The Deep Breath Before The Plunge

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File:2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine animated.gif

Almost two years ago, it was becoming clear in Britain and most other countries that the coronavirus was a global problem and not merely a regional one. There were cases identified in the UK in January 2020, through February its news coverage slowly outgrew that of Brexit, with stories of panic buying and rising case rates, but much of ordinary life went on. By mid-March the crisis had become unavoidable – the government was giving daily press conferences and many public places (including universities) were shutting down. Hand sanitiser dispensers and social distance signs popped up all over. Then, on 23rd, the entire country went into the first lockdown. The Britain at the end of that month felt like a wholly different world from what it had been at the beginning. For other countries the exact dates vary but the overall phenomenon is very much the same. In retrospect, there was something particularly surreal about the week of 17th-23rd, where for many it may have felt like an unplanned holiday, the full weight of the disaster looming but having yet to hit.

Now, after twenty-three months of on-and-off disease control, much of the developed world is transitioning from “pandemic” to “endemic” and returning to something like normality. In Scotland and Wales, all remaining COVID-induced restrictions are set to be lifted by the end of next month. In Northern Ireland they were lifted on 15th of this one. In England they went on Thursday. By superb coincidence, that was the same day the Vladimir Putin launched a full-on invasion of Ukraine.

Compared to the virus, this is neither as surprising nor as sudden – Russia has been in a state of war with its western neighbour for just over eight years, and diplomatic relations with other countries have been tense throughout that time, including many accusations of election meddling, political bribery and even assassination. Over the last few months the pressure could be seen rising. It was generally understood that war would properly break out at some point, but not exactly when. I remember Lucy Worsley’s Empire of the Tsars airing in early 2016, with quite a few online quips that the BBC wanted to get the filming done quickly in case war was imminent. Now, at the time of typing, it looks as if momentum has gathered – countries are, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, freezing (soon it could even be seizing) the financial assets of Russian businessmen and officials, as well as banning such people from their airspace. Sporting organisations look to ban Russia from their games. Britain is even sending troops to Eastern Europe. Other countries are doing likewise, or at least supplying equipment to the Ukranians themselves.

All that being said, we are not yet actually at war. British and Russian embassies to each other remain open, as do those in most other countries. It remains to be seen how long that lasts. The situation of the tens of thousands of Russian people living in Britain is perilous, as is that of Russian businesses trading here, or vice versa. This week’s invasion has been dubbed the largest conventional warfare operation in Europe since World War 2, and cries of World War 3 are widespread – and they are not meant jokingly this time. In the books that my late grandmother bought for me about the first two, it was mentioned that before the United States’s involvement, British and German ambassadors in Washington DC were competing with each other for American military contracts, and that private businesses within the allied and axis territories continued trading with each other (including weapons) right up until the declarations of war took effect. It will be interesting to see how much of that is repeated with Russia Today.

Speaking of Russia Today, RT continues to broadcast in this country. Suffice to say, its coverage of the invasion differs sharply from that of most other networks. The channel has been under review by Ofcom, and the leaders of the Labour and Scottish National parties have called for its termination. This has already been done in Poland and Germany, though the latter’s own public broadcasting service was reciprocally banned in Russia and there are fears that the BBC would suffer the same fate. I discovered RT in late 2012, at the same time as I was covering the Soviet Union for GCSE history. I appreciated the level of attention it gave to topics other channels thought less important, such as SOPA/PIPA/CISPA/ACTA and the Snowden revelations, as well as its documentaries on a variety of topics. If nothing else, it was good for checking the aspect ratio settings on one’s television, being for the time one of very few networks still airing in 4:3. All that being said, as a state-controlled news outlet it was never entirely trustworthy, and one could always sense that it was going out of its way to depict western democracies – and indeed “The West” as a concept – in the worst possible light and to encourage any kind of crankery that would undermine Russia’s strategic rivals.

As many are now pointing out, the true strength of Russian propaganda is online rather than on television, and that will be much trickier to sort out. The powers, rights and obligations of the large social media sites to intervene on political matters has long been controversial, as have measures to restrict the digital activity of Russia in particular. If the situation continues to escalate we may well see YouTube channels and Twitter accounts being suspended en-masse, as well as purges of suspicious users from message boards. As far as the pandemic comparison goes, we must currently be at least at the second or third week of March. I dread to think what the fourth looks like.

OTHER ANALYSES

  • Putin’s Power and Western Impotence by David Starkey. He says that Putin seeks to revive Tsarism not Stalinism, and that he understands that all authority derives from force whereas Western nations have forgotten this. Starkey condemns Angela Merkel for shutting down Germany’s nuclear plants in favour of Russian gas, as well as all European nations for letting their militaries wither. This being Starkey, he also takes potshots at 16-year-old girls.

UPDATE (2nd March)

RT’s television channel is off air and YouTube, along with other platforms, has hidden all of its videos.

Sigh for A Deltic

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This one was taken by Terry Foulger circa 1977, just to confuse you.

Today’s virtual lecture was put on by the North Eastern Railway Association. The Zoom session opened half an hour before the start of the actual presentation. This allowed the veteran members of the association to resolve technical issues, and also to trade jokes about Vladimir Putin. Neil Mackay, the association’s chairman, said that the upcoming Annual General Meeting would be held on Zoom due to the trustees’ lack of confidence in physical attendance, and asked if anyone would volunteer to be minutes secretary.

Our speaker was David Thomas. He had come to show off his photographs of the Class 55 diesel locomotives – popularly known as the Deltics, taken at various points along the East Coast Mainline in the period of 1977-1982, in anticipation of their displacement by the Class 43 High Speed Trains. Originally the photographs were taken with a Kodak Retinec 1B and the sound was captured by a Philips cassette tape recorder. Thomas’s original plan was to produce a tape-slide presentation, but this proved too costly at the time. Rather than settle for a less-than-professional presentation, he simply withheld the pictures until Microsoft Powerpoint came along to make things easier.

There followed a long stream of images. I will not attempt to describe them all. Thomas said that the Deltic engine was originally a marine concept, the admiralty having wanted a powerplant for its minesweepers. There were some technical diagrams included, and photographs of smashed engines undergoing repair. There were also insights into his personal life – he mentioned rushing to get a shot of No. 003 Meld at Holloway before going to see his wife give birth in York. He noted, too, where the environment in his photographs had changed, such as the “re-greening” around the viaduct at Leeds or the disappearance of poplar trees on the A64. Important moments in railway history were captured, such as the centenary of York Station in June 1978 and the final Deltic Scotsman service in February 1982.

The title of the lecture derived from Sigh for a Merlin by Alex Henshaw. The Rolls Royce Merlin engine had unofficially given its name to the Lancaster Bomber aeroplanes which used it, just as the Napier Deltic engine had done for the Class 55s. Thomas admitted that he didn’t like the locomotives originally but he grew to love them and he ended his talk by saluting all the volunteers who keep them working in preservation, the fleet between them having covered sixty-eight million miles.

EXTERNAL LINKS

UPDATE (8th March)

Chairman Mackay has accepted my offer to act as Minutes Secretary at the Annual General Meeting in May.

Fighting Corruption in the Judiciary

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Many times before I have virtually attended the kinds of events that I could not attend in person. Sometimes it is because the location is too far away, other times because I am not a member of the organisation hosting. On this occasion it was both.

When I first found the flyer for today’s presentation on Eventbrite I assumed it would be an academic or professional presentation similar to all the others. Only upon entry did I realise it was actually the preparatory talk to a competition (which I obviously will not be entering).

The challenge was for high-schoolers and undergraduates to imagine that they were junior staffers at the justice ministry in a fictional Eastern European country which, having emerged from the Warsaw Pact, signed and ratified the United Nations Anti-Corruption Convention but then, after a change of government, withdrew from it, and wanted to make changes to the method of appointment and dismissal of judges. The student’s task was to make a video presentation about the meaning and consequence of corruption. They should outline the basics of a legal strategy to bring their fictional homeland in line with the convention again, and produce three key ideas on enhancing judicial independence.

The speaker, Alice Thomas, then went on to make some general points about political corruption: It exists everywhere in some shape or form. What we know is only what other people have found out, and in countries without an independent media it can be difficult to find out anything. Most countries have anti-corruption strategies, at least on paper. The United Nations often follows the work of smaller regional groups, because having fewer members means it takes less time to reach decisions. North Korea, unsurprisingly, did not sign the aforementioned treaty at all. Some countries signed but did not ratify. International cooperation is important for asset recovery and information exchange, since corruption is often a cross-border phenomenon. The judiciary, legislature and executive are there to monitor each other. In a country without a functioning judiciary everybody can basically do as they please. Corruption may take the form of individual judges being bribed or coerced rather than the whole system being controlled. For a government to ensure judicial independence without inadvertently encroaching on it is a complicated task, since attempts to scrutinise the courts would themselves resemble the executive applying  political pressure.

Rather amusingly, Thomas ended by telling participants to be careful about their sources and not to rely on Wikipedia because “it’s not always very accurate. It’s a very subjective thing. It relies on who writes what in it.” – me, for example.

EXTERNAL LINKS

More Speakers, More Arms

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Almost three years ago I constructed, for Wikipedia, a list of all the coats of arms borne by Speakers of the House of Commons. That list covered the lower houses of Great Britain (1707-1800) and the United Kingdom (1801-present). Finding sources for the later incumbents was difficult – quite a few were missing from Burke’s and Debrett’s, so I had to get creative in looking for visual evidence, often relying on photographs from corporate events at Speaker’s House.

A few weeks ago the heraldic artist Baz Manning, whose photographs from Lincoln’s Inn I had already used for a similar page about Lords of Appeal, contacted me to say that he had taken extensive photographs inside the Palace of Westminster of the speakers’ arms, and would be uploading those on Flickr too. Not content with merely documenting those speakers who served since the Acts of Union, he had photographed the shields commemorating just about every speaker since the age of Henry III. It was therefore only natural that I should make a Wikipedia list for them as well.

In addition to these photographs I had written the written source of the 1850 book The Lives of the Speakers of the House of Commons by James Alexander Manning (Related? I’ll have to ask.), which I had already used for the earlier entries in the British list. The relative ease of accessing these compared to what I had before meant the prequel was much more easily accomplished than the original.

That is not to say that there were no difficulties, however – whereas speakers from the Georgian age onward generally served a good number of years in the green chair before ascending to the red bench*, in medieval to Stuart times their tenures were often very brief – indeed, the legislatures themselves were often only in existence for a few weeks. It was also much more common for members to serve non-consecutive terms, which means confusion about how to arrange their entries.

A particularly knotty problem is that many of these men lived and died in an age long before English spelling was nailed down, which means tricky decisions on what to actually call them (e.g. Guildesborough or Goldsborough, Broke or Brooke). Another is that different sources often contradict each other as to what exactly their armorial bearings were, Baz even pointing out quite a few instances where the painted shield on the wall does not conform to the blazon in the grant, or when there are two separate illustrations that are not in agreement.

Still, the page is up, and unlike last time it does not appear that I will be stuck waiting months for review and clearance, so I’m counting this as a success. It remains to be seen if one more armorial page can be squeezed out of this topic. Obviously the old Parliament of Scotland had no elected speaker (being unicameral and chaired by the Lord Chancellor much like the House of Lords), but the House of Commons of Ireland before 1801 had one much like its English counterpart. I will have to see if a similar gallery of painted shields is maintained at College Green, and if any other budding heraldists have been able to photograph it.

*Only five speakers of the English House of Commons ever ascended to the peerage, whereas only ten speakers of the British house have not, and several of them died in office. Quite a lot of English speakers were at least knights or baronets, though that introduces the further difficulty of finding out if each one was knighted before or after their time in office.

Warwick the Kingmaker by John Reid

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Today I attended another virtual meeting of the Richard III Society Gloucester Branch. The presentation was by John Reid, discussing the historical reputation of Richard’s father-in-law Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, popularly nicknamed “The Kingmaker”.

Warwick has been hugely divisive to contemporaries as well as historians, Ricardians, Lancastrians and Yorkists. He was England’s greatest celebrity of the fifteenth century and his fame (or infamy) carried on into the twentieth). He even had a board game named after him.

He became the premier earl in England in 1449 due to lucky deaths. His family were great winners in the lottery of aristocratic marriages – picking up the estates of the Beauchamps and Despensers. His patchwork of armorial quartering reflects the complexity of his family connections. He had initially supported Henry VI, but changed sides in 1452 largely due to his inheritance disputes with the Duke of Somerset.

Henry VI, due in part to inherited mental health troubles, proved spectacularly incompetent, and many considered Richard, Duke of York to be king by right – though Reid showed us York’s signature on the letters patent of 1454 appointing Henry’s son Edward of Lancaster as Prince of Wales, clearly showing that even at this late stage he was not disputing the latter’s right. When eventually he rebelled against the Lancastrian crown he had Warwick’s invaluable support. York’s son Edward, Earl of March rescued Warwick from Margaret of Anjou and Warwick in turn arranged his coronation as Edward IV. For the first three years of Edward’s reign Warwick was thought “third king”, being virtual governor of the realm, acquiring even more land (after he confiscated the estates of the Percy and Clifford families, he wound up with lordships in twenty-eight English counties and a handful in Wales) and an annual income of at least £10,000 (nearly £11m in 2021 money).

Matters of matrimony spoiled his status: Warwick had spent months lobbying for a French princess to marry his king, and was humiliated by the revelation that Edward had already married – in secret – to Elizabeth Woodville, a dowager dame whose family had fought for the Lancastrian side. He described the parvenu Woodvilles as “grasping and charmless”, resenting how many titles, offices and marriages were given to them at the expense of his own dynasty, and how their influence over the crown came to displace his. Reid drew parallels with the modern-day rivalry between Carrie Symonds and Dominic Cummings.

Warwick’s first coup against Edward occurred in the summer of 1469. He launched his second in 1471, making a deal with Margaret of Anjou on 22 July and reinstating Henry VI on 3 October. He was killed at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471. Reid noted that this was the only time he had fought on foot rather than horseback, leaving him with no easy way to escape when the tide turned against him and he was isolated from his allies on the field. This was very similar to the way Richard III would die fourteen years later.

The earl was adept at his own spin so contemporary sources are often too kind to him. Later writers were often too harsh. In particular Burgundian writers made him a bogeyman, believing that his policies would lead to their absorption by France. He had something of a rehabilitation under the Tudors – Henry VII wanted Henry VI to be declared a saint.

In summing up, Reid discussed Warwick’s virtues and vices. He was confident, charismatic, charming, courageous and energetic. He was treated shabbily by Edward IV after 1464. He may have been the model for Sir Lancelot as envisioned by Sir Thomas Mallory. On the other hand he can be seen as seeking power only for himself and being motivated by personal feuds rather than the national interest. His military skill is doubted, as is his necessity in the Yorkist accession. Could Edward IV have made himself king without Warwick’s help? Were the Woodvilles any worse than the Nevilles?

After the presentation itself had concluded and most attendees had logged out, there was a lengthy discussion between one attendee (Sean O’Neill) and the host (Cynthia) over the intricacies of Zoom functions – because various buttons were appearing and disappearing depending on the settings of individual hosts and updates by the company. This led to an explanation of the difficulties of an organisation managing virtual meetings, then one into internet difficulties generally as well as experiences of coronavirus. I mentioned having tested positive in November, and my experience with Hubbnet. I remarked that I would have been truly screwed had the pandemic hit in the period of 2009-13 when my house relied on plugabble WiFi dongles for very limited internet access. The two were surprised to realise that I lived near Hull, the former having once lived in North Ferriby and the latter in Hessle. They started asking me if Kingston Telecoms or Kingston Communications still existed (they do).

The Trouble with Tombs

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This was a presentation by the University of Liverpool, concerning the history, primarily between the seventh and nineteenth centuries, of how England has dealt with human corpses.

The main speaker was Ruth Nugent. She wanted to examine how the dead were handled literally, emotionally, ethically, spiritually and ideologically. She found that there was rarely much commentary on the relationship between bodies and tombs, students of other subjects would focus on associated details of architecture, geneaology, heraldry and religion but the principles of burial itself were often overlooked.

Until the eleventh century burial within a church building (as opposed to the yard outside) was reserved for royals, saints and clergy. Until the thirteenth it was monasteries that were most sought after as resting places. Due to the long-term problem of overcrowding it was common for bodies to be moved after a hundred years so that the plot could be used for someone else, or because the church was undergoing renovation work. There were cases of corpses stolen by one church from another, and legal disputes between families of the deceased over where the remains could be placed. Sometimes churchmen would claim to “discover” the bodies of legendary figures such as King Arthur. Epidemics, such as the Great Plague, put increased pressure on churchyards due to sudden mass burials. In the nineteenth century secular public cemeteries were opened to give alternatives to church burials, and cremation became more accepted. Laws were passed against intramural burials and exhumation to recycle spaces.

Physical upkeep was always a problem. Tombstones would be chipped away to make ingredients for magical medicines, and sometimes families would carry out clandestine removals of their own ancestors to escape from vandalism. Elizabeth I ordered churches to restore their tombs but often the churches lacked the money to comply. The Civil War left cathedrals in particularly poor condition and soldiers often looted graves. Large numbers of graves underneath churches could cause subsidence. Antiquarians (she named John Leland, John Stow, William Camden, John Waver and William Dering) determined to make written records of tombs and their contents in the hopes that the information could survive even if the physical structures didn’t – partly through interest in history, partly to safeguard their own futures.

The next speaker was David Monteith, who recalled his experience with the reburial of Richard III in 2015. Public consultation revealed a very wide spectrum of preferences for the appropriate manner in which to deal with the late king – some wanting a full tomb, others a simpler box. He noted that many people’s feelings about Richard were hard to separate from his Shakespearean portrayal, and that if the rediscovery had occurred a few years later he would have needed to contend with much more polarised attitudes to memorials. He said that even in Richard’s day it was normal for the dead to be moved or their surroundings altered – Edward IV rebuilt many tombs of his relatives, as later would Elizabeth I. Burial styles changed over the centuries and so there were many valid ways of disposing of Richard. He did, though, have to discourage visitors at Leicester Cathedral from taking photographs with the casket.

Harold Mytum followed. The Church of England has policies for bodies found on consecrated land that parallel those of secular authorities. In medieval times English burials were much the same as continental ones, including frequent recycling of plots. Most above-ground interments in Europe lasted only twenty-five years before the cadaver was moved elsewhere. The Church has a duty to protect and respect human remains, but exhumation can be allowed if it serves the public interest, e.g. the advancement of science.

Andrea Bradley spoke of the challenges involved in securing land for HS2 – with its own bespoke system for the removal and reburial of human remains. They have a specific legal agreement with the Archbisop’s Council that corpses uprooted from consecrated ground must be put down in other consecrated ground.

Ian Dungavell said that burial spaces in cities are getting full again, and few now expect a large grave for themselves in perpetuity, instead accepting that after some time they will be relocated. Re-use of graves in this way has been allowed again (although only in London) since 2007 because there is no alternative possible.

Lin Foxhall, the host, took questions from the audience.

  • On the rise of digital commemoration, Nugent said to be wary of rapid-onset obsolescence. QR codes and URLs might not be functional a century from now and those without compatible technology – even today – would be locked out of interaction.
  • Asked why bodies were so obsessed over, even by cultures who insisted the soul was more important, Monteith suggested that without a standardised metaphysical understanding of death we fill the gap with fear.  He also wondered if we over-medicalise death nowadays.
  • Asked how common it was for bodies to be upgraded to higher-status graves, Mytum said that the emergence of non-religious cemeteries allowed greater commercialism in burial plans. Dungavell said that not everyone has detailed plans for their disposal, and that survivors sometimes need to “park” the body in a cheap grave for a few years while a more elaborate commemoration is organised.
  • Asked if future wills could contain clauses regulating future exhumations, Nugent said that such clauses are already in use. Foxhall said that ecological implications of burial and/or cremation are more closely observed now.
  • Asked if we should go back to communal burials, and why bones are seen as more important than ashes, Dungavell thought bones were treated brutally enough and Mytum said there are already commercial long-burrows.
  • I asked if something like the Necropolis Railway could reappear to allow urban residents to visit relatives’ graves far away. Dungavell said that the original company was unsuccessful as people wanted burials nearby. Ruth mentioned how railway companies had allowed corpses to go in sidings and embankments.
  • Asked about the changing nature of images on graves, Nugent said that some pictures could be very upsetting, especially if photographs peel off. Mytum noted that there had been changes in taste for memorials in the middle of the twentieth century, Foxhall noted very dark imagery in the eighteenth – such as cherubs becoming skeletons.
  • Asked about the need for different funeral and disposal styles for different cultures, Monteith noted he had already seen multi-faith crematoria for that purpose.

EXTERNAL LINKS

A Thistly Issue

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I have written before about the intricacies of the Order of the Garter. Although it technically has only one grade (in contrast to the Bath which has three, or the British Empire which has five), there are many finely differentiated categories of membership. It is traditionally said that the order is limited to twenty-four knights companion at a time, but of course the reigning monarch himself is always the sovereign of the order (and all others), so really it was twenty-five. Then the Princes of Wales had automatic membership, so it was twenty-six. On top of that, George III in 1786 created the separate status of “royal knight”, so that his unusually large brood of sons could be installed without crowding out everybody else. In 1813 a further category of “stranger knight” was instituted so as to allow the appointment of supernumerary foreign members.

The position of female members is even more complicated. From the time of Richard II it was common to appoint ladies of the order, though even after many years I am still unsure as to their exact status and function. The last such lady appointed was Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, in 1488. After that the installation of women to the order was discontinued completely, and for the next four hundred years the only women to wear the Garter robes were the queens regnant. After Victoria’s passing her son Edward VII, her grandson George V and her great-grandson George VI each installed their consorts as royal ladies by special statute. The Princess Elizabeth was also made a royal lady in 1947 and the stranger category came to include foreign female monarchs. From 1987 the statues were altered to allow non-royal women to be Ladies Companion of the order on the same basis as the non-royal men, the first example being the Duchess of Norfolk in 1990.

Wikipedia’s list of members for the order took pains to colour-code and differentiate between the different categories of membership. Curiously, while the modern ladies from Queen Alexandra onwards were all included, the medieval ladies were omitted. Long ago there had been a separate smaller page listing them, but it had been deleted on the recommendation to merge with the larger list. For unknown reasons that merger was never actually carried out, so that the medieval ladies were simply forgotten.

Yesterday, with the aid of one other editor, I worked to correct that problem. The sixty-four Garter ladies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are now included in the table with their own colour code and numbering. For completeness, I have also added entries for those monarchs who were not already members of the order prior to accession.

Having finished that task, I then wondered if the page for the Order of the Thistle – Scotland’s Garter equivalent – would need a similar refurbishment. The list page I found was of a very different table design to that used for the Garter, or indeed the other chivalric orders, bearing sharp black borders around cells and being organised by century instead of by monarch. It took just over a day to completely convert the content to the more usual format. On the one hand, the Thistle has fewer categories than the Garter – sixteen knights brethren and supernumerary extra knights. On the other, the list did not differentiate one type of member from the other in the way that the Garter’s did, so in many cases guesswork was required and it is likely that the whole numbering system will need to be redone at some point to account for any I’ve missed.

While going through this, I received a notice that I had been granted access to the Wikipedia Library. This was intriguing, for it was an innocuous, easy-to-miss announcement of what turned out to be quite an important perk of being an editor. According to a video I found from last summer, the library has actually been around for about a decade, but until recently there was no systematic effort to advertise it, and so the vast majority of eligible members (including me) had no clue it existed. Having only discovered the resource today I cannot yet report on how useful it will be, but it looks promising so far.

It’s not all good news – for a long time I have been vexed by the positioning of “Sir” and “Dame” in the infoboxes of such subjects as are entitled to them. I prefer them to be in the name field, rather than among the honorific prefixes. Previously this appeared to be the consensus among the editors who frequented the articles of knighted politicians and civil servants, though not necessarily those of actors and musicians, with only a small number of persistent miscreants persisting otherwise. A fortnight ago this was discussed and my contribution was sought. It appeared that my stance was going to win out, but when the matter went to vote my supporters were rarely to be seen. We’re doomed to ugly box-headers for the forseable future, one supposes.