Some say that, in London, the asphalt remembers. If so, then this grey, gritty, traffic-light-locked junction, where Albany Road spills onto the Old Kent Road’s dual-carriageway roar, has much to reflect on.

The Old Kent Road. A childhood memory, Monopoly’s mean streets, just past Go. And old indeed: Watling Street, the Romans’ road to Canterbury, and on to Dover.

On the one side here, the open urban ground of Burgess park. On the other, the domed and gabled red-brick bulk of a corner block. Flats now: it’s been many things in recent years – an estate agent, a gallery, a Vietnamese restaurant. But unmistakable still: a high-Victorian London public house. I passed it often, its proud landmark sign high on the gantry—the Thomas a Beckett. A pub with a reputation….a history.

He had been here, they say. Two weeks before King Henry’s men split his skull in two in the holy cathedral sanctuary of Canterbury. There was a pond then, and a crossing of a marshy country stream. To the left the pull of London, to the right the open road. London’s tense clerics rode out to meet their archbishop here, to counsel conciliation with the king—to talk him back from the edge. To no avail.

From then on this was St. Thomas-a-Watering. A landmark. A boundary. A point of reference for every London traveller.

And forth we riden a litel more than paas

Unto the wateryng of Seint Thomas.

And there our host began his hors arreste

A first waypoint for Chaucer’s pilgrims; they drew lots here for who should go first and tell their tale that evening.

And still for Samuel Pepys two hundred and fifty years later, on his way to the dockyards at Deptford. ‘So to St. Thomas a Watering, and there stopped and drank.’

And when did the executions begin, here at the edge of London? On the gallows, across the traffic, on the flat and dusty Tesco car park. Soon enough it seems.

In time at least for the Lollards, in living memory of Becket’s passing. Free-thinkers. Sceptics of the Church: did bread truly turn to flesh? could only a priest forgive? Hanged not burned, a mercy given all that was to come later.

In time for traitors; not here the theatre of the Tower, but disembowelled and quartered nonetheless. And in time for generation after generation of the criminal classes of Surrey—South London. Thieves, footpads--and the Free Will Men, who had preyed on the rich highwayman’s pickings of the Canterbury Road.

The Thomas-a-Beckett went up in the 1860s, the name a hand-me-down they say, the latest incarnation in a long line of hostels and coaching houses.

The Sixties and Seventies were its heyday. When Beryl Cameron’s man, light-heavyweight Tommy Gibbons, died young, she found herself the landlady of his London boxing pub. ‘Blonde and done, always’, at thirty five she was to be the first woman to hold a British Boxing Board of Control promoter’s license. Visiting royalty—Mohammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Sugar Ray Leonard—all sparred in the gym upstairs.

Boxing journalist Steve Bunce writes:

She was treated like a queen by the fighters, fixers and gangsters downstairs… The dumbest man in South London hit Beryl one night, and Tony Lambrianou a known associate of the boxing twins, Reg and Ron Kray, went in search of the ex-boyfriend. “I went to shoot him, but I think he emigrated” Lambrianou said.

The story goes that he had indeed.

And how could it not be haunted. Joe Lucy, 1956’s thoroughly grounded British Welterweight Champion, would tell anyone who would listen of three whispering spectral nuns. When a punter downstairs at the bar scoffed at the story, his glass ‘flew apart in his hands’.

Today, if you are passing on foot—and there is little reason why you would be—you might notice a blue plaque.

Sir Henry Cooper, OBE KSG

British, European and Commonwealth Heavyweight Champion

Trained in the Gymnasium of the Thomas a Becket

Voted by the People

Henry Cooper, nimble under-sized heavyweight and part-time greengrocer, who in 1963 knocked down the young Ali. Local hero and national treasure. British boxing’s David Beckham, in an age before the money.

If the boxer’s name is unfamiliar—and, unless you are British and over sixty, it will be—then, as you picture him toiling away in sweat-soaked preparation for what will be his final fight, turn instead to the cash-strapped musicians tuning up in the spartan rehearsal space above. A band starting out; still to settle a line-up. Yet to land on a name.

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Lead singer: one David Bowie.

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Further reading:

Steve Bunce’s great piece on the legend of the Thomas-a-Beckett in Boxing News is well worth a read.

On a late summer’s day in 1538 Sir William Peniston, gentleman usher at the court of Henry VIII escorted a high-ranking foreign visitor to the cathedral at Canterbury. They were to visit the 350-year-old shrine of Thomas Becket, martyr of the struggle for the church’s supremacy over earthly royal power, one of the great wonders of the age, its treasures drawn from across Europe. As he reported:

She was not a little marveilled of the greater riches thereo,f….. and if she had not seen it, all the men in the wourlde could never make her believe it.

It was just nine days later that a train of officials, soldiers, wagons and workmen arrived at the same gates. Demanding entry, and deaf to protest, Thomas Cromwell’s commissioners set to work at once—the work of systematic demolition. It took a procession of twenty-six carts to carry away the treasures of the great shrine. As for the saintly bodily remains themselves – probably destroyed, and certainly never seen again.

For the Pope, long hesitant to finally close the door to reconciliation, this was to be the last step in the long path to the king’s excommunication—the day that swept away the last fictions of England’s relationship with Rome.

Today, a single low-set candle sits at the centre of a polished expanse of age-worn flags. A void, here at the cathedral’s very heart. An absence of the object the building has been staged around. A space still flanked by the grand royal tombs that once stood so close to Becket’s holy remains.

Early one morning, a few weeks ago in a grubby Southwark alley just off Borough High Street, we posed, eleven of us, for a mass selfie. A sign, high on the wall behind, declared this the site of the Tabard Inn: point of departure for Chaucer’s fourteenth-century pilgrims—and today for a group of twenty-something friends brought together by George Monaghan, my fellow substacker.

I have walked this path too – ten leisurely daytrips, most involving a country pub. Where we had the luxury of time, this group had all the benefits of youth, so this would be a more vigorous frontal assault: a hundred miles in just five days. Peeling off at Blackheath, I passed on my dog-eared copy of the Cicerone guide, wished them well, and strolled across the road to wait for the bus.

That morning, on the sunny heath, I thought again about what lay at the end of their journey: the cathedral with the hole in the middle.

It was Henry II himself who thrust Becket into the Archbishop’s chair. In electing him, the monks of Canterbury had bowed to brute power. Henry’s Chancellor, close companion and trusted advisor, he was not even yet in holy orders. But men change, and the cleric had proved to be anything but a compliant instrument of royal control.

‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest!’ the King had exclaimed after the latest act of priestly resistance. Or perhaps it was something longer and less resonant. Enough anyway for four of his knights to ride post haste to Canterbury, and strike Becket down—and to do so inside the cathedral itself. A grisly death: his brains splashed across the consecrated masonry.

At once, the miracles began. Not just in Canterbury--across the country. A leper cured, eyesight restored, a toddler emerging unscathed from beneath a collapsed wall. Every week more reports, every month further across the nation. The sprawling blooming of a national lay cult—passionate Christianity grafted onto superstition and sympathetic magic. By 1173, just three years after his death, the Church had declared Becket a saint.

By any measure, Henry had overreached, and now he must act out the humiliating public penance the Church demanded. Barefoot and dressed in woollen sackcloth, he walked three miles to the cathedral, his feet soon cut, his footsteps bloodied. Kneeling before Becket’s tomb he was thrashed by the monks—three hundred ritual lashes some say—and passed a night of vigil, alone in the crypt at the tomb side.

Many saw God’s hand still when, just months later, a great fire ravaged the old cathedral. Whatever its cause, the effect was devastating.

Buried, below ground level, Becket’s remains escaped the blaze, and the pilgrims continued to pour into the building’s ruined shell – for decades to come, a building site. Pressing their way down into the gloom and reverent chaos of the crypt, clambering on his simple tomb, they reached through its porthole-like apertures to touch the sacred sarcophagus inside.

Now surely the cathedral must rise again as a grander structure, one rebuilt around a magnificent centre fit for the national figure that Becket had become. A structure that could house the machinery that could impose order and control on his cult, could harness for the Church its full power – political and financial. But, one obstacle after another, the buildings remained stubbornly unfinished through decades of delay.

Every long term project needs a deadline. 1220 would be the fiftieth anniversary of Becket’s martyrdom—his jubilee, a milestone of great biblical weight. For Archbishop Stephen Langton, political to his fingertips, the moment was perfect. Just five years after his submission to his barons, the time of the Magna Carta, King John was dead, the country under the fragile rule of a nine-year-old boy king. England sorely needed unity and harmony. Now was the moment for a great occasion, resonant with symbolism, to ground the legitimacy of young King Henry—and in doing so to bind him, and all who came after him, ever closer to the Church.

The saint’s remains would process from the crypt to their grand shrine chapel, the stately ‘translation’ led by the young king himself. And on what day? In this time where symbols were everything, the ceremony would fall on the anniversary of the burial of his grandfather, Henry II; Henry III continuing the chain of the veneration of the blessed saint by the legitimate Kings of England. How right, now, that the ceremony had waited through those long years of delay for this most auspicious of moments; God’s plan was ever clearer.

The ceremony, more lavish still than Henry’s Westminster coronation six months earlier, took thirty years to pay off, they say. The monks carried the relics aloft in a richly decorated casket, to take its place in the magnificent new Trinity Chapel beyond the choir. The top half of his severed skull had a reliquary all of its own in the new Corona Chapel, directly to its East.

The realm had been healed, Langton told England’s mighty assembled before him, through the victory of Becket’s martyrdom, and the royal veneration that had followed. 7 July was to be an annual feast day – the Feast of the Translation of St. Thomas’ - a major date in the Church calendar, with a text to be read every year and from every village pulpit.

Just as this cornerstone joined two walls… into one, thus the glorious martyr, through his death, made kingship and priesthood….. harmonise into one’

What did this wonderful shrine look like? Nobody knows with any certainty. But from the reports of those who saw it, the shrines across Europe whose design it inspired, and the crude depictions of pilgrim’s badges and other tourist tat, we have a good idea. ‘Richly adorned with gold and precious stones’ its structure stood on a large rose marble base maybe seven foot high, seven foot long, and three foot wide. Niches carved into the stonework brought the wealthy and powerful that bit closer in their prayer—with shelves at hand to display their fresh offerings. The relics themselves lay in an iron bound wooden chest, itself covered by another richly-worked bejewelled case. Above the whole was a splendid canopy, suspended by pulleys, raised or lowered by the monks as occasion, and the rank of their visitors, demanded.

Becket’s iconography of red and white would have dominated: the lily and the rose; the virgin’s milk and the blood of Christ; also the grey matter and the martyr’s blood mixed on the cathedral floor, represented grimly but purposefully in the marbling of the stone at its base. The visually stunning array of gems included a famous ruby -- the Regale – an offering they said from Louis VII. Secured to the whole were the lavish donations of generations of rich and powerful pilgrims: jewelled barnacles on a golden boat.

There can come a point where an allusion is enough, and a name is no longer necessary. So it was for Chaucer in the set up for his Canterbury Tales.

And specially, from every shires ende of Engelond

To Canterbury they wende

The hooly blissful martir for to seke

That hem hath hopen whan that they were seeke.

Gone now were the chaotic days of the crypt. How much you got to see, indeed whether you had access to the shrine itself at all, depended on who you were. Mysterious and carefully lit in its dark surroundings, for those who did witness it the impact of the full glory of the treasures was memorable indeed.

The materials - gold and precious stones – clothe the object in light and…manifest the transcendent, invisible and all-powerful…

Chaucer’s time was Canterbury’s heyday. Becket’s jubilees - every fifty years – continued to be vast events, drawing crowds they say of maybe a hundred thousand, huge numbers in a country of just a few million with travel so challenging.

Perhaps the last great hurrah came in 1470 – the last of the great jubilee celebrations. As the fifteenth century gave way to the sixteenth, the pull of the old relic shrines was beginning to fade – their treasuries long bloated with offerings of the rich, the public tiring of ever more blatant abuse at the hands of their monastic stewards, and the secondary relics around the shrines stretched credulity ever further.

Then the Reformation: a cold wind blowing across the North of Europe for this world of cults, relics, and the priestly control of wonder. And finally, to that September day in 1538.

When his moment came, Cromwell was every bit as thorough as Langton had been centuries before him. The great feast day was struck from the Church calendar. Parish priests must preach not a word on Becket – no longer a saint, but a traitor to his royal master. Every trace of him must go too from orders of service and church papers. In a world where dissent could be deadly, it was as if the cult of Becket – for so long England’s de facto patron saint -- had never been.

Today the name of Canterbury first brings to mind, not Becket, but Chaucer and the Wife of Bath. Of course he is still to be found in the cathedral – the man though, not the phenomenon. A martyr now, not a saint - quietly rehabilitated in some twentieth-century tidying of Church of England orthodoxy. In the transept, where he died, three stark modernist blades descend on a small altar.

And at the Cathedral’s very heart, a few words of discreet signage tell those who choose to pause, and bend to read, that, once, there was a shrine here.

Thomas Cromwell certainly knew his craft.

Nightfall on the shores of Persia. Just north of the Isle of Ken. (Long since renamed as Kharg Island, much in recent news as Iran’s offshore oil hub.)

Under a full moon, a straggling group in tattered clothing ‘crawls from rock to rock, whilst continual cries of the jackals and other animals’ sound out around them. To keep the hidden creatures at bay, the dozen men sing – tunelessly roar—

‘Rule Britannia! Britannia, rules the waves! Britons never never shall be slaves’.

Words ‘never heard before in these deserted and inhospitable regions’.

An Authentic Narrative of the Late Fortunate Escape of Mr. R.W. Loane tells the tale of their ill-fated odyssey: a small band of men, lost in foreign lands, struggling to find their way home. The author: one Roland Walpole Loane: Anglo-Irish adventurer from Belfast—trader, seaman and teller of tales.

It was an ironic choice of song. First mate on the Indian-built Shrewsbury, Loane had lost two ships within days of each other– the Shrewsbury to a French privateer, the other soon afterwards to a marauding Arab dhow. Held for weeks in a Qawasim encampment on the shores of what is now the United Arab Emirates, he and his companions had been certain they were destined for slavery.

They say every action adventure needs a MacGuffin: an object, a device, that gives a through line and keeps the action moving. For a scriptwriter, it matters little what it is. In real life, of course, it sits at the root of everything. Here it is an East India Company mail packet: the monthly despatches for London. Waterproofed and weighted, it had been thrown thrown overboard to escape enemy hands as the same privateer had borne down on the EIC’s Fly. Everything that came afterwards followed from that. Nothing mattered more to the far flung British empire than its lines of communication with London.

But more of that anon.

Put ashore at Bushehr by the French Captain La Meme – ‘restoring me in the most polite and pleasing manner, every article of my private property, not excepting even my nautical books and instruments’ – Loane fell in with a Mr. Flower, a passenger on the Fly, and Captain Youl of the Nancy, a third ship that had suffered at the hands of the prolific privateer.

Flower had taken precise bearings, he said, at the moment of the Fly’s capture: he knew the exact location of the lost mail packet. Why not sail to the site, recover the mail packet from the seabed, and return it to Bombay. Surely they could expect a generous reward. All expenses and rewards, the men agreed, would be shared equally.

Purchasing a Bugala – a local vessel, sufficient for their purposes – they quickly fitted it out, and organised the construction of a ‘creeper….of a form we thought best adapted for our purpose’: a grappling device to trawl the seabed for the lost packet. A week later the ship was on its way, crewed by Simms and Parnell, two fellow Europeans, and eleven Lascars, as Indian Ocean seamen were then known.

A four-day voyage took them back to the site. But trawling the seabed for the lost packet, so simple in theory, proved anything but straightforward in practice. Finally, triumph! After three days of ‘indefatigable employment’ with ‘many vexations and disappointments’, the creeper pulled the dripping packet from the sea.

But just two days into their onward journey, the expedition was to come to an abrupt end. Two large dhows, seen in the distance, suddenly changed course and swept towards them. The Qawasim – ‘Joe Haseem’ as Loane called them, with the eternal British talent for mangling other languages: the formidable seafaring tribe who had come to dominate the Hormuz straits and surrounding waters. Capture again.

It was soon clear that there was no prospect of a ransom, but perhaps they could be sold. A passing slave trader took the ship’s carpenter. A day or two later, the cook disappeared. Who would be next?

Relief came from the stern intervention of a Wahhabi chieftain. Loosely allied to the Qawasim, but altogether more powerful, the Wahhabi were challenging Ottoman control across the region. Now set on cultivating links with the British Resident at the East India Company’s factory at Basra this Wahhabi leader had no intention of allowing mistreatment of these British seamen to undermine his efforts.

Taken on Wahhabi orders to the friendly and relatively safe Isle of Ken, events were immediately overtaken by another, larger, Qasimi raiding party bursting onto the scene, plundering the island and nearby coastal settlements. Hiding out in the hills for days, they eventually found passage to the mainland and started to make their way slowly up the coast, slogging from one settlement to the next in search of a boat that might take them to Bushehr.

Loane’s account is full of improbable colour. Time and time again, it is his skill, leadership and cunning that makes the difference.

His crew are savagely attacked by the boarding Qasimi ‘pirates’, cutting and slashing without mercy or quarter – but somehow all survive without severe injury. For him, every Arab leader they encounter is sly, guileful and self-serving. Except of course their noble Wahhabi liberator: when their captor asked in submissive tones whether he could perhaps have some payment for the release ‘the stranger’s eyes flashed with indignation and anger; he arose from his seat and in the most impressive manner demanded…our freedom’.

Determined to prove his value to Qasimi captors, Loane pretends to be a doctor and is called upon to treat the local Sheik’s eye complaint. When his cure fails, he explains it is for lack of proper medicines and resorts instead to bleeding; fortuitously, the patient recovers. Weakened from heat, thirst and hunger after days trapped in hiding on Kharg, the party venture out at night, and stumble on a cabin in the hills, deserted in the chaos, feasting on unripe figs and suckling on a pair of unmilked nanny goats.

Repeatedly, promises by local sheiks that a boat will come end in disappointment, and suspicions grow of dark motives. The reality may have been a simpler one of language barriers, miscommunication and plain disinterest.

At every stage there is business to be done with the MacGuffin. Repeatedly, the mail packet is confiscated, bargained for, searched, repacked; it is buried for safety and hauled to the surface, it’s waterlogged contents spread are across a beach to dry, and regathered as the dew begins to fall.

Finally, the party reached Nakiloo, a settlement close to the island of Busheab (today, Lavan) where the Sheikh had grown rich from the plunder of EIC ships wrecked on the shores of Lavan. Their luck seemed to have turned. Having ignored all demands to return his loot, he was keen, if it could be done with little effort, to regain at least some sort of a balancing credit with the British.

The Lascars were to be sent by dhow to safety in Muscat, while the Europeans were taken to the island for a warm welcome from the sheik. Fresh clothes appeared—and a barber to shave their ‘immense beards’.

But then fever struck.

With Bushehr and medical attention just twenty four hours away, a vessel was at their disposal; but that meant an overnight voyage in an open boat. Persuading themselves that the first effects of their illness were waning, they embarked on what would prove to be a terrible voyage.

Loane’s fever returns. Youl at first nursing him, goes down himself; now all five are sick. Simms, is in a terrible state – in violent spasm, his extremities cold already. Black clouds gather, a heavy squall, then as evening falls, thunder, lightning and a night of torrential rain. At four in the morning Youl is dead. At nine, Simms too.

Then finally they are there.

Flower, Loane and Parnell were carried from the boat into the East India Company factory. A week later, with Parnell still not out of danger, Loane at least was well enough to board an EIC ship for Bombay. He arrived on the fifth of February, four months after the start of his ordeal, ‘and on the same day had the honor of delivering to the Honorable Jonathan Duncan, The Honorable Company’s Packet, which had cost us so dear in recovering from oblivion’.

The bones of the story are firm: La Meme’s raid happened; the dates for the Qawasim raid fit; compensation was paid to the families of the Lascars dead or missing along the way. And the EIC’s own records show that Flower and Loane collected their rewards: 4,000 rupees to Flower – about £400 – maybe a hundred times that in today’s money; for Loane, half that sum. Serious money indeed, for what they had set off hoping would have been the work of a few weeks.

But standing back from this improbable survival story, what was the bigger picture?

British interest in the Gulf was, above all else, about a communications channel. Trading opportunities in the region were nice to have, but strictly secondary. This was the longstanding overland route to London. From Bombay to the EIC’s base at Bushehr midway up the Persian side of the Gulf, then on to Basra at its northernmost end. From there to the Ottoman Empire’s well-oiled courier system – upriver to Baghdad, on overland to Aleppo, and across the Mediterranean to Malta, perhaps Lisbon, and home.

The route was not only risky but expensive – as much as £800 for the regular monthly packet. But it was fast. If all went well, despatches could be in London in three months. The far more dependable route around the Cape would take six. For the most important and sensitive despatches such delay was simply not an option.

Conditions had been becoming ever more difficult. Beyond the increasing maritime threats in the Gulf, the overland routes north of Basra had been disrupted too by the fallout of Wahhabi insurrection. Soon, this ‘express’ traffic would flow up the Red Sea and overland to Alexandria. But for the British this promising new route had been closed by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and chaos that continued after his departure, and was only now once again becoming an option.

A conundrum lies at the centre of this tale. The rescue of the mail packet makes no sense. Why retrieve lost despatches, lying on the seabed safe from enemy hands, just to carry them to their point of origin? The usual duplicates would already have been well on their way round the slower safer route around the Cape. Why then such confidence – amply justified – that the effort would be handsomely rewarded?

In time of war, nothing was more important than fast secure communications.

When the Treaty of Amiens peace collapsed in 1803, just a year before Loane’s misadventures, British forces got word of the new war, before their French enemies, and marched substantially unopposed into the French enclave of Pondicherry.

The London mail then was no matter for half measures or nitpicking logic. The packet service was not only strategically critical, it had become iconic. Every effort to protect and preserve it was something to be recognised and celebrated.

Even when misguided.

What then of Loane?

For five years, just the odd glimpse of his picaresque career in the imperial record: another ship, another capture; a spell on French-ruled Mauritius. Then mysteriously he arrives in Hobart, a well-heeled Tasmania merchant.

But some things stay constant in a man’s nature. ‘Not a man in the colony’ his Lieutenant-Governor would later write ‘would rely …upon his word or engagement for the most trifling thing’.

Further Reading:

The British Library have published a paperback reprint of Loane’s book in their Travel Books series:

Authentic Narrative of the Fortunate Escape of Mr. R. W. L., Who, with Captain R. Youl, M. J. Flower, and Eleven Natives, Was Captured by the Aza Arabs in the Persian Gulph : Also an Account of Their Journey on Foot Up the Persian Coast

A ripping yarn.

If you want a wider picture on power, politics and unrest in the Gulf in this period, I would recommend ‘In the Persian Gulf: Tangles Empires, States and Mariners’ in Sujit Sivasundaram’s Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire - which is where I first came across Loane’s story.

I found it in an Oxfam bookshop. A few years back, just after the end of lockdown. ‘Human Rights’, a 1949 volume, still in its tattered dust jacket.

It is no exaggeration to say that the question of human rights is of burning importance to every man, woman and child in the world, whether they know it or not….Every serious student of the social development of man should read this book.

15s net

A string of earnest essays, penned by the great thinkers of the day. Their theme, the momentous question of how best to frame the first international statement of human rights. Papers for a UNESCO symposium, to lay the philosophical ground for the politicians who were to settle 1948’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All now, somewhat after the event, lightly polished for a wider public.

To begin, an editor’s gloss on what follows from his peers: many valuable views, and a wide range of perspectives, but on balance we agree ‘as long as no one asks us why’. A positive spin on a series of cautious, pensive and often sceptical contributions. Decidedly lukewarm intellectual underpinning on the eve of the creation of this cornerstone of the late twentieth-century’s international order.

But then next, before the rest, in pride of place, Mahatma Gandhi. Jarring and unexpected. Just half a page. The careful stipulations of an academic brief cast firmly aside.

Bhangi Colony

New Delhi

May 25th, 1947

Dear Dr. Julian Huxley

As I am constantly on the move, I never get my post in time. But for your letter to Pandit Nehru in which you referred to your letter to me, I might have missed your letter. But I see that you have given your addressees ample time to enable them to give their replies. I am writing this in a moving train. It will be typed tomorrow in Delhi.

I am afraid I can’t give you anything approaching your minimum [wordcount]. That I have no time for the effort is true enough. But what is truer is that I am a poor reader of literature past or present much as I should like to read some of its gems. Living a stormy life since my early youth, I had no leisure to do the necessary reading.

I learnt from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done. Thus the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. From this one fundamental statement, perhaps its easy enough to define the duties of Man and Woman and correlate every right to some corresponding duty to be first performed. Every other right can be shown to be a usurpation hardly worth fighting for.

Yours sincerely

M.K. Gandhi

So, stripping away the folksy veneer, he had just two things to say. The project is incoherent: how can rights stand without obligations? In any event, he had no time for such abstractions, so disconnected from the daily tumult of Indian politics. The tone: perhaps polite; certainly dismissive.

How can this moral icon of the twentieth century be keeping his distance from the creation of this shibboleth of progressive politics?

Then, leafing through the book, a yellowing clipping, carefully folded, fell from among its pages.

Inked across it in messy block capitals, THE OBSERVER 12/12/82, blotting through to the flip side—the latest twists to a messy tussle for editorial control of a dimly-remembered left-wing journal.

On the front, a World Map. A headline: WHY ONLY FEW ARE FREE.

Black is the dominant shade of this map of world freedom, based on an annual survey by the American research group Freedom House.

White for ‘Free’ in the infographic above: The US, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, India, Japan. Hatched for ‘Partly Free’: Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, a few others. Russia, China, the Middle East and most of Africa, a sea of Black: ‘Not Free’.

Last Friday, human rights campaigners round the world marked International Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948.

In the enthusiasm of the UN’s early days this call for a new world order was adopted by 48 votes to nil, with eight abstentions. Significantly, the eight included the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, South Africa and Saudi Arabia – all black spots on this year’s freedom.

From where we stand, we cannot help but read history backwards. We smooth it to straight lines that were never there. Today Human Rights stands at the heart of the United Nations’ moral architecture, and this first Universal Declaration is the root stock of all that came later.

But at the end of the Forties, Leaders like Gandhi cared about one thing above all: their people’s right to self-determination – then still nowhere to be seen in the Human Rights project.

Indeed, the traffic was moving in the opposite direction. The Great Powers’ sweeping wartime rhetoric of national freedoms was being walked back; building independent states from the ruins of old empires and new invasions for the peoples of Eastern Europe was one thing. Surely there had been no need to spell out that this could not apply to the far flung empires of Britain, France and the Netherlands, now being busily patched together again after the dislocations of wartime.

Talk of new concepts of individual rights seemed a distraction; even perhaps a diversionary sleight of hand. And who could truly be confident that these rights too would not prove to be reserved for the people of the First World?

Who indeed.

Certainly nobody who heard the Belgian speaker at one 1950 UN meeting. Surely these human rights, he declared, could not be meant for the likes of his country’s colonial subjects in the Congo :

‘[They] presupposed a high degree of civilisation, [and] were often incompatible with the ideas of peoples who had not yet reached a high degree of development. By imposing those rules on them at once, one ran the risk of destroying the very basis of their society.’

The French and American delegations saw strengths in what he said.

But for Human Rights Law, the journey to something more truly universal had begun. A long and grinding process of committee negotiation, debate, and painfully slow national ratification, that would run through to the Seventies.

Over its life, the powerful rhetoric of Human Rights has been a sail for many boats.

As more countries gained independence, and with it their place at the UN, the increased power of the new bloc vote brought changes that placed self-determination at the very heart of Human Rights Law. In time it became a powerful engine for anticolonialism.

Later, it was to be a political yardstick. One calibrated to the liberal values of the West. Its comparisons to be brandished through the dog days of the Cold War.

Today, the wheel has turned again. We see it no longer as a rescuer of peoples from the grip of empires, but as a bulwark for the individual against the power of the state. A bulwark suddenly, it seems, a little past the zenith of its strength.

How will we see things in another thirty years?

What Gandhi would have made of all of this, we can never know. One evening just eight months after his letter had been typed up and dispatched to Huxley, he set off with his grand-nieces for an evening walk to their prayers. A man approached, produced a pistol from his coat, and shot him three times in the chest. His speeches – it seemed – had shown an excess of concern for the Human Rights of his country’s Muslim minority.

America’s ambitions for Greenland are once again all over the news.

In 1915, the United States let Denmark know of its intentions towards a different Danish territory — what is now the US Virgin Islands.

The tone was very different. The substance rather less so.

Here is how Maurice Egan, the urbane US Ambassador to Copenhagen, remembered the discreet dinner with the Danish Foreign Minister where he started the conversation.

“You would never pay the price”.

“Excellency”, I said, “this is not a commercial transaction... I know that my country is as rich as it is generous. It is dealing with a small nation of similar principles to its own, and with an equal pride. Unless the price is preposterous...I shall not object. My Government does not wish to haggle. And I am sure that you will not force me to do so by demanding an absurd price. You would not wish to shock a people prepared to be generous.”

De Scavenius looked thoughtfully, pencil in hand, at a slip of paper. While he wrote I tried to feel like a man to whom a billion was of no importance.

He pushed the slip towards me, and I read:

- $30 million dollars, expressed in Danish crowns.

“The price is dazzling, I know.”

But then Egan was a novelist long before he was a diplomat.

In the States though, a mirror conversation between Secretary of State Robert Lansing and Egan’s opposite number, Constantin Brun, made things altogether clearer. Brun asked whether ‘the United States would feel it necessary to take the islands if Denmark decided not to sell’. Lansing’s rather drier notes record his response:

I had not considered this action to be necessary as I hoped we would get them by formal negotiation alone, but that I could conceive of circumstances which would compel such action on our part.

The islands, particularly St. Thomas — ‘the Gibraltar of the Caribbean’ with its great natural harbour — were in a zone of sudden strategic importance: not the Arctic, but the approaches to the new Panama canal, gateway to the Pacific.

A foreign power had established a worrying presence there — not Russia or China of course, but Germany. And with war under way in Europe, neutral and defenceless little Denmark was full of rumours that Germany might annex it at any time. Of course the islands would be claimed to boot. With the United States poised to enter the war on the other side, the door must be firmly closed on any prospect of Germany entering the American back yard.

With an offer on the table that seemed, on several levels, to be one the Danes could not refuse, talks began in earnest. With a little haggling, the price came down a touch, and on 31 March 1917 sovereignty duly passed, with pomp, circumstance, and the payment of $25 million in gold coin.

All property rights of the islands’ wealthy landowners were to be protected in full from any change in law under US ownership. Altogether less attention was paid to the rights of the 25,000 islanders.

When the Danish delegation proposed that the sale should be subject to a local vote, so that the islanders could decide on their own future, the Americans politely but firmly rejected the idea. This was a state-to-state matter, and giving the Caribbean islanders a say would set a most unfortunate precedent.

The 25,000 islanders, the great majority of them black, were to become US Nationals and subject to US laws: entitled to a passport, but with no constitutional rights whatsoever. For the next fourteen years they were to be governed not as a democracy, but under the control of the United States Navy.

Strip away the polish of old world courtesies and diplomatic discretion, and the substance of Donald Trump’s pressure on Greenland might not have seemed unfamiliar to his predecessor Woodrow Wilson. Although he would probably have been surprised at the talk of America making payments to underprivileged islanders.

But then, this was a hundred years ago.

A lot has happened since.

In the end, all the talk beforehand of a US naval base at St. Thomas came to nothing. It proved to be enough to have simply excluded others. But today this Caribbean backwater has finally gained the relevance to US political life that it has lacked since the end of the First World War. And in a way nobody could have predicted.

Somewhere on its fringes lies the tiny island of Little St. James. Eighty years after it had become US territory it was to be purchased by a mysterious American financier.

One Jeffrey Epstein.

For a British general to get to be played by a bankable film star, something generally has to have gone very well or very badly. Success at Waterloo brought us Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington. On the other side of the ledger, Khartoum features Charlton Heston as General Gordon — alongside the disturbing blackface casting of Laurence Olivier as the Mahdi. There’s a bumper crop from World War II in A Bridge Too Far, but otherwise the pickings are thin.

How then has Sir Hudson Lowe, a man whose rise came slowly over long dull years spent garrisoning small islands, punctuated sporadically by a series of long-forgotten Mediterranean campaigns, come to have a filmography that includes Richard E. Grant, Ralph Richardson, and no less a figure than Orson Welles?

He was on the big screen for one reason only: the task assigned to him in 1815. A role as junior partner in one of the great dramatic set-ups: the keeper of an Eagle in a Cage, to borrow the title of one of the films. Lowe was to be Napoleon’s jailer.

From the time of their birth, just a few weeks apart in the summer of 1769, the two men’s lives seem to have been braided together by a perverse fate. Both grew up on the margins of privilege, Napoleon a scion of minor nobility in an impoverished backwater, Lowe the son of a British army doctor, his childhood spent trailing after his father’s regiment. Both were sent away at an early age, entering officer corps where the fast track to advancement was dominated by their social betters.

Their paths almost crossed in 1794, both spending part of the year in the Corsican city of Ajaccio. For Napoleon, home from the French army with permission to get involved in Corsican affairs, this was the year of banishment — his family judged too close to the French colonial power as the wheel of Corsica’s turbulent politics turned again. Just a few months later that summer, Lowe was to arrive in town with the British forces supporting the new regime. Thereafter their lives took very different courses; that is, until they were finally brought together in St. Helena.

So just who was this man chosen for such a role?

Sparely built, of medium height, his reddish-fair hair set above a prominent brow, Lowe was a bustling figure with a rapid gait: the kind of officer who always projected firmness and energy, if no suggestion of either charm or flair.

Brought up in a series of army bases, mostly in the West Indies, he joined the militia from school. Then came a commission in his father’s regiment as an Ensign, grinding out four years of garrison duty on Gibraltar.

For Napoleon, all barriers to his brilliant ascent evaporated as the turmoil of the revolution reached the army. But for Lowe, the status quo prevailed. Lacking connections or a patron, his only path upwards would be through consistent usefulness: reliability and dogged competence. By the time the paths of the twenty-four-year-olds so nearly crossed in Corsica, Lowe was a newly promoted Lieutenant, while Bonaparte was already a Brigadier-General.

Lowe’s higher-born brother officers thought him abrupt, taciturn and lacking in all the social graces. But beneath that surface, he was a cultured man of high intelligence. Granted eighteen months of leave before promotion to Lieutenant, he chose to spend his time not back in England, but travelling in the Mediterranean and learning French and Italian.

In a monolingual army, his flair for languages took his career on an unusual course.

Lowe was given command of a ragtag light infantry unit of émigré Corsicans, remnants of the short-lived regime that had cast the Bonapartes out of the island a few years before. (Given Napoleon’s personal history, this was a group he loathed and despised above all others.) Lowe licked them into shape, and, led them—now equipped with new uniforms and modern rifles—when they took part in the British campaign against the French forces in Egypt. Distinguishing themselves in battle, they became the Royal Corsican Rangers

With his force soon bolstered by recruits from Sicily, Naples and Sardinia, long years followed in Southern Italy, Portugal and a long list of islands: Menorca, Capri, and Cephalonia among others.

In 1813, finally back in England, now a Colonel, he was quickly despatched on another international assignment. After so many years of obscure island postings and forgotten campaigns, he was to be a British liaison and intelligence officer attached to the staff of Marshal Blucher. The Prussians took to this briskly efficient British officer; a personally brave man of strong insight, who wasted few words. He followed the general staff through a dozen battles as the campaign moved Napoleon’s forces, weakened by their disastrous retreat from Moscow, inexorably towards defeat.

Praised for his role and decorated by the Prussian government, he was allowed the honour of bearing the first news of Napoleon’s 1814 abdication to London. On his return he was knighted and achieved his long-held dream of promotion to Major-General.

Of course, as it turned out, the abdication was not to be the end of the story. All believed Napoleon was a broken man, and a spent force politically. He had been exiled to Elba, not as a prisoner, but as sovereign of the island and its twelve thousand inhabitants, with a small court, and a personal guard of four hundred under his command. With the island just six miles off the coast of Tuscany, it was small wonder that he had been able to leave the island with his force more or less at will. All of Europe had paid the price in the Hundred Days that followed as he succeeded in rallying the French army and establishing a new government in Paris, before his final defeat at Waterloo.

When Napoleon finally surrendered to the British authorities, they would not make the same mistake again. This time Napoleon would be despatched to St. Helena, a small island twelve hundred miles out in the mid-Atlantic, almost halfway between Africa and South America. And there should be no doubt now that he was there as a prisoner. He would be allowed to take only a small circle into exile with him: just a couple of dozen of his closest followers. Facilities on the island would be requisitioned from the East India Company, whose colony it was. The British garrison, already a thousand or so, would be reinforced to double that number, and the island would be protected by a Ship of the Line and a flotilla of smaller boats.

This time there would be no confusion about Bonaparte’s captive status. He would be confined to the island, housed in an isolated, damp and draughty house high up on the island’s bleak and windswept plateau, well away from Jonestown in its sheltered valley location. Any excursions beyond a perimeter would need to be escorted by a British officer. Correspondence in and out would be censored and filtered, as would news arriving in the weeks-old newspapers. In no circumstances was the imperial title he claimed to be acknowledged—he must be addressed only as General. Arrangements on Elba had been farcically lax. Now, understandably, it was time for overkill.

But who should take command? This was a posting that called for someone who could be relied on totally, in one of the most isolated locations in the world, to follow his orders to the letter. Someone impervious to the charms and wiles of their charismatic prisoner. Someone who understood the defence of islands from surprise attack. So much better, too, if they could communicate with the prisoner and his circle in their own language. Perhaps above all, it needed someone who was prepared to isolate themselves from society to spend years on end on St. Helena.

Come the hour, come the man. The new Governor of St. Helena was to be Sir Hudson Lowe. Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War, wrote: ‘I do not believe we could have found a fitter person of his rank in the army willing to accept a situation of so much confinement, responsibility and exclusion from society’.

Extraordinarily, across the six years of exile, the two men were only to meet six times, both unbending in their imposition of and resistance to the strict conditions of Bonaparte’s imprisonment. It was a stark contrast to Napoleon’s warm exchanges with the island’s previous Governor, the East India Company’s urbane Colonel Wilks, who had remained in post for a few months pending Lowe’s arrival.

It was Lowe’s great misfortune that his term of office was to coincide with the flowering of the great salon of Whig politics and romanticism at Holland House. With the ideas of Byron and the Lake poets in the air, Napoleon himself was a great romantic figure—a force of nature, who had risen to great heights through personal greatness, now brought low by pettifogging, abusive and inflexible process: indeed, a caged eagle.

Every such tale requires a villain. When Barry O’Meara, the Irish naval surgeon who had served as Napoleon’s doctor on the island, published a sensational memoir accusing him of mistreating his prisoner, Lowe — thousands of miles away, with no means of response — was cast firmly into a role that seemed to his detractors to fit him perfectly. With the Whig machine intent on making political capital out of Napoleon’s treatment by the Tory government, the story was set to run and run.

Napoleon died in 1821, his household dispersed and St. Helena set about a return to its normal life as an East India Company staging post for passages to India. The naval guard dispersed, the garrison scaled back to its normal size. It was time for Lowe to return to England.

Back in London, views on his term of office were by now all too firmly set. The Duke of Wellington — who had briefly had Lowe under his command, and preferred his officers to have a certain savoir-faire — wrote privately that he had been ‘a very bad choice; he was a man wanting in education and judgment. He was a stupid man. He knew nothing at all of the world, and like all men who knew nothing of the world, he was suspicious and jealous.’

His task completed, Lowe had every reason to expect the same pension that his predecessors had received for far less demanding service on the island. But ministers quietly shelved the idea, seeing the notoriety of their faithful servant as a political embarrassment, with little prospect of obtaining the normal routine parliamentary approvals.

Over the years, defenders of Lowe’s reputation have appeared, and a more balanced view of him has emerged — a man unfairly stigmatised for following explicit Government orders: in many ways a victim himself.

And yet. Sometimes it’s the small stuff that is the most truly revealing.

Preparing for his departure to London, Lowe stopped by at the storeroom where the furnishings and fittings from Napoleon’s home were being prepared for auction. He set aside a few items as memorabilia for himself, for delivery to England: pride of place was the table at which Bonaparte had sat in his library to write.

When he finally got word that the goods were available for collection at an East India Company warehouse, he made his way there to inspect them, only to find that the library table had been substituted for another piece entirely.

The British Library holds three large bound volumes of papers covering the resulting dispute between him and General Walker, the East India Company official who had taken over from him as Governor.

Frustration at the early responses from Walker’s officials turned to fury when he learned that ‘his table’ now had pride of place in his successor’s study. Unable to get his table restored to him, Lowe quickly escalated to accusations of bad faith. Bad faith on the part of officials, then by Walker, and in the end even by the East India Company’s Court —Board in modern terms. Walker in his turn reacted in kind, grasping at every possible argument to hold the cherished table back.

Absurdly, matters finally reached the point where Lowe insisted that the minister’s officials raise it directly with EIC Court. Their response contained all he could have wished for.

Although the Court think that at the time that General Walker made a selection from the articles for his own use, he was ignorant of their having been reserved for Sir Hudson Lowe, it appears to be clearly established …that the claim… was [later] made known to General Walker.. It is a matter of concern to the Court that General Walker did not at once admit Sir Hudson Lowe’s claim.

The Court propose to communicate this sentiment to the St. Helena Government and at the same time to express the regret with which the Court have observed that…he did not exercise sufficient caution in the statements which he has advanced and had adopted a mode of expression altogether unsuited to official correspondence.

But then:

The Court lament that Sir Hudson Lowe should have pursued an equally objectionable course – they are persuaded that many passages in [his notes] which accompany your letter…will be considered by Earl Bathurst as entitled to animadversions quite as severe as those which the conduct of General Walker has appeared to call for.

Lord Curzon, returning from his term as Viceroy of India eighty years later, leafed through the correspondence files to pass the time during a stopover at the island. His verdict seems a fair one — on this, and on so much else that had gone before:

Just as in the larger controversy over Napoleon himself, Sir Hudson Lowe was fundamentally in the right. At the same time he had the knack of doing the right thing in a very clumsy way. Even when he was right, as he usually was, he succeeded in making people annoyed that he was not wrong.

Except it did happen; and in the most sensational circumstances. And outside the island where these events occurred, somehow, it has more or less disappeared from public memory.

On the eighth of May 1811, on the island of Tortola, Arthur Hodge, a white planter, a gentleman, and a longstanding member of the island Council, was hanged for the murder of Prosper, a young enslaved man – executed publicly in front of a large and enthusiastic crowd, many of them black.

His conviction turned on the eye-witness account of Pereen Georges a formerly enslaved woman of colour. Prosper, she said, had come to her asking for money to pay the outrageous price of a shilling that Hodge had demanded as payment for his having taken a windfall mango. She gave him sixpence, but that wasn’t enough, and Hodge had had him flogged for the best part of an hour.

He would be beaten the next day, Hodge told him, unless he came up with the money. Of course he had no means of payment, and next day the punishment was repeated.

Dragged away afterwards and placed in irons, he had managed to crawl away, but only as far as his living quarters, where he died alone. His body was found days later, only revealed by the stench of decomposition.

After a trial that ran all day and right through the following night, a bleary-eyed all-white jury of his planter peers were unanimous in their verdict: Guilty.

Just in case of an acquittal, the prosecution had held indictments for four other murders in reserve.

Spend time with the papers, and any simple story lines quickly dissolve into a messy story of violence, corruption and tragedy. The trial, for crimes long known across the island, came not from any search for justice, but from a grapple for advantage in a vicious factional dispute among the white elite.

Nor should we confuse this in any way with some kind of reckoning with racism.

After Hodge’s arrest, his lawyer—the senior King’s Counsel on the island—applied for his bail, arguing in court that ‘it was no greater offense in law to kill him… than it would be to kill his dog’.

Though finding him guilty as charged, and knowing him to be a serial killer, the majority of the jurors still lent their support to an appeal for clemency.

So high was feeling running that the governor felt the need to place the island under martial law. A British frigate stood in the bay throughout the trial, a detachment of marines placed at the courthouse and the prison, to guard against the threat of Hodge’s supporters taking matters into their own hands.

Far away from the West Indies, the British papers were full of the story. A book-length transcript of the trial was published in England, and later in the United States, complete with sensational and shocking details of Hodge’s crimes.

How could a story such as this come to be forgotten?

Perhaps what gets remembered in the long term is not so much the events themselves, but the stories we tell about them. Certainly, public memory requires a narrator. As the abolition debate raged in the decades that followed, who was that narrator to be?

Not of course the West Indian lobby, bent on pressing their arguments that concerns for the welfare of the enslaved were exaggerated and out of date.

But nor did the story entirely suit the abolitionists. Hodge was a psychopathic monster, but the colony had held him to account for his crimes. Why focus on a case, however grim, where the West Indian system had actually brought a killer to justice. Why indeed, when so many well-documented atrocities had gone entirely unpunished.

One place of course where the trial would never be forgotten was Tortola itself. Whatever the tangled roots of this deeply flawed process, on this little island held under the fragile rule of a tiny white elite, things would never be quite the same again.

A hundred years and more later, an American traveller asked an aging resident sitting on a street bench what the trial meant to him. ‘In slavery days’, he said,’ a black man’s life counted for nothing. But after the time of Hodge, a black man’s life counted the same as a white man.’

The trial continues to be a part of the national story of the British Virgin Islands today. Two years ago, when the BVI officially named a role of national heroes, Pereen Georges name stood proudly among them.

I am currently writing a book about the trial of Arthur Hodge, and I’ll be sharing more as my work progresses. I would particularly welcome comments, reflections, or questions—especially from readers with insights into Caribbean legal history, the region’s history of slavery, or the politics of memory.

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Everyone should have a book group, although you can overdo it: my wife has three, her life now a blur of monthly deadlines hurtling towards her. My approach is more modest: just the one group, four times a year. Always a history book— something with footnotes, but not too heavy to make it onto the shelves at Waterstones.

We got together again last week. This time it was Roger Knight’s Britain Against Napoleon, a five hundred page doorstep about how Britain organised nationally to defeat Napoleon. Fascinating stuff, but every chapter a higgledy-piggledy pile of facts. One of those books that is both a worthwhile journey, and at the same time nice when you stop. Everyone was suitably vague about how much of it they had actually read.

The evening was a repeat visit to the Army and Navy Club in Pall Mall. So there we were, eight of us, gathered for dinner around a large circular table, sitting appropriately enough, under an enormous portrait of Horatio Nelson.

I have been working on a book of my own this summer, and reading up on the life of Hugh Elliot—a brilliant diplomat, who in 1810 ran out of money and was forced to leave his family behind and take a dangerous hardship posting in the West Indies as the Governor of the Leeward Islands. Ten years before that, he was serving as the British Minister (for which read Ambassador) at the court of Saxony, when Nelson swept into Dresden with his mistress Emma Hamilton. Their stay was to dominate his life for eight chaotic days.

The admiral, already famous but now a polarising figure, was on his way home from a tumultuous eighteen months in the Mediterranean. It had seen him first raised to international celebrity, then pitched into scandal and controversy over his personal conduct, military ethics and political loyalties. His rise had come when he had shattered the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, effectively driving French sea power out of the Mediterranean. It was his time at the court of Naples and the Two Sicilies that had quickly complicated the picture.

When the Bourbons lost Naples to a Republican revolution, it was Nelson’s warships that had escorted the King, the Queen and their royal treasures on their retreat to Palermo on island Sicily. Six months later when the revolution collapsed, it had been he again who had brought them back.

By this point, he had been conducting an affair with Lady Hamilton for months, with no effort at discretion and little obvious concern for the loss of face by her tolerant husband. Emma’s closeness to Queen Maria Carolina, had drawn Nelson ever deeper into the Bourbon camp. In Naples, the newly returned royal family found that a surrender had already been agreed, with guarantees of safe passage to France for the rebel leaders. But now they demanded their revenge. Nelson by now seems to have all but lost his political and moral bearings. At Queen Maria Carolina’s behest, urged on by the Hamiltons, he had cast aside all undertakings, and presided over a swathe of arrests and executions. Most notoriously, he had ordered that a republican admiral be hanged from the yardarm, with his body cut down at sunset and cast into the sea—a humiliation reserved for pirates. For his services the Bourbons had granted Nelson a dukedom, and the Sicilian lands at Bronte that came with it.

What you made of all this depended to some extent on your politics. For some, his part in the counter-revolutionary royalist victory added to his myth. For many others, all this was a shocking overreach, and a betrayal of British values. It was, wrote his biographer, the poet laureate Robert Southey just a few years later “a deplorable transaction, a stain on the memory of Nelson and upon the honour of England.”

But one thing crossed all political boundaries: the dismay of the British establishment over his very public relationship with Emma Hamilton.

A poor teenager from nowhere, Emma had been living on her wits on the fringes of London’s theatre world when she was taken up by a rakish country squire. Cast out, pregnant at seventeen, she had then become the mistress of Lord Hamilton’s strange bachelor nephew Charles Greville. A century and more before Pygmalion and Shaw’s Eliza Doolitle, a full two hundred years before Julia Roberts’ turn in Pretty Woman, he had spent four years shaping the young beauty as a society ornament. A natural performer, both striking and magnetically charismatic, she soon found acclaim as an artists’ muse and model, and a fixture in the loucher corners of London society. She was famed too for her unique ‘attitudes’, striking a flowing series of poses from the classics. A great performance artist, born before her time.

When Greville decided it was time to seek a wealthy wife (fruitlessly, as it turned out), he despatched her to Naples as a companion for his aging widower uncle. To Greville’s surprise a few years later they were married. With her newly elevated status, and cast free in an international society where her origins were less easily placed, his remarkable young woman blossomed. Soon celebrated in the Naples court, she quickly became an intimate of Queen Maria Carolina, and over eighteen years had become firmly embedded at the heart of the Bourbon cause, a political animal and an ardent royalist.

Now she was inseparable from the great admiral. For the British establishment, her capture and entanglement of the great naval hero of the Nile was in equal parts perplexing, tragic, and ridiculous; they were, as Elliott summed it up privately, Antony and Moll Cleopatra.

Lord Hamilton’s retirement had been coordinated with Nelson’s return to England, planned as a leisurely overland tour of the courts of Europe. The entourage was to include the Hamiltons, their literary friend Cornelia Knight, and Emma’s working class mother, now going by the name of Mrs. Cadogan. An exercise in celebrity, it was to be a slow triumphal progress for Nelson, and an international stage for Emma. It also promised to be a diplomatic nightmare.

On 2 October, Elliot was playing chess after dinner with Mrs.Trench, an affluent Irish widow on her own European tour, when news reached them of the party’s arrival in Dresden. Mrs. Trench herself was reckoned a beauty, a poet, and something of a musician; to her consternation, Emma Hamilton was to cast her as a kindred spirit and an instant friend. Her diary –catty, snobbish and self-regarding, but so very vivid—gives a frank account of the power couple’s week in Saxony.

After a welcome dinner at the Elliots’ home the following evening, Mrs Trench summed up her first impressions tartly.

‘It is plain that Lord Nelson thinks of nothing but Lady Hamilton, who is totally occupied by the same object.’

Dismissing Nelson as ‘a little man, without any dignity’, she wrote that ‘Lady Hamilton takes possession of him, and he is a willing captive, the most submissive and devoted I have seen’.

Mostly she wrote about Emma:-

‘She is bold, forward, coarse, assuming and vain. Her figure is colossal, but, excepting her feet, which are hideous, well shaped. Her bones are large, and she is exceedingly embonpoint….Her expression is strongly marked, variable, and interesting; her movements in common life ungraceful; her voice loud, yet not disagreeable’.

As for Sir William, he was ‘old, infirm, all admiration for his wife, and never spoke… but to applaud her.’ At Mrs. Cadogan she turned up her nose entirely—writing merely that ‘she was all that you could expect’.

After dinner, Lady Hamilton stood at the piano and performed songs in honour of Lord Nelson. One, penned by Miss Knight in honour of his victory at the battle of the Nile, had been set to music for them by Joseph Haydn during their stay in Vienna a few weeks before. The lyrics were worthy of the great William McGonagall; here is the section describing the explosion of the magazine of L’Orient the French flagship at the height of the battle.

Britannia’s leader gives the dread command

Obedient to his summons flames arise

The fierce explosion rends the skies

And h igh in the air the pond’rous mass is thrown.

The dire concussion shakes the land

Earth, air, and sea, united groan.

The solid Pyramids confess the shock

And their firm bases to their centre rock

The flattery poured forth. ‘She puffs the incense full in his face; but he receives it with pleasure, and snuffs it up very cordially. The songs all ended in the sailor’s way, with ‘Hip, hip, hip, hurrah,’ and a bumper with the last drop on the nail.’

After passing the following evening together at the opera, Mrs Trench took up Lady Hamilton’s invitation the next day to witness Nelson in full ceremonial dress for his visit to the Saxony court. On his breast, alongside the Order of Bath and three gold medals for his naval victories, he was bedecked in international honours garnered from his stay in the Mediterranean. A diamond starburst around a sun and crescent moon, signified the Order of the Turkish Crescent—an honour for non-Muslims created specifically for Nelson by Sultan Selim III, the Ottoman emperor. Pinned above them was a lavishly jewelled brooch, a parting gift from the Bourbons, their portraits entwined with laurels and a pair of naval anchors. In his hat ‘a large diamond feather’ was another symbol of the Sultan’s favour.

Unsure whether to be impressed or to mock, Mrs Trench settled for the arch: ‘in short, Lord Nelson was a perfect constellation of stars and orders’.

The next evening they were together again for dinner, a concert and a society party, Lady Hamilton loading down the diarist ‘with all marks of friendship at first sight, which I always think more extraordinary than love of the same kind’. The following morning she was invited to breakfast and a private performance of Emma’s ‘attitudes’:

‘She assumes their attitude, expression, and drapery with great facility, swiftness and accuracy. Several Indian shawls, a chair, some antique vases, a wreath of roses, a tambourine, and a few children are her whole apparatus. She stands at one end of the room with a strong light to her left, and every other window closed. Her hair (which by-the-bye is never clean) is short…and her gown a simple calico chemise, very easy with loose sleeves to the wrist. She disposes the shawls so as to form Grecian, Turkish and other drapery, as well as a variety of turbans.’

Even Mrs. Trench was grudgingly impressed.

‘Her arrangement of the turbans is absolute sleight-of-hand, she does it so easily, and so well. It is a beautiful performance…It is remarkable that, though coarse and ungraceful in common life, she becomes highly graceful, and even beautiful, during this performance.’

But she could not resist returning to type.

‘It is also singular that, in spite of the accuracy of her imitation of the finest ancient draperies, her usual dress is tasteless, vulgar, loaded, and unbecoming. She has borrowed several of my gowns, and much admires my dress; which cannot flatter, as her own is so frightful’.

Afterwards Mrs. Trench accompanied her at the piano as she sang. ‘Her voice is good, and very strong, but she is frequently out of tune….She acts her songs, which I think is the last degree of bad taste’.

That evening she reflected on her new acquaintance.

‘Still she does not gain upon me. ‘I think her bold, daring, vain even to folly, and stamped with the manners of her first situation much more strongly than one would suppose, after having…lived in good company for fifteen years.

‘Her ruling passions seem to me vanity, avarice, and love for the pleasure of the table. She shows a great avidity for presents, and has actually obtained some at Dresden by the common artifice of admiring and longing.’

By now, a problem had emerged. The great ladies of Dresden were not inclined to welcome Emma Hamilton into their homes. Elliot had finally prevailed on Madame de Loss, the Prime Minister’s wife, to include Emma in the dinner invitation, though only when Nelson had refused to attend alone. But at the royal court, the Queen was immovable, leaving Elliot to handle an outraged Nelson, anxious to keep news of the snub from his mistress – not least through fear of her reaction. ‘Sir, if there is any difficulty of that sort, Lady Hamilton will knock the [king] down.’

Drawing on every ounce of his diplomatic charms, Elliot brokered a pragmatic solution. The court closed for a few days. Emma, of course, understood the reality. She claimed indifference, but confided her true feelings to Elliot’s wife. Mrs Elliot comforted her that the court would not amuse her, and told her that the King very seldom entertained.

It was now that Elliot told the couple that news had come in the diplomatic mail of a British frigate now available to them at Hamburg, if they hurried. True or not – and the party was to end up waiting three days at Hamburg for passage – this brought the Dresden sojourn to a close. The following day there was a party at the Elliots’ to see the visitors off, where for their benefit Emma ‘repeated her attitudes with great effect’.

Once the party had broken up, just Nelson and his entourage, the Elliots and Mrs. Trench remained for a final dinner. At which point:

Lady Hamilton, who declared she was passionately fond of champagne, took such a portion of it as astonished me. Lord Nelson was not behindhand, called more vociferously than usual for songs in his own praise.

As the toasts began, things were getting out of hand, and confused loyalties were becoming all too clear:

After many bumpers [Nelson] proposed the Queen of Naples, adding ‘She is my Queen; she is queen to the backbone.’ Poor Mr. Elliot, who was anxious the party should not expose themselves more than they had done already, and wished to get over the last day as well as he had done the rest, endeavoured to stop the effusion of champagne, and effected it with some difficulty, but not till the Lord and Lady were pretty far gone’

Emma then gave an impromptu performance of as Nina, the tragic heroine of The Woman Driven Mad by Love, a sentimental and deservedly long-forgotten opera, before dancing the exotic Tarantella, all to Nelson’s wild applause throughout.

Not to be left behind, the aging Lord Hamilton ‘performed feats of activity, hopping round the room on his backbone, his arms, his legs, star and ribbon all flying about in the air’.

The next day, the party having been seen to their boats as planned, Mrs. Trench called again on the Elliots.

I went to congratulate them on their deliverance, and found them very sensible of it. Mr Elliot would not allow his wife to speak above her breath, and said every now and then, ‘Now don’t let us laugh tonight; let us all speak in our turn; and be very very quiet.’

Fifty years later, the Dresden visit was summed up in just a few lines in a major Nelson biography:

In two days he reached Dresden, where Mr. Elliot was British Minister. Prince Xavier, the brother of the Elector of Saxony, here visited Nelson. The celebrated Dresden gallery was thrown open for his inspection and his friends’, and they remained eight days in the city, admiring its worthy beauties and receiving entertainment at the Court, and when they took their departure, gondolas magnificently fitted up were in readiness to convey them to Hamburg.

And today, back in Pall Mall, the towering portrait of the great man is giving absolutely nothing away.

Thanks for reading. If you have enjoyed it please pass the word. If you have stumbled across Forgotten History Matters for the first time, welcome. I write about once a month, and it’s always free; that’s two things that don’t appeal to the Substack algorithm, so if you would like to see more, please sign up here to get my next piece delivered straight to your inbox.

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By the time London’s National Portrait Gallery reopened its doors last summer after its three-year long makeover, Sir James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, had moved across the Thames to the vaults of the NPG’s Southwark storage facilities.

Give or take the odd loan for an exhibition, Brooke’s portrait had been on display ever since it was acquired in 1910. A bequest from Brooke’s long-time secretary, Sir Spencer St. John, it was driven up to London by a family member, strapped precariously into the back of a Model-T-era motor car. He had written ahead to warn the gallery that the painting was on the large side.

Sir James Brooke, by Sir Frances Grant. Oil on Canvas, 1847. National Portrait Gallery, London.

The artist was no less a figure than Sir Francis Grant, a future president of the Royal Academy, whose patrons already included Queen Victoria herself. It shows a figure in undress naval uniform, at the same time both casual and dynamic, standing against a backdrop of palm trees and a tropical river. Painted in 1847, this is Brooke on his first return to England; a feted celebrity and national hero at the height of what a rare sceptic described as ‘a sentimental mania’. He was a new phenomenon, ‘the Englishman as sovereign of a foreign land’; a land seen to have been won through fortitude, character and the slenderest of personal resources (albeit with considerable assistance from the Royal Navy). He had, the British public were told, brought the civilising promise of British values and the rule of law to faraway Borneo, a vast and exotic island known to them hitherto only for stories of piracy and thrillingly barbaric customs of ‘headhunting’. As the venerable Edinburgh Review put it, he was ‘a very Knight-Errant of justice and humanity……. lighting like a new Prometheus, a fire in the hearts of Savages’. It was a measure of the moment that Grant offered the painting gratis.

Captain Henry Keppel RN, Brooke’s close friend, and a comrade-in-arms for many of his freebooting exploits, wrote in his breezy journal of accompanying Brooke to a sitting at Grant’s studio. Keppel may have been along to handle Brooke. Grant, it seems, felt the gesture of offering his services went unappreciated by the great man of the moment; private letters among Brooke’s team suggest he was quite right to sense that Brooke did not want to be there.

In Grant’s portrait, Brooke is a picture of health and vigour, maybe in his late thirties – certainly well preserved for his 44 years at the time. Keppel remarked in his journal on the excellent likeness. Years later, as his biographer, St John chose his words carefully: the painting was a wonderful reminder of Brooke before he had been worn down by illness and the burdens of his responsibilities. By 1847, he had already suffered both serious physical injury and life-threatening bouts of tropical disease. Another contemporary who had met with Brooke at his hotel during this London visit expressed frank surprise at the image. He had found him an impressive man of ideas, but had put him somewhere in his early fifties.

Sir James Brooke, by Thomas Woolner. Marble bust, 1858. National Portrait Gallery, London

The NPG holds a bust too, created a decade later, this time by Thomas Woolner, sculptor, poet and founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The caravan had moved on, so this time there was a fee - albeit one settled by an admirer. On meeting his subject Woolner was impressed. ‘He has the slow weighty movement of the head that you see in a lion, and tho’ he roars with laughter and is full of geniality, you see when talking of hostile matters his mouth clench like a vice with determination.’

Born and raised in the ancient city of Benares on the River Ganges, today’s Varanasi, Brooke was the restless son of a well-heeled East India Company judge. Wounded in action and invalided out early from a military career in Bengal, he passed comfortable but aimless years as a young man in England. On his father’s death, he used a handsome inheritance to commission an armed schooner, the Royalist, and set off for the Far East with ambitious if ill-defined plans to make his mark and fulfil his country’s ‘civilising mission’. Opportunity knocked when a semi-official errand for Singapore’s authorities took him to Borneo.

Arriving in Sarawak, a tract of the island’s Northwest about the size of Yorkshire, he found the Sultan of Brunei’s regional governor mired in a local rebellion that had descended into a long-running phoney war. Brooke and his crew, probably bolder and certainly far better armed than anyone else involved, intervened decisively and quickly suppressed the rebellion. Rewarded with local residence, and now the cuckoo in the nest, Brooke soon persuaded the governor, more or less at gunpoint, that it would be altogether better if he took over. His naval friends stationed in the region, men like Keppel, were easily persuaded that the raiding parties of Sarawak’s hostile neighbours along Borneo’s turbulent coast were ‘pirates’, the very kind of adversary they had been tasked to suppress. Brooke’s demonstrable ability to summon such overwhelming fire power to intervene on his behalf in local struggles eventually brought the cowed Sultan of Brunei to cede his rights over the territory entirely, leaving a now sovereign Brooke as the idiosyncratic and high minded, if often brutal, ruler of the now expanding Sarawak.

Some of the shine soon came off Brooke’s rose-tinted reputation with news of a disastrously successful naval engagement that pitched the first British ironside steamships against a large flotilla of men in canoes, armed only with traditional weapons; it became known as the ‘Borneo Massacre’. Largely forgotten today, Gladstone once coupled the incident with the reprisals following the Indian Mutiny as the two prime examples of Nineteenth Century British atrocities. But after years of parliamentary motions and eventually an official enquiry, Brooke rode out the storm, with opinion forever polarised but his reputation still more or less intact. Passing rule on to his nephew Charles, he retired to a small Dartmoor estate paid for by public subscription, and duly took his posthumous place in the late Victorian imperial pantheon.

The Brooke family were to rule Sarawak, eventually the size of England, for a hundred years. In 1946, after the Second World War and the ravages of a Japanese occupation, the territory passed formally to Britain in its very last act of colonisation. Today it is part of the Federation of Malaysia.

In any national narrative, everyone needs to fit into a category; Brooke was an ‘Empire Builder’. He himself would have found the label painfully ironic; despite the knighthood and many honours, he was never able to persuade a reluctant British government to accept responsibility for his jungle kingdom; his frustration even led to flirtations with France and Belgium. Today he and others like him have made way at the NPG for broader and fresher perspectives on British Empire. But in truth this was no ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ moment. Brooke has not been cancelled; gradually, and quite some time ago, he just dropped from the national conversation.

Accurate or not, Grant’s picture is the iconic image of Brooke. If it seems familiar, that might be from the cover of a once ubiquitous Oxford World Classics paperback edition of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, a novel grown on the trellis of Brooke’s story, and full of the most lightly coded references to his life. There are bits of him too in the dark figure of Kurtz, the Belgian ivory trader in the Congo at the centre of Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s other meditation on an isolated European holding sway over indigenous tribes - Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, the story’s Vietnam updating.

Le Tigri di Mompracem, by Emilio Salgari, 1900

Brooke lived on elsewhere in a different guise. The prolific Italian pulp author Emilio Salgari was more or less Conrad’s contemporary. His eleven Pirates of Malaya novels, with their hero Sandokan, have been a cultural phenomenon spawning almost as many films. For a generation of Italians, the theme tune of the 1970s TV series became an indelible memory. Sandokan, cited by some as the spiritual godfather of Clint Eastwood’s character in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, is the wandering scion of a buccaneering dynasty of raiding Malay pirates. He dispenses rough and ready justice on behalf of the oppressed and seeks revenge for his family and home, destroyed by British forces led by his arch enemy, ‘the Exterminator’ – James Brooke. For generations brought up in Southern Europe, or indeed Latin America, Brooke is the Sherriff of Nottingham to Sandokan’s Robin Hood.

Brooke almost made it as a romantic lead in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Errol Flynn, the Australian star of many a swashbuckler was taken with a script, and pressed Warner Brothers to produce a star vehicle for him. The effort dragged on for years, but never made it out of development. It is said that a stumbling block was the challenge of introducing the necessary love interest; the screenwriter, a Brooke herself, declined to be involved in inventing a love life for Sir James that ran counter to the reality of his gay sexuality.

But what of Sarawak, where the story began? Grant’s painting may have been relegated to the archives in London, but not here. Museums display facsimiles of varying quality (here and on the mainland in Kuala Lumpur); the selfie-oriented ‘interactive displays’ of the Borneo House Museum even offers visitors the opportunity to pose with a life-size three dimensional waxwork of the image. That is only the official part of it. Visiting Kuching, Sarawak’s capital, an NPG curator noted with wry amusement ‘the very liberal and unlicensed use of our picture on everything from boat tour advertisements to restaurant menus’.

Edge of the World. Margate House Films

Brooke, the movie, finally came in 2021. Rob Allyn, a Texan independent film producer, found the bulk of the money for Edge of the World not in his native America but from Asia, much of it from Malaysia. In this telling, a dashing, dynamic but world-weary Brooke is drawn into the rich complexities of Borneo’s violent culture, and falls in love with a local noblewoman. When a British warship arrives to call him back to England and his family, he searches his soul and resolves to stay. For the first time he realises that, for him, home is now Sarawak.

James Brooke’s story is no longer British. If indeed it ever was.

If this is your first time on Forgotten History Matters, let me tell you more. I generally write something about once a month, and always aim to give a thoughtful modern take on a piece of neglected history. I don’t keep to an exact schedule, and I fly well below the radar of the Substack algorithm. So if you enjoyed this, and would like to read more, please do sign up to make sure you catch my next post. It’s free, and always will be.

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It’s the summer, and we are away on holiday: up in Norfolk for a couple of months. So this time something a little different.

To start with, its festival season. This year, for the first time, Norwich is adding to the calendar with a history festival of its own – history being something the city is not short of. So far we have made it to the first four—and its been great.

Then a repost of one of my very first pieces, Back to Sarawak, about the international cultural legacy of James Brooke the ‘White Rajah of Sarawak’, once famous here in Britain, now better remembered elsewhere. Its one of the posts I most enjoyed writing, and it went down well too with the few early readers who saw it at the time; begging their forbearance, I would like to share it more widely now.

So first the festival. Its themed Rebels and Radicals—with Norwich being well-supplied with both. The talks so far have been in the Octagon chapel—a wonderful mid-eighteenth-century neo-Palladian building, which architecturally does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a building with plenty of radical history itself – run as a Unitarian community (a movement whose dissent from the established church went so far as to deny the divinity of Christ) at least since an 1813 statute finally carved such views out from the Blasphemy laws—and probably, rather more quietly, for a good while before that. It’s the church that the remarkable Harriet Martineau attended while she was growing up. She is featured next week! We arrived a little early, and it was lovely to see the organisers, for who all this must have been both a real labour of love, and rather a leap in the dark, both so pleased and more than a little nonplussed by the sell-out audiences the talks have been attracting.

First up was Lucy Hughes Hallett, taking a wry and assured canter through the extraordinary story of the stratospheric rise, and sudden violent end, of George Villiers the Duke of Buckingham – powered, at the court of King James, by youthful beauty, great legs and a talent for dancing—all covered in her new book The Scapegoat.

Next, a marked contrast in styles. Professor Chris Joby is an expert on the rather nichier subjects of the Dutch diaspora, and the colonial history of Dutch as an international contact language. He was with us to present his latest research on the infiltration of religious extremists into an Elizabethan Dutch refugee community in Norwich, his home town. The combination of an oversensitive microphone and high and sustained levels of enthusiasm with a distinctive barking style of delivery was memorable indeed—especially with the scrupulous attention to the gutturally authentic pronunciation of a litany of Dutch names. The substance was absolutely fascinating, and a reminder of how far back Norwich’s history of dissent and disruption stretches.

Over the space of just a few years Norwich welcomed a community of Flemish Calvinists, ‘the Strangers’, fleeing religious conflict in Flanders that quickly grew to make up over a third of the city’s population. Initially granting a licence for thirty Flemish master weavers to bring households of up to ten to the city, this started as an entrepreneurial move to boost the city’s flagging economy by taking the overspill of a centre for exiles in Sandwich that had grown beyond its limits, now making up about half of the City’s whole community. As conditions in the Netherlands worsened, more refugees poured into Norwich, and soon the numbers were in the thousands—peaking briefly as high as seven thousand—in a city that had previously housed just ten thousand locals. The combined effects of an epidemic of plague and a better outlook at home quickly brought those numbers back down again. But many stayed in Norwich, and the Strangers are remembered today as an important part of the city’s history, and a community that made a lasting contribution to the city’s economic success.

What Chris Joby’s research has shown is that, in amongst the supposed weavers, the émigré community had brought among its number several radical Calvinist preachers and leaders: marked men on the continent, who could draw crowds of twenty thousand to hear them speak—hardliners agitating for religious violence, iconoclastic attacks on church property and the murder or mutilation of catholic priests. Concerns and intrigues around the presence of these ‘protestant Taliban’ ,and efforts to control them or move them on, were to be a constant theme for the city fathers.

As we headed home that evening—driving across open fields towards a luminous sky—Caroline, musing now on her own history, began to ponder.

‘Joby. It can’t be that common a name. Back in the Seventies - at school in North Walsham, when I was eleven—Dr. Joby taught me Geography. Mrs. Joby taught me biology. Do you think they could be related?’

A pause, then:

‘There’s something strangely familiar about that parade-ground lecturing style!’

A quick moment on Google found a 2020 obituary. In a long full life, Dr. Joby’s fifteen minutes of fame had come with a winning run on Mastermind in 1984. After the final, the national press had carried reports of the BBC’s apology for disallowing a correct answer on his specialist subject: Railways of the East of England—a passion passed down from his father, a fireman on LNER, back in the age of steam.

And yes, he had a son—Christopher.

The perfect end to a good evening out.

That’s probably about enough festival talk, but I must just add a few lines on the following day. Two more talks, both of which, in very different ways, were a joy.

Philip Hoare was talking from his extraordinary book William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. He has clearly been doing the festival rounds; Caroline had heard him speak at Charleston down in Sussex, so she left Hannah and me to enjoy it. The talk had been wonderful, she had told us at the time. But she had come home without a copy of the book—struck by a haunting feeling that too many hours spent in his world might just take her beyond the bounds of rationality—with no guarantee of return. My wife is not given to such flights of fancy…..

Starkly thin, clad in a dark striped tee shirt and red shorts, our speaker opened with his arms stretched wide, palms up, a little above his shoulders, standing before a blown-up slide. Behind and above him, lay Adam—Blake’s tiny original now larger than life—caught in the explosive moment of his creation: spreadeagled across a rock in the stormy sea, a serpent wrapped tightly round his leg, a winged God, sprawled across him like a strange bearded swan.

A writer with the strongest possible affinity with his subject, you sensed that were Philip one day to come face to face with the poet, neither would be surprised—or in the least disturbed. Now he drew a line for us from Blake’s inspiration—Milton’s Paradise Lost, ‘the Star Wars prequel to Genesis’, through his life, and onto his legacy, through Paul Nash, Derek Jarman, and all the way through to David Bowie. In just an hour the way I think of Blake had changed completely.

I took the plunge, and bought the book. You should too.

Finally, we had Jenny Draper, billed as a TikTok historian, riffing on her first foray into print – Mavericks, a series of 24 cameos on ‘the life stories and lessons of history's most extraordinary misfits’. Not my choice, this time, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.

She was brilliant! A view I offer with all due humility—realising now that I am very late to the party, and that if someone has 700,000 subscribers to a YouTube channel of punchy fifteen-minute slices of British history, there is probably a good reason.

It was lively, witty, engaging, and full of personality. Not a presentation, a performance. Sharp, intelligent and utterly unpretentious. A public historian, Jenny started out working in museums and historical attractions, and cut her presenting teeth as a London blue badge guide: a ‘live ammo environment”—as she explained in the Q&A—where you know immediately if your audience has lost interest ‘even when they are being polite’. She started posting on social media, she explained, as something to help consolidate her revision for the notoriously gruelling blue badge exams.

This time the audience in the Octagon Chapel was a different one —one that spanned the generations. After a couple of suitably articulate questions from the admiring academic who had introduced her, the floor was open. For a few moments, a silence—one that felt longer than it probably was. Then a teenager raised his hand,

‘Which two of your characters would you like to have meet, and what would they talk about?’

And the flood gates opened.

‘Time for one more question’

From up on the balcony, high above: “if you had to pick one of your stories to be made into a Muppets movie, which one would it be, and how would you cast it?!”

Then out we went into the mid-afternoon sun, as the chapel emptied and the audience spilled out in a buzz of happy conversation.

That’s rather more than I intended to write. So I will stop there for now. James Brooke will have to follow in a few day’s time.

If this is your first time on Forgotten History Matters, let me tell you more. I generally write something about once a month, and always aim to give a thoughtful modern take on a piece of neglected history. I don’t keep to an exact schedule, and I fly well below the radar of the Substack algorithm. So if you enjoyed this, and would like to read more, please do sign up to make sure you catch my next post. It’s free, and always will be.

And if you know someone else who would appreciate this, please take a moment to share it.

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In the summer of 2002, two years after their mother died, my young children and I pulled ourselves up onto the welcoming shore of a new home: a tall handsome Dutch-gabled semi, in a leafy corner of South London. It was a fresh start, and our lives were moving forwards again. In the end we were there for just three years, before I met Caroline and we moved again to bring our families together. I remember it as a happy time.

Walking away from my first visit to the house, I had noticed a plaque: high on the wall next door – not blue but grey – John Coakley Lettsom, physician and philanthropist. Our houses and the next two along stood, it turned out, on the footprint of his large Georgian villa. ‘There is a biography I think’, a new neighbour told me – and indeed there was.

The more I learned about him the more fascinated I became. He seemed to know everyone – from Joseph Banks to Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Johnson. By thirty he was a member of the Royal Society, and had a finger in every innovative or progressive pie of the period. But he had come to all of this from more or less nowhere, he was an intriguingly unreliable narrator of his own life; for all his saintly reputation, he had clear and deeply human flaws. Perhaps most compelling though was the surprising and ambiguous manner in which the themes of slavery ran through his story – in ways that made me realise how shallow my understanding was.

I wrote an article about Lettsom recently for the Camberwell Quarterly. I have posted a few ‘offcuts’ from that project here in the last month or two. But now I need to share a fuller account of this extraordinary long-forgotten figure, and his many contradictions. So here is an extended version (adapted slightly to move away from strictly local interest). What follows is not just as a biographical sketch but an exploration of how one man’s life complicates and muddies our understanding of the past.

-----

In 1779 a rich, successful and hyperactive thirty-five-year-old London physician, boasted of the view from his newly-built villa, three miles out of town, on a Camberwell hilltop:

In front…the city presents itself, but the eye soon passes over this grand display of human elegance and wealth, to the summits of those hills where other hamlets are scattered…The views…are heightened by the various subjects which the Thames daily affords…..and combine naval grandeur and rural elegance, nowhere equaled in the world, being indisputably the richest scenery that ever was afforded to sight.

The house –soon to be surrounded by exotic botanical gardens and draped neoclassical statuary was more than a weekend retreat. It was a statement: he had arrived.

John Coakley Lettsom had reached the heights of London’s medical elite, where he would remain for decades. Doctor to royalty and the rich, benefactor to the poor, pioneer of science and man of letters. But who was this self-created outsider – a man without family, penniless just twelve years earlier? A man of contradictions: a Creole Quaker – a combination as discordant as a Cavalier Roundhead; more than that, both an abolitionist and a slaveholder.

To begin at the beginning: he was born in 1744, son to small-scale planters on Little Jost van Dyke, a tiny islet off Tortola in the Virgin Islands – on the fringes of a colony that was itself an ungovernable smugglers’ haven at the outermost edges of the British Caribbean. He and his brother, he liked to say, were the seventh pair of male twins born to the family – and the only ones to escape the scourge of Yellow Fever. But Lettsom said many things about his past, and there is no record of other children.

The first Lettsom in the Caribbean must have been an indentured servant – bound to his master for years as payment for his passage. From those beginnings, the family built slowly upward. Today, Lettsom’s own appearance – ‘his face very strongly furrowed, and his skin of a dark yellow tint’ – begs speculation about mixed heritage. At the time, such features were seen as natural in a white Creole family acclimatised over generations to the tropics.

His parents were Quakers, part of a small community that briefly flowered after a missionary visit, long before the movement troubled itself about the institution of slavery. The visitor fell ill and died before he could continue his journey, but the faith endured on the island for another twenty years or so. As the sugar trade boomed, the Lettsoms invested in land and enslaved workers to catch the lucrative wave; doubtless, like so many others, they borrowed to do so – a better recipe for short-term profits than long-term security. By then their means were enough to send the young Lettsom away to be educated in England, safe from the ravages of disease –and cut off from his parents, and from the twin brother he left behind to spend his unremarkable life on the island.

At six, a trusted sea captain took him on the six week voyage to Lancaster, where he was to be raised and educated among the Quaker community. There, while dancing a jig he had learned from his family’s enslaved workers, he caught the attention of the great Quaker preacher Samuel Fothergill. Eight years later, when news came from Tortola that his father had died, Samuel Fothergill stepped forward as his guardian and set about planning the future of his new ward. After a brief false start in Liverpool, he was apprenticed to Abraham Sutcliff – a self-taught Quaker apothecary, practicing deep in the North Yorkshire countryside.

Five years later, now twenty-one and with a practical grounding in day-to-day medicine, he set off again – this time to London, armed with a letter of introduction to his guardian’s brother, the formidable Dr. John Fothergill: physician to the elite, Quaker patriarch and one of the most powerful men in British medicine. Fothergill took him gruffly under his wing and secured him a post as a surgeon’s dresser at St. Thomas’s, walking the wards, assisting at operations, and soaking up every detail of life at a busy London hospital.

But money was running out. The flow of funds from Tortola had dwindled to a trickle. In need of cash to complete his education, he broke off his studies to return to his home island and claim what was left of his share of his father’s estate. It was to be a six-month stay that would connect him to a Creole side to his identity.

On arrival, he found his mother living with her new husband – a cooper – living in modest circumstances. His share of his father’s estate was a disappointment: a small parcel of land, and rights over a few enslaved people. In later years, when abolitionism had become a great cause, he liked to tell the story like this:-

When I came of age the only property I possessed was a little land and some slaves. To the latter I gave freedom when I had not £50 besides in the world. I never repented to this sacrifice. Indeed Heaven has cancelled it long ago, by refunding innumerable unmerited blessings, and what I estimate still more gracefully, a heart to diffuse them.

..I thought there was only one true Religion, consisting in doing unto others, as we wished that others should do unto us… These sentiments overcame worldly interest, and I was a voluntary beggar at twenty-one.

This is probably true, as far as it goes. The ‘inventory and appraisement’ of his ‘property’ has survived. It lists just two men – Cudjoe marked as ‘old’ and valued at just £20, and Bentora at £100 – their wives, and four more children, two of them so young they are appraised at just £9 each. A three generational family group, perhaps. Maybe Lettsom remembered Cudjoe from his infancy. Keeping them may have been uneconomic; selling them would have split the family. How could a young man raised among Lancashire Quakers countenance that?

Over the years, the story grew with repetition. After his death, his eulogy credited him with freeing a thriving workforce of fifty.

Still only part-trained, Lettsom set out to put his finances back on a firm footing, and established himself on the island as a medical practitioner. A whirlwind of energy throughout his life, he often saw fifty or a hundred people– most of them enslaved plantation workers - before taking a late breakfast. Over the six months he earned the extraordinary sum of £2,000. For a skilled textile worker in Britain might earn £50 in a year.

After a sober upbringing among the serious-minded and industrious Quakers of the north of England, Lettsom’s time on this tropical island was clearly transformational. The white Creole identity – that of families of European heritage who had been born and raised in the Caribbean (at this time the phrase had no racial connotations) – was close to a polar opposite to that of the Quakers. Certainly the reputation in London of a Creole community generally flush with new wealth from the sugar boom was a stark contrast.

They are possessed with a degree of supineness and indolence in their affairs... With a strong natural propensity to the other sex they are not always the most chaste or faithful of husbands. They are liable to sudden transports of anger, but these fits… though violent while they last, are soon over. …. They are fickle and desultory in their pursuits; though unshakeable in their friendships… they have some tincture of vanity, and occasionally of haughtiness…. They are too much addicted to expensive living and costly entertainment.

He immersed himself in island life, formed lifelong relationships with wealthy planters, and lost his heart briefly to the young mistress of a nearby mansion, and connected with a Creole side to his identity. From then on, back in London, he seems to have given himself fresh licence in his behaviour. In later life he liked to recycle a quip first made against him: that he combined ‘the volatility of the Creole with the plodding industry of the German’.

It was this visit, and his medical practice across the plantations of the island, that drew him intimately into the world of slavery. Though by no means blind to its brutal realities, he persuaded himself – however naively – that under benevolent masters, the enslaved might live contented lives. By the time that he left the island he had decided to put that idea to the test, and used £200 of his earnings to purchase a young enslaved brother and sister from his step-father. The girl, Teresa, he left in Tortola as a servant for his mother, eventually freeing her after his mother’s death.

The boy, Sam, returned with him to Britain. Lettsom taught him reading, writing and arithmetic and – against clerical advice – to have him christened. Though never formally freed, Sam later served as a steward aboard a Royal Navy ship, ultimately perishing with three thousand others in a great naval disaster when the British fleet was overcome by a hurricane in mid-Atlantic.

Completing his education with a winter season in Edinburgh and a few months more at Leyden – both open to non-conformists in a way that England’s universities were not – he soon gained his degree as a Doctor of Medicine. Returning to London, his next priority was to find himself an advantageous marriage.

Dr. Fothergill’s niece Betty, meeting him during a stay at her uncle’s home, quickly sized him up as an engaging, attractive but emotionally shallow flirt:

The doctor though a man of letters, can trifle agreeably with females, He possesses the Creolian instability; and by turns feels a short-lived attachment to many; but I think is incapable of a steady delicate affection. Interest or caprice will, I am afraid, direct his choice.

A few days later Lettsom confided – with excitement – that, with Fothergill’s help, a match was in the offing with the heiress to a large Quaker tin-plating fortune. Betty had met the young woman, Nancy Meiers, a few days earlier, and had already dismissed her in her diary as both plain and dull.

The couple were married in the Summer of 1770. At a stroke, Lettsom was a man of means -- with the resources and connections he needed to begin his rise in earnest.

Over time Lettsom crafted for himself a reputation with the wider public as more or less a secular saint; journalist friends made sure that no good deed went unnoticed. One story often repeated of him (and indeed often by him) illustrates this perfectly. ( I have written about this previously here). It is best told in his own words:

It was my lot a few years ago, to be attacked on the highway by a genteel looking person, well mounted, who demanded my money, at the same time placing a pistol to my breast; I requested him to remove the pistol, which he instantly did; I saw his agitation, from whence I concluded he had not been habituated to this hazardous practice.. I had both gold and silver about me, which I freely gave him…..[and told him] that if I could serve him by a private assistance, more becoming his appearance, he might farther command my purse; and at the same time I desired him to accept a card containing my address…. He affectingly said, ‘I thank you for your offer, -- American affairs have ruined me, -- I will, dear Sir, wait upon you’.

In three weeks’ time he took the resolution to call at my house. I instantly knew him, and ….took the liberty of addressing the Queen, and instantly succeeded. He is now an officer in the army…This is better than hanging.

The tale reveals much: his nerve, his moral code, his access to power — and, perhaps above all, his irresistible urge to be admired for them all.

Lettsom’s capacity for real good was matched only by sharp elbows – and an instinct for the spotlight. This was a combination which inevitably brought him his share of detractors. When an anonymous letter to the editor of Westminster Magazine lampooned a Dr. Wriggle, few insiders were in doubt who it was referring to.

The lengthy character assassination began:

Dr. Wriggle has the skill to cover an artful and designing disposition, with the utmost semblance of gravity and simplicity. He passes with the public for a man of humanity and deep learning: and has the address to work himself into considerable practice by his subtle conduct.

…His first great maxim is: ‘Bring your name often before the public…and they will at length think you a man of consequence’.

Lettsom’s increasingly lavish self-display was not to everyone’s taste – London’s Quakers in particular found it unseemly. His hospitality at his Camberwell villa was renowned. Gentleman’s Magazine gave a gushing Tatler-style account of a glittering rural fete held in 1801 for 500 guests. Among the cast of London’s ‘opulent citizens’ and professional classes, the journalist singled out the intriguing combination of ‘Mr. Nelson, brother of the gallant admiral’ and ‘Sir William Hamilton and his luxuriously charming lady’. The tables ‘groaned with the weight of the feast’.

His attitude to women and treatment of his wife were another worry in Quaker circles for the Quaker . He established Nancy there, with their young children, while he lived a very separate life in the City. For him, Camberwell was a weekend retreat: short weekends, not every week – and then often with his smart literary friends in tow. The secret to their happy and contented marriage, he told his friends, was not to become tied to apron strings.

Even in his eulogy there was a passing reference to the persistent rumours about his behaviour while away from his family, with a brave attempt to explain the stories as a misreading of the situation so unconvincing that it teeters on the edge of irony.

By those who were ignorant of his true character, he has been accused of a licentious attachment to the fair sex. This slander his enemies have shown a peculiar satisfaction in magnifying …. Many amiable females conceived it an honour to have his acquaintance, as it was advantageous to listen to his conversation. His enthusiastic attachment to the fair sex, may account for an unguardedness of behaviour which subjected him to severe censure – he was imprudent, but certainly not vicious.

And if his achievements had gone to his head a little, who could blame him:

Where is the individual that could withstand all temptations to vanity, if he found himself every day, both in public and in private, the theme of almost an unanimous applause and approbation?

And what of slavery, the great issue of the day?

For most of his life Lettsom showed both a real concern for the well-being of enslaved people, and a sympathetic understanding of the plantation owners who enslaved them. Individual freedom was not his guiding star, but he was keenly interested in philanthropic efforts to establish livelihoods for those who had been freed. He was involved, for example, in the ill-fated founding of a colony in Sierra Leone for the Loyalist Blacks freed by the British for their military service in the War of Independence.

As Quaker support for abolitionism grew, he naturally fell into line, and did so with his usual energy, even sitting on the Quakers Slave Trade Committee for two years. Now he made the most, of course, of the generous actions of his youth, promoting himself as a selfless idealist who had been well ahead of his time.

Paradoxically, none of this marked a break with Lettsom’s Creole community in Tortola. Fate was to deliver one final twist. When the granddaughter and heiress to Belaziel Hodge, the greatest landowner on Tortola, was suddenly widowed in middle age, she swiftly remarried: this time to Lettsom’s twenty-five year old son. But tragedy struck again. Both the son, and then his new wife, died on the island in quick succession. To the surprise and shock of her family it emerged that she had named her new father-in-law as her sole heir. Challenged by her children and wider family, the inheritance matter was mired in the Chancery courts for years. But, in what were to be the last years of Lettsom’s life, the courts finally upheld the will.

In 1815 – still active in his medical practice at 70 – Lettsom nicked his finger with an infected lancet. A few days later he was gone. He died a revered philanthropist, a driving force behind countless progressive causes, and the founder of hospitals and dispensaries for the poor – one of the most celebrated physicians of his time.

He is remembered, not least, as a pioneer of emancipation.

He also died, by legal title, the owner of more than a thousand enslaved people.

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Further Reading

I have posted a few times recently with offcuts from researching this piece. If you want to read more about Lettsom, have a look at:-

Saving Boswell - piece about his friendship with James Boswell - biographer of Samuel Johnson.

An American Highwayman in London - more about his handling of a highway robbery by a distressed American Loyalist.

Camberwell Goddess - the long afterlife of a plaque of the goddess Flora from Lettsom’s Camberwell villa.

Today Flora, springtime goddess of the flowers, leans back nonchalantly in her oval frame, a swag of blossoms held lightly in her hand. With her colleagues Plenty and Liberality, she gazes out across the busy weekday traffic of South London’s Camberwell Road.

But for her this is a second act. She came here as a badge of trade – salvaged as a permanent billboard by the stone mason whose shopfront this once was. Before all this, for a hundred years more or less, she sat where she truly belonged: deep in the Camberwell countryside at the heart of an Enlightenment garden.

John Coakley Lettsom’s weekend villa lay at the top of Grove Hill, with sweeping views across rural Peckham to the Thames and London beyond. Then the city’s preeminent physician, this energetic Quaker man of letters prided himself too on his botanical expertise. Marriage into a tin-plating fortune let him pursue his enthusiasms at scale. Flora and the others looked out from the house itself across ten acres of gardens stocked full of rare, precious and precisely labelled specimens, many of them imported from America. They were not alone; scattered amongst the greenery lay the languid female forms of Contemplation, Music, Painting, Architecture, Commerce, Peace, Law, Truth and Prudence.

Flora and her friends came into being in Southwark too. Mistress Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory stood on the Thames riverside on the site of what is now the Royal Festival Hall. Half stone, half ceramic, Coadestone was cast from a master mould in a twice-fired mix of clay, sand, and a finely ground powder of quartz and glass. A formidable entrepreneur, Eleanor Coade was the first to master this tricky industrial process. Having done so, she cornered the custom of the leading architects of the day.

Coade promised durability. Two hundred and fifty years on her pieces are still scattered across the capital. Most, like the great lion on the South Bank at the end of Westminster Bridge (which has its own storied past), have turned out to be more or less indestructible.

Her firm was renowned for the range and excellence of its designs. Customers chose from a whole catalogue of figures, many to the neoclassical tastes of the day; all could be cast to order. She worked with some of the best artists in London. Given the dates, Flora probably emerged from a mould crafted by John Bacon, arguably the most successful monumental public sculptor of his time — a man who cut his teeth, not in an art academy, but as a modeller in a porcelain factory.

Flora’s story will not end here. Just a few years ago, master-plaster-caster Peter Hone, took advantage of a house painter’s scaffolding to take fresh casts in situ a twenty-first century architectural salvager, the upmarket LASSCO. Now a modern catalogue shows Flora’s clones have sold out. Somehow, somewhere, her progeny are starting over.

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This is an extended version of an article first published in the Camberwell Quarterly.

History, they say, helps us understand the present. But sometimes it works more the other way round.

For centuries our courts have striven to stay out of politics. For just as long, activists and politicians have done everything possible to draw them in – when it suits their purposes. Seeing this playing out in our daily news after the Supreme Court’s recent decision on gender identity brings to life judges’ futile struggle to steer away from the great political struggles of history – not least one of the greatest of all – the future of slavery.

Lord Mansfield was one of the legal giants of the eighteenth century. He is credited with leading the cautious modernisation and reshaping of English common law for the modern age – steadily readying it to underpin the commercial needs of the rising merchant class, and clearing the way for the explosive growth of a capitalist society that was to come in the years ahead. But he is remembered today, above all else, for the landmark case of Somerset vs Stewart in 1772: his courageous and far-sighted decision that no man could be held as a slave on English soil, because ‘the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe’.

Away from the courts he was a considerable figure too. His grand London home was Kenwood House, now open to the public on the edge of Hampstead Heath. It was there that he and his wife raised their black great-niece Dido Belle, the illegitimate daughter of their seafaring nephew — a striking personal detail that would later colour interpretations of his judgement. (There is a wonderful portrait in the family’s great house in Scone depicting Dido with her cousin Lady Alice Murray – the subject of a fascinating BBC documentary.)

Here was a great judge with strikingly progressive personal views taking the first bold steps in a long march that led inexorably to Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and eventually to the emancipation of slaves in Britain’s colonies in 1834.

Except that is not what actually happened.

James Somerset, an enslaved servant, was brought to England around 1768 by his master, Charles Stewart. In the autumn of 1771, he escaped and lived freely in London for several weeks. Anti-slavery sympathisers arranged his baptism — then thought to offer legal protection. But in late November, Stewart’s agents recaptured him and forced him aboard a ship bound for the Americas, intending to sell him on.

When abolitionist Granville Sharp learned of Somerset’s plight, he acted quickly. Backed by fellow campaigners, he secured a writ of habeas corpus, requiring Stewart to justify Somerset’s detention in court. With the West Indian planter class rallying behind Stewart, the scene was set for a high-stakes test case before England’s most powerful judge.

Presented with the chance to clarify English law once and for all, Mansfield first spent weeks trying to avoid hearing the case at all. He held as many as five preparatory hearings to seek a private settlement between the parties. Could Stewart not see his way to free his servant? Could someone, Somerset’s godparents perhaps, not buy him out and free him themselves?

With both sides firmly entrenched Mansfield reluctantly convened a panel for the case: two other senior judges, with him presiding as Lord Chief Justice. In February the case finally began. It was not until 14 May that Mansfield adjourned the final session and the judges retired to consider their ruling. Now his first move was to bring the parties together one last time, to urge them again to reach a private settlement before the court reached its verdict. All to no avail.

On 22 June Mansfield finally read the judgement of the Court of King’s Bench in Westminster Hall. It was, the Morning Chronicle reported ‘as guarded, cautious, and concise as it could possibly be’. Any power to hold a man against his will and transport him to the colonies could only be based on the clearest of legal rights under English law. No persuasive evidence of such a right had been presented to in this case. So Somerset must be released.

All the ingredients were in his place to take the judgement just one step further and make a clear statement that English law does not recognise the condition of slavery – a step the logic of his argument begs. But Mansfield’s court stopped short of that – doing only what was absolutely necessary to fulfil their legal function.

Of the flowery language of pure English air famously attached to the judgement there is not a trace.

How did we get from here to the bright clear lines of public memory?

Roll forward two hundred and fifty years, and another big legal case has made a splash in the political world.

On 16 April, the Supreme Court handed down its judgement in For Women Scotland vs The Scottish Ministers. For international readers, or anyone in Britain living under a rock, this was a case about trans rights – the hottest of political potatoes.

Scotland is largely subject to UK-wide laws set in Westminster, but the Scottish administration has the rights to pass its own laws in certain areas. They have used them to take a controversially liberal approach to legal recognition of the gender preferences of trans people, which has run into strong opposition. This was a test case brought by a feminist Scottish campaign group, arguing that the Scottish government had exceeded its legal powers. The case had taken five full years to work its way up through courts and appeal processes; now this was the final verdict. Ultimately it hinged on what the word ‘woman’ means in one particular UK statute – the Equality Act of 2010.

When the Supreme Court finally delivered its ruling, the judges once again went out of their way to stress how limited their role was. They made clear that they weren’t weighing in on the wider public debate around gender or sex, or offering a general definition of what a ‘woman’ is. Their job, they said, was strictly to interpret what the word meant within one specific law: the Equality Act 2010.

As they put it near the top of their judgment:

It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex… It has a more limited role which does not involve making policy.

Try as they might, the decision has been a big political event. However narrowly drawn, it has a host of practical consequences. But, more than that, political leaders have seized on it as a pivot point to move away from progressive positions on trans rights that have become a liability for them as Britain’s political climate has become more socially conservative.

When our Prime Minister, himself a distinguished lawyer, told a regional television broadcaster that “a woman is an adult female; the court has made that absolutely clear”, it was not because he had misunderstood the judgement. In an area fiercely contested by activists on both sides of the issue, commentators of all persuasions have been quick to pile in and use the moment creatively for their own ends.

Across the country, sports organisations are changing their rules, pronouns are dropping from email footers, and policy memos are urgently clarifying office arrangements for toilets and washing facilities, while politicians explain that it had never crossed their mind that someone could possibly be a ‘woman’ if they had not been so from birth.

It is a reminder that however clinical and precise the courts may be when treading on the most delicate political ground, their judgements can quickly become cultural and political objects grown well beyond their legal limits – seed crystals for accretions of activism, propaganda and political convenience. Living through this now casts fresh light on how things would have gone as Mansfield’s careful monochrome judgement gained the primary colours of the version now firmly lodged in our public memory.

By the 1770s, the legal status of enslaved people brought to England was gaining new relevance. Black communities had long existed around major ports, but few were enslaved. Now, as absentee landlords abandoned the West Indies, more wealthy planters returned to England with enslaved household servants in tow.
In practice, legal rights were often academic. Runaways in cities like London found support from black communities and abolitionist networks, making them hard to trace. Meanwhile, slave-catchers operated freely, with little concern for legality.

English law was a muddle of contradictory judgements and professional opinions and the English courts had been in no hurry to get drawn in more deeply. Slavery increasingly troubled the English public, and ran counter to its sense of self. West Indian planters were an unpopular group in the metropole to boot – generally viewed as rich and spoilt. But however undeserving slaveholders seemed as a class, property rights over slaves, established under Colonial rather than English law, were now a mainspring in Britain’s commerce.

Mansfield coupled a fine legal mind with deft political instincts; he had, they said, ‘a Tory head on a Whig body’ – finely balancing an instinct for innovation with respect for maintaining tradition, and always moving forwards at a measured pace. Beyond the interests of planters themselves, enslaved people now served as the bedrock collateral for the ever-growing loans from England’s merchants that were fuelling investment in the West Indies sugar boom. Taken too far, undermining slavery property rights threatened economic disaster.

Mansfield chose precisely where to stop. He freed James Somerset. He allowed himself the briefest flash of his personal values, describing the practice of slavery as ‘odious’. But he and his colleagues did as little as possible to bind future judges in the wider field of the English law on slavery.

In truth, this was far from the first case on this and similar issues. However cautious and narrow the decision, this time there was one critical difference –the involvement in Somerset’s corner of that superlative activist Granville Sharp and his network of abolitionists. They took the judgement and ran with it in an energetic cascade of propaganda, embroidering it as they went, and making the absolute most of the prestige of Mansfield’s name.

What of ‘the pure English air’? Nothing suggests such a phrase ever passed Mansfield’s lips. It seems to be a memorable and poetic phrase put into his mouth retrospectively by a propagandist for the abolitionist cause.

Clearly it resonated, because it was repeated endlessly. Here is version published a full thirteen years later by William Cowper, the hymn-writing partner of John Newton, the reformed slave trader responsible for Amazing Grace—an extract from The Task, one of those book length verses strangely beloved by the eighteenth century reading public

We have no slaves at home – then why abroad?

And they themselves once ferried o’er the wave

That parts us, are emancipate and loosed.

Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs

Receive our air, that moment they are free;

They touch our country and their shackles fall.

That’s noble, and bespeaks a nation proud

And jealous of the blessing.

By now, as abolitionism gained ever greater momentum, this embellished account of Mansfield’s decision had taken on a life of its own. It was now a political and cultural reality. Whatever the legal niceties, the Somerset case had, as a practical matter, ended slavery in England.

And what of James Somerset himself? After the judgement, the man at the centre of Mansfield’s ruling slips quietly from the historical record.

How will we come to remember For Women Scotland….

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We chose well for a recent family trip to West Norwood Picturehouse. Jesse Eisenberg’s passion project, A Real Pain, tells the story of a trip to visit the Polish childhood home of a holocaust survivor grandmother.

Kieran Culkin steals the show as Benji, the cousin and companion. Charming and funny, connecting with strangers effortlessly, Benji lights up a room in an instant. But he is also unpredictable, impulsive and clearly troubled. When Culkin won an Oscar for the performance, it seemed unfair that he had been allowed into the Supporting Actor category at all.

Most of us know a Benji. The life and soul of the party. Great to be with when they are flying high. But a little lost, and all too clearly self-propelled on a downward path. Should you say something? But what? and how would it land? and is it your place? And, in the end, what are the chances of it making a difference anyway?

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a Quaker doctor was struggling with all of this. John Coakley Lettsom’s Benji was one James Boswell.

Success had not brought Boswell contentment.

Finally published, The Life of Johnson had been a sensation—but one that brought with it little immediate prospect of money. And fame had not opened new doors, so much as closed old ones. Few, it seemed, were prepared to risk reading about their private dinner conversations in a sequel. Samuel Johnson was dead, and Joshua Reynolds and the rest of the great man’s circle now aging and frail.

Now a widower, a life of heavy drinking and sexual adventures had taken its toll on Boswell. In company, he was as spirited and engaging as ever, but he wrote often of his ‘hypochondria’ – his depression. Armchair psychiatrists ponder today whether he was bipolar or simply an alcoholic. Neither seems a stretch.

In Boswell’s shrinking circle the two men—one a lawyer, one a physician – both writers – found themselves thrown together more often at the dinner table of their publisher.

Soon Boswell and his friends began to make their way to Lettsom’s weekend retreat in the Camberwell countryside for dinner, and a game of bowls— the party retiring across the villa’s botanical gardens to look down on London and the Thames from it’s Temple of Sybills, enjoying ‘moderate potations from a bowl of delicious syllabub, or a generous Tortola punch’.

At some point, an increasingly animated Boswell could be relied upon to burst into impromptu song.

After one such visit, Lettsom took up his pen.

I have, my friend, had some occasions of viewing thee…. when thy whole soul has been poured out in social enjoyment, I might have said ecstasy, and in no point of view canst thou appear more endearing; for those will love thee most who see most of thy heart.

But in these scenes of pleasure, which I have cordially enjoyed, sometimes a sigh of solicitude has burst upon me, lest by any unguarded excitement of such conviviality a bodily constitution can be undermined, and that life thereby shortened, which every man of refinement and virtuous sociality must wish long, very long, preserved.

I have observed, not merely a too frequent use of the glass, but the mixture of liquors which, as a professional man, I can add, tends to injure the best human fabric. By whatever means the spirits are exhilarated beyond the chaste medium of nature, the alteration of mental languor will result.

Two motives embolden me thus to …. chasten and to moderate the fascinating influence of social pleasures, either too frequently repeated or too far extended.

I feel in the first place the emotions of friendship, which I cannot repress; and in the next, the intrinsic solid sense of one I am proud to call my friend; these equally impel me to risk his censure, whilst the latter encourages me to subscribe myself,

his sincerely,

J.C.LETTSOM

A few months later a short note from Boswell.

I am not cheerful at present. I have not been so attentive as I should be to your most friendly recommendation as to regime. Spero Meliora—I hope to improve.

But the friendship at any rate survived. And among his papers Boswell filed the letter away. On the back of the envelope, there is a careful handwritten note:

Dr. John Coakley Lettsom, a very friendly letter cautioning me against indulging too much in wine.

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There has been a run of articles in the press lately about Americans with Democrat leanings turning up in London.

The Times, under a headline ‘Why uber-rich Americans are escaping to the UK’ reported that

Every house in Notting Hill is now for ‘soft sale’…the locals are braced for the Donald Dashers, wealthy Americans…. who do not need to read another deranged news story to persuade them that now is the time to leave the US

One buyer from Palm Beach told the reporter that

Democrats and Republicans used to just about rub along on the small billionaire island…but now that Trump is back, the former are being dropped from book clubs, social circles, charity committees and even children’s playgroups. “Its time to go”.

All this has to be taken with a pinch of salt of course. The newspapers have an unhealthy fascination with the ebb and flow of the seriously rich in London’s pricier postcodes, and its only a few weeks since the same journalists were writing insider accounts of a mass flight of footloose millionaires to sunnier climes.

But a little lower down the income scale American applications for British citizenship are up 40% too, and whatever its true scale there certainly seems to be a steady stream of new American arrivals.

For a few years in the noughties I lived in a South London house on the site of what was once the country villa of a well-connected Quaker physician called John Coakley Lettsom. A renowned philanthropist, he was also a particularly enthusiastic self-publicist. I was reminded of a story he seems to have repeated often about a late-night encounter in the early 1780s.

This is not the first time that London has offered a port in an American storm, although back in the eighteenth century the stakes were rather higher than being dropped from book clubs. It is easy to think of the American Revolution as a new nation uniting in the mass repudiation of both George III and Britishness generally. The reality was that support for the radical movement for independence and for the status quo were both broadly based; the priority for much of the population was simply trying to find a safe path for their families in a suddenly and violently polarised society, as the country quickly descended into years of messy and bloody civil war.

In the end, finding themselves on the losing side, somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 Loyalists felt left with little choice but to leave their homes entirely, often with only what they could carry. Most of them headed for one of three destinations: Canada, the West Indies, or London.

Many arrived in England with high hopes and a sense of deep relief. As one young woman wrote in her diary:

How shall I describe what I felt, when I first set my foot on British ground? I could have kissed the gravel on the salt Beach! It was my home: the Country to which I had so long and earnestly wished to see. The Isle of Liberty and Peace.

They were greeted with a wave of public sympathy. As politicians vied with each other in their expressions of support, the Government launched a Loyalist Claims Commission to compensate the refugees for financial losses that had arisen from loyalty to the Crown. But soon any early euphoria among London’s new American arrivals had quickly worn off. As the quickly overwhelmed compensation fund became a byword for bureaucracy, delay and parsimony, the Americans clustered together waiting for news often found themselves in increasingly difficult financial circumstances. Some turned to desperate measures.

Lettsom came from a family with West Indian roots. Although he had lived in England since early childhood he still considered himself very much an American, and had strong sympathies for his distressed countrymen washed up in the capital.

Late one evening he came face to face with a compatriot who put that sympathy to a stern test.

It was my lot a few years ago, to be attacked on the highway by a genteel looking person, well mounted, who demanded my money, at the same time placing a pistol to my breast; I requested him to remove the pistol, which he instantly did; I saw his agitation, from whence I concluded he had not been habituated to this hazardous practice: and I added, that I had both gold and silver about me, which I freely gave him; but that I was sorry to see a young gentleman risk his life in so unbecoming a manner, which would probably soon terminate at the gallows; that at the best, the casual pittance gained on the highway would afford but a precarious and temporary subsistence, but that if I could serve him by a private assistance, more becoming his appearance, he might farther command my purse; and at the same time I desired him to accept a card containing my address, and to call upon me, as he might trust to my word for his liberty and life.

He accepted my address, but I observed his voice faltered; it was late at night; there was, however sufficient star-light to enable me to perceive, as I leaned towards him on the window of my carriage, that his bosom was overwhelmed with conflicting passions; at length, bending forward on his horse, and recovering the power of speech , he affectingly said, ‘I thank you for your offer, -- American affairs have ruined me, -- I will, dear Sir, wait upon you.

When, a few days later, the young man came to his door, Lettsom took his case in hand. Nowhere was the sympathy for distressed loyalists deeper than in royal circles, so he presented the young man’s case to Queen Charlotte: might he be granted a commission in the British Army?

To Lettsom’s delight and satisfaction the Queen approved the plan. Now, he concluded smugly, his American friend was ‘as amiable and deserving an officer as any in the army. This is better than hanging.’

Indeed it was. Sadly though the sequel to the story is in a distinctly minor key.

After quick promotion, the young officer was posted to the Caribbean. By the time he reached Jamaica, fully three thousand of his white loyalist compatriots had arrived ahead of him, as well as a further eight thousand enslaved workers they had brought with them. Beyond the daunting demands of finding their way on this brutally violent island, one already so heavily exploited by the close-knit and intimidatingly wealthy community of white creole families who had lived there for generations, the loyalists by and large had little or no immunity to tropical disease. Within a couple of years, his life, like those of so many of his loyalist neighbours and their enslaved workers, had been claimed by yellow fever.

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Further Reading: If you would like to learn more about American Loyalists, I strongly recommend Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World.

Another magazine cover of a US president wearing a crown.

In this case of course not a White House mock-up, but a real one: the cover of Puck, the satirical magazine founded by cartoonist Joseph Keppler — a joke at the expense of Theodore Roosevelt on the eve of the 1904 presidential election.

When Roosevelt had stepped into the presidential shoes of the assassinated McKinley a few years earlier, he inherited a brand new suite of foreign American possessions, the spoils of the recent Spanish-American War: Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam and more. In a swashbuckling first term, he asserted American power further across the Caribbean and Latin America, and took possession of the ten mile wide strip across the Isthmus that would become the Panama canal. To complete this picture of an international man of action, he was awarded a Noble Peace Prize for brokering peace between Russia and Japan.

The thrust of the spoof article accompanying the cartoon in the Democrat leaning Puck (which before the election period had generally been relatively positive about him), was that the regal Roosevelt should ascend to his proper role of Emperor as soon as that could be arranged. And in the meantime it probably made sense to for his Democrat opponent Alton B. Parker to be left to handle the workaday duties of president, until such time as that outdated role could finally be wound up.

None of this did the slightest harm to Roosevelt, who went on to win the vote in the electoral college by 331 to 140.

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And it came to pass after these things, that Naboth the Jezrelite had a vineyard, which was in Jezrel, hard by the palace of Ahab king of Samaria.

And Ahab spake unto Naboth, saying, Give me thy vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house; and I will give thee for it a better vineyard than it; or, if it seem good to thee, I will give thee the worth of it in money.

And Naboth said to Ahab, The Lord forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee.

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Recently the news has been difficult to watch.

By the time President Trump casually dropped into a press conference what seemed to be a proposal to annex, clear and redevelop the Gaza Strip, I badly needed some respite from reality. I drew the curtains, shut out the world, and sat down to West Wing, Series One, Episode One. It reflects badly on me that at some level it helped.

Having now already made a fair dent in the boxed set, this feels like a good time to broaden out from comfort viewing to explore some comfort history.

So here is a short piece on the story of a courageous and unbending senator, cut from the cloth of an Old Testament prophet, standing up to presidential power, and standing in the way of a dangerous and ill-thought-through plan to annex the war-torn home of another nation. The story too of a great speech, portentously titled Naboth’s Vineyard - just the kind of Old Testament reference Aaron Sorkin’s President Josiah Bartlett might have thrown out insouciantly for the benefit of his indulgent staffers.

We are back now in the era of Reconstruction. The Civil War is over, the question of slavery has been decided, and Ulysses S. Grant is President, leading a Republican party with commanding majorities in Congress; doing so with the weight, and indeed the management style, of a victorious war leader. At his right hand is one Orville Babcock, young, ambitious, dynamic, and unfailingly corrupt – still formally serving as an army officer, a device that has more or less freed him from Congressional oversight (he will go on to feature in two criminal indictments, and most of the major scandals that will dog Grant’s presidency).

In 1869 Grant was approached by a man with a plan, another former army officer, the suave and polished Colonel Joseph Fabens. Fabens had become close, he told him, to the president of St. Domingo, one Buonaventura Baez. A great admirer of the United States, and of course Grant in particular, Baez felt that the best future of his country lay under the protective wing of the US, not least to shield it from the predations of its neighbour, Haiti. He saw annexation by the United States as the best way to assure his people a future of stability and prosperity.

St. Domingo, the Dominican Republic of today, occupied the Eastern part of the island of Hispaniola. Throughout the century it had been blighted by a chaotic and violent history as Spain and the neighbouring and newly independent Haiti took turns to invade and occupy the country between periods of fragile and troubled independence.

Grant was attracted to the plan immediately. With Samana Bay offering a fine harbour perfect for a US naval base, his country could at a stroke make itself the strongest naval power in its Caribbean back yard. And with nearly twenty thousand square miles of sparsely populated land, surely too this could be an ideal location to bring life to a cherished project - to offer the formerly enslaved Black population of the South the chance of a fresh start with their own land holdings. Plenty of opportunities too for American investment, development and profit. And for a man reared on ideas of Manifest Destiny, what a fine legacy another addition to the ever-expanding United States would be.

He dispatched Babcock to investigate the plan.

On arrival in St. Domingo, Fabens introduced Babcock to his associate General William Cazneau. The pair were Massachusetts land speculators who had made a fortune buying land in Texas ahead of its annexation. They had spent the last few years in St. Domingo, cultivating Baez, now firmly in their pocket, and preparing the ground for a second, altogether bigger and better, financial coup. Babcock’s share of the action was soon settled.

St. Domingo, Babcock reported back, was indeed a great opportunity for the United States. While its people were ‘ignorant and indolent’, Samana was indeed an excellent harbour, and ideal for a naval base. The country’s soil was fertile and should be able to feed and sustain a population of up to four million – conveniently the number of Black Americans recently freed from slavery.

To even Grant’s surprise, his energetic Chief of Staff brought back with him a draft treaty that he had taken it upon himself to negotiate with Baez. Presented with the draft in cabinet, the astonished Secretary of State Hamilton Fish had to be talked down from resignation. But, once ruffled feathers had been smoothed, he swallowed his pride and finalised the negotiations. Grant meanwhile dispatched the US navy to support Baez in holding back Haitian incursions.

Back in St. Domingo, to allay US queasiness about the treaty’s legitimacy, Baez had announced a plebiscite on the proposal, first taking the precaution of imprisoning or banishing likely opponents. The consequences of dissent were made sufficiently clear that the plan was approved by 15,964 votes to 11.

The treaty was finally signed at the end of November 1869. The US would assume local debts and take full control of the territory’s external affairs, as well as all military and financial matters. Baez would remain in place as the governor and figurehead leader, his position buttressed of course by the power of the United States.

Now all that was left was Congressional approval of the annexation. It would require a two thirds majority in the Senate. Given the Republican party’s commanding majority, and Grant’s own almost military approach to party management, the president foresaw little difficulty.

There was really only one figure person who might stand in his way - the Republican Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. All of Washington knew that he was opposed on principle to anything approaching American imperialism, particularly in the Caribbean.

Sumner was a towering figure in the Abolitionist movement, famous for his uncompromising moral views, stubborn integrity, and confrontational oratory. In 1856 he had given a fiery anti-slavery speech that had so inflamed Southern sensibilities that a young congressman by the name of Preston Brooks had attacked him as he sat at his desk in the Senate Chamber. Berating him as he beat him around the head with a walking cane, while an associate brandished a pistol to keep away bystanders, Brooks had left the senator on the floor, bleeding and unconscious. His injuries were so severe that it was four years before Sumner recovered sufficiently to return to his seat in the Senate, his chair left empty as a silent rebuke to his opponents. In his chambers, it was said, his still-bloodied coat was displayed for visitors as a badge of pride.

Grant, as ever, decided on the direct approach. On 2 January, he appeared unannounced at Sumner’s home, explained his plans and emphasised very clearly the personal importance he attached to them. Accustomed to obedience, he came away from the conversation convinced that Sumner would cause no trouble. He could not have been more wrong.

Sumner was not the only Republican with concerns about the plan. Just eight years earlier Baez had struck a similar deal with Spain. The news had triggered uprisings across the country, drawing Spain into years of bloody internal war. By 1865 they had had quite enough and withdrew from the country. Without their support Baez had fallen, and it had taken years of often violent struggle for him to re-establish a tenuous grip on power. It seemed all too likely that the US would be walking into yet another cycle of St. Domingo’s long history of insurrection and bloodshed. And after this, what next? Would this prove to be the thin end of an expansionist wedge sweeping up the whole of the West Indies? Others, committed like Sumner to the cause of Black emancipation, recoiled from the prospect of the United States taking sovereignty away from this independent republic with its largely Black population.

With Grant strongly set on the plan, it was obvious that opposition might carry personal cost. But what even shy opponents could do was to ensure the treaty was referred to Sumner’s committee. There he played his signature move of completely ignoring the matter; he had only recently succeeded in killing the previous administration’s plan to buy the Danish West Indies simply by leaving their Treaty to languish in his committee until the ratification deadlines could be extended no further.

Grant was made of sterner stuff. He demanded that his Republican colleagues haul the Treaty back to the floor of the House well before its deadline. Marshalling his committee to deliver a damning adverse report, Sumner girded his loins for the struggle, while Grant set to work arranging personal meetings with senators to argue his case and make his personal wishes crystal clear.

Come the day of the debate, Sumner was the first to rise, delivering a marathon four-hour speech eloquently setting out all his grounds for opposition – financial, political and above all moral. Despite all efforts of Grant’s supporters, and with still nervous opposition now consolidating around Sumner’s leadership, the Senate contrived to kill the Treaty passively - avoiding a vote entirely as the Treaty’s deadline expired.

Unaccustomed to resistance from his own party, Grant was not to be denied so easily. The treaty was refreshed, and the deadline extended. The President wrote to the Senate advising them of his ‘intense anxiety for the ratification of the treaty’. In the background, every form of carrot and stick available was in use. The cabinet was summoned and told by Grant that any of them opposing the plan would be excluded from the rich seams of political patronage for the rest of his term. At the same time preferments and juicy posts were traded freely for promises of support. Sumner himself had to decline an offer of a posting to London as his country’s ambassador.

All of this was to no avail. After a long and stormy session at the end of June, votes for the treaty were tied at twenty-eight for twenty-eight against – not even a majority, let alone the required super-majority.

Grant was not done yet. His year-end message to Congress reaffirmed his undimmed resolve, and the New Year brought a fresh manoeuvre. A commission was to be established on the proposals, one authorised by both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Under the arcane rules of Congress, recommendations from such a joint commission could be approved under a different process, bringing the House of Representatives into play and potentially defanging Senate opposition. Sumner reacted angrily and publicly, making it clear that he would fight the plan to the end.

By the time the new motion was debated, realism about the scale of political opposition had set in for the Grant camp, and the terms of reference of the Commission had been watered down to a relatively harmless fact-finding brief that would do little more than keep the plan alive. Sumner was counselled by his colleagues to pick his battles and let the Commission’s approval pass. But the senator had seen an opportunity and now was determined to kill the plan once and for all.

Senate debates on treaties had always been held in closed secret sessions, albeit with the normal leaks and briefings. The debate on the establishment of the Commission, however, would be public. For the first time Sumner had the Congressional megaphone available to take his rhetoric across the nation. He resolved to make the most of it.

In impassioned and often vituperative terms, Sumner not only laid out his many objections to the annexation but accused Grant of usurpation and launched ad hominem attacks on the behaviour of Babcock and his associates. Finally, after several hours, he wound up:

I conclude as I began. I protest against this legislation as another stage in a drama of blood. I protest against it in the name of Justice, outraged by violence; in the name of Humanity insulted; in the name of the weak trodden down; in the name of Peace imperilled, and in the name of the African race, whose first effort at Independence is rudely assailed.

In those pre-Twitter days, set-piece speeches were printed at length in the press and often as pamphlets. Sumner’s ran to sixteen pages. He titled it Naboth’s Vineyard, and above the text laid out the first verses of the story from the Book of Kings that I have quoted at the top of this piece. It is a powerful metaphor for the projected annexation.

Naboth owned a vineyard close by the palace of Ahab the king of Samaria. Ahab wanted the vineyard as a herb garden, and asked to have the land. He would pay, or provide another. But Naboth was not inclined to sell: ‘The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers’.

Beyond the text Sumner quoted directly, the story continues in a manner that makes the reference deeply offensive to all involved. Ahab’s wife Jezebel scolded him for accepting this rebuff and forged a letter in his name instructing Samaria’s nobles to organise false witnesses against Naboth on charges of blasphemy and have him stoned to death. The deed done, she told Ahab ‘Arise, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite which he refused to give thee for money; he is no longer alive, but dead’.

Take possession he did, at which point the prophet Elijah confronted him with thunderous news of divine wrath, and a smorgasbord of colourful curses on him and his family – ‘In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine’.

In the Senate, the harmless procedural motion duly passed with little opposition. The Commission was formed, and in due course set about their work. But of course, that had never been what the speech was really about. As the press across the country responded to the heat of Sumner’s rhetoric the end was coming for any realistic prospect of the annexation of St. Domingo.

With his relationship with Grant and his circle in ruins, it was the beginning of the end too of Sumner’s political career. Within three months he had been ousted from the cherished chair of his committee. Three years after that he was dead.

It is unsurprising to read that Sumner was a difficult individual. At times he was clearly quite insufferable. From one biographer: -

Distrusted by friends and allies, and reciprocating their distrust, a man of “ostentatious culture”, “unvarnished egotism”, and a “specimen of prolonged and morbid juvenility”, Sumner combined a passionate conviction in his own moral purity with a command of 19^th century “rhetorical flourishes” and a “remarkable talent for rationalisation”.

But in the end he was also a moral giant. As the poet Emerson, one of his close circle, wrote of him

His friends, I remember, were told that they would find Sumner a man of the world like the rest. “It is quite impossible to be at Washington and not bend; he will bend as the rest have done”. Well, he did not bend.

As presidential rhetoric turns again to empire, who will be our Sumners today?

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There were three things I had quickly found I was missing deeply: the learning, the writing and the people. I had loved the process of diving into a series of historical worlds I had wrongly imagined I already understood something about, and having to work out which way was up and what I thought about them. Then I had really enjoyed the craft of turning that into a few thousand words with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Perhaps the most important thing of all had been doing that among a community of friends.

That is what I have tried to recreate a bit of for myself here - writing without the footnotes of course, and with a bit more of an eye to what’s relevant for our lives today - sometimes my life in particular. What I try to bring, once a month or so, is a long-form piece that is readable, reliable and relatable, and that sheds light on a piece of history you may not have known about - perhaps sometimes making you see our past just a little bit differently.

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The paper I can’t stand, the worst of all, is the Daily Mirror….. Yes, the Daily Mirror. It makes me spit!

- Winston Churchill

Political cartoons have always got under the skin of powerful men. This is the story of one that never really intended to; a wartime story of frayed ministerial nerves, public threats to close down a national newspaper, and - in the end - one of the more stylish ripostes in the history of the free press.

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In the end, Philip Zec’s cartoon turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Zec and Bill Connor had known each other for what seemed like forever. All the way back to 1929, when Connor, living at home with his Irish family and bouncing around London jobs as an office boy, saw a vacancy for a junior accounts clerk at a small ad agency called ARKS Publicity.

Zec, born the same year as Connor, had already been at ARKS for a while. The artist prodigy son of a Russian Jewish tailor, he had won a scholarship to St. Martins at thirteen. He had joined the firm from there; still only twenty, he was now running the art department.

Founded by a young entrepreneur in a hurry, ARKS worked mostly with clients in the new and exciting radio industry. As long as you turned up on time, there were few rules and fewer boundaries. When Zec tipped his boss off that this distracted and underperforming accounts clerk had a way with words, he took the young man aside and told him that he was now a copywriter; he would be working with Zec, and had a month to show he could cut it. Zec drew the graphics, and Connor penned the copy. It worked like a dream.

From that point on their careers were entwined. When Connor moved upmarket to the London arm of J. Walter Thompson, he outsourced his graphics to Zec, now running his own outfit. Two years later Connor’s boss took his team with him to a troubled national newspaper called the Daily Mirror, and no one was surprised when Zec turned up there soon afterwards.

Now Zec and Connor were sharing an office once more. Zec drew the daily political cartoon. Connor helped sharpen the captions.

The Mirror had been on quite a journey.

Founded at the turn of the century as a companion for the Daily Mail, written for women by women, it flopped after an expensive launch. A rapid reset relaunched it as a picture-led second string daily in the Harmsworth family’s newspaper stable. By 1914, when Lord Northcliffe parcelled the paper off to Lord Rothermere, his younger brother, it was selling a steady 1.2 million copies a day.

Rothermere soon found bigger fish to fry, neglecting the paper while he spent the Twenties immersed in a string of deals to consolidate the British newspaper industry. His shares in the Mirror became chips in this bigger financial game when he floated the company on the London Stock Exchange; by 1931 he had sold the last of them, and for teh first time in its history, the Mirror was an independent public company - free from the control of a proprietor.

The paper had been steadily leaking readers for years. By 1935, its circulation had dwindled to 700,000, and the future looked bleak. It was now that its editorial director Harry Guy Bartholomew, “a sawn-off shotgun of a man” known to all as Bart, tabled a radical plan. The Mirror was to be reshaped again, this time as a full-bore US-style tabloid. With little to lose, the board backed him.

Unashamedly sensationalist, new typeface, picture-led, chock full of comic strips and bold opinions straight-forwardly voiced, the paper was now to speak to, and for, the working class - a fearless and methodical slaughterer of sacred cows. New, raw and direct, the bete noire of the Establishment, this was a formula that was to take the paper through decades of growth and glory. By the end of the next decade, it would be the biggest newspaper in the country, selling four and a half million copies a day.

But first Bart needed fresh blood. A veteran of the technical side of the paper, he had never been a writer himself. He needed new journalistic talent - young, fearless and untainted by assumptions about how a national newspaper ought to work. Connor joined on the same day as a Welshman three years his junior called Hugh Cudlipp.

Could the twenty-five-year-old Connor write a column? Bart asked him.

Like the man who is suddenly asked if he could play the violin, I replied; ‘I don’t know. I’ve never tried.’ He said ‘Start now!’ – and sure enough I’ve been sawing the catgut ever since.

He was to write a daily opinion piece under the pen name ‘Cassandra’ – Bart’s device, Connor later learned, to ease his frictionless replacement if things didn’t work out; he needn’t have bothered.

By the time war came, the new Mirror had hit its stride. It was the newspaper of choice for both the troops, and the women they had left behind them in the wartime munitions factories. It spoke with the clear and assured voice of the common man: as the journalist Matthew Engel later put it -

The intelligent chap leaning on the counter of the bar: not la-di-dah or anything – he liked a laugh, and he definitely had an eye for the girls – but talking a lot of common sense.

As war loomed over Europe, with Cassandra at the fore, the Mirror had doggedly attacked Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler. But though their weight had been firmly behind Churchill in opposition, now they were a thorn in the side of the war machine he was leading. Their readers, they wrote, were lions led by donkeys – not just out-of-touch and out-of-date generals, but timeserving ministers and profiteering business magnates. Their public loved it.

Though a former journalist himself, Churchill, the thinnest skinned of Prime Ministers, raged against the attacks. The Mirror’s directors became almost used to being summoned for a dressing down.

Sometimes the meetings were with Churchill himself, sometimes his Deputy Clement Attlee or the Home Secretary Herbert Morrison – both, they sensed, operating on instructions from above. Cudlipp, by now the precocious editor of the Sunday paper, got deeply under the premier’s skin by playing back in print his own sonorous pre-war opposition rhetoric, and advising him to heed his own warnings. But mostly the cuttings pushed cross the table were Cassandra’s.

And there was more from Downing Street in the mail. This for example at the start of 1941, after Connor had retold an anecdote in America’s Life magazine, that Churchill had scribbled a note on a long-winded report from his Foreign Secretary saying, ‘As far as I can see, you have used every cliché except “God is Love” and “Please adjust your dress before leaving”.

Dear Sir

The Prime Minister has had his attention drawn to the enclosed cutting from the Daily Mirror of January 1.He desires me to inform you that this offensive story is totally devoid of foundation. No such report was ever made by Mr. Eden, nor any such comment by the Prime Minister.

A second cutting came in the same envelope, Cassandra again, this time on the need for energy and fresh talent in a Cabinet dominated by the familiar faces of a cosy rotating cast of long-serving ministers. Voicing rumours that RAB Butler was about to be promoted, Connor listed a litany of incestuous ministerial shufflings:

Everybody knows everybody.

Keep it in the family!

Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours!

Talk about musical chairs!

The trouble is that this particular game is being played to a funeral march.

Ours.

Downing Street denied plans for a promotion, sternly closing the letter:-

The Prime Minister wishes me to say that it is a pity that so able a writer should show himself so dominated by malevolence.

Nothing changed.

While its readers lapped it all up, ministers grumbled, and generals complained that attacks on their competence and their methods were a danger to morale. After two years or so of this, Churchill’s patience was exhausted. War Cabinet minutes precis what must have been lengthy ranting monologues on the theme.

By now he had persuaded himself that the Mirror was actively engaged in a subversive campaign to sap the nation’s will to sustain its war effort. Perhaps, he pondered there was a hidden foreign hand at play. Officials were despatched to investigate whether American isolationists sympathetic to Germany might be pulling the paper’s strings, their presence cloaked by nominees secretly acting on their behalf in this apparently independent British public company.

At a little after nine ‘o’clock on 5 March 1942, Zec set off for the office with a piece of cardboard ten inches by twelve in the saddle bag of his bike. Drawn at home the previous evening it was the third cartoon on his theme of the week, chiding the public for wastefulness and attacking cynical black marketeers.

Supplies of precious oil were being maintained at a terrible cost to the merchant marine facing the desperate realties of U-boat warfare. The Government had just allowed an increase in the price of fuel, both to allow the oil companies to cover higher costs and in an effort to stem demand. Never mind marginal economics, Zec was making the moral point of the human cost of unnecessary consumption.

A seaman, half drowned, clung to a makeshift raft in a heaving sea. ‘PETROL IS DEARER NOW’.

It’s great! Connor told him. But the caption needs to be stronger:-

‘THE PRICE OF PETROL HAS BEEN RAISED BY A PENNY. (OFFICIAL)’

Of course not everyone always reads a cartoon the same way. For most, it was taken as what it was - a powerful call to heed the human cost of needless consumption. But to the politicians this was a seditious message to working class merchant seamen that they were sacrificing their lives just to fatten the profits of the oil companies. The Lord Chancellor was consulted – it was, he agreed, a cruel cartoon, deplorable, horrible.

Two weeks later, Herbert Morrison the Home Secretary arrived at Bart’s office.

‘What I have got to say is going to be rather unpleasant. You gentlemen have your own legal advisers. What I have to tell you is the unanimous decision of the Cabinet’

He placed a dossier of Mirror cuttings on the table. ‘Criticism is one thing. Unfair criticism is another’.

The Zec cartoon was ‘very artistically drawn; worthy of Goebbels at his best. Only a very unpatriotic editor would pass that for publication’. If this continued, he said, the Government would close the Mirror down. He was going to make his warning public in Parliament that afternoon.

A question in the House duly cued up Morrison’s statement: had he seen the cartoon, and given that it seemed ‘calculated to discourage seamen and readers of all classes from serving the country in its time of need and conducive to defeatism’, could action be taken?

The cartoon in question is only one example, but a particularly evil example, of the policy and methods of the newspaper which, intent on exploiting an appetite for sensation and with a reckless indifference to the national interest and to the prejudicial effect on the war effort, has repeatedly published scurrilous misrepresentations, distorted and exaggerated statements and irresponsible generalisations.

The Government have decided that the right method of dealing with a newspaper which persistently disregards its public responsibility and the national interest is to make use [its emergency power to suppress] a paper that systematically publishes matter calculated to foment opposition to the successful prosecution of the war.

I have seen those responsible for the publication of the Daily Mirror….A watch will be kept on the paper and the course which the Government may ultimately decide to take will depend on whether those concerned recognise their public responsibility…

It would not normally be an offence, a backbencher pointed out, for a newspaper to call attention to the rise in process of an important commodity’. That was not the intent of the cartoon replied Morrison:-

The implication….was that the brave men of the Mercantile Marine, whom I would not put in the same street as some of the people who write these things – the implication is that these brave men were sacrificing their lives merely in order that the petrol combine should make another penny a gallon.

A backlash quickly followed. The press, jealous of their long cherished freedoms, held their noses and rallied round their upstart Fleet Street neighbours. Would the Government, an MP asked, be arranging that in future British newspapers should be edited by Parliamentary Private Secretaries?

It was soon clear that few outside the circle of Government ‘group think’ had understood the cartoon as an attack on the profits of oil companies. Indeed the Mirror was getting requests for copies to display at garages, and from the organisers of naval ‘Warship Week’ funding drives.

A week later, the House of Commons cleared time for a bruising debate on Freedom of the Press. Morrison’s own journalistic offerings as an anti-war conscientious objector in the first war were dredged up, and his opponents pointed out that, inconveniently, his wife sometimes contributed to the family coffers writing for the scurrilous rag he was attacking. Was the right to criticise the powerful not one of the values that the country was fighting for? The damage to public morale, from suppressing a popular national newspaper must surely far outweigh any benefit.

In the cold light of day, the Government had clearly overreached.

But, more determined than ever not to take a backward step, how could Cassandra and his Mirror colleagues now respond?

The day after the debate, Connor’s column appeared without its normal headline. This, he wrote, was to be his last wartime column.

…I campaigned for Churchill and my support was early and violent. But since he came to power I have distrusted many of his lieutenants – and I have said so with scant respect for with their position or their feelings.

It has seemed to me that we have never got going in this war. We have had victories – but they have been overpowered in a terrifying succession of defeats. And the only things that have been as numerous as the defeats have been the excuses.

…In the House of Commons you will have heard how criticism is received. The Government is extraordinarily sensitive.

They are far too glib with the shameful rejoinder that those who do not agree with them are subversive – and even traitors.

Yet the whole course of their conduct from Dunkirk [onwards] has showed that they have followed the advice of their critics. Yesterday’s proceedings prove how determined they are henceforth to do without this advice.

But that is all over. You will have heard the storm and read the debate about the Daily Mirror.

I cannot and will not change my policy. In the past I have applauded politicians who have got out rather than knuckle under. Today I applaud my own funeral…

I am still a comparatively young man and I propose to see whether the rifle is a better weapon than the printed word.

Mr. Morrison can have my pen – but not my conscience.

Mr. Morrison can have my silence – but not my self-respect.

And with that he was gone.

Three years later, just demobbed from the army, Connor was back at his Daily Mirror desk.

Finally, it was time for Cassandra to speak once more:

As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted…….

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Further Reading

I recently wrote about Connor and his part in the Government’s attack on P.G. Wodehouse. I hadn’t appreciated quite how much bad blood there was between him and Churchill and his cabinet by the summer of 1941, which makes the decision by Duff Cooper, Churchill’s Minister of Information, to let him loose on a primetime BBC radio broadcast all the more extraordinary.

His son Robert covers this episode in his memoir of his father Cassandra: Reflections in a Mirror. There is a freely available copy here.

Publish and Be Damned, Hugh Cudlipp’s history of the Daily Mirror, which he went on to edit for twenty-five years, also free, is here

15 July 1941. Postscript: Britain’s prime national radio slot, straight after the nine o’clock evening news, broadcasting to one in every four adults across the country.

I have come to tell you tonight the story of a rich man trying to make his last and greatest sale – that of his own country.

It is a sombre story of self-respect, of honour and of decency being pawned to the Nazis for the price of a soft bed in a luxury hotel.

It is a tale of laughter growing old and of the Judas whine of treachery taking its place.

Uniquely in the BBC’s long history, all editorial controls had been overridden on government orders for the seven-minute demolition of the reputation of a national treasure.

There seem to be running themes in the lists of famous alumni that public schools hold so dear; Eton for example does aristocratic prime ministers. When I first found myself at South London’s robustly middle-class Dulwich College, I learned that the local specialities were arctic explorers, long-retired sportsmen, and mass market authors.

There was only the one explorer of note, but he was a daily, if rather dusty, presence in our lives. An open boat sat in the passage between two of the school’s grand Victorian blocks; this, we were told, was ‘Shackleton’s boat’. Nobody really bothered to explain to us the story of its desperate five-man, fifteen-day voyage across the South Atlantic in storm force winds. A once sacred relic of Edwardian derring-do, the small vessel remained untouchable – but with Dulwich determined to adapt itself to the zeitgeist of the Seventies, there seemed no need to dwell on it.

A few years later, another piece of alumni clutter arrived: the Long Island study of a man with one of the stronger claims to be the twentieth century’s greatest comic writer - dismantled and shipped across the Atlantic to be rebuilt, typewriter, pipe-rack and all, in the middle of the school library.

P.G. Wodehouse was one of a quartet of best-selling old boys. Most of us had read C.S Forester’s Hornblower books, the beginning of a whole genre of Napoleonic sea adventures. Dennis Wheatley’s page turners were mediocre but hugely popular, particularly his occult thrillers where clean-cut British heroes battled rich and powerful satanists with thick European accents. Raymond Chandler, we knew mostly from television reruns of black-and-white Humphrey Bogart movies made from his hard-boiled private eye stories. Wodehouse himself of course had brought us the bottled sunshine of Blanding’s Castle, Bertie Wooster and the wise and ever resourceful Jeeves.

Wheatley was the black sheep of the group, expelled from the school, he claimed, for founding a secret society. Very much on brand. But with Wodehouse too, more puzzlingly, there was some sort of a shadow, never fully explained. Something to do with the war.

This is the strange story of a state-sanctioned character assassination, and of how, in a violently polarised world, affability, and a good-natured ability to make the best of things and get along with almost anyone, suddenly came to look very much like collaboration with the enemy.

In the summer of 1941, the war was in the balance. The Blitz and the Battle of Britain were over and, alongside its strange new bedfellow Russia, Britain was gearing up for a long struggle with Germany. What mattered most of all now was whether the United States would weigh in by their side.

Polls at the start of hostilities had showed that 95% and more of Americans wanted to stay out of the war. By now Franklin Roosevelt had edged political opinion to the point where he had been able to pass the Lend-Lease Act, at least opening a channel for military supplies and meaningful economic support. But the isolationist lobby were still a formidable force, and the nation was deeply divided.

As much as high politics, public opinion would decide the matter, and much of that would turn on the softest of questions. What was this war really about? Who, at their core, were the British? Why should America fight by their side? Who better to sway the American people than the voices they already knew: writers, entertainers and broadcasters – their every move curated behind the scenes by two formidable propaganda machines.

Britain naturally played on its transatlantic bonds - a shared heritage and common values. A progressive nation, she was united across society in an all-consuming war to defend the proud traditions she stood for. No one embodied this better than the British Ministry of Information’s favourite public figurehead, the playwright and writer J. B. Priestley – best remembered now for that mainstay of the GCSE English syllabus, An Inspector Calls. Priestley was the BBC’s star broadcaster routinely drawing the biggest audiences of the week – not just on the Home Service, but of course on its North American shortwave station. It had been Priestley’s on-air alchemy that had somehow transformed the rout of Dunkirk into that golden miracle of unity and hope, the deliverance of the stranded troops by the great democratic fleet of ‘little ships’. Described by Time Magazine as ‘compact as a beer mug, with a voice as mellow as ancient ale’, his flat Yorkshire intonation and ability to capture a vision of a people fighting as one for a better future was exactly what was needed.

Germany countered with a very different vision: Britain was a deeply hierarchical class-based society, whose manipulative and decadent elite would do anything to keep their grip on the ill-gotten fruits of Empire. This was fertile territory; Ronald Tree, the junior British minister based in Washington, reported that most Americans saw the British as ‘a country of picturesque and servile peasantry ruled over by a land-owning class with affected and effeminate voices’. Noel Coward, much loved by America audiences for his charm and wit, and a regular guest at the Roosevelt’s Whitehouse, was quietly ushered home for fear that his effete public persona was feeding the German narrative.

So where were our quartet of authors while all of this was going on?

C.S Forester was at the heart of things, working discreetly for the British propaganda operation in Washington, placing pro-British content with his many friends in the US media world. Wheatley, who turned out to be Churchill’s favourite thriller writer, had been hired, largely on that basis, for a strange role in a secretive government department in London dreaming up wild outside-the-box ideas for military operations and planning scenarios. A little older, Chandler, a veteran of World War One still battling with PTSD and alcoholism, was out on the West Coast painstakingly reworking the follow up to Farewell my Lovely.

Wodehouse, meanwhile, was sitting in a German internment camp.

When war broke out, the Wodehouses had been living in comfortable tax exile in the smart resort of Le Touquet on the Northern coast of France – Wodehouse tapping away on his latest book in workaholic bliss, while his flamboyant wife Ethel held court to the local expat community. Taken by surprise by the rapid advance of the German army they had found themselves trapped. Soon Wodehouse, along with every other British man in the area under the age of sixty, had been swept up by the occupying authorities as an enemy alien.

Viewed by his international public as the quintessential Englishman, Wodehouse was in fact in many ways by now more American than British. He first made it big in New York, writing the lyrics for a string of Broadway musicals. Then he moved on to novels and short stories that were essentially the same thing in written form, produced above all for the American market. Once news of his imprisonment reached his well-connected friends in the American entertainment world, they began to lobby for his release. Now realising who they had been holding, German propagandists scented opportunity.

However affectionate, Wodehouse’s outdated cartoon depiction of an idle and frivolous British upper class - one that he had been profitably peddling to his American readers for twenty years and more - fitted all too well with Germany’s favoured stereotypes. He offered the perfect audience too; every weekend, the Saturday Evening Post, seen in the media world as ‘the nearest thing to a bible for the isolationists’, took his short stories and serialisations into three million opinion-leading middle-class American homes. And how seriously should Britain’s claims of a titanic struggle for the future of civilisation be taken if P.G. Wodehouse, of all people, was cheerfully broadcasting from Berlin.

Wodehouse was in the middle of a time-killing game of camp cricket when a German official arrived unexpectedly and told him to pack his bag. He told Wodehouse he was to be freed, and took him directly to the altogether different surroundings of Berlin’s exclusive Adlon Hotel. Who should he run into on arrival but a German friend from his Hollywood days, who invited him to come into the bar and join a convivial circle of what would turn out to be German intelligence officers. While his old friend went to find him something better to wear, the discussion over drinks turned to sympathetic and helpful suggestions of how he could quickly reconnect with his long-neglected American readership. Why not a radio broadcast?

But first came a long round of interviews with foreign correspondents, mostly American. Emerging into a now radically changed world, the ever-affable Wodehouse got the tone hopelessly wrong. For the New York Times:

I never have been able to work up a belligerent feeling. Just as I am about to feel belligerent about some country, I meet some nice fellow from it and lose all sense of belligerency.

Then an ill-fated radio interview with CBS’s Berlin correspondent broadcast live on their US network. A cheery Wodehouse pondered complacently how the war would affect Britain, ‘whether England wins or not’.

In America the release was picked up the press as a mildly positive good news story. In Britain though, reactions ranged from the ‘disappointed’ to the venomous. The Daily Mirror carried a damning column by ‘Cassandra’, the nom-de-guerre of its star columnist Bill Connor, behind a front-page splash, very much in the same vein, headlined ‘The Price Is?’.

Wodehouse, isolated and oblivious to the British reaction, pondered what he might use as material for his coming broadcast, and decided to brush the dust off the script for a series of jokey talks he had given to his fellow inmates: How to be an Internee. It was innocuous enough material, if laden with an irony and understatement far better suited to his insider audience of fellow prisoners than to a wartime public broadcast. The Germans cared little about the detail. As long as Wodehouse was telling cheerful stories and cracking jokes on German radio, the rest really did not matter. The talk done, he headed off for some rest as a guest of his friend’s fiancée in the Bavarian countryside.

Now, back in Britain, the politicians started to pile in. Questions, ever less coded, were asked in Parliament at four consecutive sittings. Could the Attorney-General give assurances ‘that British subjects who broadcast under enemy auspices will be prosecuted under the Treachery Act’? Was the Ministry of Information watching the broadcasts of any British prisoners liberated in Germany? Were broadcasts being taped to support prosecution? Then finally he was named: the Government, announced the Foreign Secretary Antony Eden ‘had seen with regret that Mr Wodehouse had lent his services to the German propaganda machine’.

The British Minister of Information of the day was Duff Cooper, a senior ally of Churchill visibly struggling with the brief. Determined to lead from the front, he had been widely mocked for reciting Macaulay’s poem on the English defeat of the Armada on national radio in a hopelessly out of touch personal attempt to bolster public morale. The Wodehouse affair was coming to a head at the end of a particularly difficult political week that had seen him losing out publicly in a power battle with other ministries about the control of messaging about the war effort. To cap it all he had been taunted in Parliament for his powerlessness even over the wartime BBC.

As it happened a lunch at the Savoy had been arranged for the following day with a group of half a dozen leading journalists. As they refreshed themselves with pro-Russian toasts in yellow vodka, they asked why he had not resigned; only because it would have been unpatriotic to do so, he said. Inevitably, the conversation turned to Wodehouse: why were the Press not doing more? Connor, one of the guests, countered with an offer to make a no-holds-barred broadcast about the affair on the BBC; but of course, he added, the minister would not dare allow it.

The taunt was a recognition of his reputation. ‘Cassandra’, his column an unrivalled bully-pulpit to the Daily Mirror’s booming working-class circulation, was the journalistic enfant terrible of the day. Still a young man, he had learned his trade in the advertising world before taking journalism by storm, ’armed’, as his own editor put it ‘with intolerance, bigotry and irascibility’. But after just a few more toasts, Connor had been commissioned to speak.

When BBC officials contacted him to organise their editorial sign off, Connor wrote at once to the minister. Unless he had complete control of the text he was going to withdraw. Cooper replied by return: -

If you send me the script personally, I will hand it on to the B.B.C. and will undertake not to interfere with the strength or violence of anything you care to say. Once I have passed it the B.B.C. cannot interfere.

A few days later, on a Friday evening, Cooper’s liaison officer, handed Connor’s scripts to George Barnes, the Director of Talks. It was to be broadcast at the very earliest opportunity, he told the appalled official; this was a direct instruction from the minister. First thing the next morning Barnes met with the his Director General, and the BBC’s Board of Governors was quickly convened. They asked for a meeting with Cooper. The legal advice, they told him, was that they had no choice but to comply, but he needed to know that they were unanimous in opposing the broadcast; if it was to proceed they would need a written ministerial direction.

Connor’s talk went out at quarter past nine on the Tuesday. A little after twenty past he brought things to a close, speaking now as if to Wodehouse himself.

Mr. Wodehouse, you said the other day that you were “quite unable to work up ay kind of belligerent feeling about this war.”

Do you know Dulwich, Mr. Wodehouse? Of course you do. It is the suburb of London where you went to school.

I was there one night not very long ago, Mr. Wodehouse, and something happened that might interest you, who feel so calm and so imperturbable about this war.

It was a peaceful night. Soft and gentle until this quiet was splintered and torn into a thousand screaming shreds as a thousand pounds of explosive travelling at seven hundred miles an hour hit the ground with appalling violence.

Near me under five, ten, fifteen tons of rubble lay human beings. Most of them dead. Some of them alive. A few of them dying.

YOUR countrymen Mr. Wodehouse.

It was quiet. The contrast was rather shocking. One expected noise and excitement. Instead of that there was a silence that was too reminiscent of the grave.

The rescue squads began to work. Someone called for silence. No one spoke.

We listened and with growing horror I knew that we were waiting to hear cries of agony and pain from underneath those crushing loads of battered masonry and brickwork…………

Something savage and unspeakable cruel. You should have been there Mr. Wodehouse with your impartiality, your reasonableness….

…. and perhaps even one of your famous little jokes.

Good night.

And good night to You Mr. Pelham….Grenville……Wodehouse.

The American broadcast aired later that evening. Considerably longer, it included bonus material for a US audience. More an American than a Brit, Wodehouse was Goebbels’ puppet, carefully groomed to manipulate his stateside public. He had been dodging US taxes to boot. It was, said Time Magazine ‘strange stuff for the staid old BBC’.

In truth, by the time Cassandra’s talk went out, the German ploy had already flopped. Clumsy management of the affair in Berlin had landed badly with an American public deeply suspicious of propaganda; the story had quickly morphed from an account of a well-liked icon of Englishness finding a way to rub along with Germany, to one of his disowning by his mother country, and an outraged British reaction to his involvement with German propaganda and manipulation.

It took a time to get the message through to the isolated Wodehouse, about the catastrophic situation he had blundered into, and a few more talks dribbled out. But the show was basically over, and the circus had moved on.

And then Japan attacked Pearl Harbour — and everything else became suddenly irrelevant.

After ‘Cassandra’s broadcast, the Establishment back in Britain exploded in anger. In the House an MP called for removal of the BBC official responsible for the ‘filthy Postscript’. The Times’s correspondence pages were alight with their readers’ outrage and disgust. Cooper himself bowed to BBC pressure and wrote to the paper:

In justice to the Governors of the B.B.C. I must make it plain that mine was the sole responsibility for the broadcast which last week distressed so many of your readers. The Governors indeed shared unanimously the view expressed in your columns that the broadcast in question was in execrable taste. ‘De gustibus non est disputandem’ Occasions, however, may arise in time of war when plain speaking is more desirable than good taste.

Setting aside the chattering classes, the BBC’s own survey showed that as many as 90% of the public basically agreed. ‘The use of Wodehouse by the Germans was…the most insidious form of propaganda – ostensibly innocent and harmless’. Wartime did not call for half measures, and this national pillorying would act as a clear warning to other British citizens.

Connor himself was unrepentant:

I have never been so pleased over anything in my life…. The BBC is anathema to me… There are Americans who still think English people are Bertie Woosters calling each other ‘Milord’ and I thought the Wodehouse broadcasts would be very helpful [to the isolationist cause].

Connor’s broadcast was Cooper’s parting shot at the MOI. A move abroad had already been set in motion, and just five days later he was replaced by Brendan Bracken, a pressman and media insider altogether better suited for the role.

A few years later, with Paris newly liberated, Cooper was rewarded for his service and political loyalty with his dream job – British ambassador to Paris. Newly established in the smart Bristol Hotel, he and his wife walked into the lift one evening to find that they were sharing a silent and awkward ascent with who else but the Wodehouses. They had been staying at the hotel since the summer. Allowed by the Germans to live comfortably off Wodehouse’s international writing royalties, they had split their time between the Adlon in Berlin and summer visits to aristocratic estates in the German countryside, before moving to Paris in 1943 to escape the worst of the allied bombing.

By now the Wodehouse’s names were on the official list of ‘British subjects living in enemy occupation whose cases required investigation’. Fellow writer Malcom Muggeridge, then a British intelligence officer newly arrived in Paris, was despatched to contact them quietly and assess the situation. But no sooner had he made contact than the French arrested the couple. Muggeridge, on the pretext of concerns for Wodehouse’s health, got him transferred from a police cell to the more comfortable surroundings of a disused maternity unit, then stepped back while the French and British worked out between them what to do with him next.

A military lawyer was flown across the Channel to investigate the case; this was a can of worms best opened abroad. The situation was messy, he reported, the Wodehouses had certainly been ‘unwise’, but in terms of anything that might amount to actual treason, he had found no smoking gun. The papers reached Churchill’s desk. The Wodehouse’s well-liked daughter Leonora had married into the influential Cazalet family, recently beset with the double tragedy of both her sudden death and the wartime loss of her brilliant brother-in-law – as it happened, the godfather to Churchill’s youngest daughter. The Prime Minister scribbled on the papers that he had discussed matters with the family, and that all things considered it would be best for the Wodehouses to be moved quietly back to America. And so it came to pass.

Muggeridge’s encounter with Wodehouse in Paris became the beginning of a lifelong friendship - and later, when Muggeridge became the editor of Punch, an important publishing relationship too. Wodehouse, he wrote ‘is ill-fitted to live in an age of ideological conflict. He just does not react to human beings in that sort of way, and never seems to hate anyone.’

Some years after the war, as if to prove the point, Wodehouse invited Connor to a Manhattan lunch and bluffly buried the hatchet. The whole thing was clearly a misunderstanding. But there was one thing that he had found almost unbearable: hearing his hated middle name on national radio. He could only hope that the W. in the middle of Connor’s name stood for Walpurgis or something of the sort! Connor chortled dutifully, and Wodehouse pronounced him now a friend. From then on, between them, he was always Walp.

In 1961, to celebrate his eightieth birthday, Evelyn Waugh broadcast a ‘national salute’ to Wodehouse on the BBC. Turning to the Cassandra broadcast, he said that it was:

with great pleasure that I take this opportunity to express the disgust the BBC has always felt for [this] injustice, for which they were guiltless, and their complete repudiation of the charges so ignobly made through their medium.

But Wodehouse’s family were never able to get even a private assurance from British ministers that the famous old writer could visit the United Kingdom without fear of arrest. And so, for the rest of his long life, he never again set foot in the country of his birth.

Finally, at ninety-three, news came that he was to be knighted. At last, he told his friends, the whole matter could be considered closed.

He died just a few weeks later.

Further Reading

For a wider view of Britain’s cultural propaganda efforts in this period, I would strongly recommend Beware the British Serpent, by Robert Calder (2004)

Wodehouse: A Life, Robert McCrum’s excellent 2004 biography has a good account of Wodehouse’s wartime mishaps.

Wodehouse at War, by Iain Sproat (1981), goes into the whole affair in as much forensic detail as you could possibly want.

J.B.Priestley’s BBC Postscript talk on the Little Ships of Dunkirk is recreated as the first segment of this audio book which is well worth a listen.

Few of his critics actually heard Wodehouse’s broadcasts. Long after the war, Wodehouse arranged the publication of what he claimed was the full text, as part of efforts to restore his reputation. I have written a short follow on piece on that here