Believing in history

Kim Dae-jung, a former President of South Korea and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, died a few weeks ago, but in the last year of his life he kept a diary, and extracts have just been published. They are, in part, philosophical with reflections back over his life. However, some of the extracts are also proving controversial for being critical of the current administration led by President Lee Myung-bak.

Kim (his family name) was born in 1925 the son of a farmer. He studied at Mokpo Commercial High School and went to work for a Japanese-owned shipping company during the Japanese occupation of Korea. In time, he ended up as owner of the same firm. During the Korean War he managed to escape capture by the Communists, and subsequently went on to enter politics, being elected to the National Assembly for the first time in the early 1960s. By the mid-1960s, he had become a prominent opposition politician. In 1971, he was chosen as presidential candidate for the New Democratic Party to run against the incumbent, Park Chung Hee.

During the Assembly election campaign that followed the presidential vote, Kim experienced the first of at least five attempts on his life by political enemies. When the re-elected Park imposed martial law, Kim began a vigorous campaign against the measures. In August 1973, government agents abducted him from a Tokyo hotel. Intervention by the US saved his life, but he was still imprisoned, and then kept under house arrest. After Park’s assassination, Kim’s freedom was restored, only to be taken away again following a coup that brought Chun Doo-hwan to power. He was given exile to the US, where he taught at Harvard until his return to South Korea in 1985.

Back in Seoul, Kim was immediately put under house arrest but his return intensified a nationwide movement for democracy. In 1987, his civil and political rights were restored, leaving him free to run for office, which he did three times before being elected President, in 1997. He is credited with major reforms and restructuring, which helped pull the country back from a financial crisis, and for pursuing a policy of engagement toward North Korea (the Sunshine Policy). In 2000, Kim was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize ‘for his work for democracy and human rights in South Korea and in East Asia in general, and for peace and reconciliation with North Korea in particular.’

Kim completed his five year presidential term in 2003. He was succeeded first by Roh Moo-hyun, and then, in 2008, by the current President, Lee Myung-bak. Roh, however, committed suicide last May, and just three months months later, in August, Kim died too. There is more biographical information about him on the Nobel Peace Prize website, at Wikipedia, and in various recent obituaries, such as The Guardian’s.

Within days of Kim’s death, 30,000 copies of a small printed book entitled Insaengeun Areumdapgo Yeoksaneun Baljeonhanda (Life Is Beautiful and History Advances) were released. It contains a selection of diary entries from the last year of Kim’s life, starting in 2008 and ending in June 2009. A number of extracts are available online thanks to The Hankyoreh, a left-leaning South Korean newspaper.

In the journal, Hankyoreh notes, Kim ‘passionately’ expresses his rage against the unilateral behavior of the Lee Myung-bak administration, and shares his ‘concern and dismay over the state of democracy in South Korea and the extent to which inter-Korean relations is in crisis’. Also, as if sensing that he does not have long to live, he praises the beauty of life and expresses warm affection for his wife Lee Hee-ho. Here are a few extracts.

11 January 2009
‘I love and respect my wife, and without her, I might not be here now and even now, I think living without her would be difficult.’

20 January 2009 (the day police stormed a building to forcibly evicts tenants)
‘Because of the violent suppression of the police, five people are dead and an additional ten have been hospitalized with injuries. It is truly barbaric behavior.’

‘The situation of these poor citizens, who are being chased out of their homes in the cold winter, brings tears to my eyes.’

14/15 January 2009
‘The question in life is not how long you lived. It is whether you lived for people who are suffering and are faced with hardship.’

‘I have lived my life believing in history and the people even amid innumerable persecutions. In the future, I will continue to walk this same path for as long as I am alive.’

16 January 2009
‘All dictators in history think that they alone will not follow the same path as those previous if they prepare well enough, but in the end, they walk the same path or are subject to history’s harsh judgment.’

27 April 2009
‘What is there to hope for in this world? I will maintain my health until the end and to lend the counsel necessary for resolving the three major crises of the present: the crisis of democracy, the economic crisis of the working class, and the crisis in inter-Korean relations.’

23 May 2009 (the day Roh Moo-hyun died)
‘Prosecutors were too harsh in their investigation. They attacked him, his wife, his son, his older brother and his nephew-in-law as if they were cleaning house.’

29 May 2009
‘There has probably never been a case of nationwide mourning like this before. The people’s disappointment, rage and sadness about reality seems to overlap with President Roh’s.’

A few days ago, Chosun Ilbo (The Korean Daily) published an article about Kim’s diary (and a forthcoming memoir) chastising Kim himself for outspokenly attacking a current administration, and criticising those who seek to use the diary (and memoir) for political ends.

It says: ‘There lingers a sour suspicion that some will seek to take advantage of his diary. Some of the entries plainly criticize the Lee Myung-bak administration. Kim should have known better than anyone that it is unseemly for a former president to condemn one of his successors. The opposition seems to abuse the journal as if it was his political testament that he wanted them to pursue. And indeed, the diary clearly shows his unfailing conviction and trust in himself as a politician rather than self-doubt as a weak human being.’

But concludes: ‘Kim Dae-jung’s memoirs will be the first book in Korea a retired president wrote with posterity in mind. Recording stark truths may be important, but the book should show what kind of person Kim really was, since we know he was an eloquent and well-read man. Let us hope that his writings can be enjoyed in perpetuity for their own sake instead of being abused as a political bible by his supporters.’

A peasant’s mind

Georges Simenon, one of the most prolific and successful writers of the 20th century and the creator of Maigret, died 20 years ago today. He published hundreds and hundreds of works of fiction; and he also penned a few autobiographical works. One of these was based on some notebook diaries he kept in the 1960s. The New York Times said of the book that it reveals Simenon’s mind to be like a peasant’s with its emphasis on ‘the tangible - family, sex, work, health, domestic routine and bourgeois comforts minus bourgeois morality’.

Simenon was born in 1903 in Liege, Belgium, and was already working on a local newspaper by the age of 16. When his mother died in 1922, he moved to Paris and was able to make a living by writing short stories and popular novels under many different pen names. The famous fictional detective Maigret appeared in the very early 1930s in Pietr-Le-Letton (in English, The Strange Case of Peter the Lett), a novel published under Simenon’s own name. In time, he would publish around 100 novels and novellas featuring Maigret. For ten years after the war Simenon lived in the United States, then returned to France in 1955, before settling in Switzerland. He died - peacefully in his sleep - 20 years ago today on 4 September 1989 in Lausanne. More biographical information is available at Wikipedia and Famous Authors.

Simenon is almost as famous for his private life as he is for his novels. As a young man in Liege and then in Paris, he was no stranger to the seamier aspects of city night-life. He married Régine Renchon (Tigy) in 1923, but apparently was also involved with their housekeeper Henriette Liberge, who travelled and moved with them. He had many other liaisons, most famously with the American actress Josephine Baker. Simenon and Tigy had one son, Marc, born in 1939. They divorced in the late 1940s, and Simenon remarried in 1950 to Denyse Ouimet, a French Canadian he met in the US. They had three children, but Simenon’s womanising continued unabated. They separated in 1964. By then, Simenon had become involved with his housekeeper, Teresa, who stayed with him till his death. In the early 1970s, Simenon claimed to have had sex with over 20,000 women.

Simenon may be famous as a crime writer and as a womaniser, but he’s hardly known at all as a diarist. Yet in 1970, he published Quand J’étais Vieux, a collection of diary notebooks written in the early 1960s. This was translated by Helen Eustis into English and then published as When I Was Old by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in New York, and by Hamish Hamilton in London.

Paul Theroux, an American author, wrote about Simenon recently (March 2008) for The Times Literary Supplement, and mentioned his diaries. ‘Incredibly,’ Theroux wrote, ‘for such a productive soul, Simenon was at times afflicted with writer’s block, and though in him it seemed almost an affectation, it perturbed him to the extent that he used it as an occasion to keep a diary, to recapture his novel-writing mood.’ In the diary, Theroux noted, Simenon tended to write about the things that obsessed him, such as money, family, his mother, and other writers. Theroux also pointed out how Simenon wrote in his diary about his friend Henry Miller, another American author, one much preoccipied with the subject of sex, and how Miller envied Simenon’s life.

More informatively, The New York Times published a review of When I Was Old in 1971 - which is available online (though may require free registration). The review, written by by Gerald Walker, quotes from Simenon’s own preface: ‘In 1960, 1961, and 1962, for personal reasons, or for reasons I don’t know myself, I began feeling old, and I began keeping notebooks. I was nearing the age of sixty. Soon I shall be sixty-seven and I have not felt old for a long time. I no longer feel the need to write in notebooks.’

Simenon’s novels are built around passion, crimes of passion, violence, Walker says, but the Simenon in this diary abhors violence (such as in Algeria, the Congo, Vietnam) and shows himself ‘a passionately devoted family man constantly trying to clear the decks to spend time with his young children and his Canadian second wife’. Being Simenon, though, he is a family man with a difference. He may deeply love his wife, Walker explains, but he is still subject to ‘a lifelong compulsion to have sexual relations with every attractive woman he sees’. He refers to one afternoon, for example, when he called four successive women to his hotel suite while his wife packed their suitcases in the next room.

As revealed in these notebooks, Walker says, ‘Simenon’s is a shrewd, lucid mind, not a deep one; a peasant’s mind, one is tempted to say, with its emphasis on the tangible - family, sex, work, health, domestic routine and bourgeois comforts minus bourgeois morality. He has small regard for ideas.’ He quotes Simenon saying ‘a novelist must live to be an old man, as old as possible, in order to see mankind from every point of view, that of the adolescent, the old man. . . . One must have led a certain number of lives.’ And then Walker concludes: ‘There are lives enough in the man’s diary for any reader.’

Here are few extracts from When I Was Old which can be found on The Maigret Forum, a website maintained by Steve Trussel. The first three are from the start of the first of the diary notebooks, but the last three are quoted on The Maigret Forum without a date.

25 June 1960
‘Four days ago - on the 21st - I finished a novel, number hundred-eighty-something, that I had wanted to be easy. Now on the first day I started to write, towards the 9th or 10th page, I’d had the sensation that it would be futile to go on to the end, that it would never come to life.

I was alone, as always when I write, in my office with the curtains closed. I walked around the room five or six times, and if it hadn’t had a sort of humanness, I would have torn up those few pages and waited a few days to begin a different novel.

This happens two or three times a year. This particular time, I was moved to tears. Then, without too much confidence, I returned to my machine. I think it may be the best of the Maigrets. I’ll know when I start editing. Since the Cannes Festival, I’ve wanted to write a novel filled with sun and tenderness. I had one in my head, for which the characters, the setting, were ready. Of that, I’ve only written three pages. It wasn’t a Maigret. The main characters were in their 30s. I realized later that in Maigret in Society, which in a sense replaced the abandoned novel, I expressed the same tenderness. . . but with characters who were all between 65 and 85.’

27 June 1960
‘Spent yesterday, a typical Sunday, with a Match photographer. He’s here for four days, after which he will be joined by a journalist for what they call a feature story. It’s the fourth that Match has published in seven or eight years about me and my family.’

2 July 1960
‘The Match photographer, who lived four or five days in the bosom of my family, had not known me before he came but left as an old friend. The writer, theoretically more ‘cultured’, but who managed to ask hundreds of impertinent questions, came to do his work, no more, and add an article, a victim, to his collection.’

Undated
‘Psychiatry fascinates me, and perhaps as a result, so does medicine. Maigret wanted to become a doctor. And me? I never thought of it when I was young. Later, yes. But without regret, and as if by chance most of my friends have been or are still doctors.’

Undated
‘A fascinating dinner for me, yesterday, with half a dozen psychiatrists. . . Almost all of them seeking to reassure themselves, to be sure that they’re on the right track, that they’re doing something useful. . . And for me, a chance to reassure myself. I think that more and more, since the beginning, moreover, my characters are sort of heading to the point where the psychiatrists will take over. That is to say, my clients, after a few more steps, will become theirs.’

Undated
‘I ask myself if the essential characteristic of murder isn’t its being illogical, which would explain why in the Middle Ages it was blamed on demons who took possession of a human being, and why today we call more and more upon psychiatry. Now psychiatry, concerned less with lesions and trauma than with behaviour, doesn’t it also escape logic?’

A Peerless jolly day

Exactly one hundred years ago today, Henry Peerless, was on holiday, as he often was, enjoying a very jolly tourist trip in North Devon. The tour included a stop at Malmsmead where he lunched on mutton, stewed fruit and clotted cream, and a visit to Oare Church, where Lorna Doone got married in R D Blackmore’s classic novel of the same name. But Peerless was equally entertained - as his colourful and lively travel diaries show - by a confrontation between his vehicle, a horse-drawn char-à -banc, and a steam driven motor car. Those were the days!

Peerless was born in Brighton into a middle-class family, and entered the family timber business when only 14. He married Amelia (Millie) Garrett in 1891, and they had four children. The oldest, Cuthbert, died during active service in the last year of the First World War. For thirty years, Peerless travelled all round the British Isles and beyond, by horse-drawn carriage, steam train, steam ship, bicycle and motor car, keeping a diary as he went. These diaries, only recently found, were edited by Edward Fenton and published by Day Books in 2003 as A Brief Jolly Change - The Diaries of Henry Peerless 1891-1920. Copies can be bought direct from Amazon.

Day Books says its book provides ‘a fascinating insight into one of the most important social trends of the past 150 years: the rise of mass tourism following the coming of the railway.’ Moreover, it paints ‘an unforgettable picture of a whole class of people striving for diversion and pleasure at a time of unprecedented and cataclysmic change’. Henry Peerless himself, the publisher adds, emerges as a cross between Mr Pooter and Mr Toad: ‘irrepressibly high-spirited (even after the death of his son Cuthbert in the Great War), fond of practical jokes, patriotic, sometimes pompous but always good-hearted, he had an almost childlike zest for discovering new places and embracing new fashions, and it is this which makes him such an engaging companion and guide’.

Here is Henry Peerless writing about his day exactly a century ago:

Wednesday 1 September 1909
‘Stroll out shopping, as Millie wants a pair of warm gloves for driving. She certainly buys a pair long enough, as they go nearly up to her shoulder.

At eleven o’clock, seven of us get on one of those hotel char-à -bancs and start for our drive, through very pretty wooded hills till we stop and water the horses at Rockford - a very sweet spot with the tumbling noise little river on our left. We push on to Badgeworthy Farm House, Malmsmead, where we partake of mutton, stewed fruit and clotted cream ad libitum.

After lunch, with a cheery ‘Now then horse’ from our driver, we clatter off. In a short time we reach Oare Church, famous as the place in which Jan Ridd and Lorna Doone were married, at the conclusion of which ceremony readers of Lorna Doone will recollect Lorna was shot by Carver Doone through the church window from the branches of an old oak-tree in the churchyard. Several of us tried to get into the church, but we had to content ourselves by peeping through the windows.

By Glenthorne and through the village of Countisbury, an episode occurred which might have had a very unhappy ending.

We were driving down carefully with the skid-pan on the wheel and the brakes on, when a motor came struggling, puffing and blowing up. To pass each other required care because of the narrow space. We drew in alongside an excavation on the hill on our left hand; the motor, nearly spent with the tug up the hill, stopped also, and a lot of steam escaped from the fore part of the car.

Then our near-side horse refused to pass, and our driver shouted out to the motorist: ‘It’s the steam she is afraid of, shut it off can’t you, then she’ll go by.’

‘It’ll lie down presently,’ says Mr Motorist.

Well there we stood, and our horses began to plunge and swerve, bringing some passengers’ hearts into their mouths. Our driver was very skilful and quiet, and in two or three minutes the steam subsided, and with a slap of the whip we were by and the danger was passed - but I should not expect to get off Scot-free in similar situations.

We ultimately reach Lynmouth. It is too much of a drag for our horses to take us up to Lynton, so Mr G., Millie, and I walk up the zig-zag path and find it a trying climb. The opinion seems to be ‘never again’.’

Salty and petulant

Andrew Russel, otherwise known as Drew, Pearson died forty years ago today. He was one of the most well-known American newspaper and radio journalists of his day, particularly because of the syndicated newspaper column Washington Merry-Go-Round which was often aimed at exposing scandal and corruption in government and business. A collection of his diary entries was published in the mid-1970s. Time magazine called them ‘salty’ and ‘often petulant’ but, nevertheless, said they provided ‘a kind of layer in the archaeology of American journalism’.

Drew Pearson was born in 1897 in Evanston, Illinois, but when still young his family moved to Pennsylvania, where his father taught at Swarthmore College. Pearson himself was educated at Swarthmore. In his early 20s, he went to Serbia for two years helping to rebuild houses that had been destroyed in the war. On returning to the US, he taught industrial geography before making a tour around the world, a trip financed by writing articles for newspapers.

In the late 1920s, Pearson reported from China, the Geneva Naval Conference, and the Pan-American Conference in Cuba. In 1929 he was appointed Washington correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, and three years later he joined the Scripps-Howard syndicate, United Features. He wrote a famous but anonymous column (with another journalist, Robert Anderson) called Washington Merry-Go-Round which was syndicated across the country and featured sensational exposes. But, when his political views (in support of Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal, and in favour of US intervention in Europe) became increasingly censored, he moved to The Washington Post.

During the war, Pearson became a radio personality, and after the war he supported the United Nations, and he helped organise the Friendship Train. In the early 1950s, Pearson was one of the few journalists to stand against the McCarthy policies, and he is credited with playing an important role in McCarthy’s downfall. In the 1960s, he was often chosen to interview national leaders; and in 1962, he accompanied Kennedy to Venezuela and Columbia. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, The Diary Junction, or Ecyclopaedia Britannica.

During his lifetime (he died on 1 September 1969, exactly 40 years ago today), Pearson wrote a number of journalism-based books. He also kept a diary, and this was edited by his stepson Tyler Abell, and published posthumously, in 1974, by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in New York and Jonathan Cape in London - Drew Pearson: Diaries, 1949-1959.

A review of the book by Time magazine at the time claimed that Pearson’s diaries were ‘chiefly valuable as a kind of layer in the archaeology of American journalism’. The diaries show that Pearson was immensely proud of his eminence and influence through the Washington Merry-Go-Round column, the review says, and that he considered his almost daily entries as ‘footnotes to history, not merely private ruminations’. While there are no major revelations in the diaries (since, as Time says, his scoops were the daily bread and butter of his column) ‘they do reflect in a detail that could not appear in his column the man’s exhaustive knowledge of what went on in Washington: Joe McCarthy’s bruited homosexuality and alcoholism; the acceptance of gifts by Truman five-percenters; the venality of sundry Congressmen.’

Time calls the diaries ‘salty’ and ‘often petulant’ in the way Pearson ‘pitilessly pilloried the drinking and wenching habits of his foes, while ignoring the public and private peccadilloes of the men who fed him information’. Pearson was often wrong too, Time notes. In his diary, for example, he falsely charged that Jack Kennedy’s Pulitzer-prizewinning Profiles in Courage had been ghostwritten. The diaries also show that he spent much time preparing press releases and speeches for senators and congressmen who were sympathetic to his causes - ‘a practice that today would probably get a Washington correspondent fired forthwith from any newspaper or magazine’, Time comments.

Another review - this one from The Village Voice - can be found online thanks to Google Newspapers. These diaries are not a whitewash job, the Voice says, ‘Pearson’s personality comes through with all its warts’. ‘He was a singularly self-centred man’, it adds, ‘viewing the world as a carousel that spun around him.’

A few extracts from Pearson’s diaries are available at the Spartacus Educational website. The first concerns James Forrestal, a US Secretary of Defence in the second half of the 1940s. Pearson criticised him mercilessly, for his conservative views on foreign policy, and is said to have claimed he was ‘the most dangerous man in America’ and could cause another world war. Some blamed Pearson for Forrestal’s death. Incidentally, Forrestal was also a diarist - more information is available from Adam Matthew Publications.

22 May 1949
‘Jim Forrestal died at 2 am by jumping out of the Naval Hospital window . . .

I think that Forrestal really died because he had no spiritual reserves. He had spent all his life thinking only about himself, trying to fulfill his great ambition to be President of the United States. When that ambition became out of his reach, he had nothing to fall back on. He had no church; he had deserted it. He had no wife. They had both deserted each other. She was in Paris at the time of his death - though it was well-known that he had been seriously ill for weeks. But most important of all, he had no spiritual resources . . .

But James Forrestal’s passion was public approval. It was his lifeblood. He craved it almost as a dope addict craves morphine. Toward the end he would break down and cry pitifully, like a child, when criticized too much. He had worked hard - too much in fact - for his country. He was loyal and patriotic. Few men were more devoted to their country, but he seriously hurt the country that he loved by taking his own life. All his policies now are under closer suspicion than before . . .

Forrestal not only had no spiritual resources, but also he had no calluses. He was unique in this respect. He was acutely sensitive. He had traveled not on the hard political path of the politician, but on the protected, cloistered avenue of the Wall Street bankers. All his life he had been surrounded by public relations men. He did not know what the lash of criticism meant. He did not understand the give-and-take of the political arena. Even in the executive branch of government, he surrounded himself with public relations men, invited newsmen to dinner, lunch, and breakfast, made a fetish of courting their favor. History unfortunately will decree that Forrestal’s great reputation was synthetic. It was built on the most unstable foundation of all - the handouts of paid press agents.

If Forrestal had been true to his friends, if he had made one sacrifice for a friend, if he had even gone to bat for Tom Corcoran who put him in the White House, if he had spent more time with his wife instead of courting his mistress, he would not have been so alone this morning when he went to the diet pantry of the Naval Hospital and jumped to his death.’

28 November 1949
‘Parnell Thomas’s trial started this morning. Looking at him in the courtroom, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. I can’t relish helping to send a man to jail. Nevertheless, when I figure all the times Thomas has sent other people to jail and all the instances when he has kept men away from combat duty in return for money in his own pocket, to say nothing of salary kickbacks, perhaps I shouldn’t be too sorry.’

24 April 1951
‘This afternoon McCarthy sounded off with another speech on the Senate floor claiming that the Justice Department had now finished its investigation and had a complete espionage case against me. He also pontificated that I had received State Department documents from the State Department via Dave Karr, whom he described as a top member of the Communist party. McCarthy also claimed that the column today, which dealt with developments in the atomic bomb field, paraphrased a secret report and was a violation of security.’

21 May 1951
‘The facts were that MacArthur had wasted blood most of his career, not only in Korea. I urged the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when they testify, should show up MacArthur’s glaring errors and his well-known ‘extravagance with his men’. For instance, General Eichelberger, who commanded the 8th Army during World War II, could testify to MacArthur’s shameful laxness on New Guinea and his refusal to visit the front at Buna even once.’

16 January 1952
‘Benton told me that McGraph and the President both were working on the matter of the young lieutenant involved with McCarthy. This is the third report on McCarthy’s homosexual activity and the most definite of all.’

Mountbatten - young and lighthearted

It is 30 years ago to the day that Earl Mountbatten of Burma was murdered on holiday in Ireland by an IRA bomb planted on his boat. He was born with the highest of royal connections, becoming uncle to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and a mentor to Charles, Prince of Wales. His death followed a glittering career in the navy and as a statesman. While still a very young man and while on naval tour with his cousin, a future King of England, he was asked to keep an informal diary for the amusement of the ship’s company, and this experience may well have led to a diary-keeping habit. That first diary, though, is full of lighthearted observations - about a scratching dog in church, the prince (H.R.H.) being wheeled in a cook’s pram, and how a koala bear went home.

Mountbatten was born in Windsor Castle in 1900, the second son of Prince Louis of Battenberg and his wife Princess Victoria of Hesse and the Rhine. Educated at royal naval colleges at Osborne and Dartmouth, he served in the Royal Navy during the First World War. During the war, King George V changed the name of the Royal House to Windsor, and, at the same time, asked those of his relatives who were British but known by German names and titles to relinquish use of them. Thus, the head of the House of Battenberg adopted the surname of Mountbatten and was raised to the peerage. As the younger son of a marquess, Louis was accordingly known as Lord Louis Mountbatten.

In the early 1920s, he accompanied the Prince of Wales, his second cousin, on two tours to Australasia and Asia. In 1922, Mountbatten married Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley. The couple had two daughters. Otherwise, between the wars, he pursued a naval career with a variety of postings but specialised in communications. During the Second World War, Mountbatten commanded the 5th Destroyer Flotilla and became Chief of Combined Operations. In 1943, he was appointed Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command with the rank of acting Admiral.

After the war he was ennobled as Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, appointed a Privy Councillor, and subsequently given a peerage as Earl Mountbatten of Burma and Baron Romsey. In 1947, he became Viceroy of India. After partition, he remained as Governor-General until 1948. Thereafter, he was promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, the highest rank in the Royal Navy, and served as Chief of the Defence Staff between 1959 and 1965. More biographical information can be found at Wikipedia or Encyclopedia.com.

On 27 August 1979, exactly three decades ago, Mountbatten was murdered by the IRA while aboard his boat on holiday in County Sligo, in the northwest of Ireland. Sinn Féin vice-president Gerry Adams said this of the execution: ‘As a member of the House of Lords, Mountbatten was an emotional figure in both British and Irish politics. What the IRA did to him is what Mountbatten had been doing all his life to other people; and with his war record I don’t think he could have objected to dying in what was clearly a war situation. He knew the danger involved in coming to this country. In my opinion, the IRA achieved its objective: people started paying attention to what was happening in Ireland.’

There are three published compilations of Mountbatten’s diaries, all of them edited by his biographer Philip Ziegler, all of them published by Collins in the 1980s, and all of them written when Mountbatten was on tours or abroad:

The Diaries of Lord Louis Mountbatten 1920-1922: Tours with the Prince of Wales;

Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, South-East Asia, 1943-1946;

From Shore to Shore - The Final Years: The Tour Diaries of Earl Mountbatten of Burma 1953-1979.
Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any information about - nor any extracts from - any of these books on the internet.

The earliest book is a collection of diaries written when Mountbatten was barely out of his teens and accompanying his cousin, the then Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII who abdicated to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson), on two naval tours (on board HMS Renown), to Australasia in 1920 and India/Far East in 1921/22.

According to Mountbatten himself, he had been instructed by the Admiral to keep an unofficial diary of the earlier tour ‘which is going to be printed on board and kept for our own amusement’. In his foreword, he wrote ‘This is a Diary of the Staff, by the Staff, for the Staff’ consciously (and somewhat pretentiously) echoing President Lincoln’s words about government being ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. The framework of this diary, he said, is based on facts, but nevertheless it is ‘a coat of many colours, with many patches of harmless libel and some patches of sheer romance. Not a word of it can be taken seriously.’ Some 20 copies were printed on the presses of HMS Renown and distributed to ‘the Staff’ at the time.

In a preface to The Diaries of Lord Louis Mountbatten 1920-1922: Tours with the Prince of Wales, the editor Philip Ziegler calls the Australasia diary (as opposed to the India/Far East diary) ‘indiscreet and light-hearted’. He suggests that some extremely frank comments about certain aspects of the tour would have caused ‘a furore’ if made public, and then recounts how this nearly happened. It seems the ship’s doctor absconded with one of the 20 copies. The doctor, Ziegler says, ‘was eventually tracked down to Kettner’s restaurant, where he was bargaining with an American journalist, the diary on the table in front of him. The asking price was £5,000.’

Here are a few extracts - more lighthearted than indiscreet I would say - from Mountbatten’s very first tour diary.

25 April 1920
‘H.R.H. and the more devout members of his Staff, as well as those whose duty it was to go, attended Divine Service at the cathedral [Auckland]. The chief diversion during the service was caused by the entrance of a small dog who trotted up between the choir, sat down, and proceeded to scratch himself. Having relieved himself of his fleas, he smiled at H.R.H. and positively laughed at the choir. This was his doom, for a choirman rushed out and seized him, pushing him into the organ, where he proved of great assistance to the organist.’

6 June 1920
‘At Government House [Melbourne] two or three girls were invited to dine and later on the Fairbairn party joined up, so that another small Sunday dance could be held in the ballroom to the accompaniment of the pianola. The cook’s pram, which was wheeled in at half time, suffered considerably, for the Captain insisted upon wheeling H.R.H. down the length of the ballroom at breakneck speed, turning round so sharply at the end that he spilled him out and damaged the pram considerably. Unfortunately the cushions fell out as well and next minute a rugger scrum had been formed and a good game was soon in full swing which lasted until the insides of the cushions were flying in all directions, giving the room a very debauched appearance. Everyone retired to bed before midnight.’

26 July 1920
‘. . . After dinner the State Organizer came aft with a telegram asking if a boy scout might present H.R.H. with a native bear before lunch on the next day. A vote was taken in the after saloon as to whether this gift should be accepted or refused. No one voted for it to be taken right home to England, but everyone except the Admiral voted that it should be accepted for a time, even if only for a day or two, to see what it was like. The Admiral made a very stirring speech denouncing the acceptance of the gift on the grounds that the beast would perish owing to the change of climate, and that the Renown did not want it on board. He was, however, counted out and the bear accepted pro tem.’

27 July 1920
‘. . . A scout, and a girl - presumably his sister - arrived with a large hamper containing a native bear to be given to H.R.H. They were shown into the sitting room, and most of the members of the Staff collected to watch the presentation. Presently H.R.H. came in, and the basket was opened, revealing the most extraordinary animal imaginable. In general appearance it certainly bore a striking resemblance to an ordinary toy teddy bear; standing about one foot high on all fours, and being about eighteen inches long. Its fur was soft, and grey in colour, and its paws had sharp claws for tree climbing. The face, however, was most ridiculous; it reminded one vaguely of a Jew’s face with a hooked nose, and had the stupidest possible expression, with a pair of tiny eyes set rather close together. It climbed up and all over the girl, who had had it for five years; and after H.R.H. had inspected it and left, she broke down and sobbed, while the bear cried like a baby. The bear spent the day in the Flag Lieutenant’s room, crawling about and leaving an odour of gum leaves everywhere, these being its staple food. In the evening compassion was taken on the little girl who had given up her pet, and the native bear (or ‘koala’ as it is more properly called) was sent back by an orderly with a letter explaining why.’

God’s work against slavery

One of the leading anti-slavery campaigners of the late 18th century, William Wilberforce, was born two hundred and fifty years ago today. A politician and evangelical Christian, he was also a keen diarist. A five-volume biography published in the 1830s relies heavily on his diaries and this is freely available on Googlebooks. However, an early travel diary by Wilberforce, written while still a student and before having become zealously religious, has been published much more recently.

Wilberforce was born in Hull, the son of a wealthy merchant, exactly one quarter of a millennium ago today. After his father died he was looked after by an aunt who was a strong supporter of John Wesley and the Methodist movement. Wilberforce studied at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he met William Pitt, a future Prime Minister. He was elected as MP for Hull when only 21; but, thereafter, became one of the two MPs representing Yorkshire. In 1784 he converted to Evangelical Christianity, and joined the Clapham Set. In 1797, he married Barbara Ann Spooner, and they had four children, one of whom, Samuel, was also a diarist.

After his conversion, Wilberforce became particularly interested in social reform and the abolition of the slave trade. In 1791, his first bill on the subject was easily defeated. However, he persisted, first winning support in the House of Commons, and then, eventually, the House of Lords: the Abolition of the Slave Trade Bill was passed in 1807. This did not end the slave trade, but is considered to be the beginning of its end. It was only shortly after Wilberforce died in 1833 (from falling off a horse) that the Slavery Abolition Act, giving all slaves in the British Empire their freedom, was brought into law. More information is available at The Diary Junction and Wikipedia.

Wilberforce’s only published diary appears to be a travel journal written while still young: Journey to The Lake District from Cambridge, A Summer Diary 1779, edited by Cuthbert Edward Wrangham, and published by Oriel Press in 1983. Plenty of second hand copies are available through Abebooks.

Robin Birkenhead, in his foreword to Summer Diary, gives a flavour of the young Wilberforce’s preoccupations, and also points up a key difference with his later diaries: ‘The reader is given detailed instructions as to his route and is even told where to stand for the best view. The dimensions of mountains and waterfalls are given or guessed at in the absence of reliable information; old country tales are retold. It reads as if he was preparing a guide book to the Lakes or doing an exercise as a young pupil of [the garden designer Humphry] Repton. . . For Wilberforce to write like this was only possible in the brief period when he had no deep religious convictions. After 1785 . . . whatever the subject would have contained a mass of religious reflections. . . Mountains, views and waterfalls would be described not only as sublime and majestic, but also as evidence of God’s goodness . . . It is fascinating to have this journal to compare with later writings.’

Wilberforce went on to keep a diary for much of his life. These diaries were used extensively by Wilberforce’s sons, Robert Isaac and Samuel, in a five-volume biography of their father, The Life of William Wilberforce, published by John Murray in the late 1830s. All five of these volumes are freely available on Googlebooks. A more recent biography, Wilberforce, by John Pollock, published by Constable in 1977, also quotes from the diaries. Adam Matthews Publications provides a guide to the contents of the unpupublished diaries.

Here are a few extracts from Wilberforce’s diary, including several around the time of his 30th birthday (220 years ago today).

28 October 1787
‘God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners.’

1788
‘At length, I well remember after a conversation with Mr Pitt in the open air at the root of an old tree at Holwood, just above the steep descent into the vale of Keston, I resolved to give notice on a fit occasion in the House of Commons of my intention to bring forward the abolition of the slave trade.’

20 August 1789
‘At Cowslip Green [Somerset] all day.’

21 August 1789
‘After breakfast to see Chedder [Gorge]. Intended to read, dine, &c. amongst the rocks, but could not get rid of the people; so determined to go back again. The rocks very fine. Had some talk with the people, and gave them something - grateful beyond measure - wretchedly poor and deficient in spiritual help. I hope to amend their state.’

23 August 1789
‘Resolved to think seriously to-day for to-morrow, my birth-day on which I shall be much more disturbed. Cowslip Green, birth-day eve. To-morrow I complete my thirtieth year. What shame ought to cover me when I review my past life in all its circumstances! With full knowledge of my Master’s will, how little have I practised it!. . .’

24 August 1789
‘Left Cowslip Green for Bristol. Spent half an hour with Sir James Stonhouse - seventy-four; under many bodily tortures, yet patient and cheerful - much pleased with him. He recommended 12th of Hebrews, and 3rd of Lamentations. Spoke in the highest terms of Dr Doddridge, and related the circumstances of his own conversion, when he belonged to a deistical club.’

13 January 1798
‘Three or four times have I most grievously broke my resolutions since I last took up my pen alas! alas! how miserable a wretch am I! How infatuated, how dead to every better feeling yet - yet - yet - may I, Oh God, be enabled to repent and turn to thee with my whole heart, I am now flying from thee. Thou hast been above all measure gracious and forgiving. . . .’

20 July 1820
‘What a lesson it is to a man not to set his heart on low popularity when after 40 years disinterested public service, I am believed by the Bulk to be a Hypocritical Rascal. O what a comfort it is to have to fly for refuge to a God of unchangeable truth and love.’

Baggage and Boche

Alfred A Cunningham, an American marine who pioneered the use of aviation for military purposes, died 70 years ago today. A diary he kept for several weeks during the First World War provides a sometimes thrilling account of chasing and gunning the boches (Germans), as well as lively thoughts on wartime England and France. Of the English, he wrote, ‘they have the most pernicious system of carrying baggage’; and of combat he said this: ‘After a few minutes we sighted a boche 2 seater just below us. We made for him. It was the finest excitement I ever had.’

Cunningham was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1882. After serving as a volunteer in the infantry regiment during the Spanish-American War and in Cuba, he worked as an estate agent. In 1909, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and promoted to first lieutenant two years later. Based at the Marine Barracks, Philadelphia, he developed an ongoing interest in aeronautics, which led him to be sent to the US Naval Academy, with its nearby aviation camp. Between October 1912 and July 1913, he made some 400 flights, for both training and testing purposes. In 1914, he was heavily involved in the decision to set up the Naval Aeronautical Station at Pensacola, Florida.

By 1917, Cunningham had emerged as de facto director of Marine Corps aviation. Under his direction, the Northern Bombing Group was developed which, during the last year of the First World War, undertook bombing raids with British and French planes, as well as independently of them. For his service in organising and training the first marine aviation force, Cunningham was awarded the Navy Cross. After the war, he served in various positions, eventually being promoted to lieutenant colonel, and becoming executive officer and registrar of the Marine Corps Institute (from 1929 to 1931).

Wikipedia has a biography, and a longer one can be read at the Naval History & Heritage Command website.

For two months towards the end of the First World War, from November 1917 to January 1918, Cunningham wrote a lively diary, full of observations about Britain and France, and about fighting the Germans. It was published by the History and Museums Division of the US Marine Corps in 1974 as Marine Flyer in France: Diary of Captain Alfred A. Cunningham (copies can be found cheaply on Abebooks).

The text of the book, though, is now freely available at The World War I Document Archive (maintained by Richard Hacken). Here are a few paragraphs from the book’s introduction by the editor, Graham A. Cosmas.

‘The diary, kept in tiny, neat handwriting in a small pocket notebook, begins on 3 November 1917 with Cunningham’s sailing from New York on board the S. S. St. Paul. After a description of a rough winter passage through the North Atlantic U-boat zone, the entries record the confusion, inconveniences, and hardships of wartime London and Paris and contain repeated expressions of homesickness, along with sometimes acid comment on the French people and culture.

Beginning with the entry of 23 November, Cunningham records his visits to the French flying schools south of Paris at Tours, Avord, Pau, and Cazaux. Here he conferred with French aviators and flew in aircraft of many types. He was impressed with the skill of many of the Allied pilots he met but sometimes appalled by their recklessness and by the accident rate among the student fliers. Throughout these passages, also, Cunningham expresses straight-laced moral indignation at the fondness of many off-duty American officers for liquor and women.

After another stop in Paris, the diary then follows Cunningham to a visit to the AEF Headquarters at Chaumont on 12 December, then to the Marine billets near Bourmont and Damblain and to front-line French airbases near Soissons. In these visits, he encounters American fliers of the legendary Lafayette Escadrille. The entries for 18-22 December, the most dramatic of the diary, tell of Cunningham’s participation in combat missions with French pilots and a brief but vivid experience of trench warfare and artillery bombardment.

The final section of the diary recounts visits to British bomber fields and seaplane bases in northern France and Belgium and a tour of the RNAF and RFC aerial gunnery schools at Eastchurch and Hythe, England. The last entries leave Cunningham on board S. S. St. Louis at sea on the voyage home.’

And here are two extracts:

12 November 1917, Savoy Hotel, London
‘After another night of expecting to be torpedoed any minute we sighted the lightship off Liverpool and took a pilot aboard. Every one on the ship had a feeling of relief and we bade our good friends the destroyers good-bye and they headed for sea to convoy some other ship in. I admit that I was rather disappointed that we did not have a brush with a sub, but this seems rather foolish considering the number it would have endangered. We arrived alongside the landing float at 10:30 a.m. The tide rises 30 ft. here so the steamers land alongside a tremendous floating wharf. The immigration officer looked us over and then we were examined by the customs people. They were extremely nice and did not ask me to pay duty on all the tobacco and cigars I have. I then landed and could not find a porter so had to lug my own baggage all over the place. Took lunch at the Adelphi Hotel and had my first experience with the war food laws. I was allowed about 1/4 of a lump of sugar, no butter and very little bread. The filet mignon I had looked like a piece of tripe. Everything is fairly reasonable, however. We left the Lime Street Station for London at 2 p.m. in one of those dinky little compartments. The country looked very peaceful and attractive and we arrived at Euston Station, London at 7 p.m. They have the most pernicious system of carrying baggage. You have to get your own baggage put in the van and when we arrived in London everyone made a wild rush for the baggage van and there was a regular riot for a while. Everyone scrambling to get their trunks, etc. and when you found your luggage you had to then find a porter and when you found him you had to hunt a cab. After wearing yourself out you finally have a cab with your luggage all over it and can go to a hotel. I never saw so much tipping. Everybody who looks at you has his hands out for a tip. I finally arrived at the Savoy Hotel and Stewart, Tumey and myself have a suite together. We took dinner at Simpson’s and I am now going to bed as the last few days have worn me out.’

18 December 1917, Front of the 4th French army
‘Got up frozen stiff. The weather fairly clear. Persuaded a French pilot of a biplane fighting Spad to take me over the lines. We went up like an elevator and talk about speed! Wk were over the lines in no time and I was all eyes. The archies bursting near us worried me some and made it hard to look all the time for boches. I saw something to one side that looked like a fountain of red ink. Found it was the machine gun tracer bullets from the ground. After a few minutes we sighted a boche 2 seater just below us. We made for him. It was the finest excitement I ever had. I got my machine gun ready. Before we got to him he dived and headed for home. On 1 of our rolls I let loose a couple of strings of 6 at him but it was too far for good shooting. After following him a ways over the lines we turned to look for another. None were out so we came home. Finest trip I ever had. If the boche had not turned quite so soon, I think I might have got him. Watched pilots doing stunts in afternoon. At about 8 p.m. we were huddled around a small fire in the hut when we heard 3 boche machines fly over very low. Two of them did not locate our place and went on. We went outside and saw the other 1 flying around trying to locate the hangars so we made for the machine gun pit. He finally flew down the line and let go a couple of bombs, as he came over we opened on him but the gun jammed and no one could fix it in the dark. He made 3 trips and let go 2 bombs each trip. Then he left us. We found he had dropped them all in the woods and no machines were hurt. We went back and tried to sleep but every time a big gun would go off I thought it was another raid. I am writing this Wednesday night with my hands blue from cold. There is certainly no lack of excitement around here.’

Let the paint dry

Rosa Bonheur, the most famous of 19th century women painters, died 110 years ago today. Remembered in particular for her paintings of animals, her renown today also stems for what, in retrospect, seems like lesbian tendencies - not marrying, dressing as a man and living with female companions. The last of her companions was a young American artist, Anna Klumpke, who kept a diary and used it for a biography of her mentor.

Rosa Bonheur was born into a cultured Bordeaux family in 1822. Her father was an artist; her mother, who died young, was a piano teacher; and several of her siblings were to become painters or sculptors. She seems to have been an unruly child, never happy in school, but became very focused on painting in her early teens. She was also interested in animals from a young age, and later studied anatomy, visited abattoirs, and even performed dissections.

Her first big success came with Ploughing in the Nivernais, exhibited in 1849. Her most famous work, The Horse Fair, was completed in 1855 and brought her international recognition. It also brought her to the attention of Belgian art dealer Ernest Gambart. He persuaded her to travel to Britain (where she met Queen Victoria) and to tour with the painting. Thereafter, Gambart (but other dealers also) would purchase the reproduction rights to Bonheur’s paintings and sell engraved copies.

However, Bonheur found fame difficult to handle, and, in 1859, she retreated from Paris to a chateau at By, near the Forest of Fontainebleau, to sketch and paint and, over the years, receive many visitors. But it was an unconventional lifestyle she lived, wearing trousers, smoking (unusual for a woman at the time) and hunting; for a while and when focused on painting wild animals, she kept a couple of lions, supplied by Gambart.

She never married, but for 50 years shared her life with Nathalie Micas who had been a school friend since the age of 12. After Micas died she met an American artist, Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, more than 30 years her junior, and invited her to By to paint her portrait. But the relationship developed beyond that and Klumpke remained with Bonheur until she died on 25 May 1899, one century and one decade ago today. Brief biographies can be found at Wikipedia and The Art History Archive.

Bonheur left her estate, include hundreds of paintings, to Klumpke who then founded the Rosa Bonheur prize (at the Société des Artistes Français) and organised the Rosa Bonheur museum at the Fontainebleau palace. Klumpke’s biographical book about Bonheur was published in Paris in 1908 as Rosa Bonheur: Sa Vie Son Oeuvre. Ninety years later, in the 1990s, Gretchen Van Slyke translated the work and University of Michigan Press published it in English as - Rosa Bonheur: The Artist’s (Auto)biography. The strange title stems from the fact that Klumpke’s text was written in the first-person voice, as if she were Bonheur. The book also includes a large number of extracts from Klumpke’s diary.

Original copies of the French book, now a century old, can be bought on Abebooks - first editions cost several hundred pounds. However, much of the English version - a 2001 edition - is free to view at Googlebooks.

‘The [following] pages,’ Klumpke says in her book, ‘are excerpts from the diary where I wrote down the day’s events every evening. At the very least, they provide an exact account of life at the chateau. Having done my best to render my famous model’s words and deeds, I’d love to think that while my brush was retracing the lines of her face, my pen was drawing a good portrait of her character, especially her spirited offhand conversation.’

Here are some extracts from Klumpke’s diary.

1 July 1898
‘After the sitting this afternoon, Rosa Bonheur stretched out on her lounge chair for a smoke while I kept on working. She scolded me for rushing: ‘Ah! that Miss Anna! she doesn’t ever stop. True, I used to be like that. Now I tend to dawdle, doing less but thinking more. Also, I did more studies. I didn’t just start a huge canvas without having gathered all the documents I needed.’

She watched me wipe my palette and went on: ‘I don’t work like that. I never wipe it off till I’ve scraped with a knife and poured on some turpentine. That way the wood stays clean. This palette, for example, looks practically new, yet God knows how long I’ve been using it for skies. Take it for your touchups. I’ll even sign it for you.

She grabbed a brush and wrote: ‘A souvenir for Anna Klumpke. May my palette bring you good luck. Rosa Bonheur.’ ’

4 July 1898
‘ ‘Today is young America’s birthday,’ Rosa Bonheur announced this morning. ‘To celebrate, I’ll give you a long sitting. Use it well!’

I’d got a good start on the head, and I prayed to God to let me capture the penetrating gaze and the benevolent, poetic air that emanated from her whole person.

In the midst of posing, she blurted out: ‘You’ve got such goodness in your face I can’t help thinking of my mother. Your face is long and oval, mine is square. You say I’m cheerful? You’re young at heart. Never would I have believed that we’d get along so perfectly. Your portrait has got fine tone and texture; it’ll be good.’ ’

5 July 1898
‘I worked on the head today. After the sitting Rosa Bonheur looked at the canvas and said: ‘Let the paint dry. When I’ve got an important piece at this stage, sometimes I just let it sit for a whole year long.’

‘In that case, dear great artist, I’ve got time for a trip back to Boston.’

‘Ah! that’s not what I meant,’ she said. ‘While the head is drying, you can paint the hands, the dress, and any background details you want.’ ’

30 July 1898
‘Late this afternoon Rosa Bonheur came into the studio where I was working on the portrait’s accessories. She looked it over absentmindedly and gave me a compliment or two. Then she turned around and placed her hands on my shoulders. While I gazed at her in surprise, she asked in tones of tender supplication: ‘Anna, will you stay here and share my life? I’ve grown attached to you. Life will seem so sad after you’re gone. I’ll be so alone again.’ ’

Writing for you, Sasha

It’s a year to the day since the death of Hana Pravda, a Czech-born actress who had lived and worked in Britain since the late 1950s. Although not a household name, she appeared in many much-loved British series, and directed plays in the theatre also. However, in recent years, she became better known thanks to an extraordinary diary she had kept during the Second World War, and which was only rediscovered in the 1990s and then published to much acclaim.

Hana was born in 1916 at her grandparents’ house in Prague, into a middle class Jewish family. Her father trained as a lawyer but joined the Austro-Hungarian army; her mother died while she was still at school. Aged only 17 Hana acted in her first film, and she then went to study acting under Alexei Dikii in Leningrad. On returning to Prague, she married Alexander (Sasha) Munk, a student activist at the time, and the two of them moved to a small town in eastern Bohemia where they thought they would be safe from the Nazi persecution of Jews.

In 1942, however, they were captured and interned in various camps. Hana survived the war, but Sasha died at Kraslice, only days before the Germans surrendered in May 1945. Subsequently, Hana returned to acting. She married George Pravda, and they emigrated first to Australia and then to the UK, where she appeared frequently in television dramas, such as Survivors, Danger Man, Z-Cars and Tales of the Unexpected. She also directed many plays at the Thorndike Theatre in Leatherhead, and continued to act for radio productions well into her 80s. She died on 22 May 2008, a year ago today, and was recognised by several of the British broadsheets with long obituaries - The Guardian, for example. Wikipedia also has a short bio.

All the obituaries mention her extraordinary diary, published to great acclaim in 2000 by Oxford-based Day Books - I Was Writing This Diary For You, Sasha. Here is how The Times describes the diary’s reappearance: ‘On Christmas Eve 1995 a parcel arrived at her London flat. It contained her wartime diary, barely legible, in its flimsy red notebook, and a photograph of Sasha. She had had to leave it behind in Prague in 1948. Attempts had been made to send it on, but it had been mislaid and forgotten for decades until a friend who had emigrated to Australia rediscovered it. After hesitating for fear of reviving old wounds she sent it on to Pravda, who initially ‘scrabbled on my hands and knees, reading snatches - I wanted to devour it’. ’

Day Books says: ‘Few diaries can have been written in more extraordinary circumstances than the one which a young Czech actress kept during the last few months of World War II. Not only was she on the run from the Nazis, following her dramatic escape from captivity: she was also searching desperately for her husband, whom she had last seen when they were prisoners together at Auschwitz.’ And it provides this quote from Hana’s diary: ‘One afternoon we saw a group of male prisoners walking past in the distance - too far away to talk to. They were clutching their grey prison blankets round their bodies, and all we could see of their faces were their huge staring eyes. They moved as slowly as ghosts. Would I recognise my Sasha among them? Would he recognise me? I think about him all the time.’

Other extracts can be found on Czech websites, such as Czech Radio.

20 November 1945
‘I am in Prague. It’s eight years since you kissed me for the first time, Sasha.
After my show tonight we went to the U Šupů Restaurant, but it was all closed up, and inside it was completely dark. Now I am sitting in our favourite coffeehouse, the Union, at our table in the middle room. I’m warming my hands on a cup of tea, just as I used to in the old days. The street hasn’t changed at all. You’re sitting opposite me. Your mother has just left us. You’re the only person for me in the whole world . . . The only one. The world is empty and I can’t stand it. I want to die.’

30 November 1945 (the diary’s last entry)
‘My dearest. My beloved. Ask God to forgive me. Pray for my soul - the soul I am losing. I don’t want to live with a shattered soul. Please help me to die.’

In recent years, Edward Fenton, who runs Day Books, has given a few snapshots of Hana in his blog - A Publisher’s Diary - on the Day Books website. Here’s a couple of entries:

4 January 2009
‘ ‘I did not succeed in killing myself,’ Holocaust survivor Hana Pravda wrote on 4 January 1996. A few days earlier, her lost diary had been sent to her by a friend in Australia, and memories had come flooding back to her. After the war she had been so distressed that she had seriously considered suicide, and the diary ends on that note. Such despair wasn’t typical of her; she was always a fighter. It was a privilege for me to be able to work with her, and to publish her diary - along with the epilogue which she wrote over 50 years later, on this day 13 years ago.’

1 February 2006
‘To Greek Street for Hana Pravda’s surprise birthday party in a little private room above a place called the Gay Hussar. Hana had been expecting to have a family dinner, and hadn’t known till the very last minute that so many of her friends would be coming to pay tribute to her. Her three granddaughters were there - and her grandson, who’d flown in from the US - and various friends from her long career, including Tom Conti, who was clearly the guest of honour as far as Mrs Pravda was concerned. But tonight she was the star. What an amazing life she’s had - and how amazing that she was there - still.’

Albéniz and Liszt (or not)

It’s one hundred years exactly since Isaac Albéniz, Spanish composer and virtuoso pianist, died. His early life was marked by brilliance and motion, and, as an adult, he never really settled anywhere permanently, living in Madrid, Paris and London. During some periods, he kept a diary - but he didn’t always tell it the truth, as when he claimed to have met Liszt.

Albéniz was born in Catalonia, Spain, in 1860. His mother, Dolors Pascual, was a native of Figueres, and his father, Àngel Albéniz, was a civil servant posted in Ripolles but then in other places. By the age of four Albéniz was playing the piano in public and was considered something of a child prodigy. At seven he passed the entrance examination for piano at the Paris Conservatoire, but went instead to Madrid to study there.

In his early teens, Albéniz made several attempts to run away from home, supporting himself with concert tours. Eventually, his father accepted his wish to play, and he toured as far afield as South America. He studied at the Leipzig Conservatory when 14 for a short while, before further studies in Brussels. In 1880, he went to Budapest wanting to meet Franz Liszt - of which more below.

In 1883, Albéniz settled in Madrid to teach, and to study with Felipe Pedrell, who inspired him to write Spanish music. During the 1890s, he lived mostly in London and Paris, composing for the stage, often in collaboration with Francis Burdett Money-Coutts, who provided both librettos and funding. But, by 1900, he had begun to suffer from Bright’s disease. This didn’t stop him working, though he returned to piano music, and, in the last years of his life, composed Iberia - a suite of twelve piano impressions evoking the spirit of Spain - which is considered to be his best work. Albéniz died exactly 100 years ago today, on 18 May 1909.

There is plenty of information about Albéniz on the internet in English - Wikipedia, the website of Barcelona-based composer Mac McClure, and the Gaudí All Gaudí website all have biographies. There is also a small amount of information about Albéniz keeping a diary, but no evidence of it having been published in English. In particular, there is one incident - the Liszt incident - sourced from Albéniz’s diary that is regularly referred to in biographies.

Here is the relevant diary extract (dated August 1880 and lifted from the online version of Paul Mast’s 1974 doctoral thesis for the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester): ‘I have visited Liszt. He received me in the most amiable manner. I played two of my Etudes and a Hungarian Rhapsody. To all appearances he was much pleased with me, especially when I improvised a complete dance on a Hungarian theme which he gave me. He asked me all sorts of questions about Spain, my parents, my religious opinions, and, finally, about music in general. I told him quite frankly and decidedly that I gave no thought to any of those things, which seemed to please him. I am to return the day of after tomorrow.’

But the Gaudí All Gaudí website as above, says: ‘Albéniz noted in his diary that he met Liszt in Budapest on August 18, 1880, an impossible feat given that Liszt had taken up residence in Weimer by then. He was given to the exhibitionism of a child prodigy, as when he would play the piano blindfolded or with his back to the piano, or place a cloth over the keys to make the task even more difficult. Therefore his diary, though undoubtedly helpful in studying his character, is peppered with several passages that require a certain scrutiny, or at least an ability to separate fact from fiction.’

Yale Fineman, a music librarian, at the University of Maryland, says in an essay, dated 2004, that the diary entry about Lizst ‘was probably meant to placate his father who helped fund this excursion’, i.e. to Budapest.

Further extracts from Albéniz’s diary can be found in Isaac Albéniz: Portrait of a Romantic by Walter Aaron Clark, first published by Oxford University Press in 1999 - many pages of which can be read online at Googlebooks.

Clark says: ‘In their fixation on the Liszt episode, biographers have neglected other passages in his diary that tell us much more important things about the young man. For instance, at an outdoor religious ceremony in Budapest on the 20th, Albéniz notes a ‘high degree of religious intolerance’ among the locals when a man is beaten by the mob for neglecting to doff his hat as the sacrament passes. This behaviour he finds simply ‘stupid’.’

In the days after the (made-up) meeting with Liszt, the diary contains no further mention of the man, and instead focuses on sightseeing, money problems, and the need for patience in ‘conquering’ a lovely young girl he has met, all his normal ‘methods’ of conquest having failed.

And here are some extracts from much later in Albéniz’s life (thanks also to the Clark biography).

21 February 1901
‘Those who search for God, those who discuss him, seem to me like those who wish to find a three-legged cat; they forget that it has four, and that God does not exist except in the here and now, that is to say while we live, think and express ourselves; thus we are God, and everything else is songs!!!’

11 March 1901
‘My misfortune is great; I am foolish with aspirations!!!.’

20 April 1904
‘The ideal formula in art ought to be ‘variety within logic’.’

Without seeing you

‘My Pierre, I think of you without end, my head is bursting with it and my reason is troubled. I do not understand that I am to live henceforth without seeing you, without smiling at the sweet companion of my life.’ These are some of the heart-rending words Marie Curie wrote in a diary after the death of her husband, Pierre Curie, with whom she had won the Nobel Prize for Physics three years earlier. Pierre, born one and a half centuries ago today, also kept a diary, at least when he was a young man.

Pierre Curie was born in Paris - 150 years ago today on 15 May 1859 - and educated at home by his father. Although he showed a strong aptitude for mathematics, lack of funds led him to take a laboratory job, in the Sorbonne faculty of sciences, rather than to full time study. As early as 1880, though, he and his older brother, Jacques, showed how an electric potential could be generated when crystals were compressed (piezoelectricity). By 1882, he had been put in charge of all practical work within the Sorbonne’s physics and industrial chemistry schools, but it wasn’t until 1895 that he obtained his doctorate - based on pioneering studies of magnetism - and was appointed Professor of Physics.

That same year, Curie married Marie Sklodowska, a Polish student of his, and they would have two daughters, Irène and Ève. Collaborating, Pierre and Marie were the first to isolate radioactive substances - radium and polonium - by fractionation of pitchblende in 1898; and they were the first to coin the term ‘radioactive’. Their research formed the basis for many subsequent developments in nuclear physics and chemistry. Together, and jointly with French physicist Henri Becquerel, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.

In April 1906, Pierre died after his skull was fractured when he fell under the wheel of a horse-drawn vehicle on a rainy night. Further information on Pierre and Marie can be found at Wikipedia, on the Nobel Prize website, and at the American Institute of Physics.

The death of Pierre was a terrible tragedy for Marie. We know a lot about her feelings at the time because soon after her husband’s death she started writing a diary, the only one she ever kept. Years later, her daughter used some quotes from it for a much celebrated biography of her mother. The full text of Madame Curie - A Biography by Eve Curie, as translated by Vincent Sheean and published by Doubleday & Company in 1937, is available at Internet Archive. Some extracts of the diary (taken from Eve’s book) are also available on the website of the American Institute of Physics.

Here is how Eve introduces her mother’s diary: ‘After some weeks had passed, Marie, incapable of speaking of her woe before human beings, lost in a silence, a desert which sometimes made her cry out with horror, was to open a gray notebook and hurl onto the paper, with writing which trembled, the thoughts that were stifling her. Through these scratchy, tear-splotched pages, of which only fragments can be published, she addressed Pierre, called upon him and asked him questions. She tried to fix every detail of the drama which had separated them in order to torture herself with it forever afterward. The brief, intimate diary the first and the only one Marie ever kept reflected the most tragic hours of this woman’s life.’

And here are some extracts about Pierre.

Undated
‘We put you into the coffin Saturday morning, and I held your head up for this move. We kissed your cold face for the last time. Then a few periwinkles from the garden on the coffin and the little picture of me that you called “the good little student” and that you loved. It is the picture that must go with you into the grave, the picture of her who had the happiness of pleasing you enough so that you did not hesitate to offer to share your life with her, even when you had seen her only a few times. You often told me that this was the only occasion in your life when you acted without hesitation, with the absolute conviction that you were doing well. My Pierre, I think you were not wrong. We were made to live together, and our union had to be.

Your coffin was closed and I could see you no more. I didn’t allow them to cover it with the horrible black cloth. I covered it with flowers and I sat beside it. . .

They came to get you, a sad company; I looked at them, and did not speak to them. We took you back to Sceaux, and we saw you go down into the big deep hole. Then the dreadful procession of people. They wanted to take us away. Jacques and I resisted. We wanted to see everything to the end. They filled the grave and put sheaves of flowers on it. Everything is over, Pierre is sleeping his last sleep beneath the earth; it is the end of everything, everything, everything. . .’

7 May 1906
‘My Pierre, I think of you without end, my head is bursting with it and my reason is troubled. I do not understand that I am to live henceforth without seeing you, without smiling at the sweet companion of my life.’

11 May 1906
‘My Pierre, I got up after having slept rather well, relatively calm. That was only a quarter of an hour ago, and now I want to howl again - like a wild beast.’

14 May 1906
‘My little Pierre, I want to tell you that the laburnum is in flower, the wisteria, the hawthorn and the iris are beginning - you would have loved all that. I want to tell you, too, that I have been named to your chair, and that there have been some imbeciles to congratulate me on it. I want to tell you that I no longer love the sun or the flowers. The sight of them makes me suffer. I feel better on dark days like the day of your death, and if I have not learned to hate fine weather it is because my children have need of it.’

There is some evidence of Pierre Curie having written a diary as a young man, but I can find (on the internet) only three extracts. The first two are from Eve Curie’s book, as above, and the last, brief one is from the Institut Curie website.

‘Woman loves life for the living of it far more than we do: women of genius are rare. Thus, when we, driven by some mystic love, wish to enter upon some anti-natural path, when we give all our thoughts to some work which estranges us from the humanity nearest us, we have to struggle against women. The mother wants the love of her child above all things, even if it should make an imbecile of him. The mistress also wishes to possess her lover, and would find it quite natural to sacrifice the rarest genius in the world for an hour of love. The struggle almost always is unequal, for women have the good side of it: it is in the name of life and nature that they try to bring us back.’

‘What shall I be later on? I am very rarely all under command at once; ordinarily a portion of my being is asleep. It seems to me that my mind gets clumsier every day. Before, I flung myself into scientific or other divagations; today I barely touch on subjects and do not allow myself to be absorbed by them any more. And I have so many, many things to do! Is my poor mind then so feeble that it cannot act upon my body? Is thought itself unable to move my poor mind? Then it is worth very little! And Pride, Ambition couldn’t they at least propel me, or will they let me live like this ? In my imagination I shall find most confidence to pull myself out of the rut. Imagination may perhaps entice my mind and carry it away. But I am very much afraid that imagination, too, may be dead . . .’

‘Life should be made into a dream and a dream into a reality.’

Happy birthday

The Diary Junction Blog is one year old today.

It’s been a fun journey, absorbing diarists from all corners of the planet (Brazil to Japan, Australia to Spain) and a wide range of topics such as politics, sport, travel and relationships.

Thank you to anyone and everyone who’s dropped by for a read.

Paul

Egyptian diary in Pisa

An Italian diary, nearly two centuries old and detailing archaeological sites in Egypt that were subsequently destroyed, has just been found in a library at Pisa university. The diary was written by Dr Alessandro Ricci, an explorer, draughtsman and medical doctor. There is not much information about him on the internet, though he took part in the important Franco-Tuscan expedition to Egypt with Ippolito Rosellini, said to be the father of Italian Egyptology. Oh, and he died of a scorpion sting.

Last month, the Italian news service Ansa revealed the story of Dr Alessandro Ricci’s diary; and, since then, it’s been widely reproduced across the internet, but without any additional facts or embellishment. So, most of the information in this article is based on the Ansa-sourced story (as on the Archaelogy Daily News website, for example).

Ricci was born in Siena and left Italy in 1817 to travel to Egypt, staying first in Alexandria and then travelling through Nubia, where he found tribal fighting and hostility from the local governor. In 1820, while in Cairo, he joined a military expedition to the Siwa Oasis - 560km west of Cairo - organised by the Viceroy Muhammed Ali, who is sometimes called the founder of modern Egypt (see Wikipedia). Indeed it was Ali who claimed the Siwa Oasis for Egypt. During the trip, Ricci carefully copied inscriptions he found at the temple of Amun and mapped out the area around the oasis. Later that year, he travelled to Suez and to Mount Sinai, where he spent some time at St Catherine’s Monastery.

In 1821, Ricci returned to southern Egypt, joining another military expedition, this one led by Ali’s son Ibrahim Pasha. He returned to Italy in 1822 and set to work organising the drawings and notes he had made in Egypt. A few years later, in 1828, these notes would be of much service when he returned to Egypt, serving as a draughtsman and doctor, on the so-called Franco-Tuscan expedition. This was organised by a French philologist, Jean-Francois Champollion, and Ippolito Rosellini, of Pisa university, who would later be called the father of Italian Egyptology (see The Travellers in Egypt website). It lasted a year, and explored up river on the Nile as far as Wadi Halfa, but soon after it was over Ricci was bitten by a scorpion. He was paralysed and eventually died in 1834.

Ricci’s journal - the one that has just been rediscovered - concerns his first period in Egypt, the five years to 1822. ‘This is an exceptional find for the field of Egyptology,’ said Marilina Betro, the professor heading a Pisa university team researching the Franco-Tuscan expedition. This is partly because, Betro explains, Ricci describes and draws sites that were already destroyed by the time of Champollion-Rosellini expedition, but also because he writes about much more along the way, ‘the customs and habits of the people he met, the fighting strategies of armies, the condition of women and even the treatment of animals’.

The whereabouts of Ricci’s journal appears to have been a mystery for decades. Ricci gave it to Champollion in 1827, prior to the Franco-Tuscan expedition, apparently believing the French expert would publish it. But then both Champollion and Ricci died a few years later. Although Rosellini asked French authorities to return the journal to Italy in 1836, it remained in France.

The diary then vanished for several decades until surfacing in 1928, when an Italian architect working for King Fuad I of Egypt bought it in a Cairo bookshop (these details are all from the Ansa news story). This architect showed it to the Italian Egyptologist Angelo Sammarco, who recognised its value and was keen to organise its publication. A synopsis of the diary appeared in 1930 but the project never got any further. After he died in 1948, all trace of the journal vanished - until recently, when it was found at Pisa university by researcher Daniele Salvoldi.

‘Now, two centuries after it was written, our goal is to get this book published,’ said Betro.

(Postscript: See From Siena to Nubia: Alessandro Ricci in Egypt and Sudan, 1817-22 published in 2018 by Bloomsbury.)

Impropriety in the pew

Poor John Skinner. His parishioners just wouldn’t stop messing about in church, something which made him very grumpy. One hundred and eighty years ago today, for example, he was complaining to his diary: ‘I said aloud that, as there had been great impropriety of behaviour in that pew, I requested there might be no repetition of it this evening. John Rossiter stood up in the pew and looked very insolently at me, but I took no notice.’ Skinner did have other reasons to be grumpy and he would, a few years later, do away with himself.

Skinner was born in Claverton, near Bath in 1772,  and educated first at Cheam School then at Trinity College, Cambridge. After reading for an MA he entered Lincoln’s Inn but soon decided on the church for a career, and was ordained priest in 1799. After a brief curacy at Brent Knoll in Somerset, he took over the living at Camerton, Somerset. He married and had five children, but his wife died young, and his eldest daughter, Laura also died. Thereafter, he seems to have been mostly unhappy, with no intellectual companionship and regular feuds with farmers. He took refuge in studying antiquities, and undertook many exceptions of ancient sites in the southwest. He committed suicide, in 1839, by shooting himself in a wood nearby his home.

Skinner is largely remembered, however, because he wrote a diary, nearly 100 volumes of which are stored in the British Library. An essay by Virginia Woolf on Skinner (made available thanks to Ms Spachman on a website devoted to Woolf) provides a little more biographical information, most of it culled, in fact, from the diaries. Wikipedia and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log-in required) also have some further details.

These diaries were first edited by Howard Coombs and Rev Arthur N Bax and published by John Murray, London, in 1930 as Journal of a Somerset Rector. Bax says the diaries are filled with sketches and records of tours of little general interest. If he visited the British Museum, Bax explains, he would begin to catalogue its contents, and hundreds of pages are filled with archaeological detail and theory - ‘mostly dead stuff’. Nevertheless, he adds, Skinner’s observations about his parish do throw light on the life of a Somerset village at the beginning of the 19th century.

Bax also suggests that the Skinner’s diaries come to life after the death of his wife and daughter. Here is more from his introduction: ‘His wife and daughter died of consumption, the daughter was laid in the same grave as her mother, and when after her death he examined a cabinet he had given her for her collections of coins and shells, he found everything was arranged with the utmost neatness, and she had some years before begun to keep a Journal. This last blow came near to breaking his spirit, though he struggled gallantly to resist the tendency of his life to shrivel, and from this time the extracts of the Journal tell their own story.

Hitherto, the Journal had been little more than a record of his archaelogical explorations and of his tours; but now that his wife and Laura are both gone, it becomes his confidant. His books are ‘his friends and consoler’; he finds them ‘the same to-day, to-morrow, and the next day.’ In the Journal he records the daily happenings, his reflections on them, and the actors in them. It becomes the mirror of his feelings; in it he makes confession, and as he turns its back pages he judges himself.’

Thelma Wilcox has a piece about Skinner on her North Stoke blog, and picks out one or two diary entries. Here is one from 1820, a few months after the death of his daughter.

‘I could not help thinking how differently this morning was to be spent by myself, an obscure imdividual, on the desolate heights of Mendip, and the Queen of these realms in the midst of her judges in the most splendid metropolis in the world. Yet when half the number of years have rolled away which these tumuli have witnessed how will every memorial, every trace, be forgotten of the agitation which now fills every breast; all the busy heads and aching hearts will be as quiet as those of the savage chieftains which have so long occupied these hillocks.’

As the diary progresses, Skinner seems to get grumpier and grumpier, and there is much about quarrels with members of his own family. But he also seems to lose patience with his parishioners. Here is Skinner confiding in his diary exactly 180 years ago today.

10 May 1829
‘During the Prayers at Morning Service Cottle’s son was hawking so loud when I commenced the service I was obliged to look at him in order to check him from interrupting the service. The pew which Burfitt built without any authority from me or the Ordinary, has been more than once the scene of great impropriety of behaviour during Church time, for the sides being higher than the seatings, so that the congregation are not able to see the people who are sitting down, they talk and laugh and misbehave themselves greatly. This evening the pew was filled by two sons and a daughter of farmer Skuse, a son of Hicks, John Rossiter, and a female in mourning; the elder Skuse I saw talking and laughing with the person in black, and I said aloud that, as there had been great impropriety of behaviour in that pew, I requested there might be no repetition of it this evening. John Rossiter stood up in the pew and looked very insolently at me, but I took no notice.’

The Diary Junction