An exhibition of recent works by the illustrator Quentin Blake, commissioned by four hospitals in the UK and France, and called 'As Large As Life, is on show at the Foundling Museum in Holborn.

We've written before about wonderful Quentin Blake and the Foundling Hospital, which was Britain's first home for abandoned children and London's first public art gallery.

Posted by Cat at 09:07 PM

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Some of the Aboriginal people were not happy when their tents, which have been pitched on the lawns of Parliament House for forty years, were criticized. Nor were some of them pleased to be celebrating the arrival of the first fleet of British colonists in Sydney on January 26, 1788. The Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was dragged to safety after a rambunctious demonstration. More here.

She may want to talk with her security personnel about the need to defend dignity as well as life.

We recall that the scenes of some Aboriginal people dragging their women into caves and raping them shocked early British settlers, according to Australian author Robert Hughes, in his book, The Fatal Shore.

Australia has a vast and gorgeous shore and an immense interior and brave and energetic people who have rescued the victims of tyrants for more than one hundred years. In the 20th and 21st centuries Australians worked hard to affirm the fundamental rights of Aboriginal peoples.

Happy Australia Day and cheers to all the people of Australia.

Posted by David and Cat at 05:33 PM

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One of many statues of Rabbie Burns around the world, this one suggests the intensity of Burns’s gaze. He looks young - he was only 37 when he died. The statue, in Stanley Park, Vancouver, BC, was unveiled by Ramsay MacDonald, Prime Minister of Britain, in 1928. The plaque reads –

Robert Burns’s sincere desire for friendship and brotherhood among all people is clearly shown in his many poems and songs. His poetry and letters, both serious and humorous, are worthy of study by those who value liberty and freedom.

Indeed his poems and songs are widely loved and quoted, often around Burns suppers which are held tonight if possible, on the anniversary of his birth, on every continent. (The British Antarctic Survey is always up to it.)

The haggis arrives, and by good fortune is met by the whisky, which renders it harmless. Speeches in Burns’s honour are made, and his songs are sung. The lasses, of whom Burns was so exceedingly fond, are toasted, and respond (with wit and delicacy) by roasting the laddies.

All of us, no matter whether we are Scots, are happy to lift the cup of kindness and share our regard for him with strangers.

We like to be reminded of Burns's poem against doctrinal purity and his sympathy for imperfection -

Address to the Unco Guid

My Son, these maxims make a rule,
An' lump them aye thegither;
The Rigid Righteous is a fool,
The Rigid Wise anither:
The cleanest corn that ere was dight
May hae some pyles o' caff in;
So ne'er a fellow-creature slight
For random fits o' daffin.

. . .Ye see your state wi' theirs compared,
And shudder at the niffer;
But cast a moment's fair regard,
What maks the mighty differ;
Discount what scant occasion gave,
That purity ye pride in;
And (what's aft mair than a' the lave),
Your better art o' hidin.

. . .Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang,
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark, -
The moving Why they do it;
And just as lamely can ye mark,
How far perhaps they rue it.

Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.

Happy night!

Posted by David and Cat at 11:43 AM

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I admire the mental and physical toughness this kind of adventure draws from a person. One thousand miles skiing cross-country while pulling a sledge weighing 187lbs in intense cold with no human beings in sight for three weeks.

Felicity returns just in time for a drink on Burns's Night, which is celebrated with gusto at the South Pole.

Posted by David at 11:00 PM

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Image: Colesbourne Park

Would you care to be a galanthophile? Once you have seen snowdrops (really seen them in all their lovely, various and shy varieties) and they have gently nodded their heads in your own garden in January, sheltering under the bare trees, you can't help but become one.

Colesbourne Park, which has 250 varieties and is set in the Churn valley in the heart of the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, is a good place to view them. In the 1890s, Henry John Elwes began Colesbourne's collection, after finding one of the principal snowdrop species, Galanthus elwesii.

His descendants keep the park alive with snowdrops, which have also paid for repairing the church bells.

Stephen Lacey reports that the snowdrops at Colesbourne 'include elegant double-flowered forms (Lady Beatrix Stanley and Hippolyta are favourites of mine), varieties with yellow markings (Grimshaw, the gardener, thinks Primrose Warburg and the double-flowered Lady Elphinstone are the best), and ones like Green Tear with lime-green shading on the flowers, which are usually the most expensive to buy, often pushing into three figures'.

Never mind three figures. I'm going to go down to the island to see the lovely snowdrops just now appearing.

Posted by Cat at 11:40 AM

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David and Ben Crystal give us an idea how Shakespeare's Original Pronounciation (OP) sounds at the Globe in London.

If they're right, OP sounds very Irish, and is full of puns and rhymes not usually heard.

Thanks to Maggie's Farm for the link.

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Today, a cold, windy day, a walk across the Downs and round the lanes saw an older woman armed with a litter stick and a Jack Russell; a tall doctor with his yellow Lab heading briskly toward the butterfly preserve; four community tennis courts filled with players aged ten to sixty; and a raucous and energetic village game of football (soccer) being waged between Compton and Kings Worthy. 'We're the Old Boys,' declared the Kings Worthy men standing in blue on the sidelines. They laughed. 'At our age you have to wonder what we're doing here'.

Having fun.

Hope you've had a good time outdoors.

Posted by David and Cat at 11:59 PM

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Ian Bryce 'found himself at Dunkirk in 1940, when an ad hoc flotilla of English fishing boats, pleasure cruisers, and other “little ships” evacuated Allied troops cut off by the advancing Germans. Young Bryce, a 17-year-old midshipman, singlehandedly rescued 109 British soldiers, eight Belgian officers, two Frenchmen, and two Jewish refugees in multiple trips in a motorboat under Luftwaffe fire.'

Actually, he rescued quite a few more men than that:

'In 1940 Bryce was a 17-year old Midshipman RNR in the minesweeper Fitzroy when, on the evening of May 28, she anchored off La Panne, nine miles east of Dunkirk. His captain ordered him inshore with the ship’s motorboat, saying: “Mid, I want you to bring off the British Army. Got it?” After several trips to the beach, Bryce’s Fitzroy rescued 109 British soldiers, eight Belgian officers, two French fighters and two Jewish refugees . . .

'On May 30 Fitzroy anchored closer to Dunkirk where Bryce found “khaki everywhere ” and “the air alive with German aircraft”. Such was the press that he once found it necessary to fire his pistol in the air to maintain discipline, but embarkation smartened up considerably after he enlisted the help of a sergeant major in the Scots Guards; that night Fitzroy landed 678 British troops in England.

'A few days later, after two further evacuation trips, Bryce celebrated his 18th birthday, becoming one of the youngest recipients of the DSC."

He spent the rest of the war serving courageously, and later wrote a rather racy biography.

He has died at the age of 89.

Ave atque Vale.

Posted by David and Cat at 11:54 PM

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Exmoor has become 'a dark sky reserve'.

On a cold night, the stars are brilliant. "The light from Deneb, the star that marks the Swan's tail, was emitted when Iron Age farmers lived on Exmoor. . ."

By day Exmoor ponies, their lineage going back to Celtic times, wander the moor, and red stags. . .

Posted by Cat at 05:00 PM

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The Daily Mail frequently features women in a state of undress. The women they recently called inspirational are unlikely to disport themselves in this way. Their generous work for others is a revelation.

Posted by Cat at 04:57 PM

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Paleontologist and Royal Fellow Christopher Stringer, an originator of the Out of Africa theory of human evolution, says he is rethinking the theory based on new DNA research:

'Some of the most fascinating ongoing research topics in the next year or two will be homing in on the DNA that some of us have acquired from Neanderthals, that some people have acquired from the Denisovans, and that some African people have acquired, perhaps even from Homo heidelbergensis.'

Learning that people living today may carry archaic DNA has made our origins more complex and mysterious than thought.

Stringer also notes:

. . .Advances like CT technology give you access to far more, and far richer, data. I was limited to the craniometric points on skulls where I could put my measuring instruments. But with CT, you can capture the whole shape of a specimen, of course. You can look at the internal cranial morphology, the sinuses, the inner ear bones of Neanderthals, which we now know are differently shaped from our own. We only learned that through CT technology, so all of that has made a huge difference to what we can get out of our fossils. . .

British scientist Godfrey Hounsfield invented the CT scan. South African Allan Cormack, who did theoretical work on a similar device, shared the Nobel Prize with him in 1979.

Humans seem capable of inventing extraordinary things, but what remains unknown is staggering. Stringer observes that the question 'what makes a modern human a modern human?' remains unanswered.

What a question! It fairly pulses with unintended irony.

Thanks to Instapundit for the link.

Posted by Cat at 03:42 PM

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The great right enshrined in Magna Carta defends you from an oppressive government and unjust accusers. You might want to vote no.

Posted by David at 11:22 PM

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British historian Simon Schama says that 'Downton serves up a steaming, silvered tureen of snobbery' and the reason that Americans have fallen in love with the Abbey's British aristocrats is that they're desperate to take their minds off current events.

We certainly have plenty to take our minds off of. (But we are not taking our minds off internet censorship, the latest appalling idea advanced by the U.S. Congress.)

Given that the show is being screened on PBS, many Americans won't be watching. Many middle class liberal Americans will be (they are the biggest supporters of the very liberal PBS).

Still, one conservative American, Mona Charen, has been watching Downton Abbey, and she responded today to Schama with a different point of view:

'As Schama acknowledges, the series is “fabulously frocked and acted.” The sets are gorgeous, the actors stunning, the costumes dazzling, and the story captivating. It isn’t great literature. It’s melodrama, with clear villains and heroes, with boy meets girl, girl loses inheritance, girl loses boy, misunderstandings, sex scandals, blackmail, sibling rivalry, lost opportunities, jealousies, lies, flower shows, and war. . .

'. . .In Downton Abbey as in Upstairs, Downstairs some of the noblest characters are to be found below stairs. Bates, the earl’s valet, is partially lame from a wound sustained in the Boer War. He bears his disability — along with the cruelty of two of the other servants — with fortitude. His quiet integrity and long suffering seem to be rewarded by the love of a lady’s maid, Anna. . .

'We Americans have not fallen into a swoon for dead British aristocrats. . .We’re simply enjoying a good yarn, beautifully executed.'

And if liberals secretly want to be British aristocrats, what can you do?

By the way, Mona Charen's entire family loved Simon Schama's History of Britain.

Posted by Cat at 08:19 PM

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Nick Lowry:

The survivor statistics tell the tale. More women from third class — deep in the bowels of the Titanic, where it was hard to escape and instructions were vague or nonexistent — survived than men from first class. Almost all of the women from first class (97 percent) and second class (84 percent) made it. As Butler notes, the men from first class who were lost stayed behind voluntarily, true to their Edwardian ideals.

. . .The Titanic went down, they say, to the strains of the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” as the band courageously played on. It lent a final grace note to the tragedy. . .

These facts tell a different story than the Hollywood film, but then facts usually do.

On the Costa Concordia, now in the news, the captain abandoned his ship.

An Australian mother and her young daughter have described being pushed aside by hysterical men as they tried to board lifeboats. . .Yet another, a grandmother, complained, “I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls.”

. . .The grounded cruise ship has its heroes, of course, just as the Titanic had its cowards. But the discipline of the Titanic’s crew and the self-enforced chivalric ethic that prevailed among its men largely trumped the natural urge toward panicked self-preservation.

In a disaster, give us the calm, the capable, the chivalrous.

Posted by David and Cat at 06:08 AM

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Quoted in Mark Levin's new book, Ameritopia, the Unmaking of America, via Instapundit.

The man of system . . . is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. Adam Smith

The man of system . . . is apt to be very wise in his own conceit. . . We all know men like this on both sides of the Atlantic, and quite a few women. We are paying them to pay chess with our lives.

Posted by Cat at 07:08 PM

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Magical nights.

Posted by Cat at 12:22 PM

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From the WSJ:

Margaret Powell's sharply observed memoir, "Below Stairs," first printed in Britain 50 years ago and only now being published in America, has been hailed by Julian Fellowes, the creator of "Downton Abbey," as one of his inspirations for the television drama. The book stands out in the tradition of literature about servants for being a true account of a life spent in domestic service, although the incidents it relates are as vividly entertaining and disturbing as anything found in fiction.

. . ."What the help saw" has long been a popular theme in English letters. Perhaps the earliest example of the genre is Chaucer's engagingly profane take on employer-employee relations in the Cook's Tale from "The Canterbury Tales." There are classics from more recent times, too, of course: "Esther Waters" by the Victorian novelist George Moore (in which the heroine is the lowest of the low, a kitchen maid who is seduced and discarded but triumphs against the odds); P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories, which provide an irreverent angle on the symbiotic relationship between body servant and aristocratic booby; and, most recently, Kazuo Ishiguro's poignantly ironic portrait of the demise of a great house in "The Remains of the Day."

One of the vivid points which Margaret Powell makes is that the work was extremely hard and the hours very long.

This has been the case all over the world for most of time. Today few Brits and Americans are engaged in agriculture, which used to demand almost everyone's attention most of the time.

We think it's fair to say that the free economy and British inventions of the last three hundred years have liberated millions of people from some of the poorest-paid and hardest work.

Oh it couldn't have been done without good work! The work of associations determined to win a fair wage and decent working conditions, the help of the government protecting patents and copyrights, the contributions of ordinary people defending their clean air and water and common land, the generosity of many people supporting grammar schools and students (Margaret Powell had won a scholarship to a grammar school), the kindness of many people helping each other. There is a lot of giving that goes into the lives most of us in the West lead today. . .

Posted by David and Cat at 08:02 AM

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She delivers a breathless, lovely thank you to all the people who help make a film - it really is a team effort.

Posted by Cat at 01:14 PM

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Writer Julian Fellowes accepts.

Posted by Cat at 01:12 PM

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And we've survived. Here are the cars.

Posted by Cat at 01:00 PM

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Scotland has raised the idea of a divorce from Britain for some time now. According to a recent Telegraph poll, a majority of the English now seem to want the Scots to go. But not a majority of the Scots.

Perhaps anyone told their partner wants a divorce is understandably resentful, and says, with intense pain, well, then, go.

Perhaps the English weary of incompetent, self-serving Scottish leaders in Westminster.

Perhaps some English resent higher spending in Scotland, which sees sterling from England supporting Scottish needs.

Perhaps the partner who opts for divorce wants a more attentive spouse and dreams of a less-circumscribed future. The Scots have rejected both the Labour and Tory parties in Scotland. For dreamers, the future always seems rosy since it is not yet the present, not yet reality.

Perhaps, as Peter Hitchens writes, Scottish leader Alex Salmond is an unwitting tool of the EU, which has always intended to break up Britain, has even produced maps showing England in pieces. The real future will be Scotland's vaunted freedom "fed into the Euro-blender".

We want the Scots to stay.

Posted by Cat at 09:19 AM

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We were reminded of this story, while preparing an ebook for upload. We thought you might be interested in it.

In 1829 and on just one ship, HMS Eden, 204 men of the Royal Navy died from yellow fever while helping to stop the slave trade.

Yellow fever is not contagious, but it must have seemed to the men that it was, and they became terrified of sick shipmates. Robert McKinnal, the surgeon on a sister ship, HMS Sybille, took drastic action to convince them otherwise. One of the symptoms is black vomit. McKinnal, on deck and in sight of the crew, had a full glass of black vomit placed before him.

Before we continue, may we mention that Parliament had ended the slave trade by statute in 1807, but there remained a crucial challenge - enforcing the law and actually ending the trade. One man was crucial to that effort.

Charles Middleton had begun his career as a captain’s servant boy. He went on to become an outstanding commander, a committed abolitionist, and First Lord of the Admiralty. In the 1780s, faced with unhappy crews, deteriorating ships, and corruption, he reformed naval regulations to ensure justice for the men; punished corruption; increased sailors’ pay; improved ship maintenance and performance; established effective supply lines; and introduced new weapons and strategies to defend against attack. But that was not all.

Middleton was 79 when he helped formulate the strategy that won the Battle of Trafalgar and ended the threat of French and Spanish invasion in 1805. His work paid off.

The reformed Royal Navy closed down slave traders operating under the British flag in three years.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, other countries moved in to take up the vile trade. The public demanded action, and the British government began a worldwide campaign. With a thousand year history, Britain was untroubled by the idea that the trade would take longer than five or six years to bring to a successful conclusion.

Younger nations might throw up their hands after a few years, and withdraw support from their brave soldiers and sailors, but not Britain, not in the 19th century. There was a problem, though.

The Royal Navy had no legal right in peacetime to intercept the ships of any other nation. However, brilliant Admiralty lawyers saw an opening: Piracy put a ship outside the protection of the law. Britain began a full court press to persuade other nations to equate slave trading with piracy. This would allow the ships of any nation to stop and search suspected slave traders.

Overcoming considerable resistance, British diplomats negotiated individual treaties with European powers and local African rulers. But that was not all. In a war, the captain and sailors who captured a privateer would divide the profits. In the case of the sailors and commanders of the Royal Navy's Africa's Preventive Squadron, the British government provided the prize money, rewarding crews for every slave freed and giving a larger tonnage bounty for captured slave ships. But that was not all.

Britain also paid heavy ‘subsidies’ to other European countries to induce them to give up or curtail their trade in slaves; paid numerous chiefs on the African coast, and paid for the costs of maintaining the squadron. This was a heavy financial burden that was borne year after year by the British people. The heaviest cost, however, was borne by sailors.

The most intense activity focused on a thousand miles of West African coast. There the slavers were heavily armed, and fast, but the speed and accuracy of British fire, and the fighting ability and determination of British crews made inroads. Traders waiting for a slave ship to make it through the tightening British gauntlet kept hundreds of slaves shackled in thatched-roof barracoons. The Brits responded by taking the action inland, going up river in pursuit of slavers, burning down barracoons and freeing slaves. This was dangerous work because inland Africa was rife with malaria and yellow fever. And hence the Royal Navy's surgeon, McKinnall, on board ship with the crew and preparing to drink a glass of black vomit from a yellow fever patient.

The slaves were usually in desperate straits when they were rescued. Exhausted, starving, suffering from fever, dysentery, diarrhoea and malaria, they had to be fed and nursed. The whole enormous task lost support in Parliament by the 1840s, but significantly, the officers of the African Squadron who endured the dangerous work and saw the sufferings of the slaves first-hand argued strongly against withdrawal.

By the end of the 1840s success was becoming evident. Navy efforts and the support of the people of Brazil closed Brazilian slave markets. In 1862, a treaty between America and Britain gave the British squadron freedom of action for both countries.

The Royal Navy's African squadron patrolled the ocean off West Africa for 59 years, liberating 150,000 enslaved Africans. By 1866 the Royal Navy had hunted the last transatlantic slave ships from the sea.

And so, Robert McKinnal drank off the glassful.

Posted by David and Cat at 02:04 PM

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As requested we have added the text of the U.S. Supreme Court decision to the post below.

Posted by Cat at 10:04 AM

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"The bloody cheek of him" - trying to rob the security guard in front of the brave ladies.

Posted by David at 07:45 PM

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In old age the General looks like a friendly walrus. When he was 33, he fought at Arnhem, was wounded, captured by the Germans, liberated by the Dutch Resistance, and secretly nursed and protected by a Dutch family who were completely surrounded by Germans. Rupert Willoughby's moving post is a salute to the Dutch family, and to the young British brigadier who came to understand their extraordinary courage. 'I had often seen bravery in battle. I now also knew the unconquerable strength of the gentle.’

Posted by Cat at 05:24 PM

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