Spanish paradors - staying in luxury and historical accuracy.

April 16, 2013, 1:00 am

≪ Previous: Canadian soldier-heroes, 1917-8: Alfred Munnings

In 1910 the Marquis de la Vega Inclán (1858-1942), close friend of King Alfonso XIII, was selected by the Spanish government to foster cultural tourism. In particular he was asked to create a hotel chain aimed at improving Spain’s international reputation as a unique tourist destination. A parador was to be a kind of luxury hotel, but the location had to be special - that is, it to be located in a significant historic building like a monastery, convent, fortress or castle. And the original architecture had to be maintained with as much integrity as possible.

Personally launched by King Alfonso XIII, the first parador opened in Ávila with thirty beds in 1928.

Since paradors were opened in sites as far north as Galicia and as far south as Andalusia, the landscape and views were very different in each location. The first Ávila parador was in the Gredos Mountains, surrounded by impressive scenery. Others would be on cliff tops looking out to sea or in medieval streetscapes in the centre of a town.

With the first hotel up and running, the Royal Tourism Commission was formed, specifically to find sites of great historical or natural interest where new paradors could be developed.

Things were going very well, and in the early 1930s four new National Parador Hotels were opened. But with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), tourists from other countries stopped travelling to Spain and internal travel was restricted to necessary business only. Also many of the hotels were converted into hospitals for wounded soldiers or suffered severe damage from battle.

Santiago’s parador, courtyard

After the war ended, damaged parador hotels were rebuilt and projects for new paradors were proposed, but World War Two interfered. It wasn’t until 1945 that a fabulous parador was opened in the San Francisco Convent in Granada, inside Alhambra Palace. Built over a small Muslim palace in the 16th century, the convent readily converted into a very special parador. Visitors can see where the Catholic monarchs had been interred, at least until the Royal Chapel Pantheon was built.

Alhambra's parador was a huge success, and a new and equally popular site was found in the Gibralfaro fortress of Malaga. In the 1960s, everyone wanted to travel inside Spain (including me). Old historical sites were renovated and new paradors opened for business in places like Córdoba (1960), Guadalupe (1965), Ávila (1966) and Toledo (1968), then Salamanca somewhat later.

At present there are 93 parador hotels operating across the nation. So the National Parador Hotel chain has created four special routes for tourists to discover Spanish history and to live in historic buildings while they explore. These routes have been arranged in several different categories:

Cultural routes: castles, monasteries, Mozarabic, through the heart of Al-Ándalus/Moorish Iberia.

Natural routes: through the Costa de la Luz and the Picos de Europa/Peaks of Europe.

Wine routes: Alava wine, Rioja and Navarra wine, Ribera del Duero wine and other wine routes.

Pilgrimage routes: St James Way to the Monastery of Santo Toribio de Liébana and on.

Guadalajara’a parador, dining area

Did the financial crisis in Spain have an impact on the paradors? Inevitably yes. The New York Times said the chain suffered a loss of 28 million euros in 2011 alone. The government wanted to close 7 paradors permanently and to close at least 25 paradors during the off-season. The Spanish population was outraged. Fortunately at least the top paradors still seem to be doing well. Guadalajara’s parador is in a former castle perched on a hill that was once fortified by the Moors (712 AD) and was for centuries the residence of bishops and cardinals. It is near Madrid.

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Casa Verdi in Milan

April 19, 2013, 3:00 pm

≫ Next: Remembering the Boer War in South Africa

≪ Previous: Spanish paradors - staying in luxury and historical accuracy.

Giuseppe Verdi born 1813 in Le Roncole near Parma, son of tavern-keepers. Then the family moved to Busseto where young Giuseppe had a normal high school education, along side his musical studies. He married Margherita Barezzi in 1836, daughter of his great patron Antonio Barezzi, and soon became municipal music master of Busseto. It seems utterly appropriate that the lovely salon in Casa Barezzi was where Busseto Società Filarmonica held its musical gatherings.

When family tragedies struck, Verdi threw himself into work. His first two operas opened at La Scala to favourable reports. They certainly established Verdi as a serious composer. His third opera Nabucco triumphed at La Scala in 1842 with Giuseppina Strepponi in the starring role. By dressing up the story of his hero’s yearning for his lost homeland in Biblical terms, Verdi bypassed the problem of Austrian censorship, either by wit or luck.

Verdi had finally become famous, and was now commanding a higher fee than his contemporaries. His fame spread; his choruses were sung in the streets by ordinary citizens and become the hymns of Italian patriots and freedom-fighters in 1843, thus forging the composer's reputation as an ideological hero of the Italian people. Only the censors in Vienna disliked and distrusted his work.

With money flowing in, Verdi bought his beloved Sant'Agata property near Busseto and continued working. His creativity knew no limits and the 1850s became his most productive decade. Rigoletto 1851, the first of what is now called the Big Three RigTrovTrav, was a triumph when it opened in Venice. Il Trovatore was a great success in Rome in 1853 and La Traviata eventually triumphed in Venice.

Casa Verdi, opened to residents in 1902
Sculpture of Verdi in the front garden

The Risorgimento/re-rise was heating up. This was the C19th nationalist movement that sought a] Italy's independence from a range of occupying powers and b] unification into one nation. By March 1848, Italian patriots fought for 5 days in Milan, trying to drive the Austrian occupying forces out, and failed. Nonetheless, growing Italian nationalism was a constant and critically important backdrop to Verdi’s life.

In 1860, with Victor Emmanuel's assistance, Giuseppe Garibaldi led his volunteer red shirts in an amazing victory in Sicily & Naples. Victor Emmanuel was proclaimed first king of a newly united (albeit incomplete) Italy in March 1861. Count Camillo Cavour and Gousei Mazzini were the other heroes across Italy.

Verdi’s heroism was more emblematic than instrumental. Yet Verdi had truly become identified with the Risorgimento. His arias served as virtual national anthems during era when Italian nationalism was a dangerous concept. He even became a politician!

In his old age, Verdi’s political views were becoming less epic and more local. He paid for and established a new hospital for local farm workers and their families in Villanova, near Sant'Agata. He also bought a site in Milan for his pet project, a retirement home for older musicians Casa di Riposo.

During 1898 Verdi stayed in Milan’s Grand Hotel much of the time, supervising the building his project. Verdi was an old man (87) by Jan 1901 when he suffered a major stroke. When he died, Verdi left all Italy in mourning. A month later his and his wife's coffins were transferred from a temporary burial spot at Milan cemetery to the crypt in Casa di Riposo. At the state ceremony the funeral cortege was accompanied by family, friends, Italian Royal family, Italian politicians, foreign diplomats and composers, including Puccini.

Casa Verdi concert hall
Verdi’s own piano

Led by Arturo Toscanini, professional singers sang the Va, Pensiero chorus from Nabucco, thus repeating the triumph Verdi had enjoyed way back in 1842. In the streets 300,000 ordinary citizens lined the black-draped funeral route and joined in. Everyone was singing for Verdi of course, but also for the cause of Italian sovereignty.

Verdi had requested in his will that all the future royalties from his operas would go to the Verdi Foundation and thence to Casa Verdi. Thus Casa di Riposo per Musicisti became a rest home for retired opera singers and musicians in Milan. Designed by the poet-librettist Arrigo Boito and by his architect brother Camillo, it would be interesting to know why they chose to build in Neo-gothic style, since a sense of Italian nationalism might have produced a very different style. Ample, beautiful 19th-century environment, amid large windows, abundant space and furniture mark it as a house full of memories. Perhaps Verdi had originally thought of instrumentalists and singers specifically from the great opera house La Scala being his guests; in any case, all Italian musicians were soon welcomed.

Casa Verdi is now home to 55 musical students and recent graduates who are studying and working in Milan. Concerts are offered several times a week in the house, and residents are also given free tickets to La Scala. Verdi's own piano stands proudly in the concert hall decorated with wood panelling and painted trompe l'oeil draperies.

Casa Verdi communal dining room

Does this story sound familiar to people who saw the film The Quartet? If Verdi had met the musicians played by Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins in Beecham House, he would surely have approved.

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Remembering the Boer War in South Africa

April 23, 2013, 1:00 am

≫ Next: My favourite film ever - Babette's Feast.

≪ Previous: Casa Verdi in Milan

The Australian War Memorial tells of how, soon after its acquisition by Britain during the Napoleonic wars, the tip of Africa had been shared between British colonies and independent republics of Boers i.e Dutch–Afrikaner settler farmers. In order to escape British rule, many Boers had moved north and east from the Cape to settle on new lands which later became the independent Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The relationship between the British and the Boers was often tense, with Britain extending its control by annexing Natal in 1845, though London did recognise the two republics in treaties signed in the 1850s.

The two Boer republics, Orange Free State and the Transvaal

The discovery of gold and diamonds in the Boer republics in the 1880s further intensified the rivalry, particularly as British citizens flooded into the Boer territories in search of wealth. The rights of British subjects in Boer territory, British imperial ambition and the Boer desire for to stay outside the British Empire caused more friction. In 1899 the Boers were provoked into preventing what they saw as an impending British conquest.

The conflict in South Africa is generally divided into three phase:
1] late 1899, when the British infantry were defeated or besieged by highly mobile Boer mounted troops.
2] from Dec 1899 -> Sep 1900, which involved a British counter-offensive, resulting in the capture of most of South Africa’s major towns and cities.
3] from Sep 1900 -> May 1902, when the war was mainly a guerrilla conflict between British mounted troops and Boer irregulars.

2nd South Australian Mounted Rifles.

Third from left: Trooper Harry Breaker Morant,

South Africa, c1900.

Photo credit: Australian War Memorial

Hastily raised contingents were sent from around the British empire. As a loyal part of the British Empire, the Australian colonies offered troops for the war in South Africa, and from 1901 on, so did the new Australian Commonwealth. Some Australians also joined British or South African colonial units in South Africa: some were already in South Africa when the war broke out while others made their own way to the Cape. Australians served mostly in mounted units, presumably because they were already experienced bushmen.

The outbreak of war had long been expected in both Britain and Australia. Believing that conflict was imminent, each of the Australian colonies ultimately sent 4-6 contingents. The first groups arrived in South Africa in late 1899.

Many soldiers of the Empire died, not just in battle but of disease, while others succumbed to exhaustion and starvation on the long treks across the veld. In the early stages of the war, Australian soldier losses were particularly high because of disease.

Empty battle fields in KwaZulu-Natal with nothing but graves.

After a series of defeats in 1900 the Boer armies became fragmented, forming groups of highly mobile commandos which harassed British troop movements and lines of supply. Faced with this type of warfare, the British commanders became increasingly reliant on mounted troops from Britain and the colonies.

After Federation (1/1/1901), and close to the end of the war, the Australian Commonwealth Horse contingents were raised by the new central government. These contingents fought in both the British counter-offensive of 1900, which resulted in the capture of the Boer capitals, and in the long guerrilla actions which lasted until the war ended. Colonial troops were valued for their ability to shoot and ride.

After September 1900, by which time the war had become mainly a guerrilla conflict, Australian troops were deployed in sweeping the countryside and enforcing the British policy of cutting the Boer guerrillas off from the support of their farms and families. This meant the destruction of Boer farms, the confiscation of horses, cattle and wagons, and the rounding up of the civilian women and children. These civilian captives were taken to concentration camps where, weakened by malnutrition, thousands died of disease.

The Australians at home initially supported the war, but became disenchanted as the conflict dragged on, especially as the effects on Boer civilians became known. Nonetheless troops continued to arrive until the war ended in May 1902.

Siege Museum, Ladysmith

Some 16,000 Australians fought in the Boer War, of whom 282 died in action or from wounds sustained in battle, while 286 died from disease and another 38 died from other events. Six Australians received the Victoria Cross in South Africa. Yet there are very few memorials to the Boer War in Australia apart from an equine Boer War statue, once in Edward St Brisbane and later moved to Anzac Square. I wonder if there are any memorials in other parts of the British Empire that sent soldiers to this war.

BBC History Magazine Jan 2013 suggested that people interested in remembering the Boer War should go to KwaZulu-Natal. It is possible to experience the eerie and poignant stillness of battle sites from the Zulu, Transvaal and Boer Wars of 1879-1902. And the Siege Museum in Ladysmith has relics, uniforms, maps and panels, that are helpful. Visitors to KwaZulu-Natal can stay at either the spectacular Isandlwana Lodge, set in the rocks above the battlefield, or the opulent Battlefields Country Lodge at Dundee.

Additionally there are several battlefield sites around the Bloemfontein area, so start at the Anglo-Boer War Museum, Monument Rd. It is believed that this museum is the only one in the world dedicated to the Boer War and gives the visitor insight into the war through its art collection, dioramas and exhibits. It also helps the visitor understand the background against which the war took place and what the life in the concentration and prisoner-of-war camps was like.

Anglo-Boer War Museum, Bloemfontein

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My favourite film ever - Babette's Feast.

April 26, 2013, 3:00 pm

≫ Next: Discovering World War One records for the first time in 2011.

≪ Previous: Remembering the Boer War in South Africa

I was reading a discussion about the best film that a reviewer had seen and fully expected him to select Gone with the Wind (USA 1939) Citizen Kane (USA 1941), Casablanca (USA 1942), The Third Man (UK 1949), Lawrence of Arabia (UK 1962) or The Lord of the Rings trilogy (New Zealand/UK 2001–2003).

I would have voted for Babette’s Feast (Denmark 1987) and was delighted to see it was one of the three winners. I was also surprised, mainly because a] Denmark seems somewhat remote for most cinema fans and b] the film displays no violence, no teenage angst, no nakedness and no chase scene.

Written and directed by Gabriel Axel, this drama was based on the story by Isak Dinesen /Karen Blixen and starred Stéphane Audran. It was the first Danish film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

The story was simple. In 19th century rural Denmark, two aged spinsters lived in a village with their father, who was the minister of a rather pious Protestant church. Out of the blue a French woman refugee arrived at their secluded front door, fleeing counter-revolutionary bloodshed in Paris. The two sisters allowed Babette to stay and she repaid their kindness by working for them as their house keeper. Her only link to her former life was a lottery ticket that someone in Paris renewed for her every year.

Babette's Feast.

Dark austere clothes, grey austere hair, dark 19th century room.
But examine the concentration and the opportunity for pleasure.

One day Babette won the top lottery prize of 10,000 francs. Apparently she had been a professional chef in her earlier life, and when the sisters decided to put on a dinner to mark the 100th anniversary of their late father’s birth, Babette asked to do the cooking. She was clearly prepared to spend all of her winnings locally, instead of using it to return to Paris and to her previous life. I am sure that the good sisters secretly feared what a Frenchwoman and Catholic might do in their kitchen, nonetheless they invited the entire village to the dinner. Babette then prepared the finest French feast ever eaten in all of Denmark’s history.

With such a slim story line, character and photography became the most important elements of the film. I really loved the second half of the film that focused on the preparation, serving and consumption of Babette's rich feast. The richness of the food was in sharp contrast to the austere house and the even more austere villagers. Would the pious, elderly church congregants comment harshly on the earthly pleasures of their meal and thus ruin the evening?

Babette's work in the kitchen was a labour of love.
The cooking and eating scenes had modern foodies drooling in the cinema.

Slowly slowly Babette's very special personality, and her ability as a chef, helped them let go of their innate distrust, allowing some pleasure to seep into their souls. Her soul, and her food, actively seduced the villagers into letting go of their inhibitions!! One blogger summarised it beautifully. Babette’s act of self-sacrifice caused old wrongs to be forgotten, ancient loves to be rekindled and a mystical redemption of the human spirit to settle over the table.

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Discovering World War One records for the first time in 2011.

April 30, 2013, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Edouard Manet and Eva Gonzalès in Paris

≪ Previous: My favourite film ever - Babette's Feast.

Every historian in the universe wants to discover a treasure trove of written texts, photographs or objects that has never been seen before. Most historians never manage it.

The small French village of Vignacourt is north of Paris, near Amiens. During WW1, this village was behind the front lines, a short march from the frontlines against the German army. It soon became a casualty clearing station/recreation area for passing war traffic. Allied troops moved up to, and then back from the battlefields on the Somme, via Vignacourt.

In 1916 farmer Louis Thuillier had returned to Vignacourt after two years of military service in the French army when Australian soldiers began arriving in the town. The Australian forces were pouring into the Western Front from the disastrous Dardanelles campaign in Gallipoli. Thuillier and his wife Antoinette were an enterprising and caring couple who saw an opportunity to make some income for themselves; they offered passing soldiers photographs of themselves. They depicted British and British Empire soldiers and French civilians, particularly Australians.

Two diggers, enjoying some recreational riding, before returning to the front line.

Taken by Louis and Antoinette Thuillier

Photo credit: The Lost Diggers, Channel 7

Captured on 4,000 glass-plate negatives, printed into postcards and posted home, the photographs made by the Thuilliers enabled Australian soldiers to maintain a link with their families at home. The Louis and Antoinette Thuillier collection covered many of the significant aspects of Australian involvement on the Western Front, from military life to the bonds formed between the soldiers and civilians.

The photographers' notes suggest that many of the photos were taken of Australian soldiers, from the 1st and 5th Division, in late 1916. Thus the boys had recently survived the carnage of battles at Pozieres and Fromelles. At Pozieres alone, in just four days, 5,285 Australian soldiers were killed or wounded.

If people DID know about the photographic collection during the 1914-18 war, they forgot about it after the armistice. Only one person mentioned the photos in the decades since 1919; a French amateur historian, Laurent Mirouze, had seen part of the collection over twenty years ago. Apparently his attempts to see the plates preserved and protected two decades ago were ignored by the British and Australian authorities in France.

Anyhow this amazing war record was recently found by a Sunday Night team in France. After following up rumours of a secret stash, the team found 3,000+ fragile photographic glass plate negatives in the attic of a dilapidated Vignacourt farmhouse that had once belonged to the Thuillers.

The Australian War Memorial in Canberra was fortunate enough to be given 74 of the original glass-plate negatives; these in turn were made into hand-printed photographs in Canberra. The resulting exhibition is called Remember Me: The Lost Diggers of Vignacourt. They are candid, informal portraits of allied soldiers enjoying time in the village, young men who had recently survived the carnage of battles on the Somme and Flanders. The soldiers were often billeted with local families and some of the pictures show local children and French teenage girls posing with the diggers. I am assuming the photos were informal and a bit larrikin because Australian soldiers at rest don't feel comfortable in formally posed military positions.

The curator noted “Nearly two-thirds of the young men who came through Vignacourt would have gone on to be killed or wounded. The losses were appalling. In all likelihood these images are the last photographs taken of many of these young men before they died. They are a character study of men under stress and in relaxation but men who are experiencing the war and coming back to areas where they can let off steam a little bit. They know they’ve got to back up the line”.

Diggers with their host family

Photo credit: Sunday Night

British censorship on the western front meant that few such informal photographs exist outside the official record. As I had noted in an earlier post, Australia did not have its own official war photographers until 1917. The Thuillier collection fills a hole in the historical record.

The Channel 7 show, The Lost Diggers, secured some of the plates from a Thuillier relative. When she heard of the great interest in the history of the plates, she donated them to Australia. Gratitude to the Australians in this part of France is apparently still very strong.

The remainder of the Thuillier collection is still in those chests in France, covered with dust and in serious danger of deterioration. I could not have written about The Lost Diggers, without Channel 7’s Sunday Night programme.

The Remember Me: The Lost Diggers of Vignacourt exhibition will end at the Australian War Memorial Canberra on the 31st July 2013.

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Edouard Manet and Eva Gonzalès in Paris

May 3, 2013, 3:00 pm

≫ Next: Alcatraz: prison life on a very nasty rock

≪ Previous: Discovering World War One records for the first time in 2011.

Eva Gonzalès (1849–1883) was born in Paris, the daughter of a cultivated Spanish writer and a cultivated Belgian musician. Her father, a naturalised Frenchman, ran a home that was buzzing with critics, writers and artists, including the director of the newspaper Siècle.

In 1865, young Eva began her art training. She learned drawing from fashionable portrait painter Charles Chaplin who ran a studio for women, including a young Mary Cassatt. In 1869, Eva met Edouard Manet (1832-83) and became his model and his only formal student. Manet apparently knew he wanted to paint a portrait of her at once.

Edouard Manet

Portrait of Eva Gonzalès, 1870

National Gallery, London

Manet’s Portrait of Eva Gonzalès 1870 was shown at the Salon that same year. She was no dilettante woman, filling in time before marriage; rather Manet depicted her as a professional artist, working at her easel.

Edouard Manet never exhibited with the Impressionist painters in their fringy exhibitions in Paris, and encouraged his pupil to remain loyal to the official system as well. So after 1870, she submitted work every year to the Salon. In those early years she was still strongly influenced by Manet and her lovely watercolours achieved great success. And she modelled frequently for other Impressionist artists.

Gonzalès loved painting images of modern Paris - theatre goers, music fans and young women relaxing outdoors. Fortunately the art critics at Salon Exhibitions preferred these more genteel pieces and did not consider her a radical. But her work was really only stoutly defended by the few critics who were supportive of all the Impressionists, including my old friend Emile Zola.

As she became less and less committed to painting en plein air, Gonzalès became less committed to Manet’s studio. Coincidentally she was evacuated to Dieppe during the Franco-Prussian War and was away from Paris.

Eva Gonzales

The Italian Music Hall Box, oil, c1874

The Louvre, Paris

In 1879 she married the engraver Henri Guerard, and used him and her sister Jeanne Gonzales as her models. Her work was exhibited at the offices of the art review L'Art in 1882 and at the Galerie Georges Petit, Paris in 1883. Life was becoming successful.

Then tragedy stuck. Gonzales died unexpectedly in childbirth at 34, immediately following the death of her teacher, Manet. Just two years later, in 1885, a retrospective of 88 of her works was held at the premises of the illustrated weekly magazine, La Vie Moderne in Paris.

Has Gonzalès’ work stood the test of time? A 1993 exhibition at the Musée Marmottan in Paris' 16th arrondissement suggested her work could at last be considered equal in talent to her two better known contemporaries, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. We should note again that all three women were born at the same time (in the 1840s), all were upper-middle-class and all were exposed to the same amount of Impressionist support and critical attack.

Gonzales’ The Italian Music Hall Box, Cassatt’s At the Opera and Renoir’s Le Loge and The First Outing all dealt with the same theme. If I had to choose, I think I would prefer Gonzales' version. Cassatt and Renoir painted young women, agog at the excitement of the crowd and the performance. Gonzales' model was older, calmer, an equal of her male escort.

The catalogue raisonné of her works lists 124 works, of which a number are known only from photographs taken at the exhibition following her death. Of the works listed, 89 were oil paintings, 22 were pastels and 5 were watercolours. Spaightwood galleries said that with attention now paid to women artists no longer required to be genteel, her work is highly desired. But I think she WAS genteel. And the money suggests she IS desirable. One of her small watercolour portraits of her sister, La femme en rose Jeanne Gonzales (1879) sold at Christie's Paris auctions in March 2007 for USA $585,000. Good money, I think.

References: Edward Lucie-Smith’s Impressionist Women (London 1989) and Nancy Heller’s Women Artists (London 1997) are useful reading. They published some of Gonzales’ works and they located her in Paris’ Impressionist world of the 1870s and early 1880s.

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Alcatraz: prison life on a very nasty rock

May 7, 2013, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Husband hunting in British India

≪ Previous: Edouard Manet and Eva Gonzalès in Paris

In San Francisco Bay the army built an island dock in the mid 19th century and constructed defensive positions. Several buildings had been added by the 1860s, when dozens of artillery pieces helped defend against possible Confederate incursions during the Civil War. At the end of this war, it was decided officially to convert the island into a military prison. The Citadel was converted and expanded in the 1870s.

But it wasn't until the Prohibition and Depression era, in 1933, that the Federal Bureau of Prisons made the isolated island into a federal prison. It is clear from all the reports that only the worst of the criminals would be sent to Alcatraz, so the living arrangements were made as miserable as those hardened inmates deserved.

I have been to San Francisco several times and understood that America's most dangerous criminals from 1933 to 1963 were handpicked for Alcatraz. But it was not until the History Channel in Australia showed a new tv programme called Mysteries at the Museum that I understood how men could break out of this apparently impenetrable gaol.

Alcatraz, San Francisco Bay
The rock also had homes and facilities for the guards and their families.

Bank robber Allen West first discovered that the concrete of the back walls of their cells had disintegrated so much from age and the salt-water air that he could indeed penetrate the walls using just a simple tool. How did the guards not hear the digging? Apparently the men did their digging during music hour, when most of the other inmates would play their instruments so loudly that the guards couldn't hear what was going on.

West devised the plan along with the other 3 bank robbers, Frank Morris, and John and Clarence Anglin, making decoy dummy heads for their cell beds. The heads were made out of wire and cement powder, and covered with human hair taken from the prison barbershop. In that way, the warders making their regular head checks would be fooled into thinking the prisoners were asleep in their own beds.

Warder's view of the dummy head

They used many raincoats to make the life jackets that would be needed in their raft. Without them, it seems no-one would risk crossing the cold water to reach safety at the other side of the bay. In June 1962, Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin (but not Allen West) succeeded in their historical prison escape when they dug their way out of Alcatraz. They were never seen again, so the three men either drowned at sea and their bodies were not found, or they got to land and hid out for the rest of their lives.

The concrete and steel gaol was closed in March 1963 because the original Victorian buildings were no longer sound, and it was far more expensive per capita to run than were other mainland prisons. In 1973, Alcatraz Island became part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The prison still stands, and millions of non-criminal visitors have since gone on tour boats to the island, as described by the National Park Service.

The timing of Mysteries at the Museum is perfect since an exhibition will be in San Francisco until the end of July, 2013. Alcatraz: Life on the Rock is a travelling museum exhibition that covers four themes: The Military Era, The Federal Penitentiary, The Native American Occupation and Preserving the Rock. Displays also tell the story of the families on Alcatraz, the gardens, the first light house on the West Coast and stories of the escapes. The original artefacts from Alcatraz include a letter from Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, a key to the front gate of the cell house and brass knuckles carried by a former guard. Either a former prisoner or former guard from Alcatraz Island will be available throughout the run of the exhibit.

Alcatraz: Life on the Rock Museum
Photo credit: MuseumPlanning

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Husband hunting in British India

May 10, 2013, 3:00 pm

≫ Next: Gustave Eiffel's Paris synagogue

≪ Previous: Alcatraz: prison life on a very nasty rock

My favourite area of history for reading and writing has always been social history, regarding marriage, child rearing, domestic architecture, education, men’s and women’s careers, collecting in the arts, entertainment and transport. Royal chronicles and military histories leave me relatively unmoved. So I was delighted to read The Fishing Fleet: Husband Hunting in the Raj, written by Anne de Courcy and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2012. The only thing I found difficult was the sexist language of the time.

British soldiers, traders and administrators had been travelling to India for a very long time. But in the later C19th, events were changing.

Firstly the India Act enhanced Parliament's control over the East India Company i.e the British government now ruled the colony, rather than a company of traders. Later Governors General were faced with the very real task of governance. Legislation after legislation back in London ensured that British rule reformed India’s law, commerce and education. In 1858 the British formally exiled the last Moghul ruler to Burma, ending the Moghul Empire. Clearly many more young British men were going to be needed to run the country.

Secondly transport was improving rapidly. The Suez Canal design was published in December 1858 and work started on the shore of the future Port Said almost immediately. The canal formally opened to shipping in November 1869. And inventions that improved ship engines soon made steam-shipping between Britain and India economically viable. The long and risky journey around South Africa could be avoided.

Anne de Courcy's book

Thirdly British soldiers and administrators were no longer allowed to mix with Indian women, let alone marry them. Men were warned that a strong connection with the motherland should guide their choice of a mate. And since most officers in India almost never visited Britain until their retirement, who were they to marry? The level of sexual frustration must have been intense, and seems to have been diverted into tiger hunting and polo playing.

Between 1850-1910, a third of young middle class women in Britain were unmarried. If a woman could not find a husband by her early 20s, she was doomed to a life of spinsterdom. These “surplus to requirement” women would have been advised to think of moving to a target-rich environment in the Empire, especially India. Single British men, with reliable incomes, were located all over India, starved for family life, sex and fun; these men were very keen to find eligible women to marry. British women who were not attractive or too poor to find a husband at home would expect to succeed beautifully in India.

Surpringly (to me) the British men in India were fitter, more sporty, more handsome in their uniforms and more sex-starved than their male friends in Britain. The fishing fleet and the fishermen were onto a win-win situation.

And there was another thing. A young married couple in India would expect to live more comfortable and exciting lives than they could at home, with as many servants as they needed, good quality housing and vice regal parties for every occasion.

The newly arrived women had plenty of opportunities to be seen. A hectic social scene was on offer in British India, with dances, hunting parties, cinemas and theatres, picnics, tennis games and royal or vice regal invitation.

And, with single men greatly outnumbering single women, each man had to move quickly. If he wanted to catch a woman before another man made a move, the romance had to be pursued very quickly, followed by a short engagement and a lovely wedding. Courtships that might have lasted a year or two in Britain were completed within a month in India. The fishing metaphor was useful again – women were snapped up out of the bridal pool as fast as possible.

Tennis Doubles

Photo credit: The Guardian Newspaper

It seems that once the honeymoon ended, married life in British India was not necessarily blissful. Big city women suddenly found that their new husbands had been given remote outposts to command, that the weather was beastly and that disease was rampant. All wives in the world might have found their lives subordinated to that of their husbands, but Fishing Fleet brides were lonely AS WELL AS rigidly controlled.

Naturally the new wives were ranked according to their husband's position. I was particularly struck by the idea of the Warrant of Precedence that showed the exact status of everyone working for the crown. Protocol was clear.

De Courcy allowed the women themselves to describe the colourful world in which they found themselves. The very evocative writing often came from those courageous fishing fleet women who left their letters and diaries to following generations.

Would I have travelled there myself, had I not found a husband at home? My tolerance for heat ends at 36c; I have zero tolerance for humidity; and I am terrified of spiders and scorpions. Worst still I would not have allowed my children to be taken to boarding school 10,000 ks from home. But I would also not have liked seeing my mother’s disappointment every day of her life, had I remained single. So while women who travelled were too young and too virginal, I really do understand why their mothers believed they were looking after their daughters by sending them away. The pressure to marry was relentless.

At the end of a year’s fishing, the would-be brides who failed to land a husband had to be shipped home as “returned empties”. Readers will have to be old enough to remember milk being sold in glass bottles to understand this appalling metaphor.

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Gustave Eiffel's Paris synagogue

May 14, 2013, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Napoleon, Nelson, Menzies ...and Newcastle, Australia

≪ Previous: Husband hunting in British India

Synagogue Tournelles is a Jewish house of worship built in the heart of Paris’ important Marais district (in the 4th arrondisement).

main synagogue entrance in Rue de Tournelles

architect: Marcellin Emmanuel Varcollier

In 1872 the building was designed to seat 1400 people, with the men on the ground floor and two higher storeys for women. The barrel vaulted building was designed by architect Marcellin Emmanuel Varcollier (1829-95) who was well known in the area because of his other architectural commissions. [Varcollier’s best known works came later. The town hall for the 18th arrondisement was started in 1888 and his Palace of Metallurgy and Mines was an amazing part of the 1900 World Exposition in Paris]. Varcollier seemed to admire the Romanesque style of architecture.

But then something remarkable happened. Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) had been appointed as the principal engineer of the Compagnie Belge way back in 1857. Apparently his work had gained the attention of several important people who were impressed, especially once they saw the metalwork of the Bordeaux bridge. Further promotion within the company followed, but in 1865 Eiffel felt he had to resign and set up as an independent consulting engineer.

exposed ironwork in the nave

engineer Gustave Eiffel

Eiffel designed the engineering structure of Saint-Joseph church Paris in 1863 and the glass roof of the Palais Galliera/now Musée de la Mode a decade later. His fame was spreading. Varcollier invited Eiffel to prepare designs for exposed ironwork in the splendid Synagogue Tournelles nave which was to be 21 meters wide. Eiffel also took the role of protecting the Holy Ark by really lovely wrought iron gates that have decorative value but no real security role.

The street façade in rue des Tournelles, highlighted by a rose window of stained glass, might have come from a church. But one element made it clear that the building was Jewish. The iconic Tablets of the Law were sculpted, inscribed in Hebrew letters and placed high above the front facade.

In the centre, two heraldic shields of Paris indicated that synagogue was successfully constructed, in part because of the financial contribution by the city. Paris' City Council had given its approval because the Jewish population of Paris was rising and the old synagogues were starting to look inadequate.

finely wrought iron gates in front of the ark

When this lovely synagogue was opened with great festivities in 1876, it was intended to suit the practices of Ashkenazi Jews and was used by congregants from Alsace and Lorraine. Then it was popular with those who emigrated from Poland and the Russia lands.

But the Holocaust exterminated part of the Ashkenazi community and by 1946 the congregation was much reduced. By the 1950s, the synagogue was being used by Sephardi Jews instead. I know what difference that would make to the liturgy and the music, but I wonder if it would make any difference to the architecture.

Synagogue Tournelles has been attacked by neo-Nazi thugs but has never been destroyed. Fortunately the synagogue was classified as a Historic Monument in 1987.

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In 1875 the Royal Portuguese Railway Company set up a competition for a bridge to carry the Lisbon-Porto railway across the river fast flowing Douro river. The Maria Pia bridge, which Joe and I saw in Porto last year, was built in 1877 by Gustave Eiffel! Built of wrought iron, its two-hinged crescent arch used to carry the railway to Lisbon for 350 metres across the River Douro at a height of 60 metres over the water. When it was inaugurated in 1877, it was the longest single-arch span in the world.

Now consider the immaculate timing. Did the Royal Portuguese Railway Company travel to Paris to see Synagogue Tournelles - between the time the synagogue plans were first considered in 1872 and the time the synagogue was inaugurated in 1876? In any case the success of Eiffel's Ponte Maria Pia in 1877 was more likely than Eiffel's synagogue to have inspired later engineering design (especially over inhospitable river gorges) in France, Spain and elsewhere.

Eiffel, Maria Pia Bridge in Porto

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Napoleon, Nelson, Menzies ...and Newcastle, Australia

May 17, 2013, 3:00 pm

≫ Next: Dana International - best Eurovision performance ever!

≪ Previous: Gustave Eiffel's Paris synagogue

Leonard Joel Auctioneers in Melbourne provided this historical evidence, based on Royal Marines Historical Society records (see reference). The auction is on 19th May 2013.

Charles A.F.N. Menzies (1783-1866) was born in Perthshire in Scotland, the son of an army captain. The young lad was educated at Stirling and, at age 15 commissioned as a second Lieutenant in the Royal Marines, serving on HMS Holden with Lord Nelson's squadron off Boulogne during the blockade of the French Invasion Fleet.

In 1803 Menzies sailed on HMS Calcutta to transport convicts to Australia and shortly after was promoted to lieutenant. In 1804 he was in command of a detachment of marines that crushed an uprising near Castle Hill in New South Wales by a group of Irish convicts, who were political prisoners from an earlier uprising in Ireland. The Australian skirmish must have been horrible.

In March 1804 Governor Philip Gidley decided to separate the worst offenders to establish a new settlement on Coal River. He accepted Lieutenant Menzies' offer to found and take command of the new settlement. The group sailed from Sydney on the Lady Nelson and two other small ships, and soon arrived at the new settlement that Menzies initially named Kingstown, but was re-named Newcastle by Governor King. From the very beginning of this small settlement, Newcastle was to be a work camp, from which coal and timber would be taken for the benefit of the main settlement in Sydney.

General Sir Charles Menzies with sword, by Daniel Cunliffe
Oil on canvas, 54 x 38 cm, 1843
Royal Marines Museum in Hampshire

Although still only in his early 20s this Royal Marines officer acquitted himself well and by the time he resigned his position in March 1805 to return home to Britain, Newcastle was established.

Menzies resumed active service soon after returning home. He commanded the Royal Marines attached to HMS Minerva and was involved in many actions. In June 1806 Menzies was in one of the Minerva's boats that were responsible for cutting out five boats from under Cape Finisterre, the Spanish scene of many naval actions during the Napoleonic wars. He led a landing party which rushed the fort; in fact because Menzies was the first to enter, it was he who lowered the enemy's colours and safely raised the British flag.

In July 1806 he planned an attack on a barge that captured a Spanish privateer and was instrumental in cutting out a Spanish vessel of war, landing at the Spanish Bay of Arosa and taking prisoners. Menzies also led his men at the capture of Fort Guardia.

In 1813 Menzies was promoted to Captain of the Royal Marine Artillery. In 1817 he married the daughter of the physician to the Duke of Gloucester and had children. His career progressed smoothly until he was the Colonel Commandant of the Portsmouth Royal Marines.

Menzies was appointed aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria in 1851, then knighted and appointed General in 1857. He died peacefully in old age. Clearly he a significant military man, yet I have three important questions:
1. Why was Charles Menzies given a valuable Patriotic Fund sword that displayed the crowned arms and cypher of George III?
2. What was Charles Menzies’ importance to early Australian history?
3. Why did the sword come to Australia?

Since 1803 Lloyd’s Patriotic Fund has worked closely with armed forces charities to identify the individuals and their families who are in urgent need of support. The contributors created the fund to give grants to those wounded in service to the Crown and to set up annuities to the dependents of those killed in action. The Fund’s prizes, awarded to those British combatants who went beyond the call of duty, could be money, a sword or a piece of silver plate.

Charles Menzies was an obvious candidate for a Lloyd’s Patriotic Fund award. Not only was he brave and full of leadership; Menzies also led his men at the capture of Fort Guardia in 1806 when he was severely wounded and his right arm was amputated. He received a sword from the Fund.

Lloyd’s Patriotic Fund sword
Awarded to Lieutenant Charles Menzies of HMS Minerva, 1806
Leonard Joel Auctions, Melbourne

His sword has a curved single-edged hollow-ground blade. The blue ground is intricately etched and gilt with a naval trophy, figures of Britannia and Hope, the crowned arms and cypher of George III, cornucopia and flora. The inscription says 'FROM THE PATRIOTIC FUND AT LLOYDS TO LIEUT. CHARLES MENZIES OF THE ROYAL MARINES, FOR THE DISTINGUISHED COURAGE & BRAVERY DISPLAYED BY HIM IN COMMAND OF THE ROYAL MARINES AT THE STORMING FORT FINISTERRE, BEING THE FIRST WHO MOUNTED THE BREACH AND PLANTED THE BRITISH COLOURS ON THE RAMPARTS ON THE 22ND JUNE - RECORDED IN THE LONDON GAZETTE OF THE 15TH JULY 1806.

There is an engraved inscription 'R. TEED Dress Sword Maker to the PATRIOTIC FUND Lancaster Court STRAND'; a red leather belt with embroidered silver-gilt thread, with gilt mounts, bosses in the form of lion's heads, and a fitted mahogany case lined with blue velvet.

Charles Menzies did not have this sword during his time in Australia. He had already returned to Britain in 1805 and was not awarded his Lloyds Patriotic Fund award until 1806. But any direct physical links with the larger-than-life characters whose energy helped build Australia are rare and to be treasured. Charles Menzies had an important role in establishing Newcastle, so the good burghers of Newcastle want the sword to rest there. It could sit next to the Menzies Commission, the original document appointing Lieutenant Charles Menzies and the Royal Marines to command and superintend the settlement of Newcastle. Signed by Governor King in March 1804, this ink-on-vellum warrant was presented to the Newcastle School of Arts in 1930 by a British family.

How did the sword get to Australia’s most famous and long serving prime minister Sir Robert Menzies (1894–1978)? Apparently the sword had been given to the prime minister by a British relative in the 1950s, believing he was related to the famous General Sir Charles Menzies. No evidence was found to support the claim, but the sword nonetheless remained in Australia for many years at one of the prime minister’s clubs in Melbourne. If the London-based relative wants the sword back, he needs to bid at the Leonard Joel auction this week (estimate: $80,000-120,000).

Reference: 'The Battle of Hernai and General Sir Charles Menzies, Daniel Cunliffe's Royal Marine Artillery Paintings by Major Alastair Donald', Royal Marines Historical Society, The Sheet Anchor, Volume XXII No.2, Portsmouth, 1997.

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Dana International - best Eurovision performance ever!

May 21, 2013, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Investments in art and culture

≪ Previous: Napoleon, Nelson, Menzies ...and Newcastle, Australia

The Eurovision Song Contest has been broadcast every year since it started in 1956 and is one of the longest-running television programmes in the world. Up to 600 million people across the globe watch each year, including my family. Congratulations to Denmark for their great success this week.

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In 1970, Ireland’s Dana Rosemary Scallon (born 1951) unexpectedly won Eurovision. Her song, a very soft, passive version of All Kinds of Everything, was Ireland's first ever victory in this very important competition. Dana, as she was known, was a teenage school student, Catholic, anti-women’s rights in abortion, contraception and divorce, and later married with four children.

In 1967, Dana’s family had moved to the Bogside, an area in the shadows of the historic city walls of Derry in Northern Ireland. The Bogside was a majority-Catholic area within a Protestant-British state which probably explains the long and terrible history of unrest in Dana’s home town in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And it also probably explains why Dana’s victory was so sweet for Catholic Irish citizens.

The other Dana, Dana International (born 1969) is an Israeli-born pop singer of Yemenite Jewish parents. Born Yoram, he was the youngest of three children and was named after an uncle who had been massacred by Arab terrorists.

Dana International in feathers

winning for Israel, 1998

Dana International could not have been more different from Ireland’s Dana. The Israeli lad came out as a transsexual when he was barely into his teens and underwent sex reassignment surgery in London in his mid 20s. Could the very gorgeous Dana International have known at that stage that she was going to have an unlikely win in Eurovision and follow in the footsteps of Ireland’s very plain Dana?

In 1998 Dana International was selected to represent Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest with her song Diva. Diva was an amazing song about strong women in history:

“Viva nari'a, viva Victoria, Afrodita
Viva la-Diva, viva Victoria, Cleopatra”.

Dana International came onto the Eurovision stage in Birmingham, with confident movement, fabulous legs, fabulous dress, amazing voice and jazzy lyrics, and took the audience’s breath away. There was nothing passive about this Dana! Every Jewish viewer in the world (except perhaps for the most religious) prayed to whatever god they had ..for a win for Dana International. Gays, straights and transsexuals thought their moment in the sun had arrived. Jordan and the other middle eastern countries censored her performance and blocked their state-run television programmes whilst the Jewish performer was on state. Yet she won anyhow!

Dana International released Diva as a single in Europe and the song climbed towards the very top of the hit parade in the UK, Sweden, Belgium, Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands. She later represented Israel in Eurovision for a second time, but never quite reached the giddy heights of 1998.

For Israel's gay community, Dana International's victory in the Eurovision song contest was a turning point. When Israelis celebrated Dana International's victory in the streets of Tel Aviv that night, people started to recognise that there was a big gay community, full of talent and colour.

Eurovision’s own history page said that Time magazine chose her as one of the important people in the world. Dana International's story is not only the story of a successful singer; it is a rare and inspiring story about courage. She completed the cultural revolution that she started with her first album; a symbol of liberalism and human rights.

Dana,

winning for Ireland, 1970.

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Investments in art and culture

May 23, 2013, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Social realist art and workers' rights - Noel Counihan

≪ Previous: Dana International - best Eurovision performance ever!

Carla Passino wrote in Country Life (13th March 2013) about the Knight Frank’s Luxury Investment Index. Her conclusion is that passion-driven investments have significantly out-performed more traditional assets such as the FTSE 100 or the property market.

With the exception of furniture, all enthusiasm-led purchases have done well, presumably because there has never been so much interest in art and culture. Stamps have more than trebled in value. Rare coins have risen significantly. The ultimate in collecting indulgence, classic cars, has had a turbo-charged performance. The only asset to have performed better than Classic cars is gold.

How assets appreciated in the decade to September 2012:
Gold 434%
Classic cars 395%
Coins 249%
Stamps 217%
Fine art 199%
Jewellery 140%
Prime central London property 104%
Chinese ceramics 85%
Watches 76%
Prime New York property 73%
FTSE 100 54%
Furniture -18%

Nothing tells the story of appreciating collectibles more than a pastel version of The Scream 1895 by Edvard Munch. It fetched $120 million at Sotheby's in New York last year, setting a new world record for a work of art sold at auction. Experts had expected the masterpiece to break new ground since its presale estimate of $80 million was the highest ever listed at Sotheby's.

Edvard Munch

The Scream, 1895
79 x 59 cm

Sold at Sotheby’s New York in May 2012

I am assuming for the purpose of this post that Knight-Frank's asset-appreciation figures are accurate and universal. And very useful to know! But there is something uneasy about believing that “if you follow your heart, the money will come”.

A passion-driven investment seems like a contradiction in terms. I am saying it because passion has to do with the love of collecting, usually based on aesthetic pleasure or historical importance. One sentence will make that clear. “Stamps are quietly building a following among wealthy investors, many of whom are not actually collectors”. If those wealthy investors are buying stamps because of the stamps’ rate of appreciation, and not because they love collecting stamps, where does the passion come in? I may as well buy pork bellies, as long as pork bellies are appreciating rapidly.

My collecting passion is for 18th and 19th century French, German, Austrian, British and Czech porcelain. But if these art objects are not appreciating very well, I should probably lose my passion for old porcelain and simply invest in another area of collecting. Or I should separate passion from investment and clearly differentiate between the two. In the latter case, “following one’s heart and the money will come” is not meaningful.

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Social realist art and workers' rights - Noel Counihan

May 24, 2013, 3:00 pm

≫ Next: The Channel Islands - occupation, resistance and collaboration in WW2

≪ Previous: Investments in art and culture

When my parents moved into a care-home earlier this year, they asked me to: take the art work from their walls, take the music and books from their bookshelves and sell everything else. I recognised all their paintings and drawings, except for their beloved Noel Counihans.

Noel Counihan (1913–86) was born in this city, Melbourne. He eventually studied part-time under Charles Wheeler at Melbourne’s famous National Gallery of Victoria Art School in the early 1930s, where he met social realist artists for the first time. In the middle of the world’s worst depression, what a joy that must have been. Social realism, the belief that art should reflect the realities of society under capitalism, could not have suited young Counihan better.

While still in his teens, Counihan joined the Communist Party, helped found the Workers Art Guild, created artistic banners and began printmaking, producing linocuts and lithographs for the party’s magazines and pamphlets.

He wanted to be known as a pencil portraitist and press cartoonist. I presume it was because these were the very media that enabled him to create art that had a social purpose and could be used to expose social inequalities. Pastels, water colours and even oils might have been too soft and not gritty enough to depict people living in the slums.

During the Great Depression Counihan participated in the Free Speech fights in Brunswick, organised by the Communist Party in response to a Victorian state government law banning subversive gatherings. Dozens of members of the Unemployed Workers Movement were arrested, and unemployed meetings in Sydney Road Brunswick were broken up by the police. Counihan, artist and brawler on behalf of the starving unemployed, became the stuff of legends.

In the 1930s Counihan worked as a cartoonist for famous and not so famous publications, including The Bulletin and the Communist Party's paper, the Guardian.

Here peace begins. 1950
linocut with ink, 21 x 30 cm
National Gallery of Australia

Even during the terrible war years, it was another social realist artist, Yosl Bergner, who encouraged and cajoled Counihan to continue. And to paint, rather than draw! A founder and member of the Contemporary Art Society in 1938, Counihan initiated its very successful anti-Fascist exhibition that was held in Melbourne right in the middle of the war, 1942. His work The New Order, one of the few paintings that he preserved from the show, was influenced by one of the American social realist artist William Gropper. And also influenced by the drab colours, sagging figures and ill fitted clothing as painted by Yosl Bergner.

The Anti-Fascist Art Exhibition had works from artists who all saw their work as having an important social and political role in documenting the suffering of the oppressed. Some young artists participated in the exhibition after they became friends with Noel Counihan and other social realist painters and writers. They clearly shared Bergner’s social conscience.

In The New Order 1942, Counihan wanted to be as direct as he could be with his anti-fascist politics. Both The New Order and Miners working in Wet Conditions (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) were shown in the Australia at War show, held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1945. Miners won first prize in this major exhibition.

Canberra's National Gallery described the New Order thus: He believed that art should have a social mission and that it could be used as a tool to expose political corruption, the hypocrisy of the church and the inequalities in society. The faceless Nazi soldiers are shown from behind, as anonymous symbols of oppression. They are symbols for all military oppressors. The victims, an elderly bearded peasant who has been shot and a decapitated woman, are symbolic of the civilian human sacrifice throughout the ages. Counihan’s comment has a timeless and universal significance

Later Counihan helped organise an Artists' Unity Congress, receiving awards for his paintings of miners in the Australia at War exhibition in 1945. In 1946 he, Bergner and Victor O’Connor exhibited at the Myer Art Gallery. They were the three realist artists who were restating their social realist position and their unhappiness with their friends in the Contemporary Art Society.

Towards the end of the 1940s the artist travelled to the United Kingdom and across Europe. Counihan continued working in the 1950s and 1960s, but radicalism largely ended in this country with the Vietnam War. Or perhaps Counihan was simply becoming a bit older and a bit better behaved.

The new order 1942
oil, 62 x 80 cm
National Gallery of Australia

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The Counihan Gallery in Melbourne aims to promote and inspire innovation and diversity in the visual arts through its annual program of exhibitions. It also endeavours to encourage discussion and debate about new ideas and issues in contemporary art and culture. I am delighted the Gallery was named in honour of my Australian artist and activist Noel Counihan, but it didn't open until 1999. Since Counihan's most important contributions to art were in the 1930s and 1940s, this seems a very long wait.

Coincidentally the blog Black Mark has discussed special exhibitions at the Counihan Gallery just recently. I recommend his posts.

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The Channel Islands - occupation, resistance and collaboration in WW2

May 28, 2013, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Melbourne (Aus) and Boston (USA) to amalgamate - re tourism

≪ Previous: Social realist art and workers' rights - Noel Counihan

Ace Cultural Tours is conducting a tour called THE CHANNEL ISLANDS: OCCUPATION & RESISTANCE in June 2013. Once part of the Duchy of Normandy, the islands stayed loyal to King John after his defeat at the Battle of Rouen in 1204, survived French invasions in the 14th and C15th, and were of strategic importance during the Napoleonic wars”. And “The Channel Islands also harbour a darker but no less fascinating past, being the only part of the British Isles to have fallen under German occupation in WW2. Determined to make the islands an impregnable fortress, the Germans expended 10% of the resources for the entire Atlantic Wall on their fortification. Explore these remarkable preserved and chilling reminders of conflict, and pay attention to the nature of occupation, including resistance and, more painfully, collaboration and slavery.” Lecture and tours will cover the Channel Islands and their Defences, including the Jersey War Tunnels, Elizabeth Castle and Guernsey's German Occupation Museum.

Map of the Channel Islands,

closer to France than to Britain

The Channel Islands are a group of self-governing crown dependencies in the English Channel, off the French coast of Normandy. They comprise two separate self governing bailiwicks: Guernsey (capital St Peter Port) and Jersey (capital St Helier), and have a total population of c160,000. The islanders were full British citizens, but the islands themselves were not represented in the UK Parliament.

The British government understood that a German invasion of the mainland was possible but that an invasion of the channel islands was inevitable. The Germans needed to defend their territorial expansion into France from its western flank. And since defending the Channel Islands was thought to be impossible, the British Government had to make evacuation plans. In June 1940 Whitehall ordered the Channel Islands to be demilitarised and sent enough ships went to the islands to allow all islander children to leave. Alas only 24,000 adults sailed to safety.

On 28th June 1940, German bombers on a mission over the Islands bombed Guernsey and Jersey’s harbours. Dozens of islanders were killed. Two days later German planes landed in Guernsey and met no resistance. Thus began the only occupation of the British Isles during wartime by Nazi Germany. The British Government's reaction to the German invasion was silent.

The Channel Islands were amongst the most heavily fortified, with tunnels and bunkers around the islands, especially the island of Alderney which is the closest to France. And light railways were built in Jersey and Guernsey to supply the Germans’ coastal fortifications. 66,000 landmines were laid in Jersey alone. Why did the Germans invest a fortune into four small, sparsely populated islands? Militarily the islands were in an ideal location, half way between Britain and France. But mainly because the Islands had huge propaganda value in Germany. Hitler viewed Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark as a jewel in his European empire.

Early in the occupation, the German troops were under strict orders to treat the islanders with respect and show Britain that Germany would be a good master. But that changed. The first few Nazi officers later grow into a fighting force of 28,000 German soldiers.

The majority of established Jewish resident in Jersey had left the island by mid June 1940, before the passport office permanently closed. A list of many of those who had left the island was compiled by Clifford Orange, the Chief Aliens Officer, and was sent to the German authorities in Jan 1942. Perhaps only 18 Jews remained. German rulings began to appear that required all Jewish residents to register as Jews and that all Jewish businesses should be publicly sign-posted as such. Jewish employees had to be dismissed and replaced by non-Jewish employees.

German soldiers marching in the main shopping streets.

They had a very visible presence in Guernsey and Jersey in particular.

Then the German authorities announced that all residents of the Channel Islands who were not born in the islands, AND those men who had served as officers in WW1, were to be deported. In the event 2,200 islanders were deported to camps in South West Germany.

The German forces consolidated. They brought in infantry, built communications and anti-aircraft defences, and started an air service with France. They closed telephone lines to the British mainland. The island news papers carried proclamations from the Commandant ordering a night curfew, handing-in of weapons, surrender of soldiers, suspension of petrol sales and the banning of boats.

The British Channel Island authorities cooperated and largely administered much of the new legislation, handing overall control to the German authorities. Occupation money was issued in Guernsey to keep the economy going. German military forces used their own occupation money for payment of goods and services. The German authorities changed the Channel Island time zone to bring the islands into line with continental Europe, and the rule of the road was also changed to driving on the right.

There was little resistance movement in the Channel Islands as there was on mainland France, probably because of the small size and physical separation of the islands. In any case, much of the population of military age, those most likely to join any resistance movement, had already left the islands and joined the British or French armed forces. But there was passive resistance!

In April 1942, the first Jewish deportation began from Guernsey. Four Jewish women were taken to Germany then exterminated in a Polish death camp. Anglican islanders with a Jewish grandparent were subjected to the Orders Pertaining to Measures Against the Jews. Who collaborated with the Germans in discovering who'd had Jewish antecedents decades earlier? And why were these measures administered by the Bailiff and the Aliens Office, since the citizens in question were Anglicans in good standing?

The Channel Islands Military Museum is now in a former German bunker in Jersey,

then part of their Atlantic Wall defences.

The Germans built four prison camps in Alderney, sub offices as it were of the Neuengamme concentration camp outside Hamburg. The Nazi Organisation Todt operated each sub-camp and used forced labour (Jewish and Christian) from Poland or Russia to build bunkers, gun emplacements, air raid shelters and concrete fortifications. The camps started Jan 1942 and eventually had a total inmate pop of 6,000 of whom 700 died.

During June 1944, the Allied Forces launched the D-Day landings and the Battle of Normandy. They bypassed the Channel Islands due to the heavy fortifications constructed by German Forces, as discussed above. However, the consequence of this was that German supply lines for food and other supplies through France were completely severed. The islanders and 28,000 German forces alike were on the point of starvation. Churchill still did nothing.

Only in December 1944 could the International Red Cross get a food ship to relieve the starving islanders. Liberation finally came when an Allied task force arrived off St Peter Port, Guernsey in May 1945. Islanders were informed by the German authorities that the war was over and a declaration of unconditional surrender was soon signed. British forces landed in St Peter Port shortly afterwards, greeted by crowds of joyous but half starved islanders. They may have been British subjects but they were not defended, fed or rescued by their own government during the entire war.

The German officer in charge of Alderney's prison camps burned the camps to the ground and destroyed all records, just before the island was liberated by British forces. At Sylt Camp, only the gates remain with a 2008 plaque. Many of the other bunkers, batteries and tunnels were not destroyed by the retreating Germans and can still be seen. Some German fortifications have been preserved as museums, including the Underground Hospitals built in Jersey and Guernsey. Liberation Square in St Helier Jersey has a great liberation sculpture. The German Occupation War Museum in Guernsey is really worthwhile!

Fort Henry, Jersey

became part of the German defence complex

How much of the Island tragedy, ending of Jewish life and business, was due to neglect of Jewish islanders by the local British authorities? And could this have been a taste of what would happen in mainland Britain, if Germany had won the war? In The Jews Of The Channel Islands And The Rule Of Law 1940-1945, David Fraser notes that high ranking island government, police and bureaucrats did not try to protect or hide their resident Jews. Following the liberation of 1945, allegations of collaboration with the occupying authorities were investigated but no-one was ever arrested and tried.

Readers might also like Dr Paul Sanders’ book, The British Channel Islands Under German Occupation 1940-5.

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Melbourne (Aus) and Boston (USA) to amalgamate - re tourism

May 31, 2013, 3:00 pm

≫ Next: Matisse: art stolen (1987) then restored (2013)

≪ Previous: The Channel Islands - occupation, resistance and collaboration in WW2

Melbourne’s international sister city relationship with Boston was established in 1985. As vibrant and learned cities, Melbourne and Boston are connected by a common commitment to excellence in healthcare and medicine, information and biotechnology, education, the arts and culture. The Melbourne Boston Sister Cities Association Inc, became an independent incorporated community association.

The importance of promoting educational exchange between Melbourne and Boston was recognised, particularly in the strong areas of medical research and the arts. So the City of Melbourne & Sister Cities Association created a series of funded fellowships, awarded annually in the fields of medical research, the arts and education. The aim of the fellowships is to provide opportunities to expand and enhance Melbourne and Boston’s reputations as centres of knowledge excellence, while strengthening international relationships in medical practices, the arts and education.

Some winners have stood out. In 2006, Dr Sharon van Doornum travelled to Boston to collaborate with leading experts on research into the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis in patients with cardiovascular disease. In 2007, Dr Emma McBryde, Head of Epidemiology and Victorian Infectious Diseases Service, travelled to Boston, working on transmission models for tuberculosis. In 2010, Dr Bob Anderson moved to Boston to further his work in developing treatments into celiac disease.

Yarra River, Melbourne

Newbury St, Boston

Additionally the Boston Arts Exchange, supported by the Melbourne Boston Sister Cities Association and the City of Melbourne, was introduced to connect two outstanding educational institutions: the Boston Arts Academy and the Victorian College of the Arts.

In the past both Melbourne and Boston often set aside a portion of their outdoor advertising space on city kiosks for municipal advertisements eg arts festivals; the cities simply swapped advertising space to make room for each other’s promotions. Now Boston will look a little bit Australian this northern summer when advertisements promoting Melbourne are put on benches and bus shelters around the city. At the same time, 16,900 ks away, Boston’s image will get a boost on Melbourne tram stops. The posters, which depict glowing night-time images of each city, are scheduled to go up in June and July for a month.

The two cities share strong British and Europe influences, large immigrant populations, many universities, stunning parks and gardens, museums, art galleries, top class public transport, heritage architecture, ports, a vibrant café culture and a passion for sport. But they are not going to be taking each other’s tourist trade since Boston should be visited in June-August and Melbourne is best seen from December-April.

Boston has sister cities other than Melbourne: Strasbourg, Hangzhou, Haifa, Padua, Kyoto, Barcelona, Valladolid, Taipei, Brasilia, Sekondi-Takoradi in Ghana and Boston in the UK. Clearly the Bostonians hope to expand their advertising exchange to these other partners later on. Melbourne’s sister cities are, apart from Boston, Osaka, Tianjin, Thessaloniki, St Petersburg and Milan.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that my closest American friends live in Boston. I would add Vancouver in Canada as well, but alas Vancouver is not a sister city of either Melbourne or Boston.

The light rail in Boston's tree lined streets

The trams in Melbourne's tree line streets

Many thanks to William Roberts, Visiting Associate Professor at Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and to the Boston Globe (25th May 2013).

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Matisse: art stolen (1987) then restored (2013)

June 4, 2013, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Jewish museums - their locations and functions

≪ Previous: Melbourne (Aus) and Boston (USA) to amalgamate - re tourism

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) lived in Paris where he was an active part of Montparnasse's thriving art world. He spent time in Morocco and Algeria before World War One broke out in 1914, but it wasn’t until 1917 that he moved his home to the French Riviera where the winters were very pleasant.

During the second half of the war, Matisse spent most winters in Nice over-looking the Mediterranean. He often stayed at the Hôtel Mediterranée, a Rococo-style building he later described as faked, absurd and delicious! Interior at Nice 1920 was one of a series of images Matisse created using the hotel as a backdrop, all of which are done in his post-war naturalistic style. As with his orientalist odalisque paintings, his interiors had detailed floors, furniture, wall paper, shuttered French windows and balconies. Matisse often included a young woman somewhere in his scenes. The Art Institute of Chicago focused on the carefully composed scene with its decorative richness, its warm, silvery palette and clear brush strokes.

Readers might also like to search out Odalisque with Raised Arms 1923 which can be seen in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. The stylistic connections with Interior at Nice continued throughout the early 1920s.

Matisse, Interior at Nice, 1920
132 x 89 cm
Art Institute of Chicago

How very different was Matisse's impressionist gardenscape Le Jardin 1920, a small work consisting of a garden of white roses in the foreground, and bushes and trees in the back ground. It was donated to the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm in Nov 1977. And although I cannot find who had bought the painting from Matisse, I did find who had donated it to the Museum so many decades later – a Mrs Nora Lundgren.

The theft of Le Jardin happened in May 1987. Apparently the thief knew which painting he was after and came armed with nothing more lethal than a hammer for the glass wall of the museum and a screw-driver to take down the painting.

26 years later, the painting popped up mysteriously when Charles Roberts, an Essex based art dealer, was offered the piece by a Polish collector. Neither Charles Roberts nor the unnamed Polish collector are suspected in relation to the crime. In fact it was Roberts who searched for information on its background through the Art Loss Register, a database centred in London dedicated to stolen art. The team at the database company quickly identified the painting as the one they were seeking; the original frame was damaged, but the painting itself seemed to be largely intact.

Once the painting was identified, the director of the Art Loss Register, Christopher Marinello, began negotiations for it to be returned home via the Swedish Ministry of Culture. In Sweden, the statute of limitations on art thefts is 10 years and so no police investigation will be possible there. In any case Marinello said that stolen artwork has no real value in the legitimate market place and would eventually have resurfaced anyhow. For the professionals, it was just a matter of waiting it out.

Matisse, Le Jardin, 1920
45 x 34 cm
Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm

But two things seem bizarre. If the stolen art market is estimated at between $6 billion and $7 billion per year, according to the Art Loss Register, other art lovers will be asking if stolen artwork has a value in the ILlegitimate market place? And is there a longer statute of limitations in, for example, Britain where the Matisse surfaced?

A second comment made even less sense to me. Martinello said the Art Loss Register would normally receive a small fee from insurers for recovering a stolen painting. However the Matisse was government-owned and uninsured, so no fee would be paid. I don't understand - wouldn't governments be much more accountable to the art loving world than private owners?

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Jewish museums - their locations and functions

June 7, 2013, 3:00 pm

≫ Next: London Bridge in the USA

≪ Previous: Matisse: art stolen (1987) then restored (2013)

Firstly I would like to consider some of the world's existing Jewish museums.

The Jewish Museum of Vienna is a museum of Jewish history, life and religion in Austria, starting with the first settlements at Judenplatz in the C13th. Founded in 1896, this was the first major Jewish museum anywhere, supported and run by the Society for the Collection and Preservation of Artistic and Historical Memorials of Jewry. Immediately after the Anschluss by Nazi Germany in 1938 the museum was closed, and its contents were sent to the Museum of Ethnology and to the Natural History Museum. It wasn’t until the early 1950s that most of the objects came back to the Jewish community. Today Vienna’s museum is located in Palais Eskeles where there has been an active programme of exhibitions and outreach events since 1993. Today the museum's aim is to highlight the past and present of Jewish culture in Austria. Visitor figures in Palais Eskeles and the museum’s other site reached 59,600 during 2011.

Palais Eskeles, Vienna

Built in the 11th century and modernised many times.

Since 1993, this has been the Jewish Museum of VIenna

Re-opened in March 2010 in Camden, the Jewish Museum of London features exhibitions that tell the story of Jewish history, culture and religion and reveal the vital contribution that the Jewish community has made to British life. The history of the country's extremely strong Jewish community stretches back to 1066, when the first Jews arrived with William the Conqueror's invading Norman army. Then the museum covers the total expulsion of the Jews by King Edward I in 1290.

Displayed across four permanent galleries are objects, films and personal stories that explore the critical issues of immigration and settlement. London’s Jewish history is beautifully evoked in displays such as the recreation of an East End tailor’s sweatshop. There is also a C13th medieval mikveh/ritual bath, recently discovered in the City of London. The Holocaust Gallery explores the impact of Nazism through the experiences and personal items of Auschwitz survivors. Through important historical artefacts and films in the Judaism: A Living Faith gallery, visitors can start to understand what it means to be Jewish in modern, multicultural Britain. It must be working; the museum had 60,000 visitors in its first year after the renovations.

The Manchester Jewish Museum in Cheetham Hill first opened its doors in 1984. The fascinating journey through Jewish history in one of Europe's most vibrant cities has thrilled tens of thousands of visitors. The museum is a stunning former Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, a cultural and architectural gem in its own right, the only British museum of its kind outside London.

The former Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue,

Now the Manchester Jewish Museum.

Photo credit: The Victorian Web.

The Jewish Museum of Australia was established in Melbourne in 1982, focusing on exhibitions that depicted and described Jewish festivals, Sabbath, food and ritual objects. But above all, its collection focused on the history of the Jewish community of Victoria and the places from where these Jews first arrived. In 1992 the Jewish Museum of Australia purchased a purpose-renovated building in Alma Rd St Kilda opposite one of Melbourne’s most beautiful synagogues, the St Kilda Hebrew Congregation. School and other groups are invited to tour the general collection and the special exhibitions, and some of these exhibitions travelled nationally.

The Sydney Jewish Museum in Darlinghurst started by identifying the 16 Jews who arrived in Australia on the First Fleet and describes life for those people in the early days of settlement of Australia. Then the Museum moves on to record Jewish settlement throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and documents and teaches the history of the Holocaust. It does this over three floors of exhibitions, video presentations, newspaper clippings, pictures, narrations, letters and first hand accounts. There are also guided tours.

The Jewish Museum of Berlin is located on Lindenstraße. The Museum first opened its doors in 2001 in a unique building complex. The complex is known for its architecture with a mixture of the old baroque Collegienhaus, the postmodern Libeskind Building, and the new Glass Courtyard. The exhibitions give visitors the opportunity to experience Jewish German history and culture over many decades. Particular highlights of the museum include the Holocaust Tower and the Fallen Leaves of the Memory Void. For refreshment, Café Schmus within the Jewish Museum specifically offers traditional Jewish cuisine.

**

I was delighted to read “Mushrooming Museums” in The Jerusalem Report of 3rd June 2013 by Shula Kopf. She appropriately discussed the opening of the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and the revitalised Jewish Museum of Berlin, and pointed out that European Jewish museums are just now recovering the histories that have been lost. The Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam also got a brief mention because of its innovative, interactive exhibits that explore aspects of Jewish life and history. As did the Sephardic Museum of Granada in Spain, for obvious reasons. These museums are largely targeted to non-Jewish audiences, since their Jewish citizens are fewer in number than they were before 1939.

But her question “are there too many Jewish museums?” seemed to be focused exclusively on the American situation. The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, designed by the brilliant architect Daniel Libeskind, is exhibiting the secret musical history of black-Jewish relations. The long established Jewish Museum in New York had a great programme called “Houdini: Art and Magic”. The National Museum of Jewish History in Philadelphia has “Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow: Jewish refugee scholars at Black Colleges in the USA’s south”. The Skirball Jewish Museum in Los Angeles was designed by the brilliant architect Moshe Safdie and opened in 1996. The Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Cleveland Ohio opened in 2005.

Sydney Jewish Museum

She should have been focusing on those parts of the world that had thriving Jewish communities until the war, like Vienna, Berlin and Warsaw. Or on communities that grew largely because of Jewish survivors leaving Europe after the war, Melbourne. Their target audiences will be very different, I suspect, from the target audiences of Jewish museums in New York and Los Angeles.

Let me consider one last Jewish museum that Kopf didn't mention. The Communal Historical Museum of Argentina is in the town hall of Moisés Ville, 600 ks from Buenos Aires. The first Jewish immigrants came from Kamentez, Podolsk (now the Ukraine) in 1889 and settled in the area, thus turning Moisés Ville into the birthplace of Jewish life in Argentina. So the museum’s history starts with Baron Maurice Moshe Hirsch’s biggest settlement and the development of institutions and continues with the changes in community life ever since. There are five permanent exhibition halls and two temporary ones which illustrate Jews’ rituals and religious belongings, and the history of the town, described in documents, photographs and objects. Plus an impressive research library.

Moisés Ville used to be a largely Jewish town, having Argentina’s first Jewish cemetery and its first rabbi. But now there are only a few hundred Jews left. So almost by default this has become a VERY important museum, talking largely to non-Jews about memories, heritage and integration.

Communal Historical Museum of Argentina, Moisés Ville

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London Bridge in the USA

June 11, 2013, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Eugenia Falleni - a miscarriage of justice in Sydney

≪ Previous: Jewish museums - their locations and functions

The book London Bridge in America: The Tall Story of a Transatlantic Crossing was written by Travis Elborough and published by Jonathan Cape in Feb 2013. There are three separate themes in the book that come roughly in chronological order: the C19th bridge built in London, its improbable sale to the USA and the movement of world power out of Britain and into the USA.

The famous Medieval London Bridge, built in the late C12th, had to be replaced. In 1799 a competition for designs to replace the old bridge was held. The Scottish engineer John Rennie won the competition with a classical design of five granite arches. It was built only 30 m from the site of the first London Bridge and was supervised by the engineer’s own son. Work began in 1824. The old bridge continued to carry traffic in the meantime, and was not pulled down until the new bridge was opened.

The official opening of the new 283 m long and 15 m wide London Bridge took place in August 1831, in front of King William IV. The total costs, which were huge, were shared by the British Government and the London city council.

The book suggested that the bridge was somewhat inadequate for the traffic it needed to carry almost immediately and by the end of the C19th, it was totally inadequate. People were flooding into the City to work; trains transported commuters to London Bridge Station; carriages, bikes and later cars were everywhere.

London Bridge over the Thames

Late 19th century, overloaded, brown, built up

Photo credit: transpress nz

And there was a second dilemma. The bridge was sinking and the east side was sinking lower than the west side. Even though the bridge was widened and strengthened just after King Edward VII was crowned, it would eventually have to be removed and replaced.

The stroke of genius was in not destroying the bridge, but in selling it on. One London City councillor, Ivan Luckin, was the brain in question. He marketed the bridge as a symbol of historic London, a feat of engineering that could trace its lineage back to its medieval ancestor and even earlier. Were the American buyers really conned into thinking the 1830s bridge was medieval? Did they believe they were actually buying the much more impressive and iconic Tower Bridge? Elborough says no to both questions. The American buyers of the rather boring London Bridge knew exactly what they were getting, but they were swayed along in a mist of history and symbolism.

It was actually a meeting of the minds. Motor and aircraft entrepreneur Robert Paxton McCulloch (1911–1977) was the key man in the creation of a new city on Lake Havasu in the Arizonan desert in the early 1960s. And it was McCulloch who decided that his new city needed something significant to make people take notice. The Statue of Liberty was not going to be moved from New York and San Francisco’s Golden Gate was firmly in place. But New London Bridge was actually available!

People may well laugh at Robert McCulloch, but who would have heard of Lake Havasu City, had he not made the winning bid of $2,460,000 in April 1968? Each block was carefully numbered before the bridge was disassembled. The blocks were then shipped across the ocean via the Panama Canal to California, then packed into trucks and driven from California to Arizona. Following reconstruction of New London Bridge, Lake Havasu City re-dedicated it in a lavish and well publicised ceremony in October 1971.

London Bridge, Lake Havasu City, Arizona

leisurely, palm trees, blue

1971

The Guardian noted that the opening ceremony in Arizona was attended by London's lord mayor and local dignitaries, who feasted on American seafood and Cornish pasties, and were entertained in the sweltering desert heat by Pearly Kings and Queens and madrigal singers, with the recorded chimes of Big Ben in the background. London truly had arrived in the USA. Today visitors to Lake Havasu City (pop 53,000) can go to the London Bridge Resort, see the dragon symbol of the City of London, fly British flags and read the British-American Friendship Plaque.

The real estate moguls of Arizona were thanking McCulloch, not laughing at him. The City of London might have been laughing, but they too were very grateful to the wily American.

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Eugenia Falleni - a miscarriage of justice in Sydney

June 14, 2013, 3:00 pm

≫ Next: Detective Inspector Rebus, what does your name mean?

≪ Previous: London Bridge in the USA

I read Mark Tedeschi’s book Eugenia Falleni: a true story of adversity, tragedy, crime and courage (published by Simon & Schuster, 2012) in two nights. The story is indeed tragic, but mesmerising in a car-crash sort of way. And I did not even mind the element of creative non-fiction - that is, while the evidence was based on official court records, the conversations were based on what might have been said.

Born near Livorno, Eugenia Falleni was the eldest of an extremely large Italian family. She migrated with the family to New Zealand in c1877 as a toddler, where her father became a labourer and horseman. From a very early age, Eugenia knew with 100% certainty that she was meant to be a boy; she wanted to work in physically demanding jobs, including in brickyards. In a horrible attempt to normalise her, the father married her off to an older Italian man in Wellington; fortunately she escaped him.

Her conservative Italian parents were disgusted with Eugenia’s behaviour and cut her off from family ties. This was the beginning of a life of secrecy and loneliness.

Eugenia/Eugene was happiest when she became a full time male and joined a trading boat as a seaman. Only after a few years on the boat did the Italian captain accidentally twig to Eugene’s true identity. As a result Eugene soon found himself tormented by the other crew members and the victim of repeated, brutal rapes by the ship's captain.

Eugene was dumped in a rural city in Australia, pregnant and without a cent. The baby Josephine Falleni was born in Sydney, and put into the care of an Italian family.

Eugene now took on a new male identity as Harry Crawford. After a series of working class jobs in pubs and factories, in 1912 Harry started to work for a doctor in an affluent Northern Sydney suburb, responsible for the doctor’s horses and carriages. It was there what he met the doctor’s lovely young housekeeper Annie Birkett, a woman who had been widowed and left with a beloved young son to support. In Feb 1913 after knowing each other for only a short time, Crawford and Annie were married in church in Balmain.

book cover of Eugenia Falleni, by Mark Tedeschi

Soon after their marriage the couple moved to Balmain where Annie ran a lolly shop. Although their sex life seemed a bit limited and their arguments not infrequent, Annie was a happy wife. She no idea that her husband was a biological woman, and the publicans at the hotel where Crawford worked also believed he was a man.

In 1917 Annie heard about her husband’s true gender from a neighbour. She confronted Harry but he fudged the topic, fearing that Annie would go to the authorities. Worse, Annie decided to leave the marriage by having it annulled, whilst Harry desperately wanted the marriage to continue.

By October of the same year Annie suggested that the two of them have a picnic near Lane Cove River, to clarify their impasse. According to Harry's later evidence, the two of them had a fight because Annie stated that the marriage was definitely over. Apparently Annie accidentally slipped and fell backwards; she hit her head on a rock and he could not revive her.

Harry was in a total panic and as there was no-one else around in the picnic ground, Harry made the ridiculous decision to burn his wife’s body. He left it in open view but made sure it was unidentifiable. Naturally Annie's body was discovered within days, complete with cracks to the skull, but as the police could not discover the body’s identity, she was buried in a pauper's grave. When Annie's son asked Harry about his beloved mother, Harry replied that she had run off with another man.

The tragedy might have made him wary about remarrying, but apparently not. In 1919 Harry met the middle-aged spinster Lizzie Allison and fell in love. They married in September 1919 with Harry recording himself as a bachelor on the wedding certificate. He continued to work in a hotel.

In 1920 after not having any message from his mother, Annie's son had alerted the police to his mother's prolonged disappearance. This led to Annie's body being exhumed and identified. Harry was arrested for murder! He went quietly to the police station but begged that Lizzie not be told about the former wife and definitely not be told about the gender issue. In the event, Lizzie’s very happy life was devastated and she was never seen again. Another life wasted!

Annie Birkett

What a small, gossipy, spiteful, insular place Sydney was in the early C20th. Justinian said that it was a city of boarding houses and itinerants, with suffocating moral codes and an oppressiveness that came from keeping up appearances. The newspapers in Sydney engaged in a feeding frenzy of unrivalled proportions; they could not get enough of the sordid sleaziness of a woman passing herself off as a male, seeing him as a freak and a pervert. A fair trial was impossible and the all-male jury was sickened by the defendant.

In any case, the defence case was absurdly handled since there was no witness, no physical evidence of murder and because Harry adored Annie. The defence barrister, Archibald McDonell, should have made mincemeat of the prosecution’s so-called witnesses, both the other picnickers who claimed to have seen the events and the pathologists who claimed to be experts in this field. Archibald McDonell should have acknowledged that the burnt body at the picnic ground was indeed Annie Birkett since the deceased’s jewellery, shoes and false teeth had been firmly identified by Annie’s own son and sister.

The Crown Prosecutor at the trial was William Coyle, the very first Senior Crown Prosecutor for New South Wales and a canny, experienced barrister. His career was seen to prosper as a result of this case.

The trial raises a number of significant legal issues of interest, even today, including
-the standard and onus of proof required in a criminal trial
-role of the judge, jury, Crown Prosecutor & defence counsel
-the elements of murder and manslaughter
-the obligation of the police to take a suspect who has been arrested directly before a magistrate
-the official police caution and the right to silence
-the present day judicial discretion to exclude evidence
-the role of expert witnesses
-irrelevant and inadmissible evidence and exhibits etc

But … but … Australia still had capital punishment in those days, and when Harry was found guilty of murder, he was condemned to death automatically. Only later was it changed to life imprisonment, ironically, because the murderer was really a woman.

Harry Crawford was released after 11 years in gaol in Feb 1931 and quietly ran a boarding house in Paddington. He died in June 1938 and was buried in a pauper’s grave. The inept defence barrister quickly retired from the Bar and lived a few more years in self imposed isolation.

I imagine that most people who read the newspapers in the 1920s and early 30s have long died and the next generations of Australians totally forgot about the story. In fact a detailed biography of Falleni/Crawford did not become of interest to academics and lawyers until the late 1980s. Gender studies became popular. People finally understood the difference between transgenderism, homosexuality and criminal offences. Had Eugenia/Harry lived now, official and institutional discrimination would have been banned and lives would not have been wasted.

For the author Mark Tedeschi, the senior prosecutor in New South Wales today, the lessons to be learned by the police, lawyers, judges and newspapers resonate still. Otherwise, as the book says: a press gone feral, a public clamouring for blood and an over-exuberant police investigation would lead inevitably to a miscarriage of justice.

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Detective Inspector Rebus, what does your name mean?

June 18, 2013, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Eugène Boudin: the man who mentored Monet?

≪ Previous: Eugenia Falleni - a miscarriage of justice in Sydney

Detective Inspector John Rebus is the star of the excellent detective novels created by the Scottish writer Ian Rankin. Did the inspector ever realise what his surname meant?

King’s College Cambridge found books of riddles and word puzzles that were published in the C16th e.g A Little Book of Riddles (1656). Anagrams and acrostics appeared in books and even high-brow literary journals got involved. Famous writers, poets and statesman such as Jonathan Swift, David Garrick, Horatio Walpole and William Cowper created puzzles for their own entertainment and the amusement of their clever contemporaries.

Jacob Levernier described visual puns, rebuses and codes in late medieval art where “a good pun was its own reword.” Evidence for patrons’ interest could be found in images that drew on witty and often scholarly word play. Creative homonyms and lively rebuses appeared in sculpture, painting and architecture. But Levernier was specifically interested in studies that were applied to sculpture whose imagery and message could be correlated to their architectural space.

So what was a rebus? It was a visual pun or allusional device that used pictures to represent words, and especially parts of words. It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used from the late C15th to denote surnames. The example that most appealed was the rebus of Bishop Walter Lyhart of Norwich, consisting of a stag/hart lying down in water. “Hart” and “lying down” together represented Lyhart.

Sir Ralph Shelton's rebus in Norfolk

Sir Ralph Shelton rebuilt the church at Shelton in Norfolk and in his will of 1497, he asked that his personal devices appear on every roof corbel and niche, as well as the nave aisle windows. The rebus used an "R" plus a "shell" plus a "tun/barrel", together representing the patron of the church: R. Shelton

The rebus alluded to the name, profession or personality of the bearer, and said in Latin Non verbis, sed rebus i.e not by words but by objects. Of all professions, rebuses were most popular amongst churchmen. John Goodall gave the example of John Islip, Abbot of Westminster (1500-53) whose rebus showed an “eye” with a man “slipping” from a tree.

There were many sculpted “owl” rebuses on the walls, ceiling and tomb in the chantry chapel of Bishop Oldham (d1519), in Exeter Cathedral. Some versions had the word “dom” on a scroll hanging from the owl’s mouth, just in case the viewer needed help in being to read the bishop’s surname.

Canting arms were heraldic bearings that represented the bearer's name in a visual pun or rebus eg for Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the arms contained images of “bows” and of “lions”. But a family might have a rebus as a personal identification device, entirely separate from the family’s formal armorials. For example in the mid C16th Sir Richard Weston’s arms used: Ermine, on a chief azure five bezants. His rebus, on the other hand, was a “tun” i.e a barrel, used to designate the last syllable of his surname. It was displayed on terracotta plaques on his Surrey mansion.

I presume that only the wealthy would require architectural sculpture carved on the front of their homes, and only the very literate would be interested in esoteric word games using three languages – Latin, French and English. The rebus might have been a common literary form of the age but Nils Thomasson published his book in 1661 that set out the rules for creating rebuses. Most importantly, a picture of an object could not be used to represent that word, since that took no intelligence to decipher at all

The V & A Museum has a modern example of a book plate. This C19th rebus, consisting of “trees” and “bees” was a simple rendition of the author's name Ashbee.

In 2007, the author Ian Rankin appeared in an BBC Four series, exploring the origins of his famous character, Inspector John Rebus. Called Ian Rankin's Hidden Edinburgh, Rankin looked at the origins of the character and the events that led to his creation. I would be keen to know if Rankin discussed the hero’s surname. After all the enigmatic inspector was a complex character who was not fully understood by his colleagues or friends.

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finely wrought iron gates in front of the ark

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