Art and Architecture, mainly

Alice Hamilton (1869-1970) grew up in a cultured family on a large Fort Wayne Ind. estate. Her father wanted home-schooling for his daughters, but eventually Alice decided to become a doctor anyhow. She studied physics and chemistry with a local teacher, took biology and anatomy courses, overcame her father’s objections and enrolled in the top class Uni of Michigan Medical School in 1892. There were c4,500 female doctors in the US then, mostly trained at women’s medical colleges.

Dr Hamilton, first-ever woman lecturer at Harvard
Smithsonian

After graduating from Michigan, Dr Hamilton interned at N.W Hospital for Women and Children, Minneapolis and then at the New England Hospital for Women & Children Boston. Hamilton had already decided on a career in research rather than clinical medicine, but she wanted some clinical experience. In 1893, Hamilton accepted a pathology research position at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Then she taught pathology at Women's Medical School of N.W Uni Chicago and was soon was appointed Pathology Prof there.

She lived for years at Hull-House Chicago, a settlement staffed by university graduates who helped immigrants and the poor, via social research and reform. Hull-House people investigated family income, school truancy, sanitation, TB and issues affecting community health and safety. And they helped organise Labour unions when many wealthy Americans opposed workers’ rights. And she later worked as a bacteriologist at Chicago’s Memorial Institute for Infectious Diseases.

Hull-House, Chicago

In the 1902 summer holidays, Dr Hamilton found Chicago in a severe typhoid fever epidemic. So she needed to explain typhoid, identifying the ineffective sewage disposal in 19th Ward, outdoor toilets, broken plumbing, standing water and flies. Tests on flies captured near filthy toilets indicated the presence of the typhoid bacillus. But blame properly fell on broken watermains that spewed sewage into water pipes, despite Chicago Board of Health denials.

That same year, when the Women’s Medical School of N.W University closed, Alice became a bacteriologist at Chicago’s newly opened Memorial Institute for Infectious Diseases. The U.S saw rapid industrialisation and by 1900 had become the world’s most industrialised nation. The growth occurred in mining, manufacturing, transport and commerce, enabled by cheap energy, better technology, growing transport, investment capital and cheap labour. But it also produced low wages, job insecurity, poor working conditions, industrial accidents & disease.

Industrial poisoning was problematic since it could take years to emerge. Most employees & employers were ignorant of the dangers from chemicals, and few factories employed doctors to monitor worker health. In any case, which workers would complain, risking their jobs?

Illinois' governor appointed Dr Hamilton to the Illinois Commission on Occupational Diseases (1908-10). Industrial toxicology was little understood, so the commissioners asked her to study diseases where high mortality rates were found: in painting trades, lead and enamelware industries, rubber production, explosives and munitions. The most widely used poisons were lead, arsenic, zinc and carbon monoxide.

From 1911-20, she became a special investigator for the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, examining the manufacture of white lead and lead oxide in paint pigments. The team visited factories, read hospital records and interviewed unionists to uncover lead poisoning cases. She discovered 70+ dangerous processes that caused high lead poisoning. During this time, Hamilton became a noted expert in industrial medicine. Harvard Uni quickly placed her on faculty in the School of Public Health in Industrial Medicine, making her the first-ever woman lecturer at Harvard. This made Dr Hamilton a famous expert in industrial medicine.

The Illinois report on industrial disease led to state legislation, Occupational Disease Law (1911), requiring employers to: end workers’ exposure to risky chemicals, offer monthly medical exams for workers in dangerous trades, & report diseases to the Dept of Factory Inspection. Soon Charles Neill, Comm. of Labour in Dept of Commerce asked her to do nationally what she’d done in the state, first in the lead trades, then in other poisonous trades.

Workers trimming and binding the felt hats
leading to mercury poisoning
Connecticuthistory

In WWI she also investigated the poisonous effects of manufacturing explosives on workers, as requested by National Research Council. Factories had sprung up to produce TNT, picric acid and mercury fulminate. Her reports on the dangers in war-industries led to the adoption of many safety procedures. After the war, Hamilton discussed mercury poisoning in the felt-hat industry, the mercury causing wild jerking of limbs, and mental illness. And workers who made matches were subject to an industrial disease that resulted from fumes of white or yellow phosphorous which pierced the jaw bone.

Hamilton’s impressive work was soon recognised abroad. From 1924 she served a 6-year term on the Health Committee of the League of Nations. She was invited by the Soviet Public Health Service, and toured a Moscow hospital that was the first-ever facility devoted to occupational disease. Appropriately she wrote Industrial Poisons in U.S (1925). And she published Industrial Toxicology (1934), studying aniline dye, carbon monoxide, mercury, benzene and other toxic chemicals for the Dept of Labour. Over the years, her many reports for the Federal government dramatised the high mortality rates for industrial workers, bringing major legislative changes.

Alice Hamilton wrote Industrial Toxicology re workplace safety, in 1934.
Radcliffe Institute

Dr Hamilton first encountered carbon disulfide years earlier when she had studied rubber making. Then in 1935, Hamilton conducted a study of viscose rayon manufacture. This new industry used two dangerous chemicals: 1] carbon disulfide, which poisoned the central nervous system, leading to mental disease, blindness and paralysis. And 2] hydrogen sulfide, a powerful asphyxiating toxin. Carbon disulfide received little American attention until Hamilton examined serious illnesses among U.S viscose rayon workers. The Dept of Labour appointed her Chief Medical Consultant, with her results published in Occupational Poisoning in the Viscose Rayon Industry 1940. What an amazing career.

Finally she retired to write her autobiography, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943). Hamilton celebrated her 100th birthday in 1970, then passed away. Congress immediately passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act.

The guest writer Dr Joe, recomnends reading Alice Hamilton & Development of Occupational Medicine, 2002.

Born in Greifswald in NE Germany, Rudolf Ditzen (1893–1947) was the son of a lawyer and a very educated mother. In 1909 the family relocated south to Leipzig, following dad's appointment to the Imperial Supreme Court. A road accident and typhoid led to a life of pain-killing medications. At 18 the lad killed his boyfriend in a mutual-suicide duel, and spent years in psychiatric hospitals and drug clinics, or in prison for robberies. In between, the re-named Hans Fallada worked on the land, wrote a few novels and did jobs on newspapers.

It was a chaotic life. At the same time as his youngest brother was killed in WW1, Hans was struggling with morphine addiction. His alcohol-fuelled crimes and subsequent gaol sentences only ended when Fallada married in 1929

His 1932 novel, Kleiner Mann, did well at home and overseas, and was made into a film. Under Nazi censorship, Fallada wrote and published a series of tough novels that Germans called neue Sachlichkeit i.e New Objectivity.

Fallada planned to leave Germany. His British publisher had arranged to send a private boat to get the family out of Germany in late 1938. But Fallada stayed, fearing he could never write in another language, nor live elsewhere.

Fallada's book cover

this edition was published in French

In late 1943, the author lost his long-term German publisher who escaped overseas. So Hans again turned to alcohol and random sex, to deal with his collapsing marriage. In 1944 he shot at his (first) wife in anger and was again certified.

Fallada remained deeply depressed by the impossible task of eradicating Fascism that was so deeply ingrained in German society. He resumed his old morphine habit with his second wife, and both ended up in hospital.

Yet at the end of the war, Fallada was welcomed by the new East German literary authorities. In 1947 he published Alone in Berlin with Aufbau-Verlag, the first novel by a German author to consider local resistance to the National Socialists. How amazing that Hans wrote his best novel during Sept-Nov 1946, just months before dying from a morphine overdose in Feb 1947. No wonder he became one of the best-known German writers of the early-mid C20th.

The 1946 book: Alone in Berlin
The characters Otto and Anna Quangel were based on the real working family of Otto and Elise Hampel. It was 1940, France had surrendered, Nazism seemed unassailable and citizens was endangered. Dissent brought arrest and prison. Belin was filled with fear.

The novel’s main characters lived in 55 Jablonski Strasse, a house divided into grimy flats. Residents tried to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the Persickes were nasty Hitler loyalists; the very decent retired Judge Fromm was preparing a shelter to protect elderly Jewish Frau Rosenthal; Eva Kluge, the kind postwoman, resigned from work and The Party, and left her thuggish husband.

In the same block of flats the Quangel couple was plodding, tight with money, unsociable and not hostile to National Socialist propaganda. So how did this unlikely family decide to defy tyrannical Nazi rule? In 1940 their beloved only son Ottochen was killed while fighting in France. Horrified out of their normally compliant existence, the couple began a silent campaign of defiance.

Otto, a nearly illiterate foreman making furniture, changed. He wrote anonymous and dissident postcards against the regime, dropping them in building stairwells around their suburb, Berlin-Wedding. His first card said: "Mothers, Hitler Will Kill Your Son Too". Then “Work as slowly as you can!” And “Put sand in the machines!” 276 postcards and 8 letters were deposited by the Quangels in 1.5 years.

Despite Otto’s fears, his quiet wife Anna insisted in joining Otto’s anti-Nazi campaign. For years the couple's marriage had become lonely. But being unable to console each other for their son’s death, it was suggested that their shared risky project brought them back closer, perhaps in love again.

A scary game developed between the Quangels and the police. Gestapo Inspector Escherich was the policeman responsible for sourcing the postcards, out of professional duty rather than Nazi ideology. During his meticulous search for clues about the mysterious postcard writer, Escherich developed a sneaky respect for his criminal.

The postcards irritated the authorities. Failure to solve the case compromised Escherich’s career, the Inspector who was beaten up by his impatient SS bosses. Clearly the Quangels could never ultimately escape the relentless savagery of the regime; a betrayal would eventually ensnare them.

Otto Quangel was caught when postcards falling out of his pocket, betrayed by a workmate. The two of them were arrested in Oct 1942, but Otto remained calm about his inevitable execution. And he did everything to save Anna. But they were both sentenced to death by the People's Court. Did Otto and Anna at least had some moment of moral triumph during the court case?

The film version of Alone in Berlin, 2016

They were executed in Plötzensee prison. After the executions, Gestapo Inspector Escherich was alone in his office. He gathered up all of the hundreds of subversive postcards, scattered them out of the police headquarters windows and shot himself dead.

The tension that the author maintained, despite the foregone conclusion, was unnerving. And like daily life in Berlin, the language was harsh and full of misery. Some readers found Alone in Berlin to be morally powerful, while others were just plain exhausted. I liked the reviewer who said that resistance to evil was rarely straightforward, mostly futile and generally doomed.

The book did very well and was filmed for television in both East and West Germany, and then again for the cinema in the west in 1975 with Hildegard Knef and Carl Raddatz.

The 2016 film: Alone in Berlin The 2016 war drama film, based on Hans Fallada’s 1947 book, was directed by Vincent Pérez and starred Emma Thompson, Brendan Gleeson and Daniel Brühl. It was made in Berlin and shown at Berlin’s International Film Festival. The film ended with the image of the postcards swirling in the wind, falling down on the Berlin streets and picked up by passers by. It gave the film's characters an understated posthumous moral victory.

Gertrude Stein at her salon, 1920

Invaluable

Baby Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and the family moved to Vienna and Paris, so Gertrude spoke German, French and English well. Her father moved them back to USA in 1879 but died in 1891, so older brother Michael supported them. Brother Leo moved back to Europe, immersing himself in art and in 1903 Gertrude also returned to Paris, sharing a left bank art studio. Michael sent money each month, making their bohemian life-style sustainable.

Thus Rue de Fleurus became the first permanent home for the Steins, with Gertrude remaining there for 40 years. They provided the informal focal point for contemporary art in Paris, inspiring, supporting and buying art. Their home became a salon, where art works by Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin and Cezanne shone. Saturday evenings enabled young, impoverished artists to examine the family’s notable art collection in their salon.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

1923

How did Leo & Gertrude become so learned about art? Art scholar Bernard Berenson introduced Leo to Paul Cézanne and helped Leo buy a work from Ambroise Vollard's gallery. In 1904 Berenson welcomed and taught the Steins in Florence. In 1905 the siblings saw the Manet Retrospective in Paris and bought Portrait of a Woman with a Hat by Henri Matisse. This purchase encouraged Matisse, just when avant-garde artists were being criticised by the press.

In 1905 Pablo Picasso met the Steins at Clovis Sagot’s informal art gallery. The first Picasso oil paintings that Leo bought was Nude on a Red Background! Then they bought some Renoirs, 2 Gauguins, a Daumier, a Delacroix, an El Greco and Cézanne water colours. The friendship with Matisse cooled only when Gertrude developed a greater interest in Picasso. Fortunately Michael Stein continued to collect Matisse.

Etta and Claribel Cone were wealthy, elegant, educated Baltimoreans who inherited vast wealth in their 20s. The Steins and Cones travelled to Florence in 1905 where Berenson introduced the Cones to Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck’s art. The Steins took Etta to Picasso’s studio while he was doing Gertrude's portrait, and she urged Etta to buy Picasso drawings.

The Steins were introducing artist to artist, patron to artist, patron to patron. In 1905-6, Leo and Gertrude invited Picasso and Matisse to their studio to meet each for the first time. In Jan 1906, Michael and Sarah Stein took Etta and Claribel to meet Matisse at his Seine flat, and both sisters bought as many works as they could. Gertrude also sold the Cones some of her prized pictures including Delacroix, Cézanne and a Stein salon group portrait by Marie Laurencin.

In the US, Harriet Lane Levy (1867–1950) had been a popular journalist in San Francisco. She’d already visited Paris before, the first being with her friends Michael and Sarah Stein. But this time she sailed to Paris with friend Alice B Toklas. They arrived in Paris in 1907, living together until Toklas met Gertrude Stein.

Toklas was invited to a weekend party at Steins’. She was besotted, soon becoming a regular visitor and going to the galleries with Gertrude. In 1910 Alice moved into rue de Fleurus home and became Gertrude's right hand woman, reader, critic, typist and publication handler! She was Stein’s lover & assistant for ever!

By 1909, photographer/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz was introduced to the Steins. By then Stieglitz knew the works of Matisse, Picasso and Cezanne well, and began to negotiate with Leo and Gertrude to exhibit their huge collection. Other young modernist painters joined in eg Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay and Guillaume Apollinaire.

New Eastern Europe Jewish artists arrived in Paris from 1904 on. Starving in their Paris garrets, Steins’ salons filled with food-drink were much appreciated. The Americans were all secularist Jews, but they wanted to help the Jewish artists, especially Max Weber, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delauney and Italian Amedeo Modigliani. The fact that the Steins, Cone sisters, Alfred Stieglitz, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Alice B Toklas spoke Yiddish or German from home must have helped the lads integrate.

Levy returned to the US in 1910, at 43, and lived her life collecting and art philanthropy. We know which artists Harriet patronised in Paris and which paintings she bought in the USA, because she became a very important benefactor at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. See Derain’s Paysage du midi 1906; Matisse’s Corsican Landscape 1899 and La Table au café c1899; and Pablo Picasso’s Scène de rue 1900.

Readers will love Paris Portraits: Stories of Picasso, Matisse, Gertrude Stein and Their Circle by Harriet Lane Levy, 2011.

Gertrude understood the radical implications of Cubism and was keen to link her status with it. Spanish cubist Juan Gris visited in 1910s, finding Stein accepted the more radical art styles that others quickly rejected. But a family rupture followed. Leo was a dedicated Matisse patron, not a Cubist fan. Gertrude and Alice visited Picasso’s studio where he was at work on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the work that marked the end of Leo's support for Picasso. In 1912 Leo took the Renoirs and many of the Cézannes to Italy, permanently! NB the Steins had established the first Museum of Modern Art at rue de Fleurus but the salon wound down with Leo leaving and war breaking out in 1914.

On her return to Baltimore in 1921, Claribel Cone rented a large flat in Etta’s building and arranged it as a private museum for their growing collection. This excellent Cone collection entered the Baltimore Museum of Art when Claribel died in 1929.

27 Rue de Fleurus, Paris

Note the plaque, next to the door

Leo Stein died in 1947, Gertrude Stein died in 1946 and Alice B Toklas in 1967. Gertrude and Alice B Toklas were both buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

The Stein collection had been constantly divided among relatives, friends, dealers and collectors, making it difficult to track. American collectors John Quinn and Albert Barnes both had access to the Stein collection and acquired significant paintings from them. In 1913, Gertrude traded large, early Picassos to dealer Kahnweiler in exchange for other paintings she wanted. Thus I’m sure the Steins were hugely successful as salonieres and patrons, more so than collectors. The 2012 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's exhibition brought together important paintings for the first time since pre-WW1 Paris.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, 2025. Wade wanted to uncover the woman behind the celebrity, as cultivated by Stein herself. But it was this very celebrity that eclipse her work. Wade found new archive material to shed more light on Stein’s relationship with Alice B. Toklas, and on the origins of her undeniably radical writing.

Wade examined the creation of the Stein myth eg posing for Picasso's portrait; central to Bohemian Parisian life hosting people eg Matisse & Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with Alice Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography. But admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan.

Yet Stein hoped to be remembered not for her personality but for her work. From her deathbed, she begged Toklas to secure her place in literary history. Using unseen material, Wade uncovered the origins of Stein's radical writing, the real Gertrude Stein as she was when alone.

Edward Colston (1636–1721) was born in a wealthy merchant family in Bristol. Later he went to school in London and established himself as a successful trader in wool

Edward Colston's statue

Bristol

In 1680 he joined the Royal African Company/RAC company, formally headed by the Duke of York/later King James II, that had a monopoly on the west African slave trade. RAC branded all the slaves’ chests, even the children, with the RAC initials. Colston apparently sold c100,000 West Africans in the Caribbean and Americas between 1672-89, and it was through this London Co that Colston became very rich.

Colston used the enormous slave profits to move into money lending and mercantile businesses. He must have known that slavery was an abomination, because he sold his company shares to William Prince of Orange in 1689, after the latter led the Glorious Revolution and took the throne.

Colston developed his fame as a philanthropist who donated to charitable causes like schools and hospitals in Bristol and London. He even served as a Tory MP for Bristol. He died in 1721 and was respectfully buried in All Saints Church Bristol.

To honour the great philanthropist, Colston’s name permeated Bristol. Note independent Colston school, Colston Concert Hall, two Colston streets and the high-rise office block Colston Tower. And the 5.5-metre bronze Colston statue has stood as a memorial on Colston Ave since 1895.

But modern campaigners vigorously argued that the hideous slavery business mean his contribution to Bristol had to be reassessed. They decided in 2018 to change the statue’s plaque to describe his slave-trading, but a final wording was never agreed upon.

Bristol slave trader Edward Colston's statue in Bristol

Dropped into docks, to cheers all around.

In 2020 a petition with thousands of signatures said that whilst history shouldn’t be forgotten, these people who benefited from the enslavement of individuals do not deserve the honour of a statue. This should be reserved for those who bring about positive change and who fight for peace, equality and social unity. We hereby encourage Bristol city council to remove the Edward Colston statue. Bristol Museum said Colston’s statue was remaining because he never traded in enslaved Africans, on his own account.

Eventually, during Black Lives Matters protests, frustrated protesters toppled the statue of Edward Colston from its plinth, graffitied it and threw it into the docks. Bristol Council quickly retrieved it, then asked conservators to stabilise the statue’s condition.

Protesters across the US tore down and vandalised statues and memorials of Confederate soldiers and generals, following George Floyd's death in Minneapolis in 2020. As long the offensive statues etc are removed to a museum and preserved for history, I would be perfectly happy not to see Colston. But no random vandalism, please.

In 1768, when Capt James Cook (1728–79) set sail on the first of 3 voyages to the South Seas, he’d been ordered by the British Admiralty to seek a continent and take possession of it for the British King. Cook reached the southern coast of N.S.W in 1770 and sailed north, charting Australia’s coast and claiming the land for Britain in 1770. Cook transformed the way Europeans viewed the Pacific Ocean and its lands, dying for Britain in a Hawaiian Islands battle in 1779. His maps, journals, log books and paintings from Cook’s travels are preserved in NSW’s State Library.

A sculpture of Cook was erected in Catani Gardens in St Kilda, opposite the beach in Melbourne in 1914. And in 1973, a life-size bronze statue of Cook was sculpted and installed near Cook's Cottage, in beautiful Fitzroy Gardens.

Vandals poured paint on the Cook sculpture on Australia Day in 2018, scribbling the words No Pride beneath the feet, along with the Aboriginal flag. Then it was re-vandalised in 2019. That statue was covered with graffiti in 2020 when the words Destroy White Supremacy were scrawled on the stone. Similarly a statue of Captain Cook in Sydney was defaced.

Captain Cook statue, Sydney
unveiled to the public, 1879.

It seemed that historical monuments around the world have been broken or dyed as Black Lives Matter protesters marched through the streets. In Australia the protesters called out Cook over his links to colonialism in a nation built on Aboriginal genocide.

In rebellion against Australia Day, called Invasion Day by the protesters, a group doused the Catani monument depicting Captain Cook in red paint. The statue was defaced and its base was papered with flyers proposing the abolition of Australia Day celebrations. The vandalism attracted curious locals, before the paint was hosed off by council workers.

Captain Cook's statue, in Melbourne

covered in red paint.

But the authorities were unhappy. Port Phillip’s mayor said they had had “a very beautiful, fitting and respectful service with our traditional landowners this morning”. Minister for Multicultural Affairs said “Vandals are trashing our national heritage and should be prosecuted. Australia Day should be a great unifying day for our country, as it has been for decades." But then why didn't the protesters send a petition from every citizen in Port Phillip area? Or negotiate through the local Council?

Roy Cazaly (1893–1963) was an early champion ruckman for St Kilda and South Melbourne Clubs from 1911-27. In the 1910s and 1920s, Cazaly formed a famous ruck pack with teammates Fred Skeeter Fleiter and Mark Napper Tandy, who was known for his high marks i.e massive leaps skywards. When teamed with Fleiter and Tandy, Cazaly soared well above the packs of tall players (Sporting Globe, 1935). While Cazaly made a leap, Fleiter would shepherd (protect) and the men would scream “Up there Cazaly” together. The crowds joined in the scream!

Cazaly going up for a screamer/a great mark

The words later became a battle cry used by Australia’s WW2 troops. It was noted that Cazaly's unusual surname likely contributed to the words’ nationalist fervour amongst working-class male soldiers overseas. Back home in Australia, the famous playwright Ray Lawler included the phrase in his play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll 1955 where the heroine Nancy used it on several occasions, with clear theatrical effect.

But why was a song necessary? In 1978, the Mojo Singers' song C'mon Aussie C'mon was so successful at promoting Channel 9's cricket coverage that it became a #1 hit in Australia. So Channel 7 urgently wanted a similar theme for its Victorian Football League/VFL broadcasts and an advertising company signed up singer-songwriter Mike Brady.

L->R: Mark Tandy, Fred Fleiter, Roy Cazaly, South Melb,

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When the South Melbourne Football Club relocated north to Sydney in 1982 as the Sydney Swans, the club changed its song to a version of Brady’s song, Up There for Sydney. This song was not loved and the new Sydney club soon reverted to its original song, Cheer the Red and the White.

The song was featured in the 1980 film version of The Club, the play by David Williamson. In 1981, Ian Turner and Leonie Sandercock published a book on the VFL history called Up Where, Cazaly?: The Great Australian Game. On his 2007 album The World's Most Popular Pianist Plays Down Under Favorites, French pianist Richard Clayderman included a medley of 3 Australian favourites: a]Up There Cazaly, b]Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport and c]A Pub With No Beer.

The National Postal Service opened a tv ad campaign in 2016. They created a cover version of Up There Cazaly, sung by various groups in their own cultural styles. It was affiliated with the AFL's Multicultural version of the anthem.

"Up Where, Cazaly?: The Great Australian Game"

book written by Turner & Sandercock

Stadia, teams and singers may change but there's one non-negotiable truth when it comes to AFL grand finals: Brady singing again, the heart of AFL Grand Final day. Brady told ABC Radio I just have a really lovely feeling about it when I sing it because people like it. And to have 95,000 people sing along with you is wonderful." But why is Brady's song still rocketing along 4 decades on?

By 1979, Brady was actively promoting Channel 7’s coverage of the VFL, composing a jingle about footy being chosen over any other weekend leisure. A disc jockey played the short jingle and asked Brady to turn it into a full-length song. It was first performed by the Two-Man Band, Brady and music arranger Peter Sullivan, and later became the “anthem” of Australian Rules Football/AFL. The catch-cry was soon adopted by South Melbourne fans and entered our slang as an expression of encouragement. The song became the highest-selling Australian single ever, and was nominated for Most Popular Australian Single.

The head of Fable Records Ron Tudor rang from Buckingham Palace where he was being presented with an MBE, saying We've got a number one record! It was a surprise, because although Brady had triumphantly performed the song at the grand final, he’d battled technical issues.

In time the song lost its #1 position but Brady could still write more footy anthems, with One Day in September (1980) very popular. And he helped write Greg Champion's song That's the Thing about Football (1994)

Was/is Mike Brady passionate about Australian footy? British born Brady moved to Melbourne in 1959 and experienced early stardom when his band MPD Ltd had a 1965 Australian hit single with Little Boy Sad. Most assumed Brady loved the sport, but he said he wasn't a huge fan of the game but he'd always been an observant person. He was fascinated by the way this Big Thing dominated Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth & Hobart. He'd been to the football once and spent all the time watching the crowd. It was really a great spectacle for me to observe and that's where Up There Cazaly came from.

Brady playing at an AFL Grand Final,

Herald Sun

When released, the song sold 50,000 copies in 2.5 weeks. However its popularity each Grand Final didn't make it a huge money-spinner. But apart from its rousing chorus, Brady said the song remained popular 40+ years after its release because it appealed to everyone. It's not all about blokes/males. It's not a blokey song but it’s woke; thus women like it. It neither mentions big men flying nor a specific footy team.

Brady, a Collingwood fan, jokes about his fame. But that first grand final performance back in 1979 was the one where the immigrant realised "the crowd was on his side". Always feeling like an outsider, from that day on, he felt like he belonged in Australia.

Roy Cazaly died in 1963

Fans singing with Mike Brady

alamy

Cazaly was fit into his 60s, but died in Tasmania at 70. Did he realise how famous his name was?

The land boom in Marvellous Melbourne came in 1883-1891 era which saw the price of land start to thrive. Naturally London banks were eager to extend loans to entrepreneurs who capitalised on this with grand, elaborate offices, hotels and department shops in the thriving city, and beautiful suburban growth nearby.

Cumnock Parkville was designed by Charles Webb who was the famed architect behind many Melbourne landmark buildings: Windsor, Royal Arcade, Mandeville Hall, Melbourne Grammar School and South Melbourne Town Hall. Cumnock is a fine example of an Italianate mansion much loved in the late 1800s over Melbourne. It was completed in 1889 for stock-and-station agent George Howat, then acquired in 1919 by Ridley College, a Christian theological college affiliated with Melbourne University.

Cumnock Mansion and tower, Melbourne University Parkville

Realestate

The four-bedroom, double-storey home on corner block opposite Royal Park is a boom period Italianate mansion. The main suite features a marble ensuite, while three further oversized bedrooms share a designer bathroom with a bath and separate toilet. Many thanks to realestate.com.au.

The home had been used by the university as a residence but was now not needed. It’s been renovated since the university bought new fixtures, fittings and amenities throughout, but now it’s sitting vacant. The listing comes c6 months after the university committed to repay $72m in wages to staff it underpaid between 2014-24. With grand proportions and flexible spaces, now it might be repurposed as consulting rooms or executive space, subject to council approval.

Set over two levels, Cumnock includes 11 principal rooms, 9 original fireplaces, two staircases, wine cellar and turreted viewing tower. Cumnock’s elegant living rooms showcase Victorian grandeur with bay windows, and park outlooks. A two-zoned bathroom, powder room and full laundry are on ground floor. Upstairs a spacious rumpus room opens to a wraparound balcony and the turret’s lookout, with sweeping views over the park.

foyer with soaring ceilings and Corinthian columns (above)

stained glass window (below)

Realestate

Cumnock’s marble-draped, state-of-the-art kitchen and dual staircases blend Victorian elegance with contemporary luxury. Preserved period details include an entry hall/foyer with soaring ceilings and flanked by Corinthian columns that greet residents and guests upon entry. Expansive formal and informal living zones feature high ceilings, bay windows and ornate period features. Melbourne University’s Parkville mansion Cumnock, grand gardens and heritage design.

landscaped gardens, private courtyard, pond, alfresco terrace

1376sq m, Realestate

Inside there are stained-glass windows, archways and decorative cornicing. Key living spaces include a formal dining room with garden views, a grand sitting room, library or home office, custom cabinetry and an expansive meals area opening via French doors to a sun-drenched alfresco terrace. Set on 1376sq m, the landscaped gardens include a private courtyard with a fishpond centre-piece, surrounded by leafy landscaping.

Dr Leon Morris became Vice Principal of Ridley College in 1945. In his 15 years as Principal he built up the college, created the new chapel, and saw Ridley become the first Uni college to have male and female residential students. He was made a member of the University Council in 1977, and loved retreating to his tower in his residence of Cumnock to study or contemplate.

Ridley College reopened Cumnock Mansion to provide accommodation for international students from the University of Melbourne in 2005. Then Prof Duncan Maskell was a biochemist and academic who specialised in molecular microbiology and bacterial infectious diseases. He became vice-chancellor Melbourne University in 2018 and was given Cumnock House as his home. This year he resigned, and the house went on the market.

I want this house! But my family only needs 2 bedrooms, one storey and a cheap price gggrr. Can the university reach the suggested $8m-$8.7m price guide?

When Hobart Town Hall had its 150th birthday, spouse and I sailed on the Spirit of Tasmania, from Melbourne to Devonport, to join in the celebrations. Joe lay on the bunk, seasick, for the entire journey – I went to a concert, a film and a restaurant on the ship, and had a great trip. After he rejoined the human race, we drove to Hobart, to inspect the Town Hall and other significant 19th century architecture. Thank you for Municipal Magnificence by Peter Freeman, a great book documenting the history of Town Hall and its place in the City’s life.

Front portico and columns, Town Hall

Henry Hunter (1832-1892) was born in Nottingham, younger son of architect Walter Hunter. Educated at a parish school in Wolverhampton, he studied at the Nottingham School of Design. Henry and his siblings migrated to South Australia in 1848 with the parents and, after their parents died, to Hobart. Next Henry went to the Bendigo goldfields and then back to Tasmania to work in the timber trade. He moved to Hobart to work in a shop but in 1856, encouraged by the Catholic Bishop Robert Willson, he began to practise as an architect. Hunter was one of the few Roman Catholic professional men in Hobart.

The architect’s admiration for Augustus Pugin, leader of the English Gothic revival movement, influenced his work in the many churches he designed around Tasmania. The architect for the new St David’s Cathedral was George Bodley, a British leader of Gothic Revival in church architecture. So in Hobart itself, Hunter became the supervising architect for St David's Cathedral.

Hunter's commission came in Sept 1860 when Bishop Willson laid the foundation stone of St Mary's Cathedral Hobart, adapted from British architect-Melbourne resident William Wardell's design . Bishop Murphy opened the cathedral in 1866, but the construction was faulty - the pillars of the central tower moved, and stone fell from the arches. Hunter examined the work and recommended that the cathedral be rebuilt. A public meeting in Feb 1876 decided that the central tower, aisles & walls be demolished and rebuilt according to the original plan. Hunter, now Hobart's Town’s most successful architect, supervised the demolition and later laid the stone for the cathedral’s new incarnation.

Long gallery, Town Hall

By 1862, Hunter was very busy. He designed and built Derwent & Tamar Assurance Offices, Masonic Hall, Australian Mutual Provident Society's Building, and Hobart Museum. He planned wards and offices for the General Hospital, designed schools for the Board of Education, warehouses, Marine Office and Elwick race-course grandstand.

And now, his master piece! The Municipality of Hobart held the early Council meetings in temporary premises and the streets defining the site of the Town Hall were completed following demolition of the old Government House in 1858. Henry Hunter prepared plans and was awarded an honour in a competition conducted by the Hobart Municipal Council for their new home. His Gothic design was acclaimed as “a fine composition of unusual breadth and unity of line” yet his first plan was not accepted. I am assuming that Gothic architecture was either too Catholic for the good public servants, or was too old-fashioned for a new, modern city.

So Hunter was given 6 months to submit a new Italianate model, this time based on the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Construction on Hobart Town Hall created part of the now-historic Macquarie St stretch of sandstone. The foundation stone was laid in April 1864, a day that was declared a public holiday and celebrated with a parade. It was completed two years later in Sept 1866, complete with its large windows and symmetrical portico with columns. Once again the day was celebrated with another public holiday and a gala ball.

From the start, the Town Hall was designed to house the City’s council chambers, police offices, municipal court and State Library of Tasmania. And the organ has been in use since 1870. In 1871 a stone wall was erected around the boundary, with trees obtained from the Botanical Gardens for landscaping.These facilities remained in use for c50 years after the town hall first opened.

WW1 Honour Roll, Town Hall

Macquarie Manor was originally built as a home for surgeon Dr Richard Bright. In 1870 Dr Bright commissioned Henry Hunter to design and oversee the construction of a residence perfect for a gentleman. It was!

On a visit to Queensland, Hunter formed a partnership with his son and a former pupil, and settled at Brisbane in 1888. Although specialising in domestic architecture, his firm did design some larger Queensland institutions. Henry was still in Brisbane when he died, in 1892.

By 1925 the state of the Town Hall’s prominent portico had degenerated to the point it was declared unsafe and major restoration work was required. Only then were the building's famous chandeliers installed in the ballroom, each having 84 gas jets that were imported from the UK.

Macquarie Manor, Hobart
Architect: Henry Hunter built 1875

On the Convict Trail

Henry Hunter had left behind one of the nation's oldest council buildings, in Australia's second oldest city. Today Hobart’s Town Hall is an ideal venue for exhibitions, balls, concerts, large meetings, citizenship ceremonies and cocktail functions. The main hall now seats 600 and the gallery seats 675 more. On The Convict Trail is excellent.

jam factory built 1869

now Henry Jones Art Hotel, Victoria Dock Hobart

Walk Into Luxury

My maternal side of the family was very proud of the Russian arts, with one cousin becoming a professional writer, one a composer and two became music teachers. My late mother studied literature at university then joined a number of book clubs. Her goal was to read every Russian novel and play (in English) from Alexander Pushkin 1799-1837 on. Of the early writers, she loved Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821-81, Leo Tolstoy 1828-1910, Anton Chekhov 1860–1904 and Maxim Gorky 1868-1936. Of the modern writers, no-one quite matched up to Boris Pasternak 1890–1960.

I quite believe that Russians are indeed "the world's most reading nation", even decades after their writers and readers permanently moved abroad. So I was very lucky my mother didn’t keep her memories alive by calling me Lyudmila at birth, and my brothers Igor and Grigor.

Teffi arrived in France in 1920,

planning to go home to Russia when she could. She never did.

Wiki

Imagine the surprise when a Russian writer’s book called Memories from Moscow to the Black Sea was reviewed by Judith Armstrong in the Weekend Australian (12th-13th Nov 2016). Written by Teffi, the book was published by Pushkin Press in 2016. Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya aka Teffi (1872-1952) was one of Tsar Nicholas II’s favourite writers, a woman born into a well educated professional St Petersburg family. Early in her career she wrote short stories and satirical articles for newspapers and magazines. In the heady excitement and radical passion after the 1905 Revolution, Teffi turned increasingly to political issues and published in the Satiricon magazine and the Russian Word newspaper. Life was going very well indeed.

Even then there was a price to pay. Teffi left her noble husband and three children on their country estate and returned to St Petersburg alone.

But when Lenin returned to Russia in 1917, he apparently had no feeling for beauty whatsoever. He overhauled New Life magazine, saying “Nowadays we don’t need theatre. Nor do we need music. We don’t need any articles about art or culture of any sort.” Like every Russian whose soul was fed by Russian culture, Teffi was devastated. She resigned with the rest of the literary section, not long before the paper was shut down by the authorities.

In 1918 Teffi moved to Moscow, Kiev and then Odessa, but she was never going to find a happy place to settle. The miseries brought by WW1 and the difficulties of the Russian Revolution suggested to her that the time had come to look for a new life. Her book was “her blackly funny and heartbreaking account of her final, frantic journey into exile across Russia - travelling by cart, freight train and rickety steamer - and the ordinary and unheroic people she met. From refugees setting up camp on a dockside to a singer desperately buying a few last scraps of fabric to make a dress, all were caught up in the whirlwind; all were immortalised by Teffi's penetrating gaze. Her sadness at leaving home and her horror of never seeing the family again will resonate with every person across the planet who has EVER gone into exile.

How does one describe the state of being a no-one nowhere, with no place on the map, or in society, to claim as one’s own? Teffi did not pretend to know what she did not know at the time. The brief stories of her journey through Russia contained almost no generalisations. On only a couple of occasions did the writer insert a fact that she learned some months after the events she was describing. She succeeded in conveying the sense of claustrophobia and disorientation that typified the refugee condition. [I lived overseas for 5 years and although I spoke the language fluently and was not a refugee, there was always the fear of stuffing up, of accidentally offending, of not finding my way around].

Readers believed that a trademark of Teffi’s writing had always been her ability to describe the absurd as though it were the ordinary. In the second half of this book, follow a harrowing train journey through Russia and Ukraine (with stays in German-occupied Kiev and French-occupied Odessa, which she fled as the Reds approach). Teffi ended up aboard a ship to Istanbul, commandeered by an ad hoc group of refugees. She had to scrub the decks on the ship to prove that she too was a proper worker.

Memories was first published as a serial, Dec 1928-Jan 1930.
It was republished in Russia by Pushkin Press in 2016

The book ended mid-journey, in the uncertainty that was the hallmark of the refugee state. The author was saying her goodbye to Russia, but she could not know where she was going next, when or how. I agreed with the comparison that was drawn with the works of Stefan Zweig, the Austrian author who wrote about the end of a grand epoch of European civilisation just before WW2. But everyone’s sadness is personal; everyone’s tragedy is individual. Perhaps it is just as well I did not even recognise Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya aka Teffi’s name before Judith Armstrong’s review. Teffi’s experiences would have broken my heart.

It worked out well in the end. After years of wanderings, Teffi settled in Paris in 1920, where she lived and wrote successfully. Like so many other Russian intellectuals, Teffi began publishing her works in the Russian newspapers in Paris and had an eager and large Russian-reading public. Her book Memories from Moscow to the Black Sea was first published as a serial between Dec 1928 and Jan 1930.

The final years in Paris were financially strapped but friends looked after her until her death in 1952. Appropriately Teffi was buried in the Russian Orthodox cemetery called Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, just south of Paris.

Not until the late 1980s was Teffi’s work seriously reconsidered in Russia. In 1990, an important publisher in Moscow brought out a two-volume edition of her humorous stories and in 1997, the Gorky Institute of World Literature held a Teffi conference to honour her oeuvre.

In recent years Pushkin Press has done English readers a service by releasing Rasputin and Other Ironies (2010), a selection of Teffi’s old journalism and non-fiction: politics, society, art, literature and family life. And Subtly Worded (2014), a collection of her short stories. The publications are in elegant packaging and have scholarly notes attached.

Teffi: A Life of Letters and of Laughter

by Edythe Haber, 2018

Her most popular works: A Modest Talent; Diamond Dust; All about Love; Love and a Family Journey; When the Crayfish Whistled; Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others and Me; and Memories. For short stories, see Shoshi's Book Blog.

My parents thought Russians were the most intelligent, and my in-laws thought Czechs were most cultured. So thanks to Culture.pl for these Polish data, totally new to me.

In Interwar years, chess was very popular in Poland. It was endorsed by key political figures as a pastime that Polish citizens could adopt eg Marshal Józef Piłsudski prime minister (1926). Chairman of Poland’s Chess Association, Piłsudski also valued Jews because the Jewish communities promoted chess. But the first chess Olympiad was held in 1927 in London, won by Hungary. Poland was excluded, because the regulations still barred professionals.

Rubinstein vs Tartakower 1927

Teodor Regedzinski (1894–1954) played for Poland at 5 Interwar Olympiads, winning 5 medals. He had German roots and collaborated with the Nazis in the war, to provide security for his wife and son. So he was imprisoned by the Polish authorities after war ended.

Poland was a chess power in the Interwar era! All the Olympiads they participated in pre-WW2 ended with Poland being on the podium (except for 1933). There were many other competitors in Poland till 1939, but because the majority were Jewish, most were handed over to the Germans or shot; Poland’s chess prowess disappeared.

The July 1930 Hamburg Olympiad was the first where pros could play, against 17 other nations. Poland sent Akiba Rubinstein, Ksawery Tartakower, Dawid Przepiórka, Kazimierz Makarczyk, Paulin Frydman. The biggest rivals were Hungary & Germany. The Poles beat Hungary and drew with Germany, Poland winning 1.5 points over Hungary (win 1 point, draw .5, loss 0). Poland’s best player was Rubinstein (1880–1961), and the fine Hamburg victory remained Poland’s best-ever Olympic chess triumph!

Polish team, Chess Olympiad in Hamburg, 1930

(L) Frydman, Tartakower, Rotmil, Rubinstein, Makarczyk, Przepiórka,

Culture.pl

In mid-1930s, Rubinstein’s depression worsened and he could no longer play competitively. Rubinstein was being taken care of by his wife, who’d opened a diner in Brussels. Despite being Jewish, the family survived the Holocaust; his wife died (1954) and Rubinstein died (1961) in Antwerp.

Ksawery Tartakower (1887-1956) was born in Rostov-on-Don in a Polish-Austrian Jewish family. Dad taught him chess but his parents tragically died in a 1911 pogrom, so he moved to Vienna to study Law. Ksaw was more drawn to chess, and after successes in 1909-13 tournaments, he chose chess over Law. In WWI he was in Austria’s army then moved to Paris. Post-war he played well in many tournaments and wrote chess theory for French and German press.

By 1920s he was a top 10 players globally. When Poland’s Chess Association started in 1926, Tartakower represented Poland. He was 2nd best of the 1930 team, winning 12 points in 16 games. In the 1930s Tartakower represented Poland at 6 chess Olympiads, winning gold medal in Hamburg, plus 2 silver and 2 bronze medals. And he won a silver in 1939 in Buenos Aires. He was still there when WW2 started, but he chose to go home. Too old to join with the Polish Army in France, he joined the French Foreign Legion. Tartakower survived and later, distrustful of Communist Poland, became a French national. He played for France at 1950 Dubrovnik chess Olympiad, and died in Paris in 1956.

Dawid Przepiórka (1880-1940) was born in Warsaw, son of a real estate owner. Young Dawid discovered chess in a Warszawski newspaper and fell in love. After dad’s death, Dawid inherited his parent’s tenement houses, becoming wealthy himself. In 1905 he moved to Göttingen then Munich to study maths. But he left uni, being more drawn into the chess world. In 1910 he married Melania Silberast in Munich, had 2 children & moved to Warsaw.

In 1924, Przepiórka came 2nd in a tournament in Gyor Hungary and 2 years later won a Munich tournament. 1926 also saw Poland’s 1st chess championship in Warsaw, with Dawid crowned winner. He was Poland’s 3rd strongest player at Hamburg’s Olympiad, taking 9 points in 13 games.

From 1928-33 Dawid became chess journal Świat Szachowy’s editor-publisher. As well as representing Poland in Hamburg, he competed at the 1931 Prague Olympiad. Alas Przepiórka lost to USA’s Israel Horowitz in a game that should have drawn, so Poland won the silver medal instead. Later he played a major role in sorting Warwaw’s 1935 chess Olympiad as head of the Technical Committee, winning the 1937 Golden Cross of Merit, a key Polish state award.

In WW2, Przepiórka stayed in Occupied Warsaw near a chess coffeeshop, filled with players playing after the Nazis closed official chess clubs. In Jan 1940, the Nazis raided and gaoled all of the clients, incl Przepiórka. Some were later freed but Jewish Przepiórka was shot and his wife and children also died. The Golden Cross of Merit protected no one.

Casimir Makarczyk (1901-72) was born in Warsaw and attended Michał Kreczmar Middle School alongside noted literary Poles eg Leopold Tyrmand. In 1915 his family moved to St Petersburg where Kaz learned to play chess. Then he returned to Warsaw in 1918 where he began studying Law. But financial problems ended his education in 1922. He worked in a bank and edited chess sections in newspapers, while studying philosophy. In 1926 he editor at Świat Szachowy then worked at Ministry of Public Works

In 1927 he won silver at the Warsaw championship and bronze in Łódź. This streak granted him a place on the Polish team at 1928’s chess Olympiad in The Hague. Then he represented Poland at 5 chess Olympiads in the Interwar period, winning 1 gold, 1 silver and 2 bronze medals. He was Poland’s 4th best player in the 1930 golden team in Hamburg, winning 7.5 points from his 13 games.

Christian Makarczyk joined the Polish resistance in WW2 and Warsaw Uprising. As a result he was taken into a German camp near Dresden & liberated in 1945. He returned to Poland, settling in Łódź where he was an aide at the Logic Dept of Lodz university. Non-Jews survived! In 1948, he became Poland’s new chess champion at a Kraków tournament, then won the Łódź title in 1949. In the 1950s, he was withdrawing from public chess life, dying much later.

Paulin Frydman(1905-82) was born into an educated Warsaw Jewish family. His uncle Szymon Winawer was a noted chess player, the uncle who introduced the lad to the game. Frydman took a liking for chess and when he was only 16, Czyn Journal published his chess puzzles. In 1922, he joined the Warsaw Society of Chess Supporters and at 19 won second place at their championship. He also medalled at Poland’s first championship in 1926, securing a place in Poland’s 1928 Olympiad team at the Hague.

Frydman then represented Poland at 8 Interwar Olympiads, taking 3 bronzes, 3 silvers and 1 gold - his chess career reflected the great strength of Polish chess pre-WW2, Frydman’s golden years. And he won Warsaw’s contests 5 times and came second in the 1935 Nationals.

At Buenos Aires’ 1939 Olympiad he won 13 points in 17 games, contributing largely to the team’s silver medal. Frydman stayed in Buenos Aires when war broke out, joining in Argentinian competitions until 1941. Then he ran a chess salon at Rex Coffee House Buenos Aires, creating a good income. Frydman’s life there was close to famous Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. Frydman died in Buenos ires

Mieczyslaw Najdorf (1894-1954) was a Polish Jewish chess player in the later 1930s, a vital figure in Olympic teams. In 1939 he chose to stay in Argentina after the 1939 Olympiad. Post-war he won the status as a top player anywhere, before making headlines creating new world records in Blind Chess, playing 45 opponents simultaneously! Having survived the war, Najdorf later retained his excellence.

A simultaneous chess game with Dawid Przepiórka
Society of Chess Lovers in Kraków, 1927

Culture.pl

Like other great Jewish competitors in Poland pre-WW2, most lived in a huge, educated community (30% of Warsaw) that had supported Poland’s 1930 gold-winning team. Antoni Wojciechowski (1905–38), one of the best Poles of that era, represented Poland at Munich’s 1936 Olympiad in great games. His style was risky and very entertaining for viewers. Sadly he died pre-war from pneumonia.

It’s accurate to say that Poland was a chess power in the Interwar era. All the Olympiads they participated in pre-WW2 ended with Poland being on the podium (except for 1933 Folkestone). There were many other competitors in Poland till 1939, but because the majority were Jewish, most were handed over to the Germans or shot; Poland’s chess prowess disappeared.

To celebrate two of the leading artistic figures of the C19th, The British Royal Collection announced that 22 of the best photographs of contemporaries Roger Fenton (1819–1869) and Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79) were travelling to three venues across the UK in 2011. The photos were selected from the Royal Photograph Collection, having initially been collected by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, two royals who lent their enthusiastic support to the exciting new medium of photography.

Henry Cole, the first Victoria and Albert Museum director, seemed to have been the link between Julie Margaret Cameron and the Queen. Cole knew the photographer and had sat for her in the past, so he arranged for her to have a studio in the museum where she could take portraits in an ideal setting. Already in 1858, the museum had the world's first international photographic exhibition and I am assuming this was where the Queen first saw Cameron's amazing work. The V & A must have remained supportive of Cameron's art. In 1865, the Museum acquired 63 of her works.

Princesses Alice and Victoria, Queen Victoria’s daughters,

at Balmoral, 1856,

by Fenton

Queen Victoria maintained her interest in photography, even after she became a widow. And one of her most important collections came from Julia Margaret Cameron. The 2011 exhibition appropriately included six of Cameron’s powerful portraits of male sitters, part of the Great and the Good of C19th Britain.

May Day by Cameron, 1866

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

The Victorian Web

Cameron was attracted to subjects who'd been successful & famous via their careers, but her portraits were unlike that produced by contemporary, studio-based photographers. Artist G.F Watts helped Cameron to create portraits that expressed the individual character of the sitter, rather than a mere record of the sitter’s facial features. The slight blurring of each image was adopted by Cameron as an artistic technique, to achieve a more painterly effect and to suggest a sense of energy.

Roger Fenton (1819–1869) was trained as a barrister, not as an artist. Yet in 1852 his photographic work was exhibited at the Society of Arts, in the first British exhibition devoted exclusively to photography. Fenton was appointed the first official photographer of the British Museum in 1854 and achieved widespread recognition for the photographs that he took of the Crimean War in 1855.

He was introduced to Victoria and Albert at the first exhibition of the Photographic Society. And soon Fenton was invited to Windsor Castle to photograph the entire royal family. This brought great happiness to both sides - Fenton's unprecedented access to the family life of the royal family must have influenced his artistic future and Fenton in turn increased the royals' great interest in photography.

The Royal Collection exhibition includes Fenton’s final work for the royal family, completed after the photographer’s return from the Crimea in 1856. Fenton had travelled to Balmoral to photograph the newly completed royal residence in Scotland and members of the Queen’s household.

The royals also purchased a number of Fenton’s commercial photos, including his views of Windsor Castle and the surrounding parkland taken in 1860. Since the opening of two railway stations in Windsor, a visit to the Castle had become a popular trip from the capital. So Fenton may have intended his work to be sold as a quality souvenir or to serve as illustrations to guidebooks.

I wondered why the nation-wide tour started in Blackwell, The Arts & Crafts House in Cumbria. Possibly because the Lakeland Arts Trust's own collection already contained photographs and photographic objects relating to the development of photography in the Lake District.

The book, 2010, by Sophie Gordon.

Photo of Thomas Carlyle by Cameron.

The accompanying book, Roger Fenton • Julia Margaret Cameron: Early British Photographs from the Royal Collection by Sophie Gordon, was published by Royal Collection Publications in 2010. Rather than being a distant patron, the book illustrated how Queen Victoria's owned a much loved set of Cameron portraits. And it showed Fenton images of Windsor Castle and the royal children.

The first photographs dated back to the first half of the C19th and after that, techniques developed rapidly. But photography as a fine art was met with some resistance by cultural critics. Perhaps it was Queen Victoria's support that pushed photography from mechanical art to fine art.

I will never forget the letters, petitions and public protests against the last execution carried out in Australia. Ronald Ryan (1925–1967) was found guilty of killing a warder during a prison outbreak in 1965. His 1967 hanging horrified Australian citizens and led to permanent legislative change across the nation.

David Blakely and Ruth Ellis
at the Little Club London, in 1955

Australia should have learned earlier. Ruth Ellis (1926–1955) was hanged for her lover's murder, the last woman to be executed in Britain. Welsh-born Ellis had been a beautiful nude and lingerie model with a great figure, a nightclub hostess in a plush London club. The blond 29 year old mother of 2 young children, she said she'd been in a relationship with a 25-year-old upper-class racing driver David Blakely.

There was a ton of evidence that Blakely had been violent towards her including 3 miscarriages from beatings on the stomach, hospital records of bruised and broken body parts. Today the medical evidence would have cancelled the murder charge in favour of a manslaughter charge, or actual bodily harm in self defence.

Hampstead, where he'd been hiding out in friends’ homes, was not far from the Magdala pub where the shooting was. Ellis was definitely the person who fired the shots at Blakely but had she been driven there and given the loaded gun by her other lover, Desmond Cussen? In any case, the trial lasted just a day. A unanimous, swift (23 mins) guilty verdict saw the trial judge immediately don his black cap to pass the death sentence.

Ellis was portrayed as calm and expressionless between the murder, in mid April 1955, and the very speedy execution in Holloway Prison 3 months later. But the main question remains: how much did class and sexist prejudices play in the decision not to bar or cancel Ruth Ellis’ hanging?

Crowds gather at Holloway Prison London

before the execution of Ruth Ellis, 1955

Flicker

There has long been a fascination in Britain with young women accused of murder eg
1. Edith Thompson & Frederick Bywaters were a British couple executed for the murder of Thompson's husband Percy in 1923.

2. Young songwriter Alma Rattenbury was accused along with her younger lover of killing her husband, in 1935. The trial judge told the jury NOT to convict her just because she was an adulteress. Only her lover was hanged, so Rabbenbury stabbed herself to death.
3. Margaret Allen, hanged in Manchester in 1949, was a gay woman who killed her elderly, brutalising neighbour.
4. In 1953 Louisa Merrifield was hanged for poisoning her employer, in response to the boss’s newly changed will.

Murders by women were sensationalised in the English press. While male villainy was dismissed as an unfortunate regression, the same sort of behaviour in females, particularly when it was directed at males, was condemned as a hideous perversion. Men were punished; women were punished and villified. The Victorians were originally fascinated by the transgressive woman, but so were 1950s newspapers! Ruth Ellis could not have breached more sexual standards of 1955, had she tried – nude modelling, adultery with Blakely, working in a night club, drinking alcohol herself and receiving money from Cussen.

Front page, Daily Mirror, July 1955 Two Royal Commissions have protested against these horrible events. Now it is time for ordinary citizens to add their voices.

BBC Four gave 3 hours to a re-examination by the American film-maker Gillian Pachter in March 2018. The tv series TheRuth Ellis Files looked at new evidence of Cussen’s role and also the part that a journalist played posthumously. The chief crime reporter for The People took up Ellis’ case and interviewed her young son, Andy– something the police had never done. In early 1956, the reporter noted: “Ruth Ellis would not have hanged … but for a tragic error of judgment by the home secretary.” The home secretary had not given Scotland Yard enough time to investigate how Cussen had primed and encouraged her to kill.

Months later, the Home Office conceded that there might be something in Webb’s claims. Director of Public Prosecutions concluded that: “Since Ellis is no longer available as a witness, there is no evidence to prove that Cussen supplied her with the gun.” Good grief!! Cussen secretly emigrated to Australia and died 1991.

In 2003, Ellis’ sister Muriel Jakubait requested a posthumous appeal. Muriel revealed that their father had raped her at 14, producing a son who was brought up as her brother, and had also abused Ellis. The abuse and the beatings by Ruth’s husband, George Ellis, and boyfriend David Blakely, formed the other part of her case for the appeal court. However the appeal court concluded that Ruth Ellis had been rightly convicted of murder under the law back then.

Her execution played an important role in eliminating capital punishment across the UK. So Gillian Pachter had to ask if that 1955 case still had any particular relevance today. Yes! Firstly, Pachter said, there hasn’t been a case that changed the conscience of the USA in quite the same way as Ellis’ did. Secondly the way that Ellis’ own violence and male sexual violence against her was framed by the authorities …still resonates today.

Endless protest marches against capital punishment in Melbourne,
Herald Sun, 1967

Ruth's ex-husband, George Ellis, committed suicide in 1958. Her son Andy suicided in 1982, aged 38. Her daughter Georgie died in 2017 of cancer, aged only 50, still hoping that her mother would be cleared. Capital punishment was always immoral, and not just for the executed person.

Established through the 1902 will of Cecil John Rhodes, the Rhodes Scholarship was a truly visionary project for its time. 120 years later, the Rhodes Scholarships are the oldest and perhaps most prestigious international scholarship programme in the world, enabling outstanding young people around the world to undertake full-time postgraduate study at Oxford Uni. Oxford scored first in the Times Higher Education rankings for 2017-25.

Oxford Uni

BBC

One of the founding aims of the Scholarship was to identify young leaders from over the world who, through pursuing education together at Oxford, would forge bonds of mutual understanding and fellowship to better mankind.

The reputation as the world's most renowned academic scholarship rests not on founder Cecil Rhodes' life, but on the great contributions our Scholars made to the world, and qualities sought in a Rhodes Scholar: intellectual distinction combined with concern for others, energy to lead, and a focus on public service, remain as compelling as ever.

Kris Kristofferson had good looks and good music

Credit: Rolling Stone

When different people come together in a shared spirit, exciting new things begin. The Rhodes Scholarship is a life-changing opportunity to join outstanding young people from around the world to study at the University of Oxford.

There is a total of 32 Rhodes Scholarships for the U.S each year, covering the 50 states of the US and its territories of American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands. The Scholarships in the U.S are administered by 16 regional selection committees, each awarding 2 scholarships. 9 scholarships are offered to Australians to enrol in graduate study; 8 Scholarships every year for South Africans; up to 3 scholars are elected from New Zealand each year; 5 scholarships available each year for India; and 3 go to Canada's Prairie Region; 2 Scholarships each to: Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. Now students from anywhere in the world can apply, so the competition must be vigorous.

Rhodes Scholarships are postgraduate awards to support study at Oxford Uni. Established in 1903, they are the oldest international graduate scholarship programme in the world. Today 100 Scholarships a year cover all fees and a stipend for 2-3 years, with over 300 Scholars in Residence in Oxford at one time.

Kris Kristofferson loved performing at

Oxford Performing Arts Centre

The criteria which determine Rhodes Scholars:

1.literary and scholastic excellence
2.energy to use one's talents to the full (as by mastery in areas such as sports, music, debate, dance, theatre, and artistic pursuits, wherever teamwork is involved)
3.truth, courage, devotion to duty, protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness and fellowship. And
4.moral force of character and instincts to lead, and to take an interest in one's fellow beings.

**

After finishing San Mateo High School in 1954, Kris Kristofferson (1936–2024) enrolled at Pomona College, hoping to become a writer. He studied writing under Dr Frederick Sontag, who encouraged him to apply for a Rhodes scholarship.

He graduated in 1958 and was awarded The Rhodes Scholarship, a prestigious grant that allowed him to study British literature at Oxford. I am not surprised that he wrote stories and examined the works of William Blake. But I had no idea he began writing songs during his time in Oxford. At the same time he began his performing career, was also awarded a University Blue for boxing and he played competitive rugby.

I played hockey at university, but had to give it up when studies demanded my total attention. However Kris continued to play sports and pursue music, all while studying literature. Perhaps he read that the criteria which determined Rhodes Scholars included the mastery of areas such as sports and music.

He graduated from Merton College Oxford, in 1960 and returned to the U.S. Followed in his father's footsteps, Kris served in the American Army and eventually becoming a helicopter pilot at the rank of Captain. He graduated Airborne School, Ranger School and flight school, served in Germany, and volunteered for Vietnam as a helicopter pilot, but instead was offered a Professor of English Literature position at USMA West Point. Disappointed that he was not allowed to fight in Vietnam, he resigned his position in 1965 and pursued song writing. This surprised me since every male I knew in the last 1960s went into hiding, if they were conscripted into the Australian Army.

Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson, date?

Credit: Rolling Stone

After being commissioned to teach literature, Kris ended up choosing to Nashville to pursue a music career instead. He got a janitorial job in Nashville Studios where he met Johnny Cash who initially took some of his songs. So I know a lot of the music when Kristofferson changed the face of Country Music back then. But I have never seen any of his poetry or stories.

Now reminisce with Me and Bobby McGee (1970), written by Kristofferson and sung by Janis Joplin:

Freedom is just another word for nothin' left to lose
Nothin', don't mean nothin' hon' if it ain't free, no-no
And feelin' good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues
You know feelin' good was good enough for me
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.

Heresies

Catholic Answers

The Inquisition was set up in the Catholic Church to root out & punish heresy. In 1184 Pope Lucius III sent bishops to southern France to track down Cathar heretics. In 1231 Pope Gregory officially charged the Dominican & Franciscan Orders with hunting heretics. Then in the C14th, the church pursued the Waldensians in Germany and Northern Italy.

Inquisitors moved into a town and announced their arrival, giving citizens a chance to admit to heresy. Those who confessed were forced to testify and received a punishment. If the heretic did not confess, torture and execution were inescapable. Heretics weren’t allowed to face accusers and received no counsel. The Inquisitors, on the other hand, were supported with a manual called “Conduct of the Inquisition into Heretical Depravity”.

Nonetheless there were many abuses of power. In 1307 Inquisitors were involved in the mass arrest and tortures of 15,000 Knights Templar in France, resulting in many executions. Joan of Arc was also burned at the stake in 1431 by this Inquisition.

In the late C15th, King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain believed corruption in the Spanish Catholic Church was caused by Jews who, to survive increasing anti-Semitism, converted to Christianity. These Conversos were viewed with suspicion and were blamed for plagues, accused of poisoning peoples’ water and abducting Christian children.

Auto de fé, final, public stage for punishing religious heretics.
Jan Hus at the stake, 1485
FreeSpeechHistory

The 2 monarchs believed Conversos were secretly practising their old religion; and that Christian support would be crucial for their upcoming crusade in Muslim Granada. King Ferdinand felt an Inquisition was the best way to fund that crusade, by seizing the wealth of heretic Conversos.

In 1478, urged by clergyman Tomas de Torquemada, the two monarchs created the Tribunal of Castile to investigate heresy among Conversos. The effort at first focused on stronger Catholic education for Conversos, but by 1480, Jews in Castile were forced into isolated and locked up ghettos. The Inquisition expanded to Seville and a mass exodus of Conversos followed. In 1481, 20,000 Conversos confessed to heresy, hoping to avoid execution. But by the year’s end, hundreds of Conversos were burned at the stake.

Hearing the complaints of Conversos who had fled to Rome, Pope Sextus stated that the Spanish Inquisition was wrongly accusing Conversos. In 1482 Sextus appointed a council to take command of the Inquisition, but the same Torquemada was named Inquisitor General and established courts across Spain. Torture became systemised and routinely used to elicit confessions. Sentencing of confessed heretics was done in a public event called the Auto-da-Fe. Torquemada’s downfall came only when he investigated members of the clergy for heresy. Diego de Deza took over as Inquisitor General, escalating the hunt for heresy within cities and rounding up scores of accused heretics, including members of the nobility and local governments. Some were able to bribe their way out of imprisonment.

After Isabella’s death in 1504, Ferdinand promoted Cardinal Gonzalo Ximenes de Cisneros, head of the Spanish Catholic Church, to Inquisitor General. Ximenes had previously been successful in persecuting Islamic Moors in in Granada. As Inquisitor General, Ximenes pursued Muslims into North Africa, encouraging the king to take military action and to establish the Inquisition there.

The Protestant Reformation

Martin Luther published his 95 Theses in 1517 and the Reformation began. Rome renewed its own Inquisition in 1542 when Pope Paul III created the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman Inquisition to combat Protestant heresy!! And in 1545, the Spanish Index was created, a list of heretical European books forbidden in Spain, based on the Roman Inquisition’s own index.

The population of Spanish Protestants increased, particularly in the 1550s. In 1556, King Philip II ascended the Spanish throne - he had previously brought the Roman Inquisition to the Netherlands, where Lutherans had been hunted and burned at the stake. Although originally organised to deal only with Jews and Moors, The Spanish Inquisition now had to widen out to include Protestant heretics.

As Spain expanded into the Americas, so did the New World Inquisition; it was established in Mexico in 1570 and in 1574 in Peru. In 1580 Spain conquered Portugal, and began rounding up and killing Jews and Protestants who had fled Spain. Philip II also renewed hostilities against the Moors, selling them into slavery.

A late witch trial in Protestant Europe in Paisley, near Glasgow, 1697.
Amusing Planet

Witch-hunts were completely different. They started only after the Reformation in majority-Protestant countries, with the number of cases increasing in the later C16th. At the very same time in Catholic countries in southern Europe, there were almost no witch trials because they were banned by the Catholic Church. As a result the Spanish killed only a handful of witches, the Portuguese just one and the Italians none at all.

So the witch-craze focused on Protestant northern Europe, in countries like Germany, France and Scotland. Presumably in those countries witchcraft was seen as a remnant of ignorant Catholic beliefs that needed to be eradicated.

Witchcraft and heresy were thus inversely related: as witchcraft trials were on the rise in Protestant countries, large-scale heresy trials rapidly decreased. In Scotland there were large-scale witch-hunts in 1590, 1597, the 1620s and 1649. Was witchcraft merely an alternative way of accusing heretics, without calling it heresy?

Even in majority Protestant populations, there were regional differences. In places like Russia and Estonia the majority of executed witches were men (68%), not women (32%). In Germany the vast majority of executed witches were women (82%). Did Eastern Europe communities have different views of women? And witch prosecutions in the Protestant Low Countries had almost ended by 1578, many decades before they died out in Germany and Scotland.

Where the Catholic Church was strong (Spain, Portugal, Italy), the Reformation was definitely the first time that the church had to cope with a large-scale threat to its existence and legitimacy. The Spanish Inquisition was so busy executing c32,000 religious heretics in 200+ years that they didn’t have the time or the need to go after witches.

In 150 years in Protestant countries, c80,000 people were tried for witchcraft and c40,000 of them were executed. Only after 1700 did witch trials disappear, almost completely, in Protestant communities.

Hedwig Kiesler/ later Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) left Vienna and moved to the USA in 1937 and continued her illustrious film career. But within a few years her film career became less satisfying, presumably because of her naked scenes in some films that were soon banned in the US and because she already had a decadent reputation. So she focused more on science and inventions.

She already knew maths very well and had picked up practical munitions-engineering knowledge from her charming but Fascist ex-husband Fritz Mandl. How ironic! If one of Mandl's favourite topics in his gatherings was the technology of radio-controlled missiles and torpedoes, did the American government acknowledge Hedy’s military knowledge and want to exploit it? [No; they didn’t utilise her genius, even in WW2]. Were the Germans interested in how much knowledge she took with her to the USA after 1937?

Hedy Lamarr and computer science, 1942

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Lamarr dated pilot Howard Hughes but she was most interested with his desire for innovation. Hughes pushed the innovator in Lamarr, giving her a small set of equipment to use in her trailer on set. While she had an inventing table set up in her house, Lamarr worked on inventions between takes. Hughes took her to his airplane factories, showed her how the planes were built, and introduced her to the scientists behind process. Lamarr was inspired to innovate as Hughes wanted to create faster planes that could be sold to the US military. She bought books of fish and of birds and looked at the fastest of each kind. She combined the fins of the fastest fish and the wings of the fastest bird to sketch a new wing design for Hughes’ planes. Upon showing the design to Hughes, he thought she was a genius.

How much expertise was she developing with American composer George Antheil in the USA where they met? Antheil was himself well connected, having earlier married Hungarian Boski Markus, the niece of star Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler. Antheil successfully experimented with electronic musical instruments and devised a punch-card-like device that could synchronise a transmitter and receiver. They were interested in many inventions, but of their greatest concerns was the hideous war in Europe.

Antheil composing, 1940

Schubertiade Music

In 1940 Lamarr and Antheil believed they could design an anazing new communication system used to guide torpedoes to their targets in war. National Women’s History Museum published as follows: The system involved the use of frequency hopping amongst radio waves, with both transmitter and receiver hopping to new frequencies together. Doing so prevented the interception of radio waves, thereby allowing the torpedo to find its intended target. After its creation, Lamarr and Antheil sought a patent and military support for the invention. While awarded U.S Patent in Aug 1942, the Navy decided against the implementation of the new system. The rejection led Lamarr to instead support the war efforts with her celebrity, by selling war bonds.

Hedy Lamar and her patent sketch.

Linked.com

Giving her credit did not help the frequency-hopping idea; even when the USA finally joined the Allies, the discovery was never applied by the American military during WW2. Even though she became an American citizen in April 1953, the real payoff of frequency-intervention came only decades later. Eventually it became integral to the operation of cellular telephones and Blue-tooth systems that enabled computers to communicate with peripheral devices. In fact Lamarr came to be referred to as "The Mother of Wi-Fi" and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth. Too late, of course, for Lamarr and Antheil.

After WW2, Lamarr continued to act in films and on television. Her biggest hit was Samson and Delilah in 1949. She took American citizenship in 1953 and in 1960, she was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1967 Lamarr wrote an autobiography, Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman, but sued her ghost writers because the book was scandalous. She complained that she’d had a $7 million income but was now subsisting on a grotty pension. More litigation followed in 1974. The story of her radio transmission invention became widely publicised but she didn’t earn an Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award until 1997. She died in 2000 and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Newspaper coverage, 1945

North Coast Current

Enjoy reading Hedy's Folly: Life & Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, by Richard Rhodes, 2012

Nolde's Crucifix, 1912
was in Städtisches Museum in Halle

I’ve not read The Gallery of Miracles & Madness: Insanity, Art and Hitler’s First Mass-Murder Programme by Charlie English, 2021 because I was more interested in the fate of Germany’s degenerate artists than in mental patients in asylums. So here is Kathryn Hughes’ fine review.

In 1922 Heidelberg psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn’s book Artistry of the Mentally Ill fired up the art world. Since the C19th, doctors in asylums pored over the drawings, paintings and sculptures of their patients. Could doctors spot schizophrenia just by looking at how someone coloured in the sky? Could they discern neurosis in an patients who simply painted models with incomplete faces?

But using art diagnostically was not Prinzhorn’s issue. His interest in the patients’ art was aesthetic and philosophic eg when a delusional Hamburg metalworker Franz Bühler produced The Choking Angel, an intense version of God’s messenger with a shining crown and a torturer’s face, Prinzhorn seriously compared the work to Albrecht Dürer’s!

Bühler, The Choking Angel,

The Guardian

This was certainly not art to soothe the soul, but of course soul-soothing was not what modern art was about. From the late C19th, Gustav Klimt, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele focused on describing the agony of modern selfhood. Feel the rising tide of madness in Munch’s horrified scream or Schiele’s warped bodies. And it was that madness, a heroic refusal to fall for the easy remedies of civilised society, that Prinzhorn’s asylum artists easily accessed. While sane artists scraped off layers of social conditioning and academic training before they could reach Freud’s hidden parts of themselves, asylum inmates had a shortcut to their unconscious. Rather than being patronised, these artists of the interior were to be revered and copied.

Paul Klee, teaching pictorial theory of form at Bauhaus, greeted the images in Prinzhorn’s book rapturously. In these oddly shattered shapes, with jagged outlines, perspective shifts and incompleteness, Klee saw an authentic response to all post-WW1 world crises. See his Prophetic Woman (1923), a primitive figure indebted to Lamb of God, a dense geometric pen-ink drawing by an insane banker.

Among the Surrealists, Prinzhorn’s book also succeeded. Max Ernst drew inspiration from August Natterer, an Upper Swabia engineer who believed he was a direct Napoleonic descendant. Natterer’s intensely detailed, densely coloured works, which came to him in a vision, provided inspiration for Max Ernst’s 1931 Oedipus. Salvador Dalí borrowed from madmen but, to his credit, tried hard to go insane as a way of improving his own painting, never quite managing it.

Having failed 2 entrance exams to pre-WW1 Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, self-taught artist Adolf Hitler scraped a living by copying postcards of pleasant Munich views and selling them in bars. Until he ended up in a Bavarian prison, screaming at the admitting psychologist! A psychologist had assessed Hitler as a morbid psychopath, with hysteria and an inclination toward a mystical mindset. Hitler was imprisoned for his part in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, in which he led 2,000 Nazi stormtroopers in a failed attempt to end the Weimar Republic. His fortunes were about to change and within 10 years he was Chancellor of Germany, but his ideas about art did not change. In fact they hardened into a dogma that became a founding principle of the Third Reich’s German culture and pure Aryan race.

Great Exhibition of German Art catalogue cover, 1937.

ancient, classical, proud

Hitler’s outrage at modern art focused on abstract, distorted and angry works. This worsened in WW1’s devastating aftermath in Germany, exaggerated colours, expressive brush strokes and gory subjects only exacerbated Germany’s societal divisions, and economic and political crises. For Hitler, on the other hand, Healthy Art was an art that painted exactly what was in front of its nose, plus some extra swagger. People should look like Aryans, with firm limbs and rosy cheeks, and landscapes should resemble the tourist postcards he once churned out. So the Führer introduced legislation to ensure that painters followed his rules.

Any art that did not follow these rules was Degenerate, seen as a deliberate ploy by the Jewish-Bolsheviks to destroy Germany. To ensure this didn’t happen, Hitler ordered the confiscation of all troublesome art from German galleries and museums in 1937. This collected treasure, including a number of pieces by the Prinzhorn artists Klee, Marc Chagall and Otto Dix, was put on display in the Degenerate Art Exhibition that year. Later iterations of the immensely popular show contrasted modernist art with art made by the Heidelberg patients, in order to show the connection between biological and artistic degeneracy.

Otto Dix. Storm Troops Advancing under Gas, 1924.

Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf.

By this time the patients were extremely vulnerable. Most professional artists whose work featured in the Degenerate Art Exhibition had gone. Klee was in Switzerland, Chagall, Dalí and Ernst were in New York, while Oskar Schlemmer and Dix were in hiding. So there was no-one left to speak up for the asylum artists when, in autumn 1939, Hitler set out to exterminate them.

The rationale was eugenics. Psychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia were heritable, so it made sense to purge the unfortunates who “represented life unworthy of life”. Actually cost-cutting was possibly the more immediate driver: long-term psychiatric care cost money and, as Germany prepared for war with Britain, the money could be better spent on tanks. 30+ of Prinzhorn’s artists were among the 250,000 inmates put into gas chambers early in the war. The lucky ones got away with forced sterilisation.

Artistry of the Mentally Ill: Psychology and Psychopathology of Configuration

Hans Prinzhorn, 1972, Amazon

Charlie English’s book was as beautiful as it was bleak. Thank you Kathryn Hughes

Portrait of Josiah Wedgwood

painted by Joshua Reynolds, Wiki

Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) lived in Stoke-on-Trent. His family were potters in Nth Staffordshire & by the mid-1700s, the closeness of clay and coal helped turn that narrow Midlands valley into a successful ceramics centre. Smallpox swept through Burslem in the 1740s and the Wedgwoods were harmed. Josiah’s right knee was badly damaged, permanently stopping him using the potter’s wheel pedal. Instead he was attracted by the design, innovation and business aspects of the pottery trade.

Wedgwood’s success advanced the Potteries region in Stoke-on-Trent into an industrial revolution centre, and started to make his name well known. Wedgwood’s fusion of art and industry depended partially on great glazes, while he was a junior partner to Thomas Whieldon (1754–9)

His key breakthrough came in the mid-1760s with cream-ware. Building on the work of Enoch Booth, Wedgwood designed a clean, functional and elegant alternative to Chinese ceramics. The smooth, fine-textured body, covered with a brilliant glaze, also allowed for easy decoration by painting with enamels. Thus his pottery could follow fashion.

Bentley medalllions of King George III and Queen Charlotte, 1777

E & H Manners

With rising incomes, the challenge for Wedgwood (and partner Liverpool merchant Thomas Bentley) was how to get the creamware noticed by a smart public. Here was where Wedgwood’s marketing skills stepped in. Fashion was much superior to merit in many respects, he believed; one had only to make choice of proper sponsors. And his best sponsor was German Queen Charlotte, whose patronage of his tableware service turned creamware into Queensware and raised Wedgwood to Her Majesty’s Master Potter.

Most techniques in modern salesmanship, from product placement to the use of influencers, were utilised by Wedgwood and Bentley. Their West End showroom was more commercial gallery and show space than shop.

The first modern factories in Stoke-on-Trent ensured efficient delivery of ornamental pottery and tableware, and new levels of quality production. Then came Black Basalt and Pearlware. Finally Jasper was invented in the mid-1770s, the most original of all Wedgwood’s ceramic materials. The pale-blue Jasper body with white neo-classical reliefs showed his years of experimentation with clays, kilns, cobalt and iron oxide, in his basement laboratory. It won him a Fellowship of the Royal Society!

Beautiful Jasperware teaset

Sunday Times

Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) had co-founded the Lunar Society in 1765. It met monthly at Matthew Boulton’s Soho House in Birmingham, to debate the first discoveries and observations. Along with polymaths Joseph Priestly and James Watt, this was a discussion group where intellectuals, thinking industrialists and natural philosophers could get together in a radical environment. Wedgwood was a good fit for that radical circle of C18th thinkers, keenly examining minerology, astronomy and medicine. Apparently the origins of the English Enlightenment were not in Oxford or Cambridge, but in the Midlands. However The Lunar Society never discussed party politics, even though its members were largely sympathetic to liberalism and internationalism.

In 1780 Wedgwood joined the Society for Constitutional Information and became friendly with new reformers. This organisation of social reformers was dedicated to publishing political tracts and educating citizens on their lost ancient liberties. It promoted the work of campaigners for parliamentary reform eg Tom Paine.

Wedgwood’s politics were born of radical patriotism: a deep love of his country along a fearful sense that the promise of Great Britain (liberty under the law, Protestantism and progress) was being undermined. As a democrat, Wedgwood supported the rebel MP John Wilkes in his campaigns for parliamentary reform and franchise spread.

When the Bastille was stormed in 1789, Wedgwood was excited by the prospect of radical change in France. The politicians thought that as a manufacturer, Wedgwood would be ruined if France had her liberty, but he risked it. Wedgwood stopped making his Jasper medallions of Queen Marie Antoinette, favouring a new figure of France embracing Liberty.

His most lasting contribution to C18th radicalism was probably his campaign against the Transatlantic slave trade. Strange, since for decades Wedgwood & Bentley’s success had been closely intertwined with the riches derived from the Atlantic slave economy! Not only was the growing wealth of the Georgian consumer market buoyed by slavery’s profits, but the tea rituals Wedgwood supplied were linked to slave owners’ estates.

Still, by the 1780s Wedgwood was convinced of slavery’s innate evil. Voted onto the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, he used his design and marketing skills to create the defining symbol of anti-slavery activism: white Jasper with an enslaved African in black relief. This symbol was called the Emancipation Medallion. Whether worn in bracelets or as hair pins, fashion promoted the cause of justice and freedom. By displaying the extent of public support for the anti-slavery movement and by reminding civil society of the suffering endured by African slaves, the medallion actively participated in the abolition campaign. [Slavery in the British colonies was abolished in 1807]

Emancipation Medallion

Am I Not a Man and a Brother, 1787

In Sept 1792, Earl Macartney left Britain aboard HMS Lion, via Cape of Good Hope to Tientsin-Tianjin, the Chinese port city. The passengers included c100 of Georgian Britain’s finest scientists, natural philosophers and draughtsmen. There were also c600 crates of objects carefully chosen to showcase Britain’s industrial might. Macartney’s mission was to convince China’s Celestial Court to open their huge markets to British imports, to excite a taste for English workmanship. The Wedgwood vases promoted Britain’s belief in its design and manufacturing prowess even further.

Since Macartney sailed to China (1790s), Wedgwood’s pottery earned national pride for British art and design. His technology and design, retail precision and manufacturing efficiency transformed production and ushered in a mass consumer society. All the C18th’s great themes were embedded in his art: enlightenment, liberty and national identity. Now his progressive internationalism may also become a source of patriotic pride

Read Tristram Hunt, The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain, Allen Lane, 2021.

Romania united in 1859 and became a nation in 1877. First Prussian Prince Carol (1839-1914) of Hohenzollern became King Carol I of Romania from 1881. In 1873 when Carol visited the location where the beautiful castle now stands, he loved the stunning Carpathian Mountains scenery. So he quickly bought land in a small village Sinaia. Why there? Sinaia Monastery had been founded by Prince Michael in 1695, used as the royal residence until Peles was built.

Peleş Castle in Sinaia

Under Charles’ control, 300 people laboured endlessly on Peles for two years. In 1875, the impressive castle was finished, spreading across 3,200 square ms. Several teams of European architects and designers had to work throughout the years, including architects Johannes Schultz (1873-83) and Karel Liman (1896-1924). The summer castle was designed in a Neo Renaissance style combining features of classic European styles - decorated by JD Heymann (Hamburg), August Bembe (Mainz) and Bernhard Ludwig (Vienna).

Carol planned the royal residence and hunting preserve for summer each year, the name coming from the Peles Creek that passed through the courtyard. Peles sat on a historic medieval road that connected Transylvania and Wallachia. A railway line was soon built to Bucharest (122 km) and many aristocratic families moved their summer homes nearby.

He was the first King of Romania, from 1881 until his death. One of the most important political figures in Romania’s history for his successes, Carol refined his passion for architecture. The Sovereigns’ Gate opened into the castle, and a monumental marble staircase went to the Hall of Honour, the official reception space with walnut panelling and statues. The ties between the Romanian and other royal families attracted big names to the castle eg Austro–Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, in 1886. Carols’ wife, Queen Elizabeth, was a patron of the arts and designed rooms specifically for artists, musicians and writers’ entertainment.

Peles Castle Piano Room

The decorations in each of the 160 rooms were given themes, with the finest examples of European art, Murano crystal chandeliers, German stained-glass and Cordoba leather-covered walls. Many of the rooms were decorated to resemble the various world cultures eg the 1906 Music Room’s carved teak Indian furniture was gifted by a Maharajah. It contained a 1621 harpsichord from Antwerp, upright piano and organ

Given his military background, King Carol had a solid knowledge of weapons. The Great Armory Room hosts fine collections of 4,000+ arms and armour. Mainly C14th-17th from Western and Eastern Europe and Asia, they were collected in 1903. Note the German armour of the C16th or 17th, and a full armour for the horse and knight.

Welcome inside the front door

Due to its remarkable architecture and exhibits, The Royal Library-Great Salon was special. It impressed with ceiling carved from linden wood, gilt, large chandeliers and Italian neo-renaissance decorations. See rare books with leather covers and gold embossing and look for a secret door behind a bookshelf for the king to hide.

Peles’ architects drew inspiration from classical styles like German and Italian Renaissance, and French Baroque eg the German stained glass and painted murals on the castle exterior. The interior, especially the main hall, is beautifully decorated with sculpted wood & stained glass windows, symbols of elegance and royalty.

Great Moorish Salon

Wiki

Carrara marble was everywhere eg terraces decorated with royal statues, so the castle could be an impressive residence fit for its political and cultural functions. Moor Hall was by painter and sculptor Charles Lecompte du Nouy, having Spanish-Moorish elements with a marble fountain.

The castle's 60-seat Theatre Hall and royal box were decorated in Louis XIV style, while the ceiling paintings and decorative frescoes were designed by famous Austrian artists Gustav Klimt and Frantz Matsch. And handmade silk embroideries adorned the ceiling and walls of the Turkish Salon. The horology exhibition had 50 different clocks from the private royal collection: grandfathers, pendulum table clocks, fireplace clocks, alarm clocks, pocket watches etc. And pieces that belonged to Queen Marie, Carol II and King Michael, mostly dating to the C19th. These collections of disparate interior decoration styles probably reflected King Carol’s eclectic taste.

Theatre Hall, Peles Castle

From the start Peles was one of the most technologically advanced palaces and expensive in Europe. It was the first European castle fully supplied by locally produced electrical power, had its own 1884 power plant, central heating system in 1897, central vacuum system, elevator for the royals, hot and cold running water.

Besides Peles Castle, other buildings were erected, such as the royal stables and Foisor Hunting Lodge. And King Carol I’s successor, King Ferdinand built a smaller castle, Pelisor, on Peles grounds. Pelisor was designed in the art nouveau-style by the Czech architect Karel Liman from 1893-1914.

Peles remained a royal residence until 1947 when, after the forced abdication of King Michael I, Peles and the other royal properties were taken by the Communist government. In 1948 the whole estate was closed, and art works went to Bucharest’s Art Museum. The communist government opened the castle as a tourist attraction, declared it the National Peles Museum in 1953 and kept it open until 1975.

Pres Nicolae Ceaușescu closed the entire estate in 1975-90, making it a State Protocol Area, limited to 1] military personnel and 2] visiting heads of state. Fortunately the museum curators frightened the President, saving Peles from military damage and from the Ceausescus. After the 1989 Romanian Revolution, the castle became a heritage site and re-opened as a museum with c400,000 visitors annually. Peles Museum has guides for those wanting historic tours.

Passionate about art, King Carol had collections covering c60,000 art objects. Additionally the ceramics collection held tiles and porcelain taken from the greatest C19th centres, was established by Queen Marie from 1914-27, and later pieces were purchased by the Museum. The wealth of artwork includes thousands of paintings and sculptures.

Peles Castle gardens and statues

All photo credits: effitimonholiday

We, the Ladies Who Coffee, debated the best ever tv programme. I chose The Surgery Ship, an Australian series filmed when Mercy Ships visited West Africa in 2016 & 17. Thankyou to the helpful Surgery Ship for their data.

Staff waiting to board a Mercyship

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Each human deserves access to surgical and health care solutions. But in some parts of the world, people go without. Since 1978, Mercy Ships began a mission to provide hope and healing to those in need. Each year hospital ships are filled with volunteers who provide life-changing surgeries to children and adults who’d otherwise go without. The staff confront ethical decisions as they decide who can be helped and who cannot not. This is a complex journey for the volunteer medics as they deal with serious cases, and balance the patients’ fates in their hands.

Globally, 5 billion people lack access to safe surgery. Due to this lack of access to surgical care, up to 18.6 mill people die each year. Every day, children and adults in some of the poorest communities die from causes that can easily be treated in hospitals in many nations. 1 in 8 children die before they have the chance to go to school.

With international volunteers, ship staff can deploy state-of-the-art hospital ships to treat more people. As part of the commitment, the staff also train local health-care workers so this important work can continue. c70% of the world’s population lives near the coast, and the hospital ships provide unique platforms for workers to direct medical care to these villages. A customised 3-year partnership model goes to many African countries requesting support.

Grace, 17, from the Democratic Republic of Congo

before and after tumour was removed

express.co

A team of volunteer staff are aboard, going to the poorest nations on earth and facing the most severe issues anywhere. The challenge is enormous but the ship makes a huge difference by supporting the silent poor and by providing life-changing surgeries to those in great need.

The staff provides free corrective surgeries for hernias and goitres that plague unemployed adults, and children who miss school because of no accessible medical care. Doing critical eye surgeries gives patients with renewed sight and quality of life. Huge tumours left to grow unchecked, massive deformities and more; some had a 4 k tumour on the face for years, living a life of ridicule and shame.

anaesthetist prepares pre-operation

New Statesman

Many children live in pain and isolation by not having access to medical care for surgeries eg clef lip, cataracts and plastic reconstructive, and dental health care. Cleft lip surgeries are treated early in life in the West, but for many Africans, it can be years before surgery happens. This results in malnutrition and exclusion from the community.

A child’s life can be severely impacted with poor eye health, so Mercy Ships provide corrective eye surgery and optical care for kids. Good dental health from an early stage means children are not susceptible to a myriad of other health conditions. Children and their families learn the basics of dental health and are provided with vital surgeries. Good dental hygiene prevents gum disease, cavities and teaches basic oral health education. 80% of the world’s fractures and the majority of club-feet occur in developing nations. Without quality orthopaedic surgeries, those who have these types of defects experience a life of pain and shame.

Infection control is a major issue in hospitals in both wealthy and developing nations. Mercy Ships teaches local medical staff to put safe-surgery protocols into practice but often the local environment makes it very difficult to keep even operating theatres clean and sterile. That’s where Mercy Ships projects like hospital refurbishment emerge, changing facilities that are uncleanable into areas where local staff can clean and sterilise, reducing secondary infections.

When the ship departs a country, the staff want to leave an improved healthcare system for the community. Before, during and after field services, Mercy Ships implements health care training projects that teach the medical knowledge, skills and attitude needed to heal patients long after. Infrastructure projects include renovating or expanding hospitals, helping these facilities become more available and to improve the quality of medical services. Previously, local staff struggled to care for their patients in very poor working conditions.

Dr Glenn Strauss performed the very first surgery aboard the Africa Mercy,

while mentoring local doctors

mercyships.co.za

The ship’s Medical Capacity Building Projects strengthen the standards of surgical care inside the local communities of the countries served. The legacy is a lasting impact that extends for years.

A child’s life can be dark because of a simple cataract. For most people in the West, a quick trip to the ophthalmologist resolves this issue, but for those who have no access to quality health care, their world dims. For 40 years, Mercy Ships has been dedicated to providing healing to those in need, via the dedicated ship volunteers.

Now to honour Dr Glenn Strauss who joined Mercy Ships in 1997 as an ophthalmologist with the Caribbean Mercy. He and his wife Kim continued to volunteer their skills for short-term missions, helping many to get care for the first time. Eventually the couple closed their practice at home and committed themselves to work fulltime on Mercy Ships from 2005. The couple developed Mercy Vision, a training programme for surgeons and paramedics from sub-Saharan Africa. Later he built a training programme in ophthalmology for regular surgeons.

Mercy Ships continues to provide essential surgery for the world’s most vulnerable people. And they also work to strengthen and support African health care systems via education, training, mentoring, equipment and supplies. Over 30 years, the staff trained 43,300+ local doctors and nurses who then trained others. The long-term impact of this medical training provides quality health care in the countries, long after the ship sails.

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William the Conqueror did not instantly dominate the whole of England in 1066. His trickiest problem was the muscular Earldom of Northumbria. After discovering that nobles could not be trusted, William I placed his faith in the Bishop of Durham instead. From 1075, the role became a Prince Bishop, giving the holder unmatched secular powers to raise their own army, mint coins and levy taxes.

After the Auckland Project was completed in 2021

the crowds arrived to visit the Castle

Bishop Auckland was a small town in County Durham, so much of Durham City's early history seems to have been influenced by the Bishops of Durham and their estate. First established as a hunting lodge, it became the principal country residence for the powerful Prince Bishops of Durham who for centuries were virtual rulers of N.E England. In fact the power of the Prince Bishops of Durham was second only to the English monarchy. Commissioned to defend that monarchy, the Bishops were placed strategically close to the border between England and Scotland, so they needed a home to match their status.

It was no surprise then that they enjoyed Auckland Castle and its lush surroundings as their countryside estate, when the pressures of London, York and Durham became too much. While their role has changed with the passage of time, the Bishop of Durham still has influence in modern life.

The gateway

England's North East

In the subsequent 750 years, 56 different Prince Bishops presided over County Durham as an independent state, answering only to the king and God. But with great power, came great responsibility. Were the Prince Bishops inspiring or deceptive leaders?

St Peter's Chapel

Historic England

St Peter’s Chapel was one of Europe's largest private chapels. Originally a medieval banqueting hall, it replaced the original C12th chapel, later lost in the English Civil War. In the 1660s Bishop Cosin transformed the Great Hall into today’s beautiful sacred space. He added the decorative ceiling, carved woodwork screen and pulpits, to inspire people to feel the glory of God and the beauty of holiness.

Discover the Bishop Trevor Gallery, named after Bishop Richard Trevor (1752-71). In 1756 an English ship seized looted cargo from the Spanish, including the old master paintings. The captured works were sold in England and the only one of the 13 portraits not bought by Durham was that of Benjamin. Bishop Trevor was delighted, having bought the series of paintings of Jacob and his Twelve Sons by Francisco de Zurbarán (1641-58). They have hung in the Long Dining Room at the Castle 250+ years.

Chairman of Bishop Auckland's Civic Society, Dr Robert McManners, said the timing of the Bishop's purchase was vital. Zurbaran’s income largely came from commissions from the established Spanish Catholic church. Yet the artist meticulously painted these Jewish symbols at a time when the practice of the Jewish religion was outlawed by Papal Bull and enforced by the Spanish Inquisition. McManners noted that Zurbaran had sympathy for oppressed Jewish people in his local community, and admired the great risks that Catholic artist took to his reputation and livelihood. See my blog post or read Robert McManners, The Zurbarans at Auckland Castle, available at Bishop Auckland Town Hall

The Zurbarans paintings in the Long Dining Room

The Guardian

Bishop Trevor and other bishops had sponsored the Jewish Naturalisation Act of 1753 which gave disenfranchised immigrant Jews, often escaping persecution in their own countries, the same rights as those born in England. Alas this progressive legislation was repealed the next year, and soon the Durham bishop bought the paintings! Dr McManners believed Bishop Trevor and Francisco de Zurbaran were both thumbing their noses at their Establishment Churches.

**
In 2001 money was short and Durham's Church Commissioners decided to cash in their easily sold art assets, for £20m. While those with a sense of national history and art heritage wanted to keep the collection together in the Church. It took 9 years of intense lobbying before the commissioners conceded, due to a £15m donation by art collector-investment manager Jonathan Ruffer via a new charity, the Zurbarán Trust. His gallery opened in 2021.

The Castle is one of the best preserved Bishops’ palaces in Europe, sitting at the heart of multi-million conservation Auckland Project which started in 2012 and continued until 2019. The goal was to coordinate the collection of galleries, gardens and parkland, all organised around Auckland Castle. After discovering the C18th wall colourings, furniture and textiles that decorated this elegant castle, they were restored to their former luxury. The team of restorers and conservators showed the scope of the power, wealth, influence and faith held by the residents. The most major conservations occurred when the State Rooms were restored to their original Georgian Gothic splendour, as designed by architect James Wyatt. Now the Prince Bishops’ private residence at Auckland Castle is revealing 8 centuries of opulence and influence, seen in 1,000 years of forgotten political, economic and religious history!

The deer house

Apart from the stunning castle/Bishop’s Palace, the town (pop 24,000) has a thriving arts and cultural centre – library, cinema, theatre, arts complex and specialist boutiques.

Camille Pissarro, 1897

Rue St Honoré, Après-Midi, Effet de Pluie

Wiki

Millions of European Jews were forced to quickly sell their homes and businesses with WW2, their assets being confiscated by the Nazis. Works of art often seemed very significant to war heirs; they represented a last cultural connection to their dead families. I particularly thank Marilyn Henry.

Sadly there had been an intentional campaign of confiscation and destruction of European cultural property. Post-war, Allied Forces uncovered caches of looted goods and the U.S military returned millions of art objects to the countries of the works’ origin. But those nations were responsible for locating the actual heirs. Did they find them?

Once the Nazis sold the objects, the works entered the art market and were dispersed. Both the pre-war owner and the current owner may have had moral claims to the works, but legal ownership varied. Most Western legal systems couldn’t deal with losses from other decades, and from other countries. Claims could be barred because Statutes of Limitation expired. Or claims and the rights of a current possessor were confused when art crossed borders. Additionally most nations had laws that protected good-faith purchasers. And who could define a forced sale? Only Germany recognised some sales-under-duress.

In the U.S, most museums are private so ownership disputes were and are civil matters. The New York State Banking Dept established its Holocaust Claims Processing Office in 1997, to resolve claims without litigation. Since then, it accepted 142 art claims covering 25,000 objects. But the small staff of lawyers, linguists and historians only secured the VERY slow return of 12 art works!

Also in the U.S, the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal created a database linked to American museums, identifying thousands of items that had been in Europe from 1933-45. But while the portal could be searched by an artist’s name, country of origin and a painting’s name, it could not be searched by the family owner.

An artwork’s ownership chain was often patchy. There WAS a responsibility to participate in provenance research, but it was expensive. The paper trail about provenance history was often deposited in: multi-national settings, private family memorabilia, governmental or museum archives.

Some museums did no additional research to clarify the history, until a claimant came forward. Others eg North Carolina Museum of Art, took the initiative. Artworks with uncertain gaps of war-time ownership were reviewed by professional provenance researchers.

Museums and collectors are more willing to acknowledge legitimate claims than they were a decade ago, and to settle them without litigation. But of course museums and collectors still dispute tenuous claims. Most museums have put their entire collections on Web sites so now the assertion of claims is much easier than it was.

The size of wartime art thefts will never be known. The size of their return, through some heroic post-war efforts, was very great. But those efforts were eventually seen as inconsistent with foreign policy, or reflecting cold war tensions by the 1960s. Only West Germany paid partial compensation to some claimants; read Nazi Confiscated Art Issues.

Camille Pissarro, 1897

Boulevard Montmartre Spring
Courtauld Institute of Art

These days attention to war-era ownership is emerging in the art world. Major auction houses and museums have provenance researchers, so sellers and buyers routinely check objects with the Art Loss Register - an international database of lost and stolen art formed in 1991 by auction houses and art traders. Unfortunately this did not happen 50 years ago.. when scrutiny could have helped.

As more artwork is identified and located, other nations are questioning the ownership of their holdings. A number of European countries eg Austria and Britain have enacted restitution policies or established independent panels to review claims. However these review processes didn’t ensure the recovery of looted art, even with clear evidence. Many claimants, especially the children whose parents died in the Holocaust, continued to be frustrated at the expense and time required to pursue a work.

The same Pissarro painting in Lilly Cassirer’s Berlin flat, c1930.

artnet news

There were 15 Camille Pissarros (1830–1903) that were painted from his Paris hotel room window. One version was called Boulevard Montmartre, spring morning, moved through the hands of two of my favourite art dealers: Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris who acquired it from the artist in June 1898; and Paul Cassirer in Berlin who acquired it from Durand-Ruel in Oct 1902.

Now consider Lilly Cassirer and her second husband Otto Neubauer, who swapped a beautiful Camille Pissarro impressionist painting for their freedom. A Nazi-appointed appraiser forced her to sell Rue St Honoré, Après-Midi, Effet de Pluie for $360 then. But when the couple fled Munich in 1939, they could not take the funds. Lilly’s first husband Fritz Cassirer, from the prominent German Jewish family of publishers and art dealers, had bought the painting from Pissarro’s agent in 1900.

Although the post-war German government voided the sale, Lilly never recovered the Pissarro. It was sold multiple times. In 1993, the Spanish government paid $350 million for the collection of industrialist-Nazi supporter Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza and placed in their Museum.

In 2001 in the US, grandson Claude Cassirer (1921-2010) found the painting after years of searching and spent five years trying to recover the Pissarro through diplomatic channels. Finally Claude filed a federal lawsuit in California against Spain and against Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation to recover the painting, now worth $40mill.

Lilly Cassirer Neubauer and her beloved heir grandson Claude, born Berlin 1921

Claude's mother died flu 1921; Claude's grandmother loved and raised the child

itsartlaw

Claude Cassirer learned the painting was at the Thyssen-Bornemisza in 2000 and petitioned Spain and the museum to return it. See the legal proceedings: the District Court case was in 2006, the first appeal was 2009-10, the second appeal was 2013, the Spanish Law case was 2015 and a last decision was in 2019. Whose law should apply, Spain’s or the USA’s? In 2024 the U.S Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit awarded the painting to the Spanish museum; it was legally bound to decide the case using Spanish law because the thefts occurred there. The Cassirers appealed the 9th Circuit ruling to the Supreme Court which vacated the Circuit Court of Appeals decision. It will now have to reconsider the case in light of the new California law on holocaust survivors' right to reclaim looted art.

Saskatchewan's fastest growing communities aren't its largest cities, but the satellite communities around them. In fact half the communities that saw large growth rates were towns surrounding Saskatoon, the latest census tells.

Saskatoon

Five of communities that saw the largest percentage of population growth from 2016-21 were Saskatoon’s bedroom communities. The population centre that grew the most was Pilot Butte, where its population grew by 26% from 2016-21! The Mayor said residents are choosing Pilot Butte because they like the small town feel. And yet they are quite close (c20 ks) to large Regina, so enjoying the amenities close gives the best of both worlds.

Pilot Butte residences, work facilities and family parks

Facebook

Urban sprawl is a universal problem but the Faculty of City Planning of Saskatchewan Uni has proposed a scholarly & practical scheme. Prof Avi Akkerman said a bedroom community is one where there would be few people in the day, as they commute for jobs or study. Some growing communities have now developed their own business communities and recreational centres, which means they weren’t empty in the day. Called exurban communities, the communities are autonomous, independent of mother city.

The predictable growth of Saskatchewan’s exurban communities, now 288,000, is expected. Land was relatively cheap, agents enticed people to buy cheaper homes, and banks enticed people to take out the cheaper mortgages. And COVID-19 was probably a minor motive for people choosing to move out of large cities. Prof Akkerman acknowledged that the factors that once drew people to the exurban communities could be changing. Inflation is higher now, so costs are rising. While a longer commute may have not been a concern when petrol prices were relatively low, a volatile energy market could change the price of driving to the big city office.

Town councils have created a plan so that the structure can support the growth. Most Mayors welcomed the town's growth, saying they are prepared for even more people. More programmes and services that the residents want are being built but still with a small-town feel

In Jan 2021 Saskatoon was identified as one of Canada's top 10 fastest-growing urban centres. Despite economic challenges and dealing with the COVID, Saskatoon emerged with a strong future. Its growth of 7.6% from 2016-21 was impressive given the global crisis. The city offers a high quality of life, safety, controlled traffic congestion and many outdoor spaces that are for pleasure. And with plans to accommodate up to a million people, Saskatoon is continuously growing and developing.

As Saskatoon expands, surrounding small towns are also growing. These towns are developing unique identities beyond Saskatoon's influence, themselves attractive destinations actively shaping their own futures. Many families seek a small-town lifestyle near a larger city, so they are enhancing community services to build their own economic and cultural services. Eg Brighton Towns on Delainey (pop 14,500), has different townhouses available, communal green space, a community centre, pet walks and family bike spaces. With modern architecture, large windows and high-end finishings, the houses are an excellent move en route to buying a home

Does Saskatoon need a $2-billion perimeter highway? As developers design new subdivisions near the city, some urban planners are rethinking the proposed perimeter highway. The bypass, first proposed 20 years ago, would now cut through the growing city. So before spending enormous money, the planners have to look at the big picture.. which has changed. The province recently released a map showing the path of a proposed Saskatoon Freeway. A working group including staff from many of the rural municipalities is having consultations with landowners who may be affected by the bypass.

Traffic on old Circle Drive East piled up,

CBC

Prof Akkerman said Saskatoon would be more successful shelving the perimeter Saskatoon Freeway and limiting Saskatoon’s geographic spread. Note that decades years ago, Circle Drive was supposed to be a bypass perimeter freeway, and it ended up as a clogged arterial road. Another Saskatoon freeway could promote sprawl, burdening taxpayers with decades of upkeep costs. Officials could use other tactics to ease truck-related congestion on existing roads eg having trucks move outside peak hours. So the city and province must rethink the way they manage freeways, re-allocating the $2 billion.

Saskatchewan's Ministry of Highways published this route

for the Saskatoon Freeway in 2018,

CBC Canada

Landowners are jockeying for position, now that the proposed route for a Saskatoon bypass is clear. Once the freeway arrives, the adjoining real-estate quickly goes up in price because of the precious access road. But Akkerman didn't think that the community at large would benefit.

The nearby communities were not merely bedrooms. White City & Warman developed their business and recreational facilities, gaining autonomy from larger cities. This growth is driven by affordable housing and a desire for more space.

affordable family homes, Warman.

Brighton Towns on Delainey

Colliers Rentals

Rising costs from higher mortgages and pricier petrol are making life more expensive for commuters. So bringing jobs closer to home is a wise decision. Employed Saskatoon residents wouldn’t drop their jobs because of attempts to bring more industry elsewhere eg Martensville doesn’t have to compete with its big neighbour, Saskatoon. Rather it will find niches that aren’t completely filled eg small workshops near workers’ residences. It won’t stop commuting into Saskatoon, but lowering the number of people driving every day would help the environment and reduce the drivers’ financial loads.

Demography is becoming more critical in understanding & managing the environment and population increases have growing negative impacts. Thus demography becomes an important complement to environmental science. But in a recent poll, 23% of people thought the city's roads was the top issue in the civic election campaign (CBC News).

Conclusion
If costs continue to grow for taxpayers, there are fewer resources to repair and replace the ageing structure in inner Saskatoon. While Prof Akkerman didn't believe the solution was to build only high-rise towers, it was important to use the space that residents already used. And Saskatoon needs to declare an urban growth boundary around it to mark the city’s outer limits.

Professor Avi Akkerman

Education News Canada

Akkerman is now lecturing in Demography, showing social sciences students the processes of growth, decline and distribution of human populations over geographic space. Perhaps people in other big cities around the world should participate in these lectures.

Thanks to CBC News Sep 2016; April 2019; and Mar 2022.

Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-50 is at the National Gall London June 2025. This might be less of a popular success than previous shows featuring paintings by eg Vincent Van Gogh, but then the C14th was a while ago. The National Gallery had mixed popular and academic shows before.

Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–50,

book cover

The early C14th in central Italy was a golden moment for art and change. Artists Duccio, Simone Martini and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti were forging a new way of painting. They painted with a drama not seen before. Faces showed vibrant emotions. Bodies moved in space. Stories flowed across panels.

Name a key Renaissance Italian city-state and many people will say Florence. But C14th Siena was wealthy and had a stable government, with plenty of patrons, both religious and secular. And as a centre for trade and pilgrimage, Siena artists were exposed to new ideas and styles. Ideal for talented artists to grow and to foster fame in Florence.

This London exhibition makes the case for the 1300-1350 era being a critical moment in Siena’s art history. Firstly, Siena was an important banking centre in Western Europe, leading to prosperity and to art patrons. This was true for private devotional objects or for more public displays of faith and wealth. Secondly Siena was a cosmopolitan place to meet new ideas. Eg see how Sienese artists encountered Gothic works from France and adapted them into their own context. Thirdly there is a whole section on textiles which came from the east and found their way into art works. Siena’s status as a trade centre and a pilgrimage route stop from Canterbury to Rome enabled this cultural exchange.

In the decades pre-1350, Siena was the site of fine artistic innovation and activity. Drawing on the quality collections of NY Met and National Gallery London, as well as loans from other major lenders, the exhibition includes 100+ works by remarkable Sienese artists. It features paintings, metal work, sculptures and textiles. And this shared exhibition with The Met focuses on the artists noted above.

Simone Martini, Christ Discovered in the Temple, 1342

National Museums Liverpool

Why did the glory era end in 1350? The Black Death/bubonic plague was ruining Europe, Asia and Africa’s people. And being a trade centre, on a pilgrimage route, became dangerous; Siena suffered as most cities and towns did. It had been easier for artists to work on commissions in times of peace & stability. Fortunately Siena’s artistic efforts did have a lasting influence, post plague.

A public display of intimate objects was created for private devotion. With 100+ exhibits made by artisans working in Siena, Naples, Avignon and beyond, see some of Europe’s earliest, most significant art works. The London and the Met’s shows are used to bring together the very best.

It is important to focus on the artists singly. By seeing many examples of their work, visitors can examine their style, themes and the commissions the artists received. Focusing on artists who knew each other personally and professionally also gives a sense of Siena’s artistic community. The exhibition’s individual biographies allow viewers to consider how each career met the city’s civic, religious and political institutions. Each depiction of the Virgin Mary, patron saint of Siena, was important.

The art space suits the biographical approach and the curators’ notes are great. The visitors can set the scene with a few Byzantine-style icons helping them understand why these Sienese paintings are innovative and thematic. Duccio was the earlier of the artists, so start with him and then, in the central space, see the other artists...and their legacy.

What was confusing was the change of individual artists and broader themes eg the artistic and historic background first, followed by Duccio. His masterpiece, the Maestà altarpiece for Siena Cathedral, occupies the hub of the hub and spokes. 2 of the spokes focus primarily on major works by Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti. But look at connections between this Lorenzetti and sculptor Tino di Camaino. Then at religious devotional objects and the depiction of textiles, and work by the Lorenzettis.

Alas the exhibition kept switching to broader themes before it finished with the biographical approach. Surely the layout is chronological, explaining why the artists come in order, with contemporary trends inserting themselves in between.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Annunciation 1344.
Tempera and gold leaf on panel, 122 x 116 cm
Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena

One of the interesting legacies of this generation of Sienese painters is how their influence extended beyond Siena eg to the Papal Court in Avignon. Martini played a pivotal role there, taking Sienese painting to Avignon in 1330s and dying there in 1344. His works helped transmit the elegance, linear refinement and emotional nuance of Sienese painting.

The emphasis on grace, storytelling and beautifully controlled surfaces marked the International Gothic style. While the rest of the exhibition shows Sienese artists featuring French Gothic & Northern European styles, see Siena’s influence on France’s, Bohemia’s and early Dutch art.

The Sienese commitment to story-telling and decorative richness left a clear mark, separate from the Florentine emphasis on anatomy and emotion. So while Siena’s Golden Age was short, its visual language lived on in courts and church settings where visual rhetoric overcame naturalism.

Duccio’s Maestà panels haven’t been together for ages. A great example is Simone Martini’s Orsini Polyptych where the diptych and triptych joined together in a multiple altarpiece. This devotional work was done for Card. Napoleone Orsini. Close it like a book, open it to an Annunciation scene or totally unfold it to reveal Christ’s tragic end. This show reunites them after being in the Louvre, Belgium and Berlin.

Duccio 's Maesta altarpiece, 1308-11

Siena Cathedral

After centuries of separation, the exhibition reunited panels that once formed part of Duccio’s monumental Maestà altarpiece. Panels from Martini’s glittering Orsini work finally came together. Gilded glass, ivory Madonnas, illuminated manuscripts, rugs and silks show the creative energy flowing between European artists.

Many thanks to saltertonartreview. And enjoy Joanna Cannon’s book Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–50, 2024

Consumptive Chic: History of Beauty, Fashion & Disease 2017 by Dr Carolyn Day examined the connection between fashion and Tuberculosis/TB. The book was beautifully written and illustrated, but I was angry on women’s behalf while reading. In an era ignorant about TB, the tubercular body came to be defined culturally. During the late 18th-early C19ths this became romanticised i.e people actively redefined notions of the otherwise horrible symptoms as ideals of beauty.

Dropsy and Consumption flirting outside a mausoleum.
Credit: Wellcome Collection

Illustrated with fashion plates and medical images, this was a clear story of the rise of Consumptive Chic which described the strange link between women’s fashions and medical thinking re TB. Thus two belief systems developed in a connected fashion:

1. Women's inherent feminine character/way of life rendered them naturally susceptible to contracting TB.

2. Despite the changing fashions over decades, TB’s symptoms were believed to increase the attractiveness of its victim over time. Once they contracted TB, patients were indeed more likely to die. But they would be increasingly beautiful as they approached death. The emaciated figure and feverish flush of TB victims were positively promoted as a highly desirable appearance. As were the long swan-like necks, large dilated eyes, luxurious eye lashes, white teeth, pale complexions, blue veins and rosy cheeks.

Women focused on their eyes by painting eye liner and eye shadow onto their faces, even though these eye paints contained dangerous mercury (causing kidney damage), radium, lead or antimony oxide (a carcinogen). Women placed poisonous nightshade drops in their eyes, to enlargen their pupils. And they bathed in poisonous arsenic, to make their skin desirably pale. The poison vermillion was worn on the lips as a lush red tint. How brutal, then, that medical writers knew that the fashionable way of life of many women actually harmed them.

What would inspire largely educated classes to respond to illness through the channels of fashion? Why would people try to glamorise the symptoms of a deadly disease?? Day showed that consumption was seen to confer beauty on its victim. Yes it was a disease, but one that would become a positive event in women’s lives.

The Victorian corset was a heavy duty clothing apparatus, capable of constricting a woman's waist down to a tiny 17”; this and an hourglass figure were all the rage in the C19th. Dresses were designed to feature the bony wing-like shoulder blades of the consumptive back, emphasising an emaciated frame. Additionally, diaphanous dresses and sandals exposed women to cold weather.

The coughing, emaciation, endless diarrhoea, fever and coughing of phlegm and blood became both a sign of beauty and also a fashionable disease. As obscene as it seems now, TB was depicted as an easy and beautiful way to fade into death. It was neither!!

Day noted the disease’s connections to the Romantic poets and to scholars in the early C19th. Literary influence was important for educated women; most Romantic writers, artists and composers with TB created a myth that consumption drove male artistic genius. The link coincided with the ideologies of Romanticism, a philosophical movement that opposed the Enlightenment through its emphasis on emotion and imagination. These men were the best, most intelligent & brightest members of society. Lord Byron (1788-1824), the most notorious of the Romantic poets, noted that his TB affliction caused ladies to look at him with heartbreak. The poet John Keats (1795-1821) embodied an example of the refined tubercular artistic genius, doomed to a very early death. He was a body too delicate to endure earthly life, but one whose intellect indelibly imprinted on culture.

And artistic women too. The link between TB and ideal femininity was played up by Alexandre Dumas fils whose novel La Dame aux Camélias (1848) presented redemption for immorality via the suffering of TB. The consumptive model Elizabeth Siddal, the drowned Ophelia in John Everett Millais’ pre-Raphaelite painting of 1851, became an icon for her generation.

There was less interest in the appearance of TB in the lower classes. Not because working women and prostitutes deserved a miserable and painful death, but because the lower classes showed how women really suffered TB’s brutal realities. TB was explained away rather realistically in the working classes: miserable living conditions, pollution, poor hygiene, poverty, promiscuity and drunkedness. TB was not romantic and beautiful for working women.

Tuberculosis shaped Victorian fashion
Furman News, 1888

Could the different reactions to TB, the glamorisation of the illness for upper class women Vs the bleak experience of TB in impoverished Victorian communities, be there to maintain class order in Britain? Perhaps fashion-setters elevated TB as an elegant form of suffering for the upper classes, specifically to create a psychological distance from the unsavoury realities of lower-class disease? No wonder TB victims from the British upper classes were lauded while poor victims were stigmatised.

My blog-partner-doctor wanted to know why other diseases like cholera did not have the same cultural impact? Because, Day said, infectious diseases followed an epidemic pattern. First they increased very quickly; then they slowly faded in intensity and incidence. The course of TB was less flashy than other contagious illnesses, but it still followed a ve ry slow epidemic cycle of infection.

New Medical Knowledge

A much better understanding of TB came in 1882 when germ theory was described by Louis Pasteur. In that year Robert Koch announced he'd discovered and isolated the microscopic bacteria that cause the disease. Koch’s discovery helped convince public health experts that TB was contagious. And that the victim’s sparkling or dilated eyes, rosy cheeks and red lips were caused by frequent low-grade fever

Preventing the spread of TB led to some of the first large-scale public health campaigns. Doctors began to define long, trailing skirts as causes of disease because they swept up germs from the street. Corsets were also believed to exacerbate TB by limiting movement of the lungs and blood circulation. And doctors began prescribing sunbathing as a treatment for TB. Eventually TB was viewed as a pernicious biological force requiring control. The weak and susceptible female gave way to a model of health and strength.

NB Emily Mullin How Tuberculosis Shaped Victorian Fashion

Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, c1852, Tate

The tubercular model Elizabeth Siddal became an icon for her generation.

Eve Kahn wrote Dartmouth College in Hanover N.H gathered much of its experimental architecture along the edges of its campus, which was otherwise dominated by Georgian and colonial quadrangles in brick and white clapboard. At the SE corner, a few imaginative buildings dedicated to the arts are huddled together. The best so far is the Hood Museum of Art, which was originally designed in the 1980s by the influential post-modernist Charles Moore. Its gabled brick pavilions are crowned in a domed finial with a necklace of raised copper triangles. Moore laid out a meandering path from the campus’ main green, meant to pique curiosity. He flanked a gateway with layers of square columns, which allowed glimpses of courtyards and galleries beyond. But the signage was poor, and the gateway’s brick, concrete and copper surfaces aged poorly in winter.

Hood Museum of Art,

Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire

Hood director, John Stomberg, says that for many students and visitors, Moore’s scheme was too obtuse. Stomberg supervised a $50 million renovation and expansion by the Manhattan firm Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects (of Barnes Collection in Philadelphia fame) that added badly needed classrooms, galleries and an atrium. The ever-growing permanent collection (c65,000 pieces) spans from Assyrian palace reliefs to C19th Native American battlefield sketches, Papua New Guinea headdresses, and a 2018 painting by Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu.

Each year, thousands of schoolchildren visit the galleries. There’s no entry fee, and few rival institutions nearby. Dartmouth undergraduates have to take some art classes, and have to visit a museum.

We pass the New Guinea wooden drums, masks and shields in polychrome swirling patterns, and through a forest of cross-hatched poles carved by Aboriginal Australians. A teacher and her class choose an elaborately coiffed African mask to sketch. A 2016 teepee-shaped sculpture was made by Choctaw-Cherokee Jeffrey Gibson, topped with a birdlike ceramic head and draped in bells.

Side galleries have more predictable works: Calder’s mobile, Rothko’s abstraction, Picasso’s Guitar on a Table (1912). In Perugino’s C16th tableau Virgin and Child with Saints, men gaze up at Mary and her infant on a pedestal; the painting is studied in various Renaissance classes. Under-appreciated masters from the 19th and early C20ths were also displayed.

There are calm waterfront scenes by the African-American painters Robert Seldon Duncanson and Henry Ossawa Tanner, and luminous portraits of women by Cecilia Beaux and Lilly Martin Spencer. A grey-green stoneware jar was made in South Carolina c1830 by enslaved potter David Drake. Snakes sprout from the forehead and ribs of Harriet Hosmer’s 1850s marble bust of Medusa, near Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s C19th painting of an ancient Roman sculpture gallery.

Dartmouth School opened in 1769. soon starting collections eg fragments of mastodon tusks excavated in Kentucky and a ruffle-edged silver bowl made in Boston. Over the centuries, museum displays were installed at various buildings, incl at neighbouring Wilson Hall, a 1880s turreted Romanesque former library. The Hood’s construction in the 1980s was financed by rich alumnus Harvey Hood.

The Hood site is sloped and narrow, tucked between Wilson Hall and a 1960s theatre building, Hopkins Centre for the Arts, designed by modernist Wallace Harrison. The Hop has concrete archways and cantilevers. Moore described his contribution to the campus as unobtrusive, in reaction to modernists’ macho constructions.

The Hood attracted many gifts e.g New Guinea woodcarvings from L.A collector-dealer Harry Franklin and Native American drawings from art historian Mark Lansburgh. But there was limited room to show them. Classroom space was cramped as faculty incorporated art into the curricula and there was little flexible indoor space for events.

Stomberg arrived in 2016 from Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, when construction plans and fundraising were underway. Charles Moore’s defenders were protesting against TWBTA’s partial erasure of the original building and gateway. TWBTA has pointed out that the firm has the greatest respect for Moore’s oeuvre – Tsien had been one of his architecture students in the 1970s.

Much of the 1980s brick skin has been preserved, along with the signature domed finial. The galleries and staircases still have Moore’s expanses of raw concrete and quirky ziggurat forms sculpted on the column capitals and light fixtures. A variety of dark and pale oak floorboards adds a sense of patina to the redone galleries. Sunlight streams in through skylights, staircase windows and the bay, which keeps visitors oriented as they roam through displays that explore continents and millennia.

Reactions to the renovations have been favourable, albeit with some traces of nostalgia. The lofty atrium, lined in the same brick, is already serving as a major campus attraction for students. Live saxophone music wafts upstairs. Stomberg says he is hoping to schedule some dance performances in the window, which has a sweeping view of the Georgian and Colonial campus.

Thank you Apollo for the history and the photos.

African Art
architecturalrecord.com

Modern American Art
Artforum

Assyrian Reliefs and ancient Greek pottery

artscope

An art critic, who visited the Hood since it re-opened in Jan 2019 after nearly three years and $50 million renovations, wrote this response: Clearly the old gallery was too dark, too small and poorly equipped for students and outside visitors. The gallery literature says the space of the old Hood was greatly expanded, and there are now 16 galleries instead of 10. Even more importantly the galleries are now beautifully light-fitted. And the Hood is much better connected to the university campus.

But the contents on display and the flow of visitors are less satisfactory. The new director clearly wanted to map and display the entire world of art history, within one gallery! When I go to a gallery it is to see what they specialise in eg Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, or Russian decorative arts during the Czarist reigns. I can broaden my horizons in art history, but I don’t want to be involuntarily moved from one era to other eras within a single room, from continent to continent without a cup of coffee in between. I agree with Murray Whyte: “In one of the museum’s few unavoidable paths, you have to pass through a collection of contemporary Native American art to reach the Hood’s traditional American collection”. It was confusing.

Britain’s monarch could expel foreigners to protect the security of the realm in the late C19th, but free movement of labour was generally unquestioned. Migration wasn’t an urgent issue until Conservative politicians agitated in the 1880s-90s, and the media got on board.

Migrants in a crowded Poplar market, 1904

The Guardian

The feared immigrants were mainly East European Jews. In the Pale of Settlement, they were allowed to live on a permanent basis. From 1880s on, with the terrible anti-Semitic pogroms, many fled. 150,000 settled in the UK, including my Russian grandmother. Then there were other Russians and Poles, Italians and Germans who moved to the East End, and were seen to lower living standards in the UK.

Emerging trade unions were worried that low-skilled migrants accepting long hours and low pay would undermine real English workers’ struggles. During the 1890s, the Trades Union Congress/TUC passed 3 resolutions calling for immigration controls.

Jewish trade unionists wrote the remarkable Voice from the Aliens to counter a nasty resolution at the 1895 congress. They unionised themselves and made strenuous efforts to cooperate with existing labour bodies. Influential non-Jewish activists in William Morris’ Socialist League supported them, as did tailors’ leader George Macdonald etc. But the dockers’ leader, Ben Tillett, described Jewish immigrants as the "scum of the continent who made slums even more foetid and congested".

Maj Evans Gordon MP and Parliamentary colleagues

to address restricting further immigration of destitute foreigners

BBL Poster, 1902

The migrants organised their own public meetings to challenge BBL propaganda through an ad-hoc Aliens Defence League, temporarily housed in Brick Lane. They proposed practical solutions: unionising migrant workers so they could fight alongside indigenous workers for better conditions for all, and creating fair rent courts to deal with landlords.

The Daily Mail continued its campaign against the arrival of Jews from Russia: "In Feb 1900, a British liner called the Cheshire moored at Southampton, carrying refugees from anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia. They had breakfasted on board, but they rushed as though starving at the food. These were the penniless refugees and when the relief committee passed by they hid their gold, and fawned and whined, and in broken English asked for money for their train fare."

In 1901, hatred continued. Bishop Cosmo Lang of Stepney in East London accused immigrants of swamping areas once populated by Englishmen. Major William Evans-Gordon, Conservative MP for Stepney in 1900 elected on a strong anti-immigration platform, agreed. Along with neighbouring Conservative MP Samuel Forde-Ridley and Capt William Stanley Shaw of the Middlesex Regiment, Evans-Gordon forged a populist anti-immigrant movement called the British Brothers’ League/BBL. It was launched in the East End in May 1901.

Initially the BBL was most interested in protectionism, although it soon emphasised more rabid anti-foreigner rhetoric. Henry Norman Wolverhampton MP publicly deplored the UK being made into the "dumping ground for the scum of Europe". He joined the campaign and advised other nations to "disinfect their own sewage".

The Eastern Post and City Chronicle happily reported BBL activities and demanded that the government end the foreign flood which had submerged East London. Within months the league claimed 45,000 members, although a member was anyone who signed the BBL's petition. The League promoted its cause with large meetings, with guards whose role was to eject disruptive opponents.

The BBL’s East End strongholds in Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Limehouse solidified around the immigrant ghetto of Aldgate and Whitechapel. BBL members, mostly local factory workers or unemployed, were convinced by BBL propaganda that their precarious work situation (low pay, overcrowded housing, poor sanitation) was caused by immigrants. But Captain Shaw also boasted of his elite recruits: Oxford graduates, city merchants and 40 Tory MPs.

The league’s opening rally in 1901 drew opponents. BBL supporters wrote to the press about socialist foreigners upsetting the meeting. Local newspapers noted that 260 big brawny stewards roughly ejected foreigners. So when the BBL held another large rally at the People’s Palace Mile End in Jan 1902, the 4,000 supporters were again protected by guards. [A technique later used by the British Fascists]

BBL supporters filled a petition pressing MPs to halt immigration. When the government launched a Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in 1903, Evans-Gordon chaired it and set the agenda. The Royal Commission investigated the BBL’s own charges - that immigrants:
arrived destitute and dirty;
practised insanitary habits;
spread infectious diseases;
were a burden on the rates;
dispossessed native dwellers;
caused native tradesmen to lose trade;
worked for rates below local workers;
included criminals, prostitutes and anarchists; and
formed a non-assimilating community.

Britain is the Promised Land and immigrants are undesirable

The 1905 Aliens Act satirised

The Royal Commission struggled to back up its charges in its 1903 report. After all, the immigrants themselves lived in overcrowded conditions and mostly worked 12+ hours a day. Their dedication to education and self-improvement denied claims that the migrants lowered living standards.

Still the Tory government passed Britain’s first modern immigration law, 1905 Aliens Act. Although the word Jew did not appear in this Act, the legislation was largely seen as a success for the BBL, which could then close down.

This Act put an end to the Victorian Golden Age of migration which had benefited from cheaper transport costs and growing labour demands. The Alien Act’s most important provision was that Leave to Land would be refused to those migrants who could not support themselves. To screen the migrants properly, the Act allowed them to disembark only in approved ports where an Immigration and a Health Officer could inspect them.

By the time the Act passed, the Tories had fallen to Liberals in a landslide. The discretionary powers were transferred to the new Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone, who used them to instruct all members of the Immigration Board. From 1906 the press was allowed to attend board meetings and in 1910 immigrants were permitted legal assistance. The refusal rate under the new Act was low although some groups, eg gypsies, were disproportionally affected. The act remained for eight years before being subsumed into the more stringent 1914 Alien Restriction Act.

Tailoring workshop, East End c1910

The Guardian

Nothing is new; the League left behind a legacy of support for far-right groups. Enoch Powell warned of rivers of blood, Oswald Mosley wanted forced repatriation of Caribbean immigrants who flooded in, Margaret Thatcher spoke of Britain’s towns being swamped and Nigel Farage said parts of Britain were like a horrid foreign land.

Brilliant Dr Alice Hamilton, USA

Alone in Berlin: Hans Fallada's great book

Gertrude Stein & friends: life in art.

Destroy old slaver statues or put them in history museums?

Up There Cazaly - Aussie football anthem

Melbourne Uni 1889 mansion, heritage protected, tower, gardens

Hobart Town Hall fine architecture 1866.

Teffi - beloved Russian writer, sad exile.

Polish chess team world champion1924-39

Julia Cameron, Roger Fenton, Qn Victoria

Ruth Ellis UK 1955 - hanging is immoral

K Kristofferson, Rhodes Scholar, music

Catholics killed heretics; Protestants killed witches

filmstar Hedy Lamarr: invented Wi-Fi tech

Miracles & Madness in German art Guardian

Wedgwood British pottery & U.S slavery

First Romanian king; stunning Peles Castle

Mentoring local medicos in Africa

Bishop of Durham in Auckland Castle.

stolen art WW2: Cassirers, Camille Pissarro

Saskatoon and its satellite communities.

Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350

Consumptive chic for women???

Hood Museum of Art, New Hampshire

British Brothers' League 1901-5, London