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Murder on the Railway

Posted in History, Literature with tags , , , , , , , , on August 28, 2011 by telescoper

I recently finished reading a book called Mr Briggs’ Hat by Kate Colquhoun, “a sensational account of Britain’s first railway murder”. In fact the subtitle isn’t particularly apt because this is a sober yet fascinating account of a famous Victorian crime, the investigation and trial that followed it. It’s a gripping story because it involves not only the elements of the classic “locked room” murder mystery, but also the pursuit of the suspect across the Atlantic to New York.

I won’t describe the story in full, as the details can be found in many places on the net. In a nutshell, the victim of this crime was a 70-year old well-to-do banker by the name of Thomas Briggs, who was found lying on the tracks of the North London Railway, between Bow and Hackney Wick (also known as Victoria Park) stations on the evening of 9th July 1864. He was carried to a nearby pub, but died later that evening of  extensive injuries to the head.

Briggs had boarded a first class compartment of the 21.45 train from Fenchurch Street station in order to travel to his home in Hackney. When the train had arrived at Hackney Central, at 22.10, one  compartment, with nobody inside, was found to be covered  in bloodstains; an empty leather bag and a walking stick were also found. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together;  some of Briggs’ possessions were found in the compartment, as was a battered hat. After Briggs’ death his family were asked to identify the various items that had been found, which they did, apart from the hat, which wasn’t his. Mr Briggs’ own hat had vanished.

All the evidence suggested that Briggs had been violently attacked and then thrown from the train. Perhaps he had tried to defend himself and in the course of a struggle had knocked off his assailant’s hat. In the rush to leave, or perhaps because his own was damaged, the murderer must have picked up the top hat Mr Briggs had been wearing. Briggs’ watch had apparently also been stolen.

After many false leads and a great deal of frustration the police finally developed a plausible suspect, an impoverished German tailor by the name of Franz Muller. Muller had apaprently been trying to raise money in order to travel to America and had in fact already boarded a ship to make the Atlantic crossing by the time the police were on his trail. However, Muller had travelled the cheapest way possible, on a sailing ship, steerage class.  Detective Richard Tanner, who led the police investigation, realised that if he travelled on a faster steamship he could still get to New York before Muller. So off he went, with a number of key witnesses in tow so he could produce them at an extradition hearing. This was all at the height of the American Civil War, incidentally, but the Muller case still made front page news in New York.

In fact Muller’s ship, the Victoria, took 40 days to reach New York – it must have been a terrible journey! – and Tanner arrived almost three weeks before that, so he had plenty of time to prepare to arrest his man. When Muller arrived he went meekly and when his possessions were searched the police found a watch with a serial number that matched Mr Briggs’. Muller also had a hat, but it didn’t quite match the description of the one belonging to Mr Briggs, as it had apparently been cut down. Such was the fame attached to this case that the style of a cut down top hat subsequently became universally known as a “”Muller” . Winston Churchill liked to wear one, apparently…

Anyway, Tanner secured the extradition warrant and returned to England with Muller, who was committed for trial at the Old Bailey and held on remand at Newgate. The trial lasted only three days, and it took the jury only 15 minutes to return a verdict of guilty. Muller was hanged at the public gallows at Newgate on November 14 1864. A huge crowd turned out to watch and there was so much disorder that the police feared a full-blown riot would break out. Such was the concern about this event that within a few years the practice of public executions was discontinued.

One of the reasons for the unrest at Muller’s execution was that there was a public outcry about the result of the trial. Many questions that had arisen during the trial had never been satisfactorily answered and Muller had continued to protest his innocence. He claimed that he had obtained the hat himself at a second-hand shop and had bought the watch in a similar fashion down at the docks, where stolen goods were regularly flogged. The law of the time, however, considered defendants on murder charges (and their spouses)  to be “incompetent witnesses”, which meant that they were not allowed to take the stand  in their own defence. Muller was therefore never given the opportunity to give his own account of what happened that evening. He had an alibi, in fact, that he’d spent the evening with a ladyfriend so she was called as a defence witness. It turned out however that she was a prostitute, and therefore lacking in credibility to a Victorian jury, and was also profoundly deaf. The prosecution tore her to shreds on the witness stand.

The compartment  in which the crime took place was a mess, with blood spatter and general signs of a disturbance. Why then did nobody else on the train hear anything? And how did Muller avoid getting any blood on his own clothes? A poor man like Muller would not have an extensive wardrobe, and his landlady (who also washed his clothes) hadn’t noticed any bloodstains on the night of the crime, or in the days afterwards before Muller left for New York. And how did he get off the train? Nobody saw him at Hackney station. Did he jump onto the tracks?

An important prosecution witness was a cab driver called Matthews, who testified to having helped Muller pawn various items. However, Matthews reliability was called into question when inconsistencies were found between his testimony on the witness stand and statements he had made earlier to the police. It also transpired that he was heavily in debt and clearly had his eyes on the reward that had been offered in connection with the murder. In fact it was £300, a huge sum in those days…

Another important question was raised at trial by  a railway employee who had noticed Mr Briggs, a regular passenger on the North London railway, on the train at Bow station in a first class compartment with not one but two other men, neither of whom matched the description of Muller (who was short of stature  and of slight build). The prosecution rubbished this testimony too, but it turns out that the police had found four other witnesses who had seen the same thing: Briggs in his compartment with two other men. In those days, however, the police were not obliged to disclose evidence to the defence if it was not used at trial. Had five independent witnesses all delivered corroborating testimony then there might well have been reasonable doubt about Muller’s guilt.

Above all, Muller just didn’t seem to behave like a murderer. He had told his friends well in advance of his departure for the United States, and had travelled in his own name without any attempt to conceal his identity. He was mild mannered and polite, on the small side, and not at all what the public expected of the perpetrator of such a violent crime. He was also quite small. Was he really capable of beating the much larger, if older, Briggs to death and then heaving his body out of the train all on his own?

All the evidence against Muller was circumstantial. No eyewitness put him on the train that night in 1864 and there was no forensic evidence to connect him with the crime scene. There was a bloody thumbprint on the hat left at the scene and a bloody handprint on the carriage door, either of which could have been conclusive, but decades were to pass before fingerprint analysis was to become an established part of forensic science. DNA or other trace evidence could of course also have been used to determine whether any of the blood in the carriage was Muller’s or even if he had worn either hat.

And what was Muller’s motive? Contrary to the suggestion that he was looking for money to allow him to move to New York, he seems to have had enough money already to pay for his ticket, because he had already bought it when the murder happened. It could have been an impulse. Perhaps he saw Briggs, who was wont to doze off on the train, and attempted to rob him but woke him up and a struggle ensued; but this seems very out of character.

However, the final words on this case should perhaps be those uttered by Muller himself just seconds before he took the drop. The prison chaplain, anxious for the confession that would bring closure to the case, stepped forward and asked “Did you do it?”. Muller reportedly answered, in German, “Ich habe es getan…”

Anyway, I found Mr Briggs’ Hat a fascinating read, fully of atmosphere and detail of the period and it yields fascinating insights into the social history of Victorian London. One of the things that got me especially interested in it was that the place it all happened is so close to where I used to live and work in the East End of London. On which note…

..I was curious about the route taken by Thomas Briggs from Fenchurch Street to Hackney, as no underground or overground railway goes that way nowadays. A bit of research (i.e. Google) revealed just how extensive the railway network was in the 1860s. Here is a map showing the relevant routes:

You can see that the service Mr Briggs took travelled in a roughly easterly direction out of Fenchurch street, along the route of the London and Blackwall Railway to Limehouse (the station there was named Stepney in those daysn, before swinging to the north. This railway is long since defunct but for much of its length this part of the route is followed by the modern Docklands Light Railway which carries on towards Poplar and London Docklands. However, the train Mr Briggs diverged from this route; it carried on  over the Regents Canal and across Burdett Road (where apparently there once was a station, although it didn’t open until 1871) before reaching Bow Station where it linked up with the North London Railway.  This part of the route doesn’t exist at all nowadays,  although there is still a railway bridge over Burdett Road carrying trains to and from destinations further to the east. Moreover,   “Bow Station” wasn’t either of the current stations at Bow (Bow Road, on the District and Hammersmith and City Underground lines or Bow Church on the Dockland Light Railway) but a much larger station which has now also vanished, but whose location you can  find next to the blue arrow on this map:

The line extending out of the top of the map is the route taken by the North London Railway at the time, essentially up the eastern side of Victoria Park, passing through Old Ford, before turning to the west to arrive at Hackney.

So what happened to this railway and all its stations? Well, if I tell you that they were all closed to the public in 1944 then you can probably guess. This part of London was heavily bombed during the Second World War, and not only during the Blitz. In fact Bow Station was hit by a V1 flying bomb and damaged beyond repair, but that was after operations on the North London Line had already been suspended because of bomb damage.

You can find a huge amount of fascinating detail about the disused stations on the North London Railway and elsewhere here.

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The Knife Man

Posted in History, Literature with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on July 9, 2011 by telescoper

It looks set to be the proverbial wet weekend here in Cardiff and I’m waiting for a pause in the rain before going out to do my Saturday shopping. Having done the crossword already, I should be cleaning the house but instead I thought I’d post a quick comment about the fascinating book I’ve just finished reading.

The Knife Man, by Wendy Moore, is an account of “The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery”. It’s a measure of my ignorance about medical history that I didn’t even know who John Hunter was when I started reading this, although I had heard of the Hunterian Museum without realising who it was named after.

I won’t give a lengthy account of Hunter’s biography; that’s done very well elsewhere on the net and indeed in the book, which I thoroughly recommend. It is worth emphasizing, however, what a remarkable man he was. Born in Scotland in 1728, he didn’t go to University and received no formal medical training. He went to London in 1748 in order to become assistant to his brother William, a noted surgeon at the time. John’s primary rsponsibility was to help with the dissection of human cadavers during William’s anatomy classes. He soon became fascinated by anatomy and himself became extremely adept at dissection. He received some medical training in London, had a spell as an army surgeon and eventually set up a private medical practice in London at which he ran his own anatomy classes for paying students. He became one of the top surgeons in London and attended to the needs of many prominent Georgian figures, including King George III.

But, as impressive as it was, his medical career wasn’t the most remarkable thing about Hunter’s life. His interests extended far beyond human anatomy and from an early age he was an avid collector of all sorts of animals, alive and dead. As he became wealthier through his medical practice and lectures he spent increasing amounts of cash on acquiring rare specimens, which he usually dissected in order to understand them better. He also collected specimens of diseased human organs, bones, and fossils. There was a very dark side to this work too. The grisly business of acquiring fresh human human corpses led him to make connections with graverobbers. Worse, he also experimented on human specimens, usually members of London’s poor. He did pay them for their pains, but that’s hardly the point.

Hunter’s studies led him to conclude – years before Darwin – that species were not fixed and immutable but that animal populations altered over time, with some creatures becoming extinct. Although he doesn’t seem to have used the word “evolution”, his work in this area was certainly heading in that direction. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767.

Above all I think what stands out about Hunter was that he pioneered the use of the scientific method in the field of medicine. His lack of formal training meant that he wasn’t steeped in the dogma or orthodox medicine which had led to many bizarre and/or dangerous practices. One wonders what chain of reasoning had led doctors to suppose that pumping tobacco smoke into a patient’s anus using specially constructed bellows could possibly have any therapeutic value!

Hunter learned primarily from experience. He knew, for example, that major surgery in Georgian times was very likely to kill the patient. There were no anaesthetics, so death by shock was a strong possibility. Loss of blood was a danger, too, unless the operation was completed extremely quickly. Moreover, doctors at the time – Hunter included – had no idea about how infections were spread and surgeons would often operate with instruments encrusted with the blood of previous victim. In the (unlikely) event of a patient surviving the agony of, say, an amputation, they would probably die of  some form of infection within a few days anyway. Hunter’s policy in the light of all this was to refuse to operate unless the situation was truly desperate.

For example, when Hunter was an army surgeon, the prevailing attitude to gunshot wounds was that the bullet had to be removed at all costs. Moreover, it was believed that gunpowder was poisonous, so entry wounds were usually “enlarged” to remove tissue that had been blackened or burnt. One day, a group of British soldiers had come under fire and several had been badly injured. They escaped the ambush and holed up in a farmhouse, where they were found a few days later. One had two bullets in his thigh, another had one in his chest. However, although seriously ill, all were still alive. Hunter knew that if men in that condition had been brought into his field hospital and operated on in the usual manner, they would all almost certainly have died. After this experience Hunter was extremely reluctant to operate at all on battlefield injuries unless they were immediately life-threatening, and often decided to let nature take its course with flesh wounds.

The Knife Man contains many more examples of Hunter’s pionering use of empirical evidence in medicine and, as such, is well worth reading by anyone interested in the scientific method. It also provides a fascinating insight into life in Georgian London. Notable characters appear in extremely unexpected ways in Hunter’s story:

  • James Boswell made frequent visits to Covent Garden  in order to the employ the services of local prostitutes, which was apparently quite normal for Georgian gentry, as was the consequence – a lifelong problem with gonorrhea, which Hunter tried to treat him for.
  • Hunter attended the birth of George Gordon (later Lord) Byron, who was born with a congenital deformity,  possibly a club foot. Hunter told his mother that it could probably be cured if he wore a specially constructed boot during infancy, but she didn’t take his advice.
  • Joseph Haydn was a frequent visitor to the Hunter residence during his time in London; he even wrote set some poems by Anne Hunter (John’s wife) to music. There were rumours of an affair, in fact. He also suffered from a nasal polyp, about which he sought Hunter’s advice. When the nature of the required surgery was explained to him, Haydn decided not to have it operated on.

I could give more examples, but that’s 1000 words, and it’s now sunny outside, so you’ll have to go and read the book, which I  recommend heartily. However, I really should point out that it’s not for the squeamish. The primitive surgical procedures deployed in the 18th Century are described in excrutiating detail and parts of the book make for very uncomfortable reading. If you don’t think you can cope with a detailed account of an operation, without anaesthetic,  to remove stone from a patient’s bladder, then perhaps this isn’t a book for you!

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Sweet Fanny Adams

Posted in History, Literature with tags , , on June 21, 2011 by telescoper

I’ve been travelling more than usual recently and have been taking the opportunity to catch up with a stack of books I bought but haven’t had time to read. The latest is a hefty tome by Judith Flanders, entitled The Invention of Murder, a detailed, scholarly, meticulously researched but highly readable discussion of “how the Victorians revelled in death and detection”.

This isn’t just one of those “true crime” shockers – although there is plenty of shocking material in it, as will become obvious – it’s about the insight that crime gives into how society works. Murder casts a particularly garish and disturbing light on Victorian culture, as it was in that period that violent crime became a form of entertainment, which it remains today with shows like CSI.

High profile murders spawned a host of bizarre cultural phenomena in the Victorian age, including stage melodramas and puppet shows in which crimes were re-enacted for the public, cheap publications called penny-dreadfuls, and the infamous “broadsides” -cheap unregulated newspapers which were the ultimate in gutter-press, reporting the gory details in grotesquely lurid details. The detective story had its birth in this era too, fuelling public fascination with crime and detection. And then of course there were the public hangings, regularly attended by tens of thousands of people. These grisly spectacles carried on until 1868, after which time they were held inside prisons out of the public gaze. Crowds still gathered even then, to watch the black flag being hoisted to indicate the end of a life.

Rather than going through the whole book systematically, I thought I’d just pass on a few things that particularly struck me as I read it. You can read a review of the whole volume here.

One was the fact that many Victorian trials were farcical. There was little understanding of what to do with physical evidence, so more often than not the prosecution relied on allegations about the character of the defendant to get a conviction. If you were poor you had no access to legal counsel and, since you belonged to a demonized underclass, pretty much doomed if committed to trial. The same went if you were “foreign”, especially if that meant “Irish” and especially if you were also catholic. Judges routinely summed up the evidence in an outrageously biased way; the defence were allowed no summing up at all, regardless of whether the defendant could afford a lawyer. There were few restrictions on press reporting of trials, with the result that newspapers openly presented views of guilt or innocence before trial in a manner that was grossly prejudicial; among the worst offenders were the Times and the Observer, papers which we now consider to be “quality”. Juries typically took 10 minutes or less to reach a verdict and the time between sentencing to death and execution was usually 48 hours, so there was no time for an appeal.

The public executioner for much of the Victorian period was a man called William Calcraft. I don’t know if he was incompetent or just plain cruel, but he favoured the so-called “short drop” which meant death by strangulation rather than by a broken neck. Often the victim – and I use the word advisedly because for me such an execution is also murder – took several minutes to die in agony. One description in the book tells of a woman – convicted on the scantiest of evidence – so terrified by the gallows that she was unable to stand and had to be put on a chair to be hanged. The hangman miscalculated the drop and she took four minutes to die. How any human being could bear to watch such an event is beyond me, but thousands did.

Over and over again there are stark examples of the grinding poverty that reigned during the Victorian era. The underclass lived in filthy overcrowded and dangerous slums, in conditions too miserable to be imagined. Poor single women often had little choice but to turn to prostitution. Annie Chapman, for example, was murdered by Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel in September 1888. On her last night she had no money to pay for a bed in a lodging house, so had gone onto the street to earn some cash. After her death her belongings were itemized: apart from the clothes she had been wearing, her worldly goods consisted of two combs and a used envelope.

And then there were the children. Infant mortality was high and working class children in the Victorian era died so often of neglect that society had largely become hardened to the idea of killing a child. One example is the particularly appalling murder of a young girl called Fanny Adams in 1867:

Fanny’s head was perched on two hop poles, while on the ground was one of her legs, still with its stocking and boot on. Her right arm, then a hand, then her torso were found nearby. Her other foot, and left arm, were in the next field. Her intestines had been removed, and were not found until the next day, together with her heart.

Almost immediately the phrase “Fanny Adams” became popular slang for a cheap type of chopped meat you could buy in tins, thence it passed into navy slang as “Sweet Fanny Adams”, meaning “nothing at all” and remains in use to this day, sometimes abbreviated to “Sweet FA”. Nothing at all, it seems, was the value of an innocent child’s life.

Today it sounds unbelievably cruel that people could make a joke about such a terrible crime, but I guess that just tells you how brutal life was. I’d always thought “Fanny Adams” was a euphemism for “Fuck All” but its origin is clearly far darker. I’ll never been able to use that expression again without thinking of its origin and, perhaps, after reading this, neither will you…

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In Memoriam – HMS Hood

Posted in History with tags , , , on May 24, 2011 by telescoper

I just realised that today is a solemn anniversary which surprisingly hasn’t been marked in the media. On this day 70 years ago, i.e. 24th May 1941, the Royal Navy battlecruiser HMS Hood was sunk by the German Battleship Bismarck in the Battle of the Denmark Strait. Of a ship’s complement of 1418 only three survived the sinking of HMS Hood; it was one of the greatest maritime disasters of the Second World War. I’m not one for dwelling excessively  on the past, but I think it’s a shame this event has not been remembered. We owe a lot to people like the 1415 who gave their lives that day, so I’m glad I remembered in time to pay my respects.

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A Dark Centenary

Posted in History with tags , on March 13, 2011 by telescoper

Very busy day today, and I’ve been out and about for most of it in the spring sunshine. I just thought I’d keep up my record of posting every day by marking a centenary that falls today. One hundred years ago, on March 13 1911, L. Ron Hubbard was born. I said “marking” rather than “celebrating” because Hubbard was a truly appaling man – a liar, a charlatan, a conman, a drug addict, and an egomaniac – who left a trail of wrecked lives, largely through the sinister Church of Scientology he founded in the 1950s. Purporting to be a “self-help” organisation, it has succeeded only in helping itself to large amounts of money from its gullible victims, much of it subsequently spent silencing its many critics. Let’s see if they have a go at me!

In 1977, the FBI raided the offices of the Church of Scientology and found damning evidence of burglary and conspiracy. Hubbard’s wife, Mary Sue, was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. Hubbard himself escaped justice by going into hiding. He died in 1986.

If you want to know more about this so-called Church, I suggest you read the book The Scandal of Scientology, all of which is available online here. I also mentioned it in a post last year.

I’ll just point out one particular victim of L Ron Hubbard: his own son, Quentin. A shy and sensitive boy, he took his own life in 1976 aged just twenty-two, no longer able to tolerate his father’s relentless homophobic goading.

I feel pity for those duped into signing up as scientologists – it seems to me such a transparently phoney operation I don’t see how anyone could fall for it – but for Hubbard himself, pity doesn’t come into it. He was monstrous.


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A Census of the Ridiculous

Posted in Bad Statistics, History with tags , , , , on March 12, 2011 by telescoper

My form for the 2011 Census arrived yesterday. Apparently they were all posted out on Monday, so that’s 5 days in the post. Par for the course for the Royal Mail these days. I’m slightly surprised it arrived at all.

There’s a hefty £1000 fine for not completing the Census, so I suppose I’ll fill it in, despite my feeling that it’s both intrusive and unnecessary. What’s worse is that several of the questions are so badly designed that the information resulting will be useless.

For example, according to the census guide:

Very careful consideration is given to the questions included in the census. Questions must meet the needs of a substantial number of users in order that the census is acceptable to the public and yields good quality data. The questions are selected following several rounds of consultation with:

  • central and local government
  • academia
  • health authorities
  • the business community
  • groups representing ethnic minorities and others with special interests and concerns

Hang on. The “business community”? Why should they be consulted? What do they want with my personal information? I thought the census data was for planning public services!  On the other hand, when everything is privatised maybe all our personal data will be flogged off to the private sector anyway.

The 2011 Census is the first one to include a question on health. According to the saturation advertising about the census, this question will help plan new hospitals and distribute NHS funding. So what is the new question, the answer to which will provide such valuable data? Here it is, together with the possible responses:

13. How is your health in general?

  • Very good
  • Good
  • Fair
  • Bad
  • Very Bad

And that’s it for “health”. Does anyone actually believe such a vague question is  going to be of any use at all in planning NHS services? I certainly don’t.

And then there’s the famous question about religion.

20. What is your religion?

For a start I don’t think my religion or lack of it should be any concern to the government. To be fair, however, this question is marked as “voluntary” so respondents are allowed not to answer it without getting locked up in the Tower of London. But in any case it’s a leading question and should never have been included in the census in this form anyway. “Do you have a religion and, if so, what is it?” would have been much better.

I could go on, but I’ve got better things to do today.

I’ll just say this last thing about the Census. Most of it clearly has nothing whatever to do with planning public services. In fact the government already holds most of the information about your private circumstances the form demands. The Census is nothing more an opportunity for the government to cross-check tax, benefit or other records in the hope of finding inaccuracies. In other words, Big Brother is watching you.

And the cost of all this snooping? A whopping £500 million, more than double the cost of the 2001 Census, and all of it  at a time of huge cuts to public services. You have to laugh, don’t you?


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The Necessity of Atheism

Posted in History, Literature, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , on February 15, 2011 by telescoper

In the course of doing a crossword at the weekend, I learnt that the poet Percy Bysse Shelley was sent down from (i.e. kicked out of) Oxford University 200 years ago this month for writing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. He was at University College, in fact. A bit of googling around led me to the full text, which is well worth reading whatever your religious beliefs as it is a fascinating document. I’ll just quote a few excerpts here.

The main body of the tract begins There is No God, but this is followed by

This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.

That’s pretty close to my own view, for what that’s worth.

More interestingly, Shelley goes on later in the work to talk about science and how it impacts upon belief. A couple of sections struck me particularly strongly, given my own scientific interests.

In one he tackles arguments for the existence of God based on Reason:

It is urged that man knows that whatever is must either have had a beginning, or have existed from all eternity, he also knows that whatever is not eternal must have had a cause. When this reasoning is applied to the universe, it is necessary to prove that it was created: until that is clearly demonstrated we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity. We must prove design before we can infer a designer. The only idea which we can form of causation is derivable from the constant conjunction of objects, and the consequent inference of one from the other. In a base where two propositions are diametrically opposite, the mind believes that which is least incomprehensible; — it is easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it: if the mind sinks beneath the weight of one, is it an alleviation to increase the intolerability of the burthen?

The other argument, which is founded on a Man’s knowledge of his own existence, stands thus. A man knows not only that he now is, but that once he was not; consequently there must have been a cause. But our idea of causation is alone derivable from the constant conjunction of objects and the consequent Inference of one from the other; and, reasoning experimentally, we can only infer from effects caused adequate to those effects. But there certainly is a generative power which is effected by certain instruments: we cannot prove that it is inherent in these instruments” nor is the contrary hypothesis capable of demonstration: we admit that the generative power is incomprehensible; but to suppose that the same effect is produced by an eternal, omniscient, omnipotent being leaves the cause in the same obscurity, but renders it more incomprehensible.

He thus reveals himself as an empiricist, a position he later amplifies with a curiously worded double-negative:

I confess that I am one of those who am unable to refuse my assent to the conclusion of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived.

This is a philosophy I can’t agree with, but his use of words clearly suggests the young Shelley has been reading David Hume‘s analysis of causation.

Later he turns to the mystery of life and the sense of wonder it inspires.

Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle. What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties, with the opinions which support them; what is the birth and the extinction of religious and of political systems, to life? What are the revolutions of the globe which we inhabit, and the operations of the elements of which it is composed, compared with life? What is the universe of stars, and suns, of which this inhabited earth is one, and their motions, and their destiny, compared with life? Life, the great miracle, we admire not because it is so miraculous. It is well that we are thus shielded by the familiarity of what is at once so certain and so unfathomable, from an astonishment which would otherwise absorb and overawe the functions of that which is its object.

Finally, I picked the following paragraph for its mention of astronomy:

If any artist, I do not say had executed, but had merely conceived in his mind the system of the sun, and the stars, and planets, they not existing, and had painted to us in words, or upon canvas, the spectacle now afforded by the nightly cope of heaven, and illustrated it by the wisdom of astronomy, great would be our admiration. Or had he imagined the scenery of this earth, the mountains, the seas, and the rivers; the grass, and the flowers, and the variety of the forms and masses of the leaves of the woods, and the colors which attend the setting and the rising sun, and the hues of the atmosphere, turbid or serene, these things not before existing, truly we should have been astonished, and it would not have been a vain boast to have said of such a man, Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta. But how these things are looked on with little wonder, and to be conscious of them with intense delight is esteemed to be the distinguishing mark of a refined and extraordinary person. The multitude of men care not for them.

I think the multitude care just as little 200 years on.

P.S. The quotation is from the 16th Century Italian poet Torquato Tasso; in translation it reads “None deserve the name of Creator except God and the Poet”.


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You didn’t ask, but I’ll tell you anyway…

Posted in History, Politics with tags , , , , , , , , on December 19, 2010 by telescoper

I just chanced across the news that the United States Senate has voted to repeal the policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell”. This silly rule required gay servicemen and women to conceal their sexual orientation or risk being kicked out of the services. It was always an awful compromise and I’m glad to see it has been scrapped.

One of the arguments used against allowing gay people to be open about their sexuality while in the armed forces was that this would be “bad for morale”. I’m not quite sure why, but that’s what people say. Perhaps what it means is that a lot of straight military personnel are deeply prejudiced and that it would be bad for morale to have that prejudice challenged.

Until 2000, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence imposed an outright ban on lesbian and gay people serving in the armed forces. However, in 1999 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that ban illegal. Now, at least officially, the MoD has a much more open and inclusive policy. One regularly sees official representation at Gay Pride marches and so on. Indeed, in 2008, General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, said in a speech that

respect for gays, lesbian, bi-sexual and transsexual officers and soldiers was now “a command responsibility” and was vital for “operational effectiveness”

It would have been hard to imagine even ten years ago that a senior officer in the British Army would make such a statement. I’m sure openly gay soldiers still have a pretty tough time in the army, but we’re heading in the right direction. Times have changed.

But all this is perhaps not as new as you might think.

I’m now going to bore you with a bit of history that might surprise you. The elite division of the Theban army in the 4th Century BC was an outfit called the Sacred Band of Thebes. This consisted of about 300 men, hand-picked for their courage and fighting skill. Or not so much 300 men, but 150 same-sex (male) couples; this was the legendary Army of Lovers. Obviously there wasn’t any need for “don’t ask, don’t tell” in ancient Thebes.

The inspiration for this special unit derived from Plato who, in the Symposium, said

And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their beloved, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other’s side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger?

Initially the members of the Sacred Band were scattered among the rest of the soldiers, in order to raise morale (!), but later on they were all united in a single fighting division, the “special forces” of the Theban army. They were responsible for several famous victories, including the Battle of Leuctra which established Theban independence from Spartan rule.

But brave and steadfast though they were, they eventually met an adversary that even they couldn’t withstand. At the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC they fought an army led by Philip II of Macedonia one of whose generals was his son, a young man by the name of Alexander. The Macedonian army had a new infantry tactic that gave it the edge over all armies of its age. This was the phalanx, a large but tightly bunched and highly disciplined group of soldiers with interlocking shields and bristling with spears, which was impervious to cavalry and archery alike. A few years later when Alexander became King of Macedonia and set off on his journey to Greatness, the phalanx continued to be the mainstay of his army and it allowed him to defeat huge forces at least five or six times the size of his own.

At Chaeronea the fearsome phalanx made mincemeat of the rank and file of the Theban army. In the face of the Macedonian onslaught, the Sacred Band stood its ground to the last, but their resistance was futile. At the end of the battle, their corpses were found piled one on top of the other. They hadn’t given an inch, but all had died where they had stood. The Army of Lovers was no more.

In about 300 BC the citizens of Thebes erected a memorial to the Sacred Band where they had been buried, with full military honours, by Philip II’s soldiers, at the spot where they had fallen. When this was excavated in 1890, 254 skeletons were found, neatly arranged in rows.

The point I’m trying to make with this bit of ancient history is that our attitudes to sexuality are not built in. They’re all formed by social conventions. In fact, bisexuality was quite normal in Ancient Greece, so nobody had any reason to think of homosexuality as some kind of “otherness” that could be a focus of discrimination. Alexander the Great himself had relationships with both men and women and, although he was clearly a megalomaniac and not at all a nice person, he was undeniably rather good at being a soldier.

There’s therefore no reason why gays and lesbians shouldn’t serve with distinction in the army, or anywhere else for that matter. The problem’s not with them, but with the rest of you.


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Observances

Posted in Biographical, History with tags on November 11, 2010 by telescoper

Just for the record, I sneaked back to my office a little early from this morning’s coffee break, closed the door, and at 11am precisely stood alone for the two minutes’ silence that marks Armistice Day. Cardiff University organised a collective Act of Remembrance in which the two minutes’ silence was preceded by prayers and to which all staff and students were invited. I am, however, not a Christian and the religious dimension means nothing to me, so I did what I prefer to do as long as circumstances permit and marked the occasion on my own.

As I stood in my office looking out over the road, I could see a small group of young people, presumably students, standing outside in silence with their heads bowed. I don’t really understand why but a solitary tear fell from my eye as I watched them.

At 11.02 I went back to work.

Lest we forget.


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To the Warmongers

Posted in History, Poetry, Politics with tags , , , on November 8, 2010 by telescoper

As we approach Remembrance Sunday (which this year lies on 14th November) I find myself once again wearing a poppy on my coat lapel, and having once again to explain this to those I meet in the department and elsewhere who don’t approve. I’ve already said everything I think I need to on this in posts last year and the year before, so I won’t repeat myself at length here.

I am aware (and acutely sensitive to) the danger that the wearing of a poppy might be mistaken for support for militarism and that many of our politicians would like to manipulate the meaning of this symbol in precisely that way for their own ends. Nevertheless, I will wear one and will observe the two minutes’ silence on Thursday too. Why? Lest we forget, that’s why…

But instead of debating this again, I will  post the following poem and letter, both of which were written by Siegfried Sassoon.

The poem is called the To the Warmongers:

I’m back again from hell
With loathsome thoughts to sell;
Secrets of death to tell;
And horrors from the abyss.
Young faces bleared with blood,
Sucked down into the mud,
You shall hear things like this,
Till the tormented slain
Crawl round and once again,
With limbs that twist awry
Moan out their brutish pain,
As for the fighters pass them by.
For you our battles shine
With triumph half-divine;
And the glory of the dead
Kindles in each proud eye.
But a curse is on my head,
That shall not be unsaid,
And the wounds in my heart are red,
For I have watched them die.

The astonishing letter below was written by Siegfried Sassoon in July 1917, and was subsequently read out in the House of Commons. Sassoon narrowly escaped court martial for treason.

It’s worth noting the last two paragraphs:

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise.

The tragedy is that these words could equally well have been written about Afghanistan 2010 rather than France or Belgium 1917. The sight of Tony Blair wearing a poppy at the Cenotaph is one that filled me with nausea, but his hypocrisy makes it more, not less, important to hang on to the true meaning. Lest we forget. Nowadays, though, I don’t really “wear my poppy with pride”, but with something rather closer to shame.


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