A most excellent person

Today marks the 320th anniversary of the death of John Evelyn, a contemporary and friend of Samuel Pepys, who described him as a ‘most excellent person’. He was a writer, gardener, and a diarist, and his diaries, spanning 50 years, are considered of historical importance. Here is the draft chapter on Evelyn from London in Diaries (see an earlier Diary Review article for more about this yet-to-published book).

John Evelyn - a most excellent person
John Evelyn is another famous 17th century London diarist, though his diaries reveal a far less colourful character than Pepys, and show none of the latter’s wide-ranging curiosity, nor his introspection, nor his love of gossip. The two lived contemporaneously - Evelyn was born before Pepys and died after him - and were friends, mentioning each other in their diaries. But what Evelyn’s diary lacks in colour and entertainment, it makes up for in time span and historical importance. He was much interested in London’s development, its new squares, houses and gardens, and, after the Great Fire, he was involved with rebuilding the city.

Evelyn was born in 1620 at Wotton, near Dorking in Surrey, the large family estate founded originally on wealth accumulated after his great-grandfather brought the invention of gunpowder to England. John would, eventually, inherit Wotton, but not until the end of his life, in 1699. John spent much of his childhood near Lewes in Sussex with his mother’s parents, and declined to go to Eton. He was admitted into the Middle Temple in 1637, and also became a fellow commoner at Balliol College, Oxford, though he left without taking a degree. After his father’s death in 1640, Evelyn inherited sufficient wealth to allow him to live independently.

These were, though, confusing times in England, especially for a Royalist like Evelyn. After a very brief involvement with the Royalist army, he managed to gain permission to go abroad, where he stayed - in France and Italy - for several years to avoid the Civil War. In Paris, in 1647, he married the 12 year old Mary Browne, daughter of the English ambassador. He returned to England soon after, but did not live with his wife for several years. In 1652, the couple moved into Sayes Court, Deptford. This was a property, once leased from the crown by his father-in-law, but which had been seized by Parliament, and which Evelyn had had to buy back. In time, he rebuilt the house and developed a beautiful garden. This latter was a project that would lead to his serious interest in botany and garden history, and the writing of an encyclopaedia of gardens and gardening practices - Elysium Britannicum.

Here is Pepys, a lifelong friend of Evelyn, describing a visit to Sayes Court some years later (in 1665): ‘ . . . and so I by water to Deptford, and there made a visit to Mr Evelyn, who, among other things, showed me most excellent painting in little; in distemper, Indian incke, water colours: graveing; and, above all, the whole secret of mezzo-tinto, and the manner of it, which is very pretty, and good things done with it. He read to me very much also of his discourse, he hath been many years and now is about, about Guardenage; which will be a most noble and pleasant piece. He read me part of a play or two of his making, very good, but not as he conceits them, I think, to be. He showed me his Hortus Hyemalis; leaves laid up in a book of several plants kept dry, which preserve colour, however, and look very finely, better than any Herball. In fine, a most excellent person he is, and must be allowed a little for a little conceitedness; but he may well be so, being a man so much above others.’

After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Evelyn was favoured by Charles II, though he never sought or held high rank. Instead, he busied himself with various minor posts usually aimed at improving public life, whether by licensing hackney coaches, developing sewers, reforming the streets, regulating the Royal Mint, or re-planning London after the great fire. He was a founder member of the Royal Society. Under the Catholic King James II, he became alarmed by attacks on the English Church, which led him to concur with the revolution of 1688 that brought William of Orange to the throne. Towards the end of his life, in 1695, he was made treasurer of Greenwich hospital for old sailors.

Writing was surely Evelyn’s main passion. His early works were largely Royalist tracts, but other, mostly scientific, books soon followed. He wrote pioneering works on tree cultivation (Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees), soils (A Philosophical Discourse of Earth) and pollution (Fumifugium). His later works tended to be more concerned with culture, art, and religion, with titles such as Sculpture: or the History and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper, and Numismata - A discourse of medals, antient and modern. An 800-page history of religion was published after his death.

And then there is his diary which has come to overshadow all his other works. First edited by William Bray and published in two volumes by Henry Colburn in 1818 as Memoirs Illustrative of the Life and Writings of John Evelyn, comprising his Diary from 1641 to 1705/6, and a Selection of his Familiar Letters. A more complete and definitive edition comprising six volumes was edited by Esmond Samuel de Beer and published by Clarendon Press 1955. Experts acknowledge that some parts of Evelyn’s diaries were compiled at a later date from notes, and that because they show evidence of hindsight, they are more memoir than diary.

Though covering a period of over 50 years, Evelyn’s diary is not as long as Pepys’s, nor is it as entertaining or interesting. It is dry and factual, and mostly the entries are brief and unemotional - except on the death of a child. When Richard - aged but 5 - dies, Evelyn fills several pages with the precocious boy’s achievements, concluding with, ‘Here ends the joy of my life, and for which I go even mourning to the grave.’ 

Arthur Ponsonby, author of English Diaries, says this of Pepys and Evelyn: ‘Although the two diarists were contemporaries and friends, and although they came across many common acquaintances in their official and Court experiences, they did not live in the same stratum of society, and their method, their motive, their point of view, their manner and their characters were so completely different that except for the fact that they refer to the same people and the same events, the two celebrated journals that have been handed down to us have very little resemblance, and they seem to call for different moods in the reader.’

Birds and animals in St James’s Park
9 February 1665
Dined at my Lord Treasurer’s, the Earl of Southampton, in Bloomsbury, where he was building a noble square or piazza [London’s first square, or at least one of the earliest], a little town; his own house stands too low, some noble rooms, a pretty cedar chapel, a naked garden to the north, but good air. I had much discourse with his Lordship, whom I found to be a person of extraordinary parts, but a valetudinarian.

I went to St James’s Park, where I saw various animals, and examined the throat of the Onocrotylus, or pelican, a fowl between a stork and a swan; a melancholy waterfowl, brought from Astrakhan by the Russian Ambassador; it was diverting to see how he would toss up and turn a flat fish, plaice, or flounder, to get it right into his gullet at its lower beak, which, being filmy, stretches to a prodigious wideness when it devours a great fish. Here was also a small water-fowl, not bigger than a moorhen, that went almost quite erect, like the penguin of America; it would eat as much fish as its whole body weighed; I never saw so unsatiable a devourer, yet the body did not appear to swell the bigger. The solan geese here are also great devourers, and are said soon to exhaust all the fish in a pond. Here was a curious sort of poultry not much exceeding the size of a tame pigeon, with legs so short as their crops seemed to touch the earth; a milk-white raven; a stork, which was a rarity at this season, seeing he was loose, and could fly loftily; two Balearian cranes, one of which having had one of his legs broken and cut off above the knee, had a wooden or boxen leg and thigh, with a joint so accurately made that the creature could walk and use it as well as if it had been natural; it was made by a soldier. The park was at this time stored with numerous flocks of several sorts of ordinary and extraordinary wild fowl, breeding about the Decoy, which for being near so great a city, and among such a concourse of soldiers and people, is a singular and diverting thing. There were also deer of several countries, white; spotted like leopards; antelopes, an elk, red deer, roebucks, stags, Guinea goats, Arabian sheep, etc. There were withy-pots, or nests, for the wild fowl to lay their eggs in, a little above the surface of the water.

Burning an effigy of the pope
10 June 1673
We went, after dinner, to see the formal and formidable camp on Blackheath, raised to invade Holland; or, as others suspected for another design. Thence, to the Italian glass-house at Greenwich, where glass was blown of finer metal than that of Murano, at Venice.

5 November 1673
This night the youths of the city burned the Pope in effigy, after they had made procession with it in great triumph, they being displeased at the Duke for altering his religion and marrying an Italian lady. [The Duke of York, who later became King James II, had converted to Catholicism, and some weeks prior to this diary entry married a 15 year old Italian princess, Mary of Modena.]

Practising for a siege at Windsor
21 August 1674
In one of the meadows at the foot of the long Terrace below the Castle [Windsor], works were thrown up to show the King a representation of the city of Maestricht, newly taken by the French. Bastians, bulwarks, ramparts, palisadoes, graffs, horn-works, counter-scarps, etc., were constructed. It was attacked by the Duke of Monmouth (newly come from the real siege) and the Duke of York, with a little army, to show their skill in tactics. On Saturday night they made their approaches, opened trenches, raised batteries, took the counter-scarp and ravelin, after a stout defense; great guns fired on both sides, grenadoes shot, mines sprung, parties sent out, attempts of raising the siege, prisoners taken, parleys; and, in short, all the circumstances of a formal siege, to appearance, and, what is most strange all without disorder, or ill accident, to the great satisfaction of a thousand spectators. Being night, it made a formidable show. The siege being over, I went with Mr Pepys back to London, where we arrived about three in the morning.

11 May 1676
I dined with Mr Charleton, and went to see Mr Montague’s new palace, near Bloomsbury, built by Mr Hooke, of our Society, after the French manner [now the site of the British Museum].

From Enfield to Bellsize House in Hampstead
2 June 1676
I went with my Lord Chamberlain to see a garden, at Enfield town; thence, to Mr Secretary Coventry’s lodge in the Chase. It is a very pretty place, the house commodious, the gardens handsome, and our entertainment very free, there being none but my Lord and myself. That which I most wondered at was, that, in the compass of twenty-five miles, yet within fourteen of London, there is not a house, barn, church, or building, besides three lodges. To this Lodge are three great ponds, and some few inclosures, the rest a solitary desert, yet stored with no less than 3,000 deer. These are pretty retreats for gentlemen, especially for those who are studious and lovers of privacy. 

We returned in the evening by Hampstead; to see Lord Wotton’s house and garden (Bellsize House), built with vast expense by Mr O’Neale, an Irish gentleman who married Lord Wotton’s mother, Lady Stanhope. The furniture is very particular for Indian cabinets, porcelain, and other solid and noble movables. The gallery very fine, the gardens very large, but ill kept, yet woody and chargeable The soil a cold weeping clay, not answering the expense.

9 October 1676
I went with Mrs. Godolphin and my wife to Blackwall, to see some Indian curiosities; the streets being slippery, I fell against a piece of timber with such violence that I could not speak nor fetch my breath for some space; being carried into a house and let blood, I was removed to the water-side and so home, where, after a day’s rest, I recovered.

Dining with Pepys at the Tower
18 April 1678
I went to see new Bedlam Hospital, magnificently built, and most sweetly placed in Moorfields, since the dreadful fire in London.

4 June 1679
I dined with Mr Pepys in the Tower, he having been committed by the House of Commons for misdemeanours in the Admiralty when he was secretary; I believe he was unjustly charged.

3 July 1679
Sending a piece of venison to Mr Pepys, still a prisoner, I went and dined with him.

14 September 1681
Dined with Sir Stephen Fox, who proposed to me the purchasing of Chelsea College, which his Majesty had sometime since given to our Society, and would now purchase it again to build a hospital; or infirmary for soldiers there, in which he desired my assistance as one of the Council of the Royal Society.

4 August 1682
With Sir Stephen Fox, to survey the foundations of the Royal Hospital begun at Chelsea.

An innumerable assembly of drinking people 
1 May 1683
I went to Blackheath, to see the new fair, being the first procured by the Lord Dartmouth. This was the first day, pretended for the sale of cattle, but I think in truth to enrich the new tavern at the bowling-green, erected by Snape, his Majesty’s farrier, a man full of projects. There appeared nothing but an innumerable assembly of drinking people from London, peddlars, etc., and I suppose it too near London to be of any great use to the country.

30 October 1683
I went to Kew to visit Sir Henry Capell, brother to the late Earl of Essex; but he being gone to Cashiobury, after I had seen his garden [later to become the famous Kew Gardens] and the alterations therein, I returned home. He had repaired his house, roofed his hall with a kind of cupola, and in a niche was an artificial fountain; but the room seems to me overmelancholy, yet might be much improved by having the walls well painted á fresco. The two green houses for oranges and myrtles, communicating with the rooms below, are very well contrived. There is a cupola made with pole-work between two elms at the end of a walk, which being covered by plashing the trees to them, is very pretty; for the rest there are too many fir trees in the garden.

Streets of booths on the frozen Thames
1 January 1684
The weather continuing intolerably severe, streets of booths were set up on the Thames; the air was so very cold and thick, as of many years there had not been the like. The smallpox was very mortal.

9 January 1684
I went across the Thames on the ice, now become so thick as to bear not only streets of booths, in which they roasted meat, and had divers shops of wares, quite across as in a town, but coaches, carts, and horses passed over. So I went from Westminster stairs to Lambeth, and dined with the Archbishop. [. . .] After dinner and discourse with his Grace till evening prayers, Sir George Wheeler and I walked over the ice from Lambeth stairs to the Horseferry.

24 January 1684
The frost continues more and more severe, the Thames before London was still planted with booths in formal streets, all sorts of trades and shops furnished, and full of commodities, even to a printing press, where the people and ladies took a fancy to have their names printed, and the day and year set down when printed on the Thames: this humor took so universally, that it was estimated that the printer gained £5 a day, for printing a line only, at sixpence a name, besides what he got by ballads, etc. 

Coaches plied from Westminster to the Temple, and from several other stairs to and fro, as in the streets, sleds, sliding with skates, a bull-baiting, horse and coach-races, puppet-plays and interludes, cooks, tippling, and other lewd places, so that it seemed to be a bacchanalian triumph, or carnival on the water, while it was a severe judgment on the land, the trees not only splitting as if the lightning struck, but men and cattle perishing in divers places, and the very seas so locked up with ice, that no vessels could stir out or come in. The fowls, fish, and birds, and all our exotic plants and greens, universally perishing. 

The air full of the fuliginous steam of sea-coal
Many parks of deer were destroyed, and all sorts of fuel so dear, that there were great contributions to preserve the poor alive. Nor was this severe weather much less intense in most parts of Europe, even as far as Spain and the most southern tracts. London, by reason of the excessive coldness of the air hindering the ascent of the smoke, was so filled with the fuliginous steam of the sea-coal, that hardly could one see across the street, and this filling the lungs with its gross particles, exceedingly obstructed the breast, so as one could scarcely breathe. Here was no water to be had from the pipes and engines, nor could the brewers and divers other tradesmen work, and every moment was full of disastrous accidents.

Building about the city too disproportionate for the nation
12 June 1684
I went to advise and give directions about the building of two streets in Berkeley Garden, reserving the house and as much of the garden as the breadth of the house. In the meantime, I could not but deplore that sweet place (by far the most noble gardens, courts, and accommodations, stately porticos, etc., anywhere about the town) should be so much straitened and turned into tenements. But that magnificent pile and gardens contiguous to it, built by the late Lord Chancellor Clarendon, being all demolished, and designed for piazzas and buildings, was some excuse for my Lady Berkeley’s resolution of letting out her ground also for so excessive a price as was offered, advancing near £1,000 per annum in mere ground rents; to such a mad intemperance was the age come of building about a city, by far too disproportionate already to the nation: I having in my time seen it almost as large again as it was within my memory.

Fire on and in the river for the Queen’s birthday
15 November 1684
Being the Queen’s birthday, there were fireworks on the Thames before Whitehall, with pageants of castles, forts, and other devices of girandolas, serpents, the King and Queen’s arms and mottoes, all represented in fire, such as had not been seen here. But the most remarkable was the several fires and skirmishes in the very water, which actually moved a long way, burning under the water, now and then appearing above it, giving reports like muskets and cannon, with grenades and innumerable other devices. It is said it cost £1,500. It was concluded with a ball, where all the young ladies and gallants danced in the great hall. The court had not been seen so brave and rich in apparel since his Majesty’s Restoration.

7 December 1684
I went to see the new church at St James’s, elegantly built; the altar was especially adorned, the white marble inclosure curiously and richly carved, the flowers and garlands about the walls by Mr Gibbons, in wood: a pelican with her young at her breast; just over the altar in the carved compartment and border environing the purple velvet fringed with I. H. S. richly embroidered, and most noble plate, were given by Sir R. Geere, to the value ( as was said) of £200. There was no altar anywhere in England, nor has there been any abroad, more handsomely adorned.

Buried at Westminster without any pomp
14 February 1685
The King [Charles II had died on 6 February] was this night very obscurely buried in a vault under Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster, without any manner of pomp, and soon forgotten after all this vanity, and the face of the whole Court was exceedingly changed into a more solemn and moral behavior; the new King [James II] affecting neither profaneness nor buffoonery. All the great officers broke their staves over the grave, according to form.

22 May 1685
Oates [Titus Oates instigated the fictitious Popish plot that led to several executions before being found out], who had but two days before been pilloried at several places and whipped at the cart’s tail from Newgate to Aldgate, was this day placed on a sledge, being not able to go by reason of so late scourging, and dragged from prison to Tyburn, and whipped again all the way, which some thought to be severe and extraordinary; but, if he was guilty of the perjuries, and so of the death of many innocents (as I fear he was), his punishment was but what he deserved. I chanced to pass just as execution was doing on him. A strange revolution!

The Apothecaries’ garden at Chelsea
7 August 1685
I went to see Mr Watts, keeper of the Apothecaries’ garden of simples at Chelsea [now the Chelsea Physic Garden], where there is a collection of innumerable rarities of that sort particularly, besides many rare annuals, the tree bearing Jesuit’s bark, which had done such wonders in quartan agues [fevers/chills]. What was very ingenious was the subterranean heat, conveyed by a stove under the conservatory, all vaulted with brick, so as he has the doors and windows open in the hardest frosts, secluding only the snow.

19 January 1686
This night was burnt to the ground my Lord Montague’s palace in Bloomsbury, than which for painting and furniture there was nothing more glorious in England. This happened by the negligence of a servant airing, as they call it, some of the goods by the fire in a moist season; indeed, so wet and mild a season had scarce been seen in man’s memory.

Shells, insects, animals - all destined for the British Museum
16 December 1686
I carried the Countess of Sunderland to see the rarities of one Mr Charlton in the Middle Temple, who showed us such a collection as I had never seen in all my travels abroad either of private gentlemen, or princes. It consisted of miniatures, drawings, shells, insects, medals, natural things, animals (of which divers, I think 100, were kept in glasses of spirits of wine), minerals, precious stones, vessels, curiosities in amber, crystal, agate, etc.; all being very perfect and rare of their kind, especially his books of birds, fish, flowers, and shells, drawn and miniatured to the life. He told us that one book stood him in £300; it was painted by that excellent workman, whom the late Gaston, Duke of Orleans, employed. This gentleman’s whole collection, gathered by himself, traveling over most parts of Europe, is estimated at £8,ooo. He appeared to be a modest and obliging person. [This collection was later bought by Sir Hans Sloane and formed part of the British Museum.]

16 March 1687
I saw a trial of those devilish, murdering, mischief doing engines called bombs, shot out of the mortar piece on Blackheath. The distance that they are cast, the destruction they make where they fall, is prodigious.

Coronation of King William and Queen Mary 
11 April 1689
I saw the procession to and from the Abbey Church of Westminster, with the great feast in Westminster Hall, at the coronation of King William and Queen Mary [after the flight of James II]. [. . .] The Parliament men had scaffolds and places which took up the one whole side of the Hall. When the King and Queen had dined, the ceremony of the Champion, and other services by tenure were performed. The Parliament men were feasted in the Exchequer chamber, and had each of them a gold medal given them, worth five-and-forty shillings. [. . .]

Much of the splendor of the proceeding was abated by the absence of divers who should have contributed to it, there being but five Bishops, four Judges (no more being yet sworn), and several noblemen and great ladies wanting; the feast, however, was magnificent. The next day the House of Commons went and kissed their new Majesties’ hands in the Banqueting House.

8 July 1689
I sat for my picture to Mr Kneller, for Mr Pepys, late Secretary to the Admiralty, holding my ‘Sylva’ [his book] in my right hand. It was on his long and earnest request, and is placed in his library. Kneller never painted in a more masterly manner.

Buildings destroyed by a storm and a fire
11 July 1689
I dined at Lord Clarendon’s, it being his lady’s wedding day, when about three in the afternoon there was an unusual and violent storm of thunder, rain, and wind; many boats on the Thames were overwhelmed, and such was the impetuosity of the wind as to carry up the waves in pillars and spouts most dreadful to behold, rooting up trees and ruining some houses. The Countess of Sunderland afterward told me that it extended as far as Althorpe at the very time, which is seventy miles from London. It did no harm at Deptford, but at Greenwich it did much mischief.

10 April, 1691
This night, a sudden and terrible fire burned down all the buildings over the stone gallery at Whitehall to the water side, beginning at the apartment of the late Duchess of Portsmouth (which had been pulled down and rebuilt no less than three times to please her), and consuming other lodgings of such lewd creatures, who debauched both King Charles II. and others, and were his destruction.

Great auction of pictures at Whitehall
21 June 1693
I saw a great auction of pictures in the Banqueting house, Whitehall. They had been my Lord Melford’s, now Ambassador from King James at Rome, and engaged to his creditors here. Lord Mulgrave and Sir Edward Seymour came to my house, and desired me to go with them to the sale. Divers more of the great lords, etc., were there, and bought pictures dear enough. There were some very excellent of Vandyke, Rubens, and Bassan. Lord Godolphin bought the picture of the Boys, by Murillo the Spaniard, for 80 guineas, dear enough; my nephew Glanville, the old Earl of Arundel’s head by Rubens, for £20. Growing late, I did not stay till all were sold.

5 October 1694
I went to St Paul’s to see the choir, now finished as to the stone work, and the scaffold struck both without and within, in that part. Some exceptions might perhaps be taken as to the placing columns on pilasters at the east tribunal. As to the rest it is a piece of architecture without reproach. The pulling out the forms, like drawers, from under the stalls, is ingenious. I went also to see the building beginning near St Giles’s, where seven streets make a star from a Doric pillar placed in the middle of a circular area; said to be built by Mr Neale, introducer of the late lotteries, in imitation of those at Venice, now set up here, for himself twice, and now one for the State.

A death, a fire, a storm and a fog
5 March 1695
I went to see the ceremony. Never was so universal a mourning; all the Parliament men had cloaks given them, and four hundred poor women; all the streets hung and the middle of the street boarded and covered with black cloth. There were all the nobility, mayor, aldermen, judges, etc. [Queen Mary II had died of smallpox two months earlier.]

5 January 1698
Whitehall burned, nothing but walls and ruins left. [In fact, Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House survived the fire.]

26 March 1699
After an extraordinary storm, there came up the Thames a whale which was fifty-six feet long. Such, and a larger of the spout kind, was killed there forty years ago (June 1658). That year died Cromwell.

15 November 1699
There happened this week so thick a mist and fog, that people lost their way in the streets, it being so intense that no light of candles, or torches, yielded any (or but very little) direction. I was in it, and in danger. Robberies were committed between the very lights which were fixed between London and Kensington on both sides, and while coaches and travelers were passing. It began about four in the afternoon, and was quite gone by eight, without any wind to disperse it. At the Thames, they beat drums to direct the watermen to make the shore.

The death of Samuel Pepys
26 May 1703
This day died Mr Samuel Pepys, a very worthy, industrious and curious person, none in England exceeding him in knowledge of the navy, in which he had passed through all the most considerable offices. Clerk of the Acts and Secretary of the Admiralty, all which he performed with great integrity. When King James II went out of England, he laid down his office, and would serve no more; but withdrawing himself from all public affairs, he lived at Clapham with his partner, Mr Hewer, formerly his clerk, in a very noble house and sweet place, where he enjoyed the fruit of his labors in great prosperity. He was universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skilled in music, a very great cherisher of learned men of whom he had the conversation. His library and collection of other curiosities were of the most considerable, the models of ships especially.

26-27 November 1703
The effects of the hurricane and tempest of wind, rain, and lightning, through all the nation, especially London, were very dismal. Many houses demolished, and people killed. As to my own losses, the subversion of woods and timber, both ornamental and valuable, through my whole estate, and about my house the woods crowning the garden mount, the growing along the park meadow, the damage to my own dwelling, farms, and outhouses, is almost tragical, not to be paralleled, with anything happening in our age. I am not able to describe it; but submit to the pleasure of Almighty God.

31 October, 1705
I am this day arrived to the 85th year of my age. Lord teach me so to number my days to come, that I may apply them to wisdom!

See also Modesty, prudence, piety, and Virtues and imperfections.

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 27 February 2016.

No. 10 hostile to me

‘TB said in ’97, no one must “we are masters now”. We must focus on our duty to serve - or something similar. The reality of his behaviour is “I am master now”. There is a complete arrogance in the way he runs the government and No. 10.’ This is direct from the diary of Clare Short, written at a time when she was still serving in Tony Blair’s cabinet. This and other carefully-selected/edited quotes from her diary are included in an autobiographical book she wrote to inform the debate on why ‘Tony Blair did what he did on Iraq’ and ‘how such a disastrous mistake came to be made’. But the book can also be read as Short’s self-justification for being so anti-Blair yet serving in his cabinet for so long, and for, ultimately, condoning the invasion of Iraq, but then resigning from government and losing no opportunity to attack Blair thereafter. Happy birthday Clare Short, 80 today.

Short was born in Birmingham, UK, on 15 February 1946, to Irish Catholic parents. Aged 17, she gave birth to a son, who was given up for adoption; and aged 18 she married a fellow student, Andrew Moss. After studying political science at Leeds and Keele universities, she worked as a civil servant in the Home Office. In 1981, she got married again, to Alex Lyon (who died in 1993). In 1983, she was elected Member of Parliament for Birmingham Ladywood. She is said to have gained some early notoriety, soon after the election, when she implied Alan Clark, the government’s employment minister, was drunk at the despatch box. And, in 1986 she gained attention for campaigning against photographs of topless models in British tabloid newspapers.

Short rose through the ranks of the Labour front bench, despite twice resigning (over the prevention of terrorism act, and over the Gulf war in 1990). From 1993 to the general election in 1997, Short held a variety of posts: Shadow Minister for Women, Shadow Secretary of State for Transport, Opposition spokesperson on Overseas Development. She was a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) from 1988 to 1997 and Chair of the NEC Women’s Committee from 1993 to 1996. In 1996, Short discovered her adopted son, Toby, was working as a solicitor in London, and had three children.

After the 1997 election that brought Labour into power, the new Prime Minister Tony Blair created the Department for International Development, with Short as a cabinet-level Secretary of State. She retained this post through to the 2001 UK general election, and into the second Blair-led Labour government. In 2003, though, she threatened to resign from the cabinet should the government go to war with Iraq, but was persuaded by Blair to remain and back the war. Nevertheless, she resigned in May that year. Subsequently, in early 2004, she was involved in a controversy when she claimed the British security services were intercepting UN communications, including those of Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General. And later, in 2004, Free Press (Simon & Schuster) published her autobiographical book on New Labour, including a detailed analysis of the run-up to war with Iraq: An Honourable Deception?: New Labour, Iraq, and the Misuse of Power. (This is freely available to read online at Internet Archive.)

Short announced in 2006 she would not be standing at the next general election, and she also resigned the Labour whip, saying she was ‘ashamed’ of Tony Blair’s government. In 2011, she expressed interest in becoming a candidate for Birmingham mayor, but the idea of a mayoralty for the city was rejected in a referendum. In 2009, The Daily Telegraph exposed irregularities in her claims for expenses - by 2009, it is said, she had claimed and received over £65,000 in expenses above her salary.

Short has largely remained outside frontline politics in the last five years, though she has not been wholly inactive. She has continued to contribute occasionally to public debate, particularly on issues of global justice, inequality, and international development, and she has remained associated with international development and transparency initiatives such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (which she chaired between 2011 and 2016). Further information is available from her own website and from Wikipedia.

In her book - An Honourable Deception?: New Labour, Iraq, and the Misuse of Power - Short relies heavily on quotations from her diaries to show or prove her opinions and state of mind at different points in time. The opening paragraph of the book reads as follows: ‘Everywhere I go, in Britain and overseas, people ask me why Tony Blair did what he did on Iraq. This book is my attempt to answer that question as fully and honestly as I can. I have written it so that the discussion of how such a disastrous mistake came to be made can be more fully informed, and in the hope that we can begin to learn the lesson and start to put things right.’ (By writing, as if in passing, of Blair’s decision to go to war against Iraq as ‘a disastrous mistake’ seems to presuppose that this is a universally acknowledged fact - which of course it isn’t - but it does set the tone of Short’s purpose, a diatribe against Tony Blair, rather well.) Here are several extracts from Short’s diary taken from An Honourable Deception?.

1 July 2002
‘TB said in ’97, no one must think “we are masters now”. We must focus on our duty to serve - or something similar. The reality of his behaviour is “I am master now”. There is a complete arrogance in the way he runs the government and No. 10. My experience of it recently in his effort to press us to misuse and to get asylum seekers returned to their countries is a minor example but very much the style of his government.’

19 September 2002
‘Was feeling very, very irritated with TB and that he and US were determined on war at any price. Asked to see V + [Vauxhall Cross - headquarters of SIS] and told not allowed. Even more irritated. Made a fuss then got briefing. V+ said SH had masses chem and biol dispersed across country. Nuclear not imminent but would get. Military option target elite - no repeat Gulf war + big humanitarian effort.’

September 2002
‘In September 2002 we had a long and full discussion on Iraq at Cabinet. Tony Blair asked to see me before the meeting. He asked if I had seen SIS and said, as my diary records: “He said he didn’t want to lose me, but couldn’t give me a veto. I had done an interview for GMTV on Sunday stressing UN, no repeat of Gulf war and hurt to Iraqi people. Need for progress on Palestine and Kashmir. Big stress on keeping to UN route. No complaint from TB. I briefly reiterated my points.”

The Cabinet discussion was full and open. Once again my diary entry summarised:

“Cabinet discussion good. Big beasts lined up to support - JP - GB - JS - DB. JP said something like must all stick together but didn’t disagree with me. GB stressed UN but brief. DB a muddled contribution M Beckett came in with, not against. Then I did teaching on the just war etc. Alan Milburn and Estelle Morris and others then spoke v openly re why now? Why him? What about the Palestinians? Palestinians came up repeatedly and UN. V Good discussion. I think it influenced TB statement to Parliament, less belligerent and more UN.” ’

7 March 2003
‘Had a couple of days feeling gloomy and sleepless nights writing my resignation statement in my head. It seemed they were into military action whatever Blix said, we are arm-twisting Security Council non-permanent members and don’t seem to care that they can’t reconstruct the country without a UN mandate.’

23 March 2003
‘. . . terrible week - decided to stay in the Gov - horrendous media and bitter disappointment to all who were buoyed by my threat to resign.’

7 April 2003
‘Atmospherics in No. 10 hostile to me, maybe not stay long in government after all.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 15 February 2016.

Thirst after grandeur

‘What a delightful sight it is, after a shower of rain, to see the dear Women tripping along and tucking their drapery round their lovely hips, now & then giving one a glimpse of a lovely ankle & part of a full leg.’ This is Benjamin Haydon, an English painter born 240 years ago today. He was an artist with a significant talent, but his allegiance to 18th century trends, especially historical subjects, meant he was swimming against the Romantic tide, one which would make household names of William Blake and J. M. W. Turner. Chronic financial difficulties compounded his artistic frustrations, and he rarely managed to live within his means, especially after he had married and had children. His story is a sad one, but his characterful diary - initially published in five volumes - is superb because it not only tells us much about the man, but also gives picturesque insights into London life, whether the art and literary scene, chasing after girls or the trials of a day out with his family.

The following is a chapter on Benjamin Haydon taken from my (unpublished) book London in Diaries (see The Diary Review for more about this). Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. And the diaries, themselves, can be sampled in Neglected Genius - The Diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1808-1846 by John Jolliffe (Faber & Faber, 2012) at Googlebooks.

Benjamin Haydon and his thirst after grandeur

Though thriving in the early 19th century, the London art scene was very much in flux. Painters associated with the Romantic movement - William Blake, John Constable and J. M. W. Turner - were moving away from classicism and its focus on history favoured by, among others, Sir Joshua Reynolds, first president of the Royal Academy, and popular interest was moving with them.

Benjamin Haydon, an ambitious young painter from the west country, arrived into this cauldron of change, his heart set on following in Reynolds’ footsteps, and re-establishing a grandeur of British art through historical painting. He wrote in his autobiography, ‘I thought only of LONDON - Sir Joshua - Drawing - Dissection and High Art.’ Unfortunately, Haydon’s life in London was to be beset with frustrations and difficulties, both artistic and financial, which would eventually lead him to take his own life. Today, his autobiographical writing and especially his diaries have saved him from obscurity, for they demonstrate an immense vitality of feeling and observation. They give brilliant insights into aspects of London, from its literary world - he was friends with the Romantic poets - to the trials of a day out to Gravesend with his family.

Haydon was born in Plymouth [on 26 January] in 1786. His father worked as a bookseller/publisher, and his mother was the daughter of a priest. He was schooled locally, but the relationship with his father, who had very different ideas for his career, was always strained. In 1804, he escaped to London. Initially thinking he would study alone, he soon became drawn into the Royal Academy, in particular through its recently-appointed keeper, Henry Fuseli. Aged 21, Haydon exhibited for the first time. The painting - Joseph and Mary Resting on the Road to Egypt - sold for £105. Two years later, he finished The Assassination of L. S. Dentatus, which sold for twice as much. Although it increased his fame, it also resulted in a lifelong quarrel with the Academy, which, he felt, had failed to hang it with sufficient prominence. An allowance from his father ceased in 1810, leading Haydon to start borrowing money, a habit that dogged him for the rest of his life. During the 1810s, he travelled to Paris and studied for a short while at the Louvre. Works such as Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem and The Raising of Lazarus followed, but so did his first arrest for debt.

In 1821, Haydon married Mary Hyman, a young widow with whom he had fallen in love some years earlier. Mary already had two children, and she bore eight more, although only three of these, including Haydon’s first born Frank, survived beyond childhood. In debt again, he was sent to prison for the first time in 1823 - other incarcerations followed at regular intervals. One of his most well-known paintings, from this time, The Mock Election, shows those in jail imitating an election taking place outside. King George IV gave him £500 for the work.

When not in prison or working on commissions, Haydon began to tour the country lecturing on painting and promoting his idea that important buildings should be decorated with historical representations of glory. In the late 1830s, he published a substantial essay - Painting and the Fine Arts - and soon after began writing his autobiography. This was edited by Tom Taylor in three volumes and published posthumously, in 1853. Today, it is considered one of Haydon’s most important achievements. 

Haydon continued to paint in the 1840s, sometimes very large pictures, like The Maid of Saragossa and The Anti-Slavery Convention, but his style was already long out of fashion, and he was chronically frustrated at the lack of public interest in his work. In May 1846, an exhibition he had organised closed with the loss of a considerable sum; a few days later a friend reneged over a promise of a £1,000 loan; and, on 22 June, he bought a gun and shot himself. The wound failed to kill him and left him conscious, so he resorted to a razor to cut his throat. A note to his wife said: ‘Pardon this last pang, many thou has suffered from me; God bless thee in dear widowhood. I hope Sir Robert Peel will consider I have earned a pension for thee. A thousand kisses. Thy husband & love to the last.’

Haydon began keeping a diary in 1808, and continued the practice throughout his life, the very last entry being on the day of his suicide. This diary was first quoted extensively in the three volume autobiography edited by Taylor, but publication of the complete text had to wait until the 1960s when Harvard University Press published five volumes, carefully edited and annotated by Willard Bissel Pope. In 1960, the Keats-Shelley Journal reviewing the diary called Haydon the only English romantic, not excepting Byron, to parallel ‘the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau’; and said of him that ‘a great writer was lost’ because again and again his sketches were more vivid than his novelistic contemporaries.

A more accessible collection of extracts from Haydon’s diary were edited by John Joliffe and published by Hutchinson in 1990 under the title, Neglected Genius: The Diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon 1808-1846. ‘His violent self-righteousness,’ Joliffe says, ‘may have frustrated most of his aims, but his sheer vitality and his quite exceptional powers of observation and description make him an irresistible subject.’

The capital of the world
14 May 1809
I began to study in London in lodgings in the Strand, 342, May 20th, 1804, and studied night [and] day, till I brought a weakness in my eyes, which obstructed me for 6 weeks. In January, 1805, I first entered the Academy. March, went into Devonshire, where I obtained bones from a Surgeon of Plymouth and drew nothing else for three months; returned to the Academy in July; met [David] Wilkie [Scottish painter] there first time. Studied incessantly, sitting up many nights, shattered myself so much obliged to leave off. Went into Devonshire for the recovery of health. Began to paint after two years’ application to Anatomy & Drawing, May, 1806. Commenced my first picture, October 1st, and finished it March 31st, 1807. Went into Devonshire for 6 months. Studied heads from Nature. Came to town. My dear Mother died at Salt Hill. January 1st, 1808, commenced by second Picture, Dentatus.

11 July 1810
In passing Piccadilly I observed in some horses galloping the various positions of their limbs - what was the position of the fore legs when the hind legs were in such a position, &c - it is astonishing how truly you get at their motions by thus scrutinizing; I made some sketches, after I arrived home, and they seemed to spring and had all the variety I could possibly wish - and such a look of Nature and activity!

9 September 1810
I walked to see Wilkie yesterday to Hampstead; as I returned about four o’clock the Sun was on the decline - and all the valley as I looked from Primrose Hill wore the appearance of happiness & Peace. Ladies glittering in white, with their aerial drapery floating to the gentle breeze, children playing in the middle of the fields, and all the meadows were dotted with cows, grazing with their long shadows streamed across the grass engoldened by the setting Sun. Here was a mower intent on his pursuit, with his white shirt and brown arms illumined in brilliancy; there another, resting one hand on his Scythe, and with the other wetting it with tinkling music - some people were lying, others standing - all animate & inanimate nature seemed to enjoy and contribute to this delicious scene, while behind stood the capital of the World, with its hundred spires - and St Paul’s in the midst towering in the silent air with splendid magnificence.

A delicious tumble in Greenwich
30 November 1812
Went to the House of Lords to hear the Prince open Parliament in State. It was a very grand affair - the beautiful women - educated, refined, graceful, with their bending plumes & sparkling eyes - the Nobility, the Chancellor - I could not help reflecting how long it was before society arrived at such a pitch of peace & quietness, that order & regulation such as I witnessed existed. What tumult, what blood, what contention, what suffering, what error, before experience has ascertained what was to be selected, or what rejected.

25 April 1813
I felt this morning an almost irresistible inclination to go down to Greenwich and have delicious tumble with the Girls over the hills. I fancied a fine, beamy, primy, fresh, green spring day (as it was), a fine creature in a sweet, fluttering, clean drapery, with health rosing her shining cheeks, & love melting in her sparkling eyes, with a bending form ready to leap into your arms. After a short struggle, I seized my brush, knowing the consequences of yielding to my disposition, & that tho’ it might begin today, it would not end with it.

A critique of Sir Joshua’s exhibition
8 May 1813
Sir Joshua’s exhibition opened. The first impression on my mind was certainly that of flimsiness. They looked faint, notwithstanding the effect was so judiciously arranged. Sir Joshua’s modes of conveying ideas were colour & light and shadow; of form, he knew nothing. The consequence was he hinted to his eye & untrained hand, and with great labour & bungling, modeled out his feelings with a floating richness, an harmonious depth, and a gemmy brilliancy that was perhaps encreased by his perpetual repetitions, and which renders him as great a master of colour as ever lived. Of poetical conception of character as it regards Portrait, he had a singular share. How delightful are his Portraits, their artless simplicity, their unstudied grace, their chaste dignity, their retired sentiment command us, enchant us, subdue us.

The exhibition does great credit to the Directors of the British Gallery. It will have a visible effect on Art; it will raise the character of the English School; it will stop that bigotted, deluded, absurd propensity for Leonardo Da Vincis & insipid Corregios, and as men who shared Sir J’s friendship and been soothed by his manners, it does credit to their hearts as men.

6 August 1815
What a delightful sight it is, after a shower of rain, to see the dear Women tripping along and tucking their drapery round their lovely hips, now & then giving one a glimpse of a lovely ankle & part of a full leg.

Nature in the park; marbles in the museum
2 June 1816
I rode yesterday to Hampton Court round by Kingston & dined at Richmond. The day is delicious, the hedges smelling of may blossom, the trees green, the leaves full & out, the Thames shining with a silvery glitter, & a lovely girl who loves you, [in] the dining room of the Star & Garter at Richmond, sitting after dinner on your knee, with her heavenly bosom palpitating against your own, her arm round your neck playing with your hair, while you are sufficiently heated to be passionately alive to the ecstasy without having lost your senses from its excesses - Claret on the table and the delicious scene of Nature in Richmond Park beneath your open window, moaty, sunny, out of which rises the wandering voice of the cuckoo, while the sun, who throws a silent splendour over all, sinks into the lower vaults & the whole sky is beginning to assume the tinged lustre of an afternoon.

28 May 1817
On Monday last there were one thousand and two people visited the Elgin marbles! a greater number than ever visited the British Museum since it was established. It is quite interesting to listen to the remarks of the people. They make them with the utmost simplicity, with no affectation of taste, but with a homely truth that shews they are sound at the core. We overheard two common looking decent men say to each other, ‘How broken they, a’ant they?’ ‘Yes,’ said the other, ‘but how like life.’

28 June 1817
Dined at Kemble’s farewell dinner [the actor John Philip Kemble had played his last stage role, Corialanus, a few days earlier, his retirement having been hastened, perhaps, by the rise in popularity of Edmund Kean]. A more complete farce was never acted. Many, I daresay, regretted his leaving us, but the affectations of all parties disgusted me. The Drury Lane actors flattering the Covent Garden, the Covent Garden flattered in turn the Drury Lane. Lord Holland flattered Kemble; Kemble flattered Lord Holland. [. . .] Anyone would have thought that the English Stage had taken its origin from Kemble - Garrick was never mentioned - when all that Kemble has done for it has been to improve the costume. Yet Kemble is really & truly the Hero of all ranting; all second rate ability find it much easier to imitate his droning regularity than the furious impulses of Kean, who cannot point out when they come or why, but is an organ for Nature, when she takes it in her head to play on him.

Of Walter Scott and Wordsworth; and Keats in Kilburn meadows
7 March 1821
Sir Walter Scott breakfasted with me with Lamb, & Wilkie, and a delightful morning we had. I never saw any man have such an effect on company as he; he operated on us like champagne & whisky mixed. It is singular how success & want of it operate on two extraordinary men, Wordsworth & Walter Scott. Scott enters a room & sits at table, with the coolness & self possession of conscious fame; Wordsworth with an air of mortified elevation of head, as if fearful he was not estimated as he deserved. Scott is always cool, & amusing; Wordsworth often egotistical and overbearing. [. . .] Scott’s success would have made Wordsworth insufferable, while Wordsworth’s failures would not have rendered Scott a bit less delightful.

29 March 1821
Keats is gone too! [A few weeks earlier, Haydon had written of the death of John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, after a duel.] He died at Rome, Feby. 23rd, aged 25. Poor Keats - a genius more purely poetical never existed. [. . .]

The death of his brother [in December 1818] wounded him deeply, and it appeared to me from that hour he began seriously to droop. He wrote at this time his beautiful ode to the nightingale. ‘Where Youth grows pale & spectre thin & dies!’ - alluded to his poor Brother.

As we were walking along the Kilburn meadows, he repeated this beautiful ode, with a tremulous undertone, that was extremely affecting! I was attached to Keats, & he had great enthusiasm for me. I was angry because he would not bend his great powers to some definite object, & always told him so. Latterly he grew angry because I shook my head at his irregularity, and told him he was destroying himself.

The last time I saw him was at Hampstead, lying in a white bed with a book, hectic, weak, & on his back, irritable at his feebleness, and wounded at the way he had been used; he seemed to be going out of the world with a contempt for this and no hopes of the other.

Gorgeous splendour of ancient chivalry
21 July 1821
What a scene was Westminster Hall on Thursday last! It combined all the gorgeous splendour of ancient chivalry with the intense heroic interest of modern times; every thing that could effect or excite, either in beauty, heroism, grace, elegance, or taste; all that was rich in colour, gorgeous in effect, touching in association, English in character or Asiatic in magnificence, was crowded into this golden & enchanted hall!

I only got my ticket on Wednesday at two, and dearest Mary & I drove about to get all I wanted. Sir George Beaumont lent me ruffles & frill, another a blue velvet coat, a third a sword; I bought buckles, & the rest I had, and we returned to dinner exhausted. [. . .] I dressed, breakfasted, & was at the Hall Door at half past one. Three Ladies were before me. The doors opened about four & I got a front place in the Chamberlain’s box, between the door and Throne, & saw the whole room distinctly. Many of the door keepers were tipsey; quarrels took place. The sun began to light up the old gothic windows, the peers to stroll in, & the company to crowd in, of all descriptions; elegant young men tripping along in silken grace with elegant girls trembling in feathers and diamonds. Some took seats they had not any right to occupy, and were obliged to leave them after sturdy disputes. Others lost their tickets. Every movement, as the time approached for the King’s appearance, was pregnant with interest. The appearance of the Monarch has something the air of a rising sun; there are indications which announce his approach, a whisper of mystery turns all eyes to the throne! Suddenly two or three run; others fall back; some talk, direct, hurry, stand still, or disappear. Then three or four of high rank appear from behind the Throne; and interval is left; the crowds scarce breathe! The room rises with a sort of feathered, silken thunder! Plumes wave, eyes sparkle, glasses are out, mouths smile. The way in which the King bowed was really monarchic! As he looked towards the Peeresses & Foreign Ambassadors, he looked like some gorgeous bird of the East.

After all the ceremonies he arose, the Procession was arranged, the Music played, and the line began to move. All this was exceedingly imposing. After two or three hours’ waiting, the doors opened, and the flower girls entered, strewing flowers. The exquisite poetry of their look, the grace of their actions, their slow movement, their white dresses, were indescribably touching; their light milky colour contrasted with the dark shadow of the archway. The distant trumpets & shouts of the people, the slow march, and at last the appearance of the King under a golden canopy, crowned, and the universal burst of the assembly at seeing him, affected every body.

A crowd of feelings but I cannot write
4 December 1821
I am married! Ah, what a crowd of feelings lie buried in that little word. I cannot write or think for the present. I thank God for at last bringing me to the arms of the only creature that ever made my heart burn really, & I hope he will bless me with health & understanding & means to make her happy & blessed. Dearest, dearest Mary - I cannot write.

17 September 1826
Walked into a delicious meadow, and sat down on an old stump behind some hay ricks, my back turned on the Edgware road. It was a beautiful seclusion; just after passing the Turnpike near West End Lane, you turn down a lane which leads to the Harrow road; about a dozen yards on the left is a style, & close to the style hay ricks & a fallen stump. Here I sat and read Xenophon’s treatise on riding & Cavalry exercise, in a French translation, which decidedly proves the Greeks did not shoe their Horses, as he gives instructions how to get the hoof so firm that it shall resist injury successfully.

London Bridge is opening
1 August 1831
Went to see the King’s procession to open the London Bridge, by particular desire, that is, of Master Frank, Alfred, Frederick, Harry, & Mary Haydon, not forgetting Mrs Mary Haydon the Elder. Well, I went, to the gallery of St Paul’s, and after waiting about 5 hours, a little speck with a flag and another little speck with a flag, and another speck in which I saw ten white specks, and 6 red & yellow specks, came by, & immediately 200,000 specks uttered a shout I could just hear, and some specks waved handkerchiefs, & other specks raised hats, and this, they said, was the King, and directly a little round ball went up in the air and that, they said, was an air balloon, and then they all shouted, and Mrs Mary Haydon the Elder had a pain in her stomach, and Master Frederick wanted to drink, and Miss Mary said she was faint, and Master Frank Haydon said, ‘is this all?’ - and Mr Haydon said he was very hot, and then they went down an infinite number of dark stairs and got into a coach & drove home, & each fell asleep and this was pleasure. Now if Mr Haydon had gone to work with his Xenophon, neither Master or Mrs or Mr Haydon would have had a pain in their bellies and Mr Haydon’s Back-ground would have been done, and his Conscience would have been quiet, & now he has spent 1.18.6 to get a pain in his belly, and has the pain without the money - and this is pleasure.

18 November 1831
This day my dear little child Fanny died, at 1/2 past one in the forenoon, aged 2 years, 8 months, & 12 days being born on March 6th, 1829. Dear Little Soul, she had water in the head, all the consequences of weakness & deranged digestion, and was one of those conceived creatures, born when the Mother has hardly any strength from the effects of a previous confinement. Good God! She never spoke, or was not able to utter syllable, & never walked. Reader, whoever thou are, shrink not from Death with apprehension. Death was the greatest mercy an Almighty could grant.

For this earthly happiness I paid 2.12.6
1 September 1838
Went to Gravesend with my family for a day of relief & pleasure. First we got into an Omnibus & were jolted & suffocated [to] the Bank. Second the Steamer at the Bridge had just gone. Third we had to wait amongst the Porters & Packages 3/4 of an hour for the next. 4th we got on board the sunny side in a cabin, close to the Boiler, & were alternately baked by the sun & broiled by the steam pipe. Fifth we got to Gravesend tired & hungry. 6th we walked to a romantic love lane, which was a garden straight walk with dirty wooden seats, and sundry evidences that people in Gravesend had good digestions & sound peristaltic motion. 7th we ordered Roast Beef for Dinner, and my dear Mary kept her appetite to enjoy a hearty meal, when the Landlord put down lamb she hated  & so did I. 8th we had rum as hot as aqua-fortis, & then old port as weak as children pap. We all got aboard with indigestion. I fell asleep on Deck & got a pain in my head, and we got home tired, grumbling, ill humoured, had tea & crept to bed.

Today I am heated, discontented, & indignant, & it will take 24 hours more to recover in. For this earthly happiness I paid 2.12.6. - enough to feed us for a week! - so much for pleasure.

20 May 1846
Continually attending to Exhibitions is dreadful and if you do not, you get robbed. These things an Artist should have nothing to do with; details of business injure my mind and when I paint I feel as if Nectar was floating in the Interstices of the brain. God be praised, I have painted today.

22 June 1846
God forgive - me - Amen. Finis of B R Haydon ‘Stretch me no longer on this tough World’ - Lear. End.

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 26 January 2016.

Something of myself

The English writer Rudyard Kipling, who died 80 years ago today, left behind a treasure of much-loved stories and poems, such as The Jungle Book, Kim and If. But, he didn’t leave much autobiographical material - hating the idea of biographers churning over his life - and what diary material has survived is thanks to chance rather than purpose: one diary from 1885, when he was working as a journalist in India, and several notebooks he kept while on motoring tours. In addition, and of much use to biographers, are surviving partial transcripts of the daily diary kept by Kipling’s American wife, Carrie, the originals of which were destroyed by the Kiplings’ daughter Elsie.

Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865. He was named after Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire near where his parents had met and courted. Aged five he was taken, with his younger sister Alice, to live with a couple in Southsea, who boarded children of British nationals serving in India, and they remained there for six years. Alice returned to India, while Rudyard was admitted to the United Services College at Westward Ho!. In 1882, he, too, returned to India - his parents lacking the resources to send him to Oxford, and doubting his academic ability to win a scholarship - where his father, in Lahore by this time, secured him a job as assistant editor of a local newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette, published six days a week. This suited Kipling, whose need to write (journalism, poetry, short stories), apparently, was unstoppable. In the late 1880s, he moved to Allahabad to work for The Pioneer, though was discharged in 1889 after a dispute. He published a first collection of his poems as Departmental Ditties in 1886, and a first prose collection, Plain Tales from the Hills, in Calcutta in early 1888.

Determined on a literary career, Kipling returned to London, visiting Japan and North America on the way. He published several short stories, and a novel, and also took another tour, this one to South Africa and the antipodes. In early 1892, in London, he married the American Carrie Balestier, and they settled in Vermont where their two daughters (Elsie and Josephine) were born. During the next four years, he wrote several books of short stories (not least The Jungle Book and its sequel), a further novel and much poetry. But, in 1896, the Kiplings left the US - partly because of an increase in perceived anti-British feeling and partly because of a dispute with Carrie’s family - to return to England, where they first lived in Torquay, Devon, then Rottingdean and, finally, in a house called Bateman’s in Burwash, Sussex. A third child, John, was born to the Kiplings in 1897. And from 1898, for a decade, the family travelled every winter to South Africa (where they were given a house by Cecil Rhodes) - except for 1899. That year, the Kiplings sailed to America, so Carrie could see her mother, but the journey across the Atlantic was very hard, and Kipling and Josephine both fell seriously ill. Josephine did not survive.

By this time, Kipling was famous. He continued writing short stories and novels, producing Kim and the Just So Stories soon after the turn of the century, as well as songs and poems (such as If, published in 1910). In 1907, after turning down other honours, including a knighthood, he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. With the onset of war, Kipling supported the fight against Germany, and even helped his son, who had eyesight problems, get enlisted. However, John went missing within a few weeks, and his body was never recovered. Devastated, Kipling continued to write after the war, but never returned to the bright colourful children’s stories he had once so delighted in; indeed, his conservative and imperialist views fell out of fashion, and his writing too. He died in London on 18 January 1936. His ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner, next to the graves of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, The Kipling Society, the BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica or The Poetry Foundation.

Kipling was apt to destroy many of his personal papers, disliking the idea of biographers churning over his life; his wife, Carrie, and daughter, Elsie Bambridge, took a similar view. Only a few diaries kept by Kipling have survived by chance: one from when he was young in 1885, and a set of notebooks he kept while on motoring holidays later in his life. Carrie, kept a daily diary from 1892 until her husband’s death. Although the originals were destroyed by Bambridge, two biographers, Charles Carrington and Lord Birkenhead, had already made extensive notes and transcribed parts of the diary. These are held by the University of Sussex’s Kipling archive at The Keep, but The Kipling Society also has copies (and has made them available online, with an index).

Biographers have made good use of the 1885 diary - see Andrew Lycett’s Rudyard Kipling, for example - but the full text can be found in Rudyard Kipling: Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings edited by Thomas Pinney, Cambridge University Press, 1991, available to preview at Googlebooks. (Something of Myself is a rare autobiographical text, started by Kipling in the last months of his life but not properly finished - Carrie edited it for publication.) Here are several extracts of the 1885 diary included in that Pinney edition.

28 January 1885
‘Scraps on Accidents on Indian Railways, The Dynamitard’s attempts at Westminster and Hume’s vegetarianism. About one column altogether. An easy day as far as the paper was concerned; there being plenty of matter in hand and not much proofwork.’

13 February 1885
‘Scrap. Musketry schools. Annotated Prejvalsky’s explorations in Thibet - and rec’d bellew’s Sanitary Report for notes of the week. Typhoid at home went in today: Mem scrap on Rai Kanega Lall and design for town hall must be done tomorrow.’

25 February 1885
‘Sting of yesterday blinded me couldn’t see. Went to hospital Lawrie came over about mid day and looked at it. Attention more occupied by blain of my face. Must come to hospital tomorrow and see how cocaine works. Did not to go office.’

26 February 1885
‘Eye all right. W said it wasn’t and so lost my work for the day - served him right. Went to hospital [?] cocaine and was impressed. To Cinderella in the evening and was impresseder.’

6 April 1885
‘No bank holiday for me. Special of three columns on review. Fine weather at last but I must shut up with a click before long. Too little sleep and too much seen.’

1 May 1885
‘On the road to Kotgur. May day at Mahasu inexpressibly lovely. Lay on the grass and felt health coming back, again. De brath a delightful man. What a blessed luxury is idleness. Eagles and shot at bottles.’

21 August 1885
‘Dinner with Tarleton Young at his chummery. Where met one LeMaistre who is a womans mind small and mean featured. He may be decent enough for aught I know. Usual philander in Gardens. Home to count the risks of my resolution.’

Transcripts of Kipling’s diaries of his motor tours, around 100 pages, are held in the archive at The Keep. The original notebooks were thought lost, at least until found in a dusty drawer at Macmillan (see The Daily Telegraph). Several articles in the Kipling Journal mention or quote from the notebooks, for example see volume 91 dated December 2017,

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 18 January 2016.

I’m looking at dying

Harold Frederick Shipman, one of the most prolific serial killers in modern times, would have turned 80 today had he not committed suicide in prison on the eve of his 58th birthday. Subsequently, the prison authorities produced a report on the circumstances surrounding his death, and this became the source for widespread publication of extracts from a diary, mostly concerning his suicidal thoughts, Shipman had kept while incarcerated.

Shipman was born in Nottingham on 14 January 1946, the son of Methodist parents. His father was a lorry driver, and his mother died of cancer when he was only 17. Aged 20, he married Primrose Oxtoby, and they would have four children. He studied at Leeds School of Medicine, graduating in 1970, and began work at the general infirmary in Pontefract, Yorkshire. Four years later, he took up a GP position at the Abraham Ormerod Medical Centre in Todmorden, and then, in 1977, at the Donneybrook Medical Centre in Hyde near Manchester. While still in Todmorden, he had been caught self-prescribing pethidine, had been fined, and had attended a drug rehabilitation clinic.

In 1993, Shipman set up his own surgery, also in Hyde, at 21 Market Street. It was not until 1998, that concerns were raised about the high number of deaths among his elderly patients. A police investigation in March was abandoned for lack of evidence, but then, in June, after the death of, what proved to be, his last victim, Kathleen Grundy, the police exhumed her body to find traces of diamorphine. They also established that Grundy’s will, leaving everything to Shipman, had been forged by Shipman himself. The police went on to investigate a number of others deaths, and found that Shipman had systematically killed many of his patients and falsified medical records to cover his tracks.

In 2000, Shipman was prosecuted for a sample 15 murders, and found guilty of them all. The judge sentenced him to 15 concurrent life sentences. Subsequently, the government set up an inquiry, chaired by Lord Laming of Tewin, to look into the case. Though it released its findings in various stages, The Shipman Inquiry, which took evidence from 2,500 witnesses and cost £21m, did not conclude its work until 2005. It found that Shipman had probably committed 250 murders in total, but that the true number could be more. Shipman consistently denied his guilt, and declined to comment on his actions. His wife, Primrose, also appears to have considered her husband innocent.

Shipman killed himself, using bed sheets tied to prison bars, in Wakefield Prison on 13 January 2004, the eve of his 58th birthday. Researchers believe he probably committed suicide to ensure Primrose’s financial security: had he lived to the age of 60 she would not have received a full NHS pension. The British press had a field day: The Sun celebrated with the headline ‘Ship Ship hooray’; the Daily Mirror called Shipman a coward and condemned the prison service for allowing it to happen; and the broadsheets proposed there be investigations into prisoner welfare and changes to prison sentencing. For further information see Wikipedia, BBC, or Murderpedia.

Following Shipman’s suicide, the Director General of the Prison Service, asked the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, Stephen Shaw, to look into the circumstances surrounding Shipman’s suicide. He produced a preliminary report in March the same year, and a final report in May 2005 (using the standard procedure of reporting the facts without identifying the person in question). In his report, Shaw notes that the police gave him a summary of everything they had removed from Shipman’s cell ‘including some entries from the man’s diary’. He quotes these diary entries in his report, and makes considerable reference to them.

The Shipman diary extracts were first obtained by The Sunday Telegraph in April 2005, and then they were widely reported in most newspapers later that year, in August. At the same time, the media reported that Shipman, while still alive, had tried to copyright his letters and ‘diary of despair’ in an effort to stop their contents being sold to the press (see the BBC or The Telegraph). 

Shaw’s report is available online, through the BBC website, and is the source of the Shipman diary extracts reproduced below. Apart from these, however, there is no other evidence I can find of what might have been in Shipman’s diary - there is no mention of it, for example, in any of several published biographies of Shipman.

13 January 2001
‘So depressed. If ?[illegible] says no then that is it. There is no possible way I can carry on, it would be a kindness to [].’

14 January 2001 (Shipman's 55th birthday)
‘[My wife] and the kids have to go on without me when it is the right time. Got to keep the façade intact for the time being.’

27 March 2001
‘. . . I’m looking at dying, the only question is when and can I hide it from everyone?’

13 April 2001
‘If I was dead they’d stop being in limbo and get on with their life perhaps. I’ll think a bit more about it. I’m desperate, no one to talk about it to who I can trust. Everyone will talk to the PO’s [prison officers] then I’ll be watched 24hrs a day and I don’t want that.’

26 June 2001
‘. . . As near suicide as can be, know how and when, just not yet.’

14 January 2002
’56 today, cards from everyone - very very sad day, not what life is about at all. [ ] not very good, it must be dreadful for her.’

31 July 2002
‘[Wife] - chat, no notes sent in yet. She’s getting no money off the DHSS, supported by the kids. What a terrible set up. How is she coping?’

17 October 2002
‘No money. [Wife] not able to get DHSS to see the poverty she is in. Only the kids who have been absolutely brilliant - the pension appeal.’

7 January 2003
‘A new year, a visit from [wife]. Still no money off DHSS. . . If this year doesn’t get anywhere I know it is not worth the effort. I have to lock down this overwhelming emotion or else I’d be on a suicide watch or drugs.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 14 January 2016.

Speaking of The Possessed

‘To London, mainly for another Prime Minister’s dinner party [. . .] I continue to find Mrs Thatcher very attractive physically. Her overhanging eyelids, hooded eyes, are the only suggestion of mystery (a characteristic I like in women). This is Anthony Powell - born 120 years ago today - the British author of A Dance to the Music of Time, making a somewhat surprising confession to his diary. He was not far off 80 at the time, and she was closing in on 60.

Anthony Powell was born in London on 21 December 1905, the son of an army officer. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, and then worked at the publishers Gerald Duckworth and Company for ten years. In 1934, he married Lady Violet Pakenham, sister of Lord Longford. They had two sons, one in 1940 and one in 1946. After leaving Duckworth, Powell did some script writing and some travelling in the US and Mexico. On returning to England in 1937, he lived in London and worked as a full-time writer, producing novels and literary criticism.

During the Second World War, Powell joined the army and rose from the rank of second lieutenant to major, serving first in the Welch Regiment and then in the Intelligence Corps as a liaison officer with Czechs and Poles among others. In 1951, he published A Question of Upbringing. This was the first novel in what would be 12 volumes, written over a quarter of century, making up A Dance to the Music of Time for which Powell is most remembered. In 1952, he moved to Somerset where he spent the rest of his life.

Powell also wrote other novels, two plays, many literary reviews, and autobiographical works. He served as a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery in the 1960s and 1970s, and was also a vice-president of the Society of Genealogists. In 1956 he was awarded a CBE, and, in 1988, was made a Companion of Honour. But, in 1973, he declined a knighthood. He died in 2000. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, the Anthony Powell Society or The Guardian.

In the early 1980s, when already in his 70s, Powell decided to begin keeping a daily journal, and, in time, these were published by William Heinemann in three volumes, each one spanning 3-5 years. The first to appear in 1995 was Journals 1982-1986, then came Journals 1987-1989 (in 1996), and finally Journals 1990-1992 (in 1997). According to his wife, Violet, who provided an introduction to the first volume: ‘The idea of keeping a journal appealed to Anthony Powell as bridging the gap when a novel was not in immediate production.’ She adds, the five years covered by the volume ‘make an effective sequel to the author’s memoirs, the last volume of which was published in 1982.

Further information about Powell’s diaries is available online in Chapter Six of Understanding Anthony Powell by Nicholas Birns (University of South Carolina Press, 2004) at Googlebooks; or in an article by Christopher Hitchens for The New York Review of Books. Two volumes of the diaries themselves can be previewed freely at Googlebooks (Journals 1982-1986, Journals 1990-1992). Here, though, are several extracts.

28 March 1985
‘To London, mainly for another Prime Minister’s dinner party [. . .] At dinner, to my great surprise, I was put on Mrs Thatcher’s right, with Vidia Naipaul on her left; on my other side was John Vincent. At one time or another I had read a lot of reviews by Vincent, some of them no great shakes, so far as I remembered, others pretty good. He has a notably prognathous jaw, perfectly civil manner. We did not have much talk, as I was fully occupied keeping my end up with the Prime Minister, while Vincent probably thought he had to make some sort of showing with his fellow don, Tony Quentin, on his other side.

I continue to find Mrs Thatcher very attractive physically. Her overhanging eyelids, hooded eyes, are the only suggestion of mystery (a characteristic I like in women, while totally accepting Wilde’s view of them as Sphinxes without a secret). Her general appearance seems to justify Mitterrand’s alleged comment that she has the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe; the latter a film star I never, in fact, though particularly attractive. Mrs Thatcher has a fair skin, hair-do of incredible perfection, rather dumpy figure, the last seeming to add a sense of down-to-earthiness that is appropriate and not unattractive in its way. She was wearing a black dress, the collar rolled up behind her neck, some sort of gold pattern on it. On her right hand was a large Victorian ring, dark red, in an elaborate gold setting. She only likes talking of public affairs, which I never find easy to discuss in a serious manner. In fact I felt myself taken back to age of nineteen, sitting next to a beautiful girl, myself quite unable to think of anything to say. Mrs T. is reputed to have no humour. I suspect she recognizes a joke more than she is credited with, if probably jokes of a limited kind, and confined to those who know her well. [. . .]

The talk at this Downing Street dinner, as before, was introduced at a certain stage by Hugh Thomas. It ranged over East Germany, to the condition of Young People in this country, topics on which I am not outstandingly hot. Mrs T. did, however, please me by saying that everything from which we are now suffering is all discussed in the plainest terms in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (as I prefer, The Devils); a fact I have been preaching for decades. I wonder when, how, she got round to this. Did she read the novel, see its contemporary relevance herself, or was that pointed out to her by someone? I fear probably the latter.’

4 April 1986
‘My agent John Rush rang in the afternoon to say the BBC (i.e. Jonathan Powell) have decided not to do Dance [to the Music of Time] on TV. Rush says he is going to try Granada with the Ken Taylor/Innes Lloyd script as a package. After the last eight or nine years of BBC ineptitudes about Dance nothing surprises me, I feel one of the commercial companies certainly would be no worse to deal with, probably better. Why Dance should now appear unsuitable after ‘passing’ three scripted episodes is beyond comprehension. For that matter, after reading the sequence itself, a quiet beginning leading up to deeper matters is an essential aspect of the construction. Rush rather distraught. He has taken a lot of trouble about Dance over the years, and is understandably disappointed at this.’

7 April 1986
‘Main reviews of The Fisher King are now in; a generally satisfactory press, important thing is to let people know book is out, what it is about. Reviewers mostly approving, tho’ one is always struck by the ingrained philistinism, illiteracy, humourlessness, their fear and hatred of literary references. [. . .]

British reviewers tend to hate writing as such. This also applies to most interviewers. I always say the same thing to interviewers, because they always ask the same banal questions. They subsequently write facetiously, desperately anxious to show they are not in the least impressed by anyone or anything.’

25 November 1990
‘I wrote to Mrs Thatcher expressing regret at her resignation, saying that at one of her dinner parties where I met her she had spoken of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (in Russian The Devils), i.e. those that entered into the swine, which then rushed over the cliff. This seemed a perfect example of what had happened to her, the swine being her betrayers in the Tory Party.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 21 December 2015.