Byrom’s universal shorthand

John Byrom, the deviser of a once widely-used shorthand system, was born 330 years ago today (give or take a leap day). He also kept a diary for much of his life. It is often dull but, buried among the daily record of his movements, there are interesting details about his shorthand work, the Royal Society, and the food/ale he was consuming.

Byrom was born in or near Manchester on 29 February 1692. He was educated at Merchant Taylors School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he first started writing poems and devising shorthand ways of writing. Although he went abroad, to Montpelier, to study medicine, he never practised as a doctor. Instead he spent many years promoting and trying to sell his shorthand system. In 1721, he married his cousin Elizabeth, and they had four children one of whom was also called Elizabeth (Beppy). He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1724.

Byrom’s shorthand became widely adopted, being used by, among others, the Wesley brothers and Horace Walpole. On the death of his elder brother in 1740, Byrom inherited the family property which relieved him of giving shorthand lessons (for income), though he remained closely associated with the method. Indeed, in 1742, an act of parliament gave him the sole rights to the system for 21 years; thereafter it became freely available as The Universal English Short-Hand.

Apart from promoting his shorthand system, Byrom wrote comic and serious poems, the most widely known of which is the Christmas hymn, ‘Christians, awake, salute the happy morn’. He died in 1763. Some further biographical information is available at Wikipedia and Authors’ Calendar.

Byrom is remembered mostly for his diaries (extracts below) which were published by The Chetham Society in two volumes, each consisting of two parts (i.e. four books in all) between 1854 and 1857. They were edited by Richard Parkinson and titled The Private Journal and Literary Remains of John Byrom. The volumes are freely available at Internet Archive, but, for the most part, they are rather bland and weighed down with too much ordinary detail. (The fourth volume also contains a diary kept by Beppy which provides an eyewitness account of the arrival in Manchester of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender.)

1 February 1724
‘This day (being Saturday) I did for the first time advertise my shorthand in the Evening Post, and the writer of that paper made a mistake of Byron for Byrom, and from this time I design to take notice of any thing that shall happen in relation to it.’

29 February 1724
‘This day I am years old thirty-two. Mr Leycester and I went to get our advertisement printed. I gave 5s to the Daily Courant for an advertisement of my own, something different from the former, and have given 7s 6d to the Post Boy for the answer to Weston, which he also put in the Daily Post. From this place I went to Mrs de Vlieger’s in Leicester fields where I dined; and from thence we went to the opera, where we found Mr Leycester waiting at the door; we went to the first row in the gallery; I did not much like this diversion.’

19 March 1724
‘That day I was admitted Fellow of the Royal Society by Sir Hans Sloane, and Mr Bobert Ord at the same time. He and I went there together, gave Mr Hanksbee two guineas, and signed bond to pay fifty-two shillings a year.’

1 March 1726
‘Rose after six, went to Torbock’s; thence to Fairchild’s at Hogeden, called at Mr Ghaddock’s by the way, met Dr Eaton and Mr Digles; Fairchild showed me his garden, his ananas, melon, thistle, misletoe, inoculations, said at first he had no Paradise stocks to spare, but after we had talked he said my friend might have half a dozen. Thence back to Moorfields, where I went through the books; [. . .] Torbock carried most of them for me; coming through Wood-street we bought steel for punches, files 2s. 8d.; then we went to see a turning engine, the man not within; then to Pingo’s the medal caster, he not at home, but the woman showed us some of his casting; then to Bridgets auction.’

5 March 1726
‘Went to Mr Johnson’s, where I dined upon potted hare, very good; thence to George’s, where I saw Mr Sanderson, Pennant, and Coatsworth; thence to Mr Nicholls, writ out some of Finch’s speech to Queen Elizabeth, he would have had me write it all out, but I would not; Hunt told me his affairs succeeded very well; home near nine, had a fire made, stayed up reading Collin’s Enquiry concerning Human Liberty, sat up till near two.’

7 March 1726
‘Empson and Butterwick came this morning and had their first lesson in shorthand, and paid me each five guineas.’

27 February 1729
‘Called upon Mr Stanley, he began, paid five guineas, and promised no soul living should see it but himself; I showed him the way of coming at the alphabet, and left him to blunder by himself, and appointed to call on him to-morrow at nine. Thence to the Guildhall, met Woolston, who told me that he should not be tried to-day, because the Attorney General was not there; called upon Mr Lethuillier and drank a dish of chocolate with him; thence to Meadow’s, who put four Knight Errants in my pocket, and desired me to send them something, a poor introduction to such a design. I went to Will’s coffeehouse to enquire for Mr Salkeld, not there; I wrote shorthand in answer to Phebe and Mrs Byrom. To Richard’s; thence to the Royal Society, Vernon there from Cambridge; Dr Rutty read about ignis fatuus; humming bird’s nest and egg, mighty small; Molucca bean, which somebody had sent to Dr Jurin for a stone taken out of a toad’s head; Desaguliers made some experiments about electricity. [. . .] we had a very elegant supper, salmon, fowls, jellies, and a pint of Moselle very good, and a bowl of punch.’

5 January 1731
‘At night Houghton, Lloyd, and I came to the King’s Head, and the club being there, viz. two Hoadlys, Brown, Ray. I brought them in, and we had brawn and beefsteaks, and talked about Cheselden and the drum of the man Ray’s ear, and about the Royal Society, and futurity. Houghton and I went into the city, saw Salkeld at Will’s, who treated us with chocolate; thence we followed a man in a Turkish dress, I spoke and paid for a barrel of oysters to the woman at the Cross Keys; to Moorfields, where I bought J. Lead, Pordage, 1s. apiece; thence to Castlon’s the type maker, where Houghton and I went into the printing cutting place; he was married to another wife, who made excuses for his undress, we drank a pint of wine at the Swan, and he said types could not be made for our shorthand.’

31 August 1742
‘I have been at the other end of the Strand to enquire of a lady about a book that her brother-in-law, Dr Gheyne at Bath, is very fond of, from whom I have just received a letter, but could not find her at home. I won a pint of wine of Mr Pickering; he would lay that Prague was taken before he went, but we hear not of it in the Gazette yet, for I called in at the coffeehouse where Dr Pellet and company meet by Mr Lloyd’s lodgings; he is gone, I suppose, to the Guild, which makes a noise even here.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 29 February 2012.

Like being an upended turtle

 ‘Guards go out with heavy sniper rifles. Sleep is cold - pile wet sleeping bags on top but sleeping in a flak jacket is like being an upended turtle with a detached shell - have to sleep on back and keep sliding down.’ This is from the diaries of Maria Colvin, a fearless foreign correspondent reporting from Kosovo for The Sunday Times. Two years later, she would lose the sight of one eye reporting from Sri Lanka, and a decade or so later - 10 years ago today - she would be murdered by the Syrian government. From an early age she kept regular diaries, and these were used for and quoted from by Lindsay Hilsum, a friend and once a fellow foreign correspondent, in her 2108 biography, In Extremis.

Colvin was born in Queens, New York, in 1956, but grew up on Long Island. Both her parents worked in the public school system, though her father had been a WW2 veteran. She went to Oyster Bay High School and spent a year abroad on an exchange program in Brazil before entering Yale University where she majored in anthropology. She worked briefly for a trade union in New York City before starting her journalism career with United Press International. In 1985, she went to work for The Sunday Times, and the following year was assigned as the paper’s Middle East correspondent. In 1986, she was the first to interview Muammar Gaddafi after the American bombings of Libya. In 1995, she was promoted to foreign affairs correspondent.

Colvin made international headlines in 1999 after refusing to evacuate a United Nations compound under attack by Indonesian-backed forces in East Timor. She stayed as other journalists left. The stand-off brought attention to the plight of 1,500 women and children, who as a result were eventually evacuated to safety. She won the International Women’s Media Foundation award for Courage in Journalism for her coverage of the conflicts in Kosovo and Chechnya. Apart from her newspaper reporting, she also wrote and produced documentaries, including Arafat: Behind the Myth for the BBC. She was married twice to fellow journalist Patrick Bishop, and briefly to a Bolivian journalist, Juan Carlos Gumucio. She also had a long term relationship with Richard Flaye, the two of them sharing a passion for sailing.

In 2001, while reporting the Sri Lankan civil war, Colvin lost the sight in her left eye; thereafter, she always wore a black eye patch. She remained committed to reporting on the realities of war, but most especially the effects on civilians. She was killed in Homs on 22 February 2012, along with a French photographer, when a makeshift media centre was bombed by Syrian rocket fire. Her death sparked a massive outpouring of tributes by heads of state, colleagues, admirers and victims of war around the world. The Guardian said she ‘was a fearless but never foolhardy war correspondent who believed passionately in the need to report on conflicts from the frontline’. Seven years later, a US court found Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government liable for her death. Further information is available from Wikipedia, the BBC, the Maria Colvin Memorial Foundation, the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting,

In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin by Lindsay Hilsum was published by Chatto & Windus in 2018. The publisher promotes the book as ‘the story of our turbulent age and the life of a woman who defied convention’. Some pages can be previewed at both Amazon and Googlebooks. Hilsum includes many quotes from some 300 diaries kept by Colvin since the age of 13 - indeed she refers to the diaries as ‘the backbone’ of her biography. All the diary entries quoted, however, are used for, and in the context of, her narrative, mostly edited, reduced, and thus cannot be read as whole entries for a single date. Here are some of the entries quoted by Hilsum.

2 January 1969
‘Everyone is wearing pants. I’ve got to talk mommy into letting me do it, for honor’s sake. I’m not sure I want to but I must.’

6 January 1969
‘Wore pants. Blue dungaree bell bottoms. Hard playing instrument, pants are so tight.

28 May 1969
‘Today I went HS in shorts. So did everyone else. But mine were v short and v tight. Wore a vest and sandals too. When we got back was mommy mad. We had a mother to daughter talk about why I was doing this. She told me how provocative I looked.’

10 July 1977
‘My father’s death has had such an influence on my life, I still don’t realise the extent. But I watched a man go from a virile, happy man - a man with everything he wanted - and that was pretty much true, everything was the family, the family was the purpose to everything. Why go to work every day, save up your money, buy that house, buy that car, if there is no purpose? It has begun to seem meaningless to my mother since he left. He went from this to that cadaver, cold, calm with such a dignified peace - he was so righteous even in the coffin. “I have lived a good life. I made people happy. And I did what I thought was right!” The last one - it is the essence of my father. I feel so weak-spirited when I think of him. Why should all the pettiness matter to me? But I did learn - LIFE IS TOO SHORT. [. . .]

There’s so much I wanted to show him - prove myself to him. Somehow, he was and is still my standard. I did everything to make him proud. That’s probably going to seem like, “you say it now, now that he is gone.” And it’s not entirely true - but it is necessary to make the statement so bald, because if I made him proud that was the main thing that mattered. Yes, I do have my own goals, and no, there is no chance I’ll not persevere now that he’s dead, but I did so want to make him proud . . . [. . .]

There are so many things I want to put my energy into, I often ask why I’m not happy completely without a man. Is it ingrained? My sense of self is not independent of men - I need their feedback. That old dichotomy, I want my liberty, I want to be free to create, be the free spirit, but at the same time I guess, I’ve admitted that I want security.’

12 October 1978
‘For me, it was my father’s death. It’s as if my prior life had been lived unconscious; as if looking back, it had been lived by someone else . . . The realization that what mattered was being able to write, that I was scared to attempt it because of fear of failure; everything has always come so easy for me. To fail at anything else would not really be to fail; to fail at writing would be real failure. And to succeed the only success I would value.

17 August 1992
‘Horrible disturbing anxiety dreams, can’t remember them. Realization today: first I was bulimic, then I discovered smoking. Everyone, even Iraqis, comments on my chain smoking. 2 1/2 packs a day, start when I wake up, before coffee. No desire to quit.’

23 April 1999
‘Terrifying walk in night down slope from camp, log over a stream. Dine hands me butt of his rifle as I almost slip in. Walk through compound of stone homes. Deserted. Roofs crashed in by mortars. Lights of Djackovica about 1 km away. Can’t tell what’s happening there. Camp in a gully. Camouflage sheets up over branches. Stack of sleeping bags but they are damp with rain all day. Guards go out with heavy sniper rifles. Sleep is cold - pile wet sleeping bags on top but sleeping in a flak jacket is like being an upended turtle with a detached shell - have to sleep on back and keep sliding down. Bursts of automatic fire and shots during night, one sustained about 2am impossible tell where coming from.’

My trip to Seychelles

‘When I awoke at about 7am on Thursday, I never dreamt that next day I would be on board one of H.M. ships bound for an unknown destination. Well, this is going to be the record of my trip to Seychelles and a diary of our stay there.’ This is the first entry in the published diaries of Husayn Fakhri al-Khalidi, a Palestinian leader who was mayor of Jerusalem for some years, and prime minister of Jordan for some days! He died 60 years ago today, but it was only very recently that a set of his diaries - covering a period when he was exiled by the British to the Seychelles - were published in English.

Al-Khalidi was born in Jerusalem, then part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1895. He completed his education at an English college in the city, and began medical studies at the Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut). With the outbreak of war in 1914, he was drafted into the Turkish army which sent him to the Ottoman Medical School in Istanbul to finish his medical studies. In 1915, he was made First Lieutenant and was posted by the army to Sinai to work in hospitals there and in the Negeb Desert. He witnessed the Battle of Gaza and the battle for Jerusalem. Injured twice, he was hospitalised himself in Damascus. Further assignments in northern Palestine and Aleppo followed. 

In 1920, al-Khalidi returned to British-occupied Palestine where he worked in Jerusalem as a government doctor and later as head of forensic medicine. Several more senior posts followed before, in 1934, he resigned his senior posts (head of the General Medical Board and head of the infectious and epidemics department) to pursue a political career. In early 1935, he succeeded in being elected mayor of Jerusalem, and became one of the founders (and General Secretary) of the Palestinian Arab Reform Party. At the time of the Palestinian Rebellion, it joined other Palestinian parties to form the Arab Higher Committee (AHC). But, in October 1937, he and other high-ranking AHC members were exiled by the British authorities to the Seychelles.

Al-Khalidi was released less than 18 months later, enabling him to take part in the London Conference in February 1939, but he rejected the British Government’s plans. He lived mostly in Lebanon for four years, only being allowed to return to Palestine in 1943. In 1946, he was elected Secretary of the Arab Higher Commission, remaining thereafter in Jerusalem. There he witnessed the endorsement of the Partition Plan by the UN in 1947, leading to the gradual withdrawal of the British Army, the disintegration of Palestine, and the birth of Israel. He declined to join the All-Palestine Government in Gaza in 1949, choosing to take a break to write his memoirs. In 1951, he joined the Jordanian Government as Custodian of Holy Sites in Jerusalem. Subsequently, he was appointed foreign minister, before, in fact, becoming Prime Minister of Jordan in 1957. Popular pressure, however, led to him resigning after 10 days. He later became a senator, and remained so until his death on 6 February 1962. Further information is available from Wikipedia, The Jewish Virtual Library and Encyclopedia.com

Recently, in 2020, I. B. Tauris (part of Bloomsbury) published Exiled from Jerusalem: The Diaries of Hussein Fakhri al-Khalidi as edited by Rafiq Husseini. In his forward to the diaries, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, writes: ’[Al-Khalidi’s] diaries of his Seychelles exile were written at the end of the two decades between the two World Wars, a period when not one single colonized people, with the sole exception of the Irish, achieved full independence from their imperial rulers. His struggle, and that of the Palestinian people, against the British and against the Zionist movement they sponsored was unsuccessful, like that of every other colonized people in this period. These diaries can nevertheless help us to understand why this happened and they give us a unique perspective on this struggle, which continues to this day.’ The published diaries can be freely previewed at Googlebooks and Amazon. Here are several extracts, including the very first one.

30 September 1937
‘When I awoke at about 7am on Thursday, I never dreamt that next day I would be on board one of H.M. ships bound for an unknown destination. Well, this is going to be the record of my trip to Seychelles and a diary of our stay there. I am writing now while sitting on the north western veranda of Villa Curio in Port Victoria - Mahé Island.

I think I better record what happened on Thursday before I left Jerusalem. I had a very busy day before noon at the [Jerusalem] Municipality preparing the agenda for my Council meeting due at 3pm in the afternoon. I went home at about 1pm and returned to the municipality at 3pm sharp. Farraj, Darwish, Dajani and [Hashma] Schwilli did not come, all the others were present. We had a long agenda to deal with. With the exception of a few hot words between me and Auster on the question of the cadre, the meeting terminated successfully at 7.30pm. I thought that before going home I better clear all my trays and issue the necessary instructions to Heads of Departments, arising out of the meeting. In fact, I left nothing outstanding. At 8pm Rasem [Khalidi] came to the municipality and we stayed there till 9pm. He told me all about his trip to Gaza, Beersheba and the North. From the municipality we went to uncle Moustafa’s house where we stayed about an hour and then went home. Rasem stayed with me till 11pm.

 I stayed late tonight chatting with Wahideh about the childrens schools and so on, when I ultimately went to sleep at about 12 midnight.’

10 October 1937
‘Every one on board seems to be preparing for the ceremony which was to take place, we were told, at exactly 10.40am. Out of a total of 120 (including officers) only 19 had passed the equator before and the remaining 101, including the Captain, had to go through that ceremony. At 10am we were asked to come to the front of the ship.

At 10.30 the ceremony began by Neptune (the chief engineer) with his wife (an officer) heading the procession followed by eight (seadogs) in peculiar dress. The seadogs were naked and had rope stuff around their waists and over their elbows and wearing wigs. Their faces, chests, backs smeared with black paint. Followed [by] a few musicians with mouth organs. Neptune with his wife mounted his throne and sat beside us when his assistants (barbers) and the seadogs went around the canvas tub filled with sea water. A spokesman read out the names and a few poems in languages that made everybody laugh.

They began with the captain who was wearing a white suit. He sat on a stool with his back to the tub which was now full of swimming sea dogs. A poem was read and the two barbers, one with a huge shaving brush, applied a soapy material from a bucket containing flour, soap and a blue paint, all over his beard, face, nose, head, brushing briskly. Another put a big pill of soda and citric acid in his mouth to make it effervescent. The other barber with a huge wooden razor began imitating shaving, sharpening the razor with his shoe. You should see and hear the cheers of the sailors and their roars of laughter. As soon as the shaving was complete, the captain, with full clothes, was thrown backwards into the canvas tub full of sea water, to be caught by the seadogs each holding a limb who gave him four dippings under water by hoisting him up and dipping him again, with the pill fizzing in his mouth. He was then thrown out.

This was repeated with Barker, the doctor, and every one of the 101 men.

We are now steaming to the south of the equator and approaching our destination. We were informed we shall be at Mahé at 10am tomorrow morning.’

24 October 1937
‘Fuad left for church with Westergreen this morning and Yacoub went to the Rockies. I remained alone. Breakfast as usual and writing my diary.

How long are we staying on this island? Jumeau tells me that the general impression of the Seychellois public - he also heard it from our advocate - is that we will leave before the end of December 1937. It is good after all to hear the local gossip and I usually have a talk with our guards on local affairs. For example, I had a talk with him on labour. He informs me that a black person and his family employed on a plantation by the whites get from 5-6 rupees a month, i.e. 42 piasters as an average of 1.5 piasters a day. Isn’t that sheer slavery? They speak about cheap labour in Palestine and what government and the Jews have done to raise their wages and standard of living. And the rascals call Seychelles a Crown Colony and yet look at labour wages here; I would like to see Ben Zvia and tell him all about it. And these wages are paid in Victoria - the capital. What about the outlying islands? I am sure they get only half those wages.

I was told that as the first of January is a national feast to the Seychellois, many of the inhabitants economize all the year round as everybody must have plenty to eat on the first three days of every new year. There is a lot of feasting - eating and booze. Dancing, singing and plenty tom-tom beating. If we stay till January, we will watch this rather interesting occasion.

When I told Jumeau that the wage of an unskilled Arab labourer was over two rupees - three sometimes - and the Jewish labourer from 5-6 rupees per day he was astonished. A labourer in Jerusalem gets in one day what an African gets even in a month; and they dare say that slavery is abolished.

Yacoub was imprisoned today at the Rockies on account of the rain and I had lunch alone with Fuad.’

Spiritless generals!

It is 150 years since the death of the soldier William Swabey. Having served in the British army, he spent twenty years farming and politicking in the Canadian colony of Prince Edward Island. However, he is largely remembered today because of the diary he kept during the Peninsular War. Arthur Ponsonby, the early 20th century expert in diaries, rates it as a good example of a soldier’s diary with ‘rather humorous comments’.

Swabey was born in Buckinghamshire, England, in 1789. He married Mary Ann Hobson in 1820 and together they had 11 children. For 18 years he served in the British Army, rising to the rank of captain and fighting in the Peninsular War (between France and the allied powers of Spain, Portugal and UK for control of the Iberian Peninsula) and at Waterloo. Following his retirement from the army in 1840, Swabey and his family emigrated to Prince Edward Island colony in Canada, where he leased land and took up farming.

In November 1841, Swabey was appointed to the Legislative Council as a Tory, but he then switched his allegiances to become a leading spokesman for the Reform Party. In 1851, Swabey joined the Executive Council of George Coles’ Liberal government, and served in various posts until the Liberals were defeated in 1859. He also served for the best part of two decades on the Board of Education. In 1861 Swabey left Prince Edward Island to return to England. He died on 6 February 1872. The most comprehensive biography of Swabey online can be found at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

Swabey’s diaries, which only cover the period of the Peninsular War, were edited by F. A. Whinyates and published in 1895 as Diary of Campaigns in the Peninsula for the years 1811, 12 and 13. Despite being out of copyright, there do not appear to be any copies of the book freely available to read online (at Internet Archive for example). A portion of Swabey’s diaries - from July to October 1807 - was also published in Journal of the Royal United Service Institution in 1916. A description of Swabey’s diary and some extracts are available in English Diaries by Arthur Ponsonby (Methuen, 1923) which can be downloaded from Internet Archive. Ponsonby says Swabey’s is ‘a good example of a soldier’s diary, which in addition to technical military details contains descriptions of scenery and places and some rather humorous comments.’

Here are a few (undated) extracts from Swabey’s diary quoted by Ponsonby.

‘I found this day as well as many of late so little worthy of being remembered that I begin to think of curtailing my plan of journal altogether and am the more tempted to do so from the habits that necessity imposes on us.’

‘The first ceremony was that the whole dinner with the two servants and myself went bodily to leeward on the floor. I kept fast hold of a chicken by the leg and we fell to without knives and forks. I think I have not laughed so much since I left Christchurch.’

‘Rather troubled with a headache which was not deserved by idleness.’

‘I am apt to be desponding when too quiet and unemployed.’

‘There is such a complete vacancy and want of employment in our time that I cannot congratulate myself of a night on having done anything either useful or entertaining.’

‘I feel myself so constantly engaged in the daily pursuits of infantry officers in England viz: watching fishes swim under the bridge, throwing stones at pigs, etc. I am ashamed of it but have nothing else to do.

‘The beds had counterpanes of satin with lace borders and fringe ornaments but oh comfort where are you gone?’

‘Confound all dilatory and spiritless generals!’

Ponsonby adds: ‘The military engagements are fully described, and in many places there are additional notes inserted by [Swabey] at a later date. He is much more concerned in giving a full account of the victory at Vittoria than in relating the incident of his being wounded in the knee. Afterwards, however, he chafes a good deal at being incapacitated, and finally he is invalided home. [. . .] Swabey returned afterwards to active service, fought in the battle of Toulouse and also at Waterloo.’

And here is one dated extract from an article on the Napoleon Series website.

7 August 1912
‘I woke this morning with the most violent and insupportable pain in my head I ever felt, which having endured for some hours, at last turned into a fit of the ague, which I was extremely glad to change for the apprehensions that an alarming fever occasions. Mr. Peach of the 9th Dragoons who attended me, made me immediately get into water during the hot fit, and repeat this operation several times. The getting into water in a fever makes one shudder almost as much as if told to get into a furnace. One of the worst of my complaints was the total want of money, so that I could not even get fruit and wine, that were particularly recommended. When the fit left me after 3 hours, I began to feel a wish to be quietly reposing in some cool spot in England, and it brought to my remembrance every tender recollection and regret. Sickness is at any time bad, but under all my circumstances and with the probability of the army’s moving in which case I could not have stirred, it put me in mind of French prisons, Bayonne and all its horrors.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 6 February 2022.