Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Diary briefs
Inside the Hawke-Keating Government: A Cabinet Diary - Random House, Amazon, The Australian
Diary detailing Khmer Rouge reign of terror - South China Morning Post, The Phnom Penh Post
Life (and football) in the trenches - The Mirror
WWI diary of Woodman Leonard - Toronto Sun
Cecil Beaton: Portraits & Profiles - Frances Lincoln, Daily Mail
Tennessee Williams diary - Morgan Library and Museum, Huffington Post
The diary of Regimental Sergeant Major George Beck - Dorset History Centre
Church collection box thief snared by his own diary - BBC, Coventry Telegraph
Civil War diary kept by a onetime mayor - The Sacramento Bee
Diary of a World War I ace - Air & Space
Free black woman in Philadelphia during the Civil War - Philly.com
Squire vs reverend
John Peter Boileau, a squire of Ketteringham and a well-connected man in Norfolk and London society, was born 220 years ago today. Both he and the local reverend in Ketteringham left behind detailed diaries which were exploited, a century later, by Cambridge professor, Owen Chadwick, to reveal - in the book Victorian Miniature - a fascinating slice of local history, in particular an acrimonious relationship between squire and reverend.
Boileau was born on 2 September 1794, in London, the eldest son in a family that claimed to be descended from Charles Boileau, baron of Castelnau and St Croix, a Languedoc Huguenot immigrant to England in 1691, and from Étienne Boileau, the first known provost of Paris in the 13th century. He was educated at Eton, Oxford and Edinburgh, and then commissioned into the rifle brigade.
In 1825, Boileau married Lady Catherine Sarah Elliot, daughter of the first earl of Minto, and they had nine children. He acquired Thursford Hall, near Fakenham, and the Ketteringham estate, where he built a Gothic hall, and where he came into a conflict with the local vicar, William Andrew.
In 1838, Boileau was created a baronet. He served as a county magistrate and a deputy lieutenant; and he was appointed high sheriff of Norfolk in 1844. Apart from holding various offices in London and being a Fellow of the Royal Society, he was also a founding member of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, and its president from 1849. His wife died in 1862, and he died in 1869. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia and The Peerage. (Thanks to the National Portrait Gallery for the image.)
In 1960, a history professor at Cambridge University, Owen Chadwick, published Victorian Miniature (Hodder and Stoughton) which relied heavily on diaries kept by Boileau and by Reverend William Andrew, and told the story of an astonishing feud between the two Ketteringham characters. Here’s the publisher’s blurb: ‘Owen Chadwick’s Victorian Miniature paints a detailed cameo of nineteenth-century English rural life, in the extraordinary battle of wills between squire and parson in a Norfolk village. Both the evangelical clergyman and the squire, proudly conscious of his Huguenot ancestry, were passionate diarists, and their two journals open up a fascinating double perspective on the events which exposed their clash of personalities. The result is a narrative that is at once deeply informative about Victorian class distinctions, rural customs and festivities, and richly entertaining in a manner worthy of Trollope.’
The book was reprinted in 1991 by Cambridge University Press. Some pages can be browsed at Amazon; and there is further information on the Literary Norfolk website.
Boileau’s diary is deposited with the Norfolk Record Society in the Norwich public library. It begins in 1839, when he left England for a continental tour, and ends in February 1869, a month before his death. Some sections - notably 1846-1850 - remain in private hands, and a couple of short sections were probably destroyed for personal reasons, says Owen Chadwick. William Andrew’s diary is in private hands (or was at the time of the book’s publication). It is in two big volumes, the first from his ordination to 1855, and the second from 1855 to his last illness. Unlike Boileau, he didn’t write in his journal very often or regularly. Here are a couple of extracts from Chadwick’s book (which uses the diaries of both men extensively, but does not, in fact, provide many dated verbatim quotes from them).
Boileau’s diary
January 1841
‘Dined early, and in the evening servants had a ball in the hall, lighted up. There were our ten maids - four indoor and three outdoor, and Cowper - Easton and three gardeners there, besides John Cannell and wife, [ . . .] It went off well as they had supper also, and all over by two o’clock, which was somewhat too late. I took Mrs. Beale to dance in the New Year but she was puffy and obliged to sit down.’
Chadwick comments: ‘Andrew disapproved of these proceedings, and hoped that some of the participants also disapproved. He found villagers like Jonas Horstead, the fiddler, who professed uneasy conscience but nevertheless had attended the ball. He was grieved when he found that Sarah Cooper was among them. When he expressed his grief, Sarah said, “I was miserable all the while and always wished from the first not to have anything to do with the school under Sir John. But he came to me saying, “I know Mr. Andrew does not agree with me that balls are not wrong. I see no wrong and I myself join in the dance. Besides, remember you are now my schoolmistress, not his.” ” This at least was Sarah’s account of her fall, and Andrew found it impossible to be cross with one so penitent and unhappy. He bore his testimony against the pomps and vanities of the world, and took his leave.’
Andrew’s diary
5 January 1842 [while Boileau was away]
‘Drew tooth for old Mrs. Roberts. It was singular that I went round to Ketteringham for the purpose of extracting it and I found her in great pain, upon which I drew from my pocket a pair of pincers which caused the poor old woman to shake and she begged I would use a piece of thread, I at last broke it off which perhaps was better than extracting the fangs.’
16 July 1843
‘Preached from Joshua ii and Jeremiah ii 37 latter part. Good congregation. Boileaus returned, very courteous. But before Mrs. Andrew reached the church they had ordered the first and second classes of girls into their pew, when my dear Ellen properly countermanded the order saying she was manager of the Sabbath School. How much they strive for mastery, but not lawfully. They aim at supremacy.’
The Diary Junction
Boileau was born on 2 September 1794, in London, the eldest son in a family that claimed to be descended from Charles Boileau, baron of Castelnau and St Croix, a Languedoc Huguenot immigrant to England in 1691, and from Étienne Boileau, the first known provost of Paris in the 13th century. He was educated at Eton, Oxford and Edinburgh, and then commissioned into the rifle brigade.
In 1825, Boileau married Lady Catherine Sarah Elliot, daughter of the first earl of Minto, and they had nine children. He acquired Thursford Hall, near Fakenham, and the Ketteringham estate, where he built a Gothic hall, and where he came into a conflict with the local vicar, William Andrew.
In 1838, Boileau was created a baronet. He served as a county magistrate and a deputy lieutenant; and he was appointed high sheriff of Norfolk in 1844. Apart from holding various offices in London and being a Fellow of the Royal Society, he was also a founding member of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, and its president from 1849. His wife died in 1862, and he died in 1869. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia and The Peerage. (Thanks to the National Portrait Gallery for the image.)
In 1960, a history professor at Cambridge University, Owen Chadwick, published Victorian Miniature (Hodder and Stoughton) which relied heavily on diaries kept by Boileau and by Reverend William Andrew, and told the story of an astonishing feud between the two Ketteringham characters. Here’s the publisher’s blurb: ‘Owen Chadwick’s Victorian Miniature paints a detailed cameo of nineteenth-century English rural life, in the extraordinary battle of wills between squire and parson in a Norfolk village. Both the evangelical clergyman and the squire, proudly conscious of his Huguenot ancestry, were passionate diarists, and their two journals open up a fascinating double perspective on the events which exposed their clash of personalities. The result is a narrative that is at once deeply informative about Victorian class distinctions, rural customs and festivities, and richly entertaining in a manner worthy of Trollope.’
The book was reprinted in 1991 by Cambridge University Press. Some pages can be browsed at Amazon; and there is further information on the Literary Norfolk website.
Boileau’s diary is deposited with the Norfolk Record Society in the Norwich public library. It begins in 1839, when he left England for a continental tour, and ends in February 1869, a month before his death. Some sections - notably 1846-1850 - remain in private hands, and a couple of short sections were probably destroyed for personal reasons, says Owen Chadwick. William Andrew’s diary is in private hands (or was at the time of the book’s publication). It is in two big volumes, the first from his ordination to 1855, and the second from 1855 to his last illness. Unlike Boileau, he didn’t write in his journal very often or regularly. Here are a couple of extracts from Chadwick’s book (which uses the diaries of both men extensively, but does not, in fact, provide many dated verbatim quotes from them).
Boileau’s diary
January 1841
‘Dined early, and in the evening servants had a ball in the hall, lighted up. There were our ten maids - four indoor and three outdoor, and Cowper - Easton and three gardeners there, besides John Cannell and wife, [ . . .] It went off well as they had supper also, and all over by two o’clock, which was somewhat too late. I took Mrs. Beale to dance in the New Year but she was puffy and obliged to sit down.’
Chadwick comments: ‘Andrew disapproved of these proceedings, and hoped that some of the participants also disapproved. He found villagers like Jonas Horstead, the fiddler, who professed uneasy conscience but nevertheless had attended the ball. He was grieved when he found that Sarah Cooper was among them. When he expressed his grief, Sarah said, “I was miserable all the while and always wished from the first not to have anything to do with the school under Sir John. But he came to me saying, “I know Mr. Andrew does not agree with me that balls are not wrong. I see no wrong and I myself join in the dance. Besides, remember you are now my schoolmistress, not his.” ” This at least was Sarah’s account of her fall, and Andrew found it impossible to be cross with one so penitent and unhappy. He bore his testimony against the pomps and vanities of the world, and took his leave.’
Andrew’s diary
5 January 1842 [while Boileau was away]
‘Drew tooth for old Mrs. Roberts. It was singular that I went round to Ketteringham for the purpose of extracting it and I found her in great pain, upon which I drew from my pocket a pair of pincers which caused the poor old woman to shake and she begged I would use a piece of thread, I at last broke it off which perhaps was better than extracting the fangs.’
16 July 1843
‘Preached from Joshua ii and Jeremiah ii 37 latter part. Good congregation. Boileaus returned, very courteous. But before Mrs. Andrew reached the church they had ordered the first and second classes of girls into their pew, when my dear Ellen properly countermanded the order saying she was manager of the Sabbath School. How much they strive for mastery, but not lawfully. They aim at supremacy.’
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Our civilization’s survival
It is 40 years today since the death of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, an extraordinary American who made his name as an aviation pioneer. However, he became even more of a celebrity when his toddler son was kidnapped and then murdered (the so-called ‘crime-of-the-century’). Subsequently, he inadvertently courted further publicity with his views on Germany, which led some to perceive him as a Nazi sympathiser - a view not dispelled, many years later, by the posthumous publication of a diary he kept during the war years. Long after his death, it was also discovered that apart from having a large family with his wife Anne Morrow, he had kept secret long-term relationships with at least three women, in Germany and Switzerland, each of whom had borne him children.
Lindbergh was born in 1902, the son of Swedish immigrants, his father being a lawyer and congressman, and his mother a chemistry teacher. He began to study engineering at the University of Wisconsin but left after two years to fly daredevil stunts at fairs. In 1924, he enlisted in the army, was trained to fly, and then joined the Robertson Aircraft Corporation as a pilot. In 1927, he took up a $25,000 challenge, that had stood since 1919, to fly non-stop from New York to Paris. Several St Louis businessmen helped finance the cost of a plane, with Lindbergh involved in the design. On 20 May he made the famous flight of around 5,600km in under 34 hours. Thereafter, he became a celebrity, and an active campaigner, partly backed by Harry Guggenheim, for the further development of aeronautics.
While in Mexico on a promotion trip, Lindbergh met Anne Spencer Morrow, daughter of the American ambassador. They married in 1929, he taught her to fly, and they made many foreign trips. In 1932, their toddler son, Charles, was kidnapped - causing a media frenzy - and ten weeks later the body was found. It took more than two years for the so-called ‘crime-of-the-century’ to be resolved when, in 1934, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was found responsible for the murder. He was executed in 1936. Since then, though, Hauptmann’s guilt has been much debated, with many books being written on the case, some asserting his innocence, others backing the original judgement.
To escape the press and media attention during these years, the Lindberghs and a second son (four other children were to follow) moved to England. Subsequently, Lindbergh attracted more public attention when he accepted a German medal of honour from Hermann Goering. After returning to the US in 1939, Lindbergh campaigned against US involvement in the European war, and was accused of being a Nazi sympathiser. After Pearl Harbor, though, he sought involvement in the war, and ended up flying about 50 combat missions even though he was a civilian. He also helped develop aviation techniques.
After the War, Lindbergh worked as an adviser for government and industry. His book The Spirit of St Louis, an expanded account of the 1927 flight, won a Pulitzer Prize. In the 1960s, he campaigned on environmental issues. From 1957 until his death on 26 August 1974, Lindbergh maintained a secret affair with Brigitte Hesshaimer, a German hatmaker, who had three children by him, as well as affairs with two other women (one German, one Swiss) who each bore him two children. It would be nearly 30 years after his death before these affairs became public. Further information is available at Wikipedia, Minnesota Historical Society, the Lindbergh Foundation, or the Spirit of St. Louis 2 Project.
In 1937, two years before the war in Europe began, Lindbergh began to write a diary, which he kept up until the war was over in 1945. However, this was not published until 1970 when Harcourt Brace Jovanovich brought out The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh. William Jovanovich, himself, provided a short introduction to the book:
‘The quarter century that has passed since the ending of World War II has dimmed our recollection, which is reason enough for us to be interested in reading a unique record of that terrible time. But the years have also lessened our sense of certitude. The past is always compromised by the present: many of the assurances of long ago, on re-examination, turn into questions and speculations. Both the exercise of memory and the writing of history tend to make it so, however different they are in resource. The historian will attempt to read the whole record of the past so far as he is able, but since he cannot write the whole record, he will select those events and circumstances that accommodate his thesis or his bias or his style or whatever. Those selected items of occurrence become, as Max Weber concluded, the facts of history.
So, too, in writing of the moment, as in a diary or journal, an act of selection takes place. One must decide what was significant in the course of a day before he can keep a reasonably short record of its passing. Yet the journal becomes, in the hands of a serious and candid person, an exceptional means by which events can be depicted literally, which is to say depicted with both accuracy of account and a consistency of view. This one recognises, casting back, in the journals of John Wesley, of Thoreau, and of General Charles (“Chinese”) Gordon, among a few other. It may be seen, now, in the wartime journals of Charles A. Lindbergh, which are here published twenty-five years after the last of the entries was written.’
Jovanovich also included a letter he received from Lindbergh. Jovanovich asked what Lindbergh had concluded on rereading the diaries, and Lindbergh replied: ‘We won the war in a military sense; but in a broader sense it seems to me we lost it, for our Western civilization is less respected and secure than it was before.’ In the letter, Lindbergh also summarised his reasons for writing the journal in the first place, and his reasons for agreeing to publishing it:
‘More than a generation after the war’s end, our occupying armies still must occupy, and the world has not been made safe for democracy and freedom. On the contrary, our own system of democratic government is being challenged by that greatest of dangers to any government: internal dissatisfaction and unrest. It is alarmingly possible that World War II marks the beginning of our Western civilization’s breakdown, as it already marks the breakdown of the greatest empire ever built by man. Certainly our civilization’s survival depends on meeting the challenges that tower before us with unprecedented magnitude in almost every field of modern life. Most of these challenges were, at least, intensified through the waging of World War II. Are we now headed toward a third and still more disastrous war between world nations? Or can we improve human relationships sufficiently to avoid such a holocaust? Since it is inherent in the way of life that issues will continue between men, I believe human relationships can best be improved through clarifying the issues and conditions surrounding them. I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues and conditions of the past and thereby contribute to understanding issues and conditions of the present and the future.’
The New York Times found Lindbergh’s diary fascinating. Eric Goldman, in his review, wrote: ‘Except in the limited instances where the entries concern highly technical matters, the “Wartime Journals” are fascinating, almost hypnotically so. The prose is always lean, often pungent; on occasions when Lindbergh’s mind or emotions were deeply engaged, it rises to a compelling eloquence.’ However, Goldman also finds much to question about Lindbergh’s beliefs:
‘If readers will surely be held by the volume, many will read on with decidedly mixed feelings. The integrity with which the journals have been published presents again the Charles Lindbergh who outraged millions of Americans in 1939-41. The basic issue involved in World War II, the diary repeatedly stresses, was the preservation of “civilization,” defined as the comforts and attitudes of the “Nordic,” middle-class West, against the forces of “disorder” and “leveling” threatening from within and without. The democracies were losing “character”; the “virility” of Nazi Germany was the barrier against the greatest menace, the Communism of “Asiatic” Russia. Franklin Roosevelt is pictured as a relentless schemer, distrusted by “friend or enemy,” who was quite capable of taking the nation to war out of sheer politics and vainglory. The diary show that Lindbergh had considerable compassion for the German Jews. But much more than his public charge, it attacks the “Jewish influence” in bringing war to the United States, particularly as a result of Jewish “control” of “huge part” of the mass media. A good deal of space is given to describing brutalities by U.S. troops against Japanese soldiers; the atrocities of individual Americans are equated with the official policy of the Third Reich. Not a sentence excoriates Nazism as a general credo or poses it as a menace to civilization in any tenable definition of the word, including Lindbergh’s own. Entry after entry bespeaks a preoccupation, almost an obsession, with the “race problem,” those “northern peoples” versus all others.’
Some extracts form Lindbergh’s diary can be found online at Wikiquote. Also pages from The Boyhood Diary of Charles Lindbergh 1913-1916, published by Capstone Press in 2001, can be read online at Googlebooks. Here, though, are two extracts taken from the The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh.
26 August 1938
‘Left embassy at 10:30 after usual problem of tipping the servants. More difficult here because of exchange problem and the fact that American Embassy help are mostly Italian. [. . .]
Arrived at aerodrome shortly before 11:00. Many Russians and Americans there to see us off. Impossible to keep them from doing this, although it makes extra work for them and delays us in getting started. Took off Moscow 11:15. [. . .]
We flew first to Tula, then to Orel, then to Kharkov, making our first landing at the latter place. After a half hour’s stop at Kharkov, we flew practically direct to Rostov on Don. Our routes are laid out for us by the Russian officials, and we attempt to follow them exactly. I miss the unrestricted routes of the United States. Immediately after taking off from the Moscow aerodrome, we passed over the aircraft factory I visited several days ago. A few minutes later we passed several training fields. [. . .]
We are having high oil temperatures in this hot weather. Sometimes above 90°C. Everything else is all right, except both voltmeter and ammeter are fluctuating excessively. The English mechanics don’t understand this equipment, even though Phillips & Powis are the agents for our Menasco engine. In consequence it is never properly serviced. The English regulations load you down with logbooks, licenses, and other papers, but one good American mechanic is worth all of them, ten times over, including the Air Ministry inspections. I keep up the logs only enough to get by the regulations. They are no value whatsoever from my standpoint, but if I should crash the plane I am sure the authorities would blame it on some omitted entry or a bit of overload, regardless of the actual cause.
The readiness to blame a dead pilot for an accident is nauseating, but it has been the tendency ever since I can remember. What pilot has not been in positions where he was in danger and where perfect judgment would have advised against going? But when a man is caught in such a position he is judged only by his error and seldom given credit for the times he has extricated himself from worse situations. Worst of all, blame is heaped upon him by other pilots, all of whom have been in parallel situations themselves, but without being caught in them. If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one’s outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. Why should we look for his errors when a brave man dies? Unless we can learn from his experience, there is no need to look for weakness. Rather, we should admire the courage and spirit in his life. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?
We had a good opportunity to see the collective farms and coal mines of the Ukraine. The collective farms are unlike anything I have seen elsewhere. They consist of a row of twenty or so houses, strung out along a road, with garden patches of an acre or so behind them, and large fields outside.
Landed Rostov 7:01. There was a group of people to meet us, including the mayor and the head of the local Intourist. Also the head of the flying school we came to see. Colonel Slepnev was there, having flown from Moscow ahead of us. The Russians are doing everything possible for us. I feel embarrassed because it so much. Dislike to cause so much trouble. Colonel Slepnev had only one hour’s sleep last night. We have never seen anything to exceed Russian hospitality. Also, they have been unusually considerate in not crowding our days with too many engagements.’
21 July 1944
‘The Japanese stronghold on the cliffs of Biak is to be attacked again in the morning. Several hundred Japs are still holding out in caves and crevices in an area about 300 yards wide and 1,000 yards long. So far, they have thrown back all of our attacks, and inflicted nearly one hundred casualties on our infantrymen. They have as perfect a natural defensive position as could be devised - sharp coral ridges overlooking and paralleling the coast, filled with deep and interlocking caves and screened from our artillery fire by coral ledges. This area is clearly visible from the top of the coral cliff, ten feet from the back door of the officers quarters where I am staying - a brown ridge surrounded by green jungle on the coast of Biak about three miles across the water from Owi Island.
The intense artillery fire has stripped the trees of leaves and branches so that the outline of the coral ridge itself can be seen silhouetted against the sky. Since I have been on Owi Island, at irregular intervals through the night and day, the sound of our artillery bombarding this Japanese stronghold has floated in across the water. This afternoon, I stood on the cliff outside our quarters (not daring to sit on the ground because of the danger of typhus) and watched the shells bursting on the ridge. For weeks that handful of Japanese soldiers, variously estimated at between 250 and 700 men, has been holding out against overwhelming odds and the heaviest bombardment our well-supplied guns can give them.
If positions were reversed and our troops held out so courageously and well, their defense would be recorded as one of the most glorious examples of tenacity, bravery, and sacrifice in the history of our nation. But, sitting in the security and relative luxury of our quarters, I listen to American Army officers refer to these Japanese soldiers as “yellow sons of bitches.” Their desire is to exterminate the Jap ruthlessly, even cruelly. I have not heard a word of respect or compassion spoken of our enemy since I came here.
It is not the willingness to kill on the part of our soldiers which most concerns me. That is an inherent part of war. It is our lack of respect for even the admirable characteristics of our enemy - for courage, for suffering, for death, for his willingness to die for his beliefs, for his companies and squadrons which go forth, one after another, to annihilation against our superior training and equipment. What is courage for us is fanaticism for him. We hold his examples of atrocity screamingly to the heavens while we cover up our own and condone them as just retribution for his acts. [. . .]
We must bomb them out, those Jap soldiers, because this is war, and if we do not kill them, they will kill us now that we have removed the possibility of surrender. But I would have more respect for the character of our people if we could give them a decent burial instead of kicking in the teeth of corpses, and pushing their bodies into hollows in the ground, scooped out and covered up by bulldozers. After that, we will leave their graves unmarked and say, “That’s the only way to handle the yellow sons of bitches.”
Over to the 35th Fighter Squadron in the evening to give a half hour’s talk to the pilots on fuel economy and the P-38.’
The Diary Junction (see also Anne Morrow Lindbergh)
Lindbergh was born in 1902, the son of Swedish immigrants, his father being a lawyer and congressman, and his mother a chemistry teacher. He began to study engineering at the University of Wisconsin but left after two years to fly daredevil stunts at fairs. In 1924, he enlisted in the army, was trained to fly, and then joined the Robertson Aircraft Corporation as a pilot. In 1927, he took up a $25,000 challenge, that had stood since 1919, to fly non-stop from New York to Paris. Several St Louis businessmen helped finance the cost of a plane, with Lindbergh involved in the design. On 20 May he made the famous flight of around 5,600km in under 34 hours. Thereafter, he became a celebrity, and an active campaigner, partly backed by Harry Guggenheim, for the further development of aeronautics.
While in Mexico on a promotion trip, Lindbergh met Anne Spencer Morrow, daughter of the American ambassador. They married in 1929, he taught her to fly, and they made many foreign trips. In 1932, their toddler son, Charles, was kidnapped - causing a media frenzy - and ten weeks later the body was found. It took more than two years for the so-called ‘crime-of-the-century’ to be resolved when, in 1934, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was found responsible for the murder. He was executed in 1936. Since then, though, Hauptmann’s guilt has been much debated, with many books being written on the case, some asserting his innocence, others backing the original judgement.
To escape the press and media attention during these years, the Lindberghs and a second son (four other children were to follow) moved to England. Subsequently, Lindbergh attracted more public attention when he accepted a German medal of honour from Hermann Goering. After returning to the US in 1939, Lindbergh campaigned against US involvement in the European war, and was accused of being a Nazi sympathiser. After Pearl Harbor, though, he sought involvement in the war, and ended up flying about 50 combat missions even though he was a civilian. He also helped develop aviation techniques.
After the War, Lindbergh worked as an adviser for government and industry. His book The Spirit of St Louis, an expanded account of the 1927 flight, won a Pulitzer Prize. In the 1960s, he campaigned on environmental issues. From 1957 until his death on 26 August 1974, Lindbergh maintained a secret affair with Brigitte Hesshaimer, a German hatmaker, who had three children by him, as well as affairs with two other women (one German, one Swiss) who each bore him two children. It would be nearly 30 years after his death before these affairs became public. Further information is available at Wikipedia, Minnesota Historical Society, the Lindbergh Foundation, or the Spirit of St. Louis 2 Project.
In 1937, two years before the war in Europe began, Lindbergh began to write a diary, which he kept up until the war was over in 1945. However, this was not published until 1970 when Harcourt Brace Jovanovich brought out The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh. William Jovanovich, himself, provided a short introduction to the book:
‘The quarter century that has passed since the ending of World War II has dimmed our recollection, which is reason enough for us to be interested in reading a unique record of that terrible time. But the years have also lessened our sense of certitude. The past is always compromised by the present: many of the assurances of long ago, on re-examination, turn into questions and speculations. Both the exercise of memory and the writing of history tend to make it so, however different they are in resource. The historian will attempt to read the whole record of the past so far as he is able, but since he cannot write the whole record, he will select those events and circumstances that accommodate his thesis or his bias or his style or whatever. Those selected items of occurrence become, as Max Weber concluded, the facts of history.
So, too, in writing of the moment, as in a diary or journal, an act of selection takes place. One must decide what was significant in the course of a day before he can keep a reasonably short record of its passing. Yet the journal becomes, in the hands of a serious and candid person, an exceptional means by which events can be depicted literally, which is to say depicted with both accuracy of account and a consistency of view. This one recognises, casting back, in the journals of John Wesley, of Thoreau, and of General Charles (“Chinese”) Gordon, among a few other. It may be seen, now, in the wartime journals of Charles A. Lindbergh, which are here published twenty-five years after the last of the entries was written.’
Jovanovich also included a letter he received from Lindbergh.
‘More than a generation after the war’s end, our occupying armies still must occupy, and the world has not been made safe for democracy and freedom. On the contrary, our own system of democratic government is being challenged by that greatest of dangers to any government: internal dissatisfaction and unrest. It is alarmingly possible that World War II marks the beginning of our Western civilization’s breakdown, as it already marks the breakdown of the greatest empire ever built by man. Certainly our civilization’s survival depends on meeting the challenges that tower before us with unprecedented magnitude in almost every field of modern life. Most of these challenges were, at least, intensified through the waging of World War II. Are we now headed toward a third and still more disastrous war between world nations? Or can we improve human relationships sufficiently to avoid such a holocaust? Since it is inherent in the way of life that issues will continue between men, I believe human relationships can best be improved through clarifying the issues and conditions surrounding them. I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues and conditions of the past and thereby contribute to understanding issues and conditions of the present and the future.’
The New York Times found Lindbergh’s diary fascinating. Eric Goldman, in his review, wrote: ‘Except in the limited instances where the entries concern highly technical matters, the “Wartime Journals” are fascinating, almost hypnotically so. The prose is always lean, often pungent; on occasions when Lindbergh’s mind or emotions were deeply engaged, it rises to a compelling eloquence.’ However, Goldman also finds much to question about Lindbergh’s beliefs:
‘If readers will surely be held by the volume, many will read on with decidedly mixed feelings. The integrity with which the journals have been published presents again the Charles Lindbergh who outraged millions of Americans in 1939-41. The basic issue involved in World War II, the diary repeatedly stresses, was the preservation of “civilization,” defined as the comforts and attitudes of the “Nordic,” middle-class West, against the forces of “disorder” and “leveling” threatening from within and without. The democracies were losing “character”; the “virility” of Nazi Germany was the barrier against the greatest menace, the Communism of “Asiatic” Russia. Franklin Roosevelt is pictured as a relentless schemer, distrusted by “friend or enemy,” who was quite capable of taking the nation to war out of sheer politics and vainglory. The diary show that Lindbergh had considerable compassion for the German Jews. But much more than his public charge, it attacks the “Jewish influence” in bringing war to the United States, particularly as a result of Jewish “control” of “huge part” of the mass media. A good deal of space is given to describing brutalities by U.S. troops against Japanese soldiers; the atrocities of individual Americans are equated with the official policy of the Third Reich. Not a sentence excoriates Nazism as a general credo or poses it as a menace to civilization in any tenable definition of the word, including Lindbergh’s own. Entry after entry bespeaks a preoccupation, almost an obsession, with the “race problem,” those “northern peoples” versus all others.’
Some extracts form Lindbergh’s diary can be found online at Wikiquote. Also pages from The Boyhood Diary of Charles Lindbergh 1913-1916, published by Capstone Press in 2001, can be read online at Googlebooks. Here, though, are two extracts taken from the The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh.
26 August 1938
‘Left embassy at 10:30 after usual problem of tipping the servants. More difficult here because of exchange problem and the fact that American Embassy help are mostly Italian. [. . .]
Arrived at aerodrome shortly before 11:00. Many Russians and Americans there to see us off. Impossible to keep them from doing this, although it makes extra work for them and delays us in getting started. Took off Moscow 11:15. [. . .]
We flew first to Tula, then to Orel, then to Kharkov, making our first landing at the latter place. After a half hour’s stop at Kharkov, we flew practically direct to Rostov on Don. Our routes are laid out for us by the Russian officials, and we attempt to follow them exactly. I miss the unrestricted routes of the United States. Immediately after taking off from the Moscow aerodrome, we passed over the aircraft factory I visited several days ago. A few minutes later we passed several training fields. [. . .]
We are having high oil temperatures in this hot weather. Sometimes above 90°C. Everything else is all right, except both voltmeter and ammeter are fluctuating excessively. The English mechanics don’t understand this equipment, even though Phillips & Powis are the agents for our Menasco engine. In consequence it is never properly serviced. The English regulations load you down with logbooks, licenses, and other papers, but one good American mechanic is worth all of them, ten times over, including the Air Ministry inspections. I keep up the logs only enough to get by the regulations. They are no value whatsoever from my standpoint, but if I should crash the plane I am sure the authorities would blame it on some omitted entry or a bit of overload, regardless of the actual cause.
The readiness to blame a dead pilot for an accident is nauseating, but it has been the tendency ever since I can remember. What pilot has not been in positions where he was in danger and where perfect judgment would have advised against going? But when a man is caught in such a position he is judged only by his error and seldom given credit for the times he has extricated himself from worse situations. Worst of all, blame is heaped upon him by other pilots, all of whom have been in parallel situations themselves, but without being caught in them. If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one’s outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. Why should we look for his errors when a brave man dies? Unless we can learn from his experience, there is no need to look for weakness. Rather, we should admire the courage and spirit in his life. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?
We had a good opportunity to see the collective farms and coal mines of the Ukraine. The collective farms are unlike anything I have seen elsewhere. They consist of a row of twenty or so houses, strung out along a road, with garden patches of an acre or so behind them, and large fields outside.
Landed Rostov 7:01. There was a group of people to meet us, including the mayor and the head of the local Intourist. Also the head of the flying school we came to see. Colonel Slepnev was there, having flown from Moscow ahead of us. The Russians are doing everything possible for us. I feel embarrassed because it so much. Dislike to cause so much trouble. Colonel Slepnev had only one hour’s sleep last night. We have never seen anything to exceed Russian hospitality. Also, they have been unusually considerate in not crowding our days with too many engagements.’
21 July 1944
‘The Japanese stronghold on the cliffs of Biak is to be attacked again in the morning. Several hundred Japs are still holding out in caves and crevices in an area about 300 yards wide and 1,000 yards long. So far, they have thrown back all of our attacks, and inflicted nearly one hundred casualties on our infantrymen. They have as perfect a natural defensive position as could be devised - sharp coral ridges overlooking and paralleling the coast, filled with deep and interlocking caves and screened from our artillery fire by coral ledges. This area is clearly visible from the top of the coral cliff, ten feet from the back door of the officers quarters where I am staying - a brown ridge surrounded by green jungle on the coast of Biak about three miles across the water from Owi Island.
The intense artillery fire has stripped the trees of leaves and branches so that the outline of the coral ridge itself can be seen silhouetted against the sky. Since I have been on Owi Island, at irregular intervals through the night and day, the sound of our artillery bombarding this Japanese stronghold has floated in across the water. This afternoon, I stood on the cliff outside our quarters (not daring to sit on the ground because of the danger of typhus) and watched the shells bursting on the ridge. For weeks that handful of Japanese soldiers, variously estimated at between 250 and 700 men, has been holding out against overwhelming odds and the heaviest bombardment our well-supplied guns can give them.
If positions were reversed and our troops held out so courageously and well, their defense would be recorded as one of the most glorious examples of tenacity, bravery, and sacrifice in the history of our nation. But, sitting in the security and relative luxury of our quarters, I listen to American Army officers refer to these Japanese soldiers as “yellow sons of bitches.” Their desire is to exterminate the Jap ruthlessly, even cruelly. I have not heard a word of respect or compassion spoken of our enemy since I came here.
It is not the willingness to kill on the part of our soldiers which most concerns me. That is an inherent part of war. It is our lack of respect for even the admirable characteristics of our enemy - for courage, for suffering, for death, for his willingness to die for his beliefs, for his companies and squadrons which go forth, one after another, to annihilation against our superior training and equipment. What is courage for us is fanaticism for him. We hold his examples of atrocity screamingly to the heavens while we cover up our own and condone them as just retribution for his acts. [. . .]
We must bomb them out, those Jap soldiers, because this is war, and if we do not kill them, they will kill us now that we have removed the possibility of surrender. But I would have more respect for the character of our people if we could give them a decent burial instead of kicking in the teeth of corpses, and pushing their bodies into hollows in the ground, scooped out and covered up by bulldozers. After that, we will leave their graves unmarked and say, “That’s the only way to handle the yellow sons of bitches.”
Over to the 35th Fighter Squadron in the evening to give a half hour’s talk to the pilots on fuel economy and the P-38.’
The Diary Junction (see also Anne Morrow Lindbergh)
Friday, August 22, 2014
He was my diary
‘My diary again. It’s sad to be going back to old habits I gave up since I got married. I used to write when I felt depressed - now I suppose it’s for the same reason. Relations with my husband have been so simple these past two weeks and I felt so happy with him; he was my diary and I had nothing to hide from him.’ This is Sophia Tolstoy, born 170 years ago today, writing in her diary during the first weeks of her marriage to the famous Russian writer. She would go on to keep a diary for the rest of her life, often using it to vent her frustrations towards L. or Lev. Nik.
Sophia Behrs was born on 22 August 1844, one of a large family. Her father was a physician at the Russian court; her mother was nearly 20 years his junior. Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, already a well-known author in his 30s, became a regular visitor to the Behrs’ household, and, in September 1862 when Sofia was just 18, the couple married. They lived prosperously, on a large estate, at Yasnaya Polyana (200km from Moscow) with many serfs, and had 13 children, eight of whom survived childhood.
Sophia (Sofia, Sophie) was largely a devoted wife, managing her busy household and helping her husband with his manuscripts. The marriage lasted nearly 50 years, but a few days before his death, Tolstoy left the family home after an argument over a desire to give away his property. Sophia continued living on the estate, survived the Russian revolution in relative peace, and died in 1919. Further biographical information can be found at Internet Archive in The Autobiography of Sophie Tolstoi as published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press, Paradise Road, Richmond in 1922. Otherwise, see Wikipedia, or Alexandra Popoff’s Sophia Tolstoy: a biography (Free Press in 2010) on Googlebooks, or reviews of the same book (see The New York Times, for example, or The Huffington Post).
Sophia kept a diary all her life - writing half a million words. For long periods, however, she only made intermittent entries: the most complete, but edited, version in English contains no entry, or just one entry, for 16 of the 48 calendar years. The fact that Tolstoy gave his teenage fiancée his diaries to read so as to conceal nothing from her - even his liaisons with servant girls, and his child by a woman who lived on his estate - is one of the most well known of literary diary stories. He bid her to keep a diary, and, thereafter, they wrote their diaries in order that the other should read them. Sophia, indeed, would try and communicate her anger and anxieties about their relationship to him through her diary; when happy, though, she would often fail to record anything.
Extracts from Sophia’s diary were first published in English in 1928 by Gollancz as The Diary of Tolstoy’s wife, 1860-1891 (translated by A. Werth), with a sequel - The Countess Tolstoy’s Later Diary 1891-1897 - the following year. In 1936, Allen & Unwin, published The Final Struggle, being Countess Tolstoy’s diary for 1910: With extracts from Leo Tolstoy’s diary of the same period (translated by A. Maude). More recently, in 1985, Cape published The Diaries of Sofia Tolstaya, as translated by Cathy Porter and edited by O. A. Golinenko. It was re-published in 1989 by Alma Books with a foreword by Doris Lessing (an informative review can be read on The Guardian website, and a few extracts can be found on the National Public Radio website).
The publisher’s advertising blurb for this latter edition states: ‘Sofia’s life was not an easy one: she idealized her husband, but was tormented by him; even her many children were not an unmitigated blessing. In the background of her life was one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history: the transition from old feudal Russia to the three revolutions and three major international wars. Yet it is as Sofia Tolstoy’s own life story, the study of one woman’s private experience, that the diaries are most valuable and moving. They are a testament to a woman of tremendous vital energy and poetic sensibility who, in the face of provocation and suffering, continued to strive for the higher things in life and to remain indomitable. From the state of the great writer’s stomach and the progress of his work, to the fierce and painful arguments that would eventually divide the couple for ever, Sofia’s Diaries are both compelling and extraordinarily revealing.’
The following extracts are taken from the Alma Books edition. (NB: the dates correspond to the old (Julian) calendar, i.e. 12 days behind the Western (Gregorian) calendar in the 19th century, and 13 days behind it in the 20th century.)
8 October 1862
‘My diary again. It’s sad to be going back to old habits I gave up since I got married. I used to write when I felt depressed - now I suppose it’s for the same reason.
Relations with my husband have been so simple these past two weeks and I felt so happy with him; he was my diary and I had nothing to hide from him.
But ever since yesterday, when he told me he didn’t trust my love, I have been feeling terrible. I know why he doesn’t trust me, but I don’t think I shall ever be able to say or write what I really think. I always dreamt of the man I would love as a completely whole, new, pure person. In these childish dreams, which I find hard to give up, I imagined that this man would always be with me, that I would know his slightest thought and feeling, that he would love nobody but me as long as he lived, and that he, like me and unlike others, would not have to sow his wild oats before becoming a respectable person.
Since I married I have had to recognize how foolish these dreams were, yet I cannot renounce them. The whole of my husband’s past is so ghastly that I don’t think I shall ever be able to accept it.’ [Before their marriage, Tolstoy had given Sophia all his old diaries to read because he did not want to conceal anything of his past. The diaries, apparently, made a terrible impression on the 18 year old.]
31 July 1868 [this is the only entry for 1868 in the published diaries]
‘It makes me laugh to read my diary. What a lot of contradictions - as though I were the unhappiest of women!. But who could be happier? Could any marriage be more happy and harmonious than ours? When I am alone in my room I sometimes laugh for joy and cross myself and pray to God for many, many more years of happiness. I always write my diary when we quarrel. There are still days when we quarrel, but this is because of various subtle emotional reasons, and we wouldn’t quarrel if we didn’t love each other. I have been married six years now, but I love him more and more. He often says it isn’t really love, but we have grown so used to each other we cannot be separated. But I still love him with the same poetic, fevered, jealous love, and his composure occasionally irritates me.’
4 June 1910
‘Too many visitors. Lev Nikolaevich is distraught because the Circassian guard has brought Prokofy in for stealing a beam, and he is an old man who once worked for him. Oh, I’ve had enough of the estate!’
28 October 1910
‘Lev Nik. has left! My God! He left a letter telling me not to look for him as he had gone for good, to live out his old age in peace. The moment I read those words I rushed outside in a frenzy of despair and jumped into the pond, where I swallowed a lot of water, Sasha and Bulgakov dragged me out with the help of Vanya Shuraev. Utter despair. Why did they save me?’
29 October 1910
‘All the children have come, apart from Lyova, who is abroad. They are so kind and attentive, but they can’t help or comfort me. Mitasha Obolensky has come. Seryozha, Ilya and Misha have left. Vanya discovered that L. Nik. had gone to Belev - maybe to see his sister Maria Nikolaevna.’
30 October 1910
‘I cry day and night and suffer dreadfully. It’s more painful and terrible than anything I could have imagined. Lev Nik. did visit his sister in Shamordino, then travelled beyond Gorbachevo - who knows where. What unspeakable cruelty.’
31 October 1910
‘I haven’t eaten or drunk anything for four days, I ache all over, my heart is bad. Why? What is happening? Nothing to write about - nothing but groans and tears. Berkenheim came with some stupid doctor called Rastorguev, and a young lady fresh from medical school. These outsiders make it much more difficult, but the children don’t want to take responsibility. What for? My life? I want to leave the dreadful agony of this life . . . I can see no hope, even if L. N. does at some point return. Things will never be as they were, after all he has made me suffer. We can never be straightforward with each other again, we can never love each other, we shall always fear each other. And I fear for his health and strength too.’
4 November 1910
‘Lev Nik. is worse. I wait in agony outside the little house where he is lying. We are sleeping in the train.’
5 November 1910
‘There is evidently little hope. I am tormented by remorse, the painful anticipation of his end, and the impossibility of seeing my beloved husband.’
7 November 1910
‘At 6 o’clock in the morning Lev Nikol. died. I was allowed in only as he drew his last breath. They wouldn’t let me take leave of my husband. Cruel people.’
22 August 1914
‘My sister Tanya arrived this morning, and her husband came for dinner. Today is my birthday; I am 70.’
7 September 1914
‘I wandered about aimlessly; I can’t do anything with this frightful war on, and my grief and worry for Tanya, my sons and Dora, who is due to give birth any day. I raked up piles of leaves for cattle bedding, gave the day-labourers their receipts and spent the evening doing accounts with Nina.’
27 September 1914
‘My sister is distraught because he son Mitya has also volunteered for the war, as an orderly. Incomprehensible hypnotism! We read aloud Matovitsky’s memoirs.’
30 September 1914
‘I did some typing for my sister. This evening Bulgakov read us his article protesting against the war. It is very good.’
2 October 1914
‘My sister Tanya has left. A beautiful still bright day. I went out and wandered around the estate. People have planted apple trees, gathered up brushwood, raked the dead leaves and swept them into four piles. We read papers. There were six visitors today - some officers and army doctors and two women. They looked round the drawing room and Lev Nik.’s rooms.’
18 October 1914
‘The American consulate has informed me that my grandson Misha has been taken prisoner in Milevic, in Bohemia.’
The Diary Junction (see also I have been indolent)
Sophia Behrs was born on 22 August 1844, one of a large family. Her father was a physician at the Russian court; her mother was nearly 20 years his junior. Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, already a well-known author in his 30s, became a regular visitor to the Behrs’ household, and, in September 1862 when Sofia was just 18, the couple married. They lived prosperously, on a large estate, at Yasnaya Polyana (200km from Moscow) with many serfs, and had 13 children, eight of whom survived childhood.
Sophia (Sofia, Sophie) was largely a devoted wife, managing her busy household and helping her husband with his manuscripts. The marriage lasted nearly 50 years, but a few days before his death, Tolstoy left the family home after an argument over a desire to give away his property. Sophia continued living on the estate, survived the Russian revolution in relative peace, and died in 1919. Further biographical information can be found at Internet Archive in The Autobiography of Sophie Tolstoi as published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press, Paradise Road, Richmond in 1922. Otherwise, see Wikipedia, or Alexandra Popoff’s Sophia Tolstoy: a biography (Free Press in 2010) on Googlebooks, or reviews of the same book (see The New York Times, for example, or The Huffington Post).
Sophia kept a diary all her life - writing half a million words. For long periods, however, she only made intermittent entries: the most complete, but edited, version in English contains no entry, or just one entry, for 16 of the 48 calendar years. The fact that Tolstoy gave his teenage fiancée his diaries to read so as to conceal nothing from her - even his liaisons with servant girls, and his child by a woman who lived on his estate - is one of the most well known of literary diary stories. He bid her to keep a diary, and, thereafter, they wrote their diaries in order that the other should read them. Sophia, indeed, would try and communicate her anger and anxieties about their relationship to him through her diary; when happy, though, she would often fail to record anything.
Extracts from Sophia’s diary were first published in English in 1928 by Gollancz as The Diary of Tolstoy’s wife, 1860-1891 (translated by A. Werth), with a sequel - The Countess Tolstoy’s Later Diary 1891-1897 - the following year. In 1936, Allen & Unwin, published The Final Struggle, being Countess Tolstoy’s diary for 1910: With extracts from Leo Tolstoy’s diary of the same period (translated by A. Maude). More recently, in 1985, Cape published The Diaries of Sofia Tolstaya, as translated by Cathy Porter and edited by O. A. Golinenko. It was re-published in 1989 by Alma Books with a foreword by Doris Lessing (an informative review can be read on The Guardian website, and a few extracts can be found on the National Public Radio website).
The publisher’s advertising blurb for this latter edition states: ‘Sofia’s life was not an easy one: she idealized her husband, but was tormented by him; even her many children were not an unmitigated blessing. In the background of her life was one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history: the transition from old feudal Russia to the three revolutions and three major international wars. Yet it is as Sofia Tolstoy’s own life story, the study of one woman’s private experience, that the diaries are most valuable and moving. They are a testament to a woman of tremendous vital energy and poetic sensibility who, in the face of provocation and suffering, continued to strive for the higher things in life and to remain indomitable. From the state of the great writer’s stomach and the progress of his work, to the fierce and painful arguments that would eventually divide the couple for ever, Sofia’s Diaries are both compelling and extraordinarily revealing.’
The following extracts are taken from the Alma Books edition. (NB: the dates correspond to the old (Julian) calendar, i.e. 12 days behind the Western (Gregorian) calendar in the 19th century, and 13 days behind it in the 20th century.)
8 October 1862
‘My diary again. It’s sad to be going back to old habits I gave up since I got married. I used to write when I felt depressed - now I suppose it’s for the same reason.
Relations with my husband have been so simple these past two weeks and I felt so happy with him; he was my diary and I had nothing to hide from him.
But ever since yesterday, when he told me he didn’t trust my love, I have been feeling terrible. I know why he doesn’t trust me, but I don’t think I shall ever be able to say or write what I really think. I always dreamt of the man I would love as a completely whole, new, pure person. In these childish dreams, which I find hard to give up, I imagined that this man would always be with me, that I would know his slightest thought and feeling, that he would love nobody but me as long as he lived, and that he, like me and unlike others, would not have to sow his wild oats before becoming a respectable person.
Since I married I have had to recognize how foolish these dreams were, yet I cannot renounce them. The whole of my husband’s past is so ghastly that I don’t think I shall ever be able to accept it.’ [Before their marriage, Tolstoy had given Sophia all his old diaries to read because he did not want to conceal anything of his past. The diaries, apparently, made a terrible impression on the 18 year old.]
31 July 1868 [this is the only entry for 1868 in the published diaries]
‘It makes me laugh to read my diary. What a lot of contradictions - as though I were the unhappiest of women!. But who could be happier? Could any marriage be more happy and harmonious than ours? When I am alone in my room I sometimes laugh for joy and cross myself and pray to God for many, many more years of happiness. I always write my diary when we quarrel. There are still days when we quarrel, but this is because of various subtle emotional reasons, and we wouldn’t quarrel if we didn’t love each other. I have been married six years now, but I love him more and more. He often says it isn’t really love, but we have grown so used to each other we cannot be separated. But I still love him with the same poetic, fevered, jealous love, and his composure occasionally irritates me.’
4 June 1910
‘Too many visitors. Lev Nikolaevich is distraught because the Circassian guard has brought Prokofy in for stealing a beam, and he is an old man who once worked for him. Oh, I’ve had enough of the estate!’
28 October 1910
‘Lev Nik. has left! My God! He left a letter telling me not to look for him as he had gone for good, to live out his old age in peace. The moment I read those words I rushed outside in a frenzy of despair and jumped into the pond, where I swallowed a lot of water, Sasha and Bulgakov dragged me out with the help of Vanya Shuraev. Utter despair. Why did they save me?’
29 October 1910
‘All the children have come, apart from Lyova, who is abroad. They are so kind and attentive, but they can’t help or comfort me. Mitasha Obolensky has come. Seryozha, Ilya and Misha have left. Vanya discovered that L. Nik. had gone to Belev - maybe to see his sister Maria Nikolaevna.’
30 October 1910
‘I cry day and night and suffer dreadfully. It’s more painful and terrible than anything I could have imagined. Lev Nik. did visit his sister in Shamordino, then travelled beyond Gorbachevo - who knows where. What unspeakable cruelty.’
31 October 1910
‘I haven’t eaten or drunk anything for four days, I ache all over, my heart is bad. Why? What is happening? Nothing to write about - nothing but groans and tears. Berkenheim came with some stupid doctor called Rastorguev, and a young lady fresh from medical school. These outsiders make it much more difficult, but the children don’t want to take responsibility. What for? My life? I want to leave the dreadful agony of this life . . . I can see no hope, even if L. N. does at some point return. Things will never be as they were, after all he has made me suffer. We can never be straightforward with each other again, we can never love each other, we shall always fear each other. And I fear for his health and strength too.’
4 November 1910
‘Lev Nik. is worse. I wait in agony outside the little house where he is lying. We are sleeping in the train.’
5 November 1910
‘There is evidently little hope. I am tormented by remorse, the painful anticipation of his end, and the impossibility of seeing my beloved husband.’
7 November 1910
‘At 6 o’clock in the morning Lev Nikol. died. I was allowed in only as he drew his last breath. They wouldn’t let me take leave of my husband. Cruel people.’
22 August 1914
‘My sister Tanya arrived this morning, and her husband came for dinner. Today is my birthday; I am 70.’
7 September 1914
‘I wandered about aimlessly; I can’t do anything with this frightful war on, and my grief and worry for Tanya, my sons and Dora, who is due to give birth any day. I raked up piles of leaves for cattle bedding, gave the day-labourers their receipts and spent the evening doing accounts with Nina.’
27 September 1914
‘My sister is distraught because he son Mitya has also volunteered for the war, as an orderly. Incomprehensible hypnotism! We read aloud Matovitsky’s memoirs.’
30 September 1914
‘I did some typing for my sister. This evening Bulgakov read us his article protesting against the war. It is very good.’
2 October 1914
‘My sister Tanya has left. A beautiful still bright day. I went out and wandered around the estate. People have planted apple trees, gathered up brushwood, raked the dead leaves and swept them into four piles. We read papers. There were six visitors today - some officers and army doctors and two women. They looked round the drawing room and Lev Nik.’s rooms.’
18 October 1914
‘The American consulate has informed me that my grandson Misha has been taken prisoner in Milevic, in Bohemia.’
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
The cost of stockings
Here is a final selection from the yet-to-be-published London in Diaries (see below for other chapters), this one about Marielle Bennett, a would-be actress, and a Mass Observation respondent during the Second World War. Her diary remains unpublished, and unnoticed within the Mass Observation archive, but it provides a fascinating record of what one unremarkable Londoner was experiencing day-by-day during the war years.
Marielle Bennett and Mass-Observation
Only two decades after the end of the First World War, which had caused so much devastation and death, German aggression again drew Britain into a major military conflict. The Second World War, though, would go on to involve nations across the globe, and be considered as the deadliest conflict in human history. Despite the global nature of the war, Britain with its political centre as ever in London, was very much a dominant and central force, as well as a major military target - just as it had been in the earlier war.
It is no wonder that so many individuals uprooted from normal life and turned into active participants of war, living in adversity and close to killing and destruction, should have chosen to try and record the extraordinary things happening to and around them. There are, thus, many published diaries specifically about the Second World War, and even today, more than 65 years later, newly found or edited war diaries are popular publishing ventures. Only a relatively small number, though, were written in London - but, unlike diaries set in the city during peaceful years, all or most of the Second World War diaries do have much to say about the city itself.
Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat now largely remembered for his diaries, was in London during the war, and his diary - The Siren Years - is witty and readable. Anthony Weymouth, a physician who also worked for the BBC, gives a detailed but far dryer account in his Journal of the War Years. Frances Partridge, one of the Bloomsbury Set, published her diary under the title A Pacifist’s War. Colin Perry was just a lad, but his Boy in the Blitz, first published in 2000, is a lively, youthful take on London during 1940.
One of the most well-known of Second World Diaries, although not published until the 1980s, is that by Nella Last, a housewife in Barrow-in-Furness. Last was one of 500 or so individuals who responded to a call by the social research organisation Mass-Observation to write about their lives. It had been launched in 1937 to record life in Britain, ‘an anthropology of ourselves’, according to the founders. With little funding, it relied on volunteers to keep diaries or reply to open-ended questionnaires. Researchers also recorded, anonymously, people’s conversations and behaviour at work, in public places, and at sports and religious events.
Mass-Observation worked throughout the war producing thousands of reports and a series of published books. After the war, its emphasis shifted away from social issues towards consumer behaviour, and, in 1949, Mass Observation was registered as a limited company, and eventually incorporated into an advertising firm. The Mass Observation Archive is now held at the University of Sussex, and holds all the material generated between 1937 and 1949, with a few later additions, from the 1950s and 1960s. The project was re-launched in 1981, and today continues to collect information aimed at providing a structured programme through which ‘ordinary’ people can write directly about their lives, and at creating ‘a resource of qualitative longitudinal social data’.
Nella Last’s diary written for Mass-Observation was exceptional because of the quality of her writing, its editors said at the time of publication, but also for the length and regularity of Last’s writing. In fact, many of the diaries delivered to Mass-Observation were bitty and intermittent in character, and only very few have been published. While Last’s is not set in London, there is at least one published Mass-Observation diary that is: Love & War in London by Olivia Crockett, billed as London’s answer to Nella Last.
Another London diary in the Mass Observation Archive - but unpublished - was written by Marielle Bennett. As with Crockett’s diary, Bennett’s is also a blend of private feelings mixed with her reactions to the war and its effect on people and places. It opens in August 1939 with sporadic entries until October, and restarts in the summer of 1940 for a couple of months. The following year, she writes to Mass-Observation: ‘I have been very slack. . . however I will make a fresh attempt starting from this month.’ She restarts in May 1941 for a few weeks. There are also a few entries in 1942, 1946 and 1947.
Not much is known of Bennett, other than that revealed in her Mass-Observation diary. The start of the war finds her living with her parents at 53 Upper Park Road, NW3; but, by the middle of 1941 she is staying out of London near Barnet. She was separated from her husband in the mid-1930s, and in 1940 reverts to her maiden name (Vaughan). She calls herself an actress, though there is a little evidence in the diary of her working, at least until after the war, though she does visit, and write about, the theatre often. In the spring of 1941, Bennett’s grandmother dies, and thereafter many pages of the diary relate to her efforts to sell or trade her grandmother’s jewellery and clothes/furs.
From the start of the diary, Bennett shows an interest in psychology. She attends some ‘brilliant lectures’, but then, having decided to try and train as a psychiatric social worker becomes very depressed when trying to analysis herself. She abandons her training for a while, but returns to studying books at home, and making weekly visits to a therapist. She makes the acquaintance of various people who have known Jung or Freud, and in June 1941 becomes much more serious about her therapy, taking a more intensive series of sessions with her analyst, often thinking about her dreams, and doing ‘psychic paintings’.
There is a persistent sense in Bennett’s diary that she is writing for an audience (i.e. Mass-Observation, to whom she sends what she calls ‘reports’) not only because of the occasional comment such as ‘Sorry this report is so trivial but nothing of importance has happened to me,’ but also because of a vague sense, here and there, of her making an effort to provide information and observations. Nevertheless, on reading the diary, one feels very close to her, as though one is there with her, making curtains out of black satin, having trouble finding suitable clothes to wear in the air-raid shelter, and being frustrated that she no longer wants to go to the cinema because all the films are ‘only slightly covered propaganda’.
Mother bought many yards of black satin
1 September 1939
Walked over the heath and saw the balloon barrage etc. Help my parents to put up rolls of brown paper and tape for the black out. Does not prove to be very successful.
2 September 1939
Mother bought many yards of black satin, which we made into curtains all the after noon, which proved to be more satisfactory, but really hate all the preparation and found it very wearisome. Not that quite a number of acquaintances seem to be enjoying themselves, the sense of responsibility and having something to do seems to make them feel more important. [. . .] Went to the cinema, difficult to get home in the dark.
3 September 1939
Hear the Chamberlain speech out of my window from a neighbouring wireless. Do not listen after I hear we are at war. The air-raid warning came as rather a surprise. Did the proscribed things, closing windows etc. Mother worried because my father is driving some greyhounds to the country and she did not know where he was. However all is over.
Gas masks; the cost of stockings
30 September 1939
I met my friend, who is at present touring in a comedy, we did some shopping. I discovered that stockings are up 1/-, my usual 3/11 cost 4/11. The colours were not good either and little selection. The assistant told me that their usual 1/6½ ones will soon be sold at 2/11 and are not fashioned (fully). [. . .]
After tea I went with my family to the pictures. I carried a gas mask for the first time as I did not know whether I could get in the films and I knew my father would not want me to have a long argument, which I should have done had I been alone. The films were “Hound of the Baskervilles” and another with Jackie Cooper and Freddie Bartholomew. Very patriotic and upholding of the military tradition in American. Very obvious and silly film, I thought.
1 October 1939
At six I went over to a friend’s flat in Westminster. The bus was slow. Noticed an ARP warden on duty outside the flats. Walked over to Chelsea via the embankment to see an acquaintance. She said she was hoping to go to Rumania for the Quakers to help with the refugee problem. Had dinner. Was told of a young man who has decided to join up because he cannot bear the thought of carrying a civilian gas mask down Oxford Street! Had a bottle of claret and went to bed.
How little meat one gets at Maison Lyons
3 October 1939
Noticed what little meat one gets nowadays in the 1/6 luncheon at Maison Lyons. Was telephoned by a pacifist friend who invited me to a meeting.
4 October 1939
Went to the hair dresser. The shop was so quiet, I was there four hours and only saw two other customers. The head man has been called up for the Territorials. The second who did my hair said “I was going to join the navy, but my girl doesn’t want me to, she says let the others go first.” Then he said his parents want him to return to S. Africa where he can get a job. He said “supposing the U Boats get me?” and remarked that he would hate to leave all his friends as he has been here many year.
7 October 1939
I stayed in most of the day and refused to go to the cinema with my parents. I have decided not to go to this form of entertainment while it continues to be only slightly covered propaganda. I’d prefer to keep my money and see a theatrical show. For the most part thank God the theatre is still fairly free.
Not all shows are musicals or comedies YET
13 October 1939
Went to “Music at Night”. The Westminster was fairly full. In the programme the management appealed for support and good attendances otherwise they will be “One of the war’s first casualties.” Excellent show, do not think they will have to worry. But getting home was awful, pouring with rain and so few buses. However it was worth it to me. I noticed a good many uniforms in the audiences, women as well as men. I do not know whether this is the type of play appreciated during war time, but it was certainly gratifying to know that all shows are not musicals or comedies YET.
14 October 1939
Noticed a local shelter has been pulled down and is being rebuilt. Spoke to a tobacconist who said the heath is ruined now owing to the trenches and guns etc.
Air-raid suits going out of fashion
26 August 1940
Start out with the intention of buying an air-raid suit for me. First we went to Bournes but they had nothing I liked. Then to Dickens and Jones who had the very thing at 41/2 guineas but we could not afford more than 2. Then to Swan and Edgars where they were horrible, trying to be very feminine instead of tailored, bits of fur and coloured scalves hanging about. Then to Weiss in Shaftesbury Avenue. The sales girl said they had gone out of fashion and most women prefer trousers and a sweater now. They had nothing suitable either. Some terrible things like striped pantaloons at 16/11. Eventually, rather hot and cross, I made up my mind to give up the idea and buy something else with the money.
28 August 1940
Called for Mother and we went together to Victoria and picked up tickets for the matinee of “Cornelius” Had lunch at Zeeta’s, service very slow, think the girls are inexperienced and overworked. The theatre was a superb show. Beautifully produced and the type casting excellent. In fact I have not enjoyed anything so much for ages. The audience was pathetically small and had to applaud like mad.
Bombs in Kentish Town, Kilburn and Fitzjohns Avenue
29 August 1940
Heard from the charwoman that Kentish Town got a bomb. That accounted for the noise being so near. Also heard that Smiths factory at Cricklewood had got some. Charwoman said that everyone “turned as white as a sheet.” Her husband will watch from the doorway but when she goes near he has “a fit”.
30 August 1940
After a quiet night I went up to Hampstead in the morning to order a new book that Priestly recommended on the wireless “The End of Economic Man”. [. . .] Father rang up [. . .] he had heard that our district had been bombed. However he said Fitz Johns Avenue had shattered windows, we did not verify this.
31 August 1940
Hear that Kilburn has been bombed. Stay in for first warning. I set off to meet a friend, but first took some old silver to a place where they buy metal for Spitfires, at first the man only offered me 2/3, I protested as it was 4 pieces. [. . .] Eventually we compromised and I took 9/-. I believe he would have gone to 10/- but I did not persuade him. He said he would lose over the deal. I bet he does!! He said he was going to close the shop next week as he does not like the raids and he thinks they are going on indefinitely. He was a lively old man and I liked him. he told me to get out of Hampstead on account of the Jewish refugees as Hitler would be after them. [. . .]
‘Dirty swine, everyone ought to be killed’
Met my best friend - an actress is who now married and just about to give birth. I am to be the godmother. We intended to go to coffee and then a doctor in Queen Anne’s Street, but we had just met when the warning went, as were in Evans, we sheltered there. Very comfortable. The first shelter I’ve been in. My friend varnished her nails most of the time [. . .]
Went to the Hollyrood and had two lagers. Telephoned another friend and then the sirens sounded again. We could not get back into the pub so we chased along Oxford Street to the Horseshoe where we went down the dive and had another and waited for the all clear. I went to the lavatory then, to find the attendant, a woman about 50, in an uproar. “Dirty swine, everyone ought to be killed, they are not fit to live. We ought to have killed them after the last war. Inhuman devils.”
4 September 1940
The pub was in uproar, because a very familiar figure - a man of about 40 - who I have often seen there came in in battle uniform of a private. Everyone teased him saying “Nice bit of stuff” and things like that. He seemed to think that nothing fitted him at all, and said his boots must have been worn in the evacuation of Dunkirk.
The whole of our street cordoned off
5 September 1940
Our char woman came today. She was very amused because a whole lot of children were shut in an air-raid shelter whether yesterday or the day before. “You could ‘ear the kids screaming fit to bust theirselves.” At last they were rescued by the warden, who must have inadvertently shut them in.
9 September 1940
The whole of [our] street was cordoned off [after a bomb in the night] and people from outlying districts came and peered over the ropes at us as though we were exhibits. We ourselves had to either tell the police when we left home that we should be returning in a few minutes, or else we had to produce our identity cards. We had huge squads of demolition workers to pull down the remains of the house [no 54], and the occupants who seemed to have either been away at the time or to have escaped with slight injuries stood outside and collected all the things that were still “collectable”, clothes were tied up in bundles and taken off. Of course nothing was much good from 54, but the house next door 56 was not quite so badly damaged. A baby and its parents usually live in that house but luckily had spent the night on the opposite side of the street and had not been injured. Some children had cuts and I saw several people walking round with cuts and bandages. I went up the street to post a letter and the demolition men must have taken a dislike to me in my trousers and one called out “Pleased with yourself aren’t you?” Which rather upset me, as altho’ I am terribly pleased to have escaped so narrowly, I am awfully sorry for the other people. Still perhaps I do look pleased with self. I hope not!
Mum nearly caught in trial gas attack
8 May 1941
We are now sleeping out of London and returning every day. We started to do that from April 17th after the heavy raid on London.
21 May 1941
Went into west end. Had an appointment with a psychologist with whom I am studying analytical psychology.
24 May 1941
I came home for lunch and then Mother went to Kentish Town to buy some things. She could not get any emerald green sating ribbon for a new night gown I am making. On her way back she was nearly caught by a trial gas attack the ARP had organised at the end of this road. She had no gas mask and they were laying out the people who had gone out without gas masks on the pavement as though they were casualties.
News full of aeroplanes and guns and ships
30 May 1941
Won at darts. Have done so for several evenings. My father’s greyhound came in second in the rerun for the Wembley Gold cup. It came in first in the first run. Very disappointing. One of the last dogs turned round and ran in the wrong direction causing the judges to ask for a rerun. The race was broadcast and naturally we were very excited when it won [on the first run]. Still second wasn’t bad, but hard luck on my father.
2 July 1941
Went to the films with my people and saw “Kipps” which I thought very good, and thank god not about the war. I got so fed up with all the propaganda we had to sit thro’ first. MOI film about WAAFs and another about Merchant ships and the news just full of aeroplanes and guns and ships.
Giving the boys something to look at
5 July 1941
A WAAF friend of mine telephoned that she was in Paddington waiting to go through to another depot. [. . .] I was in my bath when I got the message, but I dressed and hurried to Paddington in very quick time and we had a drink or two at The Norfolk Hotel, and she told me what terrible head aches she has had since she went on the gas course a fortnight ago. We went up to the services cloak room in Paddington Station and I was amused to find the room literally covered in photographs cut from Magazines like “Lilliput” of nude women. The cloak room attendant said it “gave the boys something to look at.”
21 July 1941
Had several conversations with people who expressed the opinion that “life isn’t worth living now”. Complaints about money, food queues, lack of cigarettes, and rationing of clothes seemed to abound.
23 July 1941
Then we went to see ‘Blythe Spirit’ which is one of the best productions I have ever seen. Margaret Rutherford as the medium was superb. I do not know when I have seen a more amusing and yet realistic characterisation. I could go over and over again and not get bored with that show. My friend saw a man come into one of the boxes towards the end of the play and look around at the audience intently and then make a great show of lighting a cigarette. She said it must have been Noel Coward as no one else would do it quite like that but I was too interested in the play to worry about the author! After that we went to get tea at The Prompt Corner only to find it closed. I was not surprised at that as all the places I hope to find seem closed. Eventually we got some at a nasty little cafe in Charing Cross.
Marielle Bennett and Mass-Observation
Only two decades after the end of the First World War, which had caused so much devastation and death, German aggression again drew Britain into a major military conflict. The Second World War, though, would go on to involve nations across the globe, and be considered as the deadliest conflict in human history. Despite the global nature of the war, Britain with its political centre as ever in London, was very much a dominant and central force, as well as a major military target - just as it had been in the earlier war.
It is no wonder that so many individuals uprooted from normal life and turned into active participants of war, living in adversity and close to killing and destruction, should have chosen to try and record the extraordinary things happening to and around them. There are, thus, many published diaries specifically about the Second World War, and even today, more than 65 years later, newly found or edited war diaries are popular publishing ventures. Only a relatively small number, though, were written in London - but, unlike diaries set in the city during peaceful years, all or most of the Second World War diaries do have much to say about the city itself.
Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat now largely remembered for his diaries, was in London during the war, and his diary - The Siren Years - is witty and readable. Anthony Weymouth, a physician who also worked for the BBC, gives a detailed but far dryer account in his Journal of the War Years. Frances Partridge, one of the Bloomsbury Set, published her diary under the title A Pacifist’s War. Colin Perry was just a lad, but his Boy in the Blitz, first published in 2000, is a lively, youthful take on London during 1940.
One of the most well-known of Second World Diaries, although not published until the 1980s, is that by Nella Last, a housewife in Barrow-in-Furness. Last was one of 500 or so individuals who responded to a call by the social research organisation Mass-Observation to write about their lives. It had been launched in 1937 to record life in Britain, ‘an anthropology of ourselves’, according to the founders. With little funding, it relied on volunteers to keep diaries or reply to open-ended questionnaires. Researchers also recorded, anonymously, people’s conversations and behaviour at work, in public places, and at sports and religious events.
Mass-Observation worked throughout the war producing thousands of reports and a series of published books. After the war, its emphasis shifted away from social issues towards consumer behaviour, and, in 1949, Mass Observation was registered as a limited company, and eventually incorporated into an advertising firm. The Mass Observation Archive is now held at the University of Sussex, and holds all the material generated between 1937 and 1949, with a few later additions, from the 1950s and 1960s. The project was re-launched in 1981, and today continues to collect information aimed at providing a structured programme through which ‘ordinary’ people can write directly about their lives, and at creating ‘a resource of qualitative longitudinal social data’.
Nella Last’s diary written for Mass-Observation was exceptional because of the quality of her writing, its editors said at the time of publication, but also for the length and regularity of Last’s writing. In fact, many of the diaries delivered to Mass-Observation were bitty and intermittent in character, and only very few have been published. While Last’s is not set in London, there is at least one published Mass-Observation diary that is: Love & War in London by Olivia Crockett, billed as London’s answer to Nella Last.
Another London diary in the Mass Observation Archive - but unpublished - was written by Marielle Bennett. As with Crockett’s diary, Bennett’s is also a blend of private feelings mixed with her reactions to the war and its effect on people and places. It opens in August 1939 with sporadic entries until October, and restarts in the summer of 1940 for a couple of months. The following year, she writes to Mass-Observation: ‘I have been very slack. . . however I will make a fresh attempt starting from this month.’ She restarts in May 1941 for a few weeks. There are also a few entries in 1942, 1946 and 1947.
Not much is known of Bennett, other than that revealed in her Mass-Observation diary. The start of the war finds her living with her parents at 53 Upper Park Road, NW3; but, by the middle of 1941 she is staying out of London near Barnet. She was separated from her husband in the mid-1930s, and in 1940 reverts to her maiden name (Vaughan). She calls herself an actress, though there is a little evidence in the diary of her working, at least until after the war, though she does visit, and write about, the theatre often. In the spring of 1941, Bennett’s grandmother dies, and thereafter many pages of the diary relate to her efforts to sell or trade her grandmother’s jewellery and clothes/furs.
From the start of the diary, Bennett shows an interest in psychology. She attends some ‘brilliant lectures’, but then, having decided to try and train as a psychiatric social worker becomes very depressed when trying to analysis herself. She abandons her training for a while, but returns to studying books at home, and making weekly visits to a therapist. She makes the acquaintance of various people who have known Jung or Freud, and in June 1941 becomes much more serious about her therapy, taking a more intensive series of sessions with her analyst, often thinking about her dreams, and doing ‘psychic paintings’.
There is a persistent sense in Bennett’s diary that she is writing for an audience (i.e. Mass-Observation, to whom she sends what she calls ‘reports’) not only because of the occasional comment such as ‘Sorry this report is so trivial but nothing of importance has happened to me,’ but also because of a vague sense, here and there, of her making an effort to provide information and observations. Nevertheless, on reading the diary, one feels very close to her, as though one is there with her, making curtains out of black satin, having trouble finding suitable clothes to wear in the air-raid shelter, and being frustrated that she no longer wants to go to the cinema because all the films are ‘only slightly covered propaganda’.
Mother bought many yards of black satin
1 September 1939
Walked over the heath and saw the balloon barrage etc. Help my parents to put up rolls of brown paper and tape for the black out. Does not prove to be very successful.
2 September 1939
Mother bought many yards of black satin, which we made into curtains all the after noon, which proved to be more satisfactory, but really hate all the preparation and found it very wearisome. Not that quite a number of acquaintances seem to be enjoying themselves, the sense of responsibility and having something to do seems to make them feel more important. [. . .] Went to the cinema, difficult to get home in the dark.
3 September 1939
Hear the Chamberlain speech out of my window from a neighbouring wireless. Do not listen after I hear we are at war. The air-raid warning came as rather a surprise. Did the proscribed things, closing windows etc. Mother worried because my father is driving some greyhounds to the country and she did not know where he was. However all is over.
Gas masks; the cost of stockings
30 September 1939
I met my friend, who is at present touring in a comedy, we did some shopping. I discovered that stockings are up 1/-, my usual 3/11 cost 4/11. The colours were not good either and little selection. The assistant told me that their usual 1/6½ ones will soon be sold at 2/11 and are not fashioned (fully). [. . .]
After tea I went with my family to the pictures. I carried a gas mask for the first time as I did not know whether I could get in the films and I knew my father would not want me to have a long argument, which I should have done had I been alone. The films were “Hound of the Baskervilles” and another with Jackie Cooper and Freddie Bartholomew. Very patriotic and upholding of the military tradition in American. Very obvious and silly film, I thought.
1 October 1939
At six I went over to a friend’s flat in Westminster. The bus was slow. Noticed an ARP warden on duty outside the flats. Walked over to Chelsea via the embankment to see an acquaintance. She said she was hoping to go to Rumania for the Quakers to help with the refugee problem. Had dinner. Was told of a young man who has decided to join up because he cannot bear the thought of carrying a civilian gas mask down Oxford Street! Had a bottle of claret and went to bed.
How little meat one gets at Maison Lyons
3 October 1939
Noticed what little meat one gets nowadays in the 1/6 luncheon at Maison Lyons. Was telephoned by a pacifist friend who invited me to a meeting.
4 October 1939
Went to the hair dresser. The shop was so quiet, I was there four hours and only saw two other customers. The head man has been called up for the Territorials. The second who did my hair said “I was going to join the navy, but my girl doesn’t want me to, she says let the others go first.” Then he said his parents want him to return to S. Africa where he can get a job. He said “supposing the U Boats get me?” and remarked that he would hate to leave all his friends as he has been here many year.
7 October 1939
I stayed in most of the day and refused to go to the cinema with my parents. I have decided not to go to this form of entertainment while it continues to be only slightly covered propaganda. I’d prefer to keep my money and see a theatrical show. For the most part thank God the theatre is still fairly free.
Not all shows are musicals or comedies YET
13 October 1939
Went to “Music at Night”. The Westminster was fairly full. In the programme the management appealed for support and good attendances otherwise they will be “One of the war’s first casualties.” Excellent show, do not think they will have to worry. But getting home was awful, pouring with rain and so few buses. However it was worth it to me. I noticed a good many uniforms in the audiences, women as well as men. I do not know whether this is the type of play appreciated during war time, but it was certainly gratifying to know that all shows are not musicals or comedies YET.
14 October 1939
Noticed a local shelter has been pulled down and is being rebuilt. Spoke to a tobacconist who said the heath is ruined now owing to the trenches and guns etc.
Air-raid suits going out of fashion
26 August 1940
Start out with the intention of buying an air-raid suit for me. First we went to Bournes but they had nothing I liked. Then to Dickens and Jones who had the very thing at 41/2 guineas but we could not afford more than 2. Then to Swan and Edgars where they were horrible, trying to be very feminine instead of tailored, bits of fur and coloured scalves hanging about. Then to Weiss in Shaftesbury Avenue. The sales girl said they had gone out of fashion and most women prefer trousers and a sweater now. They had nothing suitable either. Some terrible things like striped pantaloons at 16/11. Eventually, rather hot and cross, I made up my mind to give up the idea and buy something else with the money.
28 August 1940
Called for Mother and we went together to Victoria and picked up tickets for the matinee of “Cornelius” Had lunch at Zeeta’s, service very slow, think the girls are inexperienced and overworked. The theatre was a superb show. Beautifully produced and the type casting excellent. In fact I have not enjoyed anything so much for ages. The audience was pathetically small and had to applaud like mad.
Bombs in Kentish Town, Kilburn and Fitzjohns Avenue
29 August 1940
Heard from the charwoman that Kentish Town got a bomb. That accounted for the noise being so near. Also heard that Smiths factory at Cricklewood had got some. Charwoman said that everyone “turned as white as a sheet.” Her husband will watch from the doorway but when she goes near he has “a fit”.
30 August 1940
After a quiet night I went up to Hampstead in the morning to order a new book that Priestly recommended on the wireless “The End of Economic Man”. [. . .] Father rang up [. . .] he had heard that our district had been bombed. However he said Fitz Johns Avenue had shattered windows, we did not verify this.
31 August 1940
Hear that Kilburn has been bombed. Stay in for first warning. I set off to meet a friend, but first took some old silver to a place where they buy metal for Spitfires, at first the man only offered me 2/3, I protested as it was 4 pieces. [. . .] Eventually we compromised and I took 9/-. I believe he would have gone to 10/- but I did not persuade him. He said he would lose over the deal. I bet he does!! He said he was going to close the shop next week as he does not like the raids and he thinks they are going on indefinitely. He was a lively old man and I liked him. he told me to get out of Hampstead on account of the Jewish refugees as Hitler would be after them. [. . .]
‘Dirty swine, everyone ought to be killed’
Met my best friend - an actress is who now married and just about to give birth. I am to be the godmother. We intended to go to coffee and then a doctor in Queen Anne’s Street, but we had just met when the warning went, as were in Evans, we sheltered there. Very comfortable. The first shelter I’ve been in. My friend varnished her nails most of the time [. . .]
Went to the Hollyrood and had two lagers. Telephoned another friend and then the sirens sounded again. We could not get back into the pub so we chased along Oxford Street to the Horseshoe where we went down the dive and had another and waited for the all clear. I went to the lavatory then, to find the attendant, a woman about 50, in an uproar. “Dirty swine, everyone ought to be killed, they are not fit to live. We ought to have killed them after the last war. Inhuman devils.”
4 September 1940
The pub was in uproar, because a very familiar figure - a man of about 40 - who I have often seen there came in in battle uniform of a private. Everyone teased him saying “Nice bit of stuff” and things like that. He seemed to think that nothing fitted him at all, and said his boots must have been worn in the evacuation of Dunkirk.
The whole of our street cordoned off
5 September 1940
Our char woman came today. She was very amused because a whole lot of children were shut in an air-raid shelter whether yesterday or the day before. “You could ‘ear the kids screaming fit to bust theirselves.” At last they were rescued by the warden, who must have inadvertently shut them in.
9 September 1940
The whole of [our] street was cordoned off [after a bomb in the night] and people from outlying districts came and peered over the ropes at us as though we were exhibits. We ourselves had to either tell the police when we left home that we should be returning in a few minutes, or else we had to produce our identity cards. We had huge squads of demolition workers to pull down the remains of the house [no 54], and the occupants who seemed to have either been away at the time or to have escaped with slight injuries stood outside and collected all the things that were still “collectable”, clothes were tied up in bundles and taken off. Of course nothing was much good from 54, but the house next door 56 was not quite so badly damaged. A baby and its parents usually live in that house but luckily had spent the night on the opposite side of the street and had not been injured. Some children had cuts and I saw several people walking round with cuts and bandages. I went up the street to post a letter and the demolition men must have taken a dislike to me in my trousers and one called out “Pleased with yourself aren’t you?” Which rather upset me, as altho’ I am terribly pleased to have escaped so narrowly, I am awfully sorry for the other people. Still perhaps I do look pleased with self. I hope not!
Mum nearly caught in trial gas attack
8 May 1941
We are now sleeping out of London and returning every day. We started to do that from April 17th after the heavy raid on London.
21 May 1941
Went into west end. Had an appointment with a psychologist with whom I am studying analytical psychology.
24 May 1941
I came home for lunch and then Mother went to Kentish Town to buy some things. She could not get any emerald green sating ribbon for a new night gown I am making. On her way back she was nearly caught by a trial gas attack the ARP had organised at the end of this road. She had no gas mask and they were laying out the people who had gone out without gas masks on the pavement as though they were casualties.
News full of aeroplanes and guns and ships
30 May 1941
Won at darts. Have done so for several evenings. My father’s greyhound came in second in the rerun for the Wembley Gold cup. It came in first in the first run. Very disappointing. One of the last dogs turned round and ran in the wrong direction causing the judges to ask for a rerun. The race was broadcast and naturally we were very excited when it won [on the first run]. Still second wasn’t bad, but hard luck on my father.
2 July 1941
Went to the films with my people and saw “Kipps” which I thought very good, and thank god not about the war. I got so fed up with all the propaganda we had to sit thro’ first. MOI film about WAAFs and another about Merchant ships and the news just full of aeroplanes and guns and ships.
Giving the boys something to look at
5 July 1941
A WAAF friend of mine telephoned that she was in Paddington waiting to go through to another depot. [. . .] I was in my bath when I got the message, but I dressed and hurried to Paddington in very quick time and we had a drink or two at The Norfolk Hotel, and she told me what terrible head aches she has had since she went on the gas course a fortnight ago. We went up to the services cloak room in Paddington Station and I was amused to find the room literally covered in photographs cut from Magazines like “Lilliput” of nude women. The cloak room attendant said it “gave the boys something to look at.”
21 July 1941
Had several conversations with people who expressed the opinion that “life isn’t worth living now”. Complaints about money, food queues, lack of cigarettes, and rationing of clothes seemed to abound.
23 July 1941
Then we went to see ‘Blythe Spirit’ which is one of the best productions I have ever seen. Margaret Rutherford as the medium was superb. I do not know when I have seen a more amusing and yet realistic characterisation. I could go over and over again and not get bored with that show. My friend saw a man come into one of the boxes towards the end of the play and look around at the audience intently and then make a great show of lighting a cigarette. She said it must have been Noel Coward as no one else would do it quite like that but I was too interested in the play to worry about the author! After that we went to get tea at The Prompt Corner only to find it closed. I was not surprised at that as all the places I hope to find seem closed. Eventually we got some at a nasty little cafe in Charing Cross.
Monday, August 18, 2014
Upper Slaughter’s squire
Francis Edward Witts, rector and squire of Upper Slaughter, in the Cotswolds, died 160 years ago today. Though not an especially remarkable character, he kept a diary for much of his life in which he recorded many details about the natural world, people he met, the fast-changing society around him, and his own life. When it was first published in the 1970s, the publisher claimed it shed ‘new light on a fascinating period of social history’.
Witts was born in 1783, in Cheltenham, the eldest son of the high sheriff of Oxfordshire. His parents moved to Edinburgh in 1795; and between 1798 and 1800, the family spent their winters at the court of the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar, where Witts attended a school for foreign students. After returning to England, he studied at Wadham College, Oxford, and was ordained deacon in 1806 and priest in 1807. The following year, he married Margaret Backhouse, and they had one child.
Witts was rector of Upper Slaughter, Gloucestershire, from 1808 until his death, and was vicar of Stanway, about 10 miles away, from 1814 to 1854. He was also squire of Upper Slaughter, and became a long-serving justice of the peace. In 1852, he was appointed deputy lieutenant of Gloucestershire. He died on 18 August 1854. There is a little further biographical information available at the The Oxford Times, or, indeed, through the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (although this requires a library card log-in or a fee). The manor house he occupied is now a hotel called Lords of the Manor.
Most biographical information about Witts comes from his diaries, and it is unlikely he would be remembered but for those. He left some 90 notebooks which were first edited by David Verey and published in 1978 by Alan Sutton as The Diary of a Cotswold Parson. Verey acquired access to the notebooks through Francis Witts, a great-great-grandson of the diarist. In 2008, Amberley began publishing a fuller edition - The Complete Diary of a Cotswold Parson - as edited by Sutton, owner, at the time, of Amberley. Some eight volumes of the edition have been published to date (I believe - I can’t find any evidence of volumes 9 and 10 being for sale, new or secondhand), each one a hefty tome, and having a hefty price.
Verey writes in his introduction to the original edition: ‘. . . Maybe [Witts] confided his daily activities to his diary rather than to his wife. It must have occupied quite a considerable time in his busy life, as he wrote at unnecessary length to our way of thinking. To make every point twice may be good practice in a sermon, but not in a diary. In making my extracts therefore I have had to reduce his verbosity - though not I hope his wit - for the sake of our readers. I have also endeavoured to use only those passages which illuminate the history of the city and county of Gloucester, paying special attention to the people Witts met, for they were the breath of life and Witts was a social being. Particulars of his day-to-day work, which take up the greater par of what he wrote, have, therefore, to some extent been excluded from these pages, owing to a certain dryness and greater suitability for the serious social historian, as have also the descriptions of his travels in other parts of England which do not have any direct application to Gloucestershire.’
The ONDB provides a useful idea of the diary’s contents: ‘[It] exhibits his full participation in local social and cultural life. Witts enjoyed dining out, and travelled in all weathers and by every means of conveyance - horse, phaeton, carriage, stagecoach, and steam train. He recorded new roads, buildings, and the spread of towns. Witts and his son both became keen botanists and conservationists, and he also helped organise the musical life of Cheltenham and Gloucester, attending many concerts. Quietly religious, Witts disapproved of hunting parsons and was generous to his parishioners. He records that he relied upon ‘three checks to the frailty of our nature; self-examination, prayer and professional study’.’
3 January 1820
‘Left Upper Slaughter for Bath in the hope that another course of the waters may essentially strengthen my dear wife’s constitution. Having sent forward my manservant and horse we travelled post with Edward and a maid. The weather very cold, frost and snow; more of the latter between home and Cirencester and between Petty France and Bath, than between Cirencester and Petty France. The road very slippery and though a horse fell in the chaise in the streets of Tetbury, we providentially escaped any accident.’
27 April 1821
‘The overseer of Halling brought up two gipsies, casual poor in their parish in order to their being examined to their settlement. Merach Lock the husband swore that he was born under an oak on Halling down as he had heard from his mother, being an illegitimate child and knowing nothing of his father; also that he was recently married to his wife Mary which whom he had cohabited twenty years, having by her six children. It seems that the Parish of Halling has little or no chance of proving him settled elsewhere. On examining the woman, she swore all the children to be Merach Lock’s - Lucas and Adam being born like their father in the Paris of Halling - Eve at Cold Ashton - Sarah at Brimpsfield - Temperance at Hawkesbury - Joanna at Cranham. The law was strictly interpreted and removal orders were made in respect of the last four children, sending them to their respective birth places.’
5 September 1826
‘The Stratford and Moreton railway was opened this day for the conveyance of goods from the former to the latter place, and a vast concourse of persons assembled at Moreton-in-Marsh. The market of this town, disused for a very long period, has on this occasion been revived with great spirit and will in some respects be injurious to the market at Stow-on-the-Wold. At an early hour in the evening all the provisions of the town were exhausted, the roasted ox demolished and neither bread nor beer to be had for love or money. The committee preceded the coal waggons with a band of music, and all was joyous. Behind the scenes, however, the proprietors have reason to mourn over mismanagement, exhausted means, and scant hopes even of distant remuneration; but the public will doubt be considerable gainers.’
29 September 1826
‘They say the march of intellect is wonderful these days. Men navigate by steam, tram carts travel by steam; but this is nothing to the present fashion of travelling by paper kites. To-day we witnessed the experiment made at Gloucester. For some days I had noticed two large paper kites hovering over the town. They were hoisted by a school master who amused himself with mechanical pursuits, letting off balloons etc. The wind being westerly, was favourable for an excursion to Cheltenham so he orders out his gig, or rather I think it was a four wheeled chair, attaches it to two paper kites, mounts with two or three companies and away they go, not very rapidly, not at a very regular pace, but progressing.’
2 April 1826
‘We walked to Over Bridge to view the site of the new bridge over the Severn, building under the direction of Mr. Telford, by the County. The work is in progress; many labourers, excavators, etc. were employed. On one side the masonry of an abutment is in a forward state, on the other they are driving the piles. There were collected great heaps of fine stone ready squared in large blocks, of different sorts, for the foundation and superstructure. A steam engine was erecting, and several cranes were in operation, lifting masses of stone from the barges in which they were conveyed.’
The Diary Junction
Witts was born in 1783, in Cheltenham, the eldest son of the high sheriff of Oxfordshire. His parents moved to Edinburgh in 1795; and between 1798 and 1800, the family spent their winters at the court of the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar, where Witts attended a school for foreign students. After returning to England, he studied at Wadham College, Oxford, and was ordained deacon in 1806 and priest in 1807. The following year, he married Margaret Backhouse, and they had one child.
Witts was rector of Upper Slaughter, Gloucestershire, from 1808 until his death, and was vicar of Stanway, about 10 miles away, from 1814 to 1854. He was also squire of Upper Slaughter, and became a long-serving justice of the peace. In 1852, he was appointed deputy lieutenant of Gloucestershire. He died on 18 August 1854. There is a little further biographical information available at the The Oxford Times, or, indeed, through the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (although this requires a library card log-in or a fee). The manor house he occupied is now a hotel called Lords of the Manor.
Most biographical information about Witts comes from his diaries, and it is unlikely he would be remembered but for those. He left some 90 notebooks which were first edited by David Verey and published in 1978 by Alan Sutton as The Diary of a Cotswold Parson. Verey acquired access to the notebooks through Francis Witts, a great-great-grandson of the diarist. In 2008, Amberley began publishing a fuller edition - The Complete Diary of a Cotswold Parson - as edited by Sutton, owner, at the time, of Amberley. Some eight volumes of the edition have been published to date (I believe - I can’t find any evidence of volumes 9 and 10 being for sale, new or secondhand), each one a hefty tome, and having a hefty price.
Verey writes in his introduction to the original edition: ‘. . . Maybe [Witts] confided his daily activities to his diary rather than to his wife. It must have occupied quite a considerable time in his busy life, as he wrote at unnecessary length to our way of thinking. To make every point twice may be good practice in a sermon, but not in a diary. In making my extracts therefore I have had to reduce his verbosity - though not I hope his wit - for the sake of our readers. I have also endeavoured to use only those passages which illuminate the history of the city and county of Gloucester, paying special attention to the people Witts met, for they were the breath of life and Witts was a social being. Particulars of his day-to-day work, which take up the greater par of what he wrote, have, therefore, to some extent been excluded from these pages, owing to a certain dryness and greater suitability for the serious social historian, as have also the descriptions of his travels in other parts of England which do not have any direct application to Gloucestershire.’
The ONDB provides a useful idea of the diary’s contents: ‘[It] exhibits his full participation in local social and cultural life. Witts enjoyed dining out, and travelled in all weathers and by every means of conveyance - horse, phaeton, carriage, stagecoach, and steam train. He recorded new roads, buildings, and the spread of towns. Witts and his son both became keen botanists and conservationists, and he also helped organise the musical life of Cheltenham and Gloucester, attending many concerts. Quietly religious, Witts disapproved of hunting parsons and was generous to his parishioners. He records that he relied upon ‘three checks to the frailty of our nature; self-examination, prayer and professional study’.’
3 January 1820
‘Left Upper Slaughter for Bath in the hope that another course of the waters may essentially strengthen my dear wife’s constitution. Having sent forward my manservant and horse we travelled post with Edward and a maid. The weather very cold, frost and snow; more of the latter between home and Cirencester and between Petty France and Bath, than between Cirencester and Petty France. The road very slippery and though a horse fell in the chaise in the streets of Tetbury, we providentially escaped any accident.’
27 April 1821
‘The overseer of Halling brought up two gipsies, casual poor in their parish in order to their being examined to their settlement. Merach Lock the husband swore that he was born under an oak on Halling down as he had heard from his mother, being an illegitimate child and knowing nothing of his father; also that he was recently married to his wife Mary which whom he had cohabited twenty years, having by her six children. It seems that the Parish of Halling has little or no chance of proving him settled elsewhere. On examining the woman, she swore all the children to be Merach Lock’s - Lucas and Adam being born like their father in the Paris of Halling - Eve at Cold Ashton - Sarah at Brimpsfield - Temperance at Hawkesbury - Joanna at Cranham. The law was strictly interpreted and removal orders were made in respect of the last four children, sending them to their respective birth places.’
5 September 1826
‘The Stratford and Moreton railway was opened this day for the conveyance of goods from the former to the latter place, and a vast concourse of persons assembled at Moreton-in-Marsh. The market of this town, disused for a very long period, has on this occasion been revived with great spirit and will in some respects be injurious to the market at Stow-on-the-Wold. At an early hour in the evening all the provisions of the town were exhausted, the roasted ox demolished and neither bread nor beer to be had for love or money. The committee preceded the coal waggons with a band of music, and all was joyous. Behind the scenes, however, the proprietors have reason to mourn over mismanagement, exhausted means, and scant hopes even of distant remuneration; but the public will doubt be considerable gainers.’
29 September 1826
‘They say the march of intellect is wonderful these days. Men navigate by steam, tram carts travel by steam; but this is nothing to the present fashion of travelling by paper kites. To-day we witnessed the experiment made at Gloucester. For some days I had noticed two large paper kites hovering over the town. They were hoisted by a school master who amused himself with mechanical pursuits, letting off balloons etc. The wind being westerly, was favourable for an excursion to Cheltenham so he orders out his gig, or rather I think it was a four wheeled chair, attaches it to two paper kites, mounts with two or three companies and away they go, not very rapidly, not at a very regular pace, but progressing.’
2 April 1826
‘We walked to Over Bridge to view the site of the new bridge over the Severn, building under the direction of Mr. Telford, by the County. The work is in progress; many labourers, excavators, etc. were employed. On one side the masonry of an abutment is in a forward state, on the other they are driving the piles. There were collected great heaps of fine stone ready squared in large blocks, of different sorts, for the foundation and superstructure. A steam engine was erecting, and several cranes were in operation, lifting masses of stone from the barges in which they were conveyed.’
The Diary Junction
Friday, August 15, 2014
Innumerable ripples; countless diamonds
Here is a fourth sample chapter from the yet-to-be-published London in Diaries, this one about Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, a bookbinder associated with the late 19th century Arts and Craft movement. His diary, more than any other, reveals a passionate relationship with London’s most important (historically and geographically) feature: the River Thames.
Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, bookbinder by the Thames
No feature of London - not even St Paul’s or the White Tower - has as much physical presence or historical importance as the river Thames. Indeed, it has been around much longer than the city itself, and has been the most significant factor in the city’s growth over the years. Many of the diarists in this collection mention the river, but none have as vital or as spiritual a connection as Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, and none write of it as romantically, as here: ‘What I should like to convey is the intense energy, sparkling, crisping, into moments of whitest, brightest light, again and again and again, everywhere over the surface of the the outstretched sheet of water.’ He was an extraordinary man in many ways, abandoning a legal career, he took up with William Morris’s Arts and Craft movement, becoming a highly-skilled bookbinder and printer. Apart from lyrical descriptions of the river, it figures often in his exquisitely-written diary for more practical reasons, whether because he is walking with his lover along the Embankment, setting up a business in a house with a garden that runs down to the riverbank, or secretly at night drowning blocks of valuable metal type.
Thomas James Sanderson was born in 1840, at Alnwick in Northumberland. His father, James, was a district surveyor of taxes who worked his way up to become a Special Commissioner of Income Tax at Somerset House. After grammar school, Thomas studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, aiming to enter the church, but he left without taking a degree, apparently in protest against the examination system. After a period of soul searching, he was called to the Bar as a member of the Inner Temple, where he worked throughout the 1870s. He was involved in establishing the powers, rights and obligations of the London and North Western Railway Company, a task which debilitated his health, and led him to go abroad to recuperate.
In Siena, in 1861, he met Janey Morris (wife of William who, still in his 20s, was in the process of launching a new-style company to supply decorative arts). Janey was with two daughters of Richard Cobden, a well-known British manufacturer and statesmen. The following year Thomas married the younger Cobden daughter Anne (she was 29 at the time, and he 41), and, out of respect for her father, changed his own surname to Cobden-Sanderson. Soon after, he left the Bar and, eager to work with his hands in the spirit of the evolving Arts and Crafts movement, took up a suggestion by Janey Morris, to train as a bookbinder. He and Anne lived first in Hendon and then in Hampstead; and they had two children, Richard and Stella.
Cobden-Sanderson took his new craft to the highest level, binding classic works of literature in simple but sumptuous floral designs with gold on leather. Unusually, he chose which books to bind, and sold them through Bains in the Haymarket. By the late 1880s, his bound books were much in demand from American buyers. Both Thomas and Anne were early socialists. Anne became a leading campaigner for woman’s suffrage, and was arrested in 1909 for picketing outside 10 Downing Street (and kept a diary while in prison). She also did much to press for various improvements in children’s well-being.
In the early 1890s, Cobden-Sanderson started the Doves Bindery at 15 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, a small house with a garden running down to the Thames, not far from William Morris’s Kelmscott House. At first, he employed several professional binders to work on individual books as he had done, but, in 1890, he launched, in partnership with Emery Walker, the Doves Press, and thereafter the Bindery worked more mundanely to cover printed editions. Between 1900 and 1917, the Doves Press produced 50 classic titles (Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, the Bible, etc), all in the so-called Doves Type (designed by Walker) and all austere, characterised by a lack of illustration and ornament, in reverence to the literature itself.
Although the partnership with Walker, who had other interests, had been dissolved in 1908, it allowed Cobden-Sanderson to continue using the Doves Type until his death, at which time it would revert to Walker. Fearing his ex-partner might not use the type in a way he thought fitting, Cobden-Sanderson chose to destroy it. He did this during many nights in the latter half of 1916 by throwing the metal blocks into the Thames. Subsequently, he wrote to Walker’s lawyers, and his actions became public knowledge. Cobden-Sanderson died in 1922, and Anne was left to settle, at some personal cost, the legal action brought against her husband by Walker.
Throughout most of his life Cobden-Sanderson kept a regular diary. This was edited by his son, Richard, and published in 1926 in two volumes as The Journals of Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson, 1879-1922. They reveal the author as a spiritual man, high-minded and intellectual, lacking perhaps a little in humour and colour himself, though the details that emerge of his life and those of others in the Arts and Crafts movement are immensely interesting, not least those about the early life-changing suggestion by Janey Morris and those about the disposal of the Doves Type. And through all of his life, apparently, and the diary, runs the River Thames which regularly inspires him to flights of literary fancy.
Annie back from Chelsea
31 May 1883
Yesterday Annie and I walked together on the Embankment towards Westminster, I to the Long Gallery, she to the Abbey to wait till I had done. But the day was so lovely, the sun so bright, the river so attractive, that when I suggested that we should walk on the river-side of the road, she suddenly bethought herself of Walter Sickert at Chelsea, and should she not go by water to see him? I backed her up, and so at the next pier we parted; she went down the landing steps - the tide was very low - and I continued along the Embankment, looking back from time to time. Presently her steamer approached the pier, paused and came off again - I watched it approach, and a wave of a parasol drew my eyes to my darling. I waved my hand and hat, and smiled to her. [. . .]
Here there came a knock at the door, and my diary fell to the ground as I rushed to open it. It was Annie back from Chelsea. We embraced, and then she hurriedly began to tell me of a girl whom she had met on the steamer, red-haired, consumptive, Scotch, an envelope folder or sorter, returning from the Brompton Hospital where she was an out-patient. (She ought to be an in-patient, but could get no letter). [. . .] She got 1d. for 1,000 envelopes, and, when well, made 12s a week.
Why don’t you learn bookbinding?
24 June 1883
Yesterday afternoon we called at the Morrises, and in the evening supped with the William Richmonds, where we again saw the Morrises. I was talking to Mrs Morris after supper, and saying how anxious I was to use my hands - “Then why don’t you learn bookbinding?” she said. “That would add an Art to our little community, and we would work together. I should like,” she continued, “to do some little embroideries for books, and I would do so for you.” Shall bookbinding, then, be my trade?
26 June 1884
I am now the proprietor of a workshop! On Saturday I signed an agreement by virtue of which I became on Tuesday last the tenant under Mr Williams (of Williams and Norgate [a bookseller]), of three rooms of the second floor of 30 Maiden Lane, being part of the back premises of Williams and Norgate’s shop in Henrietta Street at £50 per annum.
23 July 1884
On Monday, Morris and the Hyndmans came to lunch with us, and I afterwards went with them to Hyde Park to take the opportunity of the Liberal demonstration to spread socialistic literature and to hold an open-air meeting. This last was a fiasco, being brought to an ignominious close by an ugly rush of the crowd.
27 August 1885
On Saturday Annie and I went to the meeting for the protection of young girls, in Hyde Park. Mrs Morris was in the procession of the Ladies’ National Society, and Morris in the brake of the Socialist League.
A body of art which quite startles
2 April 1886
I went on to St James’s to see the Graham pictures on view at Christie’s. Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Millais and F. Walker - prodigious performances. They, and the works of Millais and Holman Hunt on view in Bond Street, constitute a body of art which quite startles by its greatness.
24 December 1886
Yesterday I went into town to do some shopping. I called at Bain’s [booksellers]. He told me with great joy that he had only one of my books left - The Gospels!
28 March 1891
On Wednesday last I went to the British Museum to see a collection of drawings arranged by Sidney Colvin, and later I went to Hammersmith to see Morris. I found Mrs Morris very happy, for he was very much better. He was having his supper - oysters etc. When he finished, I went into his room, and found him sitting in a chair by the fire with a large silk handkerchief spread over his knees. He looked - despite his supper! - a little empty, his clothes hanging somewhat loosely upon him. But he was cheery and hopeful, and fell to talking about the new book (The Glittering Plain) now in the course of printing at the Morris Press. It promises to be a very beautiful book. [The Glittering Plain, a novel by Morris, is considered to be one of the first in a genre now called fantasy.]
The occasional sound of an oar turning
4 April 1891
Last Sunday I visited Morris’s printing press. Morris was a little down; not up to talking.
The Press has been set up in a little cottage opposite The Doves, and next door to Sussex House [Upper Mall, north bank of the Thames in Hammersmith], and is worked by two compositors and one pressman - of course all by hand. I saw the new type, and the sheets, paper and vellum, already printed The Glittering Plain.
4 July 1895
I am reading Pater’s study of Dionysus. It is delightfully silent. From the window I see the lights on and beyond Hammersmith Bridge, and the lengthened reflection on the dark river, and I hear the occasional sound of an oar turning in the rowlocks; but the tide is low, and the otherwise-sounding river is still, sounding only with the passing toiling barge, and alive with moving lights. On my table are my tools, and a glass of tiger-lilies given to me out of our garden by my cleaner, Mrs Mansel.
William Morris in a bathchair
11 October 1896
Morris is dead. He died on Saturday 3rd October at 11:30 in the morning. I saw him alive in Riverscourt Road the preceding Monday. I had been to the Bindery to get some of my books for the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and I was on my way to the Gallery on my bicycle, when on turning the corner into Riverscourt Road I saw before me, going in the same direction, Morris in a bathchair, with a shawl across his shoulders [. . .]. I had never seen Morris in his chair before. It was a strange sensation to see the strong man so reduced. Yet he looked clear of complexion and ruddy red, and though he said not a word he yet lifted his gloved hand and waved me farewell as I mounted again and turned and bade him good-bye. . . a last good-bye.
21 August 1897
How superbly beautiful the river is at this moment! There is a high wind blowing the surface into innumerable ripples, each of which catches instantly and reflects a dazzling gleam from the sun, so that there are as it were countless diamonds at play, reflecting and deflecting rays of brightest light, so that the river’s face is an ever shifting . . .
What I should like to convey is the intense energy, sparkling, crisping, into moments of whitest, brightest light, again and again and again, everywhere over the surface of the outstretched sheet of water.
Education: shall we at last transform it, and with it our vision of and dealings with the world? Shall we have the energy of the light I see in dazzling brilliance playing upon the reflecting facets of the water, and play with the earth our home, and its dwelling-place, the infinite voids of space? Education will be transformed. “Arts and crafts” will invade and overcome literature and science and commerce, and with our own eyes we shall re-see the universe, and with our own hands and brains we shall re-create it afresh.
My writing splutters and fails of the mark.
Hampstead hideous with affluent vulgarity
28 September 1897
A cold mist this morning shuts out the sun, and only the near trees, now so yellow, are visible, and the outlines of the bridge. [. . .] On Sunday I went to Hampstead, and lunched with the Kapteyns, and had tea with Blomfield, and looked over the wall at the old house and home, No. 49. It looked very pretty, but Hampstead is becoming every moment more hideous with affluent vulgarity. I wheeled along the Finchley Road to the cemetery, and went and stood by the dear, quiet grave of Father and Mother.
21 January 1898
The sea-gulls - or river-gulls? - are sweeping in wide curves to and fro over the river - the river slides smoothly on its course - the wintered trees, arrested, placidly wait for the spring, the sky overhead is one continuous veil of stationary cloud.
All life at its best is poetry
9 May 1905
I have just seen Swinburne pass through the [British] library into the Large Room preceded by a lady and Watts-Dunton. Swinburne had on a grey, large, soft felt hat. His head, too, seemed vast, his shoulders, on the other hand, seemed slight and very sloping, and his figure plump but small. He walked without moving his body, or arms, which were held down straight at his sides. So passed our greatest living poet. I rose from my seat to see him, and pondered upon the insignificance and significance of things. The library remained as undisturbed as the surface of a lake and its whole body of water by the entrance of an undistinguishable pebble.
30 May 1905
The poets are the supreme craftsmen - the poets at their best. But all life at its best is poetry.
26 July 1908
Yesterday there was a procession, or series of processions, in support of the Licensing Bill. Annie with Stella went off early to join in it under the Suffragist banner. [. . .] I took the Turnham Green omnibus at the top of Rivercourt Road, and drove to Hyde Park Corner. There I got down, for already a procession blocked the way. I stood at the gate and watched the passing whirl; not a great stream, but great “the cause.”
25 August 1908
I went the other night to a concert at Queen’s Hall. It was a Promenade Concert, and a Wagner night. The Hall was packed. To get in I had to go to the end of a long queue extending round the building. I paid 2s., and got a seat in the balcony. The music was very loud, and filled the Hall like a great sea, and beat up into our ears as the sea does into the caves and hollows of the shore. [. . .]
Having resolved to close the Bindery next year, it seems to follow as a matter of course that I should close the Press also. But whereas I seemed to come naturally, after twenty-five years, to the former resolve, to come to the latter seemed to be against nature, there are so many great books to print and so few to bind.
Westminster Cathedral and St Paul’s
12 October 1908
Yesterday was a lost day, save that in the morning I was at Westminster Cathedral and St Paul’s - the former, by the way, was the finer. St Paul’s seemed littered up with columns and architectural ornament, and the arches under the dome hideous in the meanness of their junctions coming down together, and [William Blake] Richmond’s decoration has not enlarged them. The effect of the Cathedral, on the other hand, with sun and shade and enclosed atmosphere, was quite beautiful. In both, however, the singing was enchanting.
14 October 1908
I came [to Kew Gardens] to see the great lily. But one had flowered and passed away in a day, and the next would not flower till to-morrow. I walked around the tank and saw the blossom of the flower to be, and its vast leaves outspread upon the water, slowly born and quickly dead, and so on from age to age.
Annie must not go to prison again
30 January 1909
Annie has just been in to say that Mrs Pankhurst has been proposing on the telephone to come and see her this afternoon. The Women’s Social and Political Union want Annie now to speak on their platform, perhaps “to go to prison.”
1 February 1909
I was at Kew on Saturday, and walked through the flower-house; lilies, lilac, azaleas, camellias, carnations, all, and others in sweet flower; and around them, outside, the bare dreaming trees, whose time is yet to come.
On Sunday afternoon, yesterday, Mrs Pankhurst called. She was gentle and affectionate, but, as it seemed to us all, tired. The prison immurement seemed to have damped her fire. [. . .] This is an odious result of prison, and an argument against its use as a weapon of revolt. Annie must not go again.
The Red Flag at the Albert Hall
20 November 1913
Last night I went to the Albert Hall to hear Larkin [Jim Larkin, an Irish trade unionist then heavily involved in the famous Dublin Lock-out dispute], and was disappointed. When he was speaking a raid was made on the hall by some “students” from outside. Suddenly a sound of running feet arose in the corridor, then the attention of the whole audience was concentrated on a dense commotion at one of the entrances to the hall and the passage leading down from it, and from all parts of the hall men rose from their seats and rushed towards it. The scrimmage continued with a dead sound of the struggle, but, as I remember, otherwise in silence. But from above women leant over from the balconies, and looking upon the struggle applauded. As it went on - I witnessed it from a box - limelights burst out in various parts of the hall, and finally the organ contributed its roar to the ear, playing “The Red Flag.” At last victory was cheered by the audience, and Larkin resumed his speech. The students had been driven out; but outside they raided the electric works, and tried to put out the lights of the hall, fortunately unsuccessfully. I was disappointed; not in this, which was highly dramatic and thrilling, but in Larkin’s speech.
12 December 1913
Last night Annie and I went to see and hear Anatole France [French novelist and man of letters] at the Suffolk Street Galleries, at the invitation of the Fabian Society. Bernard Shaw in the chair. Anatole France looked like an affectionate old fox, and spoke with great animation, and many smiles and many wrinkles. He was, or seemed to be, short and stout and bent and grey. Justice, Pity, Mercy, Love - these are things as wonderful as are the flowers of the field and the stars of heaven.
13 December 1913
Clear for London, and cold. Yesterday morning as I walked through Kensington I paused in front of a “provision” shop, and looked at the birds - shot, and hanging with their heads downward - golden plovers, pheasants, partridges. Pitiful sight.
The great fight at Olympia
1 July 1914
On coming home last night between 10 and 11 o’clock after dining with Stella, I at once felt myself in an atmosphere of excitement - motors were rushing past, and newspaper boys and men were rushing about on foot, and crying hoarse, and to me unintelligible, cries. As I proceeded towards Addison Bridge - I was on my bicycle - the crowd and excitement became so great that I had to get off and walk close to the kerb. Presently the crowd was impenetrable. I asked the reason why. The great fight at Olympia - which was indeed all lighted up; Bombardier Wells had just knocked Bell out in the second round, and that was it! I pulled to the side, and leaning my bicycle against the wall on the bridge, waited the passing of the crowd. Such a crowd! Old and young, rich and poor, evening dress and filth, and men, almost all, or boys, but some women on foot, in the latest limpest evening dress, some in motors; all hurrying by as if all were bearers, to some remote other world, of long expected news. [Wells beat the Australian Colin Bell, for the heavyweight championship of the British Empire and a purse of £10,000. The New York Times headline for a report of the match ran: Women flock to fight at Olympia.]
5 August 1914
Europe and the world are now in the hands of statesmen and warriors, who have enslaved - and are now hurling against each other their enslaved - human beings, drilled to destruction. Death, not Life, and Death in another form than in times of peace, now fills to their utmost limits the minds of men, and spreads itself over all the aspects of life.
A gun mounted in peaceful Green Park
9 October 1914
A few moments ago, as I passed into [Hyde] Park, a regiment of recruits marched by - it brought tears to my eyes.
8 February 1915
In the Green Park, newly erected, there is an enclosure and platform, and on the latter, with its muzzle appearing above the screen, is mounted a gun. In the midst of Peaceful Green Park.
24 January 1916
This morning I walked to Kensington through the Park. At Hyde Park Corner three guns mounted on trucks passed. Horrible looking weapons, apparently for high firing. Walking on, I saw a company of soldiers doing bayonet practice, piercing sacks with a thrust of their bayonets. I had just passed the gardens on the other side, where the flowers of spring were just piercing the grass. How beautiful they were; how horrible the bayonets.
This evening I began its destruction
31 August 1916
The Doves Press type was designed after that of Jensen; this evening I began its destruction. I threw three pages into the Thames from Hammersmith Bridge. I had gone for a stroll on the Mall, when it occurred to me that it was a suitable night and time; so I went indoors, and taking first one page and then two, succeeded in destroying three. I will now go on till I have destroyed the whole of it.
9 February 1918
Just returned from Bow Street whither I went at 2pm to stand by Bertie Russell, on trial for some writing which I had not seen in some obscure pacifist journal. He was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in the second class. He appealed, and Frank and I bailed him out, otherwise he would have gone straight to prison. To prison, to solitary confinement, day and night in a locked cell. There was not a crowded court, only a gathering of friends, mainly women. [. . .] Bertie sat in front of the dock with his co-defendant, a young lady editor and proprietor of the journal in question, The Tribunal.
11 November 1918
The bells are ringing, and the guns have ceased.
12 November 1918
All London went merrily mad yesterday. I was indoors all day. All London merrily mad; all Germany?
The Oxford-Cambridge boat race
31 March 1921
The race was rowed yesterday, and after a terrific struggle - first Cambridge leading, then, at Hammersmith Bridge, Oxford, then beyond Chiswick, out of sight, Cambridge - Cambridge finally won by a length, but never once, or hardly once, was daylight seen between the boats. The crowd was immense, for the day was fine, and it was expected that the race would be a great race. We had a great crowd, and all the morning was taken up in preparing tea - cakes, tables, etc. - and arranging seats and benches in the garden. We were to be “at home” from 4 to 6pm - the race being at 5 or thereabouts - and by 4 I was exhausted, and retired to the parlour to rest.
Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, bookbinder by the Thames
No feature of London - not even St Paul’s or the White Tower - has as much physical presence or historical importance as the river Thames. Indeed, it has been around much longer than the city itself, and has been the most significant factor in the city’s growth over the years. Many of the diarists in this collection mention the river, but none have as vital or as spiritual a connection as Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, and none write of it as romantically, as here: ‘What I should like to convey is the intense energy, sparkling, crisping, into moments of whitest, brightest light, again and again and again, everywhere over the surface of the the outstretched sheet of water.’ He was an extraordinary man in many ways, abandoning a legal career, he took up with William Morris’s Arts and Craft movement, becoming a highly-skilled bookbinder and printer. Apart from lyrical descriptions of the river, it figures often in his exquisitely-written diary for more practical reasons, whether because he is walking with his lover along the Embankment, setting up a business in a house with a garden that runs down to the riverbank, or secretly at night drowning blocks of valuable metal type.
Thomas James Sanderson was born in 1840, at Alnwick in Northumberland. His father, James, was a district surveyor of taxes who worked his way up to become a Special Commissioner of Income Tax at Somerset House. After grammar school, Thomas studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, aiming to enter the church, but he left without taking a degree, apparently in protest against the examination system. After a period of soul searching, he was called to the Bar as a member of the Inner Temple, where he worked throughout the 1870s. He was involved in establishing the powers, rights and obligations of the London and North Western Railway Company, a task which debilitated his health, and led him to go abroad to recuperate.
In Siena, in 1861, he met Janey Morris (wife of William who, still in his 20s, was in the process of launching a new-style company to supply decorative arts). Janey was with two daughters of Richard Cobden, a well-known British manufacturer and statesmen. The following year Thomas married the younger Cobden daughter Anne (she was 29 at the time, and he 41), and, out of respect for her father, changed his own surname to Cobden-Sanderson. Soon after, he left the Bar and, eager to work with his hands in the spirit of the evolving Arts and Crafts movement, took up a suggestion by Janey Morris, to train as a bookbinder. He and Anne lived first in Hendon and then in Hampstead; and they had two children, Richard and Stella.
Cobden-Sanderson took his new craft to the highest level, binding classic works of literature in simple but sumptuous floral designs with gold on leather. Unusually, he chose which books to bind, and sold them through Bains in the Haymarket. By the late 1880s, his bound books were much in demand from American buyers. Both Thomas and Anne were early socialists. Anne became a leading campaigner for woman’s suffrage, and was arrested in 1909 for picketing outside 10 Downing Street (and kept a diary while in prison). She also did much to press for various improvements in children’s well-being.
In the early 1890s, Cobden-Sanderson started the Doves Bindery at 15 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, a small house with a garden running down to the Thames, not far from William Morris’s Kelmscott House. At first, he employed several professional binders to work on individual books as he had done, but, in 1890, he launched, in partnership with Emery Walker, the Doves Press, and thereafter the Bindery worked more mundanely to cover printed editions. Between 1900 and 1917, the Doves Press produced 50 classic titles (Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, the Bible, etc), all in the so-called Doves Type (designed by Walker) and all austere, characterised by a lack of illustration and ornament, in reverence to the literature itself.
Although the partnership with Walker, who had other interests, had been dissolved in 1908, it allowed Cobden-Sanderson to continue using the Doves Type until his death, at which time it would revert to Walker. Fearing his ex-partner might not use the type in a way he thought fitting, Cobden-Sanderson chose to destroy it. He did this during many nights in the latter half of 1916 by throwing the metal blocks into the Thames. Subsequently, he wrote to Walker’s lawyers, and his actions became public knowledge. Cobden-Sanderson died in 1922, and Anne was left to settle, at some personal cost, the legal action brought against her husband by Walker.
Throughout most of his life Cobden-Sanderson kept a regular diary. This was edited by his son, Richard, and published in 1926 in two volumes as The Journals of Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson, 1879-1922. They reveal the author as a spiritual man, high-minded and intellectual, lacking perhaps a little in humour and colour himself, though the details that emerge of his life and those of others in the Arts and Crafts movement are immensely interesting, not least those about the early life-changing suggestion by Janey Morris and those about the disposal of the Doves Type. And through all of his life, apparently, and the diary, runs the River Thames which regularly inspires him to flights of literary fancy.
Annie back from Chelsea
31 May 1883
Yesterday Annie and I walked together on the Embankment towards Westminster, I to the Long Gallery, she to the Abbey to wait till I had done. But the day was so lovely, the sun so bright, the river so attractive, that when I suggested that we should walk on the river-side of the road, she suddenly bethought herself of Walter Sickert at Chelsea, and should she not go by water to see him? I backed her up, and so at the next pier we parted; she went down the landing steps - the tide was very low - and I continued along the Embankment, looking back from time to time. Presently her steamer approached the pier, paused and came off again - I watched it approach, and a wave of a parasol drew my eyes to my darling. I waved my hand and hat, and smiled to her. [. . .]
Here there came a knock at the door, and my diary fell to the ground as I rushed to open it. It was Annie back from Chelsea. We embraced, and then she hurriedly began to tell me of a girl whom she had met on the steamer, red-haired, consumptive, Scotch, an envelope folder or sorter, returning from the Brompton Hospital where she was an out-patient. (She ought to be an in-patient, but could get no letter). [. . .] She got 1d. for 1,000 envelopes, and, when well, made 12s a week.
Why don’t you learn bookbinding?
24 June 1883
Yesterday afternoon we called at the Morrises, and in the evening supped with the William Richmonds, where we again saw the Morrises. I was talking to Mrs Morris after supper, and saying how anxious I was to use my hands - “Then why don’t you learn bookbinding?” she said. “That would add an Art to our little community, and we would work together. I should like,” she continued, “to do some little embroideries for books, and I would do so for you.” Shall bookbinding, then, be my trade?
26 June 1884
I am now the proprietor of a workshop! On Saturday I signed an agreement by virtue of which I became on Tuesday last the tenant under Mr Williams (of Williams and Norgate [a bookseller]), of three rooms of the second floor of 30 Maiden Lane, being part of the back premises of Williams and Norgate’s shop in Henrietta Street at £50 per annum.
23 July 1884
On Monday, Morris and the Hyndmans came to lunch with us, and I afterwards went with them to Hyde Park to take the opportunity of the Liberal demonstration to spread socialistic literature and to hold an open-air meeting. This last was a fiasco, being brought to an ignominious close by an ugly rush of the crowd.
27 August 1885
On Saturday Annie and I went to the meeting for the protection of young girls, in Hyde Park. Mrs Morris was in the procession of the Ladies’ National Society, and Morris in the brake of the Socialist League.
A body of art which quite startles
2 April 1886
I went on to St James’s to see the Graham pictures on view at Christie’s. Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Millais and F. Walker - prodigious performances. They, and the works of Millais and Holman Hunt on view in Bond Street, constitute a body of art which quite startles by its greatness.
24 December 1886
Yesterday I went into town to do some shopping. I called at Bain’s [booksellers]. He told me with great joy that he had only one of my books left - The Gospels!
28 March 1891
On Wednesday last I went to the British Museum to see a collection of drawings arranged by Sidney Colvin, and later I went to Hammersmith to see Morris. I found Mrs Morris very happy, for he was very much better. He was having his supper - oysters etc. When he finished, I went into his room, and found him sitting in a chair by the fire with a large silk handkerchief spread over his knees. He looked - despite his supper! - a little empty, his clothes hanging somewhat loosely upon him. But he was cheery and hopeful, and fell to talking about the new book (The Glittering Plain) now in the course of printing at the Morris Press. It promises to be a very beautiful book. [The Glittering Plain, a novel by Morris, is considered to be one of the first in a genre now called fantasy.]
The occasional sound of an oar turning
4 April 1891
Last Sunday I visited Morris’s printing press. Morris was a little down; not up to talking.
The Press has been set up in a little cottage opposite The Doves, and next door to Sussex House [Upper Mall, north bank of the Thames in Hammersmith], and is worked by two compositors and one pressman - of course all by hand. I saw the new type, and the sheets, paper and vellum, already printed The Glittering Plain.
4 July 1895
I am reading Pater’s study of Dionysus. It is delightfully silent. From the window I see the lights on and beyond Hammersmith Bridge, and the lengthened reflection on the dark river, and I hear the occasional sound of an oar turning in the rowlocks; but the tide is low, and the otherwise-sounding river is still, sounding only with the passing toiling barge, and alive with moving lights. On my table are my tools, and a glass of tiger-lilies given to me out of our garden by my cleaner, Mrs Mansel.
William Morris in a bathchair
11 October 1896
Morris is dead. He died on Saturday 3rd October at 11:30 in the morning. I saw him alive in Riverscourt Road the preceding Monday. I had been to the Bindery to get some of my books for the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and I was on my way to the Gallery on my bicycle, when on turning the corner into Riverscourt Road I saw before me, going in the same direction, Morris in a bathchair, with a shawl across his shoulders [. . .]. I had never seen Morris in his chair before. It was a strange sensation to see the strong man so reduced. Yet he looked clear of complexion and ruddy red, and though he said not a word he yet lifted his gloved hand and waved me farewell as I mounted again and turned and bade him good-bye. . . a last good-bye.
21 August 1897
How superbly beautiful the river is at this moment! There is a high wind blowing the surface into innumerable ripples, each of which catches instantly and reflects a dazzling gleam from the sun, so that there are as it were countless diamonds at play, reflecting and deflecting rays of brightest light, so that the river’s face is an ever shifting . . .
What I should like to convey is the intense energy, sparkling, crisping, into moments of whitest, brightest light, again and again and again, everywhere over the surface of the outstretched sheet of water.
Education: shall we at last transform it, and with it our vision of and dealings with the world? Shall we have the energy of the light I see in dazzling brilliance playing upon the reflecting facets of the water, and play with the earth our home, and its dwelling-place, the infinite voids of space? Education will be transformed. “Arts and crafts” will invade and overcome literature and science and commerce, and with our own eyes we shall re-see the universe, and with our own hands and brains we shall re-create it afresh.
My writing splutters and fails of the mark.
Hampstead hideous with affluent vulgarity
28 September 1897
A cold mist this morning shuts out the sun, and only the near trees, now so yellow, are visible, and the outlines of the bridge. [. . .] On Sunday I went to Hampstead, and lunched with the Kapteyns, and had tea with Blomfield, and looked over the wall at the old house and home, No. 49. It looked very pretty, but Hampstead is becoming every moment more hideous with affluent vulgarity. I wheeled along the Finchley Road to the cemetery, and went and stood by the dear, quiet grave of Father and Mother.
21 January 1898
The sea-gulls - or river-gulls? - are sweeping in wide curves to and fro over the river - the river slides smoothly on its course - the wintered trees, arrested, placidly wait for the spring, the sky overhead is one continuous veil of stationary cloud.
All life at its best is poetry
9 May 1905
I have just seen Swinburne pass through the [British] library into the Large Room preceded by a lady and Watts-Dunton. Swinburne had on a grey, large, soft felt hat. His head, too, seemed vast, his shoulders, on the other hand, seemed slight and very sloping, and his figure plump but small. He walked without moving his body, or arms, which were held down straight at his sides. So passed our greatest living poet. I rose from my seat to see him, and pondered upon the insignificance and significance of things. The library remained as undisturbed as the surface of a lake and its whole body of water by the entrance of an undistinguishable pebble.
30 May 1905
The poets are the supreme craftsmen - the poets at their best. But all life at its best is poetry.
26 July 1908
Yesterday there was a procession, or series of processions, in support of the Licensing Bill. Annie with Stella went off early to join in it under the Suffragist banner. [. . .] I took the Turnham Green omnibus at the top of Rivercourt Road, and drove to Hyde Park Corner. There I got down, for already a procession blocked the way. I stood at the gate and watched the passing whirl; not a great stream, but great “the cause.”
25 August 1908
I went the other night to a concert at Queen’s Hall. It was a Promenade Concert, and a Wagner night. The Hall was packed. To get in I had to go to the end of a long queue extending round the building. I paid 2s., and got a seat in the balcony. The music was very loud, and filled the Hall like a great sea, and beat up into our ears as the sea does into the caves and hollows of the shore. [. . .]
Having resolved to close the Bindery next year, it seems to follow as a matter of course that I should close the Press also. But whereas I seemed to come naturally, after twenty-five years, to the former resolve, to come to the latter seemed to be against nature, there are so many great books to print and so few to bind.
Westminster Cathedral and St Paul’s
12 October 1908
Yesterday was a lost day, save that in the morning I was at Westminster Cathedral and St Paul’s - the former, by the way, was the finer. St Paul’s seemed littered up with columns and architectural ornament, and the arches under the dome hideous in the meanness of their junctions coming down together, and [William Blake] Richmond’s decoration has not enlarged them. The effect of the Cathedral, on the other hand, with sun and shade and enclosed atmosphere, was quite beautiful. In both, however, the singing was enchanting.
14 October 1908
I came [to Kew Gardens] to see the great lily. But one had flowered and passed away in a day, and the next would not flower till to-morrow. I walked around the tank and saw the blossom of the flower to be, and its vast leaves outspread upon the water, slowly born and quickly dead, and so on from age to age.
Annie must not go to prison again
30 January 1909
Annie has just been in to say that Mrs Pankhurst has been proposing on the telephone to come and see her this afternoon. The Women’s Social and Political Union want Annie now to speak on their platform, perhaps “to go to prison.”
1 February 1909
I was at Kew on Saturday, and walked through the flower-house; lilies, lilac, azaleas, camellias, carnations, all, and others in sweet flower; and around them, outside, the bare dreaming trees, whose time is yet to come.
On Sunday afternoon, yesterday, Mrs Pankhurst called. She was gentle and affectionate, but, as it seemed to us all, tired. The prison immurement seemed to have damped her fire. [. . .] This is an odious result of prison, and an argument against its use as a weapon of revolt. Annie must not go again.
The Red Flag at the Albert Hall
20 November 1913
Last night I went to the Albert Hall to hear Larkin [Jim Larkin, an Irish trade unionist then heavily involved in the famous Dublin Lock-out dispute], and was disappointed. When he was speaking a raid was made on the hall by some “students” from outside. Suddenly a sound of running feet arose in the corridor, then the attention of the whole audience was concentrated on a dense commotion at one of the entrances to the hall and the passage leading down from it, and from all parts of the hall men rose from their seats and rushed towards it. The scrimmage continued with a dead sound of the struggle, but, as I remember, otherwise in silence. But from above women leant over from the balconies, and looking upon the struggle applauded. As it went on - I witnessed it from a box - limelights burst out in various parts of the hall, and finally the organ contributed its roar to the ear, playing “The Red Flag.” At last victory was cheered by the audience, and Larkin resumed his speech. The students had been driven out; but outside they raided the electric works, and tried to put out the lights of the hall, fortunately unsuccessfully. I was disappointed; not in this, which was highly dramatic and thrilling, but in Larkin’s speech.
12 December 1913
Last night Annie and I went to see and hear Anatole France [French novelist and man of letters] at the Suffolk Street Galleries, at the invitation of the Fabian Society. Bernard Shaw in the chair. Anatole France looked like an affectionate old fox, and spoke with great animation, and many smiles and many wrinkles. He was, or seemed to be, short and stout and bent and grey. Justice, Pity, Mercy, Love - these are things as wonderful as are the flowers of the field and the stars of heaven.
13 December 1913
Clear for London, and cold. Yesterday morning as I walked through Kensington I paused in front of a “provision” shop, and looked at the birds - shot, and hanging with their heads downward - golden plovers, pheasants, partridges. Pitiful sight.
The great fight at Olympia
1 July 1914
On coming home last night between 10 and 11 o’clock after dining with Stella, I at once felt myself in an atmosphere of excitement - motors were rushing past, and newspaper boys and men were rushing about on foot, and crying hoarse, and to me unintelligible, cries. As I proceeded towards Addison Bridge - I was on my bicycle - the crowd and excitement became so great that I had to get off and walk close to the kerb. Presently the crowd was impenetrable. I asked the reason why. The great fight at Olympia - which was indeed all lighted up; Bombardier Wells had just knocked Bell out in the second round, and that was it! I pulled to the side, and leaning my bicycle against the wall on the bridge, waited the passing of the crowd. Such a crowd! Old and young, rich and poor, evening dress and filth, and men, almost all, or boys, but some women on foot, in the latest limpest evening dress, some in motors; all hurrying by as if all were bearers, to some remote other world, of long expected news. [Wells beat the Australian Colin Bell, for the heavyweight championship of the British Empire and a purse of £10,000. The New York Times headline for a report of the match ran: Women flock to fight at Olympia.]
5 August 1914
Europe and the world are now in the hands of statesmen and warriors, who have enslaved - and are now hurling against each other their enslaved - human beings, drilled to destruction. Death, not Life, and Death in another form than in times of peace, now fills to their utmost limits the minds of men, and spreads itself over all the aspects of life.
A gun mounted in peaceful Green Park
9 October 1914
A few moments ago, as I passed into [Hyde] Park, a regiment of recruits marched by - it brought tears to my eyes.
8 February 1915
In the Green Park, newly erected, there is an enclosure and platform, and on the latter, with its muzzle appearing above the screen, is mounted a gun. In the midst of Peaceful Green Park.
24 January 1916
This morning I walked to Kensington through the Park. At Hyde Park Corner three guns mounted on trucks passed. Horrible looking weapons, apparently for high firing. Walking on, I saw a company of soldiers doing bayonet practice, piercing sacks with a thrust of their bayonets. I had just passed the gardens on the other side, where the flowers of spring were just piercing the grass. How beautiful they were; how horrible the bayonets.
This evening I began its destruction
31 August 1916
The Doves Press type was designed after that of Jensen; this evening I began its destruction. I threw three pages into the Thames from Hammersmith Bridge. I had gone for a stroll on the Mall, when it occurred to me that it was a suitable night and time; so I went indoors, and taking first one page and then two, succeeded in destroying three. I will now go on till I have destroyed the whole of it.
9 February 1918
Just returned from Bow Street whither I went at 2pm to stand by Bertie Russell, on trial for some writing which I had not seen in some obscure pacifist journal. He was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in the second class. He appealed, and Frank and I bailed him out, otherwise he would have gone straight to prison. To prison, to solitary confinement, day and night in a locked cell. There was not a crowded court, only a gathering of friends, mainly women. [. . .] Bertie sat in front of the dock with his co-defendant, a young lady editor and proprietor of the journal in question, The Tribunal.
11 November 1918
The bells are ringing, and the guns have ceased.
12 November 1918
All London went merrily mad yesterday. I was indoors all day. All London merrily mad; all Germany?
The Oxford-Cambridge boat race
31 March 1921
The race was rowed yesterday, and after a terrific struggle - first Cambridge leading, then, at Hammersmith Bridge, Oxford, then beyond Chiswick, out of sight, Cambridge - Cambridge finally won by a length, but never once, or hardly once, was daylight seen between the boats. The crowd was immense, for the day was fine, and it was expected that the race would be a great race. We had a great crowd, and all the morning was taken up in preparing tea - cakes, tables, etc. - and arranging seats and benches in the garden. We were to be “at home” from 4 to 6pm - the race being at 5 or thereabouts - and by 4 I was exhausted, and retired to the parlour to rest.
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