Woody Guthrie at 100: the return of a pariah

Woody Guthrie was shunned by his home state.

 Now Oklahoma can finally embrace the singer-songwriter's work
• 
o Billy Bragg in Tulsa, Oklahoma
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 July 2012 21.30 BST
 
Woody Guthrie in New York City.

'In the pantheon of American poets he belongs midway between Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan.'

The construction team that kept hammering away all night outside my hotel window in downtown Tulsa are gone by the morning, the fierce glare of the Oklahoma summer forcing them into the shade to rest.

A few blocks away there are streets full of empty buildings, signs that the oil boom of the past decade is long past. Tulsa sure could do with some regeneration.

Woody Guthrie was born not far from here 100 years ago, and as people all over the world celebrate his life and work this weekend, Oklahoma has still to come to terms with the legacy of its wayward son.

 In this conservative midwest state, Woody's work is still viewed through the prism of the McCarthy era, when the state department accused folk singers of "un-American activities".

However, it's not what Woody did in the 1940s that still riles people in these parts.

It's what his followers did in the 60s that made Woody a pariah in his home state.

For Woody was the original singer-songwriter, the first to use his voice not just to entertain, but to ask why people should remain dirt poor in a country as rich as the US.

It was Woody's words that prompted the young Robert Zimmerman to leave his home in the Iron Range of Minnesota and head for New York.

Changing his name to Bob Dylan and singing as if he came from the red dirt of Oklahoma, he inspired a generation of articulate young Americans to unleash a torrent of criticism against the complacency of their unequal society.

The fact that Woody was a hero to that generation of long-haired freaks ensured that he and his songs would remain largely unsung in Oklahoma.

Yet perceptions change.

In the 1990s Woody's daughter, Nora Guthrie, began a labour of love, gathering up all her father's papers and creating the Woody Guthrie Archive in New York City.

The man who emerged from the countless boxes of songs, prose and drawings was a much more complex figure than the Dust Bowl balladeer of legend.

Woody was afflicted by Huntington's disease, an incurable degenerative disorder of the nervous system that gradually incapacitates, leading inexorably to death.

The years after the second world war are generally held to have marked Woody's decline into ill health, but the archive suggests otherwise.

Perhaps aware that he was succumbing to the same illness that had killed his mother, Woody upped his already prodigious output, writing three or four songs a day in the house on Mermaid Avenue, in Brooklyn, where he lived with his wife, Marjorie, and three kids.

He wrote songs about riding in a flying saucer, about making love to film star Ingrid Bergman, about getting drunk and chasing women with his sailor buddies.

Clearly the material in the archive – now estimated to stretch to more than 3,000 complete songs – would force us to reassess our idea of who Woody Guthrie was.

Fitting then, as we gather here to celebrate his centenary, that news should come that the Woody Guthrie Archive is relocating to a purpose-built facility in downtown Tulsa.

Bringing Woody home is a gamble, but Nora Guthrie knows that Oklahoma needs to rediscover her father's work, now more than ever.

 Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger sang Woody's most famous song, This Land is Your Land, at Obama's inauguration – but Oklahoma is the only state in the union that failed to return a single district in favour of America's first African-American president.

In the pantheon of American poets, Woody belongs midway between Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan, but it is his roots in Oklahoma that give his work an authentic voice, ringing out from the dusty midwestern plains: a welcome antidote to the easy jibe that, if you're poor and white in this part of the world, you're bound to be a redneck.

Nelson Mandela's daughters emerge from his shadow to forge careers

The family of South Africa's former president has spread its wings to take advantage of the freedoms he won for them
•

• David Smith in Johannesburg
• guardian.co.uk, Saturday 7 July 2012 23.37 BST 
 
Nelson Mandela with his daughter Zenani Mandela-Dlamini, left, and granddaughter Ndileka.

"Do you understand that you were nearly born in jail?" Nelson Mandela once wrote to his daughter, Zenani. "Not many people have had your experience of having been in jail before you were born."

Zenani's mother, Winnie, had been detained by apartheid police for taking part in a women's protest shortly before giving birth to her in Soweto in 1959.

 Her father was imprisoned when she was five.

There would be no innocence of what it meant to bear South Africa's most famous surname.
Zenani (the name means "what have you brought to the world?" in the Xhosa language) Mandela-Dlamini emerged from her father's shadow last week to join the country's diplomatic corps.

The 53-year-old, who studied science at Boston University and became a Swazi princess through marriage, was named as ambassador to Argentina after a successful career in business.

The appointment was widely described as the first foray into public life by one of Mandela's children, although this may be harsh on Zenani's sister, Zindzi, who was active in the African National Congress underground during the anti-apartheid struggle and famously relayed a defiant message from her father to a crowd in Soweto in 1985.

Mandela's grandson and oldest male heir, Mandla, has followed him into parliament.

But he is very much the exception.

The Mandelas cannot be characterised as a political dynasty.

This in a nation where the name Mandela confers a priceless cachet and is attached, for example, to a bridge, square, theatre, annual lecture, scholarship, wine label and more than one museum and street.

The ANC has been criticised for dragging the frail former president, who turns 94 later this month, to its election rallies.
A charismatic successor with his DNA might have been unstoppable.

 Such manoeuvres are not unknown in Africa but Mandela, who stepped down after one term, is different.

"I don't find it surprising at all," said Verne Harris, head of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory.

 "My father was a jazz musician and I very deliberately didn't pick up an instrument because I didn't want to be subject to scrutiny and found wanting.

This is probably a common response from the children of successful parents."

South Africa's first family could never be described as ordinary.

Mandela's devotion to politics came at a high price.

His children have recalled that, even when not in prison, he was emotionally cold and distant, seeing his role as disciplinarian and provider.

He has married three times and fathered six children.

Three have died: one as an infant in 1948, another in a car crash in 1969 and a third from an Aids-related illness in 2005.

His surviving children are all women: Maki, by his first wife, Evelyn Mase, and Zenani and Zindzi, by his second wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

He divorced Winnie in 1996 and is now married to Graca Machel.

 According to the Centre of Memory, Mandela currently has 17 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.
Maki, 58, is a businesswoman and founder of the House of Mandela wine label, taking on a white-dominated industry.

Asked if she had ever considered a career in politics, she told the Observer: "I'm not a politician.

I think one or two people in politics is enough in this family.

We need to spread.

 I really want to cut my teeth in business and see how it goes because I think that we can.

It's one thing to win politically.

We still have a battle in terms of the economic centre.

 Black people are nowhere in terms of the economy.

We will know this country is truly transformed when a significant population of black people really actively participate in the economy. Right now we're not there yet."

Her daughter Tukwini, 37, who also works for House of Mandela, added: "I think that my grandfather and Walter Sisulu and the other struggle fighters fought so that we could have self-determination to be whatever we wanted to be.

The opportunity for us to do those things is now.

Not all roads lead to politics; they lead to other things as well."

Tukwini's brother, Kweku, is a filmmaker, though the patriarch's gravitational pull is strong: projects include a TV mini-series about Mandela's life and a documentary showing him with his grandchildren. Three Mandela granddaughters have announced plans to star in a reality TV show.

Some family members appear to revel in celebrity while others shrink from it.

The diversity of the family is clear.

But according to some observers, the house of Mandela is divided against itself.

They point to animosity between factions, in particular the descendants of first wife Evelyn, who died in 2004, and second wife Winnie, now 75.

Perhaps the most polarising figure is Mandla, a village chief who bears a striking resemblance to his grandfather.

 Negative headlines swirl around him.

He ordered the exhumation and reburial of Mandela's late children and, controversially, built a replica hut on the remains of the statesman's birthplace.

But one family member said: "One day he is going to be the head of the family.

That's the custom and we have to respect it."
Maki Mandela burst into laughter at the suggestion of internecine warfare.

 "Show me one family that doesn't have," she said.

 "Churchill's family was. Every family has its intricacies.

Ours is no different; it's got its own intricacies, but it doesn't mean that we don't get along…

"Yes, there are times when you don't see eye to eye on things – you don't see eye to eye with your brothers, with your sisters.

That's why there's something called sibling rivalry.

We Mandelas did not create it.

It's something that's out there.

"But I think one of the things that unite us is our dad.

We can come from different mothers but the uniting person is tata [father]."

Camila Batmanghelidjh

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Camila Batmanghelidjh receiving her honorary doctorate from the Open University in April 2008

Born 1963
Tehran, Iran

Known for Businesswoman, author and philanthropist

Camila Batmanghelidjh ("Batmanjelidge", born 1963, Tehran, Iran) is a British businesswoman, charity leader and author of Iranian and Belgian origin.

She has been living in England since the age of 11[1] and founded two charities - the place2b[2] and Kids Company where she and her team care for 14,000 vulnerable children and young people in London.

The charity operates from three street level centres in Southwark, Lambeth and Camden, as well as working in 37 inner-city schools. She lives in West Hampstead.[3]

[edit] BackgroundBatmanghelidjh was born in Tehran into a wealthy professional family.

Her mother was a Roman Catholic from Belgium, while her Muslim, Persian father was the highly controversial doctor Fereydoon Batmanghelidj.[4][5]

Her family were supporters of the Shah and so hugely impacted by the 1979 revolution.

She moved to England when she was 11 years old.

She attended the fee paying Sherborne Girls school in Dorset, where she claims "everybody thought I was completely odd.

Y'know they just thought I was a total oddball".[6]

Severely dyslexic[7], she has to dictate everything and cannot use a computer or text. [8]

But after leaving Sherbourne she went on to gain a first in Theatre and Dramatic Arts from the University of Warwick.[9]

Later she went to work as a nanny in prosperous households in west London, where she discovered a knack for dealing with emotionally damaged children.[10]

She has been described as "Britain's most colourful charity leader".[11] and is well known for her eccentric and flamboyant dress sense:
"it takes me probably 5 minutes to get dressed. I don't think about it at all... But the way I dress matches my psychological energy, so when I get up in the morning I think 'What colour do I want to wear today?' and I just bung it on really quickly and get out. I don't worry about what people think at all... And it's instantaneous - I instantly know what fabrics go together and what doesn't - and it's just instinctive."[12]

In 2009 the Women in Public Life Awards named her Businesswoman of the Year

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela has been hospitalised in Johannesburg to treat her diabetes -- for the second time time in three months -- her daughter said on Friday.

"Mrs Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is being treated at Milpark Hospital for an existing diabetes condition," Zindzi Mandela said in a statement.

Madikizela-Mandela (75) was briefly hospitalised in September for a foot operation.

Madikizela-Mandela was married to former president Nelson Mandela from 1957 to 1996, though they had officially separated four years earlier.

She had tirelessly campaigned for his release during his 27-year imprisonment under apartheid.

Her image was tarnished by a series of scandals, including her links to the kidnap and murder of a young activist and a 2003 fraud conviction.

But she remains an influential figure as a parliamentarian and a member of the ANC's national executive committee.

Three weeks ago she made headlines by testifying for ANC Youth Leader Julius Malema during the disciplinary hearing that resulted in his suspension from the party.

She is one of the most visible backers of Malema's calls for "economic freedom" -- which he says should be achieved by nationalising mines and seizing white-owned farms.

Last month she told Malema that she wants him to liberate South Africa, saying: "Come to me and I will show you how." -- AFP

The new left for Scotland

William Blum

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William Blum (born 1933) is an American author, historian, and critic of United States foreign policy. He studied accounting in college. Later he had a low-level computer-related position at the United States Department of State in the mid-1960s. Initially an anti-communist with dreams of becoming a foreign service officer, he said he became disillusioned by the Vietnam War. He lives in a 1 bedroom apartment in Long Beach, New York.^[1]

Journalism

He left the Department in 1967. He then became one of the founders and editors of the Washington Free Press, the first "alternative" newspaper in the capital. In 1969, he wrote and published an exposé of the CIA in which was revealed the names and addresses of more than 200 employees of the Agency. He has worked as freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. From 1972 to 1973 Blum worked as a journalist in Chile, where he reported on the Allende government's "socialist experiment". In the mid-1970s, he worked in London with ex-CIA agent Philip Agee and his associates "on their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds".^[2] He supports himself with his writing and speaking engagements on college campuses.^[1]

In his writing, Blum devotes substantial attention to CIA interventions and assassination plots. He has supported Ralph Nader's presidential campaigns.^[3] He currently circulates a monthly newsletter by email called "The Anti-Empire Report". Blum has described his life's mission as: "If not ending, at least slowing down the American Empire. At least injuring the beast. It's causing so much suffering around the world."^[1]

Osama bin Laden statement

In early 2006, Blum briefly became the subject of widespread media attention when Osama bin Laden issued a public statement in which he quoted Blum and recommended that all Americans read Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower. As a result of the mention sales of his book skyrocketed. "I was quite surprised and even shocked and amused when I found out what he'd said," Blum said. "I was glad. I knew it would help the book's sales and I was not bothered by who it was coming from. If he shares with me a deep dislike for the certain aspects of US foreign policy, then I'm not going to spurn any endorsement of the book by him. I think it's good that he shares those views and I'm not turned off by that."^[4] On the Bin Laden endorsement Blum stated "This is almost as good as being an Oprah book."^[1]

Statements on 9/11

Blum has described the September 11th, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington DC. as "an understandable retaliation against US foreign policy."^[5] However, he has also written that there are "serious contradictions and apparent lies in the Official Government Version" of the September 11 attacks and that the New York skyscrapers "collapsed essentially because of a controlled demolition". Blum has suggested elements of the US government "let it happen" using the events as a justification for the war on terror

Robert Aickman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Fordyce Aickman (27 June 1914 – 26 February 1981) was an English conservationist and writer of fiction and nonfiction. As a writer, he is best known for his supernatural fiction, which he described as "strange stories".

Life

Aickman, born in London, England, was the grandson of the prolific Victorian novelist Richard Marsh (1857–1915), known for his occult thriller The Beetle (1897), a book as popular in its time as Bram Stoker's Dracula.

He originally received his training in architecture, the profession of his father, William Arthur Aickman. In the opening lines of his autobiographical work The Attempted Rescue (1966), Aickman described his father as "the oddest man I have ever known".^[1]

Aickman is probably best remembered for his co-founding of the Inland Waterways Association, a group devoted to restoring and preserving England's inland canal system. (One of the association's co-founders, L. T. C. Rolt, also produced a volume of supernatural tales, entitled Sleep No More (London: Constable, 1948).) Aickman was married to Edith Ray Gregorson from 1941 to 1957.

With a keen interest in the theatre, ballet, and music, Aickman also served as a chairman of the London Opera Society and was active in the London Opera Club, the Ballet Minerva, and the Mikron Theatre Company in London.

Aickman died of cancer on 26 February 1981 after refusing to have conventional treatment. His obituary appeared in The Times on 28 February.

Writing

Fiction

As a writer, Aickman is best known for the 48 "strange stories" which were published in eight volumes, one of them posthumous. The American collection Painted Devils consists of revised versions of stories which had previously appeared in other books.

Cold Hand in Mine and Painted Devils featured dust jacket drawings by acclaimed gothic illustrator Edward Gorey. August Derleth proposed that Arkham House should publish a book of Aickman's best stories, but was unable to meet the author's demands and withdrew the proposal. The original collections of short stories are quite scarce, though copies of the U.S. edition of Cold Hand in Mine are very plentiful.

Aickman's published novels were The Late Breakfasters (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964) and The Model: A Novel of the Fantastic (New York: Arbor House, 1987). The latter was a novella which had remained unpublished in his lifetime. Aickman had hoped to have had the latter work illustrated by Edward Gorey. Another novel, entitled Go Back at Once, remains unpublished. S.T. Joshi is at work on this and it may be published.

A previously unpublished short story, "The Fully Conducted Tour", appeared in the Tartarus Press periodical Wormwood in 2005.

] Awards

In 1975, Aickman received the World Fantasy Award for short fiction for his story "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal". This story had originally appeared in February 1973 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; it was reprinted in Cold Hand in Mine.

In 1981, the year of his death, Aickman was awarded the British Fantasy Award for his story "The Stains", which had first appeared in the anthology New Terrors (London: Pan, 1980), edited by Ramsey Campbell. It subsequently appeared posthumously in Night Voices.

Nonfiction

Aickman's autobiographical writing consists of the two memoirs The Attempted Rescue (London: Victor Gollancz, 1966) and The River Runs Uphill: A Story of Success and Failure (Burton-on-Trent: Pearson, 1986). In 2001, Tartarus Press reissued the former volume in a new edition with a foreword by the writer and Aickman enthusiast Jeremy Dyson of the British comedy quartet The League of Gentlemen.

For a time, Aickman served as theatre critic for The Nineteenth Century and After. His reviews remain, to date, uncollected in book form. He also wrote two books relating to his conservation activities, Know Your Waterways and The Story of Our Inland Waterways (both 1955).

Unpublished works

Other than Go Back At Once, mentioned above, Aickman produced a number of other unpublished works. These include the plays Allowance For Error, Duty and The Golden Round. Another book, a vast philosophical work entitled Panacea: The Synthesis of an Attitude ran to over 1000 pages in manuscript form. Copies of these items are preserved, along with all of Aickman's other remaining papers, in the Robert Aickman Collection at Bowling Green State University, Ohio.^[2]

Career as editor

In addition to writing his own stories, Aickman edited the first eight volumes of the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories between 1964 and 1972. He selected six of his own stories for inclusion over the course of the series. The fourth and sixth volumes lack one of his tales. He also supplied an introduction for every volume except the sixth.

Recent interest

The most detailed biographical and critical study is Gary William Crawford's Robert Aickman: An Introduction (Gothic Press, 2003). Crawford has also compiled an online database of works about Aickman. David Bolton's Race Against Time: How Britain's Waterways Were Saved (Methuen, 1990) contains a great deal of material about Aickman, including several photographs of him, and the final chapter is devoted to him. Elizabeth Jane Howard's autobiography Slipstream (Macmillan, 2002) gives an account of her relationship with him.

Philip Challinor has brought together eight critical essays on Aickman's stories in the chapbook, Akin to Poetry (Gothic Press, 2010.) A critical essay on Aickman's fiction appears in S.T. Joshi's book The Modern Weird Tale (2001). Articles, essays and papers by other authors have appeared on the website Robert Aickman: An Appreciation, and in the journals Studies in Weird Fiction (published by Necronomicon Press), All Hallows (published by the Ghost Story Society), Studies in the Fantastic, Supernatural Tales and Wormwood.

Adaptations

In 1968, a television adaptation of "Ringing the Changes", retitled "The Bells of Hell", appeared on the obscure BBC 2 program Late Night Horror. A radio play version based on "Ringing the Changes" was broadcast on the CBC Radio drama series Nightfall on 31 October 1980.

In 1987, HTV West produced a six-episode anthology series for television called Night Voices, of which four were based upon stories by Aickman: "The Hospice", "The Inner Room", "Hand In Glove" and "The Trains".^[3][4]

A 1997 adaptation of "The Swords",directed by Tony Scott appeared as the first episode of the cable original horror anthology series The Hunger.

Jeremy Dyson has adapted Aickman's work into drama in a number of forms. A musical staging of his short story "The Same Dog", for which Dyson co-wrote the libretto with Joby Talbot, premiered in 2000 at the Barbican Concert Hall. In 2000, with his League collaborator Mark Gatiss, Dyson adapted Aickman's short story "Ringing the Changes" into a BBC Radio Four radio play. This aired exactly twenty years after the CBC adaptation, on Halloween, 2000. Dyson also directed a 2002 short film based on Aickman's story "The Cicerones" with Gatiss as the principal actor

L. T. C. Rolt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lionel Thomas Caswall Rolt (usually abbreviated to Tom Rolt or L. T. C. Rolt) (11 February 1910 – 9 May 1974^[1][2]) was a prolific English writer and the biographer of major civil engineering figures including Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Telford. He is also regarded as one of the pioneers of the leisure cruising industry on Britain's inland waterways, and as an enthusiast for both vintage cars and heritage railways.

Biography

Tom Rolt was born in Chester to a line of Rolts "dedicated to hunting and procreation". His father Lionel had settled back in England in Hay-on-Wye after working on a cattle ranch in Australia, a plantation in India and joining (unsuccessfully) in the Yukon gold rush of 1898. However he lost most of his money in 1920 after investing his capital in a company which failed and the family moved to a pair of stone cottages in Stanley Pontlarge in Gloucestershire.^[3]

Chester memorial plaque

Tom studied at Cheltenham College and at 16 took a job learning about steam traction before starting an apprenticeship at the Kerr Stuart locomotive works in Stoke-on-Trent, where his uncle, Kyrle Willans was chief development engineer. His uncle bought a wooden narrow fly horse boat called Cressy and installed first a steam engine and then (having discovered the steam made steering through tunnels impossible) a Ford Model T engine. This was Tom's introduction to the canal system.

In the thirties slump he was jobless and turned to vintage sports cars, taking part in the veteran run to Brighton and acquiring a succession of cars including a 1924 Alvis 12/15 two seater 'ducks back' which he was to keep for the rest of his life.^[4] He bought into a motor garage partnership in Hartley Wintney in Hampshire (their breakdown vehicle was an adapted 1911 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost) and together with a local landlord, Tim Carson, formed the Vintage Sports-Car Club in 1934. He also found and helped create the Prescott hill climb.

In 1936, Kyrle bought back Cressy, which he had earlier sold, and several trips on the waterways convinced Rolt that he wanted a life afloat. He persuaded Angela Orred, a young blonde in a white polo-necked sweater who had swept into his garage in an Alfa Romeo in 1937 and got caught up into the vintage car scene, to join him in this idyll. Tom bought Cressy from his uncle and set about converting her into a boat that could be lived aboard, the most notable addition being a bath.

By the summer of 1939 they decided to defy Angela's father's reluctance and got married in secret on 11 July and within two weeks had set off up the Oxford Canal in Cressy. But the second world war intervened and Tom, a pacifist at heart, immediately signed up at the Rolls Royce factory at Crewe (on the production line for the Spitfire's Merlin engine). He was saved from the tedium of the production line by the offer of a job in an Aldbourne foundry. They battled south in Cressy through storms, reaching Banbury a day before the canals were finally frozen over for the winter.

Their first four month cruise became a book which he initially called Painted Ship. Despite sending the manuscript to many publishers, he had to put it aside as they all considered there was no market for books about canals. It wasn't until a magazine article he wrote came to the attention of the countryside writer H. J. Massingham that he had the break which led to the book's finally being published in December 1944 under the title Narrow Boat. It was an immediate success both with critics and public, with fan mail arriving on the boat at Tardebigge where they were then moored.

Two of the letters he received were from Robert Aickman and Charles Hadfield who were both to figure prominently in the next phase of his life, as a campaigner. He invited Robert and his wife Ray to join them on Cressy and this trip Robert later described as "the best time I have ever spent on the waterways". It was on this voyage they decided to form an organization that a few weeks later in May 1946 at Robert's London flat got the name of the Inland Waterways Association, with Robert as chairman, Charles Hadfield as vice-chairman and Tom as secretary.

This was a critical period for the waterways, which were nationalised in 1947 and faced an uncertain future, as the traditional life which Rolt had so movingly described was faced with extinction. Tom pioneered a direct action on the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal which stopped British Waterways from closing it, organised a hugely successful Inland Waterways Exhibition, which started in London but toured the country, and proposed the first boat rally at Market Harborough. Aickman, with a private income, was working full-time on the campaign whilst Rolt, who had only his writing to support himelf and was still living aboard Cressy, struggled to meet all the commitments he found himself with. Eventually he fell out with Aickman over the latter's insistence that every mile of canal should be saved and in early 1951 was expelled from the organization he had inspired.

By this time also he had decided to bring his life on Cressy to an end and return to his family home in Stanley Pontlarge. Angela departed to continue the mobile life, joining Billy Smart's Circus.

A letter he had sent to the Birmingham Post in 1950 resulted in the formation of the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society and he now threw himself into this and became chairman of the company, which operated it as a tourist attraction. "By the time the fateful letter terminating his IWA membership arrived, he was already busy issuing and stamping passengers' tickets from the little station in Towyn".^[5]

He got married again to Sonia South, a former actress, who during the war had become one of the amateur boat women who worked the canals and had married a boatman. She had been on the council of the IWA. They had two sons, Tim and Dick, and continued to live in Stanley Pontlarge till Rolt's death in 1974.

The fifties were his most prolific time as an author with the best known being biographies of Brunel, which stimulated a revival of interest in a forgotten hero,^{[6] [7]} George and Robert Stephenson, and Telford, and his classic Red for Danger, about historic railway accidents, which became a text book on numerous engineering courses. He produced many works about subjects that had not previously been considered the stuff of literature: civil engineering, canals, railways, etc. In the last years of his life he produced 3 volumes of autobiography, only one of which was published during his lifetime.

Achievements and honours

The Tom Rolt locomotive

He was Vice-President of the Newcomen Society, which established a Rolt Prize;^[8] a trustee and member of the Advisory Council of the Science Museum; member of the York Railway Museum Committee; an honorary MA of Newcastle; an honorary MSc of Bath and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was a joint founder of the Association for Industrial Archaeology, which has an annual Rolt lecture. He helped to form the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust.

A locomotive Tom Rolt on the Talyllyn Railway, the world's first preserved railway, was named in his memory in 1991. His book Railway Adventure recalls this period.

Plaque at bridge 146 on the Oxford Canal, Banbury

Rolt observed the changes in society resulting from the industrial-scientific revolution. In the epilogue to his biography of I.K.Brunel he writes two years before C. P. Snow makes similar statements about the split between the arts and sciences:

Men spoke in one breath of the arts and sciences and to the man of intelligence and culture it seemed essential that he should keep himself abreast of developments in both spheres. ... So long as the artist or the man of culture had been able to advance shoulder to shoulder with engineer and scientist and with them see the picture whole, he could share their sense of mastery and confidence and believe wholeheartedly in material progress. But so soon as science and the arts became divorced, so soon as they ceased to speak a common language, confidence vanished and doubts and fears came crowding in.

He set out these ideas more fully in his book High Horse Riderless, a classic of green philosophy.

A bridge (no. 164) on the Oxford Canal in Banbury bears his name (in commemoration of his book Narrow Boat), as does a centre at the boat museum at Ellesmere Port in Cheshire. A blue plaque to Mr. Rolt was unveiled in at Tooley's Boatyard, Banbury on 7 August 2010 as part of the centenary celebrations of his birth.^[9]

Phil Tufnell Awarded Honorary Doctorate 

20 July 2011

 Phil Tufnell Awarded Honorary Doctorate

Former international cricketer Phil Tufnell was presented with an honorary doctorate by Middlesex University today (Middlesex University's Hendon Campus, 10.30am, 20 July), recognising his achievements in sport and the media.

Phil joined students, many graduating from sports related degree courses. Aside from a successful cricket career with Middlesex and England, Phil has also capitalised on his reputation as an entertainer with a wide range of TV work including BBC’s A Question of Sport,  The One Show I’m A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here.

Middlesex University Vice-Chancellor Michael Driscoll said: “Phil was a match winner on the pitch but also a much loved character off it. To be able to honour a local boy who has reached the very top of his game is a real pleasure, and his achievements will be an inspiration to our students.”

Phil said: “As a cricketer, Middlesex was my county team and North London is where I grew up, so it’s a real pleasure to receive this honorary doctorate from Middlesex University. I’m wishing the next generation of graduates the best of luck.”

The award is made as part of the University’s annual graduation celebrations, with honorary degrees presented to people who have made an outstanding contribution to their profession or the community.

Tertullian

From Wikiquote

 

It is certainly no part of religion to compel religion.

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (born ca. 150-160, died ca. 220-240) A major theologian in the early Christian church, known for his powerful denunciations of many influences he considered heretical, including the widespread admiration of pagan philosophers and many Gnostic ideas, yet in later life a Montanist, and thus he himself an embracer of beliefs that came to be declared heretical.

 Sourced

Truth persuades by teaching, but does not teach by persuading.

When God's Spirit descends, then Patience accompanies Him indivisibly.

Reason, in fact, is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason — nothing which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason.

• fiunt non nascuntur Christiani
  • Christians are made, not born.
  • Apologeticus, xviii.
  • Many variants on this exist, notably “Great lovers are made, not born.” and “(Great) leaders are made, not born.”
  • A variant on “One is not born wise, but becomes wise” from Seneca On Anger 2.10.6; see: Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire: the witness of Tertullian, by Tertullian, Robert Dick Sider, p. 38, footnote 79.

• Vide, inquiunt, ut invicem se diligant; ipsi enim invicem oderunt: et ut pro alterutro mori sint parati; ipsi enim ad occidendum alterutrum paratiores erunt.
  • See, they say, how they love one another, for themselves are animated by mutual hatred; how they are ready even to die for one another, for they themselves will sooner put to death.
  • Apologeticus, 39, describing how Christianity is mocked by its enemies.

• Plures efficimur, quoties metumur a vobis; semen est sanguis christianorum.
  • We multiply whenever we are mown down by you; the blood of Christians is seed.
  • Apologeticus, 50

• Omnium gentium unus homo, uarium nomen est, una anima, uaria uox, unus spiritus, uarius sonus, propria cuique genti loquella, sed loquellae materia communis.
  • Man is one name belonging to every nation upon earth. In them all is one soul though many tongues. Every country has its own language, yet the subjects of which the untutored soul speaks are the same everywhere.
  • De Testimonio Animae (The Testimony of the Soul) (6.3)

• Veritas autem docendo persuadet non suadendo docet.
  • Truth persuades by teaching, but does not teach by persuading.
  • Adversus Valentinianos (Against the Valentinians) (1.4)

• Nihil veritas erubescit
  • Truth does not blush.
  • Adversus Valentinianos (3.2)

• Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est.
  • It is to be believed because it is absurd.
  • De Carne Christi (5.4)

• Certum est, quia impossible est.
  • It is certain because it is impossible.
  • De Carne Christi (5.4)
  • Two lines from De Carne Christi have often become conflated into the statement: "Credo quia impossibile" (I believe it because it is impossible), which can be perceived as a distortion of the actual arguments that Tertullian was making.

• De calcaria in carbonarium.
  • Out of the frying pan into the fire.
  • De Carne Christi (6)

• Omnia periclitabuntur aliter accipi quam sunt, et amittere quod sunt dum aliter accipiuntur, si aliter quam sunt cognominantur. Fides nominum salus est proprietatum.
  • All things will be in danger of being taken in a sense different from their own proper sense, and, whilst taken in that different sense, of losing their proper one, if they are called by a name which differs from their natural designation. Fidelity in names secures the safe appreciation of properties.
  • De Carne Christi (13.2)

• Qui fugiebat, rursus sibi proeliabitur.
  • He who flees will fight again.
  • De Fuga in Persecutione, 10.

• Nec alii obest aut prodest alterius religio.
  • One man's religion neither harms nor helps another man.
  • Ad Scapulam (2.2)

• Nec religionis est cogere religio
  • It is certainly no part of religion to compel religion.
  • Ad Scapulam (2.2)

• Infirma commendatio est quae de alterius destructione fulcitur.
  • Of little worth is the recommendation which has for its prop the defamation of another.
  • Adversus Marcionem (IV.15.5)

• Itaque et ego vanitatem vanitate depellam.
  • I shall dispel one empty story by another.
  • Variant translation: I must dispel vanity with vanity.
  • Adversus Marcionem (IV.30.3)

• Cum ergo spiritus Dei descendit, indiuidua patientia comitatur eum.
  • When God's Spirit descends, then Patience accompanies Him indivisibly.
  • De Patientia (15:7)

• Quippe res dei ratio quia deus omnium conditor nihil non ratione providit disposuit ordinavit, nihil [enim] non ratione tractari intellegique voluit. [3] Igitur ignorantes quique deum rem quoque eius ignorent necesse est quia nullius omnino thesaurus extraneis patet. Itaque universam vitae conversationem sine gubernaculo rationis transfretantes inminentem saeculo procellam evitare non norunt.
  • Reason, in fact, is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason — nothing which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason.
  • All, therefore, who are ignorant of God, must necessarily be ignorant also of a thing which is His, because no treasure-house at all is accessible to strangers. And thus, voyaging all the universal course of life without the rudder of reason, they know not how to shun the hurricane which is impending over the world.
  • De Paenitentia (On Repentance) (1.2-3)

• esterni sumus, & vestra omnia implevimus, Vrbes, Insulas, Castella, Municipia, Conciliabula, Castra ipsa, Tribus, Decurias, palatium, Senatum, Forum, sola vobis relinquimus Templa.
  • We are but of yesterday, and yet we have filled all the places that belong to you — cities, islands, forts, towns, exchanges; the military camps themselves, tribes, town councils, the palace, the senate, the market-place; we have left you nothing but your temples.
  • Tertullian's Plea For Allegiance (A.2)

• We worship unity in trinity, and trinity in unity; neither confounding the person nor dividing the substance. There is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost; but the Godhead of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal.
  • Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 285.

Mary Wollstonecraft, the daughter of a handkerchief weaver, was born in Spitalfields, London in 1759. The family moved a great deal during Mary's childhood and she lived for periods at Epping, Barking, Beverley, Hoxton, Walworth and Laugharne in Wales.

In 1784 Mary Wollstonecraft opened a school in Newington Green, a small village close to Hackney, with her sister Eliza and a friend, Fanny Blood. Soon after arriving in Newington Green, Mary made friends with Richard Price, a minister at the local Dissenting Chapel. Price and his friend, Joseph Priestly, were the leaders of a group of men known as Rational Dissenters.

Price had written several books including the very influential Review of the Principal Questions of Morals (1758) where he argued that individual conscience and reason should be used when making moral choices. Price also rejected the traditional Christian ideas of original sin and eternal punishment. As a result of these religious views, some Anglicans accused Rational Dissenters of being atheists.

Although Mary was brought up as an Anglican, she soon began attending Richard Price's chapel. Price held radical political views and had encountered a great deal of hostility when he supported the cause of American independence. At Price's home Mary Wollstonecraft met other leading radicals including the publisher, Joseph Johnson. He was impressed by Mary's ideas on education and commissioned her to write a book on the subject. In Thoughts on the Education of Girls, published in 1786, Mary attacked traditional teaching methods and suggested new topics that should be studied by girls. Two years later Wollstonecraft helped Johnson to found the journal Analytical Review.

In November, 1789, Richard Price preached a sermon praising the French Revolution. Price argued that British people, like the French, had the right to remove a bad king from the throne. Edmund Burke, was appalled by this sermon and wrote a reply called Reflections on the Revolution in France where he argued in favour of the inherited rights of the monarchy. Wollstonecraft was upset by Burke's attack on her friend and she decided to defend him by writing a pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Man. In her pamphlet Wollstonecraft not only supported Price but also pointed out what she thought was wrong with society. This included the slave trade, the game laws and way that the poor were treated.

The publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Man brought Wollstonecraft to the attention of other radical thinkers such as Tom Paine, John Cartwright, John Horne Tooke, William Godwin and William Blake. Wollstonecraft met several of these men including Godwin who was busily writing a book on Political Justice. In 1791 the first part of Tom Paine's Rights of Man was published. This book created a burst of radical activity and although Paine was forced to flee the country, others were determined to carry on the struggle in England. Soon after Rights of Man appeared, two of Britain's leading Rational Dissenters, Richard Price and Joseph Priestly, formed the Unitarian Society, an organisation that was to have a profound influence on religious and political ideas in Britain.

The following year Mary Wollstonecraft published her most important book, Vindication of the Rights of Women. In the book Wollstonecraft attacked the educational restrictions that kept women in a state of "ignorance and slavish dependence." She was especially critical of a society that encouraged women to be "docile and attentive to their looks to the exclusion of all else." Wollstonecraft described marriage as "legal prostitution" and added that women "may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent."

The ideas in Wollstonecraft's book were truly revolutionary and caused tremendous controversy. One critic described Wollstonecraft as a "hyena in petticoats". Mary Wollstonecraft argued that to obtain social equality society must rid itself of the monarchy as well as the church and military hierarchies. Mary Wollstonecraft's views even shocked fellow radicals. Whereas advocates of parliamentary reform such as Jeremy Bentham and John Cartwright had rejected the idea of female suffrage, Wollstonecraft argued that the rights of man and the rights of women were one and the same thing.

In 1793 Edmund Burke led the attack on the radicals in Britain. He described the London Corresponding Society and the Unitarian Society as "loathsome insects that might, if they were allowed, grow into giant spiders as large as oxen". King George IIIissued a proclamation against seditious writings and meetings, threatening serious punishments for those who refused to accept his authority.

In June, 1793 Mary decided to move to France with the American writer, Gilbert Imlay. The following year, Mary gave birth to Fanny. After her relationship with Imlay came to an end she returned to London. Mary married William Godwin in March, 1797 and soon afterwards, a second daughter, Mary, was born. The baby was healthy but the placenta was retained in the womb. The doctor's attempt to remove the placenta resulted in blood poisoning and Mary died on 10th September, 1797.

Winston Churchill lead Great Britain for most of World War Two and Churchill’s ‘bulldog’ spirit seemed to summarise the mood of the British people even during the bad times, such as Dunkirk, and the inspirational victories, such as the Battle of Britain.

Winston Churchill was born in 1874 into a wealthy and famous family. His father was Lord Randolph Churchill and he was the grandson of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. Winston Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. He was schooled at Harrow where it is said that he only put his name on the exam entrance paper to get in. Churchill went to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and gained a commission in the Fourth Hussars. He saw some military action and took part in the Battle of Omdurman in 1898.

During the Boer War, he was a war correspondent. Winston Churchill was captured, held a prisoner, escaped and took part in the relief of Ladysmith.

After this, Winston Churchill went into politics. He had a chequered career up to World War Two and was seen as something of a maverick. In 1900, he was elected Conservative MP for Oldham but in 1904, he left the Conservative Party and joined the Liberal Party, which, he believed, better represented his economic views on free trade. From 1906 to 1908, he was a Liberal MP for northwest Manchester and from 1908 to 1922, he was MP for Dundee.

Between 1908 and 1910, Winston Churchill held a cabinet post when Herbert Asquith, leader of the Liberal Party, appointed him President of the Board of Trade. Winston Churchill’s major achievement in this post was to establish labour exchanges. In 1910, he was promoted to Home Secretary. As Home Secretary, Winston Churchill used troops to maintain law and order during a miners strike in South Wales. He also used a detachment of Scots Guards to assist police during a house siege in Sidney Street in East London in January 1911. Whilst such actions may have marked him down as a man who would do his utmost to maintain law and order, there were those who criticised his use of the military for issues that the police usually dealt with.

From October 1911 to May 1915, Winston Churchill was made First Lord of the Admiralty. In this post, he did a great deal to ensure that the navy was in a state to fight a war. Winston Churchill put a strong emphasis on modernisation and he was an early supporter of using planes in combat.

However, Churchill was to pay the price for the bloody failure of the Dardanelles campaign in 1915 – it was Winston Churchill who proposed the expedition to the War Council and, as a result, he was held responsible for its failure. He was dismissed from his post at the Admiralty and he was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Having been Home Secretary and First Lord at the Admiralty, this was seen by many, including Winston Churchill, to be a demotion and he left the post after just six months. Churchill rejoined the army.

Here he commanded a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front until May 1916.

However, Winston Churchill quickly returned to government.

In 1917 he was appointed Minister for Munitions – a post he held until 1918.

In 1919, Winston Churchill was appointed Minister for War and Air – a post he held until 1920.

In 1921, he was appointed Colonial Secretary – a post he held until he lost his seat for Dundee in the 1922 election.

After his electoral defeat in 1922, Winston Churchill left the Liberal Party and became the MP for Epping in 1924 standing as a ‘constitutional anti-socialist’. Stanley Baldwin, leader of the Conservative Party, appointed him as Chancellor of the Exchequer (a post he held from 1924 to 1929) and Winston Churchill officially rejoined the Conservative Party in 1925.

Churchill remained outside of government from 1929 to 1939. He had spoken out against the government’s policy towards India and as Hitler became more and more aggressive in Europe, Winston Churchill became more and more concerned about the stance taken by the then leader of the government, Neville Chamberlain. From 1938 to the outbreak of war in September 1939, Churchill urged the government to be more pro-active against Hitler, including for an early call for conscription.

On September 3rd, 1939, Winston Churchill was back in the government when Chamberlain appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty. The seeming failure of the government, including the military failure in Norway in 1940, meant that criticism of Chamberlain became more and more robust. On May 10th, 1940, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and during the war, he was the most dominant figure in British politics – a role that received huge praise once the war was over.

To many people in Britain, Churchill’s stand against Nazism and all it stood for, summarised why the war was being fought. His speeches have become part of legend – be it ‘fighting on the beaches’ or his salute to the men from Fighter Command who took on the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain:

Churchill also remained in London during the Blitz and regularly visited areas bombed out by the Luftwaffe. To the people of London, he was one of them and a man who could have removed himself from the dangers of German bombers, but refused to - staying in bombed out London along with those who suffered.

Churchill also took a role in military issues. It was he who was the political force behind the creation of commando units that would be sent in to disrupt the German military. He was also scathing about military defeats, calling the defeat at Tobruk a "disgrace".

During the war, Winston Churchill also held a number of meetings with other wartime leaders. He met F D Roosevelt, the American president, on nine occasions between 1941 and 1945; he had five meetings with the Russian leader Stalin between 1942 and 1945.

For all his popularity as a war leader, Winston Churchill lost the 1945 general election to Labour’s Clement Atlee. His wife told him that it might be a ‘blessing in disguise’. Winston Churchill is said to have replied that it was ‘very well disguised’.

In October 1951, he became Prime Minister once again. However, Churchill had suffered a stroke in August 1949 that had been kept secret from the public and his health was now a concern. Aged 77 in 1951, Winston Churchill was not in a fit enough state to involve himself in day-to-day politics as required from a Prime Minister.

In April 1953, he was made a Knight of the Garter and he resigned from politics in 1955.

However, few people could match his international status. Having won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, he became an honorary American citizen in 1963 – an honour confirmed by Congress.

Winston Churchill died in 1965 and was buried less than one mile from where he was born at Blenheim Palace. For many people, his stubborn refusal to admit defeat or a lost cause during World War Two has given him a reputation few other politicians have ever achieved.

Alan Turing was the one who invented computer programming back in the early 40's.

He committed suicide by taking a bight out of an apple laced with cyanide.

Apple computers have Alan Turing's apple with a bight out as their logo, in recognition of his brilliance.

Saturday interview: Aung San Suu Kyi

Burma's tireless political campaigner talks about rebuilding the National League for Democracy, the revolutionary power of social media and her love of The Grateful Dead

• • Polly Toynbee
  • The Guardian, Saturday 16 April 2011

'More people are realising that if they want change, they’ve got to go about it themselves' … Aung San Suu Kyi

The high fence is back, separating her house from the lake it stands beside – but this time it has been erected by her own people to protect her, not to lock her in.

How free is Aung San Suu Kyi, five months after her 15 years of house arrest ended?

Not very; or free as a bird, depending on how you ask the question.

Fragile yet strong as iron, the yellow and white roses in her hair belie her steely resolution.

She had not been well when we visited her this week.

Though she steps into the room with bright smiles, warmth and grace, her ramrod-straight deportment disguises painful spondylosis of the spine.

Andrew Comben, director of the Brighton festival, and I as its chair, have come to film an interview, as she is guest director of this year's event in May.

Since she dare not travel abroad, knowing the generals who have run Burma since 1962 would never let her return, we shall show this film of her instead.

Her visitors will be followed, so it takes some subterfuge, ducking and diving in and out of taxis, a ferry over the river and sidling out through hotel back doors to avoid confiscation of our film.

Approached some months ago while still under house arrest, we wondered if she might think the idea of guest directing an arts festival absurdly frivolous or irrelevant to her country's struggle for democracy.

But not at all. She accepted with delight: despite 15 of the last 21 years spent in solitary isolation, she has an ebullient enjoyment of many things. Arts matter, she says.

"If you can make people understand why freedom is so important through the arts, that would be a big help." Exploring her artistic tastes, pleasures and memories has been revealing and moving.

And surprising – of which more later.

As a surge for freedom storms across the Middle East, will it ripple on through dictatorships everywhere, including Burma? "Human beings want to be free and however long they may agree to stay locked up, to stay oppressed, there will come a time when they say 'That's it.'

Suddenly they find themselves doing something that they never would have thought they would be doing, simply because of the human instinct that makes them turn their face towards freedom."

Is that time now? "More people, especially young people, are realising that if they want change, they've got to go about it themselves – they can't depend on a particular person, ie me, to do all the work.

They are less easy to fool than they used to be, they now know what's going on all over the world."

The Middle East is never mentioned in Burma's state newspapers, organs that make Soviet-era Pravda look like Wikileaks.

The New Light of Myanmar carries front and back page warnings – "Anarchy begets anarchy. Riots beget riots, not democracy. Wipe out those inciting unrest and violence" – and attacks on the BBC and Voice of America: "Do not allow ourselves to be swayed by killer broadcasts designed to cause troubles."

She laughs at it, calling the paper "The New Blight of Myanmar". Is the regime rattled?

"People know what's going on because of the communications revolution.

So people are becoming more aware of their own potential, and this has to be encouraged."

What might the trigger be? A 1988 uprising was sparked by the government abolishing existing bank notes overnight, so everyone lost their savings.

The 2007 protests, joined by the monks, began with soaring rice prices. "Once the army starts shooting, most uprisings are put down pretty quickly.

But how long the people will remain quiet after something like that is another matter.

" People look to her, and now she is free the National League for Democracy has a new impetus, though organising is extraordinarily difficult with all its leaders among the country's 2,200 political prisoners: 65-year sentences were handed out to students.

"Fear, fear, fear" is everywhere, she says.

Except inside her. In 2003 they tried to assassinate Aung San Suu Kyi when her convoy was set upon by government-organised thugs and 70 of her people murdered: beaten up and thrown into jail, she was put under house arrest until this year.

Her people want her heavily guarded, but she refuses.

She shrugs, and says if the regime wants her dead, there's little to be done. How free is she now? If she steps outside she is mobbed by thousands of admirers wherever she goes.

She went shopping once with her son, but had to be rescued from the crush of well-wishers.

"Luckily, I don't like shopping!" – and indeed shopping in Burma holds few enticements.

Once the second richest nation in south-east Asia, despite rich resources it is now the poorest, as well as least free nation after North Korea. Is she free to travel the country? Unlikely, she thinks. She hasn't yet ventured out of Rangoon: "So far I haven't tried to go anywhere they wouldn't wish me to, but I must start testing the waters again."

Her work detains her between the party's office and her home, her erstwhile prison.

Her long years in detention were so exceptional because they were partly voluntary.

Most prisoners have no choice, but every day she could have walked free, headed for the airport and flown away, her captors glad to be rid of her for ever.

Every day for 15 years she had to make that hard decision to stay, alone and isolated without her two sons, even as her beloved husband was dying of cancer in Britain, cruelly forbidden from visiting her.

But if you suggest exceptional fortitude, she always refers to the other Burmese political prisoners kept in far harsher conditions, half-starved, their health broken. "I don't think I was the only one who volunteered. A lot of our people could have chosen not to go to prison if they had given up working for the movement for democracy.

" The generals' respect for her war-hero father, who died fighting for Burma's independence when she was just two, kept her incarcerated in her own home. This Nobel Peace Prize laureate was protected, too, by world opinion.

"This word 'free'," she says of herself and the other prisoners, "we all think that we are freer than the people outside because we don't have to compromise with our conscience.

We are doing what we believe in. We are not locked in by the bars of guilt.

So I think this is what made us choose imprisonment rather than to stay – in quotes – 'free'. For us, that is how our lives are."

In the last five months she has revived the National League for Democracy, starting new humanitarian services, digging wells, opening clinics and schools with scarce money.

Scrupulously, they take not a penny from foreign campaigners, only from Burmese donors. She laughs as she says that if they begin to dig a well, the government rushes in to dig a better one, "So that does a lot of good!"

But it's hard to convene meetings with regional organisers without funds, hard to find out what's happening anywhere. She has just learned of mutinies in army bases from the BBC World Service, a lifeline when information is so hard to come by.

She is relieved the BBC's Burma service has been saved from British government cuts, "puzzled" at the decision to cut the Chinese service. After 70 years, the BBC's last Mandarin programmes for China have just been broadcast.

Pressure from the outside world makes more impact than people realise, she says.

That's why the generals felt obliged to shape a new constitution, though it leaves the same military cadre running the country in civilian clothes. Sham elections held just before her release were declared "deeply flawed" by the UN. Her party did not stand, since conditions included repudiating all its political prisoners and swearing support for a constitution that lets the army take over at any time.

But it has been enough to allow neo-liberal Western economists to call for compromise and the lifting of sanctions, accusing her of stubbornness. "They say if we build up trade, it will bring democracy.

They say what you need is a middle class, that will bring democracy." As in China? She mocks the idea. "But the IMF say the mess in the economy is due to mismanagement and not sanctions."

She heats up with controlled anger at pusillanimous NGOs: "They invite civil servants to 'capacity building' training. But the problem with civil servants' capacity is they won't do anything unless bribed."

Burma is ranked 176th out of 180 countries for corruption.

"I talk to business people and they say (what prevents enterprise) is that everything falls into the cronies' hands."

Her message is that democracy and transparency are the only answer – but the NGOs steer clear of politics, which makes her burn with indignation. She quotes Graham Greene, "He wrote, 'Sometimes, if you are human, you have to take sides.' They say we are not ready to compromise.

I don't know what they mean. Our minds are not inflexible, but perhaps our knees are inflexible.

We are not down on our knees!" Her message is that politics is everything, nothing is apolitical.

With crystal clear precision, she enunciates in capital letters, "I AM A POLITICIAN. That's a dirty word, but I write it on forms as my profession. I AM A POLITICIAN!" We talk about the universal contempt for politics, as voting declines in the West. "Just ask them if they would like to emigrate to a totalitarian state," she says.

But does she worry that when freedom comes, people quickly forget as the everyday business of governing falls short of expectations? "I've always tried to explain democracy is not perfect. But it gives you a chance to shape your own destiny."

Despite everything, politics is not her whole life, as she talks of what the arts have meant to her.

You might expect her to choose Beethoven: "For many people he does represent not just the greatness of music, but the greatness of thought behind it.

I've often wished in these last few years under detention that I were a composer, because then I would be able to express what I felt through music, which is somehow so much more universal than words."

So the festival starts with Fidelio, the prisoner's opera. In detention she played the piano daily. She talks of her devotion to TS Eliot when she was at Oxford reading politics and economics, so the festival is producing the Four Quartets, accompanied by a Beethoven string quartet.

She mocks the awful poetry she was taught at school in colonial Burma, reciting "At Flores in the Azores, where Sir Richard Grenville lay" with a laugh. But here's a surprise.

You might not expect her recently acquired taste for the Grateful Dead's Standing on the Moon. "Have you ever listened to it? I like it very much. My son taught me to like it. And Bob Marley.

Well, I do like 'Get up, Stand up for your rights'. We need more music like that." So the festival has brought her Lee Scratch Perry, one of Bob Marley's mentors.

Before we go, she stops to fold an origami lotus flower to send to the festival, to join the thousands to be floated on the lake in Queen's Park to mark Burma's many political prisoners.

 Deftly her fingers fold it back and forth, and she smiles as she recalls doing origami with her young sons.

There she is, the iconic beacon of freedom, worldwide symbol of fortitude and endurance, laughing and folding.

As ever, with good humour and grace, she wears her heroism lightly.

Aung San Suu Kyi is Guest Director of Brighton Festival 2011. Brighton Festival takes place on 7-29 May. See brightonfestival.org (01273 709709)

Celebrities with links to the age of Empire

Another famous writer with colonial connections was Spike Milligan, who was born in India to a father serving in the British Indian army. He spent most of his childhood in India and Burma, and served in the army himself during World War II. He once attributed his love for comedy to his colonial background: "I wasn't consciously aware of it, but I had had enough of the British empire. The Goons gave me a chance to knock people my father and I had to call 'Sir'. Colonels. Chaps like Grytpype-Thynne with educated voices who were really bloody scoundrels."

Celebrities with links to the age of Empire

Peter Cook was the son of Alexander Edward Cook, a civil servant who was working in colonial Nigeria when Cook was born in 1937. As a young man, Cook had planned to follow in his father's footsteps and become a diplomat, but joked that by the time he was old enough, "Britain had run out of colonies." In later life, he once reflected, "I'd still say yes if the governorship of Bermuda came up."

Henry Mayhew

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 Henry Mayhew, from London Labour and the London Poor (1861)

Henry Mayhew (25 November 1812 - 25 July 1887) was an English social researcher, journalist, playwright and advocate of reform.

He was one of the two founders (1841) of the satirical and humorous magazine Punch, and the magazine's joint-editor, with Mark Lemon, in its early days.

He is better known, however, for his work as a social researcher, publishing an extensive series of newspaper articles in the Morning Chronicle, later compiled into the book series London Labour and the London Poor (1851), a groundbreaking and influential survey of the poor of London.

Biography

Early life

He was born in London, one of seventeen children of Joshua Mayhew.

He was educated at Westminster School before running away from his studies to sea.^[1] He then served with the East India Company as a midshipman on a ship bound for Calcutta.

He returned after several years, in 1829, becoming a trainee lawyer in Wales.^[2] He left this and became a freelance journalist.

He contributed to The Thief, a readers' digest, followed quickly by writing a play - Figaro in London in 1829. Along with continuing to develop his writing, Mayhew briefly managed the Queen's Theatre.^[3]

Mayhew reputedly fled his creditors and holed up at The Erwood Inn, a small public house in the village of Erwood, south of Builth Wells.

On 17th January 2011, The Erwood Inn submitted a planning application for change of use from public house to additional residential accommodation.^[4]

Paris and writing

In 1835 Mayhew found himself in a state of debt and along with a fellow writer, they escaped to Paris to avoid their creditors.^[2]

He spent his time writing and in the company of other writers including William Thackeray and Douglas Jerrold. Mayhew spent over ten years in Paris returning to England in the 1850s whereby he was involved in several literary adventures, mostly the writing of plays.

Two of his plays - But, However and the Wandering Minstrel were successful, whilst his early work Figaro in London was less successful.^[5]

Punch magazine

Punch magazine was co founded by Mayhew in 1841.

On 17 July 1841 Mayhew cofounded Punch magazine.

At its founding the magazine was jointly edited by Mayhew and Mark Lemon. Initially it was subtitled The London Charivari, this being a reference to a satirical humour magazine published in France under the title Le Charivari (a work read often whilst Mayhew was in Paris).

Reflecting their satiric and humorous intent, the two editors took for their name and masthead the anarchic glove puppet, Mr. Punch. Punch was an unexpected success, yet, a year later, Mayhew resigned as joint editor in 1842.^[5] He however continued as 'suggestor in chief' until he severed his connection in 1845.

His brother, Horace stayed on the board of Punch until his death. The Punch years gave Mayhew the opportunity to meet talented illustrators who he later employed to work from daguerreotypes on London Labour and the London Poor.^[5]

Formative work

In 1842 Mayhew contributed to the pioneering Illustrated London News. By this time Mayhew had become reasonably secure financially, had settled his debts and married Jane Jerrold, the daughter of his friend Douglas Jerrold.^[6] She lived until 1880.

London Labour and the London Poor 

Main article: London Labour and the London Poor

The articles comprising London Labour and the London Poor were initially collected into three volumes in 1851; the 1861 edition included a fourth volume, co-written with Bracebridge Hemyng, John Binny and Andrew Halliday, on the lives of prostitutes, thieves and beggars.

This Extra Volume took a more general and statistical approach to its subject than Volumes 1 to 3.

He wrote in volume one: "I shall consider the whole of the metropolitan poor under three separate phases, according as they will work, they can't work, and they won't work".^[7]

He interviewed everyone—beggars, street-entertainers (such as Punch and Judy men), market traders, prostitutes, labourers, sweatshop workers, even down to the "mudlarks" who searched the stinking mud on the banks of the River Thames for wood, metal, rope and coal from passing ships, and the "pure-finders" who gathered dog faeces to sell to tanners.

He described their clothes, how and where they lived, their entertainments and customs, and made detailed estimates of the numbers and incomes of those practicing each trade.

The books make fascinating reading, showing how marginal and precarious many people's lives were, in what, at that time, must have been the richest city in the world.

Mayhew's perception as an observer is unsurpassed in early descriptions of London's street scenes.

His richly detailed descriptions are able to give an impression of what the street markets of his day were like.

Here is a typical description by Mayhew:

'The pavement and the road are crowded with purchasers and street-sellers.

The housewife in her thick shawl, with the market-basket on her arm, walks slowly on, stopping now to look at the stall of caps, and now to cheapen a bunch of greens.

Little boys, holding three or four onions in their hand, creep between the people, wriggling their way through every interstice, and asking for custom in whining tones, as if seeking charity.

Then the tumult of the thousand different cries of the eager dealers, all shouting at the top of their voices, at one and the same time, is almost bewildering.

“So-old again,” roars one. “Chestnuts all‘ot, a penny a score,” bawls another. “An ‘aypenny a skin, blacking,” squeaks a boy. “Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy-- bu-u-uy!” cries the butcher.

“Half-quire of paper for a penny,” bellows the street stationer. “An ‘aypenny a lot ing-uns.” “Twopence a pound grapes.” “Three a penny Yarmouth bloaters.”

“Who‘ll buy a bonnet for fourpence?” “Pick ‘em out cheap here! three pair for a halfpenny, bootlaces.”

“Now‘s your time! beautiful whelks, a penny a lot.”

“Here‘s ha‘p‘orths,” shouts the perambulating confectioner. “Come and look at ‘em! here‘s toasters!” bellows one with a Yarmouth bloater stuck on a toasting-fork.

“Penny a lot, fine russets,” calls the apple woman: and so the Babel goes on.' Mayhew.^[8]

• London Labour and the London Poor: Volume 1

Influence

Mayhew's work was embraced by and was an influence on the Christian Socialists, such as Thomas Hughes, Charles Kingsley, and F. D. Maurice.

Radicals also published sizeable excerpts from the reports in the Northern Star, the Red Republican and other newspapers.

The often sympathetic investigations, with their immediacy and unswerving eye for detail, offered unprecedented insights into the condition of the Victorian poor.

Alongside the earlier work of Edwin Chadwick, they are also regarded as a decisive influence on the thinking of Charles Dickens.

Mayhew also often appears as a character in television and radio histories of Victorian London, played by Timothy West in the documentary London (2004) and by David Haig in the Afternoon Play A Chaos of Wealth and Want (2010).

Henry Mayhew was the great-grandfather of Audrey Mayhew Allen (b. 1870), author of a number of children's stories published in various periodicals, and of a book Gladys in Grammarland, an imitation of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland books.

Platform for polemicists

 

WITH THE UP AND COMING ALTERNATIVE VOTE (AV) SYSTEM

COMING UP FOR A REFERENDUM

I JUST WANT TO MAKE IT QUITE CLEAR

THAT ALTHOUGH I DID VOTE WHEN I COULD

THAT I DID NOT VOTE FOR :- 

THATCHER,MAJOR, BLIAR ,CAMERON OR CLEGG

WITH ALTERNATIVE VOTING

I WOULD NEVER VOTE FOR SOMEONE I COULD NOT SUPPORT

HOWEVER MANY CHOICES I HAD

Nelson Mandela 'responding well' to South Africa care

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Hundreds of worshippers in Soweto gather to pray for Nelson Mandela

South Africa's former President Nelson Mandela is "responding well" to treatment, according to his doctor.

Mr Mandela who spent two nights at a hospital for a respiratory infection last week, is being treated by military doctors at his Johannesburg home.

Hundreds of South Africans held prayers services on Sunday for the speedy recovery of the liberation icon.

Mr Mandela was a political prisoner for 27 years but emerged to become the country's first black president.

A statement from Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe said Mr Mandela had a "restful and peaceful night".

He also said that doctors were concerned about the number of people visiting Mr Mandela at his home in Houghton, a suburb in Johannesburg.

"We want to appeal to all that we accord the former president and his family the space to support him in privacy and dignity which he deserves," the statement said.

"Doctors must also be allowed to do their work without any undue pressure and in an atmosphere that allows them to carry on with their duties without any disturbance."

Andrew Mlangeni, one of Mr Mandela's fellow prisoners on Robben Island, visited him at the weekend

"He looks bright," said Mr Mlangeni, reports Sapa news agency.

"The doctors say he is responding well to treatment and what pleased me most, is he is able to recognise us."

Nelson Mandela makes few public appearances these days

Media crews remain outside his home, where a team of military doctors is monitoring his health.

Mr Mandela contracted tuberculosis in 1988 while in jail on Robben Island and also had a respiratory infection eight years ago.

Officials say despite Mr Mandela's condition in hospital, he joked with staff and visitors.

"His amazing positive attitude allows him to cope with the difficulties of old age with the greatest of grace," said military surgeon general Dr Vejay Ramlakan.

Mr Mandela retired from public life in 2004 and has made very few public appearances in recent years.

On Friday only a brief view of his head covered by a surgical cap was visible as he was wheeled into an ambulance.

The former president is also an iconic figure beyond South Africa and officials said that his office had received more than 10,000 messages of support, including from US President Barack Obama.

Billy Bragg

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

www.billybragg.co.uk/