DiMaggio’s diary - $33 a word

Joe DiMaggio died a decade ago today. He was one of the most famous of American baseball players, and is perhaps best known for his 56-game hitting streak, a record that still stands, or, possibly, for a marriage to Marilyn Monroe that lasted less than a year. There is nothing about Monroe, however, in DiMaggio’s diaries, and not much else interesting either, according to reviewers. Nevertheless, a variety of original pages from the diaries are on sale at $2,000-5,000 each.

There is no shortage of information about DiMaggio on the internet. Wikipedia’s article is a bit full of jargon, Notable Biographies is a much easier read, and the official Joe DiMaggio website has lots of photographs too.

DiMaggio was the eighth of nine children born in 1914 to Italian immigrants, and grew up in San Francisco. He made his professional baseball debut shortly before his 18th birthday, and became a local Minor League celebrity. A serious knee injury slowed down his career down slightly, but in 1936 he made his Major League debut for the New York Yankees, in front of many thousands of Italian fans. He soon earned the nicknames ‘Joltin’ Joe’ for the power of his batting and ‘The Yankee Clipper’ after the transAtlantic ships built for speed.

In the 1939 season, DiMaggio won the League’s Most Valuable Player award, and in 1941 he created the record that still stands - a fifty-six-game hitting streak. (For non-Americans, the term ‘hitting streak’ refers to the consecutive number of official games in which a player gets at least one base hit, and a base hit is when the batter safely reaches first base after hitting the ball into fair territory, without the benefit of an error or a fielder’s choice.). He spent three years in the army returning to professional baseball in 1946 and winning his third Most Valuable Player award in 1947.

With injury problems having affected his play for several seasons, DiMaggio retired in 1952; the Yankees then, in honour of their much-loved player, retired his uniform number (5) so no player could use it again. Thereafter, he worked in television. He was married once before the war, to Dorothy Arnold, and then briefly - for less than a year - to the actress Marilyn Monroe after the war. In 1955, he was he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and in 1969 a poll of sports writers named him the sport’s greatest living player. He died on 8 March 1999, ten years ago today.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Joe DiMaggio kept a diary from 1980 to 1994, although this was at the suggestion of his accountant so that he could have a record of expenses. In 2007, these diaries were acquired by Steiner Sports, which describes itself as ‘the leader in autographed sports memorabilia and sports collectibles’. Immediately, it announced that it would try to auction them for a minimum of $1.5m. The auction received plenty of publicity, and it was widely reported that there were over 2,000 pages in plastic protective sheets contained in 29 thick, black, loose-leaf binders.

According to Onion Sports Network, though, the diaries are not very interesting. They are merely a listing of all the things and people DiMaggio hated: ‘Jukeboxes, dollar stores, Paul Simon, Washington DC, speaking, Garth Brooks, myself, and automobiles. Also sore throats, Yogi Berra, films, Lee Iacocca, coffeemakers, anyone who has ever referred to me as Joltin, sandals, baseball.’

And the UK newspaper The Independent was not very impressed by DiMaggio’s diaries either: ‘His so-called diaries are a random collection of 2,000 pages, offering a clipped daily chronicle of events . . . next to nothing about Marilyn Monroe, and precious little even about the Yankees. Instead you find bland entries about dinners with friends, and endless complaints about the burdens of fame. ‘Swamped with the signing of baseballs - pictures - radio and TV,’ he writes of one July 1989 day in Anaheim, California. ‘Stress too much.’ ’

Although there were many reports of the proposed auction by Steiner Sports, there appear to have been none about the result. Presumably, the company did not find anyone willing to pay $1.5m, and therefore decided to sell - as it said it might - the great baseball’s players jottings one by one. Indeed, individual specified diary pages, some of them with only 150-200 handwritten words, are currently on sale at the Steiner Sports website for $2,000-5,000. Each page, it says, will be shipped in ‘a blue protective hard cover display’, however, it stresses, the purchase includes no rights to copy, reproduce or publish the page.

For example, the diary page 2 March 1992 is on sale for $5,000. Steiner Sports describes the content as follows: ‘DiMaggio had a very late breakfast at the club then met with a couple of friends who wanted to say hello before hitting some balls at the driving range. Met a friend at the range and decided to play nine holes with him. After the nine holes DiMaggio took at [sic] steam and had dinner at the club.’ The website shows a picture of the diary page, so I can calculate that there are no more than 150 words, and that therefore each word is worth at least $33.

According to the company, the diaries detail ‘a myriad of memories’ including: ‘A visit with President Ronald Reagan at the White House at Gorbachev dinner . . .; a meeting with New York City Mayor Ed Koch; missing the final game of the 1986 World Series to receive Ellis Island Medal of Honor; sitting in George Steinbrenner’s box and talking baseball with the Yankees owner; reaction to Commissioner’s press conference on Pete Rose; the pressures of the 56 game hitting streak . . .; watching the Gulf crisis unfold on television; sitting in an airport lounge getting ‘high on diet cokes’.’

However, it is not clear which of the pages for these events have already been sold, nor indeed how many pages in total have been sold since 2007. Nor have I any idea whether pages containing the following extracts have been sold or not.

28 April 1989
‘Up at 5am . . . Book people felt me out with questions pertaining to baseball. Some part of my private life but not too strong on that. Will not reveal anything in a negative way towards Marilyn - only books that have come out on her might have not been truthful.’

30 April 1991 (at Kennedy Airport)
‘. . . was asked for another autograph - just one interruption after another - people must think I have skin like an armored plate. Will get a checkup and find out how I’m holding up.’

And NBC Sports has these undated laments about a public relations frenzy and about travelling: ‘If I thought this would be taking place I would have stopped the hitting streak at 40’; and ‘Plane food should be fed to pigs’.

The Wallenberg curse

The Wall Street Journal has just published a series of articles about Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat working in Budapest who saved thousands of Jews but who went missing in the last months of the Second World War. In particular, the newspaper draws attention to a diary kept by Raoul’s stepfather, Fredrik von Dardel, for over 25 years, most of which is about the search for Raoul.

Raoul Wallenberg’s story is well-known and well documented. Wikipedia has a fully-referenced summary, and there is a long biography on the website of The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation. There are also dozens of books about the man, many of them on Googlebooks, such as Wallenberg: Missing Hero by Kati Marton, which claims on the cover that he saved 100,000 Jews.

Wallenberg was born in 1912 into a wealthy Swedish family, three months after his father had died. In 1918, his mother married Fredrik von Dardel, and they had two children, Guy and Nina. In the 1930s, Wallenberg went to study architecture in the US, but then worked for a construction company in South Africa and a bank in Haifa. On returning to Stockholm, he joined the Central European Trading Company, owned by Kálmán Lauer a Hungarian-Jew. From the early 1940s, he began to travel to Hungary as Lauer’s aide, and was soon a part owner of the company and a director.

By the spring of 1944, Allied leaders were considering what to do about the persecution and deportation of Jews in Hungary. One consequence was that the American War Refugee Board sent a representative to Stockholm looking for someone willing and able to go to Budapest to organise a rescue programme. In July that year, Wallenberg travelled to the Hungarian capital as the First Secretary of the Swedish legation, and for the next six months organised safe housing and protective passports for Jews, saving tens of thousands of lives (possibly 100,000 as the Marton book claims, but certainly 20,000). At its peak, the rescue programme involved as many as 350 helpers.

In January 1945, though, the Soviet army entered Budapest, and Wallenberg was arrested under suspicion of being an American spy. He disappeared, almost certainly to a prison in Russia. In 1957, the Soviets announced that Wallenberg had actually died of a heart attack in 1947, but some believed/believe he might have been executed. A Swedish report in 2001 concluded as follows, ‘there is no fully reliable proof of what happened to Raoul Wallenberg’, so the manner and timing of his death remain a mystery. For the rest of their lives Wallenberg’s mother and stepfather fought to find out what had happened to Raoul, often against staunch resistance from the Swedish authorities. In 1979, they both committed suicide, acts which their daughter Nina Lagergren attributed to despair.

Thereafter, Nina and Guy continued their parents’ campaign for the truth, and to foster knowledge about their brother. Both appear to have recently contributed to a series of articles in The Wall Street Journal. The first is entitled The Wallenberg Curse - The Search for the Missing Holocaust Hero Began in 1945. The Unending Quest Tore His Family Apart. Another article explains where the mystery stands today; and a third piece provides an example of the diary kept by von Dardel.

Frederik von Dardel began writing the diary on 24 October 1952, his 34th wedding anniversary, and would maintain it until a year before his death. The diaries were donated to the Swedish National Archives in 1985, but were only made available to the public in 2000. Officials say no one has been very interested in them, at least not until The Wall Street Journal showed up. It claims to have read thousands of family journal entries, letters and documents, and hundreds of interviews - and to have been the first to read most of them.

The paper gives brief extracts from the first and last entries in this diary (translated by Amalia Johnsson). Of the first, on 24 October 1952, it says there are two paragraphs devoted to von Dardel’s wife, and that he then turns ‘to the stepson who had come to call him Papa’: ‘Raoul Wallenberg’s fate has lain like a dark cloud over our existence.’ And with regard to the last entry, 25 years later, on 28 April 1978, it says, von Dardel concluded the diary with two English words: ‘stone wall’.

The Wall Street Journal also gives another, longer extract from the diary, in which von Dardel explains how, in connection with the king’s 70th birthday, Raoul was awarded the medal ‘Illis quorum meruere labores’ (For Those Whose Labors Have Deserved It), partly as a result of efforts by Stockholm-based Austrian author Rudolph Philipp. Here are the last few paragraphs of the story as written in von Dardel’s diary.

12 November 1952
‘. . . it was nevertheless decided that Raoul, in connection with the rain of decorations on the king’s 70th birthday would receive ‘Illis quorum’. Philipp’s action also aimed for this distinction to mark the Foreign Ministry’s understanding that Raoul was still alive.

So it was also understood by all the newspapers save Svenska Dagbladet, which mentioned the news item under the headline Posthumous Distinction for Raoul Wallenberg.

This was irksome, especially as this paper is the lifeblood of our social circle. After I and several others had shaken up the editorial staff, they introduced in the regional edition, and in the following day’s Stockholm edition, a correct statement in a prominent place.’

Woolf on rinderpest and salt

A century ago today, while the Bloomsbury Group of literary friends was beginning to coalesce in London, one of its future members, Leonard Woolf, was more concerned about salt stocks and outbreaks of rinderpest working as a government administrator in Sri Lanka (then still a British colony called Ceylon). Never a diarist like his future wife, he did keep a diary of his duties in Ceylon, and these were published in the early 1960s.

Leonard Sidney Woolf, born in 1882, was the third of ten children. When his father died ten years later, Woolf was sent to board at Arlington House, a preparatory school near Brighton. Thereafter he was educated at St Paul’s and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he joined a group of writers and intellectuals - including Bertrand Russell and E M Forster - who called themselves The Apostles. In 1904, however, he left behind the literary world, and went to work in Ceylon. For the last three years of his time with the Civil Service there, from 1908, he served as the Colonial Administrator for Hambantota, in the very south of island. He returned to London in 1911; and, the next year, married Virginia.

Woolf opposed Britain’s involvement in the First World War, and, having been rejected for military service on health grounds, began to focus his writing increasingly on politics and sociology. The couple settled in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, and together set up The Hogarth Press, with Leonard as the main director, a position he retained until his death in 1969. His main work, however, was as a political writer and editor. He also spent much time caring for his wife, through the ups and downs of manic depression. After Virginia’s death, he had a long relationship with Trekkie Parsons, an artist, despite her being married.

More information about Woolf can be found at Wikipedia, of course, and at The Diary Junction. Sussex University holds most of his papers (at The Keep) which has an extensive catalogue online. Also online - at Internet Archive - are many of his books, now out of copyright, including his first novel The Village in the Jungle. Publicity (on Amazon) for a modern print of the novel says: ‘It reads as if Thomas Hardy had been born among the heat, scent, sensuality and pungent mystery of the tropics. Translated into both Tamil and Sinhalese, it is one of the best-loved and best-known stories in Sri Lanka.’ In the 1960s, Mr Saparamadu, of the Ceylon Civil Service, said it was ‘generally acknowledged to be the best work of creative writing in English on Ceylon’.

In January 1960, 50 years after his administrator’s stint in the country, Woolf returned to Ceylon (although independent by this time, it would remain Ceylon until the name Sri Lanka was adopted in 1972), where he was received with ‘much honour’ (again according to Saparamadu). As a result of the visit, and because of Woolf’s literary eminence, the country’s prime minister directed that the official diary written by Woolf half a century earlier, when serving as the Hambantota administrator, should be published by the government. An edition was thus printed by The Ceylon Historical Journal in 1962, and another by The Hogarth Press (the company set up by Woolf but, by then, part of Chatto & Windus) in 1963 - Diaries in Ceylon 1908-1911, Record of a Colonial Administrator

Saparamadu explains, in the book’s introduction, that there is a vast corpus of official diaries written by government agents and administrators from 1808 to 1941, and that the diaries were meant to contain a full record of work done by each writer and a full description of events and and the conditions of their districts. ‘Woolf’s diaries,’ he says, ‘have been selected as a good introductory to them not only because they are typical of the diaries but because of the wide public interest in them and also since they help to throw some light on the experience in the villages of Hambantota which provided the inspiration for Woolf’s celebrated book The Village in the Jungle.’

Here are two extracts, taken from exactly 100 years ago today, which give a good indication of Woolf’s preoccupations at the time - cattle and salt!

3 March 1909
‘I was woken at 3am by the Stock Inspector’s messenger. My wrath was appeased by learning that it is not rinderpest. I heard today that all the contractors who are removing salt from Palatupana on Government account at Rs1.70 per ton had left the lewaya [shallow lagoon]. This was a strike to force my hand and make me pay Rs2 per ton. In the evening I got hold of the previous contractor and I was determined that he should take another contract. Eventually with great difficulty and a certain amount of pressure I induced him to enter into a contract to remove 10,000 cwts a month until all the salt on this side of the lewaya is removed. As he will probably pay the carters about Rs1.50 a ton, I feel that I have scored. He undertakes with me to do it at Rs1.80 per ton which is the old rate.’

4 March 1909
‘Another case of rinderpest but again out of the isolated contacts. There are now 4 isolated contacts left. In the evening I went down to the Maha Lewaya and released the 230 bulls there. I have had them in quarantine since February 18th and the Stock Inspector considered it safe to let them to go yesterday but I thought I would keep them an extra day. Great rejoicing among the carters who told me that in future they would obey any order I gave them, so I told them they had better prove what they said by going away and removing salt for two months from Bundala. 32 carts immediately left for Bundala, at least so they said.’

The finding of Tutankhamun

Howard Carter, the archaeologist who is credited with discovering the Egyptian tomb of Tutankhamun, died 70 years ago today. Thanks to the Ashmolean Museum and Griffith Institute, in Oxford, diary entries made by Carter in 1922 when discovering the Tutankhamun tomb are freely available online.

Carter was born in Kensington, London, in 1874, the youngest son of an artist, and while still a teenager began studying inscriptions and paintings in Egypt. For much of the 1890s, he worked as a member of the Egypt Exploration Fund, directed by Édouard Naville, at the Hatshepsut temple of Deir el-Bahri, on the west bank of the Nile opposite Luxor. In 1899, he joined the Egyptian Antiquities Service, as chief inspector of antiquities for Upper Egypt, and then for Lower Egypt. In 1905, though, he resigned following a dispute between Egyptian site guards and some French tourists.

In the next few years, George Herbert, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, became interested in Egyptian antiquities and agreed to finance some archaeological work. It was agreed with the Egyptian Antiquities Service that Carter should take charge of the Carnarvon-sponsored excavations. They began at Thebes, and then moved to the Delta region, but in 1914 Lord Carnarvon secured a concession to excavate in the Valley of the Kings.

There were many delays to the excavations due to the First World War; and then, subsequently, in the years after the war, Lord Carnarvon became increasingly frustrated at Carter’s lack of excavation success. However, in October 1922, Carter - literally - struck gold by finding the now-famous tomb of Tutankhamun. In Wikipedia’s article on Carter, the tomb is described as ‘by far the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings’.

After completing the excavations, Howard Carter retired from archaeology and became a collector of antiquities, though he did visit the US in 1924 to give a series of lectures. He also visited Luxor often, and could be found at the Winter Palace Hotel, sitting by himself in willful isolation, says a short biography of Carter at Tracing The Past. He died in Kensington on 2 March 1939, 70 years ago today.

Carter was not a literary diarist, but he did keep an excavation diary, and this is held by the Griffith Institute, which is part of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, which itself is part of Oxford University. The text of the diary is available (on the Ashmolean Museum or Griffith Institute web pages). Here are two entries, one from the day that Carter first discovered the tomb, and the second from the day three weeks later when Lord Carnavon had arrived and the tomb was opened.

Saturday, November 4.
‘First steps of tomb found
At about 10am I discovered beneath almost the first hut attacked the first traces of the entrance of the tomb (Tut.ankh.Amen) This comprised the first step of the N.E. corner (of the sunken-staircase). Quite a short time sufficed to show that it was the beginning of a steep excavation cut in the bed rock, about four metres below the entrance of Ramses VI’s tomb, and a similar depth below the present level of the valley. And, that it was of the nature of a sunken staircase entrance to a tomb of the type of the XVIIIth Dyn., but further than that nothing could be told until the heavy rubbish above was cleared away.’

Sunday, November 26.
‘Open second doorway - about 2pm - Advised Engelbach
After clearing 9 metres of the descending passage, in about the middle of the afternoon, we came upon a second sealed doorway, which was almost the exact replica of the first. It bore similar seal impressions and had similar traces of successive reopenings and reclosings in the plastering. The seal impressions were of Tut.ankh.Amen and of the Royal Necropolis, but not in any way so clear as those on the first doorway. . .

Feverishly we cleared away the remaining last scraps of rubbish on the floor of the passage before the doorway, until we had only the clean sealed doorway before us. In which, after making preliminary notes, we made a tiny breach in the top left hand corner to see what was beyond. Darkness and the iron testing rod told us that there was empty space. Perhaps another descending staircase, in accordance to the ordinary royal Theban tomb plan? Or may be a chamber? Candles were procured - the all important tell-tale for foul gases when opening an ancient subterranean excavation - I widened the breach and by means of the candle looked in, while Ld. C., Lady E, and Callender with the Reises waited in anxious expectation.

It was sometime before one could see, the hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker, but as soon as one’s eyes became accustomed to the glimmer of light the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one, with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one another.

There was naturally short suspense for those present who could not see, when Lord Carnarvon said to me ‘Can you see anything’. I replied to him ‘Yes, it is wonderful’. I then with precaution made the hole sufficiently large for both of us to see. With the light of an electric torch as well as an additional candle we looked in. Our sensations and astonishment are difficult to describe as the better light revealed to us the marvellous collection of treasures: two strange ebony-black effigies of a King, gold sandalled, bearing staff and mace, loomed out from the cloak of darkness; gilded couches in strange forms, lion-headed, Hathor-headed, and beast infernal; exquisitely painted, inlaid, and ornamental caskets; flowers; alabaster vases, some beautifully executed of lotus and papyrus device; strange black shrines with a gilded monster snake appearing from within; quite ordinary looking white chests; finely carved chairs; a golden inlaid throne . . .

Our sensations were bewildering and full of strange emotion. We questioned one another as to the meaning of it all. Was it a tomb or merely a cache? A sealed doorway between the two sentinel statues proved there was more beyond, and with the numerous cartouches bearing the name of Tut.ankh.Amen on most of the objects before us, there was little doubt that there behind was the grave of that Pharaoh. . .’

The ghost of a reader

‘The journal writer, like the poet, is haunted by the ghost of a reader; but a ghost is very different from some palpable flesh-and-blood reader whom the writer imagines looking over his shoulder with his expectations, standards and demands.’ So wrote the British poet Stephen Spender, born a century ago today, in trying to explain why he had decided to publish his diaries, even though they were not written with publication in mind. The diaries themselves contain similar self-analysis (about his role as a poet for example) as well as many interesting anecdotes about other literary figures of the 20th century.

Spender was born in London, exactly 100 years ago today, to a mother of German-Jewish descent and to a liberal journalist. He was educated at University College School, Hampstead, and at Oxford where he became acquainted with other poets such as Auden, Isherwood and MacNeice. After Oxford, Spender lived in Hamburg for a while and then Berlin. From the start of the 1930s, he began to publish poetry and literary criticism, much of it flavoured by his left-wing politics. One of his poems, The Pylons, gave rise to the label Pylon Poets.

During the Spanish Civil War, Spender helped write propaganda for the Republican side; during the Second World War he worked for the National Fire Service. In the early 1950s, he published an autobiography giving an account of his relationship with the Communist Party. He went on to be editor of Encounter from 1953 to 1967, and to be involved with Index on Censorship. At times, he also lectured in the US. He was knighted in 1983 (the same year he appears to have stopped writing a diary) and he died in 1995.

More information on Spender can be found at Wikipedia; and The Diary Junction has some diary-related links. The Stephen Spender Memorial Trust, which says it aims to widen knowledge of 20th century English literature with particular focus on Spender’s circle of writers, has a biography, a bibliography and photos.

Although best remembered for being a poet, and, to some extent for literary criticism, Spender did produce other kinds of writing, travel books, a couple of plays and a handful of novels. For much of his life, he also wrote journals intermittently, often for specific purposes. These were compiled and edited into a single publication by John Goldsmith - Stephen Spender’s Journals 1939-1983 - and published by Faber and Faber in 1985. Spender, himself, however had some control over which entries were included in the volume, and provides a biographical commentary before each chapter.

In his introduction, Spender explains his journal-writing philosophy: ‘The essential of the journal for me is that I can put down whatever I like without consideration of fulfilling the expectations, or catering for the taste of, an editor or a reader. ‘But after all,’ the reader may protest, ‘here you are, publishing your journals.’ The answer to this objection is, I think, that the journal writer, like the poet, is haunted by the ghost of a reader; but a ghost is very different from some palpable flesh-and-blood reader whom the writer imagines looking over his shoulder with his expectations, standards and demands. The writer of the journal need only set down what is interesting to himself, his own truth, and much of this will conform to no standards of publication that he is aware of at the time. Much of it will, indeed, be unpublishable.’

In the 40 years and more covered by Stephen Spender’s Journals 1939-1983 there is only one entry dated 28 February, i.e. on his birthday. It’s from 1970: ‘I drove to New York and dined with Auden. My sixty-first birthday: his sixty-third was two days ago, 26 February.’ And there follows a poem which starts ‘Dined with Auden. He’d been at Milwaukee . . .’

Here, however, are two other extracts from the book, forty years apart.

20 October 1939
‘It must now be three weeks since my weekend at the Woolfs. They live in a very pleasant house at Rodmell near Lewes . . . I arrived in time for tea. After tea, we went out on to the lawn and played a game of bowls. . . Virginia and I walked about the garden talking about writing, which she said she wanted to discuss with other writers. She was pleased that I kept a journal because she said she found it was the only thing she could do, too. She thought that every day an occasion arises in which one sees things in an entirely new and different way, that these moments of transformation are one’s grasp of reality. This is the experience she tries to catch hold of in her journal.’ (NB: See The Diary Junction for more on Woolf’s diary.)

5 October 1979
‘I wrote a poem about Derwentwater. One of my best, at this moment, I think. Why do I have such resistance to writing poetry? Since when I am writing it I can become very absorbed, happy, fascinated. The resistance comes first from the sense not so much of failure as of non-recognition. I can’t really convince myself my poetry gives pleasure to anyone. I feel apologetic sending it to a friend, humiliated sending it to an editor, as though asking for a favour. Next, writing it is a test in which all one’s best qualities are brought in confrontation with all one’s incapacitiy. Next, poetry is not ‘work’. And there is always ‘work’ elbowing its way in and pushing poetry aside. . .

Being a minor poet is like being minor royalty, and no one, as a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret once explained to me, is happy as that.’

Mullin and leylandii

The diaries of Labour MP Chris Mullin, covering the period of New Labour from 1999 to 2007, are about to be published by Profile Books. However, substantial extracts are being serialised in the Mail on Sunday, and can be read online. While Profile Books says Mullin is ‘irreverent, wry and candid’ in the diaries, the Mail on Sunday extracts - such as those in which Mullin is most concerned about leylandii legislation - make his irreverence seem more puerile than wry.

Wikipedia offers a short biography of Mullin. Born in Chelmsford, Essex, in 1947, he read law at the University of Hull. He first campaigned (unsuccessfully) for a Labour seat when only 22, but then worked as a journalist on the television documentary World in Action, which, among other things, campaigned for the release of the so-called Birmingham Six.

By the start of the 1980s, Mullin was an active member of the Labour Party, veering towards Tony Benn’s style of politics, supporting Benn’s political positions, and editing some of his written material. Mullin himself was elected to Parliament in 1987, and has remained an MP (for Sunderland South) since then. Tony Blair appointed him to the government in 1999, as a junior minister at the DETR, under John Prescott; he has also served in ministerial positions at the Department for International Development and the Foreign Office. Since 2005, though, he has been a backbencher. He is married to a Vietnamese woman, Ngoc, and they have two children.

Last year, Mullin announced that he does not intend to fight another election - which is, presumably, why he’s now happy to make his diaries public. A View From The Foothills, about life in the New Labour government from 1999 to 2007, is due to be published by Profile Books on 2 March. The book is being billed as ‘Alan Clarke meets Yes Minister’, and Profile is quoting Mullin as saying: ‘It is said that failed politicians make the best diarists. In which case I am in with a chance.’

Here is more of the publisher’s blurb: ‘Mullin is irreverent, wry and candid. His keen sense of the ridiculous allows him to give a far clearer insight into the workings of Government than other, more overtly successful and self-important politicians. He offers humorous and incisive takes on all aspects of political life: from the build-up to Iraq, to the scandalous sums of tax-payers’ money spent on ministerial cars he didn’t want to use. His diary is a joy to read: brilliantly-observed, it will entertain and amuse far beyond the political classes.’

In advance of 2 March, extracts from the diaries are being published in the Mail on Sunday, which claims that, until now, the diaries have been ‘kept hidden from everyone but his family’. The book is available from Amazon at half the recommended retail price of £20.

Here’s a small sample of the delights in store. They come from Mullin’s first year in office, when working under John Prescott at the DETR. Personally, I think Mullin’s irreverence and/or wryness falls rather flat in some of this writing, especially when taking his effort to legislate on leylandii so self-importantly!

21 September 1999
‘At John Prescott’s office. JP, grim-faced in shirtsleeves, standing near the window. The reason for this morning’s angst is yet more interference by Downing Street in the business of the Department. Speed limits are the subject of today’s intervention.

His black mood is compounded by the fact that he has come to work this morning wearing unmatching shoes. We are permitted a brief giggle at this. Towards the end of the meeting a minion appears with a plastic bag containing an assortment of shoes.

JP has no concept of how to get the best out of people. His idea of conferring is to lie slumped in an armchair and deliver, at breakneck speed, a series of diatribes. Occasionally, he invites brief contributions from one or other of his Ministers, who are arranged around him on easy chairs. Now and then he solicits information from one of the advisers, who sit behind us on upright chairs.

Our main role is to laugh sycophantically at his jokes. This is how it must be at the court of Boris Yeltsin.’

13 October 1999
‘With Michael Meacher to discuss the dreaded leylandii hedges. After two years of faffing, the Department has produced a leaflet advising on suitable hedging for suburban gardens. ‘Where,’ Michael asks the officials, ‘does it actually say it is not a good idea to plant leylandii?’

‘Ah well, Minister, it doesn’t quite put it as boldly as that. We have to be careful of upsetting the industry.’ Pure Yes, Minister. Later, Brian Hackland - an official from No10 - calls in. Amazingly, The Man has indeed given the matter his attention.’

18 October 1999
‘Another exchange about leylandii with Hackland. ‘The climate in Downing Street is not right,’ he asserted. ‘What climate?’ I say. ‘I bet the Prime Minister hasn’t devoted more than 30 seconds of his time to the matter.’ Reluctantly Hackland disgorged two names, Jonathan Powell and Anji Hunter.

‘Hunter? Where does she fit in?’ ‘The Prime Minister values her political antennae.’

So, our entire effort is paralysed on the whim of the Prime Minister’s Special Assistant. Come back Marcia Falkender.’

Postscript: John Prescott, not to be entirely floored by Mullin’s diary revelation concerning the unmatching shoes, has retaliated (if that’s not too strong a word) with a story about Mullin in his blog, as reported by The Guardian. Prescott writes: ‘I wonder if he [Mullin] mentions in his book about the time when I was called by security to the front of the department’s building to deal with a tramp. I turned up to discover security refusing to let in a man dressed in a thick overcoat, scarf, gloves and a wooly Russian cap that covered his face and ears. I turned round to security and had to tell them: ‘That’s no tramp, that’s my junior minister - Chris Mullin.’

August Derleth Day

Today, 24 February, has just become August Derleth Day in the state of Wisconsin, US, thanks to a proclamation by the state governor, Jim Doyle. The proclamation was made to honour Derleth’s centenary, for he was born exactly 100 years ago. Although a versatile and prolific writer, he is most well remembered for promoting the horror stories of H P Lovecraft. He was also, though, a committed diarist, and published several volumes of diaries.

Here is the proclamation being read out today by Governor Doyle at Sauk City Park Hall (Sauk City being but a village): ‘. . . Whereas August W Derleth, a Wisconsin author born on February 24, 1909 in Sauk City, brought honor and distinction to himself, his community and his state during a lifetime spent in writing and publishing; and whereas, Derleth was educated in Sauk City beginning a writing career at age thirteen, publishing his first story in 1926; and whereas, he entered the University of Wisconsin where he continued writing, and graduated in 1930, after which he was briefly employed in an editorial position out-of-state; and . . .

Whereas, returning to Sauk City in 1931, Derleth embarked on a writing career leading to a contract with Charles Scribner’s Sons, the publication of the first of his Sac Prairie novels depicting the historical evolution of Sauk City and Prairie du Sac; the awarding of a Guggenhein Fellowship in 1938, and the ultimate publication of over 150 books ranging from history, historical novels, biography, poetry, contemporary novels, juvenilia, supernatural fiction and pastiches, marking him as the most prolific writer in Wisconsin history, and . . .

Whereas, Derleth founded Arkham House [a publishing company] . . . devoted to the works of H P Lovecraft and other writers of the macabre . . . and whereas, in 1941, Derleth was appointed literary editor of the Capital Times of Madison, a position he held until 1960, and whereas, Derleth died in 1971 at age 62, leaving behind two children, April Rose and Walden William and the many lives he touched through his works; and whereas, Derleth took continued pride in his Wisconsin roots as evidenced by his writings, his activities in lecturing on American Regional Literature and his Journals exploring the delights of rural Wisconsin,

Now, therefore, I, Jim Doyle, Governor of Wisconsin, do hereby proclaim February 24, 2009, the hundredth anniversary of August Derleth’s birth, as August Derleth Day.’

The long bibliography on Derleth’s Wikipedia page lists five published journals: Village Year: A Sac Prairie Journal (1941); Village Daybook (1947); Countryman’s Journal (1963); Wisconsin Country: A Sac Prairie Journal (1965); and Return to Walden West (1970). But John Howard, who maintains a website called Walden East with lots of information about Derleth, adds two other books with journal extracts: Walden West (1961) and Walden Pond: Homage to Thoreau (1968)

Howard says of Derleth: ‘His journal is full of variety. Even more so than in [his] novels, there is plenty of acute observation of nature: wildlife, plants, the weather and the changing seasons. And the human inhabitants of the region are put under the microscope and analysed. Comedy and tragedy is played out in equal measure, and recorded.’

An analysis of Derleth’s writing and books can be found on the Arkham House website. It says this of Countryman’s Journal: ‘Much of the entertainment results from his comic pictures of townspeople’s eccentricities, such as their colorful speech, and their dry wit. Conversely, the transience of human existence, evident in the many deaths, contrasts with nature’s survival, which he emphasizes by describing nature’s recurring seasonal changes. Derleth also reveals something about himself. He is both gregarious, which made it possible for him to learn much about others, and mildly abrasive, as shown by his running battle with one of the local priests.’

Here are two (undated) extracts from Derleth’s journal provided by the Walden East website:

‘Miss Ilsa Lahman passed: she who has always had delusions of grandeur. . . walking in her characteristic fashion, as if on eggshells, with the appearance of a slight limp: a hitch, actually. When asked what was wrong with Miss Lahman, Jo Merk replied, ‘She got that walking up and down the stairs in her medieval air castles.’ ’

‘Turning over his words in this place where, conceivably, they had taken shape for him, I was made to think of Sac Prairie, where, I suppose, I engage life in somewhat similar circumstances, allowing for a century’s advance in time. . . There are still solitary places in the woods and the marshes around Sac Prairie where, as Thoreau found it at Walden, only a railroad can be seen to remind one of civilization. . .’

Finally, John Howard also provides, on his Walden East website, an interesting article in which he traces how one small incident that happened on a train was not only recorded by Derleth in his journal, but used in his poetry and fiction as well.

World Chief Guide

Olave Baden-Powell, a key figure in the history of the Girl Guides, was born 120 years ago today. Coincidentally, it is also the birthday of her husband, Robert Baden-Powell, who launched the whole scouting movement a century or so ago. Girl Scouts and Guides celebrate this day each year as World Thinking Day. Olave must have kept some kind of diary since there are a few extracts online. More revealing, though, is a diary entry about (not by) her doing ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’.

Olave St Clair Soames was born on 22 February 1889 - exactly 120 years ago today - and was the youngest daughter of Harold Soames, a brewery owner. In 1912, aged only 23, she married Robert Baden-Powell, then 55, having met him on a liner sailing to New York. During the early years of the First World War, Olave spent a few months in France, but mostly helped her husband with secretarial services and by driving him to meetings. From about 1916, though, she became involved in working for the Girl Guides, becoming Chief Commissioner, then Chief Guide, and then, in 1930, World Chief Guide.

In 1918, Olave and her husband moved to Pax Hill, near Farnham, Hampshire, where they lived for 20 years and brought up three children. In 1939, they went to live in Kenya, where Robert died in 1941. The following year, she returned to live in Hampton Court Palace (since Pax Hill had been taken over by the Canadian military) and stayed there after the war. Thereafter, she continued touring to promote the Scout and Guide organisations. From 1942 until her death in 1977, she is said to have travelled the world five times taken 653 flights.

Today - 22 February - is also World Thinking Day for Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. It was chosen as such over 80 years ago, in 1926, precisely because of the joint birthday of Olave and Robert. This year’s theme is ‘stop the spread of AIDS, malaria and other diseases’; last year it was ‘Think about water’; and the year before it was ‘Discover your potential by taking the lead, growing friendships, and speaking out’.

A guide to archives on the history of Scouting can be found on PAXTU, the International Web Site for the History of Guiding and Scouting, and this lists many diaries left by Robert Baden-Powell. The same site has similar documents for the history of Guiding, but there is no mention of Olave’s diaries. However, there must be some, for the Olave Baden-Powell tribute website quotes a few short extracts. Here are three (exactly as they appear on the website).

1945
‘St. George's Day., Attended Scout and Guide celebrations of freedom in Paris. Toured through Normandy with General Lafont, Chief Scout of France. Continued through Alsace and Lorraine, and on VE Day crossed into Switzerland, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium, England, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland.’

1946
‘West Indies, British Guiana, Cuba, Mexico, the Unites Staets, Canada and Newfoundland. Travelled 3,720 miles by sea, 6,355 miles by train, 16,610 miles by air, and 3,565 miles by road. Made 231 speeches to audiences varying in number (from 30 to 20,000, gave 62 press interviews or radio talks. Attended World Conference at Evian, France. Visited Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and Holland.’

1949
‘Visited Holland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Belgium, France and Denmark and many parts of the British Isles; in a five months' tour of Africa travelled over 23,000 miles by air and visited 20 territories.’

And here is another brief entry, apparently from Olave’s diary (found on the Historical Boys’ Clothing website), just after the death of her husband in 1941: ‘He looked so sweet and perfect in death as he was in life - utterly utterly noble and good and dear and wonderful, great and faultless.’

Here, though, is a diary entry that gives a much better picture of Olave. It’s taken from the diary of the late Lorna Collins (quoted in Guiding in Australia - May 1989) and can be found on this Olave Baden-Powell tribute website.

June 1967
‘A rally had been organised for Saturday 25 June at the Perry Lakes Stadium. Girls had come from widespread country areas and there was the concern that as they assembled at the stadium, they would be very wet and very cold. So it was decided to have a warm-up activity in which everyone could join. The Chief - always greeting people: ‘How are you? How are you?’ - could see that the people were being asked to stand and they weren’t, so she got up, and of course, then every one got up and did ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’. When it was through the Chief called ‘again’ and everyone did it again. And so everyone was warm and happy and they sat down and the rally proceeded. Now the next day the Chief was to leave by plane for London. All the goodbyes had been said, all the hands shaken and all the VIPs kissed and she went up the gangway, stood at the top and waved, and of course everyone waved to her. One would think that that would be the end, but there at the doorway to the plane the Chief started ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’ and those back on the ground joined in.’

Pepys on Sir Edward Hyde

Sir Edward Hyde, historian, statesman and grandfather to two queens, was born 400 years ago today. He served in high capacity to Charles I and Charles II, and is generally thought to have written the best contemporary account of the Civil War. Although he didn’t leave behind any diaries himself, he is mentioned frequently by Samuel Pepys. One entry, for example, has Pepys telling a beautifully convoluted story about Hyde’s anger over some trees marked for felling.

Hyde was born in Dinton, Wiltshire, the sixth of nine children, on 18 February 1609 - four centuries ago today. He was educated at Oxford, and inherited the family estate after his two older brothers died. He was called to the bar in 1633, and became a Member of the Parliament in 1640. During the Civil War, he served as an adviser and then Chancellor of the Exchequer to King Charles I. However, eventually, he lost favour in a political capacity, and was put in charge of the King’s son, Prince Charles, who he escorted to exile in Jersey, arriving in 1646. He himself stayed there for two years, though the prince moved on to France.

While in Jersey, Hyde began writing History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England which today is considered to include the best contemporary account of the Civil War. (An early 18th century copy is currently on sale at Abebooks for over £12,000.)

On the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Hyde returned to England with the new king and became even closer to the royal family through the marriage of his daughter, Anne, to Charles’s brother James, the heir-presumptive - their two daughters, Mary II and Queen Anne, would both one day reign the kingdom. Hyde, or the Earl of Clarendon as he had become by then, served as Lord Chancellor from 1660 to 1667, giving his name to the Clarendon Code, which imposed restrictions on religious dissenters. In 1667, though, he lost favour with the king because of failures during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and was forced to flee to France, where he died in 1674.

The Lord Chancellor is mentioned many times in Pepys’s diary. Here is a fairly long extract, taken from an excellent website called simply The Diary of Samuel Pepys. It tells of Pepys being blamed by Sir Edward Hyde (Earl of Clarendon, the Lord Chancellor) for having allowed his trees to be marked for cutting. Pepys seeks out the Lord Chancellor and protests, saying that he did not know his property was involved, and that he was only carrying out a decision of the Navy Board. (NB: I have added some paragraph breaks to, and ommitted a few sentences from, the full extract for ease of reading.)

Thursday 14 July 1664
‘My mind being doubtful what the business should be, I rose a little after four o’clock, and abroad. Walked to my Lord’s [Sir Edward Mountague, Earl of Sandwich and Pepys’s patron], and nobody up, but the porter rose out of bed to me so I back again to Fleete Streete, and there bought a little book of law; and thence, hearing a psalm sung, I went into St. Dunstan’s, and there heard prayers read, which, it seems, is done there every morning at six o’clock; a thing I never did do at a chappell, but the College Chappell, in all my life.

Thence to my Lord’s again, and my Lord being up, was sent for up, and he and I alone. He did begin with a most solemn profession of the same confidence in and love for me that he ever had, and then told me what a misfortune was fallen upon me and him: in me, by a displeasure which my Lord Chancellor [Sir Edward Hyde] did show to him last night against me, in the highest and most passionate manner that ever any man did speak, even to the not hearing of any thing to be said to him: but he told me, that he did say all that could be said for a man as to my faithfullnesse and duty to his Lordship, and did me the greatest right imaginable.

And what should the business be, but that I should be forward to have the trees in Clarendon Park marked and cut down, which he, it seems, hath bought of my Lord Albemarle; when, God knows! I am the most innocent man in the world in it, and did nothing of myself, nor knew of his concernment therein, but barely obeyed my Lord Treasurer’s warrant for the doing thereof. And said that I did most ungentlemanlike with him, and had justified the rogues in cutting down a tree of his; and that I had sent the veriest Fanatique [Deane - a shipbuilder] that is in England to mark them, on purpose to nose him. All which, I did assure my Lord, was most properly false, and nothing like it true; and told my Lord the whole passage. My Lord do seem most nearly affected; he is partly, I believe, for me, and partly for himself.

So he advised me to wait presently upon my Lord, and clear myself in the most perfect manner I could, with all submission and assurance that I am his creature both in this and all other things; and that I do owne that all I have, is derived through my Lord Sandwich from his Lordship. So, full of horror, I went, and found him busy in tryals of law in his great room; and it being Sitting-day, durst not stay, but went to my Lord and told him so: whereupon he directed me to take him after dinner; and so away I home, leaving my Lord mightily concerned for me. I to the office, and there sat busy all the morning. . .

. . . and I to my Lord Chancellor’s; and there coming out after dinner I accosted him, telling him that I was the unhappy Pepys that had fallen into his high displeasure, and come to desire him to give me leave to make myself better understood to his Lordship, assuring him of my duty and service. He answered me very pleasingly, that he was confident upon the score of my Lord Sandwich’s character of me, but that he had reason to think what he did, and desired me to call upon him some evening: I named to-night, and he accepted of it.

So with my heart light I to White Hall . . . thence I to the Half Moone. . . and thence to my Lord Chancellor’s, and there heard several tryals, wherein I perceive my Lord is a most able and ready man. After all done, he himself called, ‘Come, Mr. Pepys, you and I will take a turn in the garden.’ So he was led down stairs, having the goute, and there walked with me, I think, above an houre, talking most friendly, yet cunningly. I told him clearly how things were; how ignorant I was of his Lordship’s concernment in it; how I did not do nor say one word singly, but what was done was the act of the whole Board. He told me by name that he was more angry with Sir G. Carteret than with me, and also with the whole body of the Board. But thinking who it was of the Board that knew him least, he did place his fear upon me; but he finds that he is indebted to none of his friends there.

I think I did thoroughly appease him, till he thanked me for my desire and pains to satisfy him; and upon my desiring to be directed who I should of his servants advise with about this business, he told me nobody, but would be glad to hear from me himself. He told me he would not direct me in any thing, that it might not be said that the Lord Chancellor did labour to abuse the King; or (as I offered) direct the suspending the Report of the Purveyors but I see what he means, and I will make it my worke to do him service in it.

But, Lord! to see how he is incensed against poor Deane, as a fanatique rogue, and I know not what: and what he did was done in spite to his Lordship, among all his friends and tenants. He did plainly say that he would not direct me in any thing, for he would not put himself into the power of any man to say that he did so and so; but plainly told me as if he would be glad I did something. Lord! to see how we poor wretches dare not do the King good service for fear of the greatness of these men. He named Sir G. Carteret, and Sir J. Minnes, and the rest; and that he was as angry with them all as me. But it was pleasant to think that, while he was talking to me, comes into the garden Sir G. Carteret; and my Lord avoided speaking with him, and made him and many others stay expecting him, while I walked up and down above an houre, I think; and would have me walk with my hat on.

And yet, after all this, there has been so little ground for this his jealousy of me, that I am sometimes afeard that he do this only in policy to bring me to his side by scaring me; or else, which is worse, to try how faithfull I would be to the King; but I rather think the former of the two. I parted with great assurance how I acknowledged all I had to come from his Lordship; which he did not seem to refuse, but with great kindness and respect parted. So I by coach home . . . At my office late, and so home to eat something, being almost starved for want of eating my dinner to-day, and so to bed, my head being full of great and many businesses of import to me.’

Lincoln and Fanny Seward

To mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the University of Rochester has put online a selection of diary entries written by Fanny, the daughter of Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William H. Seward. Among these diary entries is an eye-witness description of the attempted murder of her father by a Confederate spy and associate of the man who succeeded in assassinating Lincoln that very same day.

The twelfth of February was not only the 200th anniversary of the birth of Darwin (see previous article), but also of Abraham Lincoln, one of the US’s greatest presidents. He successfully led the country through the American Civil War, thus preserving the Union against the secessionist Confederates and ending slavery. But, as the war was drawing to a close, on 14 April 1865, Lincoln was assassinated - the first president, in fact, to be murdered - by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate spy.

On the same day, and at the same time, another Confederate spy and associate of Booth, Lewis Powell, attempted to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward. This plot, however, failed. He continued to serve as Secretary of State under the next president Andrew Johnson, and to negotiate the purchase of Alaska from Russia, an act that is remembered as his greatest achievement but which was ridiculed at the time as ‘Seward’s Folly’.

Many of Seward’s papers are held by the University of Rochester’s Rare Books and Special Collections department, and these include a treasure of letters to, from and about Lincoln. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth, on 12 February, the university’s library launched an exhibit entitled Lincoln at Rochester; and, in connection with this has made available some extracts from Fanny Seward’s diaries.

Frances (or Fanny) Seward’s life was short. Having contracted typhoid when a child she suffered ill health, and died when only 22. However, as a teenager and young woman, she was already taking over social duties in Washington, because her mother preferred to stay at the family home in Auburn. She began keeping a diary at 14, and continued until a few weeks before her death.

The university’s library website has just made available both the images and the transcribed texts of Fanny’s diary from 10 days in April 1865, up to and including 14 April. The final entry, for 14 April, is long, over 4,000 words, and provides an extraordinary eye-witness account of the attempted assassination of her father. Here is a short extract.

‘. . . I remember running back, crying out ‘Where’s Father?,’ seeing the empty bed. At the side I found what I thought was a pile of bed clothes - then I knew that it was Father. As I stood my feet slipped in a great pool of blood. Father looked so ghastly I was sure he was dead, he was white & very thin with the blood that had drained from the gashes about his face & throat. Fred was in the room till after Father was placed on the bed. Margaret says she heard me scream ‘O my God! Father’s dead.’ I remember that Robinson came instantly, &: lifting him, said his heart still beat - & he, with or without aid, laid him on the bed. Notwithstanding his own injuries Robinson stood faithfully at Father’s side, on the right hand - I did not know what should be done. Robinson told me everything - about staunching the blood with cloths & water. He applied them on the right side, & I, kneeling on the bed, on the left, put them on a wound on that side of the neck. Father seemed to me almost dead, but he spoke to me, telling me to have the doors closed, & send for surgeons, & to ask to have a guard placed around the house. . .

. . . It was then that I first heard about the President, one of the gentlemen telling Mother that he was shot. As this group stood there Father related in a clear, distinct manner, his recollections of the whole scene - between each word he drew breath, as one dying might speak, & I feared the effort might cost his remaining strength. I think we gave him tea in the night - at his own request. I was in constant apprehension of some fatal turn in his symptoms . . .’

There is another set of extracts from Fanny’s diaries on the libary website - from September 1860, when Fanny was 15. These were published in the Library Bulletin for an article on Stumping for Lincoln (politicians are said to be stumping when they’re on the campaign trail). In an introduction to the extracts, Patricia C Johnson explains how Fanny came to be ‘stumping for Lincoln’ that year.

‘There was no possibility of Mrs Seward joining her husband on the trip. She was a semi-invalid who hated crowds, parties, travel and, most of all, the political limelight. She agreed, though, when Seward decided to substitute their fifteen-year-old daughter, Fanny. The motive for taking the young girl was not solely or even mainly political. Seward intended that his beloved only daughter should have a wide, liberal education and the campaign provided an opportunity for her to glimpse much of the Midwest. The parents also hoped that it would improve her health. She was a delicate child, subject especially to coughs, colds, and fevers and there was a chance that the exercise, fresh air, and change of climate would bolster her weak constitution.’

Johnson also explains that Fanny would write notes in a pocketbook diary and then transfer those notes, in an expanded form, into her main diary, but that the diary for 1860 no longer exists. Here, though, is an entry from the pocketbook diary for 6 September 1860.

'Rose rather late. Visited the State Reform School - Interesting and humane much pleased with it, State Agricultural college men deliverd adress to Father. Procession formed, Took in our carriages - it was between two and three miles long. Girls dressed as States, wideawakes etc. Paraded through city - Speaking at a public common, covered stage. Father’s lap - He began speaking stage began to give way - we off all right - he spoke - Gen Nye followed - Company dinner - Torchlight and roman candles evening were gay with the Hosmers such nice people. Mr Howard joined.’

Darwin and his diaries

Charles Darwin, one of the greatest and most important scientists that ever lived, was born two centuries ago today. It is well known that his discoveries regarding evolution were first seeded while travelling round the world on HMS Beagle. During that journey, he wrote a detailed diary which has been published many times; but he also kept another diary throughout his life - unfortunately it’s very brief. Darwin’s wife, Emma, kept a diary too, also very brief (which seems to ignore her husband’s birthday!). All three diaries are freely available on the internet thanks to the wonderful Darwin Online website.

There is no shortage of biographical information about Darwin on the internet, at Wikipedia for example, or the BBC website. The Diary Junction gives links to etexts of his diaries, and the Natural History Museum has a whole series of Darwin-related events and exhibitions.

Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, on 12 February 1809, exactly 200 years ago today. His mother died when he was eight, and he left home at 16 to study medicine at Edinburgh University. Rejecting the medical profession, though, he went to Cambridge to prepare for Holy Orders. However, this line of work didn’t suit him either, and he accepted an invitation to serve as unpaid naturalist on a five year scientific expedition aboard the HMS Beagle.

After returning, in 1839, Darwin married his cousin Emma Wedgwood, and in 1842, they moved to Down House at Downe in Kent, where they lived for the rest of their lives, bringing up 10 children, of whom only seven survived beyond puberty. Darwin worked at Down House, living off inherited money, reading and researching widely (including a long study on barnacles). Despite sometimes being incapacitated by illnesses, he established reputations in the fields of taxonomy, geology and the distribution of flora and fauna.

It was not until 1859, after painstaking consideration, that he finally published his famous theory on natural selection in The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. And it took him another 12 years to publish The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. It was Darwin’s research and thought processes during the five years on board HMS Beagle that was to lead to these revolutionary theories, and, consequently, the journal he kept during that voyage has great historic and scientific importance.

Darwin wrote a book about the journey in the form of a journal which he based on his diary. This was first published in 1839 along with two further volumes written by other participants on the journey, Captain Robert Fitzroy and Captain Philip King. This three-tome publication was originally called Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries visited by H.M.S. Beagle, under the command of Captain Fitzroy, R.N. from 1832 to 1836. However, it has been reproduced in various forms since then, and is often just called The Voyage of the Beagle these days.

All three of these tomes, and a bibliographical introduction to them by R. B. Freeman, are available on the excellent Darwin Online website - a one-stop source for all Darwin’s publications. These volumes also seem to be the source for an ongoing blog called Charle’s Darwin’s Beagle Diary which is publishing texts by Darwin and Fitzroy exactly 175 years after they were written; but, for some reason, the blog doesn’t give any information about itself.

Darwin Online, though, also provides the original text of Darwin’s actual Beagle diary (held by English Heritage at Down House). Here is an extract from the diary during his visit to the Galapagos Islands.

17 September 1835
‘The Beagle was moved into St Stephens harbor. We found there an American Whaler & we previously had seen two at Hoods Island. - The Bay swarmed with animals; Fish, Shark & Turtles were popping their heads up in all parts. Fishing lines were soon put overboard & great numbers of fine fish 2 & even 3 ft long were caught. This sport makes all hands very merry; loud laughter & the heavy flapping of the fish are heard on every side. - After dinner a party went on shore to try to catch Tortoises, but were unsuccessful. - These islands appear paradises for the whole family of Reptiles. Besides three kinds of Turtles, the Tortoise is so abundant; that [a] single Ship’s company here caught from 500–800 in a short time. - The black Lava rocks on the beach are frequented by large (2–3 ft) most disgusting, clumsy Lizards. They are as black as the porous rocks over which they crawl & seek their prey from the Sea. - Somebody calls them ‘imps of darkness’. - They assuredly well become the land they inhabit. - When on shore I proceeded to botanize & obtained 10 different flowers; but such insignificant, ugly little flowers, as would better become an Arctic, than a Tropical country. - The birds are Strangers to Man & think him as innocent as their countrymen the huge Tortoises. Little birds within 3 & four feet, quietly hopped about the Bushes & were not frightened by stones being thrown at them. Mr King killed one with his hat & I pushed off a branch with the end of my gun a large Hawk.’

Also at Darwin Online can be found what Darwin called, in his autobiography, the ‘little diary, which I have always kept’. It’s not a real diary of the Samuel Pepys or Alan Clark variety, mores the pity, but just a few notes for each year. It does, though, span the whole of his life. In a short introduction Dr John van Wyhe, the director of Darwin Online, writes:

‘In August 1838, while living in London, Charles Darwin began his ‘Journal’ or diary in a small 3 x 4 inch notebook. He made back dated records of his life from birth to that date and continued adding entries recording his work and private events until December 1881, four months before he died.’ There is also a comment on the diary by Darwin’s son, Francis: ‘It is unfortunately written with great brevity, the history of a year being compressed into a page or less, and contains little more than the dates of the principal events of his life, together with entries as to his work, and as to the duration of his more serious illnesses.’

Here is the entire entry for 1869 (including one note for 11 Feb, the day before Darwin was 60).

‘Feb. 10th Finished 5th Edit of Origin: has taken me 46 days.

Feb. 11th Sexual Selection of Mammals & Man & Preliminary Chapter on Sexual Selection (with 10 days for notes on Orchids) to June 10th when I went to North Wales.

On Augt 4 recommenced going over all chapters on Sexual Selection.

Feb. 16th - 24th to Erasmus.

June 10th started for Caerdon, Barmouth sleeping at Shrewsbury. Returned July 31st having slept at Stafford. Weak & unwell.

Novr 1st to 9th Erasmus.’

Emma, Darwin’s wife, also kept notebooks, the images of which (though not the texts) are available at the Darwin Online website. Janet Browne, in her introduction to them, points out that they ‘are not discursive journals’ but were used ‘to make notes of appointments, important family events, a seemingly endless succession of illnesses and remedies, primarily relating to her children and husband, visits to and from relatives and friends, concerts to attend, minor expenses, charitable activities and other daily memoranda’. And, in this sense, she says, ‘they constitute a vivid record of daily life in the Darwin household. Indeed, they take the reader right to the heart of family life.’

There are no entries in the diaries for 12 February 1859 or 1869 or 1879, when Darwin was 50, 60 and 70 respectively. On 12 February 1849, all Emma writes is ‘sick twice in the evening’. Here, though, are a few entries taken from the week that Darwin died, in April 1882 (I have no idea what 3 1/2 means, but I think Polly was Darwin’s dog).

17 April 1882
‘good day
a little work -
out in orch twice’

18 April 1882
‘Ditto
Fatal attack at 12’

19 April 1882
‘3 1/2‘

20 April 1882
‘Polly died
All the sons arrived’

The Demolition Decorators

Thirty years ago today I attended the start of a trial against several members of a band of performers called the Demolition Decorators, and then wrote about the event in my diary. This seems, thus, a perfectly good excuse to revisit all my other diary entries in 1978 and 1979 concerning the DDs, as well as one five years later.

The Demolition Decorators say they were ‘an extraordinary collective of musicians and comedians’ based in London in the latter part of the 1970s. This retro-publicity can be found as part of the promotion for Don’t say baloney, a CD put together, in 2005, by Arif Usmani, one of the DD leaders, and available from various websites, including CD Baby. It also reveals that the DDs ‘chalked up 24 arrests for performing in the street, had a kamikaze suicide squad and squatted the main stage at the Bath Festival to hold a ‘people’s event’ complete with laundry service’.

The DDs called themselves ‘incidentalists’, it seems, because many performances comprised confrontations: ‘Audiences could not be neutral and many outdoor performances involved an appearance by the police. At one gig, some of the audience were so incensed, they firebombed the hall. Although very political, they were never fanatical or bitter. There was a mystical quality about them.’ They also claim to have ‘single-handedly‘ won buskers the right to play in the London Underground system.

A dozen names are listed on the credits of Don’t say baloney, but I’m certainly not one of them. My involvement with the DDs was fairly short-lived, and very non-committal. I think I found the whole thing vaguely amusing or entertaining, and failed to absorb how seriously others in the group felt about certain issues. In any case, although I did indulge in occasional and indulgent acts of performance art, they were without political focus. Moreover, I was much happier with a pen in my hand than with an audience in front of me.

Here are all the diary entries I made concerning the Demolition Decorators - they can also be found on my Pikle website. At the time, they and other alternative organisations were squatting in a Covent Garden building on Tower Street I think. The diary entries lead up to the fire, in December 1978, that started during a party and gutted the building, and to February 1979 - exactly 30 years ago - when I attended the trial of four DD members. There is also an entry from five years later, one that brings fresh enjoyment every time I read it! (BIT refers to the BIT Information Service, and IT to International Times - see Wikipedia for more information.)

2 October 1978
‘Tommy has his eyes wide open; his eyeballs roll around and up high as he tries to formulate exactly what he wants to say. George and Bill yawn. A frizzy black student expounds ideas on politics and theatre, and is supported by a hard-nosed, determined kid (from the slums?). They are here to ask for the services of the Demolition Decorators; they have patiently waited their turn on the agenda. I yawn. The Demolition Decorators’ cause for the month. We are to picket shops that sell South African goods. Yes, folks, every small tin of South African pilchards that you buy supports APARTHEID. This is what happened: these people found out their local health food shop was selling South African goods. The shop was informed that it might lose customers in future, but it didn’t listen. So they organised a small picket, and it succeeded almost immediately - all South African goods were removed from the shelves. So, now they want to organise a bigger picket, and they want the DDs to help.’

6 November 1978
‘Surely, a whole play, or a novel, could be written entitled ‘The rise and fall of the Demolition Decorators’. Another Monday meeting passed by. The group and its members are more interesting than the actual gigs they peform. Tonight, for example, we had a sharp-but-dulled-by-drugs couple from BIT who took up our time and space. They wanted to hold their tenth anniversary in our squat. The mob, our mob were patient with them. I find myself willing and practical but often defeated by the criss-cross mutterings that cut under and fly over me. I walk out into the street to collect some boxes. I am in bare feet. I return and crush them beneath my feet and feel the fire of my impatience. I tramp around avoiding eyes, the quick and supple. I catch the crossfires but have no effect on them.’

11 November 1978
‘Pete and Paul organised a gig last night, a Demolition Decorators gig. It was explosive. Beryl and the Peryls were booked to perform at 8:30, according to ‘Time Out’, but they didn’t start until 11 or finish till midnight. And the power blew, so the show’s finale only came with the help of everyone’s matches. Two bands and Ruff Theatre had also been due to play at the event, but the whole thing was a cock-up. Since this is the alternative scene, though, people are supposed to keep cool, not get mad. It was chaos - four bands and two and a half theatre groups hanging around all squabbling about the running order. Pete did keep his cool, and Paul calmly tried to organise the performers but they eventually took things into their own hands. Two of the DDs were chanting to some seventh heaven and calling it peace and prosperity.’

15 November 1978
‘The Demolition Decorators Monday meeting. Notes twang through the cold buildings from a solo electric guitar. The ex-coach seat that I sit upon is held upright by breeze blocks; others sit on bottle crates; a board covers a hole in the floor caused by the fire in the grate spreading too far. Mary wanders around, sober calm. She’s pretty tonight, hoping to do something, anything. There is a rumour that the police are going to raid us because of the wood fire, so Mary has been cleaning out the ashes. ‘Upstairs at Ronnies’ is scribbled on the wall with orange paint behind a makeshift counter. Next door Willy shows the visitors from BIT his cubbyhole, the IT office. Pages and articles and photos are still strewn across the table. The magazine was due at the printers on Friday, but one person’s perfection is cauterised by another’s ideals, and the pages get changed and cut, cut and changed. Meanwhile, revenue from advertising is awaited to pay the printing costs. Single notes still twang. A lady has been and gone with the electricity money, but a small donation from BIT has upped our finances slightly. It’s nine o’ clock, still no-one else has arrived, so the Monday meeting finally starts - and my gut rumbles.’

3 December 1978
‘Poor old IT was gutted; poor old BIT was definitely unlucky. They invited guests from everywhere, and from anywhere they came. A 10th anniversary and all that. How many bands were to come? 9 or 10, 20 or 30. It was all friends and grooves, smokers and abortion campaigners, squatters and the rest. What a shame. Poor old IT, its thousand files, its million prints, its two typewriters, its five cabinets, its three desks - who was to blame after all? Those two friends, the best of friends, too keen, too overworked, who let the paint dry, and the wallpaper dry, and then catch fire, with flames licking up the wall, up the wall, out the window, the side of the house. I hear Paul went squeak at 2am and saved a life or two, but neither an office nor a bed was saved. Malcolm stumbled in with lips that almost hold a smile. He has soft hairs on his face, a twitch in his eye, and finds a flick of the eyeball when he needs attention, and then a slight twisting of the head down and to the side before he lifts it and takes it into the direction he will speak. And he uses such gentle speech, such insistent gentleness. He talks of plans for a coffee bar. He is keen. He has ideas. But the time comes to talk of something else. Arif proposes tubal theatre. Sara jumps with glee, with her bright and ebullient cheeks, her shiny ponytails. Conversation somehow returns to the coffee bar. Duncan is an old timer - is it his eyebrows I remember? Is he osteoporotic? He certainly isn’t very tall and tends to crouch, chin tucked well into shoulders, almost tortosic (i.e. like a tortoise). He is very quiet, and can only talk in paragraphs. He’s an antique book runner, i.e. he goes to jumble sales and sells to the trade. He is not far removed from a tramp - but then are any of us I wonder. When he is asked to speak, he talks not of policies or future gigs or special nights but of his kinship with the squatters. He is too old. I interrupt to say we really don’t want to listen to such well-rehearsed trite but am beaten down, brow-beaten down by the rest who are enthroned on benches of respect for the holy papa. In any case, the conversation reverts to coffee bars.’

6 February 1979
‘Today is the trial of four defendants - Jisimi, Tony Allan, Jonathan Graham and Alan Boyd. They were arrested and charged with causing an obstruction to the highway. Court Four at the Wells St. Magistrate’s Court is a fountain of wood panelling. The judge has a built-in desk raised above the rest. The scribe and secretary sit below him, silent and powerless, seemingly content with their lot. And there, in dark seats, are the Leicester Square Four, young eccentric and fearless challengers of the law. The judge is firm and fair with a sense of humour. He makes all this clear to the court by making fun of both the police and the defendants. The young, almost adolescent, policeman and woman are tense and alert in their starched uniforms. They have prepared well and corroborated their stories. A good defence, though, would have had them both in tears. Jisimi is out to upset. He plays with his proud hair, and tells the court how he dislikes NOT being talked about. Jonathan is a goat, he prances and prattles around. His confusion is obvious. Only Tony, I feel, is on top of the situation, and is able to challenge the prosecution. The prosecution proves to be cool and generous, but the judge wins the day by, not only, keeping the court under excellent control without being condescending, by being funny without being carefree, and fair without pretentions. At 4:30, he gave the defendants a five minute lecture, advising them very strongly to get a lawyer. The case continues on 15 May.’

10 August 1984
‘I was at R’s last night, talking to a girl called Sara about my clownish past. She mentioned a house full of parties in Covent Garden, five or six years ago, so I tried the name ‘Demolition Decorators’ on her. She recognised it immediately. She said she had thought we were all magic, being only 14 at the time. I told her about the evening I mimed and clowned building of a room with rubble and rubbish, oblivious to the party going on around me, and she actually and vividly remembered me and my act. Amazing. What is more - I have to say this to someone - I remember that I impressed myself that Friday evening. It was an improvisation lasting a couple of hours and I really acted, really built a room and really possessed it, despite the party. But I felt at the time nobody had appreciated my invention, my playing, my art. And when Sara remembered me, it was as though I’d been waiting all these years for the applause I felt I deserved.’

Mendelssohn’s honeymoon

Felix Mendelssohn, a famous German composer, was born two hundred years ago today. Although not a regular diarist, he did keep a diary for seven months jointly with his new wife after they were married. This was published for the first time about a decade ago; a few short extracts are available online.

Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg, Germany, on 3 February 1809, into a wealthy Jewish family, although his father converted to Christianity and took on the name Bartholdy. The young Mendelsshon grew up in Berlin, where the family moved when he was two, and where he was soon considered a child prodigy, performing at the piano and composing music. While still a boy he met the writer Johann Goethe who was to prove an enduring influence. Apart from music, Mendelssohn learned to sketch and to speak several languages.

By 15, Mendelssohn had composed his first symphony, and by 16 his famous string octet. Alongside composing, he also worked as a conductor, touring Europe, becoming especially loved in his native Germany and in England, where he became Queen Victoria’s favourite composer. In time, he would hold positions in Dusseldorf, Berlin and Leipzig. Among his most well-known compositions are Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream, Songs without Words and the Scottish Symphony. In the last years of his life, he suffered ill health and died young in 1847 after a series of strokes.

However, ten years earlier in 1937, he married Cécile, a union that was to prove happy and to produce five children. After the wedding, and while on honeymoon, the couple kept a joint diary for seven months. The manuscript is held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, where one of the librarians, Peter Ward Jones, is something of a specialist in Mendelssohn. His edited text of the diary was published by Clarendon Press in 1997 as The Mendelssohns on Honeymoon: 1837 Diary of Felix and Cécile Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Together with Letters to Their Families.

The publisher’s blurb says this of the book: ‘Enlivened by the couple’s private sense of humour, [the diary] begins by chronicling their seven-week honeymoon journey in the Rhineland and Black Forest, and later includes an extensive account of the composer’s visit to England in the summer that year, when he conducted and played at the Birmingham Music Festival.’ Here is a short extract, culled from Amazon.co.uk, in which Mrs Mendelssohn is less than complimentary about Rhinelanders.

Wednesday 5 April 1837
‘In the morning we walked for a good half-mile along the Rhine as far as the river crossing. Misunderstandings on the way. Made plans at the boatman’s cottage. Return at three for lunch. In the afternoon Felix played the organ of an atrociously decorated church - a wretched box of whistles. Walk to the cathedral and down into the crypt, but no spring. The sacristy - the subterranean chapel with its strange pillars. In the course of the evening and well into the night endured the loathsome company of Rhinelanders who behaved little better than their large dogs.’