A swarthy old man

One hundred and fifty years ago today Edward Bates, a potential US presidential candidate at the time, began keeping a diary, one he was to carry on writing while serving as Attorney General under Abraham Lincoln and for much of the last decade of his life. Bates’ diary - which is full of interesting entries about politics, society, gardening and literature - is freely available on the internet.

Edward Bates was born in 1793, on the family plantation in Goochland County, Virginia. He served in the war of 1812 against Britain, and then moved to St. Louis, Missouri Territory, to study law. He was admitted to the bar in 1817, and worked as an attorney while also rising through the political ranks in the new state of Missouri. He then served a term in the US House of Representatives (1827-1829) before returning to state politics in the 1830s.

Bates became a prominent member of the Whig Party during the 1840s. When the party broke up, though, he became a Republican. He also became involved in the campaign against slavery, and freed his own slaves. In 1860, Bates was one of the nominations to become the party’s presidential candidate but when it became clear he couldn’t win, he gave his full support to Lincoln, and was subsequently rewarded by being appointed Attorney General.

During his term of office in Lincoln’s administration, Bates opposed military conflict with the Confederacy; and then, during the civil war, he opposed the recruitment of black regiments. Subsequently, Lincoln and Bates disagreed about how the Confederacy should be treated after the war, and Bates resigned in November 1864. He died just over 140 years ago in March 1869. For more on Bates, see Wikipedia or Spartacus.

A diary - or rather notebooks - Bates kept in the last decade of his life was edited by Howard K Beale and published in Volume IV of the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the year 1930 as The Diary of Edward Bates 1859-1866. This edition is freely available at Internet Archive. More recently, editions have been published by Da Capo Press in 1971 and Read Books in 2007, and these are partly viewable on Googlebooks.

The Preface to The Diary of Edward Bates 1859-1866 explains that it contains the edited contents of five volumes held by the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress. The first covers the period from April 1859, when Bates was already seriously discussing the possibility of his nomination for the Presidency, to February 1861, when he was about to depart for Washington to enter Lincoln’s Cabinet. The second contains ‘Notes of Business in Cabinet’ from February 1861 to November 1862. And the last is ‘badly worn and bulging with newspaper clippings and other insertions’. The preface also notes that although Bates kept an earlier diary (from 1846 to 1852), held by the Missouri Historical Society, it was not available for inclusion in this book.

In his introduction to the diary, Beale talks of it as being important in terms of politics, local and national, and social history: Bates ‘was interested in the minutiae of life’ such as ‘the weather, his garden, his servants, his financial dealings, the cost of a watch, his changes from summer to winter clothing, repairs on the outbuildings’. Plus, Beale says, one of the most interesting features of the diary is ‘the breadth of reading and familiarity with works of literature and history that it reveals’.

Here is the start of the very first entry in The Diary of Edward Bates 1859-1866, dated 20 April 1859, exactly 150 years ago today: ‘Today was published in St Louis papers (copied from the New York Tribune) a recent letter of mine to the Whig Committee of New York, in answer to their call upon me for my views and opinions on the politics of the country, and the signs of the times.’ And there follows the text of the long letter, and much about Bates’ politics.

A week or so later on 29 April, he wrote this in his diary: ‘This is the anniversary of my arrival in St Louis, 45 years ago April 29, 1814. Then, I was a ruddy youth, of 20, now I am a swarthy old man of 65, with a grey beard, and a head beginning to grow bald. In that lapse of time, I have witnessed mighty changes in population, locomotion, commerce and the arts; and the change is still going on, with a growing impetus. And every year adds to the relative importance of the Central position of St Louis. Already, it is the focal point of the great Valley, and, in course of time, will become the seat of Empire in North America. I will soon sink into oblivion, but St Louis the village in which I studied law will become the seat of wealth and power the ruling city of the continent.’

And here is the entry from 15 April 1865, the day of Lincoln’s assassination (see also earlier article Lincoln and Fanny Seward for another diary entry of the same day).

‘This morning we have the astounding news, by various telegrams that last night President Lincoln was murdered in a public Theatre, in Washington! and that the assassin escaped, in the stupid amazement of the crowd, by leaping from the box to the stage and disappearing behind the scenes. One account says that as the assassin ran across the stage, brandishing a knife, he exclamimed [sic] ‘I am avenged sic semper tyr[&]nnis’. Sic semper tyrannis is the motto on the shield of Virginia and this may give a clue to the unravelling of a great conspiracy, for this assassination is not the act of one man; but only one scene of a great drama.

Also that about the same hour, Mr. Seward, being ill in bed, was assailed by another (or the same) assassin, and received several stabs, but it is not yet known whether or no they are mortal !

It is also said that two of his sons (in attendance on a/c of his sickness his severe hurt - lately, at Eichmond) were dangerously wounded by the assassin : Fred : W Asst. Secy, was knocked down by a billet, over [the] head; and Major S paymaster, U. S. A. was severely stabbed.

This day was appointed by authority, for displays of rejoicing and thanksgiving over the recent great victories of the national arms. I presume it is turned into a day of mourning.

We will thank God as heartily, for the solid benefits derived by the nation, from those great achievements, but at such a time, any boistrous display of joy would be contrary to good feeling and good taste.

I shall abstain from all ostentacious [sic] displ[a]y of exuberant emotion, for besides a deep sense of the calamity which the nation has sustained, my private feelings are deeply moved by the sudden murder of my chief, with and under whom I have served the country, through many difficult and trying scenes, and always with mutual sentiments of respect and friendship. I mourn his fall, both for the country and for myself.’

Perfect order that prevails

Alexis de Tocqueville died 150 years ago today. Alexis de who? A Frenchman of noble birth, he travelled to the United States while still a young man to investigate the penal system there, and on his return to France wrote a seminal two volume text on democracy in America. While on his travels, though, he also kept a diary which was published in English 50 years ago.

Tocqueville was born in 1805 in Paris to descendants of a noble Norman family, and was tutored privately before attending college in Metz, and studying law in Paris. His family secured him a position as an apprentice judge in Versailles, where he stayed for several years learning about the law, but also becoming increasing liberal and developing a belief in the inevitable decline of the aristocracy. Then came the July Revolution of 1830 in which Charles X abdicated and Louis-Philippe acceded to the throne, which resulted in Tocqueville’s family losing position and influence. Tocqueville himself, though, saw France moving towards more democracy, and was keen to learn how such a system was working in the United States.

In 1831, have secured an official commission from the French government to investigate the American penal system, Tocqueville (then aged only 25) and his friend Gustave de Beaumont (28) sailed for the New World. They travelled for nine months touring, going west to Michigan and south to New Orleans, but spending most of their time in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. As they travelled, they interviewed influential and prominent people, and recorded their thoughts and observations on the social and political institutions they found, not only the prisons. On returning to France, they wrote their report on the US penitentiary system which received wide acclaim.

More importantly, Tocqueville also wrote De la démocratie en Amérique which was published in two volumes (1835 and 1840). This was translated into English, with the title Democracy in America, and soon became very popular in Europe and America. It is still studied and referred to today - see Wikipedia - as ‘a classic work of political science, social science, and history’. (The full text is widely available on the internet, see Googlebooks for example.) The book helped establish Tocqueville’s reputation as a political thinker, and earned him admission to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques and the French Academy. Until his death, 150 years ago today on 16 April 1859, he played a significant part in French politics, and travelled to collect more information for his ideas and books. There is plenty of biographical information about Tocqueville available online, at Wikipedia for example or the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

During their fact-finding journey to the United States, both Tocqueville and Beaumont wrote many letters and kept diaries, but only Tocqueville’s diary survives. This was printed as part of his Œuvres Complètes, by Gallimard in Paris, and then translated into English in 1959 (perhaps to mark the 100th anniversary of Tocqueville’s death) and published as Journey to America by Faber and Faber and Yale University Press. In 1990, CUA Press published Tocqueville’s Journey in Ireland, July-August, 1835, some of which can be previewed at Googlebooks.

Here is one entry from Tocqueville’s diary about Independence Day in 1831.

4 July 1831
Ceremony of 4th July. Mixture of impressions, some funny, some very serious. Militia on foot and on horse, speeches swollen with rhetoric, jug of water on platform, hymn to liberty in church. Something of the French spirit.

Perfect order that prevails. Silence. No police. Authority nowhere. Festival of the people. Marshal of the day without restrictive power, and obeyed, free classification of industries, public prayer, presence of the flag and of old soldiers. Real emotion.

Departure from Albany in the night of 4th July. Valley of the Mohawk. Hills not high. Wooded the whole way up. A part of the valley wooded too. In general the whole country has the look of a wood in which clearings have been made. Much resemblance to Lower Normandy. Every sign of a new country. Man still making clearly ineffective efforts to master the forest. Tilled fields covered with shoots of trees; trunks in the middle of the corn.

Nature vigorous and savage. Mixture in the same field of bushes and trees of a thousand different species, plants sown by man and various self-sown weeds. Brooks on all sides. New country peopled by an old people. Nothing untamed but the ground; dwellings clean and well cared for; shops in the middle of the forest; newspapers in isolated cabins. The women well turned out.

Not a trace of the Indians, the Mohawks, the most admired and the bravest of the confederate tribes of the Iroquois.

Road infernal. Carriage without springs and with curtains.

Calmness of the Americans about all these annoyances; they seem to put up with them as necessary and passing ills.

A jolly double tricycle ride

Due to be published today, perhaps, by Liverpool University Press is The Diary of Elizabeth Lee - ‘a rare firsthand account of adolescent life in Victorian Britain’. There is not much advanced information about the book from the publishers, however the diary has already been used as source material by one of its editors for an academic paper on the history of transport technologies - not least the double tricycle.

Elizabeth Lee was born into a large middle class family in Birkenhead in 1867. Her father was a draper and gentleman’s outfitter. For about 10 years - from 1884, when she was 16, to 1892 - Elizabeth kept a diary. This has been edited by Colin G. Pooley and Richard Lawton (geography professors at Lancaster and Liverpool universities respectively) with Siân Pooley a research student, and is being published by Liverpool University Press as Growing up on Merseyside in the Late Nineteenth Century - The Diary of Elizabeth Lee.

According to the Liverpool University Press website, the book is due to be published in April 2009 (priced at £50). But according to Amazon.co.uk, it should have been released in December 2008 (yet it’s still not available). However, Amazon.com has the publishing date set for today, 15 April 2009. None of those three websites has much information about the diary. The blurb on Amazon says: ‘There have been a number of diaries published relating to ‘ordinary’ people, but most accounts were written as life histories, late in life, by people who eventually gained some degree of fame or prominence in society. This very rare firsthand account provides a unique insight into adolescent life in Victorian Britain.’

There is, however, more information about Lee’s diary available on the internet in a paper, written by Pooley and two colleagues, presented to the Alternative Mobility Futures conference at Lancaster University in January 2004 - The impact of new transport technologies on intra-urban mobility: a view from the past. In this paper, the authors draw on three main sources: individual diaries, oral history interviews and archival evidence. The first of these is, essentially, Elizabeth Lee’s diary which, the authors say, seems ‘to be a remarkably frank and artless account of the everyday life of a middle class adolescent girl in late-Victorian England’.

The focus of the paper is entirely on transport. Here’s an excerpt: ‘Bicycles (and tricycles thought to be more appropriate for women) were a relatively new transport innovation in the 1880s. They gained rapid popularity for leisure amongst those that could afford a bicycle, but did not achieve widespread use as an everyday means of transport until the 1920s. Elizabeth did not own a bicycle, though her brothers did and they undertook long rides (for instance from Birkenhead to Manchester). The novelty of the bicycle and tricycle is noted in her diary, with bikes mostly used for leisure activities. Although she knew both men and women from her circle of friends who rode bicycles, Elizabeth never learned to ride during the period of her diary, and she notes only one occasion when she is given a ride on a double tricycle. Like driving, it was a form of individualized transport from which she was excluded, probably by her gender and class.’

And here are a few transport-related extracts from Lee’s diary (the Mersey Railway Tunnel was officially opened on 20 January 1886):

1 February 1886
‘Fine day. The railway under the Tunnel was opened for traffic today and I went to L’pool by it. I went up in the ‘lift’ when I got to L’pool and there was such a frightful crush to get it. Had a good look round L’pool and came back by train. Such a lot of gentleman in the station. It was so jolly but I got nearly squashed to death.’

3 August 1886
‘Baked today. Mr. Rimmington and J. Carless came up tonight on a double tricycle and they gave me such a jolly ride on it up and down the road.’

27 April 1888
‘Tonight Mr. Bragg took me to a ball at the City Hall, Liverpool. Mr. Rimmington took Miss Homes. Of course we all went together. Enjoyed myself immensely. We caught the 4.a.m. boat and came home (all the lot of us) in a hansom (which is only made for two).’

10 July 1892
‘Lovely day. Mr. Young called and had a row with him. Went to Kirk Braddam with Tom F. It is quite a sight to see, they have an open-air service. Drove in gig with Tom thro’ Peel to Glen Maye. Loveliest place I ever saw. I drove home all the way and round the Prom. the Scotchman saw me etc. people did look, as it is quite an uncommon thing to see a lady driving. Percy, C. Needham and I went down to see Tom off by 12.pm boat. So sorry he’s gone (to Glasgow).’

Postscript: Some pages of Elizabeth Lee’s diary can be previewed at Googlebooks.

Ether, a gorilla, and poppies

‘Mr Gorilla though ill and unacclimatized (having been in Liverpool only 24 hours) cost 250 pounds.’ Harvey Cushing, an American neurosurgeon born 140 years ago today, wrote these words in his diary while still a young man and working in England. He is remembered because Cushing’s disease was named after him, but also because he was a pioneer in teaching neurosurgery, as well as being a Pulitzer Prize winning author.

Cushing was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 8 April 1869, the son and grandson of physicians. He graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1895. After an internship at Massachusetts General Hospital, he studied surgery under William Stewart Halsted at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, where he returned to work after several years of living overseas. In 1902, he married Katharine Stone Crowell and they had five children. In 1912, he was appointed professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, remaining there for two decades, but for war service in Europe with the US Army Medical Corps. From 1933, he was Sterling Professor of neurology at Yale University School of Medicine. He died in 1939.

Cushing is particularly remembered for being the first to describe a type of obesity of the face and trunk, caused by a malfunction of the pituitary gland, now known as Cushing’s disease or syndrome. But he also developed many of the basic surgical techniques for operating on the brain, and was considered the world’s leading teacher of neurosurgeons in the first decades of the 20th century. Wikipedia lists several other achievements including the use of x-rays to diagnose brain tumors, and the introduction to North America of blood pressure measurement.

However, Cushing was also an accomplished writer. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for a biography of Sir William Osler, a Canadian physician sometimes described as the father of modern medicine. And, for a quarter of a century, he wrote diaries. Two of these found their way into print: From a Surgeon’s Journal: 1915-1918 published by Little, Brown & Company in 1936; and A Visit to Le Puy-en-Velay published by The Rowfant Club in 1944. First editions of this latter book, which only had a small print run but contain some fine sketches, fetch several hundred pounds each - see Abebooks.

Extracts from both published works and the unpublished diaries can be found online in Elizabeth Thomson’s 1950 biography Harvey Cushing - Surgeon, Author, Artist - which is available at Internet Archive. Thomson explains how, early in 1893, possibly on New Year’s day, Cushing began to keep a journal: ‘In a small diary which had been a Christmas gift, he began to jot down the principal happenings of his days, and here, rather than in his letters, was recorded his complete absorption in his work - here also were revealed moments of uncertainty and inadequacy that rarely found their way into the cheerful notes he sent to his father and mother. ‘Still working over the poisons. Contemplate taking some myself,’ and ‘HARD luck again etherizing. . . . Dr P. must think I’m a clumsy dunce.’

Here is a short collection of Cushing’s diary entries over the next few months, as described by Thomson: ‘On Friday, January 13, he noted in his diary: ‘Encysted hydrocele . . . with Dr Porter - A K Stone assisted. Promised later to help in a bandaging course with policemen.’ On the 14th: ‘Big operating day. Etherized well but don’t seem to hit it off with the house officers.’ On the 16th: ‘Etherized 3-4 times and pretty poorly. Couldn’t study in evening and went to bed early. I fear for the Chemistry exam.’ And again in March, ‘Etherized this noon for Dr Porter who removed a dermoid cyst from a young girl’s neck. Beautiful operation. Assisted him till Alex came.’ On the 30th: ‘Shattuck told an old hypochondriac to remember the Eleventh Commandment - ‘Fret not thy Gizzard’ & forget all the others if necessary.’ On the 30th: ‘Walked out to park with Codman. Saw first robin . . . Bandaging class with policemen.’ ’

In 1900, Cushing sailed for Europe, and from the day he landed in Liverpool until his departure over twelve months later, he kept a detailed diary, much of it medical. This diary also records his reactions to people (‘often astute but often impatiently critical’ says Thomson) and places, but it does not mention any current affairs (such as the Boer War, the Boxer Rebellion, or even the death of Queen Victoria). Here is one entry from 1901 (a trephine is a surgical instrument with a cylindrical blade): ‘It does not come within the realm of everyday experience to be called upon to trephine a gorilla. This happened to me yesterday the day before an orang-outang and the day before that I saw Sherrington do a chimpanzee. Experimentation on a large scale certainly and expensive. Mr Gorilla though ill and unacclimatized (having been in Liverpool only 24 hours) cost 250 pounds.’

A couple of quotes out of Cushing’s From a Surgeon’s Journal: 1915-1918 can also be found on a web page hosted by the Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum (in Bradon, Canada). The page explains how the poppy flower came to be used as a symbol for those who died in the wars, and quotes the famous poem - In Flanders Field - by the Canadian poet and surgeon John McCrae which starts: ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow; Between the crosses, row on row, . .’ And then it also quotes Cushing who wrote about McCrae in his diary.

28 January 1918
‘I saw poor Jack McCrae . . . last night - the last time. A bright flame rapidly burning out. He died early this morning . . . Never strong, he gave his all with the Canadian Artillery during the prolonged second battle of Ypres and after at which time he wrote his imperishable verses. Since those frightful days he has never been his old gay and companionable self, but has rather sought solitude. A soldier from top to toe - how he would have hated to die in bed . . .

They will bury him tomorrow. Some of the older members of the McGill Unit who still remain here were scouring the fields this afternoon to try and find some chance winter poppies to put on his grave - to remind him of Flanders, where he would have preferred to lie . . .’

29 January 1918
‘We saw him buried this afternoon at the cemetery on the hillside at Wimereux with military honors - a tribute to Canada as well as to him. . . A company of North Staffords and many Royal Army Medical Corps orderlies and Canadian sisters headed the procession - then ‘Bonfire’ . . . with his master’s boots reversed over the saddle - then the rest of us . . . the Staffords, from their reversed arms, fix bayonets, and instead of firing over the grave, as in time of peace, stand at salute during the Last Post with its final wailing note which brings a lump to our throats - and so we leave him.’

Postscript: The full work, From a Surgeon’s Journal: 1915-1918, can be found online at Internet Archive. Here is one sample extract:

22 April 1915
‘The morning passed with Tuffier, and now waiting for him for a moment at his private hospital. Here at this place are several officers, one a general with half his face blown off and quite blind. T. says most of the officers have been killed, and that is why the men are so brave! It puts courage into them. Queer idea; but possibly I don’t quite understand.

He tells me of peculiar wounds that he has seen. An officer, hit in the trenches by an explosion of an enemy hand grenade, had a small wound of entrance near the inner canthus of the right eye, without special symptoms. An X-ray showed an undeformed cartridge in the frontal lobe of the brain. This was extracted and it proved to be an intact French Lebel cartridge! I give it up. He explains that the captured French ammunition, which of course does not fit the German Mauser rifles, is used with whatever else may be handy to fill the hand grenades, now so murderously thrown about in the trench fighting.

Another instance was that of a woman who had been injured in the thigh by a fragment of the first of the aeroplane bombs dropped on Paris. There was in addition a trifling wound of the scapular region, and a point of tenderness low down in the back, where subsequently an X-ray showed the presence of a French rifle bullet! She had been hit by a falling ball that had been fired from a mitrailleuse (“devil’s coffee mill”) at the aeroplane. Strange coincidence that she should have got both injuries at one and the same instant.

Lunch with T. and a Belgian officer, who constitute a committee to supply artificial limbs to the amputés. A month ago 7000 were needed and the French can only make 400 a month at the best - the American manufacturers 500. Hence it will take the better part of a year to supply those already wanted. Many more will be needed before we’re through. Later to see a review at the Invalides of the 29th and 30th Regiments (territorial) of infantry - very moving. There is something about French troops on the march that dims one’s eyes.’

The Pole at last!!!

‘The Pole at last!!! The dream prize of 3 centuries, my dream & ambition for 23 yeas.’ So wrote Robert E Peary, an officer in the US Navy and one of the great arctic explorers, in his diary exactly 100 years ago today. His claim, though, of being the first to reach the North Pole has been the source of considerable controversy.

Peary was born in Cresson, Pennsylvania, in 1856 but lived in Maine following the death of his father. He studied engineering at Bowdoin College, and, after graduating in 1877, worked as a county surveyor for several years before being commissioned in the US Navy as a civil engineer. He was sent to Nicaragua to survey a ship canal, but his interests turned increasingly towards the Arctic.

In 1886, Peary, with his associate Matthew Henson, travelled inland from Disko Bay over the Greenland ice sheet for 100 miles; and in 1891 he returned with his wife (Jo) and several other companions, including Dr Frederick Cook. During this trip, he sledged over 1,000 miles to northeast Greenland, found evidence of Greenland’s island status, and studied the ways of an isolated Eskimo tribe, which helped him on subsequent expeditions.

Three years later he made a first, but unsuccessful, attempt to reach the North Pole. Other trips to the Arctic followed, some to collect meteoric iron, some to reconnoitre a route to the Pole, and, in 1905, another unsuccessful attempt on the Pole itself (using, for the first time, the Roosevelt, a ship constructed to his specifications).

Then, in 1908, Peary launched a third attempt. He wintered near Cape Sheridan on Ellesmere Island. Early in March 1909, he set off from Cape Columbia with 24 men, 19 sledges, and 133 dogs northward. During the final stage of the trek, he was accompanied only by Henson and four Eskimo companions. On 6 April, exactly 100 years ago today, he claimed to have reached the Pole for the first time in man’s history.

Peary’s diary, which has been transcribed and made available online by Douglas R Davies, a navigation researcher, reads as follows: ‘The Pole at last!!! The prize of 3 centuries, my dream & ambition for 23 yeas. Mine at last. I cannot bring myself to realize it. It is all all seems so simple & common place, as Bartlett said ‘just like every day.’ I wish Jo could be here with me to share my feelings. I have drunk her health & that of the kids from the Benedictine flask she sent me.’

In his book The North Pole, which has an introduction by Theodore Roosevelt and is freely available online at Internet Archive, Peary uses this same quote from his diary but without the exclamation marks or the spelling mistake!

The New York Times put the story on its front page, and quoted a cable it had received from Peary: ‘I have the pole, April sixth. Expect arrive Chateau Bay, September seventh. Secure control wire for me there and arrange expedite transmission big story.’ But the newspaper also referred to a claim that had been made by Peary’s ex-companion Dr Frederick Cook that, in fact, he had reached ‘the top of the world’ earlier - a claim that undermined Peary’s achievement at the time, but which was later proved false.

Cook’s unfortunate deception apart, Peary’s claim to have reached the North Pole has been subject to much critical analysis, and remains controversial to this day. One weakness of Peary’s assertion arises from the fact that the final party of six did not include anyone trained in navigation, and another stems from inconsistencies about the speeds Peary appeared to have achieved. Wikipedia gives a summary of the ongoing controversies, as does an article on The Smithsonian website.

Wikipedia summarises an article by Larry Schweikart in The Historian which looks at the evidence provided by Peary’s diary (not opened to the public until 1986). Schweikart reported ‘that the writing was consistent throughout (giving no evidence of post-expedition alteration); that there were consistent pemican and other stains on all pages; and that all evidence pointed to the fact that Peary’s observations were made on the spot he claimed.’ Some pages of the original diary can be viewed here.

Here is another quote from the diary (as found on Davies’ website) from the day before he reached the Pole.

Monday 5 April
‘Over the 89th!! Started early last evening. The march a duplicate of previous one as to weather & going. temp at starting -35˚. Sledges appeared to haul a little easier, dog on trot much of the time. Last two hours on young ice of a north & south lead they were often galloping. 10 hours. 25 miles or more. Great.

A 50 yd lead open when I reached it moved enough by time sledges came up to let us cross. Still this biting cold, the face burning for hours. (like the Inland Ice),

The natives complain of it & at every camp are fixing fixing their clothes about the face, waist, knees & wrist. They complain of their noses, which I never knew them to do before. it is keen & bitter as frozen steel. Light air from S during first of march, veering to E & freshening as we camp. Another dog expended here. Tomorrow if ice & weather permit, I shall make a long march, ‘boil the kettle’ midway, & try to make up the 5 miles lost on the 3rd.

We have been very fortunate with the leads so far, but I am in constant & increasing dread of encountering an uncrossable one. Six weeks today since I left the Roosevelt.’

And finally, here is a quote from Peary’s diary as found in his own book (The North Pole):

23 April 1909
‘My life work is accomplished. The thing which it was intended from the beginning that I should do, the thing which I believed could be done, and that I could do, I have done. I have got the North Pole out of my system after twenty-three years of effort, hard work, disappointments, hardships, privations, more or less suffering, and some risks. I have won the last great geographical prize, the North Pole, for the credit of the United States. This work is the finish, the cap and climax of nearly four hundred years of effort, loss of life, and expenditure of fortunes by the civilized nations of the world, and it has been accomplished in a way that is thoroughly American. I am content.’

A ticking off at Westminster

The diaries of John Rae, headmaster of Westminster School in the 1970s and 1980s, are being published tomorrow (2 April) by London-based Short Books under the title The Old Boys’ Network. Short Books says they capture the spirit of the times, and of a man at the very heart of things - with humour, passion and a refreshing honesty.

John Malcolm Rae was born in 1931, the son of a radiologist, and educated at Bishop’s Stortford College (a public school in Hertfordshire) and Cambridge. As a young man, he excelled at sport, especially swimming and rugby. He went straight into teaching, training in Edinburgh. His first job was at Harrow, where he taught as an assistant master until being appointed headmaster of Taunton School in 1966. By 1970, though, he had moved to head Westminster School, where he stayed until 1986. In the subsequent two decades, before his death in 2006, he remained active, giving lectures, and holding various directorships (Laura Ashley Foundation, The Observer, Portman Group). He also wrote books, fiction and non-fiction.

These brief facts, though, say nothing of Rae’s ambitious, charismatic and controversial personality. The Times obituary begins: ‘He understood how boarding schools had to adapt to the changing expectations of a generation of parents new to independent schools. The process was sometimes painful, and with his strong personality he became a controversial figure. Some acknowledged that he brought necessary innovation, especially on co-education; but others were uncomfortable with his forthrightness, his flair for publicity and his ambition.’

The Guardian called him a ‘brilliant headmaster who was inspirational, outspoken and happy to court controversy’. But Jim Cogan, writing in The Independent, says this: ‘Working as John Rae’s deputy was exciting, rewarding and good fun. But I was lucky. Others in the Common Room found him aloof and distant - a weakness which he was well aware of, and which predated his time as a headmaster.’

During 14 of his 16 years at Westminster, Rae kept a diary, which is due to be published tomorrow (2 April) by Short Books as The Old Boys’ Network: A Headmaster’s Diaries 1970-1986. The diaries chronicle, Short Books says, ‘everything from dinners with prime ministers, to drugs and sex scandals, and more than a smattering of extraordinary and demanding pupils and parents', and this makes 'for an often shocking and unputdownable read’. The diaries capture, the publisher adds, ‘the spirit of the times, and of a man at the very heart of things - with humour, passion and a refreshing honesty’.

In fact, the book is already available - see Amazon. Moreover, it is being serialised on BBC Radio Four (read by Tim Pigott-Smith); and The Telegraph has published a substantial set of extracts (nearly 3,000 words), here are three of them.

10 July 1973
‘After lunch, I see the parents of a sixth-former who has received very bad reports. They blame the school because they saw their son pass the entrance exam and start at Westminster with such bright-eyed enthusiasm, only to drift away into a non-academic, guitar-playing world. I suspect the truth is rather different. They sent their son to a tutor to get him up to the standard of the entrance exam, and this private intense tuition produced an illusion of ability that soon faded once these special circumstances were withdrawn. Subsequently, the boy has been out of his depth.’

19 April 1976
‘To Winchester for an unpublicised meeting of eight major public schools: Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Harrow, Rubgy, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury and Marlborough. We dine in the warden’s lodgings and before and after dinner we talk about the threats to the future of our schools at a time of rising fees, falling numbers and political hostility. We agree that whatever happens, we eight will act in concert. The unspoken agenda is that our schools must survive even if other independent schools go to the wall.’

22 June 1978
‘I am woken at 2am by footsteps on the roof. I find two 14-year-old boys clambering along in the semi-darkness. I say, ‘good evening’, and they, only mildly surprised to see me, say: ‘Sorry, Sir’. I tell them that roof-climbing is dangerous and that they must come down through the headmaster’s house and report to me in the morning. I admire their enterprise - it is what schoolboys should do sometime before they grow up, but they need a ticking off just the same.’

Eisenhower’s diary fragments

To mark the 40th anniversary of Dwight Eisenhower’s death, the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum is opening up the last of the President’s personal diaries to the public - hitherto kept closed under the instructions of his son. These last diaries - as most of Eisenhower’s earlier diaries - are rather fragmentary. The museum’s director says they show the man was in firm control of his mental faculties despite failing health.

Eisenhower was born in 1890 in Denison, Texas, but was brought up in Abilene, Kansas. He graduated from West Point military academy in 1915, and served in a variety of military positions until being made responsible for strategy in the War Department in 1941. The following year, he took command of US forces in the UK, and eventually, in December 1943, became Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, leading the allies to victory over Germany. Three years as US army chief of staff followed, as did an appointment as president of Columbia University, and a posting back in Europe to be the first boss of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

In 1952, Eisenhower successfully ran for president, with Richard Nixon as his running mate. His achievements, during the two terms (1953-1961), are generally said to include negotiating a truce to end the Korean War; maintaining cold war pressure on the Soviet Union; prioritising nuclear defence weapons; launching the space race; and starting the interstate highway system. Critics blamed him for insufficiently supporting the civil rights movement, and for not publicly opposing McCarthyism. He died on 28 March 1969, some 40 years ago.

And to mark the anniversary, the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum (in Abilene) has announced the opening of Eisenhower’s ‘final personal diaries from 1966, 1968, and 1969’. The museum’s director, Karl Weissenbach, says these ‘new diaries show that Ike was still very much engaged in the world of politics and affairs, even in the twilight of his life . . . and that he was in firm control of his mental faculties despite failing health’.

Here is more from the Museum’s press release: ‘Eisenhower writes that he started the diary in 1966 ‘to make notations of any physical discomfort or ailment so as to answer my doctor’s questions concerning my health.’ Although medical problems dominate the volumes, Ike found space to comment on the issues and personalities of the day, including the economy, civil rights, Vietnam, and the 1968 presidential elections. ‘Scholars will find President Eisenhower’s opinion of President Johnson to be of particular interest,’ added Tim Rives, supervisory archivist.’

The Museum has an online list of its diary holdings which describes those previously open to the public as follows: ‘These diaries were maintained by Dwight D. Eisenhower on an intermittent basis between December 1935 and January 1969. Although they document several phases of Eisenhower’s military and civilian careers, they are richest in their documentation of certain periods. For example, his experiences with the MacArthur mission to the Philippines, 1935-38 are well documented. Also, the diaries are rich sources for the 1948-52 period when he was intimately involved in such matters as military unification, defense mobilization for the Cold War, and NATO, and he was confronting political pressures to run for the Presidency. Finally, there are materials pertaining to his experiences during the first eight months of the Presidency, January-August 1953.’

The listing also explains that the 1966 and 1969 diaries ‘have been closed to research for an indefinite period at the request of John S D Eisenhower who controls literary property rights in his father’s writings as well as conditions governing access to them’. Clearly, this situation has now changed.

The hitherto closed diary holdings are described as follows:
1966 - appointments, Eisenhower College, 1966 election, Lyndon Johnson and civil rights, but primarily notes on his health;
1968 - health, social life and recreational interests, public service activities, writing projects, GOP politics, Lyndon Johnson, Vietnam, Pueblo incident, civil rights;
1969  (January only) - account of DDE’s health, Walter Reed operations and staff, visitors.

There is one published collection of Eisenhower’s diary entries (obviously not including the diaries just made public): The Eisenhower Diaries by Robert H. Ferrell, first published by W W Norton in 1976 (this can be previewed at Amazon). But The New York Times’ reviewer, John P Roche, wasn’t much impressed by it. For starters, he says, the Eisenhower ‘diaries’ are in no meaningful sense diaries: ‘The book is a disappointing collection of fragments Eisenhower inscribed in random fashion over the period 1935-67.’ Although, he adds, ‘[they] do at least reflect Eisenhower’s closed, calculating quality’.

Roche provides a few brief extracts from the diary, and here is his commentary on them:

‘Only briefly, in his entries during early 1942, does Eisenhower indulge in spontaneous comments. On Jan. 23, he noted: ‘MacArthur recommends successor . . . He picked (Major General Richard K.) Sutherland, showing that he still likes his boot lickers.’ And on March 10 we get the last real id discharge of the volume: ‘One thing that might help win this war is to get somebody to shoot (Admiral Ernest) King. He’s the antithesis of cooperation, a deliberately rude person, which means he’s a mental bully.’ Elevation to high command ended these forays into candor.

From 1942 on, what few entries there are tend to be highly formal, particularly in the postwar period, when he realized he was potentially an extremely valuable political property. The entry for Sept. 16, 1947, is a classic in this genre: ‘I wonder whether I’ve previously noted down in this book what I’ve often given, in conversation, as my conviction regarding the progressing world revolution.’ What follows is a banal treatise that reads like a political speech, not some hasty thoughts entered at close of day.’

Mann on Mann

Golo Mann, a German historian and writer, was born 100 years ago today. He is considered by some to be the most brilliant and intellectual of Thomas Mann’s six children, and, of the six, to have come closest to shedding some light on why two of them committed suicide and why three of them were homosexual. With regard to the latter family trait, Golo draws on a story about his father’s diaries.

Thomas Mann, the great German author, lived from 1875 until 1955. Born in Lubeck, his family moved to Munich when he was still a child, and where he then stayed until forced into exile by the Nazis. When only 26, he found huge success with the epic novel Buddenbrooks. It tells of the downfall of a wealthy mercantile family of Lübeck, similar to his own, over the course of several generations. Two novellas - Tristan and Tonio Kröger - followed in 1903. Mann’s other famous works include Felix Krull (1911), Death in Venice (1912) and The Magic Mountain (1924)

He married Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a secular Jewish mathematician, in 1905, and they had six children. The three eldest - Erika, Klaus and Golo - were all homosexual. Two girls and a boy followed - Monika, Elisabeth and Michael. All but Elisabeth - who was said to be the most loved - went into print with memories or reflections about their father; and Jeffrey Meyers has written an excellent article about them for The Virginia Quarterly Review. He says the memoirs ‘are torn between veneration and rivalry, between a desire to emphasize their father’s greatness and reveal his human failings, to bask in his reflected glory and to tell the story of their own development’.

But today is the centenary of Mann’s third child - Golo Mann - who was born on 27 March 1909. He studied with Karl Jaspers, a psychiatrist and philosopher at Heidelberg university. Like the rest of the family, he went into exile as Hitler’s power was rising, and taught history for a short while in France, before escaping to the US. There he joined the army and returned to Europe to make radio propaganda in London and Luxembourg. After the war he went back to Germany, and became a respected historian, authoring A History of Germany Since 1789. In an article for the BBC, Brian Walden (an influential British broadcaster) called it ‘a very great book’. Golo Mann, he said, may have written ‘the best of all popular history books’.

According to Jeffrey Meyers, it was Golo who got closest of any of Mann’s children to uncovering in print why they felt crippled, even crushed by their father’s overwhelming presence. He calls Golo ‘the most brilliant and intellectual of the children’ and suggests that his book, Reminiscences and Reflections, ‘pries open the vault containing the family secrets and gives a more realistic, probing, and convincing picture of Thomas’. Golo was partly able to do this, he says, because his book was not published until 30 years had passed since Thomas’ death, and six years since Katia’s, and because of a changed cultural climate.

‘Not until Golo’s frank, perceptive memoir of 1986,’ Meyer says, ‘do we begin to understand why the three oldest children were homosexual, and why Klaus and Michael committed suicide.’ Golo lists a number of earlier suicides on both sides of the family, and concludes that there was a genetic predisposition to dealing with depression in this way. And then, on the subject of homosexuality, Meyer tells this anecdote taken from Golo’s book:

‘After Thomas had gone into exile, he asked Golo to pack his diaries in a suitcase and send them to Lugano, then added: ‘I am counting on you to be discreet and not read any of these things!’ . . . Golo naively handed the suitcase over to their chauffeur, who offered to take it to the train station but gave it instead to the Nazi authorities. Fearing the worst, Thomas exclaimed that the Nazis would publish excerpts in their newspaper: ‘They will ruin everything, they will ruin me. My life will never be right again.’ In the end, Thomas’ lawyer managed to recover the diaries, which were published from 1977 to 1995. When Golo, who ‘had never really been able to part’ from his mother, finally read the dangerous diaries, he learned that the homosexual attraction and longing described in Tonio Kröger and Death in Venice, in The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus, were based on Thomas’ secret feelings, and he, Erika and Klaus. . . had much more in common with their father than they had ever realized.’

In fact, Thomas Mann was a committed diarist. The Virginia Quarterly Review (which seems to have an affinity for Mann) has another excellent article, freely available online, entitled Thomas Mann as Diarist (by Jay Parini). And The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, which is partly viewable on Googlebooks, has an essay on Mann as Diarist by T. J. Reed. Here is a paragraph from that essay with details about Thomas Mann’s diaries.

‘Although Mann appears to have kept a diary all his adult life, only parts survive. In 1896 he burnt the records he had made up to then, only to begin again at once; and in 1944-5 he burnt nearly all the pre-1933 diaries. In 1950 again, he wondered whether to burn what he had written since 1933. The issue was his homosexuality, the secret of which he had guarded by previous burnings but had then then gone on writing about, often in nostalgic reference back to feelings of earlier days. Should he now dispose of this evidence too, or should he make it the means of belatedly coming out? He finally decided against destruction, and in 1952 packaged and sealed his notebooks down to the preceding year, inscribing the cover, in English: ‘Daily notes 1933-1951 without literary value and not to be opened before twenty years after my death’. Erika, his daughter, sealed the last few notebooks in 1955.’

The Invention of Love

A. E. Housman, a poet and classical scholar, was born 150 years ago today. He’s best remembered, perhaps, for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad - certainly not for his diaries, which don’t seem to have been published. However, these diaries did inspire Tom Stoppard, one of Britain’s best contemporary playwrights, to write The Invention of Love.

Housman was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, to a solicitor’s family on 26 March 1859, exactly one and a half centuries ago (and one century before my brother - who is 50 today!). He won an open scholarship to Oxford, but, for reasons that are much debated, he failed to finish his degree. While at Oxford he met Moses Jackson, another student and an athlete, who became the object of his unrequited love, and the inspiration for some of his poetry.

For a decade or so, in the 1880s, Housman worked at the Patent Office, London, but continued studying and publishing on classical subjects. In 1892, he was appointed professor of Latin studies at University College, London; and 20 years later he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, as Kennedy Professor of Latin. According to Wikipedia, his editions of Juvenal, Manilius and Lucan are still considered authoritative.

Although Housman thought of classical scholarship as his main work, he also developed a significant reputation as a writer of poetry. His cycle of poems called A Shropshire Lad has been much loved over the decades, and been printed many times. Currently, Abebooks has over 1,000 copies available for sale, the most expensive of which is a first edition inscribed by Housman to Jackson - a bargain at just over £60,000 (price converted from dollars).

Housman has also become an icon in the history of homosexuality. The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage says his poetry ‘is inextricably rooted in homosexual experience and consciousness and is also a significant reflector of gay history’. This was sensed at the time, it says, by ‘knowing readers’, and understood latterly because of two candid posthumous volumes that Housman’s brother Laurence, his literary executor and also homosexual, assembled from Housman’s unpublished manuscripts.

There are a number of references online to Housman’s diaries - archived at the British Library - but I can find no trace of them having been published in book form. Richard Perceval Graves quotes from them in his biography A. E. Housman: the scholar-poet published by Taylor & Francis in 1979 (viewable on Googlebooks).

Graves says this: ‘The few diary entries made between 1888 and 1891 which did not refer to the Jacksons [Moses and his brother Adalbert] were indeed about the changing seasons, showing how he had maintained that interest in botany which had been his since early schooldays. The complete entry for the day in October when Moses Jackson’s eldest son was born, reads:
‘Epping Forest
Hornbeam shows some yellow
One honeysuckle bloom
A tree with red berries and leaves turning partly yellow heather mostly faded
His son born.’ ’

Another person who has seen at least some of Housman’s diary is Tom Stoppard, one of Britain’s foremost playwrights. He’s justly famous for plays such as Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia, and Jumpers. According to Wikipedia, however, ‘many’ consider The Invention of Love to be his finest play. It premiered in London (at the National Theatre) in 1997, and on Broadway (at the Lincoln Centre) in 2001.

The New York Times called The Invention of Love ‘a memory play’, one that follows Housman ‘as he looks back on his frustrated lifelong love for Moses Jackson’. In making this journey into the past, it says, the play reflects both an interest in the literature and myth of classical antiquity and Oxford intellectual life of a century ago.

Various articles on the US opening explained that Stoppard was inspired to write the play after discovering a book containing some of Housman’s letters and lectures which also contained brief excerpts of Housman’s diary. The New York Times, for example, quoted Stoppard himself: ‘Most of the time, there were little notes about what flowers were in bloom or his walks. But during a particular year, sporadic days began to include reference to an unnamed man he’d fallen in love with as a student. . . It was so cryptic and so reticent and suppressed, it suggested a tremendous amount of emotion.’

A shrivelled gouty old man

A pleasant, chatty little man was Joseph Liouville, a French mathemetician born two centuries ago today. He wasn’t a diary man, though, as far as I know; but another mathematician, Thomas Archer Hirst, was, and he made a habit of writing about his academic peers.

Liouville was born on 24 March 1809, exactly 200 years ago today. His father, an army captain who survived Napoleon’s wars, moved his family to Toul in northeast France, where Joseph attended school. He went on to study at École Polytechnique, France’s foremost engineering school, later becoming a professor at the same institution. His career also saw him appointed chair in mathematics at the Collège de France and a chair in mechanics at the Faculté des Sciences.

He worked in a number of different fields in mathematics, including number theory, complex analysis, differential geometry and topology, but also mathematical physics and even astronomy, Wikipedia says. He is remembered particularly for Liouville’s theorem, but other procedures also carry his name - the Sturm-Liouville theory and the Liouville-Arnold theorem for example - as does a crater on the moon. He is said to have published about 400 papers and notes, more than 200 of them on the theory of numbers alone.

In 1836 he founded Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées, which did much for mathematics in France throughout the 19th century, and is still around today. He also dabbled in politics for a while. More information can be found at Wikipedia and at MacTutor (a website run by the School of Mathematics and Statistics at St Andrews university).

Thomas Archer Hirst, an English mathematician born two decades after Liouville in 1830 in Yorkshire, studied at the University of Marburg, Germany, and remained on the Continent for most of the 1850s. He then returned to England, first to teach at University College School, London, and subsequently to take up a physics professorship at University College as well as the mathematics chair. In 1873, he was appointed Director of Studies at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. According to Wikipedia, he was an active member of the governing councils of the Royal Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the London Mathematical Society.

Hirst was also a diarist and kept a personal record for most his life. His notebooks and diaries are archived at the Royal Institution, London, but, as far as I know have never been published. However, the MacTutor website has filleted out a collection of quotes about Hirst’s mathematician peers, including two about Liouville twenty years apart.

18 Nov 1857
‘He is a pleasant, chatty little man with whom I soon felt at perfect ease. The only blemish I observed in him was an occasional unmeaning giggle.’

18 May 1879
‘A little shrivelled gouty old man [Liouville] has become and very garrulous. It was with difficulty I broke away from him.’

An owl in the desert

Lady Anne Clifford died 333 years ago today. She was a formidable woman who struggled for many years to claim ownership of her family’s large estates in the north of England, but when she did finally inherit them, she did much to restore their buildings, especially the castles. She’s also considered a minor literary figure because of the quality of a diary she left behind. Coincidentally, this was first edited by Vita Sackville-West, a descendant of the brother of her first husband.

There is an excellent biography of Lady Clifford on the Encyclopedia of World Biography website, and there are short biographical summaries on the Wikipedia and Diary Junction websites. Born at Skipton Castle, she was the third and only surviving child of the Third Earl of Cumberland and his wife Margaret Russell. The Earl was away at sea most of the time, so she was brought up in a house dominated by women, though she did have a tutor, the poet Samuel Daniel. As a girl, she spent time at Queen Elizabeth’s court, and indeed was still at court in 1603 when Elizabeth died and James I ascended the throne.

When her father died, in 1605, the whole estate went to his brother not to her, and Anne then spent several decades in a battle (which went so far as to involve King James) to reclaim it. Her first husband, Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, with whom she had five children (three of whom died young), did not support her in these efforts. (The descendants of Richard’s brother, Edward, include the writer Vita Sackville-West who was born at Knole, the great Sackville stately home in Kent; and - coincidentally for this Blog - she married Harold Nicolson, the subject of the last Diary Review article.)

Clifford’s second husband, Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, did support Lady Anne’s legal efforts. He employed Inigo Jones to restore the Pembroke family home, and Anne became enthusiastic about other building projects. She eventually inherited her father’s estate when the male line failed, and, with the Civil War raging, went north to live there. At the age of nearly 60, with Pembroke having died, Lady Anne spent the final years of her life helping to rebuild local churches and castles on the estate lands (including Skipton Castle). She died at Brougham Castle where her father had been born - 333 years ago today.

Only a small portion of Clifford’s diaries survive - a reminiscence written in 1603 and a regular diary for 1616, 1617 and 1619 - and these were first edited by Vita Sackville-West and published by Heinemann in 1923 as The Diary of Lady Anne Clifford. First editions can be bought secondhand at Abebooks for as little as £30 in the UK. More recently, there have been various new editions/reprints, including The Memoir of 1603 and The Diary of 1616-1619 edited by Katherine Acheson and published by Broadview Press in 2007. Some pages of this latter edition are viewable on Googlebooks.

Otherwise, there’s not much of Clifford’s diary on the internet, though a few extracts can be found on The Norton Anthology of English Literature website. Here are a couple of extracts, both of which refer to the dispute about her family estate. (‘My Lady’ refers to her mother; ‘my Lord’ to her husband; and the ‘agreements’ to the dispute over the family estate.)

February 1616
‘Upon the 17th being Saturday my Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, my Lord William Howard, my Lord Roos, my Cousin Russell, my brother Sackville, and a great company of men of note were all in the gallery at Dorset House where the Archbishop of Canterbury took me aside and talked with me privately one hour and a half, and persuaded me both by divine and human means to set my hand to these agreements, but my answer to his Lordship was that I would do nothing till my Lady and I had conferred together. Much persuasion was used by him and all the company, sometimes terrifying me and sometimes flattering me, but at length it was concluded that I should have leave to go to my Mother.’

May 1616
‘At this time my Lord was in London where he had infinite and great resort coming to him. He went much abroad to Cocking, to bowling alleys, to plays and horse races, and [was] commended by all the world. I stayed in the country, having many times a sorrowful and heavy heart, and being condemned by most folks because I would not consent to the agreements, so as I may truly say I am like an owl in the desert.’

Of war and of sowing

The diaries of Harold Nicolson, one of the most interesting and readable of 20th century diarists, are being republished today in their original three volumes by Faber Finds. Following on from Chamberlain’s ‘birthday’ article yesterday, I’ve chosen one extract from Nicolson’s diary dating to almost exactly 60 years ago about the then prime minister, and another just a few days later which shows Nicolson as happy (well not quite on this occasion) in his garden at Sissinghurst as he was in Parliament.

Wikipedia and The Diary Junction have short online biographies with basic details of Nicolson’s life, but there are also several published biographies, starting with Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (1973), James Lees-Milne’s two-volume Harold Nicolson: A Biography (early 1980s), and Norman Rose’s Harold Nicolson (2005).

Nicolson was Born in Tehran (Persia at the time) in 1886 and worked in the British diplomatic service before becoming an MP in 1935. He married the writer Victoria Sackville-West in 1913, and together they created the famous garden at Sissinghurst, Kent. While not an especially remarkable politician in his own right, Nicolson’s skills lay in his talents as an observer, and as a journalist and writer. He wrote many biographical books, but is probably best remembered for his diaries. He is also well remembered for the relationship with his wife, which was both very close yet also open, in the sense that each partner allowed the other to have affairs, including with same-sex lovers.

Harold’s son Nigel Nicolson edited and published three volumes of the diaries (and letters) in the last years of his father’s life (Harold died in 1968). Since then there have been many reprints and reissues. Most recently, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (now part of Orion, but originally founded by Nigel Nicolson and George Weidenfeld in the 1940s) published, in 2004, a one volume edition - The Harold Nicolson Diaries 1907-1963. This was, like the earlier versions, edited by Nigel but included a different set of entries.

Today (19 March) though, the original three volume set is being reissued by Faber Finds: Harold Nicolson - Diaries and Letters Vol. 1 (1930-1939); Harold Nicolson - Diaries and Letters Vol. 2 (1939-1945); Harold Nicolson - Diaries and Letters Vol. 3 (1945–-1962).

In advertising the reissued books, Faber Finds quotes a number of past reviews. Sir Kenneth Clark, for example, said the diaries provide ‘not only a brilliant picture of English society in the 1930s, but a touching self-portrait of a highly intelligent and civilized man driven by conscience and curiosity to enter politics’. The late Cyril Connolly said, ‘One is hardly able to put it down for meals . . . It is very artfully edited for, besides the diary proper, there are many letters to Sir Harold’s wife, Vita Sackville-West, and not a few from her to him. But this remains solidly and brilliantly Sir Harold’s own book.’ And Michael Foot: ‘One stops to marvel at the achievement. Honesty, decency, modesty magnanimity are stamped on every page, as evident as the wit. These are not the normal virtues of successful diarists or would-be politicians, but Harold Nicolson possesses them all.’

Here are two short extracts (taken from The Harold Nicolson Diaries 1907-1963), both from 60 years ago. I’ve picked the first one because it’s about Chamberlain, the subject of yesterday’s article, and the second because it’s only a few days later but gives a charming (if somewhat maudlin) and characteristic impression of Nicolson at Sissinghurst.

31 March 1939
‘Down to the House. The PM says he will make a statement shortly before three. The general feeling is that he will announce that if Poland and Rumania are attacked we shall go to war. There is some uneasiness about in the corridors. People fear lest Chamberlain may not stay put. Chamberlain arrives looking gaunt and ill. The skin above his high cheek bones is parchment yellow. He drops wearily into his place. . . He begins by saying that we believe in negotiation and do not trust in rumours. He then gets to the centre of his statement, namely that if Poland is attacked we shall declare war. That is greeted with cheers from every side. He reads his statement very slowly with a bent grey head. It is most impressive.’

9 April 1939
‘In the afternoon Viti and I plant annuals. We sow them in the cottage garden and then in the border and then in the orchard. We rake the soil smooth. And, as we rake we are both thinking, ‘What will have happened to the world when these seeds germinate?’ It is warm and still. We should have been so happy were it not for the thought which aches at our hearts as if some very dear person was dying in the upstairs room. We discuss whether we might be defeated if war comes. And if defeated, surely surrender [suicide] in advance would be better? We ourselves don’t think of money or privilege or pleasure. We are thinking only of that vast wastage of suffering which must surely come. All because of the insane ambitions of one fanatic, and of the vicious theory which he has imposed on his people.’

Chamberlain’s diary letters

It’s Neville Chamberlain’s birthday, or would have been if he were alive to have reached twice three score years and ten. A Conservative politician best known for his short term as prime minister and a policy of appeasement in the run up to the Second World War, he also served as Minister of Health and Chancellor of the Exchequer between the wars. During this inter-war period, he wrote weekly letters to his sister, and these have been published in four (expensive) volumes, described by the editor as ‘diary letters’. Diary letters?

The British Government website provides a brief biography of Neville Chamberlain. He was born 140 years ago today (18 March) into a political family: his father, Joseph, would become a mayor of Birmingham and a cabinet minister, and his half-brother Austen would hold various high posts in government including Chancellor of the Exchequer. After being schooled at Rugby and Mason College, Birmingham, Neville went to the Bahamas to manage the large family estate growing sisal (for making rope). On returning to Britain, he became a prominent manufacturer in Birmingham, and then, in 1915, was elected Lord Mayor.

In 1918, aged 49, Chamberlain was returned to Parliament as a Conservative MP. Although offered a post in government, he refused to serve under Lloyd George, and remained a back-bencher until 1922 when he was appointed Postmaster General. For most of the 1920s and 1930s, he went back and forth between the positions of Minister of Health and Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1937, he succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister. Conflict in Europe, though, was not far off.

In 1938, Chamberlain went to meet Hitler, the German chancellor, in Munich. He came back with an agreement that Britain and Germany would never again go to war. ‘I believe,’ he declared, ‘it is peace for our time.’ However, the success of his appeasement policy was shortlived, since Hitler was soon to march into Prague. The subsequent invasion of Poland led Chamberlain to declare war on 3 September 1939. Thereafter, he proved unable to counter mounting criticism of his leadership, and thus resigned in May 1940. Later the same year he died of bowel cancer. Find out more from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, or the BBC.

It was not until just 60 years later, though, that a first volume of The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters was published, by Ashgate Publishing. This first one was subtitled The Making of a Politician, 1915-20. A second volume followed the same year subtitled The Reform Years, 1921-27; a third volume in 2002 subtitled The Heir Apparent, 1928-33; and the fourth and last in 2005 subtitled The Downing Street Years, 1934-40. Each one was edited by Robert Self; and the full set is available from Routledge.

Ashgate says: ‘As a primary source of historical evidence and insight, it is difficult to overstate the value and importance of Neville Chamberlain’s diary letters to his sisters [Ida and Hilda]. They represent the most complete and illuminating ‘insider’ record of British politics between the wars yet to be published. . . Beyond the fascination of the historical record of people and events, these letters are extremely valuable for the remarkable light they throw upon the personality and character of the private man lurking behind the austerely forbidding public persona.’

But what of this idea of ‘diary letters’? Interestingly, there is, online, a full explanation by Robert Self, the editor, of why he chose to use the term rather than simply calling Chamberlain’s letters ‘letters’.

The second volume of the set was reviewed in 2002 by David J. Dutton for the Institute of Historical Research, and this review is available online. Although very positive about the book, Dutton did express reservations about the title, which he said was ‘somewhat misleading to the extent that Chamberlain, unlike his half-brother, did keep an extensive, if not continuous, diary, and the primary purpose of his letters to Ida and Hilda was not to record events for posterity but to keep them informed, to share his concerns with two women of considerable intelligence and good sense, and to use his sisters as a sounding board for his own thoughts and plans.’ Dutton does admit, though, that the letters form ‘an almost continuous record and Chamberlain did, on occasion, clearly use them as a substitute for entries in his diary’.

Also on the Institute’s website is Self’s response to the review. ‘It is difficult to quibble about either the general tone or the specific content of David Dutton’s extremely generous review’, he says, nevertheless, ‘there is one point raised in Dr Dutton’s review which does merit clarification’, and this concerns the claim that the use of the title ‘Diary Letters’ is ‘somewhat misleading’.

Self explains that, in part, the adoption of the term ‘diary letters’ represented ‘a logical extension of my earlier edited volume of letters from Austen Chamberlain to the same sisters which he commenced in February 1917 after enquiring whether he ‘could write something like a diary letter’ to them’. He also notes that the practice of writing regular ‘diary letters’ did not start in the Chamberlain family with the generation that included Austen, Neville and their sisters, but earlier. Moreover, he adds, Neville Chamberlain explicitly noted in a letter on New Year’s Day 1921 that the correspondence with his sisters had ‘the advantage of making a sort of diary’.

Self goes on to examine what he considers a more fundamental point raised by David Dutton, namely ‘the relative significance and historical value of the diary letters to Hilda and Ida when compared with the five relatively slim volumes of political journals which cover a similar period’. Despite a similarity in the period covered, he says, the content and even the phrasing of the political journals ‘invariably lack the depth, the detail and (crucially) the almost unfailing weekly consistency of the record contained in the diary letters to his sisters, which so painstakingly reconstructed all of the events, activities and experiences of the preceding week’.

More generally, Self argues that the letters have specific diary qualities. Here is the final paragraph of his response.

‘Yet beyond the far greater continuity, depth and length of the record contained in the diary letters, their outstanding value and importance is derived from the very nature of the epistolary act and the closeness of the relationship with his sisters which underpinned his devotion to it. Thus, whatever the similarity in terms of information content, the solitary act of keeping a diary did not necessarily encourage the same uninhibited expression of emotion and inner feelings that so often emerges in an intense and revealing manner in the diary letters to his sisters. Only here do we really see more than a glimpse of the complete inner man so fastidiously concealed from the world beyond his immediate family. Indeed, as Austen noted in 1931, even within the family it was well known ‘how tongue-tied in matters of sentiment’ his half-brother was. Yet the intense natural confidence and reassuring intimacy of Neville Chamberlain’s bond with his sisters encouraged this supremely reticent man to indulge a well developed propensity for ‘epistolary garrulity’ (as he called it in August 1921), which permitted him to reveal as much about his innermost thoughts, hopes, fears and ambitions as he was ever capable of exposing to anyone - perhaps even to his adoring wife. Ultimately, the unique value of the diary letters is derived from precisely this additional, intensely personal insight into that hidden, warmer and more human side of the truly enigmatic personality which lurked behind a public persona that all too often appeared to be cold, abrasive and supremely unlovable.’

Lennon and Linda McCartney

It’s forty years ago today that Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman, and it was, by all accounts, a happy and successful marriage that only ended when Linda died. However, rumours, partly said to be based on the diaries of John Lennon, suggest that he and Linda had sex on one occasion.

Paul McCartney, one of the famous Beatles group, married Linda Eastman, an American photographer, at a civil ceremony in London on 12 March 1969. Paul adopted Linda’s daughter from her first marriage, Heather, and the couple had three more children. Most observers say the marriage was happy and successful. Paul himself claimed that he and Linda spent less than a week apart during their entire marriage. Linda died in 1998.

However, a contributor (calling himself 18th candidate) to Everything2 (which says it is ‘a collection of user-submitted writings about, well, pretty much everything’) suggests Linda might have been unfaithful to Paul on one occasion.

18th Candidate writes: ‘It’s been said that the Beatle to whom Linda was initially attracted was John Lennon, but John showed no interest in her and Linda subsequently set her sights on Paul. According to John’s diaries, however, years later in the 1970s, when Linda was married to Paul and John was married to Yoko Ono, Linda and John reportedly had a brief affair. According to the story, after an argument with Yoko, John went to Paul’s home where he found Linda alone. She had also had an argument with Paul and he had stormed out. After a bottle of wine and some marijuana, the diaries claim that John and Linda ended up in bed for a short encounter. Whether or not that story is true is actually largely speculation, but it’s the only report that Linda was ever unfaithful to Paul during their marriage.’

The source claimed for this unlikely scenario is ‘John’s diaries’, but information on these is hard to come by, on the internet at least. There is, though, some hard information about the involved story of the diaries in an article by Brian Murphy called Let Me Take You Down - In a Cyn Sandwich, The Profoundly Paradoxical Mind of John Lennon (Cyn being short for Cynthia, Lennon’s first wife). This is freely available on the Oakland University Journal website.

Certainly, Lennon kept some diaries in the last years of his life which, immediately after his death, were stolen by Fred Seaman, Lennon’s assistant in New York. He was convicted of this theft in 1983, and sentenced to five years’ probation. The diaries, which were returned to Yoko Ono (though, obviously, they may have been photocopied), have never been published nor made public. Seaman did, though, author The Last Days of John Lennon: A Personal Memoir published by Birch Lane Press in 1991.

However, there have been two books which specifically claim to be based on Lennon’s diaries. One is Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon written by Robert Rosen and published by Fusion Press in 2000. Rosen, in his introduction to the book (available on john-lennon.com) explains how he came to use Lennon’s diaries as ‘a road map to the truth’.

‘Twenty-four hours after John Lennon was murdered on December 8, 1980, his personal assistant Fred Seaman, a close friend of mine came to my apartment. He was visibly shaken, his eyes blood shot, tears streaming down his face. There was work to be done he said. The previous summer, during an extended stay in Bermuda, John had told him should anything happen to him, it was Seaman’s job to write the true story of his final years. It would not be the official tale of a happy, eccentric household raising Sean and baking bread while Yoko ran the family business. Instead it would be the story of a tormented superstar, a prisoner of his fame locked in his bedroom, raving about Jesus Christ while a retinue of servants tended to his every need. Still it was not until Wednesday October 21, (1981) that I began the process of transcribing Lennon’s diaries. It was exhausting work that continued unabated until the end of November. No matter how much I transcribed there was always more; the task seemed endless. . .’

‘. . . Then on January 4, 1982 Ono fired Seaman. He assured me the project would continue; he’d given John Lennon his word that he’d tell his true story. Yoko, he said would not object. On February 9, 1982 I flew to Jamaica. When I returned to New York on February 27, my apartment had been ransacked. Everything I’d been working on - the diaries, the photocopies of the diaries, the transcripts, the manuscripts, the tapes, the photos - had all been taken. There was no sign of forced entry. It was Seaman. He had the keys. It was only then that I realized that virtually everything Seaman had told me about why we were doing the project was a lie. I sank into a state of near paralysis but managed to file a complaint with the police. Lennon’s diaries haunted me. I’d wake up in the morning and details would come flooding back. I began taking notes on everything I could remember. By mid-April I’d put together a manuscript that included the information from the diaries and everything that had happened since the day Lennon was murdered. Nowhere Man is a work of both investigative journalism and imagination. I have used the memory of Lennon’s diaries as a road map to the truth.’

In fact, the book’s index offers less than a handful of references to the diaries, and those references lead to little of substance in the book itself.

The other book - Lennon in America: 1971-1980 - was written by Geoffrey Giuliano and published by Cooper Square Press in 2000. This even has the subtitle: Based on the Lost Lennon Diaries. Wikipedia’s article on Giuliano gives detail. The author claimed he was given transcripts of Lennon’s journal by the singer Harry Nilsson, who died in 1994. The claim, however, was made after Nilsson’s death, and several people close to Nilsson do not believe he ever had such transcripts. Moreover, Steven Gutstein, a lawyer who read the diaries in connection with the legal case against Fred Seaman, remarked that Giulano’s book was ‘a Mad magazine version of the diaries’. Gutstein described his own memory of the diaries as being ‘a lot of philosophical musings combined with mundane details of everyday life’.

But, presumably, this book must be the source of 18th Candidate’s rumour-mongering. Giuliano says (or imagines) that Linda was alone nursing a headache in the aftermath of a heated argument with Paul. John and Yoko were going through a rough patch, and John regularly went over to Paul’s house in St John’s wood (incidentally only two doors down from where I myself lived for a short while in the 70s). On this occasion, Paul was out and Linda was making a bed, so Paul helped. In the course of spreading the sheets, Giuliano says, their hands touched briefly. Linda paid the contact no mind, but as Lennon reached to tuck in the top sheet (the detail is banally brilliant!), Lennon caught her arm and kissed her. Giuliano’s words: ‘A gentle, awkward embrace evolved into caresses and a quick interlude of sexual intimacy.’ Linda deeply regretted the indiscretion, Giuliano suggests, and never told a soul, while Lennon found it amusing.

So where did this rumour come from? Giuliano claims that George Speerin, a former Lennon aide, revealed the story in 1983; and that he himself (Giuliano) had seen a handwritten note by Lennon ‘which was probably intended for inclusion in his diaries’ which ‘referred’ to the same incident.

Giuliano admits in the introduction that his book does not contain any quotes from Lennon’s diaries. He says they were often incomplete thoughts and snippets - the exact meaning of which was dificult to discern. Instead, he says, he used the diaries as ‘collaborating source material’. The book’s index does have 20 or more references to Lennon’s diaries for where Giuliano has used them as source material. Here are two, one about the McCartneys and one about sex.

- ‘John ended up at dinner listening to the McCartney’s endless bragging about how wonderfully they were doing. In his [Lennon’s] diaries, he termed them obnoxious, smug and even downright stupid.’

‘So important were these pleasurable [sexual] episodes to the former Beatle than he kept a daily record of them all - in handwritten and taped diaries he assiduously maintained to the end of his life.’