Secondat

San Rocco

2013-05-19T09:24:00.000-04:00

In the summer of 1942 residents of New York City's Mott Street held a parade to honor their newly-inducted boys in uniform. For the date of this event they chose the feast day of a favorite saint, and the celebration of soldiers and saint blended nicely together.

The saint was Rocco, venerated for miraculous cures. His feast day, August 16, falls directly after one of the most important feasts of the liturgical year: the Feast of the Assumption, a celebration of the mother of Jesus. On those two days the faithful make petitions to the one for relief of distress and the other for return to good health.

The son of an aristocrat, San Rocco vowed poverty, distributed his wealth among people who were destitute, and made a pilgrimage from his home in Montpelier, France, to holy places in Italy. On the way he succored many plague victims and became victim of that disease himself. He was expelled by officials of the town where he was ministering when stricken and dragged himself to a nearby wood where he made a rude shelter of boughs and leaves. In that place he was supplied with water by a spring which miraculously arose and with bread by a dog which also licked his plague wounds, healing them. When he had regained his health he turned toward home. On entering his home town dressed as a simple pilgrim he thrown in jail as a vagrant and suspected spy. His family connection would easily have secured his release had he made it known, but he preferred anonymity and died on August 16, 1378, while still a prisoner.

At the last quarter of the nineteenth century when large numbers of Italian immigrants came to Mulberry and Mott Streets and surrounding blocks they brought with them the practice of celebrating San Rocco's feast day. The Irish, whom the Italians displaced, did not celebrate saints' days with street festivals and the leaders of New York's Roman Catholic churches tried to discourage these spontaneous demonstrations. In 1888 Michael Corrigan, the Archbishop of New York, banned the Italian faithful from holding any public religious procession or festa. Regardless, the new immigrants set up temporary private shrines in side streets and alleyways. Eventually the Holy See responded to requests for Italian clergy to augment or replace the largely Irish ones of the neighborhood. The New York hierarchy continued to condemn street festivals, but in 1889 the rector of the city's first "Italian" church, St. Joachim's, made an arrangement by which an independent organization could put on a festa for San Rocco and thereafter the celebration became a regular summer event.

At about this time Jacob Riis took these photos of a back-alley shrine to San Rocco.

The alley itself was Bandits' Roost which Riis also captured in this famous image.

Writing a decade later Riis said the shrine shown in his photographs was one of many erected on August 16th each year within the "darkest and shabbiest" of the back yards in the Italian neighborhoods. He said one of his few pleasing memories of an area he called "foul core of New York's slums," was seeing Bandits' Roost lighted up in honor of San Rocco:

An altar had been erected against the stable shed at the rear end of it and made gaudy with soiled ribbons, colored paper, and tallow dips stuck in broken bottle-necks. Across the passageway had been strung a row of beer-glasses, with two disabled schooners for a center-piece, as the best the Roost could afford. In sober truth, it was the most appropriate. It made a very a brave show, and, oddest of it all not a displeasing one. At all events, I thought so. Perhaps it was the discovery of something in the ambitions of the Bend that was not hopelessly of the gutter which did it.[1]

Riis does not mention a practice which a journalist reported a few years later: "Every one of the faithful who has an ache or a pain will buy from the liberal stores kept in the church a wax leg, or head, or arm, or hand, according to where his or her ailment is, and place it as an offering at San Rocco's shrine. Those who are sound of body and limb will offer decorated candles with their prayers and light them themselves at the shrine."[2] The reporter was wrong about the source of the effigies. They were called voti di cera (vows of wax) and were sold by street vendors. In 1906 a reporter told readers of these "hands, feet, legs, and heads, the latter with the flush of youth on their rounded cheeks, the other members painted with gaudy ribbons" that were sold by a street vendor at a make-shift stand.[3]

Marjory Collins' photos of the Mott Street parade on August 16, 1942, include this one of a shoemaker and his wife in front of his shop and, visible next door, are jumbled body parts in a dismantled sidewalk booth.

{I showed this photo in my previous blog post. It is "shoemaker and his wife in the Italian section on Mott Street" by Marjory Collins, FSA/OWI Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.}

Detail of this photo.

The details which I show below come from photos of New York's San Rocco festa taken by Percy Loomis Sperr in 1933 and 1937. At left is a sidewalk booth open for business on Roosevelt St. and at right women carrying wax offerings. The doll signifies a wish for fertility and the head a wish to be free of headache or other head malady.

{From photos in collections of the New York Public Library.}

Riis does mention, as do most other writers, the street illuminations of the San Rocco feast. These writers mention jelly jars, clear, green, and red, strung across the streets, each having a wick and a little oil. Writing of the festival in 1906 a reporter tells of "arches of red and green jelly glasses, suspended by wires and clotheslines from across the narrow canyons of streets, each glass with a wick floating in olive oil."[4] Writers also tell of immense illuminated shrines which, in time, joined the humble back yard ones that Riis describes. In 1907 one of the most extravagant was "a dazzling structure of white and blue and gold, rose to the height of the five-story tenement house back of it and had the form and elaborate ornamentation, in stucco, of a cathedral front."[5]

In the early 1970s the producers of Godfather II re-created this scene as it might have looked in the summer of 1919. Here are screen grabs showing the procession of the statue of San Rocco and the shrine to which it's being carried.

This screen grab shows the statue covered with the one- and five-dollar bills of people seeking the saint's intercession on their behalf, expressing gratitude for his aid, or making a general donation.

This article from the New York Times of August 17, 1902 is the earliest news account I could find. It mentions the exploding fireworks which were typical of the festival and which figure in Godfather II when Vito Corleone murders Don Fanucci.

The article also mentions the Society of San Rocco. Originally called the "Potenza Society" after the southern Italian province from which many of its members had come, this was the organization which had made a deal with the rector of St. Joachim's by which it was able to sponsor the first San Rocco festa in 1889. Founded with the contributions and service of local residents, the society survived a serious challenge from a competing organization in 1906 and continues to sponsor the feast to this day. (The challenge came from Church leaders who were hostile to the exuberant celebrations and, it was said, eager to receive the money of those seeking help from San Rocco.)

The Times article of 1902 also reveals the difficulty reporters had in pinning down details about San Rocco (or perhaps their aversion to some elementary fact checking). The reporter understood the saint to be "St. Rocco di Ruoti Dimos" which is not a title given the saint anywhere else. He says the saint is Neapolitan but there is no particular association of San Rocco with Naples. He names the provinces of Conserta and Baselicata by which he probably means Caserta and Basilicata. Potenza is not far from Conserta and is itself within the region of Basilicata. His account says wax figures were presented in gratitude for cures already accomplished while other accounts say they were presented in hope of being cured. In 1903 the Times carried another report on the festival and this time the reporter said he believed the effigies were offered in hope of cure but tells a distorted version of another part of the San Rocco story. He said he was told that saint is depicted with a dog because he once cured a mad one. This comes from the 1903 report:

So in the procession many people, presumably those afflicted or with afflicted friends, carry wax arms or legs, hands, feet or heads, or portions of the anatomy not usually exposed to view. Apparently no hint of the humor of the situation crosses their minds. They carry their waxen models gravely through the streets, and when they reach the church send them up to be piled around the altar.

There is a little place in Baxter Street which makes all these wax images for San Rocco's day. The figure of the saint, borne aloft at the head of the procession, has a dog at its feet. It seems the dog went mad and bit him once, and he cured the bite with some hair from the same dog, so the people in the procession will tell you.[6]

The earliest printed description of New York's San Rocco festival appeared in 1893 in an Italian-language novel by Bernardino Ciambelli. He inserted this bit of local color in it, presumably to add some local color to his lurid plot of love and revenge:

San Rocco was being celebrated, and the Italians of Mulberry wanted to do things properly. Towards 11 A.M., the call of the trumpets was heard and in the distance flags and banners appeared. The crowd thronged the sidewalks to enjoy the parade in honor of San Rocco. A squad of policemen headed the procession, followed by the Conterno Band, and right after by a banner on which San Rocco was painted in oil, with his wound and his dog. Two flags, one Italian, and other American, flapped at the banner's sides, thus placing the saint under a double protection. Then came the members of the Società San Rocco, stern and proud in their blue dresses with golden buttons and stripes, as if the whole world belonged to them. In the buttonhole of their parade dresses, they had flowers, ribbons, and cockades. After another musical band, military society paraded, in the uniform of the military engineer corps, with the three colours flapping in the wind; and after it the congregations of the Carmine, of the Madonna Addolorata, and of other saints like San Cono, Sant'Antonio, etc. It was a gorgeous parade, something that really made a hit in a country such as this where parades of every race and form are the order of the day. The bands played, the crowds watched in awe and cheered, the windows, the street, the sidewalks were thronged with people.[7]

Many saints laid claim to the affections of New York's Italian immigrants. Riis ascribed the popularity of San Rocco partly to their sympathy with his death in a dungeon which resembled the dank subterranean dwellings of the truly destitute poor. Whether or not that is so, it's certain that living as they did in the unhealthy environment of the tenement district (which Riis graphically described) and lacking access to medical care, many Italians drew hope from San Rocco's reputation as miraculous healer. I suspect San Rocco also retained his hold on the affections of Italians as a result of affinities with St. Francis. Both saints led lives of poverty, devoted to helping impoverished victims of misfortune and both are remembered for interactions with animals. (In time, Rocco would become the patron saint of dogs.) It's also likely San Rocco's feast drew great crowds of enthusiasts because that day fell directly after the Feast of the Assumption with its celebrations of all things associated with the Blessed Mother. And, finally, the celebration probably would not have been so exuberant if it had taken place at some other time of year. I think the festive crowds of the San Rocco fest, its many processions, the lights and decorations, the bands and fireworks all owe something to the warm-weather date of the saint's death. In other words it's likely the Feast of San Rocco got some its popularity because it fell at a time when the airless summer heat of stifling tenements gave powerful encouragement for outdoor activity.

The festa of the Assumption and of San Rocco were more inclusive than most. During those two days all members of the community — poor and modestly well off, lay and religious, male and female, old and young — mingled more or less freely with a relatively high degree of spontaneous high spirits. Such happy mingling might not be remarkable in the second half of the twentieth century, but I'm pretty sure it was uncommon in 1907 when a Times reporter (with typical mild condescension) described religious societies parading under brilliant arches of oil lights in glass cups and processions where shrines were carried on the shoulders of twenty men, adding: "Before, around, and behind them marched thousands of children, each carrying lighted candles. Even women with both arms holding babies managed to drag through the street and hold lighted candles in front of them. These were the Italians of the south of Italy."[8]

The San Rocco feast is also traditionally free of clerical mediation. Masses are said and blessings invoked, but the organization, leadership, and participation is generally outside the church hierarchy. San Rocco was not himself a member of the clergy and did not perform his services to the poor and the sick in conjunction with any religious organization. The Society of San Rocco in New York has always been free of church sponsorship and by arrangement, the San Rocco statue is kept in a church (first St. Joachim's, now St. Joseph's) but does not belong to the church. San Rocco's performance of miracles as an independent believer is very likely to be yet another source of the popularity he achieved among immigrant Italians. And it is also a probable source of the communal spirit which was one of the festa's defining characteristics.

San Rocco is usually shown baring his leg to show a plague wound along with a dog holding a loaf of bread in its mouth. The image at left below depicts the statue of New York's Società di San Rocco, which, as you can see, is formally called the Confraternita di S. Rocco, founded by the citizens from Potenza (It.) in New York, 1889.[9] The image at right shows this statue in procession in the late 1920s.

{At left: statue of San Rocco in St. Joseph's Church, New York. The image can be found on a number of web sites. At right: the same statue in procession in the late 1920s, detail of a photo in collections of the San Rocco Society.}

One last thought. There are San Rocco parishes in Italy and throughout the world where Italians have settled. The best known is probably the one in Venice which sits next to the famous Scuola Grande di San Rocco. The church is home to these two paintings by Tintoretto. The first shows San Rocco in Prison Visited by an Angel.

{San Rocco in prigione visitato da un angelo, 1567, Oil on canvas, 300 x 670 cm, Chiesa di San Rocco a Venezia}

The second shows San Rocco in a sick ward effecting a miraculous cure:

{San Rocco risana gli appestati, 1549, 300 x 671 sm, Chiesa di San Rocco a Venezia}

Detail of this painting:

The Scuola Grande di San Rocco contains only one painting of San Rocco. It shows his apotheosis.[10]

{San Rocco in Gloria, 1564, oil on canvas, 240 x 360 cm, ceiling decoration in the Sala dell'Albergo, Scuola Grande}

Of the many San Rocco (and St. Roch) parishes in the United States, one, now closed, is located among the slate quarries of south-central Pennsylvania. It's significant because the Italian immigrants of that community include many members of the in-law side of my family. At least some of these family members affectionately called the church "St. Rock."

{St Roch Parish (West Bangor), founded 1937, 141 Verona Avenue, Pen Argyl, PA, A Closed Parish of The Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown PA }

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Notes:

General note: All images in this blog post are reproduced under fair use provisions of copyright law or they are in the public domain.

[1] Jacob A. Riis, "Feast-Days in Little Italy,", The Century Magazine, August 1899.

[2] Peaceful San Rocco Day; Capulets and Montagues of Crooked Streets Reconciled. Candle-Bearers and Flower Girls of Rival Societies Meet in Procession Without Clash — Wax Legs and Arms For Sale, According to Custom — Shrines of Many Colors. Evening Post, August 16, 1907

[3] The San Rocco Society web page says the voti di cera are brought to church in gratitude for San Rocco's healing powers, but all the early sources say the people who purchased them and made offerings of them were afflicted or were acting on behalf of people who were afflicted with a disease or other medical condition. Source of quote: A Religious Festa; Statues of San Rocco Covered with Money Carried Through Streets. New York Daily Tribune, August 17, 1906

[4] A Religious Festa; Statues of San Rocco Covered with Money Carried Through Streets. New York Daily Tribune, August 17, 1906

[5] Peaceful San Rocco Day; Capulets and Montagues of Crooked Streets Reconciled. Candle-Bearers and Flower Girls of Rival Societies Meet in Procession Without Clash — Wax Legs and Arms For Sale, According to Custom — Shrines of Many Colors. Evening Post, August 16, 1907

[6] Quaint Italian Customs of Summer Festal Days; With Music, Gifts and Feasting the Denizens of Little Italy Pay Their Devotions to the Saints -- Curious Phases of the Celebrations. July 12, 1903

[7] The book is I Misteri di Mulberry Stritto by Bernardino Ciambelli, (New York, Frugone and Baletto, 1893). This passage was translated by Mario Maffi

[8] THOUSANDS OF ITALIANS IN ILLUMINATED PARADE; Night Procession Celebrates Feast of the Assumption. HONORS SAINT ROCC0 TO-DAY Great Shrines Carried on Men's Shoulders Through Streets. New York Times, August 16, 1906

[9] The web site of the San Rocco Society of Potenza (New York), says this about the statue:

The original statue of St. Rocco pictured above, was made in Italy and shipped to New York in the summer of 1889 and carried in the first annual Feast of St. Rocco on August 16,1889 on Roosevelt Street.

The statue was kept in a special chapel in St. Joachim's Church on Roosevelt Street. When St. Joachim's was demolished, the statue was taken to St. Joseph's Church, 5 Monroe Street, where it remains enshrined to this day.

The original statue is of magnificent artistic quality, made of Italian papier mache'. It weighs with it's base over 100 lbs.

As the statue aged, Angela Carnevale the Treasurer of the St. Rocco Society and then it's acting President and sole organizer decided to purchase the new statue, fearing the original priceless statue might be damaged while carrying it in the procession.

For the last 25 years or so a duplicate statue has been used for the Feast and Procession.

The original statue was "rented" by Francis Ford Coppola and used in the filming of "The Godfather II" during it's Festa di San Rocco scene. Only members of the Society were allowed to carry the statue in the film. The statue is the oldest Italian American religious society statue in New York.

The original statue can be seen at the rear left of the Church of St. Joseph, 5 Monroe Street, New York, New York. The "Feast" statue is stored during the year and brought out and placed on the main alter under a special canopy for the week prior to the Feast.

[10] This painting, "the glorification of St. Roch" or "assumption of San Rocco into heaven" was the first work of art commissioned for the Scuola. It's pride of place is the central position on the ceiling of the meeting chamber of the directors. One of these concillors had insisted that Tintoretto not be given the commission and he circumvented this prohibition by donating the painting and this led, eventually, to commissions to paint the many other works in the building. See Tintoretto on the web site of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco.

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Some sources:

Italian Festivals on the National Italian American Foundation web site

The Saint Rocco Society of Potenza home page of the New York San Rocco Society

The Feast of St. Rocco 121 Years Young, history page on web site of the New York San Rocco Society

Celebration of the Madonna Di Pierno Feast by Tom Frascella August 21, 2011 on the web site of the San Felese Society of New Jersey

Jacob A. Riis, "Feast-Days in Little Italy," THE CENTURY MAGAZINE, August 1899

Rocco di Montpellier in Wikipedia (Italian)

Saint Roch in Wikipedia (English)

LIFE Magazine (Vol. 3, No. 10, September 6, 1937) a feature on the San Rocco festa in New York City

The story of Saint Rocco the patron saint of pestilence on sanrocco.org

Photographs and Lantern-Slide Lectures of Jacob Riis at xroads.virginia.edu

JACOB A. RIIS, REFORMER, DEAD; Social Worker Who Was Roosevelt's "Ideal American" Succumbs to Heart Disease. CLEARED MULBERRY BEND Made a Name and a Career as a Police Reporter -- Author of Several Books. New York Times, May 27, 1914.

St. Roch on the catholic.org web site

St. Roch on the newadvent.org web site

Friends of Saint Roch, Montpellier, France

Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto Mannerist Artist Italian 1518 - 1594

historical facts regarding the life of Saint Roch on the Scuola Grande San Rocco web site

Michael Corrigan in Wikipedia

St. Joachim's Church in Wikipedia

We Must Not Fail Them

2013-05-10T14:52:00.003-04:00

In 1942 OWI photographer Marjory Collins worked her way around Manhattan recording the ways of the city's inhabitants in wartime. OWI stands for Office of War Information. Roy Stryker, the leader of its photographic unit, was charged to show the strength of Americans' resolve to defeat foreign aggression. In line with this objective Collins produced upbeat images of women in the workforce, children collecting scrap metal, administrators of newly-formed daycare facilities, and recruits headed out to training camps. She also shot scenes that depict patterns of American life that remained the same despite the massive restructuring brought on by the world war: teens in school, young people at public swimming pools, and adults relaxing in bars and restaurants.

Determined to show "pictures of life as it is," Collins did not limit herself to this one-sided point of view but used her camera to reveal somewhat more diversity in American life. Her photographs capture not just the confident and optimistic can-do citizens shown in the glossy magazines but also what a fellow OWI photographer disparagingly called "the seamy side of life." Subjects included relief clients, Bowery bums and members of struggling minorities. In one of her photo shoots she documented the difficulties faced by a war-widow who struggled to make ends meet and care for her young family. She also showed the daily lives of hyphenated Americans: Chinese-, Turkish-, and Italian-American residents, and, unlike the news reporters of the time, she did not present the inhabitants of immigrant communities as curiosities, but as ordinary people.

The photographs are good. Her technique was excellent and she chose subjects well. She also had fine eye for design and light values, and knew how to make good use of the 6x6 cm. frame which her twin-lens reflex camera gave her.

In the first half of 1942, as a brand new OWI staffer, she was given assignments in and around Washington, DC. In November she spent a week in a small town in Pennsylvania Dutch country. The summer and fall found her in New York City. During this time she took pictures of Chinese Americans in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Jewish merchants in the Lower East Side. She did a set on the customers in a hairdresser's salon. She showed crowds at Radio City Music hall, pin setters at a bowling alley, and patrons of O'Reilly's Bar on Third Avenue in the Fifties. She showed centers for recruiting soldiers and promoting the sale of war bonds. In September she did a lengthy shoot in the building where the New York Times was written and published (about which I've previously written). There are also a few shots of a workers' bookshop which served as Communist Party headquarters.

In mid-August she photographed a parade on Mott Street to celebrate Italian American servicemen. I've selected some of the photos from this occasion. They all can be found in the FSA/OWI collections of LC's Prints and Photos Division. As always, click image to view full size.

The parade is unlike the ones we're used to with clear separation between observers and participants. It has the spontaneity of a summer street festival. Marchers are dressed casually with few attempts at formal uniforms and the leader, dressed as Uncle Sam, is accompanied by some guys in shirt sleeves. Collins was one level above the street when she took this photo, probably on the fire escape. It's interesting that she didn't ask the person next to her to step back in order to clear the camera's view. I suspect she liked having the two out-of-focus foreground elements.

{Caption: Parade of Italian-Americans on Mott Street at a flag raising ceremony in honor of neighborhood boys in the United States Army}

Detail showing the band.

Here you see young people carrying the flag (more of a banner). They're following the band. People are throwing money onto the fabric.

{Caption: Italian-Americans of Mott Street raising a flag in honor of neighborhood boys in the United States Army.}

Now that they've passed by the parked cars you can see more of the banner. Despite its subject it's not really militaristic but has a religious theme — a priest blessing young soldiers whom we know will be going off to fight. The focus is very local. There's no evidence that the event is part of a national campaign. It appears to be of as well as by the two blocks of Mott Street where it takes place.

{Caption: Flag raising ceremony in the rain in honor of Mott Street boys in the United States Army}

Collins was in 274 Mott St. Now she's crossed to 279, on the west side of the street, to get this next shot. The parade has passed down the block and is by the back of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral. The church faces Mulberry at Prince and is at the bottom of the parade's route.

In the photo just below the viewer sees the banner's patriotic message. Banners such as this were called flags of honor. As here, they'd be hung over a street, attached to buildings on either side. Street banners were also used to announce municipal events, show support for political candidates, and advertise major shows and festivals. There's a political example from the 1930s here and a municipal one here.

These photos show people watching the raising of the banner.

This one shows that a rain shower has recently passed. You can also see members of a band who are about to play. The couple in the foreground have a quiet dignity.

Collins took another photo of this couple, identifying them as a shoemaker and his wife. It's clear that they're in the doorway to his shop.

Collins' photos tend to have the lens at a child's eye level, as here, because that's the height at which an adult holds a twin-lens reflex camera. It interests me that the shirt of the man at right has a zipper closure. In 1942 zippers were not nearly as ubiquitous as they are now and I suspect they were very rarely seen on a man's shirt.

This detail of hands and face are not the main subject but they make a nice photographic study.

This honor guard seems to have been the only formally military element in the parade and, in keeping with the spirit of the day, its discipline isn't up to parade-ground standards.

{Caption: Italian-American Legionnaries marching in a parade on Mott Street, at the Feast of San Rocco (August 16) which ended in a flag raising ceremony in honor of the boys of the neighborhood who were in the United States Army}

Here you can see the band that was gathering in the background of an earlier photo. They call themselves the "Brooklyn Dodgers" and from the looks of them I'd say they took their name not from the baseball team but from the original sense of the word dodger: cunning, devious, untrustworthy, or, as Dickens had it, artful. It's also possible they took their name from the same source as did the baseball team. Wikipedia says the Brooklyn Dodgers were originally the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, trolley dodger being a slang name for people from Brooklyn.

{Caption: Dancing and music on Mott Street, at a flag raising ceremony in honor of neighborhood boys in the United States Army}

The is a detail of the previous photo.

Taken only a few minutes apart, these two photos show residents at 274 Mott St.

{This building is directly opposite at 274 Mott St.}

Here are detail images of people viewing the parade from the fire escapes and windows.

One can imagine Collins wishing she had a telephoto lens so as to take close up shots of people observing from their windows. Or so it seems from this shot taken from street level.

After the parade Collins took photos of residents in an espresso shop and on the sidewalk.

{Caption: Italian-American cafe espresso shop on MacDougal Street where coffee and soft drinks are sold. The coffee machine cost one thousand dollars}

{Caption: Italian-Americans on MacDougal Street relaxing on Sunday}

In November 1942 Collins was in Lititz, Pennsylvania, and while there she took this photo of her reflection. In it you can see her camera. It's clearly a twin-lens reflex, probably a Rolleiflex. The photo shows the upper lens as bright and the lower one dark because the upper is transmitting light that is reflected from the bright sky above (it is the view lens). The lower lens is dark because it receives light but (unless the back of the camera is removed) does not transmit it.

{Lititz, Pennsylvania. Self-portrait at a public sale, November 1942}

The lower lens of Collins' has a lens hood like the one in this photo of this Rollei from 1933.

{Standard Rolleiflex Model 6RF, 1933; source: flickr}

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Some sources:

United States Office of War Information

Women Photographers of the FSA and OWI: Marjory Collins

Photographs by Marjory Collins, 1944, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute on Facebook

Collins, Marjory, 1912-1985. Papers of Marjory Collins, 1904-1985: A Finding Aid

Marjory Collins in Wikipedia

Marjory Collins (1912-1985), a Biographical Essay on the Library of Congress web site

Marjory Collins (1912-1985), Introduction on the Library of Congress web site

photographs of the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection on the Library of Congress web site

Women Photojournalists Prints & Photographs Division Holdings on the Library of Congress web site

Il viaggio di Marjory Collins in Sicilia. Sabato 31 marzo 2012. Ricordare Palermo. Palermo e la Sicilia durante il fascismo e la seconda guerra mondiale. Presenta una ricca galleria fotografica, sullo sbarco degli Alleati in Sicilia del 10 luglio 1943. (This article says that in July 1943 Collins was using a Rolleiflex twin lens camera.)

St. Patrick's Old Cathedral in Wikipedia

St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on NYC-Archtecture.com

History of Woodside, Queens (New York)

2013-04-12T20:29:00.000-04:00

I received an email from Kindle saying the blog has at least one Kindle follower and would I please put up a new post (or they'd drop me). It's true I've been otherwise occupied. A few months ago Deniz Hughes of Denizblog suggested I do an article on the history of Woodside, Queens, for Wikipedia. I said I'd try. On and off since then I worked up a somewhat longer draft than I originally expected. I loaded the piece a couple of weeks ago and so far: (1) no one's sniped at it, (2) one helpful soul has made a useful addition. Here's the link: History of Woodside, Queens.

Despite its length there was quite a bit that I left out of the article. I'm thinking I'll find some time to make a post or two out of the research that didn't seem to fit in the Wikipedia format.

I have previously had something to say about this image from the article (here) --

Listening to music, 1965

2013-01-01T20:00:00.000-05:00

Doing some year-end reordering of attic storage we came across a wayward album, an LP by Tracy Nelson with whom I was friends back in 1965. Within a day or so a family member mentioned that he had begun listening to Bill Evans, specifically his album, Everybody Digs Bill Evans. Another friend, Elspeth Leacock, gave me that album in 1965 and it's found with the rest of my old LPs in our basement. The two reminded me of yet a third friend and musician, Rodney Moag, who played in a bar I frequented in 1965. He hadn't cut an LP at that time and I didn't know about the 45 he'd made that year.

Back in 1965 Rod was the most versatile of the three. He did vocals and wrote many of the songs he sang accompanying himself on the mandolin. And he was also proficient on guitar, dobro, violin, and viola. The group he led was called the Front Porch Back Steppers. I don't recall any others in that group but they probably included Charlie Taylor on bass and keyboard and maybe Don Gale on banjo.

This video was made 45 years after I met Rod but it gives some idea of the music I heard him play: Rod Moag at Forest Grove

(Rod performing at the Forest Grove Music Show, Chandler, Texas, on December 19, 2009; YouTube video uploaded by Alvin Murphy on Jan 16, 2012.)

Rod is much more than a versatile musician. He's a linguist with a specialty in languages of the Indian sub-continent. When I knew him he was studying for his Master's in Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin. This photo shows him at a Peace Corps training program where he gave instruction in speaking Malayalam, the language of the Indian state of Kerala.

{Rodney Moag-Director of India 20A Malayalam Language Instruction, Photos from Peace Corps training held at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee August 31 - November 22, 1965}

Rod's blindness seems more an attribute than a liability. It certainly hasn't been an obstacle in his careers as professor and musician. When I knew him in Madison he moved easily around campus and downtown, using his foldable "elephant thermometer" as much to warn people that he was sightless as to navigate his way. He told me he liked to run foot races and that he could "watch" tv, not just listen to the audio component. He'd pepper his conversation with visual idioms such as "see you later" and "I saw him (or her) the other day."

I'd often sit with Rod's wife, Rachel, at Glenn & Ann's, the bar where the backsteppers played. She told me about Rod's ability to cook, clean, and manage his life so independently that there seemed little difference between him and her sighted friends. She did say, however, that she was taken back the first time she visited his apartment during the evening. When she saw all the lights were out, she thought maybe Rod had forgotten their date and almost left without knocking. But he'd heard her approach and called out a welcome. After that, he said he tried to remember to put a light on when he thought it might be dark outside.

I remember driving Rod and Rachel to Minneapolis one weekend. She was many months pregnant and the two of them thought it best that she not drive that long way. They owned a VW Beetle which fitted us well enough but without a whole lot of room to spare. I can't recall the purpose of the trip. Possibly to attend an event at the Guthrie Theater, possibly to visit her parents, probably both.

An internet search turns up this clipping announcing Rod and Rachel's engagement.

{Moag-Foley engagement, Wyoming Reporter, Thurs, Feb 6, 1964}

If Rod is the most versatile of my three musicians of 1965, Tracy Nelson is the best singer. When young, both she and Rod used radio programs as their source of inspiration. In his case it was country and bluegrass music coming out of Nashville and vicinity. In hers it was blues coming from the clubs of Chicago's South Side. Both of them nurtured their talents somewhat against the grain — he as a kid from upstate New York with a bent for the music of Appalachia and she as a kid from central Wisconsin with a talent for singing Black urban blues. She was an undergraduate in the School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin when he was there studying for his Master's in Indian Studies.

They share a love for music that has deep roots in regional traditions, a kind of historical authenticity. For Rod this manifests as a love for old time country/bluegrass and Texas swing. Tracy's passion is two-fold: first for the music which grew from African-American field hollars and guitar blues and expressed itself in urban ghettos of burgeoning industrial cities, and second for the same Appalachian sound which Rod admires. In an interview Tracy once revealed how unsuited she felt herself to be in the Hait-Ashbury atmosphere of the early 1970s. She felt uncomfortable with the culture of drugs, hip spiritualism, and pounding rock rhythms and at that time she moved from San Francisco to Nashville, left her blues rock band and made a country album.

This is how she looked at the time I met her.

{Tracy Nelson, ca. 1965 from simplybek on Tumblr }

In 1964 she was able to make her first album courtesy of Sam Charters who arranged a recording session with Prestige. I came to know her at about that time. My flatmate had met her — I forget how — and after they'd started seeing one another she'd drop by and sometimes to sing but mostly just to share some beers and talk. My flatmate played stride piano, picked up from listening to radio broadcasts from his childhood home in Kansas. When Tracy put together the group that was to back her at the Prestige recording date she included him as pianist.

The recording is Deep Are the Roots. Released in 1965, it contained songs from the blues greats of the 1920s and '30s, including Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey.

You can hear four 30-second teasers from that record in a sampler put out by Prestige called The Bluesville Years, Vol. 7: Blues Blue, Blues White. The teasers show that Tracy's voice was powerful then but not as strong as it would become later in her professional career. They display the harmonica playing of her friend Charlie Musselwhite and the piano of my flatmate.

Tracy sang at a place called The Pub in Madison, but I don't recall going there to see her perform.

There are quite a few videos of Tracy on YouTube. One features a song she wrote in 1968. It's from The Lonesome Pine Specials of 1987 (The Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts): Tracy Nelson - Down So Low. Another comes from the 22nd Annual Simi Valley Cajun & Blues Music Festival on Memorial Day Weekend, 2011: One More Mile (Muddy Waters) - Mannish Boys Revue with Tracy Nelson - Live in Simi Valley.

She sings both blues and country in snippets played during this interview on the American Routes program (radio station WWNO, Aug. 4, 2010). This interview, which includes an excellent and succinct overview of Tracy's career, brings out a side of her music I hadn't known about. After blues and country, she turned to R&B for a while. Some of the songs she sang at this time were covers of ones by Irma Thomas and Tracy worked with Irma at least once. You can hear her with Marcia Ball doing backup vocals on this video:

Tracy showed a more popular country style in a segment of the Prairie Home Companion show of June 16, 2001: Got A New Truck - Tracy Nelson and Band, Live from the Orpheum Theater in Memphis. Before the show Tracy participated in an interview that's available here: Tracy Nelson: Living Well, June 12, 2001, by Russ Ringsak.

This image shows Tracy's first country album (and the one that turned up in our attic).

{Mother Earth (feat. Tracy Nelson) - Tracy Nelson Country - 1969}

A few days ago, on the occasion of Tracy's birthday, a favorite blogger of mine — Bent Sorensen — linked to two of her songs, one from the earliest country album and the other from her San Francisco band, Mother Earth: (1) Tracy Nelson: I Fall To Pieces - from Mother Earth Presents Tracy Nelson Country, 1969 and (2) Mother Earth: Mother Earth (Memphis Slim) - from Living With the Animals, 1968. Of the former Bent says Tracy's version is better than Patsy Cline’s original and of the latter he says Tracy is "one of the most underrated female singers of all time." He also points out that the latter feature "Makel Blumfeld" on lead guitar, that man being the great Mike Bloomfield. It also features Barry Goldberg on keyboards.

If Rod Moag and Tracy Nelson have much in common, neither, so far as I know, has any connection with Bill Evans. His place in this blog post is really about the act of another 1965 U of W friend, Elspeth Leacock, who (as I say) put Everybody Digs Bill Evans in my hands. She gave it to me after I'd admitted that I enjoyed Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain, but did not really have much else in the way of jazz likes. Or much knowledge. I certainly didn't know that Bill Evans played on the former and didn't notice there was no piano on the latter. I've always been grateful to Elspeth for introducing me to his music. I've collected his recordings ever since and they've given me pleasure for close on fifty years.

I can't recall how I came to know Elspeth but suspect we met via mutual friends Carole Deutch and Phil Buss. Phil was another Madison musician. He played and sang at the 609 Club and Nitty Gritty and he had a shop where he made high quality guitars. I recall a time when he took me out for some target practice using rifles and a pistol that he owned. Carole was a friend of his. In the late '60s she married a fellow history grad student who would later become Chairman of the Board at John Wiley & Sons.

This shows Carole in the Bernal Heights district of San Francisco in the early 1970s.

{source: San Francisco's Bernal Heights (Bernal History Project, Carl Nolte, Arcadia Publishing, 2007)}

Here is a guitar Phil made for his younger sister.

{P Buss, luthier, Fretted String Instrument Shop, Madison, Wisconsin. Made in 1964 for Mary Lynn Buss, image source: Vintage Instrument Dating}

Someone with the handle hansgy1 has put Everybody Digs Bill Evans on YouTube. I'd link to it, but I'm not sure hansgy1 obtained rights before uploading.

------------

Side notes:

1. Searching Phil brings up reminiscences from friends of his. One mentions some of the musicians who also played the Madison clubs in the mid-1960s, including Marshall Brickman, Danny Kalb, Eric Weissberg, and Paul Prestopino. I think they are all still performing; Phil died young: 15 June 1988, at the age of 49.

Here's the text of one reminiscence of Phil:

Nitty Gritty bar: Re: Marsh Shapiro, RIP

Post by snoqueen » Wed Dec 26, 2012 3:59 pm
His original Nitty Gritty was the greatest place downtown. I can picture sitting in there on a Sunday night in about 1974 listening to Phil Buss play "In The Pines" with pinball games jingling in the background. One time Phil had a bunch of friends sitting in and they jammed on Folsom Prison. It was one of those performances that lifted the roof off the building and I still get chills remembering how it just would not stop. You could tell when Marsh was happy -- he'd jump up on one of the picnic tables. He did on that night.

The Gritty hosted an amazing lineup of bands. I think the State Historical Society has a definitive collection of street posters from the era -- the beginning of "postering" -- and if someone was interested they could assemble a nice little Gritty retrospective in Marsh's memory.

Thanks to Marsh Shapiro for a fine little bar and some good times -- and that's a nice legacy.

2. The web page that contains the photo of Rod doing Peace Corps language training also includes a photo of trainees drinking beer, Blatz beer.

In 1965 a 6-pack of that beer cost maybe $0.99 at the local supermarket (and if you saved your Green Stamps you might get it for less). Though that seems cheap, I didn't always have the cash to buy it. A pocket calendar I kept then contains the statement "flat broke" in the box for September 15, 1965. (In fact 99 cents was probably a fair price for that beer in current terms; using the CPI inflator shows that a 1965 dollar is now worth more than $7.00.)

photochroms -- Tunisia -- 1899

2012-12-09T09:14:00.000-05:00

At the turn of the twentieth century the Detroit Photography Company sent its operatives to exotic locales to shoot black & white negatives that it could manipulate by a process called photochrom to make full color prints. The process was exacting, slow, meticulous, and its results could be breathtaking, or maybe banal, or even ghastly. The skill of the photographer mattered, but the success of the color print depended more on the skill of the artisans creating the intermediates by which the photochroms were worked up.

Much also depended on the availability of detailed information about the original coloration of the scene that was photographed. The man behind the camera had to name the colors present in his subject, record them accurately, and give enough context so that production workers could recreate what the photographer saw. On occasions when they lacked sufficient information the workers used their own judgment and sometimes, no matter what the photographer wrote, they gave color values and shadings that seemed right to them. Frequently they worked from hand-colored versions of black and white prints and the artists who did the coloring might themselves use artistic license to make what seemed to them to be an appealing result.[1]

The photochroms themselves could be mass-printed as inexpensive postcards (and in that time of penny-stamped cards millions of them were) or they could be produced as large high-resolution prints.

The photos which follow come from a Library of Congress collection of high-quality prints that the Detroit Publishing Co. produced in or near 1899. They show places and people in Tunisia.[2] Apart from the brief notes accompanying them there's nothing that can be found out them. A publisher's catalog calls them "Views of Architecture and People in Tunisia." I believe the absence of narrative takes little away from the prints. See if you agree. As usual, click an image to view full size and then hit the escape key to return to the blog post.

{Caption: Types of Arabs, Tunis, Tunisia}

{A mosque in the principal street, Kairwan, Tunisia}

{Moorish cafe, Tunis, Tunisia}

{Outside a Moorish cafe, Tunis, Tunisia}

Details of this image:

{Detail}

{Detail}

{Group before Bab Aleona, Tunis, Tunisia}

{Group of wandering Arabs, Tunis, Tunisia}

{Tresure Street, Tunis, Tunisia}

{Market, Kairwan, Tunisia}

{A street, Kairwan, Tunisia}

{A traveling cook, Kairwan, Tunisia}

{Mosque of St. Catherine, Tunis, Tunisia}

Details from this image:

{Detail}

{Detail}

{Detail}

{Souc-el-Trouk, Tunis, Tunisia}

{Bab Suika-Suker Square, Tunis, Tunisia}

{Kasbah market, Tunis, Tunisia}

----------

Some sources:

the American Photochrom Archive gallery on photochrom.com

Catalogue F. Scenic, architectural and marine views (Detroit Photographic Co., 1899)

About Photocroms on photocrom.com

The Photochrom process on bluemonocle.com

Photochrom in wikipedia

World Digital Library

Photochrom Prints on the Library of Congress web site

the Detroit Publishing Company Collection on the Library of Congress web site

Detroit Publishing Company Photographs on the Library of Congress web site

Detroit Publishing Co. in wikipedia

The Miracle of Photochrom on creativepro.com

Photochrom on photopreservation.com

---------

Notes:

[1] See the list of sources for information about the Photochrom process and its history.

[2] The prints are from the Photochrom Prints collection of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Click image to enlarge.

tukker

2012-12-07T15:04:00.001-05:00

Last summer I joined a few other family members in a trip to the Netherlands and nearby areas in Germany — locales where our Dutch and German ancestors were born and raised. While in the Dutch province of Friesland we stayed in a tiny dorp called Ee. Our B&B was a reclaimed barn with a centuries-old pedigree and thick thatch roof.

Like other old Friesian villages Ee is built around a church and the church lies on the highest point of a man-made mound, both making it visible across the area's vast extent of flat farmland and also providing a place of refuge on black-swan occasions when the seas overwhelm the dikes and flood the countryside.

Ee still consists of the church and not many other structures (homes, sheds, barns, a few shops) surrounded by farmland. Most Friesian villages that have survived from the middle ages do not retain the compact configuration that you can see in this satellite view.

Country lanes encircle the church, not a bad track for a morning jog as I found on the second day of our stay. I took some photos during a final cooldown walk and they're visible in a gallery I put up here: 2012 Trip to Europe - St. Gangulfuskerk. This image shows our B&B in the foreground with the church behind.

On the evening we arrived we sought out a place to eat and quickly located the only one that was open: a café-pub attached to a gas station called "Eetcafe de Tukker." As you'd expect, an eetcafe is simply an eatery. Tukker refers to the inhabitants of Twente, an eastern, mostly rural part of the Netherlands. It's roughly the same as "hayseed," "hick," "redneck," or "rube" in America, and as have many other terms of abuse, it's been adopted as a badge of pride by the locals.

This satellite view shows the eetcafe as well as our B&B and the church.

Since "tuk" means pocket in the local dialect, the Dutch Wikipedia article on the subject says tukkers are guys who slouch around with their hands in their pockets. The article also says tukkers gained cred when their local (and very successful) pro football team, FC Twente, took "De Tukkers" as their nickname.

This is the logo from the website of the Eetcafe de Tukker.

You might think that Eetcafe de Tukker is owned and run by Tukkers and, indeed, we were told the guy behind the bar, Frank Duursma, comes from Twente. But on the other hand his name is definitely Friesian so there's some doubt as to how deep the Tukker blood runs.

The eetcafe has a web site, Eetcafe de Tukker, which gives some photos of the place, its menu, and information about its darts team. There are also some images of a German Night (Duitse Avond), a birthday celebration, and other events.

The web site shows the exterior of the little place and the table where we ate our Tukker meal.

And the German Night photos show our host dressed as a Duitse boer (that is to say as Frieslanders imagine the German version of Tukkers to look).

After discussion with the guy who had a bit of English (standing at the bar drinking Grolsch) I ordered the "Broodje Tukker" which turned out to be a big juicy burger with lots of toppings accompanied by fries and slaw.

-----------

All this came back to me on reading today that my favorite pro bike racer is retiring from the sport. In an interview he said he's not quitting because of the doping scandal that has brought down Lance Armstrong, most of his teammates, and a bunch of others. His reasons are three: He doesn't have a contract for the coming year, he's been enjoying the sport a lot less, and he wishes to spend more time at home with his young family.

This shows Joost at the 2011 Tour of Britain.

{Joost Posthuma in a photo from brassynn's photostream on Flickr}

Joost comes from the Twente city of Hengelo. He's a fan of the football club and he's proud to be a Tukker. You can read about him on his own web site and the sites I've sited in "sources" below. I have been following his career since 2006 when he won the best young riders' jersey in the prologue of the Tour de France. I've put below a list of my blog post in which Joost figures.

When a bike racer retires, the Dutch say he's hanging his bike on the willow (hangt fiets aan de wilgen" or as it says on Joost's web page, de fiets in de wilgen). I don't know why.

This video shows an afternoon of cyclocross racing in the Twente city of Enschede and ends with a ceremonial last kilometer. At the close, in addition to seeing Joost hang his bike on a willow, you get to see his son ring the last-lap bell and both the son and his daughter present him with bunches of flowers.

----------

My blog posts in which Joost Posthuma figures:

July 03, 2006 — July 12, 2006 — July 13, 2006 — July 14, 2006 — September 02, 2006 — April 19, 2007 — June 20, 2007 — July 15, 2007 — July 29, 2007 — November 12, 2007 — July 03, 2008 — November 25, 2008 — April 01, 2009 — April 02, 2009 — November 25, 2008 — September 21, 2009 — July 25, 2009 — July 25, 2009 — July 24, 2009 — April 01, 2009 — April 02, 2009 — April 12, 2009 — April 13, 2009 — April 21, 2009 — April 27, 2009 — July 10, 2010 — July 16, 2010 — March 24, 2010

----------

Some sources:

Joost Posthuma on Wikipedia (en)

Joost Posthuma on Wikipedia (nl)

Joost Posthuma from trap-friis.dk via the Wayback machine

Joost Posthuma from the Rabobank cycling team website via the Wayback machine

Advertisement Advertisement 2006 Tour de France prologue Joost Posthuma on Velonews

Posthuma hangt fiets aan de wilgen in De telegraaf

Posthuma hangt fiets aan de wilgen on spitsnieuws.nl

Gezocht op: joost posthuma on De Telegraaf news site

Ee in Noordelijk Oostergo, Dongeradelen, Staatsuitgeverij by Herma M. van den Berg (Den Haag 1983)

Kerk van Ee on Wikipedia

Nederlandsch Hervormde Kerk van Ee on the dorp-ee website

bill of pains and penalties

2012-12-06T13:42:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James II.

Approaching the end of its twenty five hundred pages I'm beginning to suffer withdrawal symptoms. It's no help that the last volume is both posthumous and incomplete. My affection for this work comes late. I enjoyed the bits of Macaulay I read when too young to know better, but the history professors of my college years had no trouble convincing me that the man and his writings were both uncool. I learned that he wrote an unacceptable version of popular history: presentist, triumphalist, progressivist, and fundamentally flawed by biases, prejudices, and, summing it all, whiggish.

There's some truth in these accusations, but, as Macaulay himself said, any history that possesses significance — that is not a meaningless assemblage of facts — is biased, though not necessarily in a bad way, and history that lacks narrative drive — with all the potential for whiggishness which that entails — will not find readers.[1] Each generation has its favorite approach to history and the historians we treasure are those we can read with pleasure long after successive generations of critics are done with them. For me, somewhat late in life, Macaulay is one such.

I've lifted some paragraphs from two early chapters the final volume to show some of the things I like about his work.[2] Their subject is an attempt to use legislation, a Bill of Pains and Penalties, to punish a wealthy and well-connected Londoner who had accused a prominent politician of corruption and who in turn had been accused of the same. The attempt is not an event that gets discussed in other histories and its obscurity is typical of Macaulay: he made a habit of deploying colorful snippets to reinforce the broad conclusions he wished to make.

He uses this one to let us see the potential of political infighting and politicians' opportunism to cause lasting harm. He also, by the way, shows that the whiggishness of which he's often accused hasn't led him to paper over cases of venality by actual Whigs. It's the Whig majority in Commons which comes close to perverting the constitution for petty and self-serving purposes and the aristocratical Lords who prevent it from doing so. The piece also thus shows a respect for the unelected Upper House by a man whose work is supposed to (somewhat crassly) celebrate the measured and inevitable evolution of representative democracy.

This is not to say that Macaulay's history was free of whiggism. Far from it. He set out to show how came to be the things of which a British subject of his time could boast — the wealth and power of his country, the liberties of its subjects and the strength of its political, religious, and economic institutions.[3] The gradual advances which led to this state of affairs were not to him inevitable nor achieved without great drama. His history is full of contingency and the clash of opposing personalities, none untainted by disabling and sometimes tragic flaws.

He believed history had no meaning unless it told a story and he tells this story compellingly and with typical verve, but he does not pretend that the end result could have been foretold or that it was in any way intentionally produced. The motivation of individual leaders, their strengths of character and moral flaws are as interesting to Macaulay, and thus to the reader, as are the decisions they make, whether for good or, as often or more so, for ill.

Charles Duncombe, the man who's the subject of the Bill of Pains was well known in his time for his wealth and position, his humble origin and impolite diction, and his willingness to spend money — both charitably and as bribes — in order to curry favor with electors and influential leaders. He has not attracted the notice of historians. His life is little known and he is not infrequently confused with other Duncombes, particularly his cousin who worked in the Exchequer.[4]

Like many, I should say most, of the characters Macaulay puts on display Charles Duncombe was greedy, self-serving, and corrupt. He stands out, however, as the only miscreant who confesses to his misdeeds. I believe the extracts I quote below give enough of the story to convey its interest to us and its importance to Macaulay as an instance of constitutional myopia.

In the extracts the "persecuted minister" is Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax. The "bill against Fenwick" refers to the bill of attainder against the Jacobite traitor ,Sir John Fenwick, 3rd Baronet, which resulted in his beheading in 1697. Fairfax and Buckingham are well known historical figures. Rochester, Nottingham, Leeds, and other persons mentioned were peers and political leaders of the time.

The extracts bring out some of Macaulay's skill of composition. He seizes on dramatic confrontation, exults in paradox, and takes obvious pleasure in exposing the meanness of politicians. He wrote slowly, corrected much, and retained a vast memory store of facts which he checked and double-checked. Yet his writing has an immediacy and displays an almost poetic feel for pace and rhythm.

You can take a paragraph almost at random to illustrate the vigor and charm of his writing style. This passage comes in a section on the ill-fated Darien scheme of the late 1690s. It concerns the survivors of a botched attempt to establish a Scottish colony on the Isthmus of Panama. After most of the colonists succumbed to Yellow Fever or other endemic diseases a relatively small number managed to escape to New York. Macaulay writes[5]:

The voyage was horrible. Scarcely any Guinea slave ship has ever had such a middle passage. Of two hundred and fifty persons who were on board of the Saint Andrew, one hundred and fifty fed the sharks of the Atlantic before Sandy Hook was in sight. The Unicorn lost almost all its officers, and about a hundred and forty men. The Caledonia, the healthiest ship of the three, threw overboard a hundred corpses. The squalid survivors, as if they were not sufficiently miserable, raged fiercely against one another. Charges of incapacity, cruelty, brutal insolence, were hurled backward and forward. The rigid Presbyterians attributed the calamities of the colony to the wickedness of Jacobites, Prelatists, Sabbath-breakers, Atheists, who hated in others that image of God which was wanting in themselves. The accused malignants, on the other hand, complained bitterly of the impertinence of meddling fanatics and hypocrites.

------

Some sources:

The history of England from the accession of James II. Thomas Babington Macaulay, (Philadelphia, Porter & Coates, 1888)

Thomas Babington Macaulay on nndb (Notable Names Database)

The History of England from the Accession of James the Second on wikipedia

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
on wikipedia

Introduction to Selections from the prose of Macaulay by Lucius Hudson Holt (Ginn and company, 1916)
Extract:

Macaulay was not only clear, but uniformly interesting. He was, in the first place, a natural-born story-teller, gifted with marvelous facility in the selection of the strikingly important facts in his narrative, and with the touch of genius in the selection of the phrases in which he presented these facts. And in the second place, he was a most careful artist in his writing, using all the devices of antithesis, balanced sentences, abrupt transitions, and climax to relieve the possible monotony of his prose. In a study of the English paragraph, Edwin H. Lewis writes: "The popular impression that Macaulay is the best of paragraphers is probably not far from the truth. ... He knows his principal point, and it is on this that he enlarges. ... He reveals very great variability in sentence-length, and drives home his main topic and his main conclusion in simple sentences. When he masses clauses it is to relieve each of emphasis and show the unity of the group as amplifying some previous terse generalization."

About Macaulay's Style, The Construction of His Sentences; How the Great Essayist Used the English Language — Some of His Homely Phrases by R.G.H. [i.e. Richard Grant White] (New York Times, August 17, 1879)
Note: The writer uses a stilted, overly-formal, and ungainly style in praising Macaulay's "simple, clear and impressive style." See the text of this article here.

Richard Grant White on wikipedia

Richard Grant White by Arnold Zwicky on Language Log

Whig history in wikipedia

Whig History Is Back by Michael Knox Beran on the GMU History News Network

"On History" by Thomas Babington Macaulay in Selections from the Edinburgh review, comprising the best articles in that journal, from its commencement to the present time. With a preliminary dissertation, and explanatory notes, edited by Maurice Cross (Baudry's European Library, 1835)

The Whig Interpretation of History by Herbert Butterfield (London, G. Bell and Sons, 1931)

A history of crime in England by Luke Owen Pike (Smith, Elder & co., 1876)

Studies in Administration and Finance 1558-1825 by Edward Hughes (Manchester University Press, 1934)

DUNCOMBE, Charles (1648-1711), of Lombard Street, London and Teddington, Mdx. on historyofparliamentonline

Duncombe, Charles in Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 16, on wikisource

Charles Duncombe (English banker) in wikipedia

John Duncombe in wikipedia

DUNCOMBE, Charles (1764-1841), of Duncombe Park, Helmsley, Yorks. in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1820-1832, ed. D.R. Fisher (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

A handbook of London bankers: with some account of their predecessors the early goldsmiths ; together with lists of bankers from 1670 (Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1890)

April 17 The Death of the Duke of Buckingham by Alexander Pope (on Bartleby.com)

IN the worst inn’s room, with mat half-hung,
The floors of plaster, and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,
With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw,
The George and Garter dangling from that bed
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies—alas! how changed from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!
Gallant and gay, in Cliveden’s proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love;
Or just as gay at council, in a ring
Of mimic statesmen and their merry King,
No wit to flatter left of all his store!
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more.
There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends.

Bill of attainder in wikipedia

The ROADS Family of Buckinghamshire, and 'One-Place-Studies' of Waddesdon, Grendon Underwood and Wotton Underwood on Charles Duncombe

"Defoe's True-Born Englishman" by A.C. Guthkelch in Essays and Studies by members of the English Association, Vol IV, collected by C.H. Herford (J. Murray, 1913)
This extract is from the first edition of the poem in which Duncombe is clearly identified. Subsequent editions treated the subject as a generalized grasping City banker.

Company of Scotland on wikipedia

Darien scheme on wikipedia

-------

Notes:

[1] On his attitude toward history and historians, see "On History" by Thomas Babington Macaulay in Selections from the Edinburgh review, comprising the best articles in that journal, from its commencement to the present time. With a preliminary dissertation, and explanatory notes, edited by Maurice Cross (Baudry's European Library, 1835)

[2] The paragraphs I've lifted come from Chapters XXI and XXIII.

[3] This is the first paragraph of the first chapter of the History:

I purpose to write the history of England from the accession of King James the Second down to a time which is within the memory of men still living. I shall recount the errors which, in a few months, alienated a loyal gentry and priesthood from the House of Stuart. I shall trace the course of that revolution which terminated the long struggle between our sovereigns and their parliaments, and bound up together the rights of the people and the title of the reigning dynasty. I shall relate how the new settlement was, during many troubled years, successfully defended against foreign and domestic enemies; how, under that settlement, the authority of law and the security of property were found to be compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual action never before known; how, from the auspicious union of order and freedom, sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no example; how our country, from a state of ignominious vassalage, rapidly rose to the place of umpire among European powers; how her opulence and her martial glory grew together; how, by wise and resolute good faith, was gradually established a public credit fruitful of marvels which to the statesmen of any former age would have seemed incredible; how a gigantic commerce gave birth to a maritime power, compared with which every other maritime power, ancient or modern, sinks into insignificance; how Scotland, after ages of enmity, was at length united to England, not merely by legal bonds, but by indissoluble ties of interest and affection; how, in America, the British colonies rapidly became far mightier and wealthier than the realms which Cortes and Pizarro had added to the dominions of Charles the Fifth; how in Asia, British adventurers founded an empire not less splendid and more durable than that of Alexander.

[4] There are two good treatments of Duncombe's life and the parliamentary bill against him. The first is DUNCOMBE, Charles (1764-1841), of Duncombe Park, Helmsley, Yorks. in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1820-1832, ed. D.R. Fisher (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and the second is by a person named Heather: The ROADS Family of Buckinghamshire, and 'One-Place-Studies' of Waddesdon, Grendon Underwood and Wotton Underwood on rootsweb

[5] From the wikipedia article, Darien scheme:

The colonization project that became known as the Darien Scheme or Darien Disaster[1] was an unsuccessful attempt by the Kingdom of Scotland to become a world trading nation by establishing a colony called 'Caledonia' on the Isthmus of Panama in the late 1690s. From the outset, the undertaking was beset by poor planning and provision, weak leadership, lack of demand for trade goods, devastating epidemics of disease and increasing shortage of food; it was finally abandoned after a siege by Spanish forces in April, 1700. As the Darien company was backed by about a quarter of the money circulating in Scotland, its failure left the nobles and landowners – who had suffered a run of bad harvests – almost completely ruined and was an important factor in weakening their resistance to the Act of Union (finally consummated in 1707).

[8] The extract comes from Chapter XXIV of the History.

Potato race

2012-11-05T17:59:00.001-05:00

These boys were spectators at a potato barrel rolling contest held October 1940 in Presque Isle, Maine. Jack Delano attended the event to photograph it for the Farm Security Administration.

I'd guess that Delano attracted the attention of the boys before he took their picture. As these two details show, they seem happy to be photographed as much as they're happy to have climbed to an ideal viewing spot.

In one of his first assignments for FSA Delano had used his camera to document laborers and laboring communities along the U.S. east coast. Starting in Florida, he'd worked his way to the nation's north-east estremity — Aroostook County along the border with Canada. All his photos in this set come from the FSA/OWI Color Photograph collection in the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. As usual, click to enlarge.

Although this set of photos shows us the contest itself, Delano seems more interested in the people who turned out to watch it.

In the following photo, the boy who's looking at the camera would probably have been happier mingling with the kids on the roof of Chesley's Electric Service.

The next photo seems to have a post-modern sensibility. It's not about the event or even about watching the event. It seems to some degree to be an abstract display of contrasting tones and textures and an exercise in handling negative space (the light colored areas, particularly among ankles and feet) but basically I suspect he wanted to see whether a photo of people's backsides would succeed, could be at all visually satisfying.

On the other hand it might have been a kind of inside joke. In an interview some 25 years later Delano said his boss would give detailed instructions before sending photographers out on assignment. He'd give them books to read and give them things to look out for, like "there is a certain drugstore on such and such a corner which has a certain thing in the window which you must be sure to find" and even "what kind of shoes" the people wear. He'd expect Delano to absorb all this information but he also expected him to be observant and to make his own judgment about what to shoot and how.*

The caption of this one says these girls are high school students who are participating by holding spuds on the ends of sticks. At left you can see a barrel sculpture, the "pototem pole."

The caption says the string that the Boy Scout is holding is the finishing line for the barrel race.

Here Delano shows the contest itself. Notice the news photographer on the back of the pickup truck and, just in front of him, the barrel with its potatoes. The caption says a full barrel weighs 200 pounds.

Detail from the previous image:

In this shot you can see more of the spectators and their reactions.

Detail from the previous image:

Here are two more photos from the many Delano took that day. The first is a poster advertising the contest and the second shows a champion roller. The caption says the latter shows "James Day, ace barrel roller and idol of Aroostook boys."

----------

*
Here's the relevant section of the interview:

[Interviewer:] We get these stories about how Roy would give you all sorts of books to read, and give you personal lectures and shooting scripts, and all that sort of thing. How much of that is correct?

JACK DELANO: Well, that's basically correct. I think that's quite true. Roy gave you the feeling that he knew more about everything that you did and, above all, ha knew more about America that you did, by far. And that's one of the things that I loved about Roy and one of the things I got most from him was a feeling about the United States, about America. This enthusiasm and love for the detail and the deeper meaning of everything American was something that he must have transmitted to everybody. He certainly did to me. In preparing for an assignment he not only gave us books to read, and all kinds of other things, but would talk and talk and talk in great detail about what you will find up there, and what you must look for, and there is a certain drugstore on such and such a corner which has a certain thing in the window which you must be sure to find, and so on. And he almost always would end up in saying, "But, of course, if you don't find any of these things, you do what you want to anyway." This is the way it always ended and frequently, after lengthy and detailed instructions and shooting scripts that Roy would develop, if you got up there and found that there was something else that interested you, and something else that you felt was more important and more pertinent, you just went ahead and did it; and wrote to Roy and said, "Look, Roy, it isn't like you said." This was perfectly okay with him because he wasn't imposing his ideas on you; he was trying to get you stimulated enough so that you would find out what was really there.

Interviewer: There was no dictation, I mean in this whole business he was simply trying to get you started. He didn't care if you went off on your own and took a different slant?

JACK DELANO: Not at all. On the contrary, he was trying to stimulate you to do that. In some of his letters, which we will show you -- I'm sure we'll find them this afternoon -- he would write in longhand these long letters in which he would work out for you a complete shooting script on what you should be looking for in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania or in Aroostook County, Maine. He would write in great detail about potato-picking, and what kind of shoes do they wear, and what kind of gloves do they wear, and where do they eat and sleep, and do all sorts of other things. But this was primarily a guide for you to open your eyes and be looking for these things. He wouldn't tell you what to photograph at all, ever.

-- Oral history interview with Jack and Irene Delano, 1965 June 12, An interview of Jack and Irene Delano in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, conducted 1965 June 12, by Richard Doud, for the Archives of American Art.

----------

Some sources

Jack Delano, 83; Depicted the Depression, an obituary in the New York Times by By Margarett Loke, August 15, 1997

Harvesting Potatoes, text by Richard E. Rand, images from Aroostook County Historical and Art Museum, Presque Isle Historical Society and Southern Aroostook Agricultural Museum

Aroostook County, Maine. October, 1940. Aroostook County, one of the largest potato producing centers in the world Photographed by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration. A collection of 160 photographic prints in the Library of Congress. Summary: Photographs show Aroostook County, one of the largest potato producing centers in the world. Aerial views of fields and farms, during harvest season. Tractor and horse drawn diggers. Crews of men, women, and children. Storage barns. Loading railroad cars for shipment. Isolated potato seed foundation farms. FSA community seed program. Demonstration of cutting and planting seed potatoes. Starch factory. Homes and families of French-Canadian farmers. Portraits.

Oral history interview with Jack and Irene Delano, 1965 June 12, An interview of Jack and Irene Delano in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, conducted 1965 June 12, by Richard Doud, for the Archives of American Art.

Farms in the Aroostook County, Me., Oct. 1940 : potatoes, Library of Congress

Farms in the Aroostook County, Me., Oct. 1940 : potatoes, Flickr photos from the Library of Congress

The Potato Culture of Aroostook County, Maine, USA

Aroostook Potatoes on aroostook.net

The Maine Potato Barrel Story
Extract: "The potato barrel is native to Aroostook, Maine's largest county; once the nation's largest producer of potatoes. While the other potato producing areas used burlap sacks, Aroostook farmers used the good, tongue and groove cedar barrel. It was used in the field during harvest and in the storage and sold by the barrel; they still are in Aroostook where farmers figure the cost of potatoes by the barrel. Although automated harvesters have taken over the bulk of the work, there are fields, even today, where barrels can be seen strung out in rows for the pickers to fill. Men, women and children-even grandparents bend to the task. An even today, children are excused from school for several weeks during this most important event."

Teams And Technology Educating Researching Aroostook County Tubers
Extract: "The history of the Maine potato industry reveals an industry of great change as illustrated by the number of farmers in business in the early 1900's compared to the early 2000's. The report titled, "Aroostook: Potato Capital of America" states there were over 6,000 farmers devoted to raising potatoes in Aroostook County, Maine around 1930-1940, while another report titled "A Study of the Maine Potato Industry: Its Economic impact 2003" reports only 586 potato farms in Maine in 1997."

Aroostook potatoes

2012-11-04T14:09:00.001-05:00

{Caption: Children gathering potatoes on a large farm, vicinity of Caribou, Aroostook County, Me. Schools do not open until the potatoes are harvested, by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration; source: FSA/OWI Color Photograph collection in the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress}

{Caption: same}

In October 1940 Jack Delano traveled to Aroostook County, Maine, to photograph the potato harvest for the Farm Security Administration. Of all the FSA photographers who worked in color film he was the most prolific and arguably the best.

When the top photo appeared on Flickr , a woman who picked potatoes in Aroostook added a reminiscence in the comments:

I feel so fortunate to have been born and raised in the potato fields of Caribou, Maine. What a wonderful opportunity to learn a good work ethic and earn money for clothes for school. We were never cold and were well dressed at the same time. My dad was the digger and the overseer of the whole operation... he would have to get off of the bus to life [i.e. let] some of the children into the bus. Sometimes he would let the men run over a barrel to build a fire to warm up our toes and fingers while waiting for the hard frost to melt on the ground so that he could dig and we could pick!! Betty Bubar Collins. -- Elizabeth 58

Another Flickr commenter thought the boy at right might be crying. The two following detail images are inconclusive but I think his expression could be a smile.

About four basket loads would fill one of the barrels that were strewn around the field. A picker would mark each barrel with a ticket which would be used to calculate earnings. A full barrel earned the picker 12 cents in 1940. An adult picker in an average field could fill 30 or more barrels and a good picker in a field free of rocks could do maybe 100. If they stuck to it, the two boys might split two and a half dollars for their day's work.

You can see from this photo from the Aroostook shoot that at least some farmers still used horses to pull a mechanical digger through their fields.

{Caption: A horse-drawn digger in operation on a (potato) farm run by a French-Canadian, Caribou, Aroostook county, Me.}

This detail shows that the digger itself was motorized.

The following pair of images show a Massey-Harris No. 1 Potato Digger. The one at left is motorized. You can tell how it worked in the photo of a non-motorized version at right. The cow-catcher burrowed down under the potatoes and the forward motion of the digger brought them up to the conveyor. As the potatoes moved back along the conveyor the earth and plant debris dropped away and the potatoes dropped off the back.

Delano trained as an artist before he took up documentary photography. This photo from the Aroostook set shows his skill at framing, instinct for positioning the horizon, and expert handling fore-, mid-, and background elements. The photo shows his artistic use of formal design elements — the foreground's diagonal furrows contrasting with diagonal elements that point to a focal point in the group of structures positioned just off center. It also shows also his fine handling of hue — the earth and sky tones balanced against each other on either side of a contrasting band with white highlights. And the barrels and figures on the foreground artificial horizon add greatly to the visual impact of the image. As with all images on this page, click to enlarge.

{Caption: Farm in the vicinity of Van Buren, Aroostook County, Me.}

These two other long shots also show his command of photographic design.

{Caption: Farm in the vicinity of Wallagrasse, Aroostook County, Me.}

{Caption: Farms in the vicinity of Caribou, Aroostook County, Me.}

FSA photographers took comparatively few color photos and only a handful of those were taken from the air. All of these color aerials appear in Delano's Aroostook set and are reproduced below. In 1965 Delano commented on the difficulty he faced in getting authorization for them.

JACK DELANO: I think life would have been a lot simpler for Roy [Stryker, Delano's boss]and probably for the rest of us if there had been less stringent insistence, if there had been less insistence, on abiding by the letter of the law in all government procedures that had to be attended to for everything, because this was in a way a kind of unusual project and it needed a little bit of unusual treatment. For example, I found myself up in Aroostook County, Maine and I wanted to get some aerial shots of the great potato fields and this got to be a real serious problem. How did I rent a plane for an hour? Telegraphs back and forth to Roy about what papers to fill out, what forms you need, and what kind of receipt to fill out, and what does the pilot have to sign, and all these things just in order for me to take a plane for an hour.

RICHARD DOUD: Did you manage?

JACK DELANO: Oh yes, I did it. I would have done it anyway and paid it out of my own pocket.

-- Oral history interview with Jack and Irene Delano, 1965 June 12, An interview of Jack and Irene Delano in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, conducted 1965 June 12, by Richard Doud, for the Archives of American Art.

{Caption: Potato farms in Aroostook County, Me.}

{Caption: Potato farms showing layout of land and buildings, vicinity of Caribou, Aroostook, Me.}

{Caption: Potato farm in Aroostook county, Me., after the potatoes have been harvested}

When Aroostook potatoes were graded, the best went for seed potatoes, next were potatoes for cooking, and last potatoes for making starch. Quality controls were stringent and most of the crop might end up in the last category. The 1940 potato crop was one of the biggest ever in the U.S. and Aroostook County was the dominant producer. Starch factories did well that year.

{A starch factory along the Aroostook River, Caribou, Aroostook County, Me.}

---------

I've marked this outline map of the counties of Maine to show the location where Delano took these color photos.

{source: 1940 U.S. Census of Agriculture}

----------

Some sources:

Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs

Oral history interview with Jack and Irene Delano, 1965 June 12, An interview of Jack and Irene Delano in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, conducted 1965 June 12, by Richard Doud, for the Archives of American Art.
Extract:

RICHARD DOUD: There was no dictation, I mean in this whole business he was simply trying to get you started. He didn't care if you went off on your own and took a different slant?

JACK DELANO: Not at all. On the contrary, he was trying to stimulate you to do that. In some of his letters, which we will show you -- I'm sure we'll find them this afternoon -- he would write in longhand these long letters in which he would work out for you a complete shooting script on what you should be looking for in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania or in Aroostook County, Maine. He would write in great detail about potato-picking, and what kind of shoes do they wear, and what kind of gloves do they wear, and where do they eat and sleep, and do all sorts of other things. But this was primarily a guide for you to open your eyes and be looking for these things. He wouldn't tell you what to photograph at all, ever.

, I found myself up in Aroostook County, Maine and I wanted to get some aerial shots of the great potato fields and this got to be a real serious problem. How did I rent a plane for an hour? Telegraphs back and forth to Roy about what papers to fill out, what forms you need, and what kind of receipt to fill out, and what does the pilot have to sign, and all these things just in order for me to take a plane for an hour.

The Photography of Jack Délano - the Man who Colored the Forties

Potatoes, Economic Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture
Extract: "Potatoes are the leading vegetable crop in the United States (not including sweet potatoes), contributing about 15 percent of farm sales receipts for vegetables. Over 50 percent of potato sales are to processors for french fries, chips, dehydrated potatoes, and other potato products; the remainder goes to the fresh market. Although potatoes are grown year round, the fall crop comprises roughly 90 percent of potato production. "

Production of White-Potato Starch
R. H. Treadway, W. W. Howerton, Commercial Potato Production in North America, The Potato Association of America Handbook, Second Revision of American Potato Journal Supplement Volume 57 and USDA Handbook 267 by the Extension Section of The Potato Association of America
Extract: "Aroostook County became a center for production of table-stock and seed potatoes, and the starch industry provided an outlet for the culls. ... In 1940, Aroostook County had 27 starch factories, whose total daily capacity was more than 150 tons of starch. This greatly increased capacity was due mainly to construction of three modern continuous-process plants in 1938 and 1939. ... Starch factories provide an outlet for potatoes that should be kept off the food market in order to make effective the slogan, 'Sell the best—and process the rest.'"

United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, Crop Production Historical Track Records, April 2012

Potatoes Annual Summary, National Agricultural Statistics Service

Harvesting Potatoes, text by Richard E. Rand, images from Aroostook County Historical and Art Museum, Presque Isle Historical Society and Southern Aroostook Agricultural Museum

Aroostook County, Maine. October, 1940. Aroostook County, one of the largest potato producing centers in the world Photographed by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration.
160 photographic prints.
Summary: Photographs show Aroostook County, one of the largest potato producing centers in the world. Aerial views of fields and farms, during harvest season. Tractor and horse drawn diggers. Crews of men, women, and children. Storage barns. Loading railroad cars for shipment. Isolated potato seed foundation farms. FSA community seed program. Demonstration of cutting and planting seed potatoes. Starch factory. Homes and families of French-Canadian farmers. Portraits.

Farms in the Aroostook County, Me., Oct. 1940 : potatoes

Farms in the Aroostook County, Me., Oct. 1940 : potatoes

The Potato Culture of Aroostook County, Maine, USA

Aroostook Potatoes

Potato country, A local harvest unearthed, by Matthew Bellico, Boston Globe Correspondent, October 5, 2008

Teams And Technology Educating Researching Aroostook County Tubers
Extract: "The history of the Maine potato industry reveals an industry of great change as illustrated by the number of farmers in business in the early 1900's compared to the early 2000's. The report titled, 'Aroostook: Potato Capital of America' states there were over 6,000 farmers devoted to raising potatoes in Aroostook County, Maine around 1930-1940, while another report titled "A Study of the Maine Potato Industry: Its Economic impact 2003" reports only 586 potato farms in Maine in 1997."

About the Maine Potato

Aroostook County, Maine on wikipedia

Aroostook War on wikipedia

Jack Delano on wikipedia

Kodachrome on wikipedia

Harvesting Oats

2012-11-01T09:08:00.000-04:00

{Click image to enlarge. Caption: Harvesting oats. Clayton, Indiana, south of Indianapolis, by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration; source: FSA/OWI Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress}

During the mid-1930s dust-bowl drought and in record-setting heat Dorothea Lange took her Rollei on assignment to an Indiana farm. The month of July in 1936 was the hottest on record in and around Clayton, Indiana. She traveled there for her employer, the Farm Security Administration, to photograph an oat harvest.

Her photos show farming in a period of transition. The farmers obtained most of the power they needed from horses and their own muscles but they would bring in power equipment at harvest time. The equipment would be cooperatively purchased and maintained among local farmers or one farmer would own and rent it. The power source would be an engine, probably a self-propelled one like the modern tractor. The engine would power a thresher which separated the oats from the stalks on which they grew. The photos show the thresher but not the engine and it's evident that Lange wasn't much interested in machines but rather the men and horses.

Oats were harvested like other grains. The oat plants would be mowed down and bundled then threshed to separate seed from stalk. This mowing and bundling had already been done when Lange arrived. Her photos show the oat plants being loaded to horse-drawn wagons and brought to the thresher where they're forked into the receiving end. The thresher pounds the plants to loosen the seed which then drops to a receiving chamber. From there it's augured up and out to a receiving wagon. The cut up stalks are blown out to make a vast pile in the field where the work is being done.

The oats — the seeds of the oat plant — are used in making beer, in cereal for breakfast, and as feed for horses and other livestock. The cut up stalks are strewn in animal stalls. Because of drought and heat this is not a good year for oats but you can't tell that from the photos.

The following photos are all captioned either "Harvesting oats. Clayton, Indiana, south of Indianapolis" or "The threshing of oats. Clayton, Indiana, south of Indianapolis." Lange took them all in the same photo-shoot and they're typically excellent as documentary record, human study, and photographic art. As with the first, they all come from the FSA/OWI Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress.

Bundles of oats were tossed into the mouth of the thresher (also called a separator). A 1979 article describes the process:

A chain operated feeder fed the bundles into rapidly moving arms which cut the string tie from the bundles and spread the stalks of grain going into the giant stomach of the old separator.

As the stalks of grain moved into the machine a cylinder beat the grain from the stalks and a huge blower blew the straw from the grain.

The straw went flying out the blower and the grain was augered from the bowels of the machine.

The engine powers the thresher by means a long, wide belt made of canvas or leather. The whole process is dangerous to men and horses alike but the belt is particularly hazardous. If it breaks in opeation it whips around at great speed causing serious injury wherever it strikes flesh.

This photo and the one that follows show part of the augur mechanism for transporting the oats from the belly of the thresher to a waiting wagon.

In addition to the augur this shows a pipe, at left, from which the stalks are expelled.

------

This video shows theshing in action. The tractor is modern but the thresher itself is authentically 1930s.

{Threshing oats with Advance Rumely Ideal threshing machine July 2012}

This image shows the type of tractor used in 1930s oat threshing.

{Men threshing oats in 1930's, Mississippi Digital Library}

These are hop seeds.

{Source: 99 Facts About Beer On the Wall... by Jennifer Daniel in Business Week, October 25, 2012}

The camera Lange used for this shoot was a Rollieflex Standard. This shows this medium format camera (6x6 cm) and her large format one (4x5").

{Dorothea Lange's cameras -- Graphix series D and Rolleiflex; source: womensconference.org}

This is a Rollieflex Standard, much like the one she used.

{Standard Rolleiflex Model 6RF 621 1933 with lens hood. Franke and Heidecke's second design for a 6X6 twin lens refex camera, it has all the features that the Rollei twin lens camera's were going to have for the next 50 years. The lens hood is the original Rollei item. Source: dave_dockerill on flickr (the caption is his).}

This shows pages 2-3 of the Instruction Manual for the Rolleiflex Standard.

{Instruction Manual for the Rolleiflex Standard; source: urmonas.net}

This shows Lange using her Rollie to photograph a migrant laborer in 1937.

{Dorothea Lange taking a photograph of a agricultural worker. 1937. Rondal Partridge. Source: Daring to Look, Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field, by Anne Whiston Spirn (U of Chicago Press, 2008)}

------------

Some sources:

Harvesting oats - yesteryear style! by Jan Lee Buxengard in the Spring Grove Herald (Minnesota)

Extract: "Bundles were loaded onto the wagons and brought to the belt-driven threshing machine, which was powered by a tractor. Workers forked the bundles into the machine, heads first. Sharp sickle knives/blades cut the twine. As the bundle moves into the machine, it goes through concave cylinders that loosen the oats from the stem. Then it goes onto the shaker that walks the straw back to the blower and onto the straw pile. Meanwhile, the oats and chaff fall to the bottom of the machine and onto an auger and to the side where an elevator brings the oats up to the hopper to be weighed. At each quarter bushel, the hopper dumps the oats into an auger that takes it to the wagon."

Survivor of 1936 drought recalls conditions by Bob Buttgen, The News Sun, Monday, July 16, 2012
Excerpt:

WAWAKA, Ind. (AP) Tom Franks was 15 years old in 1936, the year that Indiana and much of the country suffered through a severe drought that spawned the Dust Bowl era in many parts of America.Now, at the age of 91, Franks still can recall the horrible conditions his family had to endure on their 77-acre farm in Wawaka.

"The corn only got to about 3 feet high, and with no water available, it just turned brown," he said. "Back then, we didn't plant corn until the first of June, because of the chance of frost and freeze. I can still see that short corn and how brown it got. Just like it's going to get this year if we don't get any rain."

Franks said his parents, Frank and Vida Franks, had six daughters and one son, William Thomas Franks. "I was fifth in line," he said.

Franks has lived an extraordinary life. Living through the drought as a teenager is just one of many trials for the man who is a hero in many respects.

Along with his many years in farming, he's a decorated World War II veteran who was presented with the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. Twice he was shot by German soldiers in Europe, and each time he went back to the front lines after being patched up.

He's been widowed twice and survived prostate cancer, open-heart surgery and a hip replacement.

"I've pretty much outlived my friends and my enemies," he said with a well-earned chuckle.

"Our farm had just about everything back then," he said of the 1930s. "We grew red clover, oats, corn and wheat. We didn't know anything about soybeans back then. We didn't have beef cattle but had dairy cows. There were lots of ducks, geese and turkeys that had the run of the yard. We had 10 cows and probably 100 laying hens, plus four sows and a few ewes.

"I know it was dry back then, but I don't remember us having the heat like we've had this summer," he said.

(According to the National Weather Service, the highest temperature ever recorded in Indiana came during the summer of 1936, when Collegeville recorded 116 degrees.)

The Frankses didn't have electricity in 1936, and there were plenty of chores to keep a teenage boy busy.

"One thing they never taught me was how to milk a cow, and I didn't mind not knowing that," he said with a grin.

Franks has lived his entire life within a mile or so from the farm where he grew up. These days, at 91, his mind is as sharp as a tack. He's still active, having attended Wawaka High School's class reunion back in June.

"We had 21 in our class, and that was the biggest class ever, up to that time," he said. "I think there's just three of us who are still around."

Farming was much simpler back then, he recalled.

"We hadn't heard of hybrid corn yet. We just had open-pollinated corn. You'd go out in the field and pick the best ears you could find for seed the next year. You didn't have any seed salesman coming around," he said.

"Dad had a Fortson tractor. It was a hard-starting thing. You had to crank the handle just right to get it to spark and get out the way when it kicked back. I remember he traded that in on a 1020 International, and later traded that one in for a Farmall F-20," he said. "They paved U.S. 6 back in '33 or '34. Our tractor had big lugs on it, and we'd have to cover them up if we were going to drive on the pavement very far.

"We also had a big team of horses, and I enjoyed working those horses. But I also enjoyed driving our tractors. Our red clover crop was planted back in February. We would make hay out of it, and the clover made it through the spring before the drought hit that summer.

"Mom had a yard garden and grew Navy beans and potatoes. We always had a basement full of potatoes in the fall. After we harvested the Navy beans, we would stomp on them to open them up and let the wind blow away the chaff.

"We had a well that was real shallow, probably only had to go down 15 feet or so to get water. I remember we had to pump the water out with a hand pump, but eventually we got a windmill that would run the pump for us," Franks said.

"Back then, we didn't realize how hard it was for my parents and what they were going through," he recalled. "We were just coming out of the Depression. I can still remember the day after the banks closed (in 1929). Dad came back from going to bank in town, and he told us there was no money. I still remember the look of panic on my mother's face. I will never forget that.

"Dad was one of the lucky ones; he had a job driving kids to school, and that brought us a little extra money," he said. "We didn't have too much money to spend, but we had parents who loved us, and that was enough for us."

The Impact of the 1936 Corn-Belt Drought on American Farmers’ Adoption of Hybrid Corn by Richard Sutch (University of California, Riverside and the National Bureau of Economic Research, Draft of January 6, 2010) (pdf)
Extract: "A severe and sustained drought struck central North America during the 1930s. Centered on eastern Kansas, it extended north into the Canadian prairies, east to the Illinois- Indiana boarder, south to the Gulf of Mexico, and west into Montana and Idaho. See Figure 1. The seven-year period of low rainfall and high temperatures, 1932-1938, was unprecedented in the memory of the Euro-Americans who inhabited the region in its extent, severity, and duration. It has been described by climate scientists as ―one of the most severe environmental catastrophes in U.S. history [Schubert et al, 2004: 1855]. The period is best remembered for the ―Dust Bowl conditions created on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and adjacent parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas."

1930's: Threshing Wheat with a Threshing Machine was a Fun Time on the Farm, Work Horses Were Very Important on Small Farms in the 1930's, by Stewart Lodge, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Extract: "No threshing day story would be complete without mention of the noon meal. The neighborhood farmers who brought their horses and wagons would also bring their wives. The wives would all bring their favorite homemade pies or cakes. Then they would stay and help cook all the meat and vegetable dishes. The cooking was done on a wood stove with a room temperature of 120 degrees or more. The workers all had very large appetites, but it was almost impossible to sample all the many dishes. The hard part was trying to work so soon after such a tremendous meal. This ritual was repeated several times as you traveled to all your neighbors' farms to repay them for their help. Each wife tried to outdo the others. It is no wonder that threshing day dinners were legendary."

FSA Photographs in Indiana,
Program of Digital Scholarship, University Library, IUPUI

Back home again: Indiana in the Farm Security Administration photographs, 1935-1943, by Robert L. Reid, United States. Farm Security Administration (Indiana University Press, 1987)

Annual Crop Summary, 1936, Indiana Crops and Livestock, US Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics (pdf)

Maximum and Minimum Temperatures in Indiana, Indiana State Climate Office, Purdue University

THRESHING OATS CHALLENGES MEN AND OLD MACHINES by Bob Harrington on farmcollector.com

99 Facts About Beer On the Wall... by Jennifer Daniel in Business Week, October 25, 2012

It's Global Warming, Stupid by Paul M. Barrett in Business Week on November 01, 2012
Extract: "This July was the hottest month recorded in the U.S. since record-keeping began in 1895, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The U.S. Drought Monitor reported that two-thirds of the continental U.S. suffered drought conditions this summer."

Rolleiflex (standard) in camerapedia.wikia

The first Rolleiflex cameras on roleiclub.com

Economy of Indiana in wikipedia

1936 North American heat wave in wikipedia

Graphlex Series D Camera

Rollieflex Camera on wikipedia

summer arts & crafts

2012-09-11T06:58:00.000-04:00

This photo is called "Fair Bros. play ground." An anonymous employee of the National Photo Company took it in the summer of 1922.

{Caption: Fair Bros. play ground; date Created/Published: [1922]; medium: 1 negative : glass ; 4 x 5 in. or smaller; source: Prints and Photographs Collections, Library of Congress. I saw this first on Shorpy}

There's whole lots in this photo to like (click here to view full size). First off, the eyes. You expect eyes in group shots but not so many expressive pairs of them. Next the poses. This is not a Kodak snap but professional work on glass neg. within bellows camera on tripod. Someone grouped the kids and kept them more or less in place while the photog did his laborious best to make an enduring image. Yet it feels, and quite clearly is, spontaneous. No one's nervous about the ungainly apparatus they're fronting; some a few are curious, one's coy, the rest can't be bothered to give it notice. Then there're the swingers. Catching them as he did the camera man achieved something remarkable. This is not easy to do with a cumbersome, sheet negative, view camera. He surely had a lens shutter but with sensitized plate and lens both inevitably slow, the catching of the swingers to freeze motion is remarkably ept, and doing so artistically is much more so. The framing seems banal until you notice that the right swinger is almost entirely out of view. That plus the structures at right lead the eye off the image and you hardly notice that there's also an off frame mysterious something at left as well. And the compositional reference to Da Vinci's Last Supper is certainly unconscious — accidental — but not too subtly present all the same. You can tell by the light that it's noon but not so bright a day that shadows are harsh. The light suffuses the shot nicely modeling the faces. There's lots more to see. Each child is shown to have her or his own personality; none uninteresting. We're in Washington DC and it's 1922. Many of these kids would have black playmates but there would be segregation of races in schools, businesses, and public places like this park and its summer program. Still, it's not like the families of these kids are many notches higher in the ranking of social classes than their black neighbors. The playground is hardscrabble. The boys are mostly barefoot. Nobody's in tatters but there are none of the sailor outfits that uppers put their kids into. I don't know anything about the actual location and the internets are not helpful. What is the "Fair Bros. play ground"? What do you see here? A bit more than a quarter of a century later I could be found in a group like this, 'tho with trees and grass and some tennis courts and a pool as well as the swing set. And we did gimp projects rather than yarn boards. But my feet were bare, the group was mixed ages and sexes as here, and the counselors were not that much older than the participants.

not so much inclined towards the cultivation of the earth

2012-09-06T10:07:00.001-04:00

My friend Mitch prepared a well-researched and -written article for a blog called "Unique at penn" (the classy lower case p is theirs, not my typing error). In it he gives a careful description of a manuscript map of 1793 showing the route from Philadelphia to the site of a treaty negotiation with leaders of the Miami Indians near Sandusky, Ohio.

His nice analysis called to mind another document related to the dealings of the new U.S. Government with the Miami's chiefs. A decade after the year the map was made two chiefs wrote the following letter to members of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends. From a time just after the making of the map the Meeting had been trying, with little success, to help the Miami survive. After U.S. forces had defeated the Indians and taken most of their hunting lands the Miami chiefs came to believe that survival depended on a cultural transformation: learning to farm and becoming a settled agricultural community. They saw the plight of the young men, defeated in battle and no long able to spend their days hunting, becoming dispirited and succumbing to alcoholism, and they saw the tribes weakened and suceptible to disease. When the Baltimore Yearly Meeting offered help, they readily accepted. The Quakers sent farming tools, put pressure on the government to outlaw sale of liquor to the Indians, and went out to Ohio to teach and advise. The letter tells how little this effort succeeded:

The Little Turtle's Town, Sept. 18th, 1803. - From the Little Turtle, The Five Medals, and others, to Evan Thomas, George Ellicott, and others.

Brother's and Friends of our hearts, — We have received your speech from the hand of our friend, Wm. Wells, with the implements of husbandry, that you were so kind to send to his care, — all in good order.

Brothers, it is our wish that the Great Spirit will enable you to render to your Red Brethren that service which you appear to be so desirous of doing them, and which their women and children are so much in need of.

Brothers, we will try to use the articles you have sent us, and if we should want more, we will let you know it.

Brothers, we are sorry to say that the minds of our people are not so much inclined towards the cultivation of the earth as we could wish them.

Brothers, our Father, the President of the United States, has prevented our traders from selling liquor to our people, which is the best thing he could do for his Red Children.

Brothers, our people appear dissatisfied, because our traders do not, as usual, bring them liquor, and, we believe, will request our Father to let the traders bring them liquor, and if he does, your Red Brethren are all lost forever.

Brothers, you will see, from what we have said, that our prospects are bad at present, though we hope the Great Spirit will change the minds of our people, and tell them it will be better for them to cultivate the earth than to drink whiskey.

Brothers, we hope the Great Spirit will permit some of you to come and see us, — when you will be able to know whether you can do anything for us or not.

Brothers, we delivered you the sentiments of our hearts, when we spoke to you at Baltimore, and shall say nothing more to you at present. We now take you by the hand, and thank you for the articles you were so kind to send us.

Signed,

The Little Turtle, Miami Chief,
The Five Medals, Potowatamy Chief

-----

Little Turtle, Gerard T. Hopkins, and the Baltimore Yearly Meeting

In 1795 the Baltimore Yearly Meeting had appointed Indian Committees to consider how best to help the Miami. When in 1797 Chief Little Turtle came to Philadelphia to meet President Washington the Friends invited him to come address the Yearly Meeting. The Quakers then sent tools and instructors to the tribes and used their influence to have the sale of liquor banned.

In 1804 a merchant named Gerard T. Hopkins, uncle and benefactor of the famous Johns Hopkins) documented the Quakers efforts to help the Miami tribes. His diary and letters were latter collected into a book published in a book called A mission to the Indians, from the Indian committee of Baltimore Yearly Meeting, to Fort Wayne (cited below).

Little Turtle, with miniature of George Washington on neck band.

{Source: Chicago Historical Society}

Little Turtle's name and mark (one up from the bottom) on the
Treaty of Fort Greenville, August 1795, signed by chiefs of the Ohio tribes after defeat by General Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

{National Archives and Records Administration (U.S.)}

------

Some sources:

Preparing for a Treaty at the Early War Department by Mitch Fraas, Wednesday, September 5, 2012

A mission to the Indians, from the Indian committee of Baltimore Yearly Meeting, to Fort Wayne, in 18O4
by Gerard T. Hopkins, Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, edited by Martha Ellicott Tyson (Philadelphia, T. Ellwood Zell, 1862)

A Quaker pilgrimage: being a mission to the Indians from the Indian Committee of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting to Fort Wayne, 1804, edited by Alene Godfrey, prepared by the staff of the Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County, 1959

Historical Narratives of Early Canada
Extract:

When an important peace parley failed American commissioners sent the following coded message to a waiting general."We did not effect peace." The general translated this into "Begin vigorous offensive action." The offensive action occurred at a place called Fallen Timbers on August 20th 1794. The army of Brigadier General Anthony Wayne, the Natives' nemesis, met and defeated a large force of western Natives. The Miami chief, Little Turtle, was a fierce opponent of the Americans but by the time of this battle he advocated peace.

Subsequent to this defeat some 110 chiefs and warriors signed the Treaty of Fort Greenville in August 1795. By this treaty, the most important in the history of the United States, the sachems and War Chiefs gave away 25,000 square miles which today includes most of present-day Ohio, part of Indiana and the sites of Detroit, Chicago and a number of other mid-western cities for a measely 25,000 dollars in trade goods - calico shirts, farm tools, trade hatchets, ribbons, combs, mirrors and blankets and an annuity of $9500 to be divided among the tribes. It was a humiliating settlement for the payments represented a mere pittance with some tribes receiving as little as $500 a year. Few could challenge its terms, however, for when Wayne destroyed their fields, most of the destitute Natives became dependent on the United States for food. The situation and the ceremony were mocked. When a calumet or peace pipe was smoked by the parties to finalize the terms of the treaty, the ceremony was ridiculed by one American negotiator as "a tedious routine."

Battle of Fallen Timbers on Ohio History Central

Little Turtle, Chief of the Miami, prepared by the staff of the Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County, published 1954 by The Library in [Fort Wayne, Ind.]

Quaker Agriculture missions to the Miami in wikipedia

Johns Hopkins in wikipedia

Battle of Fallen Timbers in wikipedia

Stalingrad

2012-07-24T19:18:00.000-04:00

The battles that took place in Western Russia and the Ukraine during 1941 and 1942 are easy to summarize but difficult to comprehend. On June 22, 1941, Germany broke its treaty with the Soviet Union and, in the largest attack ever made by one country on another, began a blitzkrieg on the entire western border from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Soviet intelligence knew that the attack would come but Stalin refused to believe his own (excellent) sources as to its timing. As a result the Soviet command did not concentrate its forces so as to delay and possibly arrest the lightening advance. By the time he came to realize the speed, extent, and targets of the German attack, huge amounts of Soviet military hardware and more than a million military personnel had been killed, wounded, or captured.[1]

It's believed that Stalin made a second major blunder at this time in issuing orders that essentially said soldiers must fight to the death without giving ground and this policy increased the Germans' ability to cut off and surround Soviet armies.

Nonetheless, by the time the Germans reached Moscow the thick and sticky mud of the Russian autumn slowed their advance to a halt and, learning from intelligences sources that the Japanese did not plan to attack from the east, Soviet military leaders were able to move armies from places like Siberia to the front lines in the west.

In the summer of 1942 Stalin made yet another mistake, not realizing that the Panzer strikes in the south were aimed at obtaining the oil fields in the Caucasus near Stalingrad. At this point Hitler committed the same sort of ego-driven error that Stalin had been making. German armies could have by-passed Stalingrad and pushed on into the Caucasus, but, when a bottleneck developed slowing movement southward, he directed that the 4th Panzer Army be diverted to attack Stalingrad.

The result of this pair of mistakes was the Battle of Stalingrad. Hitler ordered that the city be taken and Stalin ordered that it be held at all costs. In this fight to the death the Soviet side prevailed. The Germans had great advantage in armor, air coverage, and field discipline, but these were of little value in the house-to-house, floor-to-floor, room-to-room fighting in the city. In that environment, the superior numbers of the Soviet forces, their skill in face-to-face combat, their endurance under impossible conditions, and the determination of great numbers of them to defend to the death gave them a superiority they'd previously lacked.

The battle was horrific, devastating in the most literal sense. One author calls it "the greatest and most hideous ... conflict in history." And many consider it to be decisive. The failure of the Germans to take Moscow had been a symbolic victory that did not lead to the repulse of attacks elsewhere, but the fanatic struggle for Stalingrad led to the first Soviet victories in counter attacks that cut off the 4th Panzer Army and eliminated it as a fighting force.[2]

That's my summary, but it's not my main topic.

I'm currently reading Vasily Grossman's A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 (Pantheon, 2007)

Grossman was a novelist who volunteered to serve as a war correspondent. In that role he covered action throughout the Soviet defeats and withdrawals up to and including the Battle for Moscow and then covered all of the fighting in Stalingrad and the subsequent crushing of German forces from the Caucasus to Berlin between 1943 and 1945.

A Moscow intellectual, non-Party member and Jew, he was an unlikely battle journalist, but his work was superb and he became one of the best known and most highly regarded of all the newsmen covering the war.

He knew that all news accounts must serve the interests of the Party and its leader, Stalin. And he knew the lines that must not be crossed on pain of imprisonment or death. He could not write anything that expressed or suggested inconvenient truths. No Soviet citizen or soldier could be shown as anything but resolute in defending the motherland. No officer could be seen to falter in judgement. No soldier could be shown to criticize a superior or question the authority of any part of the governmental apparatus.

Yet, against regulations and what we would think to be common sense, he kept notebooks in which he put what were in fact treasonous statements that he heard in interviews and informal discussions with all sorts of people, military and civilian alike.

He recorded forbidden topics: desertion, self-mutilation to avoid combat, support willingly given the enemy (or, just as bad, coerced support). He wrote about the battalions behind Soviet lines whose job it was to arrest (or sometimes just shoot) anyone who refused to fight, malingered, or showed unwillingness to face the enemy and die fighting.

He wrote about Soviet snipers who were ordered to shoot Russians whom the Germans had forced to act as water carriers, even children who ran errands in return for the promise of a crust of bread.

He quoted men who believed their officers to be fools. And he wrote about hardships which were not to be made public — lack of ammunition, lack of food.

He recorded petty rivalries among high-ranking officers and incidents in which these rivalries affected tactics. And, rarely, he found commanders who were willing to speak of their own mistakes and to criticize not rival officers but (treasonous speech) the high-command in Moscow.

And he kept his notebooks secret. While listening to an interviewee or simply engaging in informal discussion, he generally wrote nothing down. Although he clearly recorded some details at the time (names particularly), only later did he write up what he'd heard, privately and in detail.

But he was not a dissident in the usual sense of the word. The notebooks were source material for his novels and the novels were not overtly anti-Stalin, anti-Party, anti-totalitarian state. He had no trouble getting them published (except for the very last) and they were widely admired. In 1942 Grossman was sure winner of the Stalin Prize in literature but Stalin crossed his name off the list. It was understood that his transgression was not anti-communism but too little Stalinism: he gave more than lip service to internationalism.

A Writer at War is based on the notebooks, his letters, and other writings. It's full of fragments rather than extended prose and jottings rather than well-composed sentences. But it also has quoted statements from people Grossman interviewed.

One set of these narratives comes from women who served in the Army as nurses, clerks, medics, signalers and the like. There were also women who were fighter pilots, snipers, and infantry soldiers.[3] And there were women who served out of uniform as partisans, spies, and the like. These, by contrast, were uniformed non-combatants.

Here are excerpts from Grossman's notebooks on non-combatant women in the Battle of Stalingrad. He is with a division of Siberian troops led by Colonel Lieontiy Nikolaïevitch Gurtiev. The division is at the heart of the fiercest fighting of the Battle of Stalingrad in which virtually all participants were killed, wounded, or captured. The location is a factory building. After the battle, Grossman quoted from his notebooks in writing up the ferocious defense put up by the Siberians.[4]

The editor of the book and source of text labeled "editor" in these excerpts is the respected historian Antony Beevor.

[Editor:] Grossman observed life at Gurtiev's command post.

[Grossman:] Reports [written] on forms, scraps of sheets from plant, party papers, etc. The return of Zoya Kalganova. She had been wounded twice. The divisional commander [greeted her]: 'Hello, my dear girl.'
[Editor:] The courage of the young women medical orderlies was respected by everyone. Most of those in the 62nd Army's Sanitary Company were Stalingrad high school students or graduates, but the 308th Rifle Division had brought some of their own female medics, clerks and signalers all the way from Siberia. The medical orderlies went out under heavy fire to collect the wounded and carry or drag them to safety. They would also take rations forward.

[Grossman, quoting Gurtiev:] Our girls, with thermos flasks on their shoulders, bring us breakfast. Soldiers speak of them with so much love. These girls have not dug themselves any slit-trenches.
[Editor:] One of the young women later provided an improvised casualty list for him of those who had come with her from Siberia.

[Grossman, quoting the casualty list:]
Lyolya Novikova, a cheerful nurse afraid of nothing, was hit by two bullets in the head. Lysorchuk, Nina, wounded. Borodina, Katya, her right hand was smashed. Yegorova, Antonina, she was killed. She went into an attack with her platoon. She was a junior nurse. A submachine-gunner shot her through both legs and she died from loss of blood. Arkanova, Tonya, accompanied wounded soldiers and was posted missing. Kanysheva, Galya, killed by a direct hit from a bomb. And there are just two of us left: Zoya and I ... I was wounded by a mortar-bomb fragment near the bunker, and then by a shell splinter near the Volga crossing.

We studied at School No. 13 in Tobolsk. Mothers were crying: "How come you're going [to the front]? There are only men there." We imagined war very differently to how it's turned out. Our battalion was in the advance guard of the regiment. It went into battle at ten in the morning. Although it was frightening, it was very interesting for us. Thirteen girls survived out of eighteen.

I had long been afraid of dead men, but one night, I had to hide behind a corpse when a sub-machine-gunner blazed away. And I lay behind this corpse. I was so afraid of blood on that first day that I didn't want to eat anything, and I saw blood when I closed my eyes.

We had marched for eight days, 120 kilometres, without sleep and without food. I had been imagining what war was like — everything on fire, children crying, cats running about, and when we got to Stalingrad it really turned out to be like that, only more terrible.

I was peeling potatoes with the cook. We were engrossed in a conversation about soldiers. Suddenly, smoke covered everything, and the cook was killed, and a few minutes later, when the lieutenant came, a mortar bomb exploded and we were both wounded.

It's particularly frightening to move during the night when Germans are shouting not far away, and everything is burning all around. It's very hard to carry the wounded. We made soldiers carry them.

I cried when I was wounded. We didn't collect the wounded in the daytime. Only once, when Kazantseva was carrying Kanysheva, but a sub-machine-gunner shot her in the head. In the daytime, we put them into a shelter, and collected them in the evenings, helped by soldiers.

There were moments sometimes when I regretted having volunteered, but I consoled myself saying to myself that I was not the first one, and not the last. And Klava said: "Such wonderful people get killed, what difference would my death make?" We received letters from our teachers. They were proud of having brought up such daughters. Our friends are jealous of us, that we have the chance to bandage wounds. Papa writes: "Serve with honesty. Come back home with victory." And Mama writes ... Well, when I read what she writes to me, tears start streaming.
[Grossman:] Klava Kopylova, clerk: 'I was buried in the bunker while I was typing an order. The lieutenant shouted to us: "Are you alive?" They dug me out. I moved to a bunker next door, and was buried there once again. They dug me out again, and I started typing again, and typed the document to the end. I will never forget it if I manage to stay alive. There was a bombardment that night. Everything was on fire. They woke me up. All were Party members in the bunker. They congratulated me so warmly, so nicely. On 7 November, I was given my Party card. They tried to photograph me several times for the Party identity card, but shells and mortar bombs were falling all the time. On quiet days, we tap dance and sing "The Little Blue Shawl". I read Anna Karenina and Resurrection.'*

[Grossman:] Lyolya Novikova, junior nurse: 'Galya Titova's friends told me that once when she was bandaging someone, there was heavy firing, the soldier was killed, and she was wounded. She stood up straight and said: "Goodbye, girls," and fell. We buried her ... The wounded soldiers write mostly to their commissars,** ... Although I speak German, I never speak to the prisoners, I don't want even to speak to them.

'My favourite subject was algebra. I had wanted to study at the Machine Manufacturing Institute ... There are just three of us left, out of eighteen girls ... We buried Tonya Yegorova. After the first battle, we lost two girls. We saw the corporal who said that Tonya had died in his arms. She had said to him: "Ay, I am dying. I am in such pain, I don't know whether these legs are mine, or nor." He said: "They are yours." It was impossible to get close to the tank for two days. When we finally got there, we found her lying in the trench. We dressed her, put a handkerchief there, covered her face with a blouse. We were crying. There was myself, Galya Kanysheva and Klava Vasilyeva. They are both dead now. In reserve, we didn't get on well with the soldiers. We checked them for lice and quarrelled with them all the time. And now the soldiers are saying: "We are very grateful to our girls."

'We have gone into the attack with our platoon, and crawled side by side with them. We have fed soldiers, given them water, bandaged them under fire. We turned out to be more resilient than the soldiers, we even used to urge them on. Sometimes, trembling at night, we would think: "Oh, if I were at home right now.

Editor's notes in the text:

* 'The Little Blue Shawl' had such a powerful influence that some soldiers even added the song title to the official battle cry so that it became: 'Za Rodinu, za Stalina, za Siny Platochek!' - 'For the Motherland, for Stalin, for the Blue Shawl!'

** A good soldier when wounded feared, with justification, that he would never be allowed to return to his comrades. The authorities in the rear would just make up a batch of those deemed to be battleworthy again and send them off to any regiment. This was why they were writing to their political officers.

--------------

These images do not come from the book, but from other sources. I'm sorry to say I didn't remember to collect source information as I usually do.

Vasily Grossman in Stalingrad, September 1942

Female medic tending wounded soldier outside Stalingrad

These both were taken at the Battle of Stalingrad

----------

Some sources:

Soviet photos from the battle for Stalingrad 1942
http://warnet.ws/news/5396

WOIIeastbattle

Fatal Beauty: Women In Russia'S Military

two Soviet snipers

VASSILY GROSSMAN, excerpt from In the Line of the Main Attack

Moscow--Stalingrad, 1941-1942, recollections, stories, reports by A. Vassilevsky et. al.; compiled by Vladimir Sevruk; translated from the Russian; edited by Bryan Bean (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1970)

Vasily Grossman in wikipedia

Women's roles in the World Wars in wikipedia

Battle of Stalingrad in wikipedia

Operation Barbarossa in wikipedia Extract: "The death toll may never be established with any degree of certainty. A recent estimate of Soviet military deaths is 8.7 million that lost their lives either in combat or in Axis captivity . . . The Red Army had suffered losses of 259% of their initial strength in 1941."

Stalingrad (book)

-------------

Notes:

[1] Both Hitler and Stalin pursued "total war." For the Germans this meant that millions Soviet prisoners were allowed to die of starvation, disease, and brutal forced labor. For the Soviets it meant the death of German prisoners in corresponding numbers. But for the Soviets it also meant a willingness to sacrifice the lives of Soviet citizens — soldiers and civilians alike — brutally and without compunction.

[2] The wikipedia article on the Battle of Stalingrad gives an exensive bibliography and list of sources for further reading. You can find it here. Despite its length, it omits an important source — the first two volumes of the trilogy by David M. Glantz: To the Gates of Stalingrad and Armageddon in Stalingrad: September-November 1942 (University Press of Kansas, 2009).

[3] The quote comes from Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War by Chris Bellamy (Knopf, 2007))
Both Hitler and Stalin pursued "total war." For the Germans this meant that millions Soviet prisoners were allowed to die of starvation, disease, and brutal forced labor. For the Soviets it meant the death of German prisoners in corresponding numbers. But for the Soviets it also meant a willingness to sacrifice the lives of Soviet citizens — soldiers and civilians alike — brutally and without compunction. The authors of the wikipedia article on the battle summarize it thus: "The Battle of Stalingrad was a major and decisive battle of World War II in which Nazi Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in southwestern Russia. The battle took place between 23 August 1942 to 2 February 1943 and was marked by brutality and disregard for military and civilian casualties. It is among the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare, with the higher estimates of combined casualties amounting to nearly two million. The heavy losses inflicted on the German army made it a significant turning point in the whole war. After the Battle of Stalingrad, German forces never recovered their earlier strength, and attained no further strategic victories in the East."

[3] I've written previously about two Soviet snipers.

[4] "This battle, unequalled in its cruelty and ferocity, lasted for several days and nights uninterrupted. It was fought for every step of a staircase, for every corner in a dark passage, for every machine and the space between them, for every gas pipe. No one took a step back in this battle. And if the Germans gained some ground it meant that there was nobody left alive to defend it. Everyone fought like the giant red-haired tankman, whose name Chamov was never to learn; like the sapper Kosichenko, who, his left arm broken, took to removing the pin of his grenades with his teeth. It was as if the fallen were giving added strength to the living, and there were moments when ten men held a line that had been defended by a whole battalion. The workshops changed hands many times in the course of the battle. The Germans succeeded in occupying several buildings and workshops. It was in this battle that the German offensive reached its climax. This was the highwater mark of their main attack. As if they had lifted a weight that was too heavy for them, they overstrained some inner spring that had set their battering-ram in motion." - VASSILY GROSSMAN, excerpt from In the Line of the Main Attack

better drowned than duffers

2012-06-10T14:25:00.000-04:00

I've been reading books meant for young readers since the late 1980s. Back then, I began managing a cataloging operation which included something called the Children's Literature Team. The leader of that group would go to professional meetings and bring back reading lists. Starting with some books by Diana Wynne Jones it didn't take me long to get hooked. All the same, somehow, 'til now, I've missed out on the Swallows and Amazon books by Arthur Ransome. I've just finished the first of them.

It's well loved and has been discussed at length by admirers and some detractors. A review on Amazon by an eleven year old reader pins down one of the books main attributes: Its story is set in place that feels real and its characters feel just as true. Their adventures involve great amounts of imagination but everything they do might easily be done by any other children in their situation. The eleven year old writes: "What's best about their adventures is that all of them are possible! They don't do impossible things like ride on dragons or become invisible. Their adventures really could happen! I loved this book from the start, and have read it again and again. I would also recommend the other books in this series. They are all super, and will become treasures to pass on to later generations. Thank you, Mr. Ransome, for writing such a wonderful book!"

The defects found by detractors also bring out interesting attributes of the book: It contains lots of lore — particularly lore related to some leisurely summer weeks on a large, well-situated lake. The children (and occasional grown-ups as well) swim, row, fish, and most of all sail. With exception of a pair of fascinating charcoal burners there's little information about doings on the shores of the lake. But there's much about its islands and about what it takes to sail upon it. With so much description of managing a sailboat and so much plot devoted to the imagination-sprung adventures of sub-teen children, the book disappoints readers whose taste bends more toward dragon-riding coming-of-age stories.[1] Here are excerpts from reviews by two such disappointed readers: (1) "The vocabulary is VERY sophisticated, quaint, and old-fashioned. Also, it's hard to understand all the sailing terminology. It has sentences like this: 'Is there a cleat under the thwart where the mast is stepped?' Who talks like that???" (2) "The real problem is in the lack of plot. The kids just go and do their thing. There isn't any problem or climax."

The author's passion for things-on-the-lake-as-they-are shows in a short description of a bird as observed by one of the children:

The eldest of the children is 12, the youngest 7. They are distinctly their own selves, different from one another, yet each, for his or her age, is admirably competent and well informed. In the passage quoted above Tilly, who is barely 9, knows her pirate literature well and it is she who recognizes that a lookout point above the lake must be their Darien. Ransome writes so skillfully that the reader (this reader anyway) does not question her extensive though apparently narrowly focused book learning.

His skill also keeps you from wondering why the children do not bicker; there's no whining, pouting, name calling, tale telling, or similar behavior and this is one of the reasons reviewers overwork the word "idyllic" in discussing the story. The idyllism is there, but it's not idyllic pleasures in the normal sense that concern the children (not picturesque nor redolent with pastoral simplicity). For them, the story of this brief part of their lives is one of self-directed adventure, of invented games, of a childish freedom that gives full rein to their separate imaginations. It's idyllic largely because the responsible adults — two mothers, an absent father, and some neighbors who inhabit the lake's shore — all watch over the children's doings from a distance; they provide care and nurturing while keeping themselves apart.

The only adult exception is Uncle Jim, alias Captain Flint. He's a responsible adult who has not lost the ability to join in childish imaginings with a wholehearted enthusiasm. As an adult he takes offense at a prank and a later burglary which he assumes (based on reasonable evidence) to have been committed by the eldest, John, and the other Swallow children. This adult side of him is too quick to condemn and, he soon finds out, is wholly wrong to do so. He handsomely apologizes and, in making amends, plays host to the children in a climax to their summer adventures. Ransome handles this character so deftly that it doesn't seem odd that this one adult is so different from the others.

In the passage shown just below Uncle Jim has just come back on board his house boat having been overcome by two gangs of pirates and made to walk the plank. Before the attack he had had the foresight to obtain materials for a feast which he and the children now sit down to enjoy. (Rio is their name for the nearest village and Mate Susan is second in age rank among the four Swallows.)

After Titty has observed the dipper her mother rows across to the island where the Swallows are camping. She, Titty, has been left behind as lookout while her brothers and sister are off adventuring in the little sailboat. Mother is a "native" in the children's way of seeing the world, that is to say an adult who's not part of their game of exploration and pirating. Left all alone on the island Titty imagines herself to be Robinson Crusoe and her mother instantly realizes that she herself must be Man Friday. (The Blackett children are a pair of sisters, both tomboys, says their mother. They are the Amazons of the title and it is they for whom Titty has been on watch.)

In her conversation with Titty, Mother talks about her own childhood in Australia and, in doing so, reminds Titty (and the reader too) that life is not all summer holidays. The ocean, as first seen from Darien, might seem pacific, but it is not always so peaceful. Here's the brief chat between the two. Note the snake, an adder kept by a charcoal burner for good luck, and the drought in the Australian sheep ranches.

All this interested and pleased me while reading the book, but what I paid most attention to was the children's self-assurance. They know what they're doing. They know how to set up and maintain camp, to make fires and cook out, to swim, to fish, to row, to sail. They know how best to treat one another, the elders among them watching out for the youngers and the youngers pulling their weight and respecting the older ones. When one of them does something well the others give credit and praise.

They do not just observe middle-class conventions, they honor them. Twelve-year-old John behaves much like his Navy Commander father, providing his siblings with an easy and unquestioned leadership. Eleven-year-old Susan is like her mother, tending to the needs of the Youngest (Roger) by (for example) sewing on his loose buttons, as well as organizing food, preparing meals, and keeping the campsite tidy.

I'm sure the children's confidence comes from the ascendancy of families like theirs (the English middle class of the time) and its shared values.

All 6 children, the 4 Swallows and the 2 tomboy Amazons, are well-spoken, considerate even when in mock-fierce competition with each other, and share a set of values that need not be expressed to be evident. The two sets — the 4 and the 2 — meet for the first time at the beginning of the story, but they have no trouble recognizing themselves as social equals: by upbringing and education they share with each other much more than they do with other children who inhabit the lake. These other children must be present, but they are never mentioned. The only local whom they encounter who has a child-like personality is a local policeman, entirely grown up but still easily cowed by the elder of the two Amazons.

In the exchange shown here, Ruth is the elder Amazon (though called Nancy while adventuring on the lake) and she's berating Sammy, the policeman, for interviewing John about a burglary that John is wrongly supposed to have committed (it's this false accusation that Uncle Jim has to answer for later in the book). There's no difficulty in seeing that Ruth and Sammy are social unequals. Sammy, in fact, is the son of the woman who was nurse both to Ruth's mother and to herself. I infer from this conversation that it's almost unthinkable that local children have any common ground with the 6 children whose story is being told.

This passage is not typical of the book. It jars in the same way Uncle Jim's hasty accusation jars and, since Ruth/Nancy is stepping in to right that wrong, her outburst is the mirror her uncle's. And it shows the divide between the Ruths and Sammys of 1929 England. This divide was the subject of my last blog post. The families of the Swallows and the Amazons are not literally "gently born" as I use the term in that post, but they possess the same social qualities. They are well spoken, sure of themselves, and well-versed in a shared set of social conventions which they do not question. There's a gulf between them and those of "mean birth," like Sammy and his mother, and like the somewhat exotic yet kindly charcoal burners.[2] You can see this in the contrast between the forthright and articulate apologies that Uncle Jim makes and Sammy's stammered ones. Although he has done no more than follow orders, Sammy is abject and cringing.[3]

Sammy is a descendant of Bottom and Shakespeare's other clowns. He is a large, ungainly fellow. Like Uncle Jim he is an adult who's retained childhood habits, but in him the adult does not seem to be in control of the child. He is awkward and clumsy and retains a childhood fear of his mother's anger. It's this last trait that enables Ruth to command him. Ransome shows the great distance between this large adult creature and the bright, agile, adventurous young Swallows and Amazons.

Sammy lacks their poise and it cannot be pleasant for him to contemplate his second-class status. While he is not in the same crowd as a pair of outsiders who drink at the pub and provoke themselves into burglarizing Uncle Jim's houseboat, you can nonetheless imagine him — at some point in his life — becoming outraged at the attitudes of his "betters" (sorry for the scare quotes) and striking back.

Ransome's Sammy is an individual, not a type. But if you take him as representative of a class, it's easy to see a main source of the massive grudge held in common by that class during the 1920s. This grudge famously exploded in the general strike of UK trades unions of 1926. The book makes no reference to the strike but since it was published only a few years later and since it presumably takes place at about that time, many readers would easily be able to recall it.

The families of the Swallows and Amazons do not exploit workers as the great industrialists exploit them, but they are found together on one side of the social divide I'm trying to describe. The members of these families have an unassuming grace of manner, are cultivated, live comfortably, and of course speak well. The exploited ones either do not have these traits or are not thought to have them. The family of the Swallows has a nurse who minds the youngest child, infant Vicki. Unlike Sammy's mother, who is given a name, this servant is simply called "nurse." She is generous and kindly. Her interactions with Mother are cordial, but it's pretty clear they are employer and employee and just as clear that there's no point in referring to her by name.[4]

The presence of this nurse does not mean the family of the Swallows are well to do. You can tell they just comfortably sufficient because they live on a naval officer's salary and because they do not have their own holiday villa but rather rent rooms in a lake-side farmhouse. The family of the Amazons are better off. The mother, who is a widow, owns the villa in which they spend their summers and they have been coming to the lake for long enough that they are treated as rather high-placed residents by locals. But it's obvious the two families have much more in common with each other than with any locals. They share a familiarity with each other which they do not offer to people not so privileged as they.

--------

You might think Arthur Ransome to have been something of a snob, or at least ridden by unconscious assumptions of place and class. There may be some truth in this, but it is also true that he approved of the Russian Revolution and supported the Bolshevik regime.[5]

{Arthur Ransome; source: drgodine.blogspot.com}

-------

When I was studying British History in the 1960s a professor, G. Peter Browne, told me two anecdotes that touch on this subject. First, he said when Oxford began admintting more than a token number of lower class students the upper class ones would sneer at them in a cultivated sort of way. The example he gave was a request by one of the uppers in the dining hall. Glancing at one of the lowers nearby he said "Do please pass the vege..., oh excuse me, please pass the greens." It sounds innocuous but was vicious all the same.

Brown also told me, however, that on going to an American dentist's office for the first time, he was surprised when the assistant said "Hi, I'm Jennifer and I'll be cleaning your teeth today." He told me it would never occur to him to address her by any other name but "nurse."

----------

LibraryThing.com is a good place to learn about the setting, protagonists, and plot. It contains a short description and some extended reviews.[6]

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{Film still (1974) of John, Susan, Titty, and Roger in the Swallow; source: dare.co.uk/cinema}

{Endpaper map from the first edition; source: stellabooks.com}

{Dustjacket of the first edition (wikipedia) and cover of the Puffin edition of 1974 (childrensbookshop.com)}

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About the title of this post:

In Swallows and Amazons, the Swallows all write letters to Daddy at Malta (but under orders for Hong Kong), asking for his permission to sail Swallow to Wild Cat Island and camp there.

Daddy replies in the famous Duffers telegram:

BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON'T DROWN

Susan says that he added the won't drown to comfort Mother.

John says that Daddy thinks we shall none of us get drowned, and that if any of us do get drowned it’s a good riddance. He is particularly keen not to let Daddy down. Hugh Brogan comments: John’s father’s telegram is famous. John’s comment is enormously significant: ‘Daddy knows we aren’t duffers’. It was something that the boy Arthur could never have said to himself with any confidence; yet how much he wanted to! Now, in fiction, all could be arranged.

-- Arthur Ransome Wiki

Duffer (OED)

A person who proves to be without practical ability or capacity; one who is incapable, inefficient, or useless in his business or occupation; the reverse of an adept or competent person. Also more generally, a stupid or foolish person.
1889 J. K. Jerome Three Men in Boat 171 ‘Is it all right?’..‘Lovely..You are duffers not to come in’.
1891 A. Lang Angling Sketches 8 Next to being an expert, it is well to be a contented duffer.

---------

Some sources:

manners unfaulted

Swallows and Amazons, 45 editions First published in 1930, on Open Library

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome (London, Random House, 1930) on WorldCat

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, work description on LibraryThing

Swallows And Amazons by Arthur Ransome (reprint Godine Publisher, 1986) on Google Books

Swallows and Amazons series on wikipedia

Arthur Ransome wiki, a wiki maintained by fans

Nancy Blackett on wikipedia

"'Which One's the Mockingbird?' Children's Literature from the 1920s to the Present" by Sheila Egoff in Theory into Practice, Vol. 21, No. 4, Children's Literature (Autumn, 1982), pp. 239-246 (Taylor & Francis, Ltd.) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1476345.
Excerpt:

I was working at the Toronto Public Library during the 1940s and I can still remember the excitement engendered in the children by the appearance of a new Ransome book. In the Ransome books we have the between-the-wars and post-war children healthy, happy, sane, self-reliant, friendly-and yet they aren't prigs in any conceivable way. These children are allowed to go off adventuring without adult supervision, the youngest being only seven years of age. Yet Ransome does not strain our credulity. First of all, the children have been trained in various skills and what they don't know, they soon find out. They pore over maps, charts, plans, books; they can cook over an open fire, mend a net and tickle trout ("Tickle trout?" said a friend of mine. "You made that up." "It's in a Ransome book," I said, "therefore it must be true."). Above all, the children can sail. It has been pointed out to me that you could actually learn to sail a boat by reading the Ransome books. It is quickly noticeable, I think, that the children fall into adult patterns as do the children in the Narnia books when they become kings and queens, which was what the society of the time expected from children. Susan, for example, takes on the mother's role. But the point of reality here is that without adult supervision, would anyone allow their children weeks of sailing and camping alone? Susan is an anchor in a world of high adventure that helps the reader believe it really could happen-independence from adult supervision-if Susan will supervise toothbrushing.

Small-boat sailing; an explanation of the management of small yachts, half-decked and open sailing-boats of various rigs; sailing on sea and on river; cruising, etc by Edward Frederick Knight (New York, E. P. Dutton & co., 1902) was Ransome's bible

Arthur Ransome on schoolnet

Arthur Ransome and Communism

Swallows, Amazons and Bolsheviks ‘The Last Englishman,’ by Roland Chambers a review by Ken Kalfus, NYT, May 25, 2012

Arthur Ransome Russia in 1919

V. I. Lenin Interview With Arthur Ransome Manchester Guardian Correspondent, October 27 - November 5, 1922

Arthur Ransome 1884-1967 on marxists.org

These two Marxist (and critical) reviews are both by the same author:

The Family as an Ideological Construct in the Fiction of Arthur Ransome by Ian Wojcik-Andrews in The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 14, Number 2, December 1990, pp. 7-15
Excerpt: "As Marx and Engels note in The German Ideology: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas." Familiar family hierarchies set up in the opening scenes establish the Walker parents in traditional work and sex-related roles which they (and the children) maintain as the novel comes full circle—it opens and closes with the same characters in the same place bound by the same parental/child hierarchy. ... In short, Ransome uses the Walker family to paint a powerful portrait of middle-class family life, one that foregrounds conventional work and heterosexist ideologies."

Introduction: Notes Toward a Theory of Class in Children's Literature by Ian Wojcik-Andrews in The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 17, Number 2, December 1993, pp. 113-123
Excerpt: "Arthur Ransome wrote the quintessentially middle-class Swallows and Amazons. Complete with nurse, the Walker family (actually the mother and children) are on holiday in the idyllic Lake District whilst Navy Commander Mr. Walker sails the high seas, symbolically defending the British Empire."

Behind the scenes at Radio 4 by Clarissa Maycock 10:30, Monday, 23 April 2012
Excerpt: "Crawford Logan has voiced a new 5-part recording of Swallows and Amazons for BBC Radio 4 Extra. He writes:

Look at the comments for 'Swallows and Amazons' on Amazon(!), and you'll find very polarised opinions, almost all either five stars or one. For the fives it's a vivid childhood memory with characters they loved, a picture of a world which has disappeared, if indeed it ever really existed at all. But for the ones, Swallows and Amazons is an easy target for every modern brickbat--it's old-fashioned, dull, middle-class, sexist (Susan does all the cooking), slow and in serious need of editing. Worst of all: "nothing happens".

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (London, J.M. Dent and sons, 1889)

Diana Wynne Jones on wikipedia.

Diana Wynne Jones, the web page of British fantasy and science fiction writer Diana Wynne Jones.

The Many Worlds of Diana Wynne Jones

Accessible Adventure in 'Swallows and Amazons' by Nicholas Thomas in Anthropology Today, Vol. 3, No. 5 (Oct., 1987), pp. 8-11 (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3032888 .

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Notes:

[1] I don't mean to imply that readers can't like both dragons and swallows (I'm one) but some do like a great deal more tension in their narratives than this book provides.

[2] I put "mean birth" in quotes because it's a term used in the seventeenth century. People of Ransome's generation might have said "lower classes." I think "mean birth" to be a little more expressive, particularly in contrast to "gently borm."

[3] Lovers of his novels have made an Arthur Ransome wiki for us. Its entry on Sammy's mother, Mrs Lewthwaite says: Mrs Lewthwaite used to be Mrs Blackett's nurse, and that of the Amazons when they were young. ... Sammy, her eldest son is a policeman. He is afraid of Nancy.

[4] I expect Sammy's mother is named because she belongs to the lake-side community, the way the charcoal burners (who are also named) belong to it. The nurse of the Swallow family, being of no special community, can be treated a bit like an appliance.

[5] Ransome was a journalist in Russia during the Communist Revolution. While there he was was recruited by the British espionage office, MI6, as a spy. However, he showed such great sympathy for the Communists that when he returned to England in 1919 he was arrested by the police under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act. He convinced the police that though he was sympathic to Communism he was not himself a revolutionary.

[6] Here are brief extracts from LibraryThing reviews:

"Swallows and Amazons, a paean to children’s make-believe play and exploring their surrounding world, is a very pleasant story that involves the great outdoors, boats, fishing, and camping, with rich characterization, vivid descriptions, wholesome reading, and old-fashioned ideals. It includes a good deal of everyday Lakeland life in the early twentieth century, from the local farmers to charcoal burners working in the woods. Seldom have I ever come to the end of a book and felt sorry that it was over."

"One thing that the book does really well is to explore the imaginative life of children, taking the everyday world around them and turning it into something much more exciting and exotic."

"The Walker and Blackett children are given an amazing amount of freedom and use that gift to its fullest. They are adventuresome, curious, imaginative, and mischievous. Oh to be able to spend weeks on end sailing and camping and exploring. Even though Ransome was writing in the 1930s, the girls and women he created are strong and capable: good swimmers, good sailors, smart, fearless, and reliable. It's no wonder that this series was among my favorite childhood books. Here is a quote that has stayed with me since I was in fourth grade: "Her real name isn't Nancy," said Peggy. "Her name is Ruth, but Uncle Jim said that Amazons were ruthless . . . [so] we had to change her name." (p. 119)

manners unfaulted

2012-05-31T15:25:00.000-04:00

I recently finished reading Hilary Mantel's new book, Bring Up the Bodies, and I liked it, every page. She's a marvelous writer, so good that it's difficult to pin down what she's doing that's so much better than anyone else does. Putting her work into the "historical fiction" warehouse doesn't make sense; it isn't genre, it's simply literature.

My affection for the book comes partly from my interest in the lives of early modern Englishmen who did not receive a university education. I've been studying one of them, the mathematician John Collins, and Mantel's subject, Thomas Cromwell, is another. The lives of the two men were very different. Cromwell lived a full century and a half before Collins and achieved wealth and power as an able politician and chief minister to a king (Henry VIII). Collins attained neither wealth nor power. He was a clerk, teacher, author, accountant, and, on the side, an "Ingenious Obstetrix of the Press promoting the laudable Design of getting Learned Men to impart their Labours to be Printed; and exciting others to encourage the same, as being of singular Use and advantage to the Republick of Learning; through the want whereof many Learned Mens Works of much worth have been lost, suppressed or long delayed."[1]

Nonetheless they were in some ways similar. Both were born "of low estate," Cromwell as son of a blacksmith and small businessman and Collins as son of a poor clergyman who was barred from preaching in any church. Both left England while young and, while on the Continent, gained knowledge and skills that served them well on their return home. Both were largely self-taught, learning more by experience than education. On returning to England both attracted the notice of high-placed men and used these contacts to advance themselves. Both married only once and were devoted to their wives and families.

I don't mark up books I'm reading, or turn down corners -- none of that. But I do occasionally write out something -- a phrase, line, paragraph, or page -- that seems especially meaningful and this I chose to scribble into my Moleskine from Bring Up the Bodies. In it we see Cromwell's thoughts about his son:

Gregory is a good boy, though all the Latin he has learned, all the sonorous periods of the great authors, have rolled through his head and out again, like stones. Still, you think of Thomas More’s boy: offspring of a scholar all Europe admired, and poor young John can barely stumble through his Pater Noster. Gregory is a fine archer, a fine horseman, a shining star in the tilt yard, and his manners cannot be faulted. He speaks reverently to his superiors, not scuffling his feet or standing on one leg, and he is mild and polite with those below him. He knows how to bow to foreign diplomats in the manner of their own countries, sits at table without fidgeting or feeding spaniels, can neatly carve and joint any fowl if requested to serve his elders. He doesn't slouch around with his jacket off one shoulder, or look in windows to admire himself, or stare around in church, or interrupt old men, or finish their stories for them. If anyone sneezes, he says, “Christ help you!”

I was able to copy and paste this quote, rather than key it, because a reviewer chose to quote it as well. Writing in the New Yorker on May 7, James Wood uses the paragraph to show how Mantel uses a "cunning universalism" to link Cromwell with modern parents, indeed any parents, whose concern about their children leads them to catalog their strengths and weaknesses.

I did not see this aspect of the quote. For me it shows in glorious detail some of the main attributes of the "gently-" as against the "meanly-" born young men of early modern England. Cromwell and Collins were "of mean birth" and by their attainments came to be known as gentlemen. As adults they mastered the forms of address, techniques of polite conversation, and deportment sufficiently well to be accepted among the gently born. By contrast Cromwell's son Gregory, as Mantel presents him, was raised from childhood to be "courteous" in the original sense of the word.[2]

Spenser gives this sense of "courtesie" in the Faerie Queene.

Of Court, it seemes, men Courtesie doe call
For that it there most useth to abound :
And well beseemeth that in Prince's hall
That vertue should be plentifully found
Which of all goodly manners is the ground.
And roote of civill conversation.
-- Spenser, Faerie Queene, VI, i, i.

It's implied that Gregory knows how to behave in Court, that is the chambers where royals and nobles gather. He knows how to restrain any of his impulses which might be considered impolite, he shows deference to his betters, and possesses a confident demeanor which frees him from distasteful arrogance. His manners are easy and graceful. This ease and grace is the basis of what Spenser calls "civill conversation."[3]

Mantel puts most of Gregory's courtly achievements as negative virtues — bad habits he has had to overcome — and this is typical of the many books of polite manners that appeared in the centuries after the invention of the printing press. She and they take it as given that people are born with unsocial impulses which must be restrained if they are to get along well with each other. It's also implicit that those belonging to the courtly classes have advantages which others lack — chiefly wealth (or at least credit) and leisure. To them being industrious is not a virtue, and, although many of the gently born do work hard, they are encouraged not to make a show of it. Their leisure is not one of idleness, ideally, but their energy should be expended in sport (tilting or hunting) and social engagements (such as riding and dancing) rather than any effort that would appear busy.

Gregory is not literally "gently born." Writers of courtesy books divided pretty much evenly over those who equated gentility with good breeding and those who said it could be acquired as well as bred, but they all acknowledged that people were accepted as gentles either way. They also implicitly or explicitly accepted that this characterization — gently born — applied pretty much equally to all those who belonged in the upper classes, from the lowest of gentry through to the highest of nobles and royals. The gap between people of mean birth and those of gentle birth was, in this instance at any rate, more significant than the gap between a poor but well mannered landowner and a duke or earl. Men like Cromwell and Collins breached the first sort of gap, but they did not do so easily and their hold on their new status was tenuous. I suspect they hoped their sons would, as men, be able to accept gentility with unselfconscious ease.

{Cromwell by Holbein from the Frick Collection; source: wikipedia}

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Some sources:

The ideal of a gentleman; or, A mirror for gentlefolks, a portrayal in literature from the earliest times by Abram Smythe Palmer (Routledge; New York, Dutton)

"The English Gentleman," by Sir George Sitwell in The Ancestor, No. I (Westminster, April 1902)

Peacham's Comple'at Gentleman (1634), with an introduction by G. S. Gordon (Oxford, 1906)

Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature by Jennifer Richards (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003)

From Civilitas to Civility: Codes of Manners in Medieval and Early Modern England by John Gillingham, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Vol. 12 (2002), pp. 267-289. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679348.

Invitation to a Beheading, The Thomas Cromwell novels of Hilary Mantel, a review by James Wood in The New Yorker, May 7, 2012.

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Notes:

[1] ... -- The sphere of Marcus Manilius [by Marcus Manilius], made an English poem with annotations and an astronomical appendix by Edward Sherburne, squire (1675).

Sherburne says:
We should be injurious to him, if we did not farther inlarge, by telling the World how much it is obliged for his Pains in exciting the Learned to publish their Works, and in acting the Part of an Ingenious Obstetrix at the Press, in correcting and in drawing of Schemes; So that he hath been Instrumental in furnishing the World with the many learned Mathematical Books here lately published (for which, his chief Reward hitherto hath been to obtain from the Learned the Title of Mersennus Anglicanus) and many more may be expected, if moderate Encouragements towards Printing such Works, and Leisure for such an Affair be not impeded through the necessary Avocations for a livelyhood, and though it be besides my Design, yet I cannot but digress in giving him and others like minded (which are very rare to be found) their due commendations, in promoting the laudable Design of getting Learned Men to impart their Labours to be Printed; and exciting others to encourage the same, as being of singular Use and advantage to the Republick of Learning; through the want whereof many Learned Mens Works of much worth have been lost, suppressed or long delayed.

a Barnabas among those mathematical apostles, his tact and
devotion in calming the headstrong and drawing out the reticent
being above all praise.

[2] "Courteous" comes from the 14th-century French word curteis and it then meant "having courtly bearing or manners." The phrases I put in quotes were common in early modern England. In the 16th and 17th centuries a literature, quite a large literature, grew up giving instructions on courtesy.

[3] As one source says, Spenser took the term "civill conversation" from an Italian work of 1574 in which gentles are shown as harmoniously intermingling with an unselfconscious grace. (The Spenser Encyclopedia by Albert Charles Hamilton (Taylor & Francis, 1990)).

Defender

2012-05-08T09:30:00.000-04:00

I found this image on a favorite tumblelog and I subsequently used it in a tumblr post of my own.[1]

It shows the yacht Defender and it can be found in the Detroit Publishing Company Collection of LC's Prints and Photographs Division.[2] The photographer, John S. Johnston, did a whole series on the Defender.

The caption gives the year (1895) but does not give the month or day. It does have "134" written on it and a nearby photo, number 132, shows the Defender on August 2, 1895, competing in the Goelet Cup so it's pretty near certain our photo was taken during the same race.

The yacht belonged to William Kissam Vanderbilt.[3] He was a cousin of Louis Windmuller's wife, Annie.[4] Windmuller didn't go in for yacht racing. His recreations were urban and close to home. He belonged to city clubs and supported city charities. An immigrant from Germany who never lost his German connections, he loved the city's German singing clubs and beer gardens. He was also a famous city walker and one of his last acts was to form a club of walkers. He traveled much for business, but also for pleasure, chiefly to Germany, France, England, and Italy.

Louis Windmuller had arrived in New York penniless and worked his way up to a comfortable prosperity. William Kissam Vanderbilt was born to wealthy parents and was never forced to earn a living. He did work as a manager of the family railroads but as someone learning the family business rather than in the entrepreneurial spirit of his grand- and my great-grandfather.[5] The differences between the two men were many, but the most obvious, I think, was in their choice of recreation. Where Windmuller walked, W.K.V. raced. He raced horses and he raced yachts. He founded New York's Jockey Club, owned both stables and race courses, and ran horses that won. And he was co-owner of the yacht defender.

Windmuller and his wife Annie saw only two of their six children survive to adulthood: a son and a daughter. Neither possessed the energy, cheerful optimism, and tempered ambition of their father. The son, Adolph, made a half-hearted effort to manage one of his father's enterprises (the importing firm which was Windmuller's first success) but did not stick with it and lived most of his life as a man of leisure.[6] My father, his nephew, called him a n'er do well. The daughter, Clara, was not expected to earn a living and, unlike others among her contemporaries in upper-middle-class New York, she did not attempt to make a name for herself by charity work, cultural contributions, agitation for reform, or even any sort of active participation in New York society.[7]

Somewhat late in life, Clara married a man who worked for her father. He, Julius, was a distant relative who had come from Germany with the expectation that Windmuller would put him to work. After serving in a clerical position in an organization of which Windmuller was treasurer he was, in the year following his marriage to Clara, appointed secretary-treasurer of a bank that Windmuller had helped to found and of which he was president.[8] In 1913, when his father in law died, the will was found to be not so generous to him as it was to Adolph and Julius consequently labored in the bank for the rest of his working life, eventually rising to be its manager. Once he found himself secure in his employment, he put in his bankers' hours, married his benefactor's daughter, fathered a family of four, let himself be caught with a girlfriend in the conjugal bed, and indulged in a passion for boating. The last two were actually related since he had the habit of inviting women to cruise with him from time to time.

This photo shows Julius and Clara shipboard during the first (happy) years of their marriage.

The year is 1902 or '03. He is 34 and she two years younger.

Julius was a power boat enthusiast so this photo — taken at about the same time — shows Clara on someone else's ship.

From about 1900 to about 1942 Julius owned maybe half a dozen craft, each 30- to 40 feet long, with paid skipper and crew. At the bank they called him "Commodore" (as, in similar manner, underlings had given Cornelius Vanderbilt that title) and he belonged to a number of yacht clubs including the Colonial, uptown on the Hudson near his home on Riverside Drive, and the Harlem on City Island.[9] My father once took me to the latter. The club house was rustic and in my memory its chief feature was a monumental pool table near windows overlooking the moorings.

This shows a diving demonstration at the Colonial Yacht Club in 1914 or 1915.

{Caption: Famous diver Elsie Hanneman at the Colonial Yacht Club; photo by the Bain News Service; the club was located on the small beach just below Riverside Drive on the Hudson River, roughly between 140th and 142nd Streets in Harlem; source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division}

Taken at about the same time, this photo shows canoe jousting, the club, and some of the city in the background.

{Caption: Canoe Tilting at the Colonial Yacht Club, by the Bain News Service; same source }

This shows the Harlem Yacht Club in 1906. I recollect it looked much the same in the late 1950s when my father took me there.

{Caption: Harlem Yacht Club, City Island, N.Y. by the W. F. Sleight Post Card Co., Mount Vernon, N.Y., 1906; source: Long Island Historic Postcards Collection (collection 346), Special Collections and University Archives, Stony Brook University Libraries}

----------

Some sources:

The Yacht Photography of J.S. Johnston - Defender

Defender - 32nd America's Cup

Goelet Cup, New York Times, August 6, 1887

DEFENDER BREAKS DOWN; Snapped a Hollow Gaff in Goelet Cup Races, New York Times, August 2, 1895

THE GOELET CUP, New York Times, August 3, 1895

William Kissam Vanderbilt on wikipedia

"Newly-elected officers of the Colonial Y. C." in The Rudder, Volume 35 (Fawcett Publications, 1919)

Harlem Yacht Club By Evelyn Schneider, Harlem Yacht Club historian, as published in the July 2008 issue of Wind Check

Century of American savings banks, pub. under the auspices of the Savings banks association of the state of New York in commemoration of the centenary of savings banks in America (New York : B. F. Buck & company, 1917)

----------

Notes:

[1] The favorite Tumblr blog is Chemin faisant by Catherine Willis and my own is rouleur.

[2] Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

[3] W.K. Vanderbilt was co-owner.

[4] Annie and W.K. were niece and nephew-once-removed, respectively, of John Edmund Thorne. W.K.'s father, also W.K., was son of J.E.T.'s brother-in-law, Samuel Kissam. Annie was daughter of J.E.T.'s sister, Sarah Lenington Thorne. If you've patience, you can trace the connection in these genealogies: Descendants of William Thorne & Susannah Booth and Windmuller Genealogy. I've written fequently about my great-grandfather. To see posts about him, click the "Louis Windmuller" link in the list of labels in the panel at right.

[5] Up until 1903 William Kissam Vanderbilt was active in the management of the family railroads, including the New York Central. His grandfather Cornelius had owned that business and, it doesn't surprise me to find that Louis Windmuller was a shareholder. Cornelius and Louis were different in many ways, but both were energetic businessmen and managers of financial affairs. In 1865 Windmuller joined other prominent New Yorkers in petitioning the state government for relief from Civil War regulations that kept rail fares and tariffs artificially low (Evening Journal, New York, March 21, 1865). In addition to the names of Cornelius and my great-grandfather, the petition showed those of William Astor, Henry Sloane, and other prominent merchants and financiers.

[6] Louis Windmuller's first successful business was "Louis Windmuller and Roelker, commissioning agents." I've written a few posts dealing with its affairs.

flourishing, December 22, 2010
commission merchant, November 06, 2010
Madagascar No. 21, November 07, 2010
an office on Reade Street, June 05, 2010

[7] My blog post on the wives of the forty-eighters gives some idea of what determined women could accomplish at the time. It is four notable German-American women. Even within her narrow community Annie was outshined by her close neighbors the Sussdorfs whose womenfolk founded a local Sunday school and provided support for the church to which they and the Windmullers belonged. Regarding the social whirl, the Windmuller family does appear in the Social Register but the only Windmuller parties you'll find in the newspapers of the time are privately family ones and the Windmullers are never seen out coaching or at Newport or even in connection with their socially-prominent daughter in law, Adolph's wife Carolyn Hague, known as Madam Thurn.

[8] In 1901 Windmuller made Julius secretary in the Legal Aid Society, which he had helped to found and of which he was treasurer. In 1903 Windmuller helped found the Maiden Lane Bank for Savings in the building where he had previously helped found the Maiden Lane Safe Deposit Company. Here are excerpts from an article about the bank.

At the time of the establishment of the Maiden Lane Savings Bank — 1903, under the General Banking Law — it was estimated that there were about 150,000 clerks and workingmen employed in the Jewelry District, who were all earning good wages and of whom at least 25 per cent. were living either in New Jersey or on Long Island and did not have the time to make deposits in the banks in the neighborhood where they lived. In order to give these people proper facilities for depositing their surplus earn-ings without inconvenience, it was proposed to establish a new Savings Bank in that section of the city and to keep it open for receiving deposits from 9 o'clock in the morning until 5:30 in the evening, Saturdays included. It was proposed to locate the bank in the basement of the building at the corner of Maiden Lane and Broadway, where the Maiden Lane Safe Deposit Company had their premises. ... The board of directors of the Maiden Lane Safe Deposit Company was approached with the proposition to rent space in their premises and the proposition was met in a liberal manner. ... The rapid increase in deposits is ample proof that a Savings Bank was needed in the down-town section of the Borough of Manhattan. ... First officers: Louis Windmiiller, president; J. Heynen, secretary-treasurer. -- Century of American savings banks, pub. under the auspices of the Savings banks association of the state of New York in commemoration of the centenary of savings banks in America (New York : B. F. Buck & company, 1917)

[9] In 1919 Julius was elected to the board of directors of the Colonial. SeeThe Rudder, Volume 35 (Fawcett Publications, 1919).

West Twenty-Third east from Sixth

2012-05-02T15:32:00.000-04:00

I've written quite a few posts about the area where Broadway and Fifth Avenue come together in New York City. Their topics were the Flatiron Building, which dominates that intersection; Madison Square Park, which adjoins it; and locations in the vicinity that were associated with my great-grandfather, Louis Windmuller.*

I've also done some posts about the block of 23rd Street that lies between Fifth and Sixth Avenues at this location. They are 23rd St., New York Newsstand, 1903, and Eden Musee, a major attraction at mid-block.

Those posts give lots of views of the area. Here are just a couple more. They were taken at the same general time and from same general place as the one in the first of the three posts listed above, and they can be found in collections of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.

{Caption: West Twenty-third Street from Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. by the Detroit Publishing Co., ca. 1908}

Details of this image:

1. We're looking at the south side of the block. The photographer has positioned himself at the foot of the stairs to the elevated railway at 6th Avenue and 23rd. He's facing east. As you see, it's late in the afternoon on a warm but overcast day. The Flatiron Building dominates the skyline, but its the department stores, shops, and most of all the bustle of the street which attracts the eye.

2. This is the north side of the block with Eden Musee, F.A.O. Schwarz toys, and the Fifth Avenue Hotel dominating the scene.

3. Best & Co., the famous women's shop, then marketed itself as the Lilliputian Bazaar. Notice that the large plate glass windows reflect the buildings opposite.

4. You can see the reflections more clearly here.

5. A display of women's fashions on the second floor. The shop is Best & Co.'s neighbor, Bonwit Teller.

The negative of this second photo is getting moldy, but most of it is still in good shape. The photographer seems to be standing on the top of a hansom cab (horse's head just visible at bottom).

{Caption: West Twenty-third Street, New York, N.Y. by Detroit Publishing Co., ca. 1908}

Details:

1. The Eden Musee again. I did a blog post about this place, whose board of directors had Louis Windmuller as a member.

2. You see that it's about 1:16 PM, so this photo was made earlier in the day, possibly the very same hazy day as the first photo.

3. Here again the glass reflects the scene across the street. The gent with the light colored top hat is a bit more dapper than the others. The women almost seem to be in uniform.

4. Seen more closely, the gent appears to be looking directly at the photographer.

5. This shows two women who are out of uniform, one all in black, the other in a light dress instead of skirt and shirtwaist.

-----------

Note:

* See for example:

the hump

2012-03-31T20:00:00.011-04:00

Freight yards like Chicago & North Western's at Proviso contain hundreds of parallel tracks. These permit arriving trains to be broken up so that individual cars can be grouped by their destinations. Some freight trains — such as those which carry coal from mines to power plants — can remain intact throughout their journey. However most contain isolated cars that are only generally headed in the right direction. These have to be reassembled one or more times along their route as they draw closer to the yards where they will be unloaded. This reassembly is accomplished by shunting cars on the parallel tracks in yards like the one at Proviso.

The shunting takes place in classification yards. The aerial photo I showed the other day gives an idea of the shape and extent of the C&NW yards circa 1940. This is a detail from that image in which you can see the track layout.
.

{Detail from photos of the 1938-1941 Aerial Survey of Illinois; source:
Illinois Aerial Photos.[1]}

This photo shows portions of two of the C&NW's "ladders" — the sets of parallel tracks into which cars would be shunted. As in my previous post, it was taken for the Office of War Information by staff photographer Jack Delano and is found in collections of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Notice that, as you'd expect, each pair of tracks splits from a main feeder and each has its own switch. The feeder is called a lead or drill.

{Caption: General view of one of the Chicago and Northwestern railroad classification yards, Chicago, Ill. December 1942}

This shows a switchman in the act of shunting some cars. Delano took this in April 1943.[2]

{Caption: Switchman throwing a switch at C&NW RR's Proviso yard, Chicago, Ill. 1942 Dec.}

The C&NW yards received lists via teletype showing the makeup of arriving trains and the destinations of their cars. These switch lists enabled workers such as the one shown below to map out the distribution of cars in the classification yards. The mapping is a lot easier to explain than it was to carry out in a place the size of proviso with its hundreds of switches.[3]

{Caption: Switch lists coming in by teletype to the hump office at a Chicago and Northwestern railroad yard, Chicago, Ill. 1942 Dec. }

Cars would be pushed around the yards by shunt engines and in large facilities like the one at Proviso they might also be fed to the ladders by gravity. Locomotives would push a train up a gentle incline, called a hump, and the cars would be released to roll down the lead toward the switches.

This photo shows one of the humps at the C&NW yards. A tank car has just been uncoupled and is making its way down the hump toward the ladders.

{Caption: General view of one of the yards of the Chicago and Northwestern railroad, Chicago, Ill. 1942 Dec.}

This shows a shunt engine working on a lead. You can see two towers where towermen controlled the flow of cars from the hump down the lead and into the ladders.

{General view of the hump, Chicago and Northwestern railroad classification yard, Chicago, Ill. 1942 Dec.}

In this view of the same set of ladders you can see the downslope from the hump at the foot of the foreground tower.

{General view of the hump yard at Proviso yard, C&NW RR., Chicago, Ill. 1942 Dec.}

The caption explains this photo. The hump track to which it refers is continued by the lead or drill.

{Hump master in a Chicago and Northwestern railroad yard operating a signal switch system which extends the length of the hump track. He is thus able to control movements of locomotives pushing the train over the hump from his post at the hump office; Chicago, Ill. 1942 Dec.}

There were devices called retarders on the lead tracks. These were electrically controlled and could be used to slow down cars as they descended from the hump. Switches could also be electrically operated. This towerman is shown at the retarder and switch controls.[4]

{C&NWRR, towerman R.W. Mayberry of Elmhurst, Ill., at the Proviso yard. He operates a set of retarders and switches at the hump, Melrose Park (near Chicago), Ill. 1943 May}

I think Delano took this shot from one of the towers.

{Caption: General view of one of the yards of the Chicago and Northwestern railroad, Chicago, Ill. 1942, Dec.}

------

Some sources:

"Combination Through Classification and Terminal Yard" by W.C. Copley in Railway age Vol. 58 (Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp., 1915)

Classification yard on wikipedia

Retarder on wikipedia

Switcher on wikipedia

Shunt (rail) on wikipedia

Train shunting puzzles on wikipedia

-----

Notes:

[1] This larger detail shows the complex interconnection of the classification yards the Proviso facility. Click to view full size.

[2] Jack Delano took all the images on this page on assignment from OWI in December 1942 and April 1943 and all are from collections of the Library of Congress.

[3] Railroaders have train shunting puzzles which are games that challenge players to break up and reassemble trains (called consists) with a minimum of de-couplings and couplings.

[4] This view of a classification yard (not C&NW) shows retarders on the leads just before the ladders. I've marked two of them with yellow circles.

Proviso Yards, December, 1942

2012-03-30T19:00:00.005-04:00

After the US entered the Second World War, the government set up a domestic propaganda operation called the Office of War Information to help rally citizens as the country geared up for the fight. Isolationism had been a strong force in the 1930s and the America Firsters argued against intervention even after war broke out on the European continent. The OWI helped neutralize opposition once the US entered the war. Despite its importance this has to have been one of the mildest forms of propaganda conducted by a state at war. One of its principal tools was documentary photography and its photographs did not preach but simply put on display a view of America's industrial might and of the people whose labor was one of its chief resources.

This gentle approach had been learned in the 1930s when an agency called the Farm Security Administration was used photographic images to convince people that the miseries caused by the Great Depression — great as they were — could be first mitigated and finally overcome by the strengthening of the agricultural (and in due course industrial) economy. The result was what has to have been the most aesthetically potent propaganda campaigns of all time. I've written about this before. Click the FSA label in the panel at right to see these blog posts. The Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, which holds most of these photos, has collected some of them here.

When the US declared war on the Axis Powers the FSA photography unit was merged into the new Office of War Information and the emphasis of the group's documentary output shifted from Depression to war mobilization. I've shown quite a few OWI photos in previous posts. To see them, click the OWI label at right.

War mobilization meant that factories which had been making products for domestic consumption switched over to production of war materiel.[1] The OWI photos show American workers making ships, planes, bombs, and all the other implements of war — large numbers of them being women doing jobs to free men for the armed services.[2]

War mobilization also meant that the volume of traffic on the nation's transportation systems shot upward. And no traffic grew more than that of the railroads. As this graph shows, the numbers of miles of freight and passenger transportation by rail decreased substantially during the Depression years and then shot upwards to levels that have never since been equalled.

{Caption: source: Economic Results of Diesel Electric Motive Power. On the Railways of the United States of America (pdf) by H.F. Brown for the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (London, 1960)}

The war years of the 1940s were the glory years of US rail service and Jack Delano, one of OWI's documentary photographers, took pains to show its strength. Here are some photos from one shoot, made at the rail yards of the Chicago and North Western Transportation Company in December 1942.[3]

In this one Delano shows both the great size of the yards and the volume of freight they handled.

{Caption: View of a classification yard at C & NW RR's Proviso yard, Chicago, Ill.}

In this detail notice the man on top of a freight car as well as the one at the rail switch.

Here you see a trainman walking toward the location where Delano is positioned. You can tell that Delano is standing on an overpass because of the dangling warning cords hung over the tracks above the man's head.

This photo shows an overpass such as the one on which Delano was standing to take the previous one. You can tell that the shoot carried over enough days so that some shots show snow on the ground and some do not.

{Caption: A general view of a classification yard at C & NW RR's Proviso yard, Chicago, Ill.}

I've stitched together details from two aerial photos of the Proviso Yards to show something of their scale. Click the image to view full size. The photos were taken a year or so before Delano did his shoot there.

{Details from photos of the 1938-1941 Aerial Survey of Illinois; source:
Illinois Aerial Photos}

This detail shows where Delano was standing to take the second of the two images of the yard. I can't see a tower there but suppose there is one and that he's on it.

Delano's photos of the freight yards don't show many workers and it's apparent that this vast system required very few people to operate it. Here is the man who had main responsibility for the operation along with an assistant or maybe just a man on break.

{Caption: The yardmaster's office at the receiving yard, North Proviso(?), C & NW RR, Chicago, Ill.}

The Yardmaster

Assistant or man on break.

Another detail from this photo.

And another.

And one final one.

Here are a couple of freight engines moving what is probably a long train of hopper cars.

{Caption: Locomotive in a railroad yard, Chicago and Northwestern RR, near Chicago, Ill.}

Unlike the freight yards, the service areas show a fairly high concentration of men at work. Here are locomotives receiving some maintenance.

{Caption: Locomotives over the ash pit at the roundhouse and coaling station at the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad yards, Chicago, Ill.}

The captions of these photos explain their subjects.

{Caption: Chicago and Northwestern railroad locomotive shops, Chicago, Ill.}

{Caption: Worn tires on locomotive wheels are refaced on this machine in the wheel shop of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, Chicago, Ill.}

{Caption: Working on the boiler of a locomotive at the 40th Street shops of the C & NW RR, Chicago, Ill.}

{Caption: Working on a locomotive at the 40th Street shop of the C & NW RR, Chicago, Ill.}

{Caption: A young worker at the C & NW RR 40th Street shops, Chicago, Ill.}

{Caption: Greasing a locomotive at the 40th Street shops of the C & NW RR.}

{Caption: Locomotive lubrication chart in the laboratory of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. The laboratory assistant in foreground is working at a precision balance. Chicago, Ill}

-----

Some sources:

Selected Bibliography and Related Web Sites about the FSA and OWI from the Library of Congress

Jack Delano, a brief biography from the Museum of Contemporary Photography

Oral history interview with Jack and Irene Delano, 1965 June 12 from the Smithsonian Institution

The Farm Security Administration page at the Library of Congress

Chicago and North Western Transportation Company on wikipedia

Chicago & North Western Historical Society

Links from the Chicago & North Western Historical Society

Chicago & North Western - A Capsule History

----

Notes:

[1] My blog post on Fox Conner touches on this. The factory he ran switched from making "porous plasters" to alleviate back pain to making bullet-proof liners for the fuel tanks of airplanes and military tanks.

[2] See for example these photos by OWI's Ann Rosener taken in 1943 at a California shipyard.

[3] All the photos come from the Prints and Photos Div of the Library of Congress.

Palladian

2012-03-25T14:55:00.013-04:00

The forecast promised downpours and maybe thunderstorms but the rain crept in out of a gray mist and fell sparsely, hardly dampening the earth.

Scenes in the book I'm reading take place in such somber weather. The book is Elizabeth Taylor's second novel, Palladian and its theme is wisdom, as you can tell from the title, but its underlying subject is death.

The chief character is introduced to us in the first sentence: "Cassandra, with all her novel reading, could be sure of experiencing the proper emotions..." The character's name might put the reader on guard, expecting onslaught of tempestuous love ending tragically, but the book's style is playful and we can tell that our heroine is (somewhat ambivalently) both Englishly proper and girlishly eager for romance. Her parents dying, she becomes governess to a girl named Sophy in a romantically dilapidated mansion whose inhabitants are ill-matched but kept together by ties of family, circumstance, and an unbreakable bond with Sophy's mother who died giving birth to her.

Though Taylor does not say so, you can tell that Cassandra feels the novelistic elements of the situation — some Charlotte Brontë, some of Jane Austin, some of George Eliot.

In their first meeting together in his study, her employer tells her there are no diversions where she now finds herself. There is only the forward stretch of time with little to fill it. "When there is so much time," he says, "there is never enough."

He speaks of a conversation that takes place in Turgenev's A Month in the Country; quoting him:

Will you walk about in the garden with a book in your hand, which you will never read? That is all there is to do here. There is all day long and the night, too; and yet, there is only time to dip into books and turn over a few pages. You'll find that. When there is so much time, there is never enough. Those long summers in the Russian novels — the endless bewitched country summers — and the idle men and women — making lace. Do you remember in A Month in the Country — that was how Natalia described their conversation — it was love conversation, too — that it was making lace ... they never moved an inch to the left or right ... only idle people are like that ... they talk to pass the time for they know that time is only a landscape we travel across. . . . They hope to make a busy journey of it ... (ellipses in original)

After she leaves him, Cassandra considers what he has said about the unending succession of one moment to another — an unmoving transition which negates change, in which only time exists and time is without meaning.

Cassandra understands this notion of time without meaning to convey a belief in life without meaning. She does not reject the thought but seeks to compartmentalize it. Taylor writes of her:

She had come a long way from the life of yesterday, of the day before that — the shabby home, the traffic, the bush full of tram tickets, the crowds on the pavements, clotting, thinning out, pressing forward; travelling across time, Marion had called it but they were really going to work, or going home from work, or shopping, or wooing one another. 'Quite separate,' she thought. 'Each quite separate. That is the only safe way of looking at it. And we can never be safe unless we believe we are great and that human life is abiding and the sun constant and that we matter. Once broken that fragile illusion would disclose the secret panic, the vacuity within us. Life then could not be tolerable.' Marion, with his talk of lace-making, had threatened to reveal the panic and confusion and so create an intolerable world for her.

In this gentle satire, it is not just Cassandra who tries to make life tolerable by repressing a secret panic. Taylor examines, charitably, but with painful clarity, all the book's main characters as they seek refuge from despair and their own regrets.

Marion's younger cousin, Tom, for example, "had been early overthrown, had failed to recover, and now cloaked himself in melodrama — the laconic drunkard or the sordid roué — to put himself beyond the reach of his mother or other women, or men." And they are, each differently, hounded by death. Tom, for example, in a brief exchange which embarrasses Marion, says "I am drinking myself to death." And this, says Taylor, was a melodramatic statement, but one, all the same, which "had the seeds of great tragedy in it." Marion responds: "In a different way, I am done for too. ... I am reading myself to death, that is all the difference is."

The book swims with allusions to classical Greece. The title refers not just to Cassandra's reverence for Pallas Athena, but also, prosaically, to the façade of the old house where the action takes place. The house is medieval at the core, but has been layered over in successive attempts to conceal its origins, the latest being a Palladian front, which is to say an 18th century imitation of classical Greek ideals. Athena's attribute is sophia, wisdom, personified in Cassandra's charge, Sophy.

The Cassandra of classical mythology is a tragic figure, a prophetess gifted with second sight whose knowledge is wasted on those around her. Taylor's Cassandra has no such heroic dimensions. When Taylor has Cassandra seek safety in her belief that "human life is abiding and the sun constant," she alludes to the relationship between the Cassandra of myth and Apollo, god of healing and of the sun and brother to Athena. It was Apollo who instilled in Cassandra the ability to see the past and future as if they were present. This insight is generally described as a gift which he later reversed by causing her to speak prophesies that no one believed but the "gift" can be seen another way: as sight so clear that there can be no "fragile illusion" (as Taylor has it) of "the vacuity within us." Unlike Taylor's Cassandra, the classical one has no choice but to see clearly what she wishes she could not.

Early in Palladian, Mrs. Turner, her school-mistress and mentor, gives Cassandra a book and the gift shows the unbridgeable gulf between the larger-than-life reality of Attic Greece and the depressed life of the English in the years following World War II. The book is called The Classical Tradition and it's meant to provide a guide for right living. Cassandra loves her disorganized, well-meaning friend but finds her writing to be unreadable. In Cassandra's hands this gift book "had a strange fungus smell and its pages were stippled with moles. The prose was formal and exact, remote from Mrs. Turner's personality and yielding up nothing between the lines..."

The time and place of Palladian is not that of classical Greece. Aeschylus's Cassandra can shriek in a mad fury about the murder she is about to suffer at Clytemnestra's hands and pray to the sun that her enemies pay a bloody penalty for slaughtering herself who has become a slave, an easy prey.[1] Taylor's Cassandra is proper and conventional. What little she knows of life she has learned from novels and immediately expects that Marion will be Rochester to her Jane.[2] The Cassandra of Aeschylus has seen much death and destruction and has no romantic illusions. Wild with grief she is eager for the fates to revenge her murder. For her, death does not steal quietly in, and a pleasant life of aristocratic ease can be wiped out in a moment: "the dash of a wet sponge blots out the drawing and that is far the most pitiable thing of all."

Taylor's setting is not classical Greece where a bright light can be brought to shine on the misdeeds of humankind, but shadowy England, "a mouldering and rank corner of earth," with its leaden skies and inescapable damp, where emotions are not primitive and raw, but rather where personalities are quirky and human lives intersect with one another obliquely. Words, rationally deployed, are used to wound and wounds are often self-inflicted. The tone of Palladian is not heroic but humorously ironic and in its pages human life is made tolerable not through hubris but by maintaining illusions.

Taylor's characters live out their lives in more-or-less desperate passivity. Although Elizabeth Taylor and Samuel Beckett seem to have had nothing in common save their roughly contempraneous lives, these characters and those of Beckett's first novel, Murphy, share this comedic absence of affect, agility in deflecting the concerns of ordinary life, and sense of death as constant companion.

Neither Taylor's Cassandra nor any others of her characters, as with Beckett's, have anything in common with the Cassandra of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (out of Aeschylus) who moans at the doorway to her death-chamber with wild eyes and "wide nostrils scenting fate."

For the rest, — a mystic moaning,
Kept Cassandra at the gate,
With wild eyes the vision shone in, —
And wide nostrils scenting fate.
-- from The Island Wine of Cyprus by Elizabeth Barrett Browning[3]

{Source: LibraryThing}

I began this post thinking it would be about Taylor's Cassandra and the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha, how her statement concerning the fragile illusion concerning the meaning of life connects with his insight about the need for humans to free themselves from illusions concerning their personal significance and their collective permanence in an impersonal and impermanent universe. But I have written something else, haven't I?[4]

I've written three other posts on novels of Elizabeth Taylor:

Elizabeth Taylor's view, May 22, 2009
A Wreath of Roses, June 22, 2009
what is the use of it?, August 13, 2009

-------

Notes:

[1] In Aeschylus's Agamemnon Cassandra has fallen from princess — daughter of Priam, sister of Hector — to slave. Agamemnon himself has taken her as concubine and she is to be murdered along with him by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover. Her mad scene is powerful theater.

Once more the dreadful throes of true prophecy whirl and distract me with their ill-boding onset. Do you see them there — beating against the wall — shapes that gather in a dream? Children, they seem, slaughtered by their own kindred, their hands full of the meat of their own flesh; they are clear to my sight, holding their vitals and their inward parts. And their father drank their blood.

For this cause I tell you that a lion, wallowing in his bed, plots vengeance, a watchman waiting for my master's coming home — yes, my master, for the yoke of slavery is nailed about my neck. The commander of the fleet and the overthrower of Ilium knows not this she-wolf's tongue which licks and fawns, and laughs with ear up-sprung, to bite in the end like secret death. Such boldness has she, a woman to slay a man. What odious monster shall I fitly call her ... a raging, devil's mother, breathing relentless war against her husband? ... And yet, it is all one, whether or not I am believed. What does it matter? What is to come, will come. And soon you, yourself present here, shall with great pity pronounce me all too true a prophetess.

[2] Marion Vanbrugh is ambiguously sexed (or perhaps unsexed). As his first name suggests he is a male with feminine attributes. There is nothing Byronic about him; he is not a reincarnation of Jane Eyre's Edward Rochester. Nor has he anything in common with Fitzwilliam Darcy. And while he is bookish, he is no self-defeating scholar like Edward Casaubon. His surname suggests his character might be like that of John Vanbrugh, but it is not.

[3] Aeschylus has Cassandra say: "Since first I saw the city of Ilium fare what it has fared, while her captors, by the gods' sentence, are coming to such an end, I will go in and meet my fate. I will dare to die. This door I greet as the gates of Death. And I pray that, dealt a mortal stroke, without a struggle, my life-blood ebbing away in easy death, I may close these eyes."

[4] This is from Into the Silence by Wade Davis: "The essence of the dharma, which the Buddha had distilled in the Four Noble Truths. First, all life is suffering. By this the Buddha did not mean that all life is negation, but only that terrible things happen. Evil was not exceptional but part of the existing order of things, a consequence of human actions, or karma. Second, the cause of suffering is ignorance. By ignorance the Buddha did not mean stupidity, He meant the tendency of human beings to cling to the cruel illusion of their own permanence and centrality, their isolation and separation from the stream of universal existence. The third of the noble truths was the revelation that ignorance could be overcome and the fourth and most essential was the delineation of a contemplative practice that, if followed, promised an end to suffering and a true liberation and transformation of the human heart. The goal was not to escape the world but to escape being enslaved by it. The purpose of practice was not the elimination of self but the annihilation of ignorance and the unmasking of the true Buddha nature, which, like a buried jewel, shines bright within every human being, waiting to be revealed. Padma Sambhava's transmission, in short, offered nothing less than a road map to enlightenment."

Bugatti

2012-03-18T13:15:00.004-04:00

As a twelve-year-old I devoured books of instruction, from the WWII NAVPER books on hand tools, to a Kodak "data book" on how to take good pictures; from a book on how to shoot with bow and arrow, to one on fishing with fly rod, and (a little later) another on maintenance of two-cycle outboard motors. Though I was notoriously a daydreamer, this reading wasn't entirely removed from reality. I never mastered any of the skills, but I did make a not-so-bad-for-a-sixth-grader attempt at all of them. On the other hand, it's true my favorite book was on a subject about which I could only fantasize. This was a little mass-market paperback by Ken W. Purdy called The Kings of the Road. The image at right shows the cover of my copy, now a majestic 58 years old and one of only a handful of books I've retained that long. Purdy was then editor of True magazine and, you can read in the book's acknowledgements, had written some of the book's chapters as articles in the mag.[1]

The best of them is Chapter II of the book, "The Fabulous Bugatti," which had appeared in True's issue of October 1949.

This chapter (along with all the rest of them) is now available on a blog:
The Kings Of The Road - by Ken W. Purdy by a British student who calls himself Scooby_Lab.

Here's an excerpt.

[Ettore Bugatti] ... was a demonstrable genius, a combination of artist and engineer. His life was a compound of paradox. He did not particularly care for motor racing, yet his cars were fastest over the ground of their time. He was a mild and courteous man, yet he liked to be given, even in his home, the autocratic title, ‘Le Patron’. ... The products of his wizardry were twentieth century to the minute, yet he ran his factory, with which was combined his aviaries, his kennels, his stables, his vineyards, his museums, his distillery, his boatyard, like a prince’s domain. ... He was not wealthy, but he refused to consider the question of cost in the making of a motor-car.

What kind of cars inspire this devotion? Are they dead silent, smooth riding as mobile feather beds, quick to start in the blackness of zero mornings, so easy to drive that a child can manage them? They are not! Most Bugattis are noisy in every way a car can be noisy, plus a few ways peculiar to themselves; when the temperature slips to the area of 30F. most of them are seized with a stubborn reluctance to fire at all, and indeed Bugatti himself blandly advised purchasers of his cars to invest in heated garages. ... And no Bug ever built was designed to be driven by children of the rich. ... The multiplate Bugatti clutches are often either all in or all out and nothing in between, giving the car a marked tendency to start off with a neck-snapping jerk. The clutch on some models must be adjusted to a hair and dosed with just the right mixture of kerosene and oil, lest it refuse to come free at all, thus forcing the hapless driver to make gear changes with hope and prayer. Bugatti favoured cable-operated brakes demanding heavy foot pressure, and on one occasion loftily told a customer that he made his cars to go, not to stop. Heavy though they were, the race-bred Bugatti brakes were efficient and virtually fade-proof. Bugatti detested detachable cylinder heads. On one model the rear axle, transmission and crankshaft must be removed before the valves can be ground. The Bugatti water pump is something to make strong men weep, and some of the racing models fling oil about like a gusher gone berserk. ‘It comes out of everything but the tyre valves and gets into everything including your hair,’ one devoted owner reports.

Purdy's passion for the Bugatti came to mind recently when I saw this photo.

It comes from a photojournal of flickr images by Ken Hircock called saxonfenken's photostream. This link takes you to the original post: Vintage Bugatti. His full-size image of the car is here.

There are lots and lots of Bugatti photos on the web. What sets this one apart is the condition of the car. It's not another Concours-d'Elegance showpiece, but rather a "driver." It's clearly not an car that's kept for show and only given infrequent and short outings. About it, Ken Hircock says "In a small Utah country town of Hanksville, a convoy of Vintage Bugatti's pulled up for breakfast, they were touring the United States and had already travelled 1500 miles"

I judge this car to be one of only fifty that were manufactured between 1928 and 1930, the supercharged Type 35C. Of the various Type 35 models, the author of a wikipedia article says: "The Type 35 was phenomenally successful, winning over 1,000 races in its time. It took the Grand Prix World Championship in 1926 after winning 351 races and setting 47 records in the two prior years. At its height, Type 35s averaged 14 race wins per week. Bugatti organized the Targa Florio as a special spotlight for this car, and it claimed victory there for five consecutive years, from 1925 through 1929."

And about the 35C: "The Type 35C featured a roots type supercharger, despite Ettore Bugatti's disdain for forced induction. Output was nearly 128 hp (95 kW) with a single Zenith carburettor. Type 35Cs won the 1928 and 1930 French Grand Prix. Fifty examples left the factory."

This Youtube video of a 35C show car is lovingly filmed with decent audio of the engine sound. Note the instrument panel to be seen between 20 and 30 sec. and the external gear shift and hand brake levers between 30 and 40.

{Uploaded by carchannelclassic on Sep 14, 2011. "I recorded this beautiful blue Bugatti Type 35 B during Concours d'Elegance Antwerp."}

This Youtube shows the 35 in full race mode.

{Uploaded by 4kam on Jul 8, 2010. Monaco Historic Grand Prix 2010, Bugatti Type 35 onboard video footage courtesy of Duncan Pittaway. The Bugatti Type 35 was the first ever winner of the Monaco Grand Prix in 1929. Footage shot with a 4Kam Onboard Camera and DV4 Solid State Video Recorder.}

You can see still photos of this car and its driver here. It's clearly a version A of 1925 (dual-carbs and not supercharger).

You'll find a bunch of other good Type 35 videos here.

There's a famous story that the great Isadora Duncan was killed in an accident while riding in a Type 35 (or maybe a Type 37). As the story has it: "According to oral tradition, her last words were: 'Farewell, my friends, I am off to glory!' As the car drove off, she threw a long silk scarf around her neck, which entangled in one of the car’s open-spoked wheels. The heavy embroidered silk pulled instantly taut and snapped the dancer’s neck."[2]

You can find a description of the 35C engine, with photos, here and this video gives a CAD tour of the engine, inside out, including the blower.

Two other videos.
Tour en Bugatti Type 35

Bugatti Type 37A at Road America

----------

Some sources:

Bugatti Type 35 35B 35C 35T

Bugatti type 35

Bugatti Models

1927 Bugatti Type 35B

Bugatti Type 35 engine

Bugatti Type 35 (1924)

------

General note: I've reproduced text and photos under fair use provisions of U.S. Copyright Law and will remove any for which it's shown fair use does not apply.

Notes to text:

[1] This is the cover of the issue of True magazine in which Purdy's article on the Bugatti appeared (Oct. 1949).
.

{Contents:

Issue Date: OCTOBER, 1949; VOL. 25, NO.149
COVER: Special Fly to Hunt map. Cover by John Atherton.

BOOK-LENGTHER: The Pioneer Baron of Burglars ... Alan Hynd. In the palmy days of bank burglary, the top man of them all was Maximilian Shinburn, a real artist at turning off a jug. Full page color illustration by David Berger.

ADVENTURE:
The Champions of the Northland ... Bruce A. Wilson. Illustrated by John Pike.
A Time for Battle ... George Scullin. Full page color illustration by Tom Lovell.
The White Magic of Voodoo ... Allan Gould & Emile C. Schurmacher.

IN THE NEWS:
"We Will Be First to Die" ... Richard Tregaskis.
The Hamster Man . ... Robert M. Hyatt.
Store Hair ... Fred Rosen.
Your Clothes Do the Talking.
TRUE Tested Trends.

PERSONALITIES: TRUE'S Who: How to Pick Pockets in Public ... Daniel P. Mannix.

SPORTS:
Good Hunting--and Where. Map by John R. Hull.
Cricket Is for Men Only ... Bob Deindorfer.
You Want to Watch Them ... Marshall Goldberg.

SCIENCE:
The Fabulous Bugatti ... Ken W. Purdy. [With color photos!]
What's New in Scope Sights? ... Lucian Cary.

PICTORIAL: Vip's Tips for Men--How to Baby-Sit ... Virgil Partch.

FACT MYSTERY: The Case of the Naked Widow ... Archie McFedries. Full page color illustration by Louis Glanzman.

SHORT FEATURES: TRUEly Yours; Next Month; The Editor Speaking; Man to Man Answers; TRUE Goes Shopping; Books for Men; This Funny Life; Strange But True; The Mountain Boys; A Slight Oversight; The Offshore Bus; Pennsylvania's Last Buffalo; Build It Yourself; Never Underestimate an Eskimo; Know These Railroad Records; Twists. TRUE, A Fawcett Publication.
-- source: eBay}

Here's a different, but representative, article from magaszine: The Sky-High Invention, Hiller's Flying Platform, by John DuBarry, True Magazine, September 1956

[2] I've mentioned Isadora Duncan once before.

rouleur

2012-03-18T12:49:00.005-04:00

I've begun posting to my tumblr microblog, Rouleur. Like most tumblogs, it's simply a vehicle for re-posting entries that have caught my eye elsewhere. This is a representative example:

11th Mar 2012

A Change of Scenery II (Making Mountains) by Rob Gonsalves; reposted from nothing new, a soup microblog by "charlottinka."

Fox Conner

2012-02-26T09:45:00.004-05:00

I dote on Ralph E. Luker's postings to the history blog called Cliopatria and while visiting there I happened upon a link to a book review by Jonathan Yardley. Yardley is always worth reading and this piece is as good as most. It's his review of Jean Edward Smith's new book on Dwight Eisenhower and in it he happens to mention the military officers who mentored Eisenhower during the two decades following his 1915 graduation from West Point. The name of one of these men caught my eye because it's the name of an uncle of my brother's wife.

I remember the uncle as owner of a smallish manufacturing plant which, from the 1930s through the '60s, produced a humane animal trap called Havahart™. I remembered two other facts: (1) the traps were invented by an eccentric German who sold the patent to the uncle sometime before WWII and (2) after the outbreak of that war, the uncle switched production from traps to a military item: liners for the fuel tanks of armored vehicles.

A bit of research shows both these facts to be true.

I also have a vague memory of the old brick factory where the traps and liners were made, located in Ossining right next door to the village in which I had been raised. Though I'm uncertain I actually saw it, there's no doubt about the existence of the place. Having begun as a plant for making a patent medicine called Brandreth's Pills and having been turned to other uses in the next 150 years or so, it now stands unkempt and empty.

This image shows the office building with the factory structures behind.

{The photo was taken from the west, or river, side of the property; caption: Buildings of the former Brandreth Pill Factory complex in Ossining, NY, USA source: wikipedia}

This is what the main factory buildings look like.

{Taken from the north, this shows part of the office and two of the Brandreth factory buildings; source: aolcdn.com}[1]

This river-side view of the property comes from a certificate awarding the right to sell Brandreth Pills in Italy. It is dated 1863. The base of the copula still exists but there are only a few indistinct remains of the Greek-revival portico seen up the hill at right. The buildings are located on a cove of the Hudson River with the New York Central Railroad (indicated by smoke from a locomotive chimney) and Haverstraw Bay (indicated by distant hills) shown on the horizon. There is some artistic license taken. The cove was somewhat smaller than shown and the buildings are shown facing the wrong direction. They faced the river to the west, not, as shown, south toward the hamlets of Sing Sing and Sparta. The building at center is the original factory; at right is an office, and the hill-side structures are a "summer house" (with copula) and residence (with columned portico).[2]

{Detail from a Brandreth certificate of agency of 1863; source: Westchester Archives}

This detail from an 1868 property atlas shows the cove and orientation of the buildings. Click to view full size. Most of the factory structures are shown top left. There is one by the train tracks at river side and the remaining Brandreth buildings are office, store house, stable and residences.[3]

{Detail from Singsing, Town of Ossining, Westchester Co., N.Y. (Atlas of New York and vicinity by F.W. Beers published by Beers, Ellis & Soule, New York, 1868); source: David Rumsey Historical Map Collection}

This satellite image shows the area as it is now. The two residences that I've marked are both modern buildings built roughly on the location of the original ones. The building marked "Office" dates from 1838 and is the first factory building on the site. It is labeled "Pill Fact." on the 1863 atlas. The buildings I call "Pill and Plaster Factory Bldgs" were built in the next couple of decades and are called "Drug Mill & Plaster Manufactury" on the atlas.[4]

{source: Google}

This photo shows the property from out on the river to the west. The "Pill and Plaster Factory Bldgs" are directly behind the white structure at left. The "office" is along the shore at right. Other structures are hidden by the trees. The church seen mid-right is the one where the factory owners and their families attended services.

{The Brandreth property seen from the river; source: hiddencove.us}

The uncle's name was Fox Conner as was the name of Eisenhower's mentor, and the one was son to the other — Fox Brandreth Conner, son of Fox Conner. Fox Conner was General Pershing's chief of staff. There's much to be read about him, and if you're interested, the wikipedia article on him is a good place to start. There's also a book on him, Grey Eminence: Fox Conner and the Art of Mentorship by Edward Cox (New Forums Press, 2010).

The factory that Fox Brandreth Conner ran has an interesting history.

The first factory building was put up in 1836 on property purchased from Oliver Cromwell Field, a direct descendant of the Lord Protector.[5] Field's house, on a promontory called Spring Hill, became the residence of the new owner, Benjamin Brandreth. You can read a concise history of Benjamin Brandreth and his family here (pdf). His grandfather invented Brandreth's Pills in Leeds, England, and Benjamin brought the business first to New York City and then to the land he'd bought from Field. The pills were a powerful vegetable-based purgative. A great-great grandfather of Fox Brandreth Conner, Benjamin was one of America's first advertising geniuses. His entrepreneurial ability made them just about universally known in their time. An astute businessman, he succeeded in acquiring and preserving a considerable fortune. In his book, Humbugs of the World P.T. Barnum describes Brandreth's early success:

"Great and reasonable as might have been the faith of Dr. Brandreth in the efficacy of his pills, his faith in the potency of advertising them was equally strong. ... Column upon column of advertisements appeared in the newspapers, in the shape of learned and scientific pathological dissertations, the very reading of which would tempt a poor mortal to rush for a box of Brandreth's Pills; so evident was it (according to the advertisement) that nobody ever had or ever would have "pure blood," until from one to a dozen boxes of the pills had been taken as "purifiers." The ingenuity displayed in concocting these advertisements was superb, and was probably hardly equaled by that required to concoct the pills.

No pain, ache, twinge, or other sensation, good, bad, or indifferent, ever experienced by a member of the human family, but was a most irrefragable evidence of the impurity of the blood; and it would have been blasphemy to have denied the "self-evident" theory, that " all diseases arise from impurity or imperfect circulation of the' blood, and that by purgation with Brandreth's Pills all disease may be cured." The doctor continued to let his advertising keep pace with his patronage; and he was finally, in the year 1836, compelled to remove his manufactory to Sing Sing, where such perfectly incredible quantities of Brandreth's Pills have been manufactured and sold that it would hardly be safe to give the statistics. Suffice it to say, that the only "humbug" which I suspect in connection with the pills was, the very harmless and unobjectionable yet novel method of advertising them; and as the doctor amassed a great fortune by their manufacture, this very fact is prima facie evidence that the pill was a valuable purgative.

In 1848 Brandreth purchased rights to a sticking plaster for relieving aches and pains: Allcock's Porous Plasters for Lumbago and All Pains. This too he heavily advertised and it was said to be so beneficial that the only problem its users faced was in removing the thing once it had done its work. Over the next century Brandreth and his successors added to the list of manufactured goods produced in the factory buildings: (1) ammunition-box liners for the military during World War I, (2) nail polish (3) mannequins, (4) cell forms for bulletproof fuel tanks during World War II, (5) an ersatz coffee, and (6) a fiberglass boat, the Swallow Model Adirondack Guideboat.

This lithograph was made just prior to the time Brandreth built his first factory building. The artist is standing on high land in the hamlet of Sing Sing, later to become the village of Ossining. The view is to the north west and Oliver Cromwell Field's property, where Brandreth will build, is out of sight, over the hill at center. The neck of land jutting into the Hudson is Croton Point. This part of the river is called Haverstraw Bay. The small peak pointed skyward on the horizon is High Tor, where Rip Van Winkle fell asleep.

{Caption: Sing-Sing or Mount Pleasant, lithograph by Jacques Gérard Milbert, Jacques, from: Itineraire pittoresque du fleuve Hudson et des parties laterales de l'Amerique du Nord, d'apres les dessins originaux pris sur les lieux. Source: NYPL Digital Gallery}

This painting shows Haverstraw Bay in 1839 with the artist standing in Sing Sing looking south and west. By this time Brandreth had built his first factory but it and the Field residence are out of sight to our right.

{The artist is W.H. Bartlett; source: rootsweb.ancestry.com}

This 1885 ad for the pills and the porous plasters shows Haverstraw Bay looking southwest from the river-side factory. The boy has one of the plasters on his back.

{source: wikipedia}

Here are some testimonial-style advertisements from the New York Tribune in 1871. Notice the willingness of officials to help promote what was then a place where many of the village's young women and not a few of its men found work.

{The Tribune almanac and political register edited by Horace Greeley (The Tribune Association, 1871)}

This detail from a property atlas shows the factory structures and residences as of 1893. H.C. Symonds was a member of the Brandreth clan. The house was labeled "Mrs. Brandreth" on earlier maps. I suspect that Miss J. Van Wyck was one as well. Her house was labeled "P.G. Van Wyck" on earlier maps. The original factory building is here labeled "Store House".

{Atlas: Sing Sing by Julius Bien & Co., 1893: source: David Rumsey Map Collection}

This larger view shows the growth of the village in the 60 years since Brandreth first moved there.

I haven't forgotten that it was the humane traps which first attracted my interest in the factory. This ad for it appeared in 1962.

As I say, Ossining is next door to the village where I was raised and I've consequently done some blog posts in which it figures. Here are some links:

along the aqueduct, May 09, 2010
a river three miles wide, May 12, 2010
the resurrection of Sparta, May 10, 2010
Croton Water, May 08, 2010
cycling newsies, February 07, 2011
Beechwood and vicinity, May 11, 2010
Hugo B. Roelker, May 07, 2010
leather man, May 15, 2010
The Old Leather Man (again), May 01, 2011

--------

Some sources:

“Eisenhower in War and Peace” by Jean Edward Smith a review by Jonathan Yardley, February 6, 2012

"Brandreth Pills" in Brother Jonathan: A weekly compend of belles lettres and the fine arts, standard literature, and general intelligence Horatio Hastings Weld, John Neal, George M. Snow, Edward Stephens (Wilson & Company, 1842)

Brandreth Pills in The Humbugs of the World, An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quackeries, Deceits and Deceivers Generally, in All Ages, by P. T. Barnum (1866)

Ossining's Historic Brandreth Pill Factory, Ossining's Brandreth Pill factory gained its National Register designation in 1980 because of its connection with Dr. Benjamin Brandreth, by former Ossining Mayor Miguel Hernandez in Ossining Patch

Benjamin Brandreth on DaleCemetery.com

EPN Real Estate Services to complete Hidden Cove on the Hudson, New England Real Estate Journal, January 8, 2008, an article about proposed development of the property

Hidden Cove on the Hudson, documents related to proposed development of the property for upscale housing

Draft Environmental Impact Statement Hidden Cove on the Hudson (pdf), one of the documents

Archaeological Assessment Hidden Cove on the Hudson (pdf) another of the documents

When Sing Sing Was a 'Model' Prison March 19, 2009, in Postscripts, an online magazine offering a pastiche of articles on current affairs, history, technics, opinion, writing, advice, humor and trivia.

Purgation Unlimited James Harvey Young, in The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation

Brandreth Pill Factory Documents, 1863-1900

The Tribune almanac and political register edited by Horace Greeley (The Tribune Association, 1871)

Archaeological Assessment and Field Investigation, Hidden Cove Development, Brandreth Pill Factory, Village Of Ossining, Westchester County, New York (pdf)

"A Most Mephitic Mystery" by venta Belgarum in The Sandisfield Times, Vol. 1, No. 5, August 2010

Brandreth's Pills in Historical Images of the Drug Market, Medical Collectors Association Newsletter, December 22, 2000

Allcock's Porous Plasters by Caroline Rance on October 16th, 2009

Œuvres complètes d'Alexis de Tocqueville (M. Lévy frères, 1865)

Fiberglass Adirondack Guideboat in Boats and Boating in the Adirondacks by Hallie E. Bond (Syracuse University Press, 1998)

Gen Fox Conner on findagrave.com

Thomas Allcock on findagrave.com

Benjamin Brandreth on wikipedia

Thomas Allcock on wikipedia

FUNERAL OF DR. BRANDRETH.; SING SIGN VILLAGE IN MOURNING--THE WHOLE POPULATION AT THE FUNERAL, New York Times, February 23, 1880

DEATH OF G.A. BRANDRETH.; Head of a Well-Known Manufacturing Company and Prominent in the Affairs of His Town, New York Times, November 16, 1897

BERNJAMIN BRANDRETH'S WILL.; HOW HE DISPOSED OF HIS PROPERTY AND BUSINESS, New York Times, February 26, 1880

Dr. Brandreth Symonds, New York Times, August 26, 1905

DEATH OF G.A. BRANDRETH.; Head of a Well-Known Manufacturing Company and Prominent in the Affairs of His Town, New York Times, November 16, 1897

Conner -- Brandreth, New York Times, June 5, 1902

Paid Notice: Deaths CONNER, FOX BRANDRETH, New York Times, July 19, 2000
Extract: "CONNER, FOX BRANDRETH - Fox Brandreth Conner of Ossining died on July 17, 2000, at the Arden Hill Nursing Home in Goshen, NY. He was 95. Mr. Conner was born June 23, 1905, at Fort Hamilton Army Base in Brooklyn, NY. He was the son of Major General Fox Conner, Chief of Operations for the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I, and Virginia Brandreth Conner. Mr. Conner married Muriel Macpherson in 1927. She died on September 12, 1986. ... In 1929, he joined the family business, the Allcock Manufacturing Company, in Ossining. ... In the 1930s, the company began producing Havahart traps, humane traps that capture animals alive and unhurt. Mr. Conner became President of the company in 1945 and began to focus exclusively on manufacturing Havahart traps, which became the country's most popular humane animal traps, sold in the United States and overseas. ... Mr. Conner was an avid fisherman and outdoor sportsman, spending much of his time at the family seasonal residence in the Adirondack Mountains at Brandreth Park, NY. He enjoyed gardening and reading, and was an accomplished wood sculptor. ... "

Brandreth Pill Factory
Extract: "During the later years of the 19th century and the early 20th, the factory began to diversify its operations in response to increasing federal regulation of the patent-medicine industry. Among the new products were ammunition-box liners for the military during World War I. ... Franklin Brandreth stepped down in 1928 and was replaced by his grandson Fox Brandreth Conner. By then the domestic market for the pills it had once manufactured in abundance was gone. ...In 1940 the company sold the buildings at the southern end of the property to the Gallowhur corporation, which used them to make insect repellent and suntan lotion. The rights to the pill formula were also sold off after World War II. Brandreth's company, under the Allcock name, continued its manufacturing operations in the 1870s complex until 1979. They were later used by the Filex Corporation, a maker of steel office furniture."

------

Notes:

[1] Jaime Martorano and Abandoned New York have made available excellent, though fiercely protected, photo sets of the factory complex.

[2] Here is the full certificate.

{source: hudsonriver.westchesterarchives.com}

[3] Notice that one local resident bears the name Conner: "Jas. Conner" lives in a house on Snowden Ave. (top right of image). I don't know anything about the man but there may be a connection with the Conner family which eventually took over management of the Brandreth factory. It's also interesting to see a member of the Van Wyck family on the Brandeth property. The house of "P.G. Van Vyk" at Grove Hill is just east of the office and store house and somewhat north of Mrs. Brandreth's residence.

[4] Notice that there is a Van Wyck St. pointing south west toward the Van Wyck property. An atlas of 1893 shows "Miss J. Van Wyck" to be owner of this place. It also shows that the house of Mrs. Brandreth then belonged to a "H.C. Symonds". Symonds was a member of the Brandreth family.

[5] Alexis de Tocqueville once visited Oliver Cromwell Field at his home in Sing Sing: "Singsing, 31 mai 1831. Il y a à Singsing un vieillard qui se rappelle avoir vu les Indiens établis dans 'ce lieu. Le nom même de Singsing est tiré du nom d'un chef indien. On nous montre une maison où demeure un descendant d'Olivier Cromwell."

a phrase

2012-02-21T08:45:00.005-05:00

I've been reading Peter Matthiessen's Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in Stone Age New Guinea. It's an excellent book. You can find it used in the usual places and it can be had for free at Internet Archive. He writes gracefully and some of his descriptive paragraphs are startlingly beautiful.

As are some of his phrases. Here's one that caused me to pause and reflect during my lunchtime reading. Two small children he said were "caught in the grave immobility of time". Here's the passage with some context:

I wondered if Matthiessen used the phrase in homage to a piece of writing he admired, but I could find nothing among authors who wrote in English. Some further searching turned up one possibility in another language. This was the phrase "immobilité du temps" in Le lys rouge by Anatole France. Matthiessen pairs well with France. Both crafted elegant prose, both attacked the narrow-minded prejudices of their day, and both found success in fiction and non-fiction, literary writing and journalism, short works and long. (I write of Matthiessen in the past tense, but at 81 he's still going strong.)

Their similarities make it possible that Matthiessen was consciously alluding to France's novel in using his arresting phrase. The phrase is not uncommon in French. I suspect, however, (though I'm not at all sure) that in ordinary usage its meaning is generally closer to "stillness of time" than "immobility of time." If I'm right, and France is unusual in employing the latter, then it's possible (barely so I guess) that Matthiessen consciously echoed France in choosing his words.

Here's a bit of the context in Le Lys rouge: "Elle n’osait pas regarder sa montre, de peur d’y voir l’accablante immobilité du temps. Elle se leva, alla à la fenêtre et souleva les rideaux. Une lueur pâle était répandue dans le ciel nuageux. Elle crut que c’était le jour qui commençait à poindre. Elle regarda sa montre. Il était trois heures et demie." -- Le lys rouge by Anatole France (Lévy, 1896).

I'm not sure which I'd prefer — that Matthiessen graciously alluded to the great French author or that the words came to him with no whisper of their heritage.

Matthiessen

{Source: Hilldale Lecture in the Arts and Humanities, September 12, 2006, University of Wisconsin}

France

{Posté par Baschus, mercredi 18 janvier 2012, on Scolies}

Shrove Tuesday football

2012-02-20T08:29:00.005-05:00

I recently wrote about the ritual warfare of the Dani people of New Guinea. It was warfare because massed warriors would set upon one another with spears and bows and arrows. Its ritual elements lie in the ceremonies that preceded battle and in the withdrawal of both sides as soon as one or at most a few men were killed or wounded. The men fought not in anger but so as to appease the ghosts of their ancestors.

Reading about Dani warfare, I thought of the racket games played by American Indians. These games, which French observers called lacrosse, pitted one village against another in free-for-alls in which injury was frequent and death a possible outcome. The players participated in rituals before games began and these rituals closely resembled the ones they practiced before going to war. Some referred to the game as analogous to war (as in "little brother of war").

There's another traditional game in which participants would put limb and life at risk. It's the ancient football competition within English villages on Shrove Tuesday.

The English games, like the AmerInd ones, shared with Dani warfare a noticeable religious element. While in the former case, Indians would participate in religious ceremonies before each game and gods were seen as guiding play and determining the victor, in the latter, the game was associated with a religious requirement to be shriven, that is to confess sins to a priest, before sundown that day. (This year Shrove Tuesday falls tomorrow, February 21. One of the three days of Shrovetide, it is the day before Ash Wednesday, and thus the last day before the beginning of Lent.)

Shrove Tuesday football games were, like those of the Indians, not so much recreation, as mock warfare. Like Carnival, held in countries to the south, the games offered a release from many, though not all, cultural inhibitions. They were a letting loose of wild spirits. And it's tempting to see them, as it's common to view Dani ritual warfare and Indian lacrosse, as a means of defusing tensions between neighboring groups of men.

The rules Shrove Tuesday football were traditional ones, varying from village to village, and there were few of them. Early in the sixteenth century one observer saw the occasion as one "wherein is nothing but beastly fury, and extreme violence, whereof proceedeth hurt."[1] While this man went on to complain that "rancour and malice do remain with them that be wounded", modern sources tend to believe the games prevented worse conflict from developing and as a result generally led to better relations between opponents.

Similarly, Dani ritual battles seem to have had the character of games. As one witness wrote, "Dani battles have a conspicuous element of play, with one documented instance of a battle interrupted when both sides were distracted by throwing stones at a passing cuckoo dove."[2]

There's no way to know how ancient were the ritual warfare of the Dani and racket games of the AmerInds. The latter were first reported in the 1630s but the former not until 1938. The football contests of Shrove Tuesday can be dated back to the reign of Edward II who attempted to outlaw them in 1349 out of fear that they kept men from practicing archery and thus imperiled the nation's defense. Claims are made that the practice had antecedents in Roman or possibly Saxon Britain, but there's no real evidence for them.

In the early nineteenth century, just as football was catching on as a sport in the aristocratic public schools, it began to die out as a communal sporting competition. In 1829 a French visitor saw the Shrove Tuesday match between two parts of Ashbourne, in Derbyshire: uppers and the downers, that is to say the neighborhoods from different sides of the river that runs through the place. The Frenchman later wrote "if Englishmen call this play, it would be impossible to say what they call fighting."[3]

{Picture showing a Shrove Tuesday battle at London's Crowe Street originally drawn in the year 1721; source: Mob football on wikipedia}

Football match, 1846, at Kingston on Thames.

{Football match, 1846, Kingston on Thames; source: Kingston upon Thames on wikipedia}

Football evolving into rugby.

{Illustration of a public schools game of football in the 1860s; source: History of Football on spartacus.schoolnet}

Football evolving into what Americans call soccer.

{England against Scotland in 1877; source: History of Football on spartacus.schoolnet}

This shows a modern match of Shrove Tuesday football in Alnwick, Northumberland.

{Traditional Shrove Tuesday football in Alnwick, Northumberland; source: Radical History of Football}

The following image shows an American Indian lacrosse game by George Catlin. A source says: "Catlin was a big fan of Choctaw lacrosse, which he witnessed in Indian Territory in 1834. He described ball-play as 'a school for the painter or sculptor, equal to any of those which ever inspired the hand of the artist in the Olympian games or the Roman forum.' Lacrosse was a physical, even violent, game called 'little brother of war' in Choctaw that included no-holds-barred scuffling and wrestling as players struggled desperately for the ball."[4]

{George Catlin (1796–1872). Ball-play of the Choctaw: Ball-up, 1846–50. Oil on canvas; 65.4 x 81.4 cm. Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr. Smithsonian American Art Museum; source: Smithsonian American Art Museum}

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Some sources:

Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide Football Shrove Tuesday & Ash Wednesday

The history of Royal Ashbourne Shrovetide Football
Extract: "There are many versions as to the true origins of the game - but the most popular seems to be the theory that the 'ball' was originally a head tossed into the waiting crowd following an execution. ... And in 1878 the game was briefly banned after a man drowned in the Henmore. Local land-owners signed petitions and refused to let the game take place on their properties."

Royal Shrovetide Football in Ashbourne on demotix.com

'Shrovetide Football at Ashbourne', 26 February 1952 images on superstock.co

Shrovetide Football: 1 Ball, 2 Days, 3,000 Players on the New York Times, March 7, 2011.

History, topography, and directory of Derbyshire, comprising its history and archaeology: a general view of its physical and geological features, with separate historical and topographical descriptions of each town, parish, manor, and extra-parochial liberty (T. Bulmer & Co, Printed for the Proprietors by T. Snape & Co., 1895)

Old English customs extant at the present time, an account of local observances by Peter Hampson Ditchfield (G. Redway, 1896)
Extract:

Shrove Tuesday is a day celebrated for its famous football encounters, which are not, like ordinary games, fought out on a level field between goal-posts, but are entirely of another character. At Sedgefield the church clerk and sexton had, according to immemorial custom, to find a ball to be played for by the trades-folk and villagers on this day. The goal of the former is at the south of the village, that of the latter is a pond at the north end. The ball is put through the bull-ring in the middle of the village. The game always begins at one o'clock, and is fought out for three or four hours with much ferocity. There are no rules of "offside," or of "no charging or hacking allowed." All is fair in love or war, and also in the old-fashioned football of England and Scotland. At Chester-le-Street they have an annual match between the "up-street" and "down-street" folk on Shrove Tuesday. The contest takes place in the street, the windows being all carefully barricaded; and a burn lies in the course of the players, who rush into the water, and enjoy a fine scrimmage there. At Alnwick the contest used to take place in the street, but the Duke of Northumberland instituted an annual match, which now takes place in "the Pasture" every Shrove Tuesday between the parishioners of the two parishes of St. Michael and St. Paul. The committee receives the ball at the barbican of the castle from the porter, and march to the field headed by the Duke's piper, where the contest takes place, after which a fine struggle takes place for the possession of the ball.

History of Football
Extract: 'Large football games often took place on Shrove Tuesday. In 1796 it was reported that in Derby, John Snape was "an unfortunate victim to this custom... which is disgraceful to humanity and civilization, subversive of good order and government and destructive to the morals, properties, and lives of our inhabitants."'

History of football: And the Rules of the Game

Something for everybody (and a garland for the year) John Timbs (London, Lockwood & Co. Stationers, 1861)
Extract: "Football is another common Shrove Tuesday sport: it is still played in Derby, Nottingham, Kingston-upon-Thames, and a few other towns. ... The people of Kingston claim their ancient custom as a right obtained for them by the valour of their ancestors. Tradition states that the Danes, in one of their predatory incursions, were defeated at Kingston, and the Danish general being slain, his head was cut off, and kicked about the place in triumph. This happened on Shrove Tuesday; and hence the origin of their football on that day."

Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide Football Shrove Tuesday & Ash Wednesday.
The game is still carried on at Ashbourne and Derby. Extract:

Football continues to be played at in many parts of England on Shrove Tuesday and Ash-Wednesday, but the mode of playing this game at Ashbourne and Derby, differs very much from the usual practice of this sport. In the town of Derby the contest lies between the parishes of St. Peter and All Saints, and the goals to which the ball is to be taken are, Nun's mill for the latter, and the Gallow's balk on the Normanton road for the former. None of the other parishes of the borough take any direct part in the contest, but the inhabitants of all join in the sport, together with persons from all parts of the adjacent country. The players are young men from eighteen to thirty or upwards, married as well as single, and many veterans who retain a relish for the sport are occasionally seen in the very heat of the conflict. The game commences in the market-place, where the partisans of each parish are drawn up on each side; and, about noon, a large ball is tossed up in the midst of them. This is seized upon by some of the strongest and most active men of each party. The rest of the players immediately close in upon them, and a solid mass is formed. It then becomes the object of each party to impel the course of the crowd towards their particular goal. The struggle to obtain the ball, which is carried in the arms of those who have possessed themselves of it, is then violent, and the motion of this human tide heaving to and fro, without the least regard to consequences, is tremendous. Broken shins, broken heads, torn coats and lost hats, are among the minor accidents of this fearful contest, and it frequently happens that persons fall in consequence of the intensity of the pressure, fainting and bleeding beneath the feet of the surrounding mob. But it would be difficult to give an adequate idea of this ruthless sport: a Frenchman passing through Derby remarked, that if Englishmen called this playing, it would be impossible to say what they would call fighting. Still the crowd is encouraged by respectable persons attached to each party, and who take a surprising interest in the result of the day's sport; urging on the players with shouts, and even handing to those who are exhausted, oranges and other refreshment. The object of the St. Peters' party is to get the ball into the water, down the Morledge brook into the Derwent as soon as they can, while the All Saints party endeavour to prevent this, and to urge the ball westward. The St. Peter players are considered to be equal to the best water-spaniels, and it is certainly curious to see two or three hundred men up to their chins in the Derwent continually ducking each other. The numbers engaged on both sides exceed a thousand, and the streets arc crowded with lockers on. The shops are closed, and the town presents the aspect of a place suddenly taken by storm. — The origin of this violent game is lost in its antiquity, but there exists a tradition, that a cohort of Roman soldiers, marching through the town to Derventio, or Little Chester, were thrust out by the unarmed populace, and this mode of celebrating the occurrence has been continued to the present day. It is even added that this conflict occurred in the year 217, and that the Roman troops at Little Chester were slain by the Britons. — This game is played in a similar manner at Ashbourne, but the institution of it there is of a modern date.

The history of Royal Ashbourne Shrovetide Football

The every day book, or, A guide to the year, describing the popular amusements sports, ceremonies, manners customs & events incident to the three hundred & sixty-five days, in past & present times by William Hone, Volume 1 (W. Tegg, 1826)
Extract:

"FOOT-BALL.

This was, and remains, a game on Shrove Tuesday, in various parts of England.

Sir Frederick Morton Eden in the "Statistical account of Scotland," says that at the parish of Scone, county of Perth, every year on Shrove Tuesday the bachelors and married men drew themselves up at the cross of Scone, on opposite sides; a ball was then thrown up, and they played from two o'clock till sun-set. The game was this: he who at any time got the ball into his hands, run with it till overtaken by one of the opposite party; and then, if he could shake himself loose from those on the opposite side who seized him, he run on; if not, he threw the ball from him, unless it was wrested from him by the other party, but no person was allowed to kick it. The object of the married men was to hang it, that is, to put it three times into a small hole in the moor, which was the dool or limit on the one hand: that of the bachelors was to drotun it, or dip it three times in a deep place in the river, the limit on the other: the party who could effect either of these objects won the game; if neither won, the ball was cut into equal parts at sun-set. In the course of the play there was usually some violence between the parties; but it is a proverb in this part of the country that "All is fair at the ball of Scone. Sir Frederick goes on to say, that this custom is supposed to have had its origin in the days of chivalry; when an Italian is reported to have come into this part of the country challenging all the parishes, under a certain penalty in case of declining his challenge. All the parishes declined this challenge except Scone, which beat the foreigner, and in commemoration of this gallant action the game was instituted. Whilst the custom continued, every man in the parish, the gentry not excepted, was obliged to turn out and support the side to which he belonged, and the person who neglected to do his part on that occasion was fined; but the custom being attended with certain inconveniences, was abolished a few years before Sir Frederick wrote. He further mentions that on Shrove Tuesday there is a standing match at foot-ball in the parish of Inverness, county of Mid Lothian, between the married and unmarried women, and he states as a remarkable fact that the married women are always successful.

Humble yet violent beginnings
Extract: "Mob Football was a popular recreation activity recognised by its violent, uncodified and rural exterior, a far cry from the Suarez swan dives of the 21st century. The heartbeat of the game was born in these English Villages, where the locals celebrated their only days off work, known as ‘holy-days’, by taking part in ritual festivals of sport and alcohol."

Local derby on wikipedia.
Extract: "The traditional Shrovetide football match was also commonplace in the city. It was renowned as a chaotic and exuberant game that involved the whole town and often resulted in fatalities. The goals were at Nuns Mill in the north and the Gallows Balk in the south of the town, and much of the action took place in the Derwent river or Markeaton brook. Nominally the players came from All Saints' and St Peter's parishes, but in practice the game was a free-for-all with as many as 1,000 players. A Frenchman who observed the match in 1829 wrote in horror, 'if Englishmen call this play, it would be impossible to say what they call fighting'."

Mob football on wikipedia
"Mob Football has been forever imortalized by the writings of William Shakespeare in his The Comedy of Errors: Am I so round with you, as you with me, That like a foot-ball you doe spurne me thus: You spurne me hence, and he will spurne me hither, If I last in this service, you must case me in leather.[9] "

Pancakes and Football

SHROVE TIDE FOOTBALL

SHROVE TUESDAY NO-RULES FOOTBALL

Shrovetide in the New Advent encyclopedia

folk football in Britain

The Radical History of Football

Shrovetide Football, Ashbourne, Derbyshire

History - US - Lacrosse by Thomas Vennum Jr., Author of American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War
Extract: "Apart from its recreational function, lacrosse traditionally played a more serious role in Indian culture. Its origins are rooted in legend, and the game continues to be used for curative purposes and surrounded with ceremony. Game equipment and players are still ritually prepared by conjurers, and team selection and victory are often considered supernaturally controlled. In the past, lacrosse also served to vent aggression, and territorial disputes between tribes were sometimes settled with a game, although not always amicably. A Creek versus Choctaw game around 1790 to determine rights over a beaver pond broke out into a violent battle when the Creeks were declared winners. Still, while the majority of the games ended peaceably, much of the ceremonialism surrounding their preparations and the rituals required of the players were identical to those practiced before departing on the warpath."

Games of the North American Indians Culin, Stewart, 1858-1929 in Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1902-1903

"American Indian Games" by Stewart Culin in The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 11, No. 43 (Oct. - Dec., 1898), pp. 245-252 (American Folklore Society) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/534133

History of lacrosse on wikipedia - "Modern day lacrosse descends from and resembles games played by various Native American communities. These include games called dehuntshigwa'es in Onondaga ("men hit a rounded object"), da-nah-wah'uwsdi in Eastern Cherokee ("little war"), Tewaarathon in Mohawk language ("little brother of war"), baaga`adowe in Ojibwe ("bump hips") and kabocha-toli in Choctaw language ("stick-ball")."

Medieval football on wikipedia

Royal Shrovetide Football on wikipedia

Scoring the Hales on wikipedia

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Notes:

[1] Thomas Elyot quoted in Famous Football Quotes and FOOTBALL AFTER THE ORIGINAL STYLE 'PLAYED' AT ASHBOURNE ON SHROVE TUESDAY.

[2] From the article on endemic warfare in wikipedia, giving as source eider, Karl Heider's book, The Dugum Dani (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970).

[3] From the author(s) of the Local derby on wikipedia. Reference is made to Local derby on The Phrase Finder, but the quote is not given there.

[4] George Catlin and His Indian Gallery, Autry National Center