamp in September 1944.

And see a modern monastery that was built into the hill in 2011 to house seven nuns. The project was criticised for ruining the appearance and the acropolis-like approach to the chapel, but it didn’t matter. The monastery was built into the slope of the land and was barely visible from the chapel.

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