The good old days

From report to Parliament in 1842 (quoted here):

Collieries.—“I wish to call the attention of the Board to the pits about Brampton. The seams are so thin that several of them have only two feet headway to all the working. They are worked altogether by boys from eight to twelve years of age, on all-fours, with a dog belt and chain. The passages being neither ironed nor wooded, and often an inch or two thick with mud. In Mr. Barnes’ pit these poor boys have to drag the barrows with one hundred weight of coal or slack sixty times a day sixty yards, and the empty barrows back, without once straightening their backs, unless they choose to stand under the shaft, and run the risk of having their heads broken by a falling coal.”—Report on Mines, 1842, p. 71. “In Shropshire the seams are no more than eighteen or twenty inches.”—Ibid., p.67. “At the Booth pit,” says Mr. Scriven, “I walked, rode, and crept eighteen hundred yards to one of the nearest faces.”—Ibid. “Chokedamp, firedamp, wild fire, sulphur, and water, at all times menace instant death to the laborers in these mines.” “Robert North, aged 16: Went into the pit at seven years of age, to fill up skips. I drew about twelve months. When I drew by the girdle and chain my skin was broken, and the blood ran down. I durst not say anything. If we said anything, the butty, and the reeve, who works under him, would take a stick and beat us.”—Ibid. “The usual punishment for theft is to place the culprit’s head between the legs of one of the biggest boys, and each boy in the pit—sometimes there are twenty—inflicts twelve lashes on the back and rump with a cat.”—Ibid. “Instances occur in which children are taken into these mines to work as early as four years of age, sometimes at five, not unfrequently at six and seven, while from eight to nine is the ordinary age at which these employments commence.”—Ibid. “The wages paid at these mines is from two dollars fifty cents to seven dollars fifty cents per month for laborers, according to age and ability, and out of this they must support themselves. They work twelve hours a day.”-Ibid.

The best of times...

Anthony Barnett quotes Frank Cottrell Boyce:

Political discourse is largely addressed to the worst of us. I'd like to see the best of us – the idealistic, altruistic, connected side of us – taken into account. When it comes to motivation, for instance – for years, we've been told that you need to give massive salaries and bonuses to the "best" people in order to keep them. In the past two weeks, we've seen brilliant work done by people – athletes, coaches, volunteers – who have no notion of financial reward. The best people are attracted to challenges, and driven by loyalty, vision, altruism, fun. People who can be bought for big salaries are not the best but, in fact, the worst – disloyal, unimaginative, restless and unsatisfied. For years, we've been systematically seeking out the very worst people and putting them in charge of our banks and big companies.

The nation delights in servitude

We fought for the public good and would have enfranchised the people and secured the welfare of the whole groaning creation, if the nation had not delighted more in servitude than freedom

--John Cooke, quoted by Geoffrey Robertson

Jeremy's stiffs

Last year I suggested that Jeremy Clarkson be held to account for extra deaths attributable to the switching off of speed cameras in Oxfordshire. Now it looks as if the evidence is in:

Speed cameras in Oxfordshire, which were switched off for cost-cutting reasons, have been turned back on again following publication of higher casualty figures...

...Superintendent Rob Povey, head of roads policing for Thames Valley, said: "This is important because we know that speed kills and speed is dangerous. We have shown in Oxfordshire that speed has increased through monitoring limits and we have noticed an increase in fatalities and the number of people seriously injured in 2010."

P.S. 20 May: 'Speed camera switch-off empowers reckless driving,' writes George Monbiot.

The politics of Jeremy Clarkson

Road safety cameras have played a significant part in a 45% reduction in road fatalities in Britain in the last decade, says Mick Giannasi.

The government says their abolition is an attempt to end 'the war on the motorist.' But the savings are relatively trivial and the real reason is obviously cheap populism.

Cheap, that is, unless you happen to be on the receiving end of a speeding car.

A suggestion: for every death additional to the number that occurred in the last year in which cameras operated, a greeting card expressing congratulations should be sent to Jeremy Clarkson. This could start in Oxfordshire, the first county to switch off its cameras and the county where Clarkson lives. Oxfordshire had 30 fatalities in 2009.

Scolt Head Island

On 21 March I waded across Norton creek. An hour through marsh, sand and thick mud. This view, eastwards from the south side of the high dunes on the western part of the island, is towards towards Smuggler's Gap in the distance with Hut Marsh on the right:

And this is the view westward from the northern side the same dunes:

The view from those high dunes eastward and toward the sea:

Looking back to the high dunes from just above the beach on the northern side:

English Nature describes Scolt Head as "the prime example of an offshore barrier island in the UK...situated on a very dynamic coastline and...steadily growing westward."

Here is medieval glass showing the Man in the Moon at St Mary in Burnham Deepdale. A prayer on a pillar in the church begins: "O Thou who dwellest not in temples made with hands..." Scolt Head Island is right in front of you if you look north from the Saxon round tower of the church.


Snowdrops, still just about in flower in a spinney above Walsingham:

Later I wrote this.

Tell'em Paul

If we are going to be part of a third industrial revolution we are going to have to have a frank discussion about power.

All the power has been centred on finance and the financial model and, funnily enough, we have just hocked our entire economy to save that broken system.

-- Paul Mason

Only to see

I found the poems in the fields

And only wrote them down.

-- John Clare, quoted by Roger Deakin

The rage of stupid

A couple of examples yesterday, as if more were needed, of how anger, lack of education and plain stupidity make a strange brew.

A BBC reporter interviewed some BNP activists in Liverpool not far from where the British Trades Unions were holding their annual national conference. He asked them what they thought of the unions. One of the activists replied that the unions were communist internationalists, and wanted to keep them poor.

In London far right supporters of the English Defence League confronted pro-Palestinian protestors holding up banners saying "Justice for the murdered children of Gaza."

Heart of oak

Three days ago I read how rising sea levels are likely to affect at least twenty million people in Bangladesh. The challenge will be enormous, and perhaps there is much more to come.

I am concerned, but it doesn't hit me on an emotional level in the same way as the relatively minor possibility (here via here) that oak trees in Britain are likely to be severely affected by mid century.

My reaction may be morally indefensible: shouldn't I care about people more, however remote from own temporarily privileged position?

If there is a rationale, then perhaps it has something to do with the fact that we may lose trees that have thrived on these islands since the last Ice Age, whereas the vast numbers of people now living in the lowest lying parts of Bangladesh have only come there in the last few decades as a result of a population explosion and land shortage elsewhere. The oak trees have resonance in the mind of those who know and love these lands in part because as living forms they express slow change over long periods of time.

England's glory

Jonathan Stevenson quotes Lord Denning on the right of jurors to follow their own judgment:

This principle was established as long ago as 1670 in a celebrated case of the Quakers, William Penn and William Mead. All that they had done was to preach in London on a Sunday afternoon. They were charged with causing an unlawful and tumultuous assembly there. The judge directed the jury to find the Quakers guilty, but they refused. The Jury said Penn was guilty of preaching, but not of unlawful assembly. The Judge refused to accept this verdict. He threatened them with all sorts of pains and punishments. He kept them 'all night without meat, drink, fire, or other accommodation: they had not so much as a chamber pot, though desired'. They still refused to find the Quakers guilty of an unlawful assembly. He kept them another night and still they refused. He then commanded each to answer to his name and give his verdict separately. Each gave his verdict 'Not Guilty'. For this the judge fined them 40 marks apiece and cast them into prison until it was paid. One of them Edward Bushell, thereupon brought his (case) before the Court of the King's Bench. It was there held that no judge had any right to imprison a juryman for finding against his direction on a point of law; for the judge could never direct what the law was without knowing the facts, and of the facts the jury were the sole judge. The jury were thereupon set free.

P.S. But Stevenson and his co-defendents were found guilty.

Thomas Paine, Englishman and citizen of the world

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers . . . though I revere their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at [their] conceit; . . . if the taste of a Quaker [had] been consulted at the Creation, what a silent and drab-colored Creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, nor a bird been permitted to sing.

Died 200 years ago today. Robert Ingersoll wrote:

Thomas Paine had passed the legendary limit of life. One by one most of his old friends and acquaintances had deserted him. Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred – his virtues denounced as vices – his services forgotten – his character blackened, he preserved the poise and balance of his soul. He was a victim of the people, but his convictions remained unshaken. He was still a soldier in the army of freedom, and still tried to enlighten and civilize those who were impatiently waiting for his death. Even those who loved their enemies hated him, their friend – the friend of the whole world – with all their hearts. On the 8th of June, 1809, death came – Death, almost his only friend. At his funeral no pomp, no pageantry, no civic procession, no military display. In a carriage, a woman and her son who had lived on the bounty of the dead – on horseback, a Quaker, the humanity of whose heart dominated the creed of his head – and, following on foot, two negroes filled with gratitude – constituted the funeral cortege of Thomas Paine.

Dark patrons

The Dark Mountain Project may seek neither god nor master, but for secular prophets in its own country could consider D H Lawrence and J G Ballard.

In a short remembrance for Ballard this morning, Iain Sinclair said "our last conversation was about the Westfield Shopping Centre, this amazing reef that brings the cathederal of nonidentity to its perfect apogee".[1]

And here's Lawrence back in 1925 (Morality and the Novel):

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment. As mankind is always struggling in the coils of old relationships, art is always ahead of the 'times', which themselves are always far in the rear of the living moment...[2]

Footnotes

[1] (added 23 April): Chris Petit writes:

Boredom underpins consumerism. It defines leisure (and desire), which collapses into shopping. Boredom invites terror (as its only cure).

[2] (added 25 April) I had been looking for the short essay on poetry from which this comes:

This is the momentous crisis for mankind, when we have to get back to chaos. So long as the umbrella serves, and poets make slits in it, and the mass of people can be gradually educated up to the vision in the slit: which means they patch it over with a patch that looks just like the vision in the slit; so long as this process can continue, and mankind can be educated up, and thus built in, so long will a civilization continue more or less happily, completing its own painted prison. It is called completing the consciousness.

England, an elegy

Ideas of race, tribe and religion, which have played a dangerous part in continental politics, have also shaped English identity. But they were qualified and moderated by the concept of home. England was first and foremost a place – though a place consecrated by custom.

–- Roger Scruton

[Sinclair] talks about the poet John Clare, who as a child walked beyond his knowledge, beyond what he knew, only to find that he no longer knew who he was because the birds and the trees didn't know him. "This is what I feel about this landscape. I've walked out into it so often that it accepts me. Bits of stone and river accept me, and I know myself by that. If the landscape changes, then I don't know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted autobiography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self.

-- from a profile of Iain Sinclair.

Wake up, England!

There is an aversion in England to organised or even personal resistance, a frightening bend towards compromise. There have always been good causes worth fighting for, but seldom, in the modern era, has there been the common volition to fight for them. Perhaps that is why we love the memory of the world wars so much: they are a national heritage exhibition of our least likely selves, a testament to our nature as it might have been. The old wars show us what it was like to be a people willing to resist a vast encroaching power. It is not a posture that comes naturally to the English. Usually, the ordinary people of England only have one word to say to authority, and that word is "yes". Orwell would not be surprised to see such forces at work over the English, but he might be shocked to see the extent to which the English themselves lacked, as time went on, all political resolve to change it. The populist mode in England is silent paralysis. No to change.

-- Andrew O'Hagan on The age of indifference. He's writing, it should be stressed, about a disinherited white working class/underclass, not the whole country. And he finishes with an anecdote that flirts with hope.

Image: Chris Steele-Perkins (1976)

P.S. 17 Jan Tim Lott responds:

The English working class are disenfranchised, depressed and apathetic - for the same reasons the working class everywhere are, including in Scotland. The end of manufacturing industry, the decline of the unions, the break-up of working-class communities through increased mobility and reckless town planning, the concentration of the elites on ethnicity, gender and sexuality issues, rather than class, being the primary reasons. The difference between the English and the Scottish working class is that the Scots can take pride in their nationality without being accused of being Powellite or racist.