The Pipers' Strike of 311

Lately I've been reading a lot of Livy. I'm enjoying his level-headedness: for instance, his scepticism that Romulus and Remus were looked after by a she-wolf, preferring the version in which they were brought up by a prostitute, who was known locally as "The She-Wolf". The early history of Rome is not so different from modern history: a running theme is of people complaining that politicians exaggerate threats of war in order to keep themselves looking good, and the people distracted from sorting out their own rights.

As the Republic matures (I'm talking c300 BC here) I get the sense that Livy doesn't know what to make of the continued superstition, having few comments to add to his narratives of Valerius Corvus (who fought a duel against a Gaul while a raven sat on his head); or the importance accorded to the Keepers of the Sacred Chickens; or the Romans' willingness, in time of plage, to suspend their sophisticated democratic system so that they can appoint a dictator to bang a nail into a temple wall.

Mainly, it's one battle after another, but there is sometimes light relief. Here's Livy's account of the pipe-player's strike of 311 BC:

I should have passed over a little thing that happened in the same year, except that it appeared to be a religious matter. The last Censors had banned the pipers from dining in the Temple of Jupiter. Taking it badly, they went out en masse to Tibur, so there was nobody left in town who could pipe in the sacrifices. The Senate took the matter reverently, and sent envoys to Tibur to make sure they would be restored to Rome.

The people of Tibur dutufilly gave their word, and first gathered the pipers into their assembly, and urged them to go back to Rome; but then, when they couldn't make them, they approached them with a strategy that would not offend their inclination. Some of them invited the pipers to a festival, apparently to celebrate their feasts with music, and got them heavily drunk with wine: on which their sort is very keen.

In this state, helpless in their sleep, they were tossed into wagons and taken them off to Rome, and they didn't notice until the wagons had been left in the marketplace and the sun beat down on them and their hangovers. Then the people gathered round, and prevailed upon them to remain, granting them three days a year on which to dress up and sing, and roam the city with the license that is now a firm custom, and the temple dining rights of those who piped in the sacrifices were restored. This happened while two very large wars were in progress.


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Cobras Fumantes

Lots of languages have briliant ways of saying "never". We have "when pigs fly". Other European languages, stretching a point, are more likely to have "when a cow flies". Latvian has "when the owl's tail blossoms", Turkish has "when fish climb poplar trees", and  Portuguese, charmingly, has "on the afternoon of St Never's Day".
    In Brazil, they used to say "when snakes smoke". "When will Brazil join the war?", President Getúlio Vargas was often asked during World War II. "When snakes smoke!" he would reply. But eventually, Brazil did send a contingent to assist in the Allied invasion of Italy, and it adopted the nickname Cobras Fumantes.
And so, it is for this succession of entirely unremarkable reasons that the emblem of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force is a snake enjoying a puff on a pipe.

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Daniel Farson and James Wentworth Day

I spent the Easter weekend in a holiday cottage, in whose library, next to the memoirs of Lord Hailsham, was The Dog In Sport. This blue-blooded compendium of the country canine included how to rate a terrier (25 points for colour), an anecdote about an aristocrat whose carriage was pulled by stags instead of horses, and a new use for a Dachshund.
When I got back to town, and the Internet I looked up its author, James Wentworth day. Amongst his writings, there's an interesting account of an awful-sounding ratting cellar in Cambridge Circus. His Wikipedia article includes in his main accomplishments "unrelenting racist".
An example of his unrelenting racism is in this episode of People in Trouble on mixed marriages. He does not come out of it looking very good at all, and I do wonder, when people do go on television and express their views in the role of token oddball, how earnestly they can really have held them.

Although finding out that its author was rude and unpleasant has tempered my enjoyment of The Dog In Sport, I am glad that it has introduced me to Daniel Farson, presenter of People in Trouble, Out of Step and other social documentaries. There's a tiny exhibition of his photographs in the National Portrait Gallery until September this year, and if you have a spare 20 minutes near Trafalgar Square it's worth popping in to see (ask for room 31).

Farson began his career with Picture Post, as did Ken Tynan. If Farson and Wentworth Day had one thing in common, it's the ease with which they produced books: in Farson's case, a two-week trip to Russia with Gilbert and George turns into a moderately sized volume. So I don't think I'll be reading their complete works, but both men have been interesting discoveries.

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The Other Empire

Gosh. It's been 6 months. That's inexcusable. So just a quick note to recommend Radio 3's current The Essay series The Other Empire. It's on the history of the French empire, and a couple of episodes of it are still on iPlayer if you're quick.


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For Every Year

Recent paddling in the backwaters of the internet has led me to the For Every Year project. It strives to amass "a story or poem for every year since 1400", and after two and a half years has got as far as the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621. I had half a mind to write something for 1625 on John Donne's sermon on torture, but I see that's now been bagged by someone more decisive. It will be interesting to see what event has been chosen, and how it's represented.

Recent creativity has celebrated Galileo's support for Copernicus's heliocentric model of the universe, as published in 1610's Starry Messenger; and the first production of The Tempest the following year. How now, moon-calf! how does thine ague?

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New dates added

I've added most of  The 50 key dates of world history, according to Richard Overy, editor of the history of the world in book form. The only exceptions are things too general to assign to a specific year and a specific category.

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Francis Galton

I had never heard of this man before this week, and now I have heard of him twice: on Tuesday at the Ink edition of University College London's amazing Bright Club courtesy of Natasha McEnroe, curator of the Galton Collection, and then on Wednesday at a British Computer Society event on biometrics. For he was the first person to make a scientific study of fingerprints, and give the discipline of fingerprinting the authority it needed before it could be used in criminal cases.
A cousin of Charles Darwin, he was interested in how Darwin's principles of selection could be applied to humans, and coined the word eugenics for the idea. For the better end of breeding, he looked no further than his own family: here's how he mapped out the brilliance of his nearest and dearest:

The first "brilliant" on row 3 is Charles Darwin: the second is Galton himself.
Galton took his principles of eugenics on tour, creating the Beauty Map of Britain. This involved his loitering in various cities, recording his ratings of the women who passed by. To spare embarrasment, he did this by pricking holes in a piece of paper in his pocket: at the top for "worst", in the middle for "so-so", and at the bottom for "best" London ranked highest; Aberdeen lowest.

The lengths to which Galton would go to save the blushes of the women he wished to calibrate in the cause of science are also shown in this excerpt from his The Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa (1853):

The object of my admiration stood under a tree, and was turning herself about to all points of the compass, as ladies who wish to be admired usually do. Of a sudden my eye fell upon my sextant; the bright thought struck me, and I took a series of observations upon her figure in every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally, and so forth, and I registered them carefully upon an outline drawing for fear of any mistake; this being done, I boldly pulled out my measuring tape, and measured the distance from where I was to the place she stood, and having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms.

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Pivot Charts: Charles and Diana announce engagement, 24th February 1981

An occasional series on how the world's major events have not affected its pop music charts.

Week ending	#1 Artist	#1 Song
24/02/81	Joe Dolce	Shaddap You Face
03/03/81	Joe Dolce	Shaddap You Face

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Monk wars

Clonmacnoise

Thanks to BBC radio series A short history of Ireland (in 240 episodes) I now know that in 760,  the abbot of the monastery at Clonmacnoise led his monks against those at Birr, and 200 died in the ensuing battle. They were at it again in 764. More here.

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Digging for gold

 Samuel Pepys has been making some interesting posts lately on his twitter account. In October 1667 Pepys was coming back to London from Brampton with his life savings. Following Michiel de Ruyter's devastating raid on the English navy in Chatham dock in June of that year, Pepys felt London might be next. Being a high-up naval man himself, might have had more knowledge of the situation than many.

So it was he sent his wife up to Brampton in Cambridgeshire, where his uncle Robert lived, and there she buried their stock of gold coins in his garden. This was a bit of a theme in the Pepys family: Samuel had buried a particularly expensive cheese in the garden of his London house to protect it from the Great Fire of the previous year. In October of 1667, once the Treaty of Breda looked like it had put an end to the Anglo-Dutch War, the Pepys family returned to Brampton to retrieve it. It wasn't an unmitigated success, for the bags had rotted, and their attempt to root out the individual pieces left them 30 short. They worked by candlelight and in hushed tones in case the neighbours worked out what was going on, Pepys exasperated to find out they had buried the gold only 6 inches under the ground and in full view of the neighbours.

On the carriage trip back to London, the still-jumpy Pepys was afraid that the bottom of the baggage compartment might give way with the weight of the coins, so he had it transferred to the hand luggage. As far as we know, the missing 30 pieces of gold are still somewhere in Brampton. Happy hunting!

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Anne of Cleves

Happy birthday (for yesterday) Anne of Cleves. That's the one whom Henry VIII is supposed to have called a "fat Flanders mare" when they first met, and although as far as we can tell that phrase wasn't recorded until over 200 years after the event, it is fair to say that they did not click as a couple. Nevertheless it remains one of Henry VIII's least unhappy marriages. Brought together for political reasons that were already disappearing before the best man's speech, the couple held off from consummating the marriage (once bitten twice shy, in his case) and it was easily annulled a few months later. By that stage, Henry had his eye on Catherine Howard.

Catherine turned out to be a blessing in disguise. In exchange for a quick and amicable separation, Henry granted Anne £3000 per year for life, and she remained in England a very wealthy and exceptionally independent woman.
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My Coney Island Baby

Delighted to learn that the funfair on Coney Island housed a baby incubator display. Dr Martin Couney's "Incubator Baby Exhibits" were a regular feature at the World's Fairs, as well as at their permanent site on Coney Island. In part this is because it was one of the most electrically endowed sites in the USA; but is is also because ticket sales funded his pioneering treatment of premature babies, and Coney Island guaranteed a high freak-show-friendly footfall. In August 1904 half a million people turned out to see the world's tiniest baby fight for its one-pound-six-ounce life (it succeeded, and according to the New York Times of September 4th, met the smallest woman in the world).

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Killer Cucumbers

I take as my text this page of free-for-all footnotes to Pepys' Diary, on the subject of cucumbers, as it serves as a pretty good selective social history of the vegetable. I was led there from a line in a song in Gay's Beggar's Opera:

As men should serve a cowcumber, she flings herself away

Serve, of course, mainly as in "treat", not as in "arrange nicely on a plate". Cowcumber was the prevailing spelling and pronunciatiom. One of those Pepys footnotes quotes "It is said that the antique name of cowcumber arose because the fruit was thought fit only for cows". Said by whom we don't know. It's not the full-on etymology, which in either its cow- or cu- form comes straight from the Latin cucumis, but could at a pinch explain a cheeky variation.

Certainly the cucumber was not in much favour in the days of Pepys or Gay. It shows up in Pepys' diary in a health scare: on September 22nd 1663, Pepys hears of the second man allegedly dead from eating that particular green peril within the space of days.
On the subject of flinging cucumbers away, the footnote to that line in the Beggar's Opera in my (D. W Lindsay) edition has "Eighteenth-century physicians were said to recommend that a cucumber should be carefully sliced and dressed, then thrown away", which although a lovely image raises more questions than is answers and is ultimately unsatisfactory. I am rather more inclined to think of the excerpt from John Evelyn quoted on that Pepys footnote page: "it not being long, since Cucumber, however dress’d, was thought fit to be thrown away, being accounted little better than Poyson." That's from a 1699 book all about salad, so ought to know. It was published chronologically slap-bang in between Pepys and Gay: so either Gay was behind the times, or else Evelyn's attempts to rehabilitate the cucumber had proved fruitless. The image I'm left with is one of an unwanted garnish of cucumber, probably pickled, ejected from one's food, a tradition which continues for the reviled Big Mac gherkin to this day.

Image by Michael Sporn.

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Burning Down the White House

1812 was an exciting year. Not just for Napoleon's trip to Moscow and back, with those scenes in War and Peace and the Tchaikovsky overture with the cannons, but for parallel goings-on across the pond in the War of 1812, when the United States declared war on the British Empire, for reasons including trade restrictions.

The trade restrictions had come about like this. Napoleon, beaten militarily by British forces but still strong in Europe, forbade traders from France and her allies from trading with Britain. Britain responded in similar terms, preventing French traders from trading with Britain's colonies. Britain, with its superior navy, did a much better job of enforcing its side of the argument than France could.

Thus the United States took matters into its own hands. A medium-complexity war ensued and on this day in 1814, the British army got into Washington and burned down the White House and the Treasury. Nowadays th War of 1812 is most often recalled when people are arguing whether the USA has ever lost a war or not. It is difficult to talk about winners and losers in the War of 1812 because it concluded in an even-handed peace with no land changing ownership.

That's as far as the major powers are concerned. Amongst the less enfranchised, some slaves did relatively well, with several thousand escaping to freedom. Native Americans did very badly, losing their last chance of autonomy.

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Cordoba Initiative

Reactions and overreactions to the plan to build a mosque (or not a mosque) at Ground Zero (or not at ground zero). Indeed it is not going to be at Ground Zero (i.e. on the site of the World Trade Center): it is going to be near ground zero, and replacing a building that was damaged in the 9/11 attack, but not actually replacing the World Trade Center so not strictly speaking at Ground Zero. A technical win for the liberals there.

And indeed it is not going to be a mosque - it is planned to be "a world-class facility which will house a mosque". So it will have a mosque but not be one. Whether this "have" is one of aggregation (like a horse has 4 legs) or one of composition (like a square has 4 sides) is a moot point to leave for another day. But the point is that the building will have strong elements of mosquiness, and even if it didn't it would have strong elements of Islam, and anybody who thought it valid to be offended by a mosque on the site would I suspect still think it valid to be offended by an Islamic organisation on the site. We will probably have to score that one to the conservatives.

The other question is how prominent it will be. The picture shown here is from Wikipedia and the only one I could find (in the half hour allotted for my blog posts). The official websites for the Cordoba Initiative and Park 51 don't use it, so I shouldn't rely on it. Anyway it has no domes, minarets or giant crescents, but nor is it shrinking hand-wringingly into the background.

 Now, this is a history blog, and what interests me most is the name. Not the name of the building (Park 51) but the name of the project to build it (Cordoba House) which was also at one point the intended name for the building. I think that is true at the time of writing but it is all very confusing and it may not be true next month. According to the Cordoba Initiative, "The name Cordoba was chosen carefully to reflect a period of time during which Islam played a monumental role in the enrichment of human civilization and knowledge". Much of the promotional information about this decision stresses the peaceful coexistence of Muslim, Christian and Jewish citizens, just as the Koran requires, in 8th-11th century Cordoba (in Andalucia). Of course, as is to be expected from a 360 year period of history, there were wrinkles in the general theme of tolerance: as the 48 Martyrs of Cordoba were keen to testify at the time. However the main element of controversy is that this peaceful coexistence was under an Islamic caliphate that was established by the decidedly non-peaceful conquest of Cordoba in 711. For a centre dedicated to exploring questions of the price of peaceful coexistence it is an excellent choice of name.

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Guantanamera

Up till recently I'd thought of Guantanamera as a cheesy folky pop song. Only when hearing a poet (who served Saddam Hussein as a human shield in the first Gulf War and goes by the name of "The Singing Marxist") sing and simultaneously translate it a capella in a room above a pub in St Giles' did I start to appreciate its powerful message. That also explained why Vanessa Redgrave chose it to sing as part of her Vietnam war protest. The verses, translated:

I am an honest man from where the palm tree grows
and before I die I want to throw my poetry from my soul.

My poetry is clear green and burning red;
my poetry is a wounded stag seeking shelter on the mountain.

I want to throw my lot in with the poor people of the world.
The mountain stream pleases me more than the sea.

Those aren't the original verses. The original verses, along with the tune, were written probably by a Cuban songwriter in the late 1920s, and were about meeting a girl from Guantanamo - hence title and chorus, which have survived unmolested. The other word in the chorus, Guajira, means "peasant girl", but to add to the confusion, Guajira is also a type of Cuban folk song and that is how people unaware of the song's previous incarnation have sometimes translated it.

The verses we have now were plucked selectively from the first few pages of Versos Sencillos by Cuban revolutionary writer/philosopher José Martí, who had died in the Cuban War of Independence shortly after writing his literary will (see verses 1 and 3).


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The Poplar Tree Incident

Or the Axe Murder Incident  if you don't mind knowing in advance how it ended. Out of all the various August 18th anniversaries, today I'm noting this skirmish on the Military Demarcation Line between North and South Korea in 1976.

An unruly poplar tree was obscuring the view from a United Nations Command observation post. A US-led South Korean gardening expedition was sent out to trim a few branches. A party of North Korean guards interrupted them, saying that the tree had been planted personally by the Great Leader Kim Il Sung and should not be touched. The UNC party carried on with their pruning, and were attacked by the North Korean guards. In the ensuing fight some axes were dropped by the UNC party, and these were used to kill the two American officers who led the expedition. The rest escaped back over the Bridge of No Return.

The UN, with swift (and Swiftian) resolve, in response mounted "Operation Paul Bunyan", Paul Bunyan being a North American folk legend: a giant lumberjack. Some of the childhood myths surrounding Paul Bunyan might have resonated with the Great Leader's fans across the border: as a baby it took three storks to bring him to his parents instead of the usual one; and when he first learned to clap he did it with such force that the shockwaves broke all the windows in the house. Operation Paul Bunyan used an overwhelming force of over 800 men, with assorted automatic weapons, vehicles and air support, to chop the tree down once and for all.

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Peterloo Hunt Breakfast

There's been a rally in Manchester today to mark the "Peterloo" massacre of August 16th 1819.  An order by magistrates to disperse a crowd of demonstrators in St Peter's Field was interpreted as a cavalry charge which killed 15 and injured hundreds. The crowd had turned out to hear the revolutionary campaigner Henry Hunt, who was jailed for his part in the meeting, and whose policy of mass nonviolent agitation was not entirely unlike Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha.

Where Hunt's approach differed from Gandhi's was his use of merchandise. He took to advertising the radical cause on promotional jars of shoe polish, bearing the snappy slogan "Equal Laws, Equal Rights, Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage, and the Ballot." He also developed a tie-in soft drink: his Breakfast Powder was billed as "most salubrious and nourishing Beverage that can be substituted for the use of Tea and Coffee, which are always exciting, and frequently the most irritating to the Stomach and Bowels." Practical revolution in the style of Amelia Bloomer (see earlier post).

Breakfast Powder was made from roasted corn, and given that he was campaigning for the repeal of laws that had made corn too expensive for the poor, he wouldn't be the last politician to position his finances with a view to future legislation.


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Grand Frère

French protorevolutionary Jean-Jacques Rousseau shot from obscurity to fame and fortune (well, patronage at least) after he entered an essay competition advertised in literary magazine "Le Mercure de France". The competition was organised by the Academy of Dijon, and the question set was "Has the restoration of the sciences and arts tended to purify or corrupt morals?" On the advice of future encyclopedist Diderot, he argued devil's advocate for "corrupt", and won.

If pre-revolutionary France had got its celebrities via the modern Reality TV route, the revolution might never have happened. Alternatively, if it had still happened, its leaders would have been very well prepared for the Reign of Terror.

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I go, I go. Look how I go! Swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow!

Went for a run over Primrose Hill earlier this evening, and followed a well-worn path through a little bit of scrubland down the other side. It was such a well-worn path that I assumed it led back to the road, but it didn't. Somewhat off-puttingly, it ended in a dingy corner and a large bush.
Of course it made me think of the love scene with Titania and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In particular, this image:

Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms,
Fairies, be gone, and be all ways away.
So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist

You see, honeysuckle grows clockwise, whereas woodbine (i.e. bindweed) grows anti-clockwise. Impressive stuff (though Flanders and Swann do make a meal of it).
A Midsummer Night's Dream is dated around 1596 - and it was on this day of August 11th in 1596 that Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, died, aged 11. More fanciful readers might identify this as the start of a transitional period in Shakespeare's career, seeing him start treating more serious themes such as age and responsibility, through The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It and the second history tetralogy.

The picture is Joy Coghill as Puck in Midsummer Night‘s Dream (1961). Photo by Franz Linder.

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Bad results for Republicans

On this 9th August, two anniversaries of regime change. Firstly the resignation in 1974 of US President Richard Nixon, following the Watergate scandal. His vice president Gerald Ford replaced him, thus becoming the only US president never to have been elected president or vice-president. He had been appointed vice-president the previous year, when Nixon's first vice-president, Spiro Agnew, resigned amidst criminal charges of corruption.

Although the US republicans recovered from that low point, the Roman republican cause never recovered after the its defeat at the battle of Pharsalus on August 9th, 48 BC. Republican forces under Pompey were beaten back when they tried to attack the legions that Julius Caesar controlled as governer of Gaul; and ultimately, Caesar was able effectively to convert Rome into an empire (though he got assassinated before he had a chance to become its first emperor).


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Hiroshima day

Hiroshima day.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Animal missiles

At a delightful Camden Fringe show last night, Helen Keen's It Is Rocket Science, I learned all about Project X-Ray. Work on Project X-Ray began the month after the attack on Pearl Harbour, and was to involve dropping a large number of chilled and hibernating bats, each carrying a miniature incendiary device, over Japanese towns. The bats would thaw out and wake up - hopefully before they hit the ground - and spend the timers' alloted half-hour infiltrating the local bat community amongst the rafters of the town before bursting into flames. The plan was ultimately dropped in favour of the atomic bomb.

Another aborted animal explosive project was the pigeon-guided torpedo. The explosive and propulsive aspects of the torpedo (aka "The egg that moves itself and burns") had long been addressed by Middle Eastern scholars in the 13th century, but guidance was another matter. A 1950s US plan to solve this involved a pigeon, which had been trained to peck at the centre of a piece of paper in the shape of an enemy battleship. When placed in the nose of a torpedo, with a clear view of a real enemy ship through a sheet of electrically conductive glass (rather like an iPhone screen), the pigeon's pecks could be used to control the torpedo's rudder. Like the bat bomb, the pigeon guided torpedo was shelved when superior technology came along - electronics in this case.


Of course the history of animals in warfare is roughly as old as warfare itself. It has included Cyrus's camels, which caused enemy horses to panic when they got a scent of them at the Battle of Thymbra in 547 BC, as recorded by Xenophon; Hannibal's elephants; and the donkey-cart rocket launchers used recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.


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A holiday from history

After all this history, a word on some people who just don't bother with it. The culture of the Pirahã tribe in the Amazon rainforest is so unconcerned with the past or future that for a long time their language was believed not to have tenses. There is some debate on which of these phenomena - that they don't have any history, or that they don't talk about it - is the cause and which is the effect. Cause and effect is also something they have difficulty expressing, because their language doesn't really have subordinate clauses.
Another thing they don't have is words for left and right: your left hand is your upriver hand or your downriver hand, depending on which way you are facing.

The best non-academic read about the Pirahã, (short of an actual book, obviously) is probably this New Yorker essay.


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Pivot Charts: Pearl Harbour, 7th December 1941

An occasional series on how major world events have not affected the US Billboard Chart.

Week ending	#1 Artist	#1 Song
06/12/41	Glenn Miller	Chattanooga Choo Choo
13/12/41	Glenn Miller	Chattanooga Choo Choo

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The Third Wave

A low-profile German film called "The Wave" was on television the other day. It's based on the "Third Wave" experiment, carried out as part of a politics class at a high school in Palo Alto, California, in 1967. The teacher Ron Jones started with a class of students (picture them sitting cross-legged on tattered grass in their sheepskin coats and calico dresses) incredulous of how so many people supported the Fascist and Nazi movements of 1930s Europe, and decided to play a trick on them that would give them a taste of Fascism.

He started by introducing a bits of stage business to his lessons - desks in straight rows; Wagner on the record player, a special salute.  He also introduced a few mottos: Strength Through Discipline; then Strength Through Community; finally Strength Through Action. Most (not all) of the students really got into it. Other students from other classes also got interested, and Jones had to think of a way of "initiating" them into the movement. A few students tittle-tattled on their less dedicated colleagues. After 4 days Jones stopped the experiment out of fear that the movement had got too strong, no doubt wagging his finger and saying "now do you understand?" as the scales fell from his students eyes.


Of course, he had not introduced them to anything like Fascism. He had avoided any political position. He had just given them a glimpse of a bit of discipline and community spirit, both of which were anathema to the prevailing ideology of individual expression that held sway in the field of education in late-60s California, and liable to be mistaken for Fascism amongst the less rigorous left wing thinkers. It could just as well have been an introduction to Communism, the Navy, or supporting West Ham. (As Slavoj Zizek has said on the matter: "Strength through discipline; strength through community; strength through action: where's the problem?)

I shouldn't be too harsh on Ron Jones. He was a high school teacher, not a psychologist, and he did make a point, although it wasn't exactly the one he wanted to make. I don't know how much he would have known about the more famous and more disturbing Milgram experiment (aka the Yale Experiment) which began in 1961 and fills in the gap between Jones' ersatz community movement and an acquiescence in atrocities.

Milgram's experiment was set up to explore a related question: whether people who participated in the Holocaust had necessarily shared its aims. Milgram's volunteers were asked to help a scientist (in fact an actor) by delivering what they thought were increasingly painful, and ultimately fatal electric shocks, to a test subject (another actor). They all protested strongly; but all except one went ahead with the maximum voltage. The experiment ultimately showed that people will do anything if a man in a white coat with a clipboard tells them it's for the best.


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Air travel

Today I salute the town of Croydon, Surrey, for its pioneering role in transport. For it was on this day in 1803 that the Surrey Iron Railway opened, linking it up with Mitcham and Wandsworth. It has been called the first public railway. It was public in the sense that it was open to anybody, as long as they had a train to put on it; and, this being a few years before the age of steam, a horse to pull it. Bits of it survive today as part of Croydon's latest groundbreaking transport initiative, the much loved Croydon Tramlink which brought trams to the London area for the first time in 50 years.

A more ambitious though ultimately unsuccessful rail project connected Croydon with London Bridge in the 1840s. This "atmospheric railway" used pneumatic propulsion. A piston would be propelled along a cast iron vacuum pipe (pictured) running between the rails. The pipe had a leather valve so that a connecting rod could fix the piston to the train.  It would have had the advantage of keeping the engines, and all their smoke, well away from the train in separate "pumping stations". It only lasted a few months, due partly to problems with the leather valves, especially at points.

The town's next transport innovation was to host the first airport in the world to have air traffic control, introduced in 1921 when Croydon was London's main airport, and it was the height of fashion for silent film stars and glamourous flappers to be photographed cavorting down Purley Way.


History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Crisis? What crisis?

In 1839, when the man in the street was busy joining the Chartist movement and founding the Anti-Corn Law League, the young Queen Victoria was busy involving herself in a typically Victorian bedroom scandal. Prime Minister Lord Melbourne of the Whig party (the party of the landowning ascendancy) wanted to resign, and recommended that Victoria should appoint Robert Peel of the up & coming, urban, reforming Tory party to succeed him. Victoria made Peel the offer, but he would only accept if Victoria made some changes to the personnel of her bedchamber. Many of her ladies-in-waiting were the wives of Whig politicians, and Peel thought that with their influence on the Queen behind closed doors, a Tory prime minister wouldn't last very long. He didn't have a majority in the Commons: besides which, he must have had a sense of inverted deja-vu.

For Peel had been Prime Minister once already. In 1834, Lord Melbourne had succeeded Earl Grey as PM, with a large Commons majority for the Whigs. Those were troubled times, and even though Melbourne wasn't a natural reformer, he felt pressured into adopting a reform agenda to avoid a revolution. King William IV however thought he was going too far, and replaced Melbourne with Peel. Peel failed to gain a majority in the 1835 election, so within a year Melbourne was back in again. In fact that turned out to be the last time an English sovereign would sack a Prime Minister: but of course only 5 years later, Peel wasn't to know that. If he was going to take the job on again, things would have to be different.

Unfortunately for him, the 19-year-old Victoria was barely 2 years into her reign and also needed to make a show of strength. She refused to make any changes to her boudoir line-up. Peel turned the job down and Melbourne agreed to stay on. Fortunately for Peel, he didn't have to wait very long to get the job on acceptable terms. By the time he won a comfortable majority in the 1841 election, Victoria had married her Prince Albert, and with a strong man on hand could be trusted not to have her head turned by her attendants' Whig wiles.




History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

The Monkey Trial

Today's the anniversary of the Scopes Trial verdict. In 1925 it became illegal in the state of Tennessee to teach evolution, and within the year John Scopes, a sports coach subbing for a biology teacher at the time, was successfully prosecuted. Although also  known as the Monkey Trial, no monkeys were directly involved in the trial: they were outside on the courtroom lawn performing for the amassed global media circus. The trial was reinvented for the McCarthyite era in the play Inherit the Wind.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Bloomers

1848 - a revolutionary year. So revolutionary that the Wikipedia article "Revolutions of 1848" starts with a small list of the major European countries that did not have a national revolution, before discussing the majority that did. In February of that year, Karl Marx had set the tone with his Manifesto of the Communist Party.

On July 19th 1848, the village of Seneca Falls NY began a two day convention on women's rights that would get its name on the revolutionary map. As well as making a particularly rousing declaration, it made a significant stride into practical revolution when local resident Amelia Bloomer introduced her eponymous underwear. Although premiered in 1848, they did not get a significant public outing until the summer of 1851 (Crystal Palace wasn't the only Great Exhibition of that year).

For the first time, women could do a bit of basic athletics without showing any more leg than Victorian morality prescribed. Combined with bicycles a few decades later, they gave women an unprecedented freedom of mobility (the bicycle has its own starring role in the revolutionary movement, which I might look into one day). Patriarchy did not take kindly to bloomers: they were vilified in the press, and the New York Times describes with relish the arrest of two "disorderly bloomers" (the word denoting the wearer - compare "hoodies") for the shocking act "of unblushingly stopping gentlemen, with their wives".



History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet