The Last Invasion of England 1971.

On a recent reading binge of Intelligence (not necessarily an intelligent reading binge!) with books including Christopher Andrew’s official history of M.I.5, “The Defence of the Realm.”

In the manner of a Wikipedia entry of a battle I will list the belligerents.

USSR                       v.                                                               United Kingdom

Forces.

KGB                                                                                            M.I.5

Spetnatz                                                                                  North Yorkshire Police

 

Location.

Hayburne Wyke (North Yorkshire Coast)

Commanders.

USSR.

Yuri Andropov, KGB General, scary guy. Organized the invasion of Czechoslovakia three years earlier in 1968. Later became Boss of the Soviet Union when I was in High School.

UK.

Sir Martin Furnival Jones M.I.5 Director General

Furnival Jones, fun-loving guy. In the official history called ‘FJ’.

“FJ’s main visible enthusiasms were bird watching and The Times crossword. One female member of staff recalls that when he came to office bridge evenings, “You would be his partner and he would not even talk to you.”

“… both the first Cambridge graduate and the first man with a law degree to become DG, widely regarded as the cleverest man in the Security Service.” Note 57: “The Legal Adviser, Bernard Sheldon, among others, considered FJ ‘much the clearest brain of the whole lot.’ Recollections of former Security Service officers.

Just let me interrupt here from a few angles on “the cleverest man in…”“Clever”? Not quite the compliment it seems. Prime Minister Hawke’s exhorting Australia to be ‘the clever country’ when I was a schoolboy brought intellectual objections from Australian academics on a linguistics(!) basis. “Clever can be thought to mean sly/sharp, not scholarly in pursuit of knowledge.”

1. “Well he would say that, wouldn’t he.” The Legal Adviser to M.I.5 about the only man there who had…the same degree he did!
2. Clever, how? The way I am roped into any and all Trivia competition on the Gold Coast by my fellow club cricketers, they could well be saying, “He is the cleverest man at the Helensvale Cricket Club.” For ability to reason/deduce answers to general knowledge and other category questions!
3. An impromptu discussion I had with a computer science undergraduate, later Ph.D and academic in his field at an Australian university. Way back in the day. I walked into his room at the University College where in residence and said, “I’m alright mate, results have come in…just got a Distinction in Professional Conduct/Ethics.” Girlfriend: “Well done, Doug.” “Yes, but is it? In my field of study not a high priority! Does it mean you are the most ethical man in your course? A religious studies scholar who got the highest score…would he be the most religious or holy? Doesn’t follow.” “Good point, Doug.” (Computer mathematics conclusion from my mate)!
4. Is the most intelligent man in the Intelligence Service (M.I.5/M.I.6) the most intelligent?

Back to the sensationalist title (not completely outlandish re British tabloid newspaper standards!). Quite right to object.
Invasion, what invasion in 1971? Correct. Didn’t happen.

Response, though, in the title of the English Folk Song, “Are you going to Scarborough Fair?”

Don’t think they were! Doubtful that they were fans of Geoff Boycott, either, keen to see him bat at Scarborough in 1971 as the new Yorkshire cricket captain having been appointed on the basis of his tremendous tour of Australia in late 1970, early 71. There would have been all the fun of the fair in Scarborough, though, if Spetnatz forces guided by the KGB had got ashore.

In 1971 he completed a comprehensive plan for the seaborne landing of a sabotage group (or groups) at Hayburn Wyke on the north Yorkshire coast. Using locally domiciled agents recommended by his Department V predecessors…he built up a network (including a Moscow trained radio agent) to support the arrival and operations of the sabotage groups to be infiltrated through Hayburn Wyke.

Was it an invasion? I would say if defined as an armed landing by a Sovereign State, then yes.

Why Hayburn Wyke? Every invasion of England had been planned for the south coast opposite the Channel. From 1066; to Philip of Spain’s Armada; to Napoleon’s Grand Armee hoping for Admiral Villeneuve to dodge Nelson’s fleet down in Spain and get to Northern France; to Hitler’s orders for Operation Sealion, German army landings to take place on the south coast. In this centenary year (2016) of the Battle of the Somme, 19 months or so before, Admiral Hipper of the German High Seas Fleet directed an attack on…

SCARBOROUGH. December 16, 1914. A terrorist attack? In that the German fast battle cruisers could claim they were trying/tasked to take out the Royal Navy and British Army shore batteries near Scarborough/Whitby in position. “Sorry about the civilian casualties but our guns aren’t that accurate.”

The only sea way to attack England for The Kaiser in 1914 or the USSR in 1971 was out from the Baltic. Direct to North Yorkshire, Scarborough and Hayburn Wyke.

Hayburn Wyke.

The beach for an armed landing.

Up the hill past the waterfalls.

A quick pint of Yorkshire Ale at the Inn.

Then…if only the plan had been thought of five years before! A railway station existed at Hayburn Wyke in 1966 but was shut that year. Spetnatz forces guided by KGB could have just hopped on the train to Scarborough, or Whitby, and with coercive persuasion, got the train driver to reroute to Leeds, Sheffield, from which they could start violent mayhem across Northern England.

Why did it not happen? ‘Cherchez la femme’. A French saying. ‘Look for the woman’. (if something mysterious happens, a woman is behind it). The man with the plan in 1971 in the quote above had an ‘it’s complicated’ profile. More ‘Cherchez les femmes’. Oleg Lyalin, A KGB Officer in London with the odd cover of ‘Soviet Union knit wear business representative.’ He had a wife back in Russia, a Russian girlfriend in London, and also was having an affair with a married Englishwoman.

His offer to M.I.5 to defect was turned down, as was his offer to return to Moscow and be an agent in place. “All these women, man’s too unstable, he wouldn’t last long,” seemed to be the attitude. Until he leaked the Hayburn Wyke!

“Now we have to do something.” But I think FJ was waiting. As a contract bridge player, waiting to play his trump (!) card. Lyalin, with his complicated love life and under the influence got himself arrested for drink driving in London. Since he’d have to appear in a London Magistrate’s Court the next day, M.I.5 let him appear, had a word with Scotland Yard, and quickly whisked him away into political asylum.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/witness/september/30/newsid_2523000/2523457.stm

Why wait? Because he was the ‘Soviet Union knit wear business representative’ (I’m sure Russian jumpers/sweaters and woollen clothes are excellent products, from the freezing Russian Steppe, if not quite as good as my old school Australian wool cricket short-sleeve cricket sweater!).

Because FJ was thinking of and then ordering OPERATION FOOT. Not for a woollen sock but for a plan. To kick out the KGB from the Soviet Embassy in London in 1971. They had overplayed their hand (to put it in bridge parlance). So many Soviet Officers were dashing out from the Embassy every day that M.I.5 could not identify them. Like Mr Lyalin, under cover as the ‘Soviet Union business knit wear business representative.’

105 KGB Officers were expelled from the USSR’s London Embassy on 24 September 1971.

International reaction? FJ reported to the Home Office on 5 October that J. Edgar Hoover (by then 76) had ‘received the news with delight’ and intended to propose similar action to President Nixon.
‘Hearty congratulations. It is not often we receive such good news!’ (CIA Director Richard Helms).
The French DST (security service) and SDECE (foreign intelligence service)…”delighted“. Personal congratulations of the French Interior Minister forwarded with intention to propose a similar expulsion to President Pompidou.
The German BfV (security service), ‘electrified and delighted’. The German BND (foreign intelligence service), first reaction astonishment, then ‘courageous and revolutionary’.
The Dutch, reported: ‘thunderstruck at the toughness and courage of H.M.G. (Her Majesty’s Government). ‘This was a real and damaging blow at the structure of the KGB in the West.‘ (pp 576-77) Andrew, The Defence of the Realm.

And yet, there was something more extraordinary on FJ’s desk in 1971 at M.I.5 than the Hayburn Wyke invasion – unbelievable though that sounds. Something that involves…our current Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull (in the future to 1971!). I hope to get to it sometime before new cricket season begins this year, work permitting. As Scarborough Fair, the traditional song mentioned above about a place 7 miles north of the Hayburn Wyke, this being North Yorkshire but there is family lore. The seaside town on Moreton Bay in Brisbane. Scarborough supposedly named by mum’s first ancestor settlers in the area from Yorkshire. http://queenslandplaces.com.au/scarborough

The only independent corroboration is from one of Australia’s great writers, David Malouf, who mentions (with a spelling change) the local lads with mum’s surname at Scarborough in his novel, Johnno. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/692871.Johnno

An elderly Chinese tourist at Helensvale train station showed me a piece of paper and asked, “How do you say this word?” Easy enough for an English speaker, not so for someone without much English. He was looking for Scarborough Street, Southport. skɑːbrɑː I said. Hope my IPA is correct 🙂

To conclude on an English folk song note like Scarborough Fair (well at least the first part of this song is!). Could FJ have heard it blaring out the window in the London suburb where he lived, returning from work, the teenage children of his neighbours playing it? Not before November 1971 and the release of Led Zeppelin IV would he have! I give you 1971’s most famous song, and one of the most famous of rock songs…”It makes me wonder.” 😉

The Piper at the Gates of Skye.

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, 1967.

 

I’d admit to plagiarism of Pink Floyd’s early album title except that…they ripped it off from Chapter 7 of Kenneth Grahame’s children’s book, “The Wind in the Willows.” 🙂

Music plagiarism seems to be the only area of music conspiracy I’ve heard of – and it’s not really much of a conspiracy theory since it can be determined by a judge/jury listening to the disputed song. Mozart, the Masons, and The Magic Flute, notwithstanding! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_Freemasonry

However, I read of this tale on the web, which seems to fit the description of a music conspiracy. Containing as it does, Royalty (two monarchs), Scotland, music notation, the quality of a piece of wood, the name of a Sydney suburb, and…Donald Trump!

A music conspiracy about a musical instrument itself. The Great Highland Bagpipe.

Bagpiper carved c.1600 A.D.

 

Some music fans might laugh, “Bagpipes are music?” I think musicologists would take the line of the description of Intelligence, “Military intelligence is to Intelligence as military music is to real music.” The regimental bagpipe band marches recognised around the world I suspect your conservatory/university musicologists would sniff, “Totally uninteresting, musically.” With solo bagpipe playing, piobairchead (pibroch), notes held for 30 seconds or longer, “Ah…this is an original sound. Much more innovative.”

Alistair Campsie (of Sydney suburb name!) an amateur piper declared in a 1980 book that pibroch could not have come into being the way it has been descibed because:-

a) Sir Walter Scott fabricated the legendary piping school on the Isle of Skye, supposedly run by the MacCrimmon family since the Middle Ages.

b) Piper Angus MacKay, who received the MacCrimmon musical notation from his father, and then wrote the classic book of Pibroch piping could not have done so because… “MacKay was probably clinically insane from the age of 20, long before most of his work was written, and was dragged off to Bedlam after an indiscretion at Windsor Castle involving the Queen when he was raging drunk with “ardent spirits” at Christmas, 1853; he was certified insane in 1854.” http://www.amazon.com.au/The-MacCrimmon-Legend-Madness-MacKay-ebook/dp/B00962G4J4

Well a) and b) are something to ponder, are they not? As to a) (and this will sound intellectually lazy)…there had to be something there. Probably not what we would think of as a modern music school, to which every bagpiper in Scotland went for in-residence tuition (more likely some old fellow in his croft). But, like his fellow-Scot, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, whose daughter when told of Mormon objections to the depiction of the early L.D.S. Church in Sherlock Holmes’ “A Study in Scarlet.” conciliatorily replied many years later, “Daddy made up a lot of things.” (he didn’t make up a lot about the early LDS Church else they would have sued him or his publisher!), so I suspect that Sir Walter Scott heard something too about bagpiping tradition/tuition on the Isle of Skye. Some place had to have brought it into existence.

b) certainly lets the cat out of the bag(pipes)! If only Campsie hadn’t made a mistake on his timeline as Mackay went insane after writing The Great Book of Pibroch. Still it raises a musical dilemma. If Mackay was mentally ill even prior to his indiscretion, in front of Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle, could he still have written coherent musical scores? Common sense says not. I can only think of the composer Schumann,

whose widow Clara, along with Brahms, burned some of his scores on his death. She certainly thought, as a pianist, that these last compositions were affected by his illness. Campsie received a lifeline from his error on the timeline on just this point of Schumann from this man…

No, Not THAT Robert Reed!

Though his authority in the world of bagpiping was as authoritative as that of Mr Brady in his household.

THIS Robert Reid.

Pipe Major, Highland Light Infantry Regiment, World War 1. Post-army retirement, bagpipe manufacturer, Glasgow. The Eric Clapton of pipers in the twentieth century.

One surmises that Campsie got the story of Angus Mackay from Reid himself. Whatever, Reid’s view of Mackay’s music notation of Pibroch was that it was, to put it mildly, incomprehensible. It didn’t make sense in terms of music from the point of view of a composer or someone trying to read it and play it. Exactly Clara Schumann’s point. Robert Schumann/Angus Mackay may or may not have been insane when the piece/s were written. The sheet music itself was unreadable. Thus Campsie’s error in correctly dating the diagnosis of Mackay’s illness was immaterial to the question. The music itself was mad.

Needless to say, The College of Piping (the Establishment) and Reid had an uneasy relationship. What with this idea of the origins around. Even so, they have purchased, from his estate, recently discovered tapes of Reid playing.

https://www.pipesdrums.com/article/Piobaireachd-Society-acquires-Robert-Reid-recordings/

Other observations from Reid to Campsie:-

“You could not play Pibroch on this.” (Reid upon examining an early Highland bagpipe). Of course, a cricket bat is not as finely turned a piece of wood as that found in a bagpipe. Or is it? I will not add to my dislike of modern cricket bats and their massive amplification of 4s and 6s. Merely to say that Albert Trott

put a 6 over the Lord’s Pavillion in 1889.

With a piece of wood like one of these.

Massive hitters of the modern era with the best English/Indian willow haven’t done it to this day. Who’s to say that MacCrimmon-style pipe music couldn’t be played?

Baron Stamfordham, George V’s Private Secretary, wrote a Letter of Thanks to Reid, “His Majesty took great comfort listening to your music, on the turntable, as he slipped in and out of consciousness.” But what Pibroch was George V, in great pain, listening to? I don’t like to say it but..

It was Cameron Style.

Chinese may not have invented the sport of table tennis, though it is the archetypal Chinese sport. Surely they had something like bagpipes in ancient paintings?!

Did George prefer the slower rhythm Cameron Style, which was Pipe Major Robert Reid’s style of Pibroch? A hint that this was better bagpiping compared to what George’s grandmother, Victoria, liked?

Has there ever been a case in music where only two styles of playing an instrument existed and the more radical style got chosen by the establishment as the standard over the more conservative? As if in the future an enterprising computer hacker erased all traces of the electric guitar and only two styles remained. Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton. And the chosen style of playing the instrument was…Jimi-Style!

Which brings us back to Pink Floyd, in a sense. The song ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

“I opened the door and nearly s**t myself … by Christ it was loud. I had certainly never heard anything quite like it before.” Abbey Road Balance Engineer Pete Bown describing “Interstellar Overdrive.”

Quite. But what was ‘it’? To add to great court cases in music, the owner of a Catholic youth club in London hired the band to perform in 1966. After listening to ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and their other psychedelic songs, he refused to pay them, arguing that it wasn’t music. Pink Floyd sued for payment. Judgment for the defendant Catholic youth club by the London Magistrate. That payment justifiably withheld on grounds that it wasn’t music.

“

Oh well, something new comes along in music and it happened with the bagpipes too!

Who was the original orderer of The Piper? Ordering the legendary Macrimmons who passed on the music through their piping school.

Nothing got done on the Isle of Skye without Clan Macleod’s go ahead.

Clan Macleod motto and symbol of a black bull.

 

Strange as it sounds, Highland Clans in Western Scotland and the Islands, before the advent of the Great Highland Bagpipe, went into battle against each other listening to…harps. Like the Irish harp.

That was no doubt the influence on western clans with links to Ireland like Macdonalds, Macleans (my clan by descent), probably even Camerons.

Until the changeover to the bagpipe.
We see the written record noting the difference and pouring scorn on what went before.

“Thy chanter’s shout gives pleasure, Sighing thy bold variations. Through every lively measure; The war note intent on rending, White fingers deft are pounding, To hack both marrow and muscles, With thy shrill cry resounding… You shamed the harp, Like untuned fiddle’s tone, Dull strains for maids, And men grown old and done: Better thy shrill blast, From gamut brave and gay, Rousing up men to the destructive fray…”

Clan Macleod were of Norwegian Viking origin. Different to their fellow-Scottish Highland and Island Clans. On the Isle of Skye, with their new music and experts, the MacCrimmons, they had put down an ultimatum and offer. “Are you Scottish or are you Irish?”, “Have we got a new instrument, to go into battle, FOR YOU.”

The Art of the Deal, indeed!

The original orderer must have been an ancestor of Mr. Trump. Through his mother, Mary Trump, nee Macleod, who emigrated from Scotland to the U.S.

Bill Clinton (observation on the rise of The Donald): “You just can’t insult your way to the Presidency.”

Me: “I don’t know Bill. His ancestors managed to insult their way to a world-famous musical instrument!”

An idea, “Think Big”, plagiarised by The Donald from New Zealand Prime Minister (1975-1984) Sir Robert Muldoon?!

Some Pibroch and unless my tree-spotting skills are badly awry I’d say that’s an Australian piper in front of some gum trees!

 

From Angus Mackay to the present day. Piper to the Sovereign. http://www.royal.gov.uk/TheRoyalHousehold/OfficialRoyalposts/TheQueensPiper.aspx

The United States Army and Helensvale Juniors.

Previous post some could construe as borderline blasphemous. Anyone reading the following who is connected with the U.S. Army I don’t wish to give any similar impression.

Wood (left), Jones (centre), Pasley (right), discuss tactics at Palm Beach cricket ground (2014-15)

No, it’s not.

A junior, myself, Stuart Wood, and Dave Pasley trying to hold down an HPPCC annexe/tent threatening to fly off in a mid-afternoon storm – weather conditions not unknown to Gold Coast Cricket!

Apologies to the US Army 1969 (Mekong Delta). Top Photo L. to R. (Lieutenant Colonel David Hackworth, Brigadier General Julian Ewell, Colonel Ira Hunt).

I received a telephone call on a Friday night before the Saturday match a few weeks into the season…”Doug can you play tomorrow?” From two mums of the Club. Asked to front up in the new Helensvale Opens team composed of…15 year olds!

Coralling and controlling junior cricketers. How to do it? Don’t take my advice. But for anyone who finds themselves in such position, some questions to put.

1) WHO TAUGHT THEM?
Often this can be used to say…”no, this is terrible technique/practice/method” but with HPPCC juniors 2014/15 I have to admit…”really good batting technique especially defensive.” Better than my blocking batsmanship which I think provides no angle between bat and pad (a belief belied by being bowled enough times during the season, though, usually the result of going for the hit!). Nope, the older Helensvale cricketers, still teenagers themselves probably, taught them well when they were 12/13/14.

2) ARE YOU STRONGER THAN A 15 YEAR OLD?
To borrow from “Are you smarter than a 5th Grader?” Mark Burnett’s top rated reality tv show…the answer is YES! The art of batting requires a single through the inner-ring of fielders. I can do it with a defensive stroke into a gap. Junior cricketers can’t. If the sport was Rugby; Probably not. 15 year old Tongan/Maori Rugby players of Helensvale Rugby Club would wind me.

3) “HE’S NOT THE MESSIAH, HE’S A VERY NAUGHTY BOY.”
From Mark Burnett to other English film producers, Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’. Alex, one of the better batsmen among the 15 year olds (in bad light and windy conditions) took…88 balls to score 11 RUNS! That’s almost half the innings, more when you consider his partner would have had some of the strike. I was impressed at this grim dogged batting display. “WE HAVE A NEW BOYCOTT REBORN, HALLELUJAH.” (confusing Buddhist and Christian theology since Geoff Boycott still, lives).

One of the Mums vehemently disagreed – not that I put any religious/cricket spin on this to her (well maybe a cricket-spin re Boycott), I was just curious – Reply to me: “No, Alex is fat, he’s lazy, and he’s selfish. That’s why he doesn’t run.”

 

With the advent of computerisation of scorebooks in Australian Club Cricket via the My Cricket website it’s become easy to see what results each individual on the field is getting.

For the U.S. Army in Vietnam (1965-1971) it was more difficult. It became a case of statisics, estimates, and guesswork.

Brigadier General Ewell versus Lieutenant Colonel Hackworth.

“If you’re not getting 10 to 1 you’re not in the game.” (Brigadier General Ewell taking the Australian Army to task, Phouc Tuy Province, 1969).

“By that measure the Australians were a great disappointment to Ewell since they were only measuring 3 to 1.” Paul Ham. Australia in Vietnam.

What to make of Ewell, the foremost American Army General (1968-70)? Definitely a combat leader, parachuting with his batallion of the 101st Airborne on D-Day into Normandy, 1944. In the Battle of the Bulge, at the forefront. But by the 1960s, had Secretary of Defense Macnamara’s (Ford Motor) statisical analysis, through IBM computer mainframes, brought on a complete reliance? On the body count.

Lieutenant Colonel Hackworth thought so. Disclosure. When a schoolboy, in Sydney, Hackworth gave us a lecture. It was real anti-nuclear time in the 80’s. Didn’t know that he was a Gold Coast property developer! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hackworth

I’m pleased to report that the Helensvale 15 year olds have shown definite improvement on the mathematical, computer mainframe measurements. Couldn’t make it to a hundred runs on first innings, now they can. Didn’t look like bowling the opposition batsmen out, (with good batsmen lurking in the lower grades).

After a season of cricket, now the bowlers do!

NOTES

http://www.historynet.com/book-review-the-9th-infantry-division-in-vietnam-unparalleled-and-unequaled-by-maj-gen-ira-a-hunt-jr-ret.htm

My own Weetbix Cricket ratios. http://mycricket.cricket.com.au/common/pages/public/rv/cricket/viewplayer.aspx?locx=PLY&playerID=802658&eID=2186&entityID=2186&seasonID=0

(odd, looking at them, bowling average equals batting highest score equals number of wickets.) 28.

Ham ‘Australia’s War in Vietnam’. http://www.smh.com.au/news/book-reviews/vietnam-the-australian-war/2008/02/08/1202234148357.html

General Ewell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Ewell

Boycott advises Cook his successor as England Opener. No doubt talking about the score rate. That’s Clarkson, Boycott, and the England Cricket Board Chairman, Graves’ for you!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/cricket/article-3072753/England-captain-Alastair-Cook-approaches-arch-critic-Geoffrey-Boycott-Barbados-restaurant-clear-air.html

Iron-kneed Rat.

Match on turf recently, I was fielding at square leg…

Square Leg is to the right perpendicular of the top light green strip of wicket diagram

…when an energetic pull shot from the batsman landed in front of me and bounced into my knee.

“THAT’S GOTTA HURT!” (as the American colour commentators on tv network sports broadcasts exclaim).

“See how you’re doing in 5 minutes.” (Opposition team player/umpiring) standing adjacent.

“Yep, I’m alright!” (2 overs later, about 5 minutes). At least he looked a bit embarassed, when I informed of complete fitness of leg/knee despite the sound. I didn’t think the well-wishes from the opposition were completely sincere!

“Flipping heck, we heard that from the sideline. Ball hitting your knee.” (Helensvale Club fellow cricketer).

What or who was I thinking of?

Russell Fairfax actually.

Left to right, Ron Coote/Russell Fairfax/Mark Harris. Eastern Suburbs Roosters premiers Sydney Rugby League mid-1970s.

“You could hear Fairfax’s leg break as he was tackled.” (Dad to Grand-Uncle Angus after watching an Amco Cup Rugby League evening telecast). I was confused, as any child would be, not just at the hushed conversation about Fairfax, one of the stars of football cards which we primary school boys swapped and bartered, but also…

“How could any limb-break on television be heard?”

Good hearing, but maybe crowd acoustics turned down now, in 2015, compared to then, in the 70’s?

Being Hit. The Iron Head Rat. Dr Jardine himeslf, founder of an interesting business in 1820s southern China comprising go-fast boats running a certain substance. As he admitted when dismissing a captain refusing to unload on the Sabbath…”We have every respect for persons entertaining strict religious principles, but we fear that very godly people are not suited for the drug trade.” Jardine in Kowloon got hit in the head by a piece of metal, whether a deliberate attack or something falling off a building site, accounts differ. Just shrugged it off and kept walking. “The Iron-headed Old Rat, the sly and cunning ring-leader of the opium smugglers has left for The Land of Mist, of fear from the Middle Kingdom’s wrath.” (Lin Zezu, Commandant of Southern China).

Disraeli didn’t think much of him either… “A Scotchman, richer than Croesus, one McDruggy, fresh from Canton, with a million of opium in each pocket, denouncing corruption and bellowing free trade.” (Disraeli’s 1845 novel, ‘Sybil’)

Certainly sent packing. By Lin and Disraeli respective Chinese and British political bigshots. Not that their opinions of the doctor/businessman had much effect. Jardine now an MP himself returned to London with the Plan of Attack on China – Jardine Matheson ships to carry the troops out from India sub-contracted with Bills of Lading at full charge to the UK taxpayer!

And so finished 2014 for me, with a big whack on the knee but no harm done. Happy 2015 everyone. From the Iron-kneed Rat (which sounds a bit Chinese horoscope!).

IN MEMORIAM

Phillip Hughes, batsman, New South Wales, South Australia, Australia. (1988-2014).

Hillel Oscar, former Captain, administrator, umpire, Israel. (1959-2014).

‘The Cricket Ground’, David Inshaw 1976.

Brisbane Dunedin Aberdeen.

…Actually three cities but Brisbane’s been done because plenty of notables have paid a visit! Indeed they crowded out the city last weekend.

“Help!”

I’m not thinking of the G20, but of a more venerable and antique institution, paying visits to Australia and New Zealand since 1965. Yes, who else but The Rolling Stones 🙂

Ronnie and Eddie the Koala

I could be unkind and ask which of these two mammals, Ronnie or Eddie, is more stoned.

http://www.ask.com/pets-animals/eucalyptus-leaves-koala-bears-high-6816d9eceb8f5043

Instead a perplexing problem arises for an institution even newer than the Rolling Stones or the G20 and its international predecessors (G7 etc). On the one arm, we see Ronnie holding a koala in as gentle an embrace as any Japanese woman tourist to Australia. On the other arm, if the story is true, this new international organization, Facebook, it’s founder didn’t cradle a koala.

He ate one.

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/koala-on-the-menu-book-claims-facebook-founder-has-strange-tastes-20090709-de0z.html

Believe me I do have sympathy for the “I can’t recall” defence. “Doug were you at Helensvale Plaza 10 days ago at 5:30 pm in the afternoon grocery shopping at the supermarket?” “Umm…I could have been. If you say so.”

It’s a bit different with a question like, “Mark, have you ever eaten a koala?” I think anyone would remember if they had or had not. No denial from Mark Zuckerberg, as far as I know. Not even a “Don’t be ridiculous.” sort of denial. You can only conclude…that The Rolling Stones are more civilised than Facebook.

On to our next Scottish name-derived city after Brisbane, Dunedin, which The Stones first visited in 1965.

“But my God, there are some black holes…Dunedin, for instance, almost the southernmost city in the world, in New Zealand. It looked like Tombstone and it felt like it. It still had hitching rails. It was Sunday, a wet Sunday in Dunedin in 1965. I don’t think you could find anything more depressing anywhere. The longest day of my life, it seemed to go on forever. We were usually pretty good at entertaining ourselves, but Dunedin made Aberdeen seem like Las Vegas. Very rarely did everyone get depressed at the same time; there was usually one to support the others. But in Dunedin everyone was totally depressed. No chance of any redemption or laughter. Even the drink didn’t get you pissed. On Sunday, there’d be little knocks on the door, “Er, church in ten minutes…” It was just one of those miserable days that took me back to my childhood, a day that will never end, the gloom and not anything on the horizon. Boredom is an illness to me, and I don’t suffer from it, but that moment was the lowest ebb. “I think I’ll try and stand on my head and recycle the drugs.”

Keith Richards, “Life.”. Autobiography.

Keith is fascinating in his town-planning observations, is he not?!

1) Horse-tethering posts in a British-settled city as late as 1965. Presumably for the Dunedin-region farmers coming into the city to buy supplies. Up to what year could you ride into London, Sydney, Toronto, and leave your horse parked in the street?

2) “…almost the southernmost city in the world.” Keith knows his geography but what was really causing him stress, I submit, was the town planning! He sensed that Dunedin was, in no way, a city like London, Sydney, Toronto. Cities built on English town planning ideas. Other cities which The Stones have toured, Brisbane, Dublin, Hong Kong did not create this dread in Keith. Though English town-design can be seen in Dublin (Ireland) and Hong Kong. It could be that Dunedin as the furthest city in the world from London was doing a number on Keith, “2000 Light Years from Home” must have been what he felt! What he was experiencing, instead, was a city not based on English design but Scottish design…(“Er, church in ten minutes…”). The cleaning staff at the Dunedin hotel where The Stones were staying were not working on the Sabbath before they had attended Presbyterian Sunday Church service.

I have visited Dunedin, probably half-way in time between Keith’s visit in 1965 and now. My thought on its town-plan driving in, “Odd. Definitely a city. One main street lighted up with full-on wattage and solid granite buildings. Either side darkness, barely a light, no suburbs.”

And finally to the Scottish city that for Keith is like Las Vegas! Aberdeen.

If this is true, and there are eyewitness accounts (though they are not exact on what they saw), physical evidence.
Would this not be the coolest visit to a city ever?
Literally. An Eskimo rowed his kayak into Aberdeen in the mid-1700s!

Thanks to Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog. http://www.strangehistory.net/2013/02/13/inuit-in-aberdeen/

The possible sighting of Nanook of the North in Aberdeen has been cited as proving global warming, or proof against climate change, I can’t remember which! More likely explanation that Netherlands ships of the V.O.C. (Dutch East Indies Company) but still trading across the Atlantic to their colony of New Amsterdam, picked up Eskimos in their kayaks, but after the V.O.C. prohibited bringing them back to Holland, had to set them adrift with their kayaks. Where they may have made it, exhausted, into Scottish harbours.

The Dissolution of The Crecheries.

Ever since the time of…

there has been an assumption, among the English-speaking peoples, of continuous progress in the realm of individual political representation, property rights and the like.

That IS an assumption! At the latest HPPCC Committee meeting, El Presidente waited until the end to make this announcement:-

“Gold Coast Council has decided to resume the lease on the child-care centre next door because only six families are using it. Council is going to give the building and lease to us.”

El Presidente looked a bit embarrassed. I was completely astonished myself. Politically, the shortage of creches and child care spaces is a social policy problem for local and state governments. Couldn’t believe they just closed one.

Henry the Eighth’s chief enforcer, Thomas Cromwell, gets the main rap in the episode of English history, “The Dissolution of the Monasteries.” Cromwell’s goon squads go into the monasteries/priories/nunneries, kick out the monks and nuns, and sell off the real estate to the local aristocrats was the accepted scholarly consensus when I was taught it at school.

Lead pipes and roofs sold off. The rest left intact. Why the ruins are still standing.

Modern Oxbridge history has revised this. The Religious Orders’ landholdings were already being sold off under advisement by clerics of King Henry V11 (a devout Catholic). To universities (how surprising they would take advantage of a good deal!). Bishop Alcock of Ely [Lord Chancellor to both Richard III and Henry VII, (how did he manage that? political genius?)] gave a monastery to Ely Cathedral’s nearest university, Cambridge. Thus, Jesus College Cambridge.

Bishop Alcock of Ely.

Hey, wait a minute, looks like someone I wrote about recently.

Alcock Mark II

Much as I would like to prove a direct ancestral link between the two Alcocks based on portraiture in stone and photography similar to that of Sherlock Holmes in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’…

Have you seen English portraiture in the late Middle Ages? Compare Henry VII’s portrait.

with that of his son at top of post. I highly doubt any late Middle Ages English painting of Bishop Alcock would provide enough of a resemblance in any form to Dr Sir Rutherford for me to prove a genetic link visually like Sherlock in ‘The Hound’. Thank you Mr Holbein for coming over from Germany and showing how to get a likeness! Unfortunately for Lord Chancellor Cromwell, it was Holbein’s tipping a likeness into flattery of the subject with his portrait of Anne of Cleves, Henry’s fourth wife, that led to the downfall of Dissolution-Man-in-Chief.

The scholars back then were more relaxed about a subtle joke than our modern equivalents. Difficult to believe but I’d say they were based on what was designed as the College Shield. Jesus College…something suitably religious, surely? Well, no. In memory of Alcock. Here comes the rooster!

But the accepted theory of a massive Tudor-era privatisation sale still holds according to this Wiki opinion quote:-

“The landed property of the former monasteries included large numbers of manorial estates, each carrying the right and duty to hold a court for tenants and others. Acquiring such feudal rights was regarded as essential to establish a family in the status and dignity of the late medieval gentry; but for a long period freehold manorial estates had been very rare in the market; and families of all kinds seized on the opportunity now offered to entrench their position in the social scale. Nothing would subsequently induce them to surrender their new acquisitions.”

Cricket covers, crecherie and clubhouse.

Getting the creche back from us might be a bit like the last sentence of the quote too! But we of HPPC Committee are generous. El Presidente:- “Leave some children’s toys there. And a small space. If any one looking for it turns up.”

Mayor Tom Tate, our Henry V111.

NOTES

The Dissolution of the Monasteries: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/dissolution_monasteries.htm

Bishop Alcock of Ely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Alcock_(bishop)

Fame’s Brush with Fuzhou Part IV (continued).

Warning: This entry contains strong language.

https://dougiejones.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/fames-brush-wi…fuzhou-part-iv/ ‎

“Dr Alcock.”
“Have we a got a job for you.”
“Her Britannic Majesty Victoria’s Consul to Fuzhou.”

The 18th Regiment of Foot’s (The Royal Irish) opposed landing at the Gulangyu Island fort, Xiamen (1841, First Opium War).

The first Opium War had been won by 1842 and it only remained, under the terms of the peace treaty, The Treaty of Nanking, to appoint the 5 H.M.U.K. Consuls to Guangzhou (Canton), Xiamen (Amoy), Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai.

But Alcock wasn’t the first British government representative in Fuzhou. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tradescant_Lay
Poor old Lay was having a hard time of things. Confined to his residence on the Min River which was flooding the floorboards. The Qing Magistrates and the locals not respecting his authority. “George, I’ll take over from here, thank you for your efforts”, was Alcock’s effective message.

A house for H.M.U.K. Government’s new Consul was built up on higher land near a Buddhist Temple. Mrs Alcock, her younger sister, and their mother, soon after arrived. When Mrs Alcock, and her sister and mother probably became the first ever western european women to promenade on the streets of Fuzhou (one can imagine the surprise of the Fuzhouites in 1845 seeing the crinoline dresses of Mrs Alcock and Mrs, (mum) and, Miss Bacon (sis)).

This is all very correct. Nothing out of the ordinary that your average western expat in Asia wouldn’t do. Sorting out the accommodation and then having the western in-laws join the household. The second part is probably a lot more than your average western expat in Asia would do. Also joining the household was the translator since Dr Alcock did not speak Chinese, his only foreign language exposures would have been French and Spanish (he spent 6 months in Paris during his medical studies and his deployment to Spain with the British Army during the Carlist War as related in Part One).

The Chinese translator wasn’t anyone you’d expect, though. A 16 year old English boy, Harry Parkes, an orphan sent out to live in Macao with missionary relatives and who from the age of 13 had witnessed the First Opium War.

So a 16 year old orphan boy joined the Alcock household in Fuzhou too. Even more than your average western expat in Asia nowadays would do.

It’s what happens next, however, after re-establishment of Her Majesty Victoria’s diplomatic and consular representation in Fuzhou in 1845, that things get interesting. Not least in terms of law enforcement. Wikipedia provides the quote by Sir Rutherford Alcock: “(I) performed the functions of “everything from a Lord Chancellor to a sheriff’s officer.”

That’s the self-description of the functions performed. Alcock and his ward Parkes in Fuzhou in 1845, instead, seem to have turned into a sort of Bruce Wayne and his ward Dick Grayson, i.e. Batman and Robin.

From Michie’s biography of Sir Rutherford Alcock in the 1890’s prose…

“a year elapsed before the violence of the people and the studied rude- ness of the officials were finally stamped out. For,
curiously enough, as Mr Lane-Poole has so well pointed out, every outrage in Canton found its echo at Foochow, showing clearly where lay the ” centre of disturbance,” as our meteorologists express it.

In the end, however, the ascendancy of the British authority was completely achieved. The consul and the interpreter between them succeeded in getting proud Tartars put in the common pillory and lesser ruffians severely flogged,”

The reaction of the local Fuzhouites to this new dispensation of justice we don’t know. Suppose an alternate history in which the Chinese had fought a war off the coast of Britain to open up British ports and a Qing consul was sent ashore in Southampton, for instance, one could only think the English locals’ reaction would have been an astonished…

“What the f**k is this guy, and the kid with him, doing?” Excuse the Anglo-Saxon language but I suppose the Fuzhouites response was something similar.

“…while before they left Foochow in 1846 they had extorted from the authorities substantial pecuniary compensation for injuries sustained
by British subjects.” [Injuries here are property damage to British houses caused by Fuzhouite stone-throwing mobs, not personal injuries to individuals].

Well that’s law enforcement 1845-46 style in Fujian, a virtuous circle if ever I saw one. First you beat up the criminals, then you strong-arm the politicians (for money, ‘extort’ 1890s English) who allowed it to occur in the first place. I’m sure the Chinese Communist Party with their vaunted long memory of foreign humiliation would like to do a prime-time tv drama on the iniquities of Dr Alcock. May be a bit problematic, though. Summary street justice meted out, fining parties for alleged property crimes even if not beyond reasonable doubt that they sanctioned such property crimes, zero tolerance towards street gatherings of protesting individuals…Alcock and Parkes’ ideas of law enforcement and the administration of justice might be just a bit too close to modern CCP ideas of same for it to be safely shown on prime-time tv to ‘old hundred names’ even for the purpose of patriotic education.

Enough political commentary, a linguistic question remains. How did a 16 year old know that a local Fuzhouite was expressing something untoward about Dr Alcock as they passed by? “Sir, he said a bad thing to you..!” Harry Parkes could only have known a Chinese language spoken in Macao/Hong Kong and a written language from Beijing being sent southwards. He couldn’t have exactly comprehended what the bystander was saying in Fuzhou-hua, Min-Nan, Min-Dong, Min-Bei, Min-Go and all the others now, could he?

And another question to conclude. What did Dr Sir Rutherford Alcock look like? There is a photographic reproduction stored with the National Portrait Gallery in London as befits H.M.’s Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary (the modern term for Ambassador) to Japan (1859-1864) and China (1865-69).

Judge Dredd from the British comic 2000 AD.

The sentiments expressed are most similar to Dr Alcock’s. But I don’t think he looked like that. Nor Batman for that matter.

Neither do I think he looked like Joe Cocker (circa 1969-1973) on tour in Fuzhou. (Chinese waxwork of an 1870s British Consul). The white naval-style uniform may, however, be accurate. White vice-regal uniforms can be seen worn by Lord Mountbatten as Viceroy of India in the 1940s and Sir Murray Maclehose, Governor of Hong Kong in the 1970s. More likely Dr Alcock wore civilian clothes.

Timothy Olyphant as Sheriff Seth Bullock in the tv show “Deadwod” (HBO 2004-2006).

The clothing is Wild West American menswear circa 1876-80. At least 30 years in the future. As with Judge Dredd, the sentiments are the same, however, and we know Dr Alcock was quick to draw a pepperpot pistol as he proved in Tokyo 13 years on from Fuzhou when faced with residential invasion by homicidal samurai.
But I find it difficult to believe Dr Alcock would use such language (not “disperse this riotous assembly”, he could well have used those exact words to the Fuzhouites, rather…the other phrase) nor wear such a moustache. Facial hair in the form of moustaches only became customary in the British army after 1854 when the soldiers in the Crimean War began to imitate their Russian infantry opponents. 1858 when Alcock arrived in Japan, doubtful ‘the mo’ style had taken off, and definitely not as early as 1845 in Fuzhou.

No. Dr Sir Rutherford Alcock looked like this.

NOTES
Dr Sir Rutherford Alcock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutherford_Alcock

Young Harry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Smith_Parkes

The Earl of Malmesbury, 26 Februrary 1857, in The House of Lords, as Harry sets off the Second Opium War in Canton with the Arrow Incident…”If it were not for the serious consequences involved in this matter, I do not know that I have ever met anything which I should consider more grotesque than the conduct of Consul Parkes throughout these transactions”.

But let’s not give a politician the final say on a still young man’s (Harry at 28) character and behaviour – let us conclude with this touching tribute from Michie’s biography of Sir Rutherford…

“In the biography of Sir Harry Parkes he speaks in the warmest terms of the kindness he received [in Fuzhou] from Mr and Mrs Alcock, who tended him through a fever which, but for the medical skill of the consul — no other professional aid being available — must have ended fatally. They helped him with books, enlarged his field of culture, and there is no doubt that daily intercourse with this genial and accomplished family did much to supply the want of that liberal education from which the boy had been untimely cut adrift. The value of such parental influence to a lad who had left school at thirteen can hardly be over-estimated, and he did not exaggerate in writing, “I can never repay the Alcocks the lasting obligations I am under to them.”

Your Medieval Name

C.S.I. Leicester sorry University of Leicester facial reconstruction of Richard the Third.

Found under a carpark in Leicester, England.

1) Shakespeare no lie! Richard did have a hunchback. Medically they’ve said it’s scoliosis (curvature of the spine) not a hunchback but I don’t think the scoliosis diagnosis existed in the 1480s. Will don’t get off the hook that easily, though, on the charge of Tudor spin doctor/propagandist.

Lump of foul deformity.”

“Elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog!”

“Poisonous bunchback’d toad.”

“Slander of thy mother’s heavy womb.”

“Bottled spider.”

Your fiction writer of plays like Shakespeare can always claim they made it all up. “Oh I don’t believe this, I’m only having my characters say it.” At the Wal Mart in Fuzhou, a young woman with scoliosis who always greeted with me a friendly smile. The Richard the Third Society, which contributed to the search, never bought that line of Shakespeare that he wasn’t prejudiced against the disabled.

2) “Gt fun & a mystery solved that we’ve found Richard 3. But does it have any HISTORICAL significance? (Uni of Leics overpromoting itself?))” Tweet from Mary Beard, UK TV Don du jour (Classics, Cambridge). Snobbish naievety of the gifted when bested, “How dare some people from a uni not Cambridge/Oxford/the Scottish unis and some redbricks make this discovery.” As if any of the above wouldn’t hold a press conference to announce the finding. You get more sophistication from American NFL teams. The Superbowl, which was in progress about the time of the Universtiy of Leicester’s announcement – doubtful that the San Francisco 49ers (a team I have heard of) begrudged the win by the Baltimore Ravens (a city franchise I haven’t heard of) or their subsequent celebrations.
Mary Beard refutes the above entirely. http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2013/02/richard-of-york-gave-battle-in-vain.html

3) The Harry Potter novels (which I haven’t read) but from what I’ve heard of them seem to owe a lot (jolly hi-jinks among school friends in an English boarding school) to the boy’s magazine, “The Magnet” (1908-1940) and the tales of boarding school life of Billy Bunter and The Famous Five of the Remove, at…Greyfriars School. I thought that Frank Richards (pen name of Charles Hamilton) the author of the stories made up the Greyfriars as a medieval monastic order for the site of his boarding school. To completely misquote Deng Xiaoping, “It doesn’t matter if it’s a White Friar or a Black Friar as long as it’s a monastic order.” (!) But a Grey Friar? There they were, though, in Leicester, The Franciscans, the Grey Friars (straight from St Francis of Assisi to England’s midlands by the 1300s) accepting Richard’s body for burial in the grounds of the monastery after the battle of Bosworth Field.

DNA confirmation of Richard. Ibsen, Canadian descendent of Anne of York, Richard’s sister. And another unidentified through the mitocondrial line.
In the internet discussion someone asked a good question, “Were people known in the Middle Ages as Anne of York, and that would be enough to identify them? Or was that only for the gentry?” Responses:: “Owen the Welshman would be known by that name if he moved to an English town.” “No one has the surname London because it was too big even by 1400 to recognise someone.”

So, for those who have relocated (it doesn’t really work with people in their home cities like London!). In another place we have…

“Douglas of Sydney” (not bad. though first name is Scottish and second place location named for Lord Townshend in Nova Scotia and Australia).
“Clara of Jersey” (better. scratch the new out of New Jersey).
“Simon of St John’s”. (outstanding.)
“Albert of Toronto..” (wait. Toronto’s old name is York.) (excellent!).

NOTES
Franciscans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventual_Franciscans
Richard III Society: http://www.richardiii.net/
Charles Hamilton, the pen name of Frank Richards. From Ealing of course! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hamilton_(writer)
And Al Pacino’s take: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVgdtcNwIGQ

Fame’s brush with Fuzhou Part IV

Part IV should really be Part II (I’m renumbering episodes in chronological order – like George Lucas with the later Star Wars movies!). After Marco Polo but before Paul Claudel comes Fuzhou’s next brush with fame.
The Alpha Ang Mos personified…

DR RUTHERFORD and MRS ALCOCK
Alcock was born in 1809 in the London suburb of Ealing (where else!) and apprenticed to his surgeon father at age 15 (they started young back then). He was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons by age 21 and house surgeon at Westminster Hospital. Two years later, in 1832, he was called up as an army surgeon for deployment to the Carlist Wars.

Ever heard of the Carlist Wars? Neither had I. About as remembered as the Wars of the Spanish Succession in the 1700s -although the W.O.S.S. were important in enlarging Britain’s overseas possessions. History repeated in that the Carlist Wars were again wars of the Spanish succession with Britain and France supporting a liberal (for those times) Infanta against her deep-conservative Catholic uncle. Spanish historians, naturally enough, have focused on the domestic impact of the Carlist Wars, seeing in them the start of a century of civil unrest in Spain that only concluded with the victory in 1939 of the Caudillo, Generalissimo Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

These Carlist Wars were to have a totally unforeseeable impact on Fuzhou, however.

Dr Alcock (I use the modern title “Dr” for surgeons, the traditional title for UK and UK-modelled medical national systems was “Mr” + “surname of surgeon”, retaining the trade, barbers etc, origins of surgery) is remembered today, not in Spain, nor in his homeland Britain, and not in China, but in Japan.

In 1859, he arrived in Japan to take up the post of British Consul General and Envoy Plenipotentiary. Regrettably, homicidal samurai were out to get Alcock – they were none too pleased about the opening of Japan by Commodore Perry’s black ships 5 years earlier. Quite sensibly, Alcock made himself scarce from the British Residence in Edo (Tokyo) and went on a tour around Honshu, the main island, where he became the first Westerner to climb Mt Fuji. Accompanied by his Scottish terrier, Toby. Unfortunately Toby blew up, not on Mt Fuji, but at hot springs nearby when he trod his paws on a geyser and was thrown 40 feet into the air.

Returning to the Legation, in contemplative mood no doubt at the loss of Toby, Alcock found that…the samurai were still after him. Guns weren’t absent in Embassies in those days. The local Japanese staff bravely held the intruders off at the wall and in the garden until the samurai managed to break into the residence where they were met by…the British staff, armed to the teeth with guns and shooting back, Dr Alcock included, with his pepper pot pistol. Which appears mysteriously at the top of the post thanks to the eccentricities of the internet and photo sharing!

No more problems with embassy invasions after that, not for the British, nor for any other nation establishing diplomatic relations with Japan.

Last year’s debacle in Libya – would the homicidal mob have been deterred if they’d known U.S. diplomatic staff would respond with guns blazing? Probably not. Which raises the interesting implication that deterrence theory works with every other world culture except the Arab mob. But then it wasn’t an Arab-Street mob (a mistake which cost Susan Rice her chance of becoming Secretary of State). It was an agitated-into-a-frenzy by Al-Quaeda group of about 20 embassy invaders. They share a not dissimilar cultural affinity to the samurai of 1860 in seeking to destroy what they regard as Western individual ‘polluters’ of their sacred land. So, if nothing deters, then diplomats encountering such sub-cultures might as well be armed.

Maybe the Japanese were embarassed by Dr Alcock’s incident-packed welcome to Nihon and wanted to make amends by a dignified stone memorial to him and Toby. Alternatively, could this not have been the first instance of Japanese successful adoption of Western models, not of science and engineering or legal-political structures, but of art and aesthetics? A canine memorial, a new sentimental tribute to the pet dog only recently originating in Britain. Greyfriars Bobby comes to Meiji Japan, but Made in Japan! (See top of post with pepper pot pistol).

And that’s the only memorial to Dr Sir Rutherford Alcock in the world.

But back to the Carlist Wars. Dr Alcock completed his service in Spain with HM Armed Forces, mostly the Royal Marines and Royal Artillery who were the combat troops sent to the Iberian Peninsular. He advanced medical scholarship too, based on his battlefield surgery experience, with Royal College of Surgeons prize-winning essays in 1839 “On Concussion or Commotion of the Brain.” and 1841 “On Injuries of the Thorax and Operations on its Parietes.“, the latter drawing on his experience in treating gunshot wound injuries.

He was also asked to serve on a Commission of Enquiry into the war, and to help settle compensation claims for wounded British servicemen. His career track was set, to become an army General of medicine, maybe even the chief surgeon to the army, the Surgeon-General. Or to become a highly-regarded civilian surgeon in London.

Until in 1844…
His thumbs became paralysed.

An affliction that would floor me, you, anyone I suggest. But especially in Dr Alcock’s field of medicine. Career-ending, then, and I would imagine now, for a surgeon. The diagnosis was that he had contracted some unknown disease in Spain.
Her Majesty’s Government did not forget Dr Alcock’s service, however.
In the prose of the Victorians…

When thus thrown upon his beam-ends in 1844, an appointment was conferred on Mr Alcock which was not only honourable to him but creditable to the Government which selected him…The Minister responsible for the appointment may be excused if, while selecting a man of proved capacity for a post of unknown requirements, he did not realise the full value of the service he was rendering to his country. Governments are not always so perspicacious in gauging the merits of the uncovenanted, and other nominations made under circumstances not dissimilar have shown how easily the efficiency of the candidate may be subordinated to considerations extraneous to the public weal.

as it was put in a memoir written in 1900 by Alexander Michie using personal and official papers provided by Dr Sir Rutherford’s family and friends (Alcock himself wrote no autobiography).

The State made him an offer.
HAVE WE GOT A JOB FOR YOU.

NOTES
Ang Mo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ang_mo
Caudillo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caudillo
Greyfriars Bobby http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Bobby Hachiko http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachik%C5%8D

Son of Thunder, Man of Wrath

I thought the Mayans rather upstaged Christmas this year! And far be it from me to go all New Age as well, however,

Christmas Lunch

“Laura, are you watching the new season of Survivor?”
“I had university exams but after they finished I started watching.”
“And what do you think of Jeff Kent?”
“He’s SO ANGRY. He’s always annoyed!”

That he is, I thought, Laura, that he is. But why would he be? A highly successful, well-remunerated career in major league baseball. I looked at his birth date. March 3, 1968. As his mother entered the final trimester in Bellflower, LA, California, she would have read in the newspaper, heard on the radio, or seen on the television the following events…

January 5
Dr. Benjamin Spock, William Sloan Coffin the chaplain of Yale University, and others are indicted on charges of conspiracy to encourage violations of the draft laws by a grand jury in Boston. The charges are the result of actions taken at a protest rally the previous October at the Lincoln Memorial.
January 23
North Korean patrol boats capture the USS Pueblo, a US Navy intelligence gathering vessel and its 83 man crew on charges of violating the communist country’s twelve-mile territorial limit. This crisis would dog the US foreign policy team for 11 months, with the crew of the Pueblo finally gaining freedom on December 22.
January 31
At half-past midnight on Wednesday morning the North Vietnamese launch the Tet offensive at Nha Trang. The offensive will carry on for weeks and is seen as a major turning point for the American attitude toward the war. At 2:45 that morning the US embassy in Saigon is invaded and held until 9:15AM.
February 2
Richard Nixon, a republican from California, enters the New Hampshire primary and declares his presidential candidacy.
February 18
The US State Department announces the highest US casualty toll of the Vietnam War. The previous week saw 543 Americans killed in action, and 2547 wounded.
February 27
Walter Cronkite reports on his recent trip to Vietnam to view the aftermath of the Tet Offensive in his television special Who, What, When, Where, Why? The report is highly critical of US officials and directly contradicts official statements on the progress of the war.
Timeline courtesy Brown University http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/1968/reference/timeline.html

Could Jeff have been affected in utero by this cataract of violence and turmoil affecting the United States and to which his mother would have been exposed by modern media?

Economists and social scientists would dismiss the idea out of hand. Any anger of Jeff’s they could explain demographically. As a Generation X member, Jeff would have felt age-cohort obstruction from older baby boomer baseball players not giving him greater opportunities – while younger Gen Y. players would be snapping at his heels towards the end of his career.
In terms of celebrities, commonsense suggests that for every surly-attitude 1968 born actor (Daniel Craig) or sportsman (Mike Atherton, England cricket captain in a side outgunned by Australia and opening batsman, to make things even grimmer) you have plenty of sunny-disposition singers (Kylie Minogue), actors (Hugh Jackman) born in 1968 – and they’re just Australian ones! Later traumatic US events of 1968 (assasinations of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy) and international- politically charged (May 1968 French student protests, the crushing of the Prague Spring by Warsaw Pact invasion) had no effect.

The writer of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, England’s first political theorist (more likely England’s first philosopher!) had a different view. “The cure for fearfulness, Hobbes thought, was the frank acknowledgment that it was the natural and universal condition of man. Hobbes knew all about fear. According to John Aubrey, the philosopher claimed that he had been born prematurely in 1588 as the result of his mother taking fright at the prospect of the Spanish Armada.” (Simon Schama, A History of Britain, Vol.2, (1603-1776), BBC 2001. p.176).

Is there a more English-sounding personal name than JEFF KENT?! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Kent
THOMAS HOBBES http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes