In Brighton with George IV

It is a century and a half today since Henry Edward Fox, the fourth Baron Holland, died. He was a fairly unremarkable aristocrat, and sired no children, thus causing his baronies to expire. Nevertheless, he was an interesting diarist, gossipy, observant and happily acerbic at times. He had no qualms, for example, in calling the King (George IV) a fool, or in describing the English countryside as being full of ‘Lilliput ostentation’! But he liked Brighton, and was there for the opening of the Chain Pier which he described as ‘a great ornament and convenience to the place’.

Fox, the third son of the third Baron Holland, was born in 1802 at Holland House in London. He was educated privately and then studied at Christ Church, Oxford. He briefly held the parliamentary seat of Horsham before eschewing politics and joining the diplomatic service, taking posts in Italy and Austria. He married the daughter of the Earl of Coventry in 1833, and succeeded to become (the fourth) Baron Holland in 1840 on the death of his father.

On returning permanently to England in 1846, Baron Holland launched himself into renovating and altering Holland House. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attended parties there in 1849-1850. He had no children, and so his baronies became extinct when he died on 18 December 1859. Thereafter, the estate passed to a cousin, the fifth Earl of Ilchester. Further biographical informaiton is available at Wikipedia, or the History of Parliament.

Diary writing, it seems, was a family habit. The diaries of both Fox’s parents were published, seven decades apart: The Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland in two volumes by Longmans, Green and Co in 1908; and The Holland House diaries, 1831-1840 in 1977 by Routledge and Kegan Paul. This latter was based on the diaries of the Third Baron Holland, but also included extracts from the diary of Dr John Allen, a physician and writer, and a significant figure brought into the Holland household by the third Baron.

The fourth Baron Holland’s diaries - The Journal of the Hon. Henry Edward Fox, afterwards fourth and last Baron Holland - were published after his mother’s and before his father’s in 1923 by Thornton Butterworth. Somewhat bizarrely, they cover a 12 year period before those of his father in the Holland House diaries. Having been found among the manuscripts at Holland House, the fourth Baron’s diaries were edited by the sixth Earl of Ilchester, who also gives a short introduction with some biographical details. All 400 pages of the diary are freely available online at Internet Archive (as are both volumes of Lady Holland’s journal).

Arthur Ponsonby, a British writer and politician, who wrote two excellent books on English diaries in the 1920s says this about the fourth Baron’s diaries: ‘He has style, great facility of expression, terse and epigrammatic powers of portraiture and gives unreserved disclosure of candid opinions. So we get at the man through the gossip. This does not prevent the gossip of high society being very exhausting, nor does it prevent him from suffering from the common delusion that association with prominent people must necessarily mean gaining wide experience.’

Here are several extracts from the fourth Baron’s diary, all of them concerning visits to Brighton (for no other reason than that’s where I happen to live).

October 1823
‘We went back to Petworth for two days, and arrived at Brighton on the first of November. For the first three nights we slept in that wretched place, the York Hotel, and dined almost every day with Lady Affleck, who brought Mary from St Ann’s. Our life at Brighton was just what all lives must be in a wateringplace. Some agreable people were there, and latterly when Charles and Henry Webster came it was more agreable: Bedfords, Vernons, Cowpers, Ponsonbys, Duncannons, Hopes, Kings, Aberdeens. Our house was pleasantly situated immediately opposite the Chain Pier, which was twice the scene of gaieties. One night upon its’ being publickly opened there were fireworks, and afterwards, in honor of King’s arrival, illuminated. It is a delightful walk, and a great ornament and convenience to the place. Nothing very particular occurred in the world except that Ld Granville was appointed to The Hague as Ambassador, and that all London has been occupied with the murder of Mr Weare in Hertfordshire one of the most barbarous ever known; and the publicity of it and of all the proceedings has been so great that they thought it but fair to the prisoners to put off the trial, as they had been so much prejudged. . .

My father and I dined one day at the Pavilion. Nothing could be more civil than the King was to him, and the whole conversation after dinner was meant to be gracious to him, praising Holland House, General Fitzpatrick; and even what he did not address to him was meant as implied civility. To Ld Aberdeen he was almost rude. Lf Aberdeen fainted from the heat and looked quite lovely. Nothing could surpass the excellence of the dinner and the splendour of the whole establishment. The King after dinner talked about Junius, which he believes to have been written by Sir Philip Francis, and gave some strong corroborations of that suspicion. The rooms are splendid, and when lighted up look like the palaces of Fairies or Genii. After dinner the King played at écarté with the favorite and Lf Cowper, and all the rest of the company remained in the outer room. Afterwards there were several evening parties and a child’s ball, to which I went. The music is so loud and the heat so overpowering, that they generally gave me a headache. Charles met Lady Errol for the first time one evening there. My father and mother went away on Xmas Day, but Charles and I staid on some time longer. Charles, however, got tired and left me.

One evening I was suddenly sent for to the Pavilion. My dismay was not small at finding myself ushered into a room where the K. and Rossini were alone. I found that I was the only person honored with an invitation to hear this great composer’s performances. A more unworthy object than I am could not have been selected. H.M. was not much pleased with his manner, which was careless and indifferent to all the civilities shown him. The K. himself made a fool of himself by joining in the choruses and the Halelujah Anthem, stamping his foot and overpowering all with the loudness of his Royal voice.’

29 November 1829
‘30 Old Steyne, Brighton. I was called a little after seven and got up immediately. The morning was foggy, damp and cold. I left London before 9 and stopped to hear how Miss Vernon had passed the night at Little Holland House. I was happy to find that the new medicine and a blister had in some measure relieved her and given her a few hours’ sleep. I cannot, however, help apprehending that all ultimate hopes of her recovery must be very faint. My journey was rapid and had no other merit. The country (indeed like almost all the country in this island) is tame and uninteresting; perpetual small country-houses with their mean trimness and Lilliput ostentation. There are few of those worst of all sights on this road - a vast green field, dotted with trees, surrounded by a wall, and damped by a variety of swampy ponds, which call themselves country seats. I arrived at half past 2. My mother was on the pier. I sat with my father, who was, as he always is, very lively. He talked of the Grenvilles, and tho’ he admitted all the faults which make them so unpopular in the world, he praised them for many merits, especially Tom Grenville for his disinterested generosity about Lord Carysfort’s guardianship. I took a bath before dinner. Our guests were, The Lord Chancellor, Lady Lyndhurst, Duke of Devonshire, Sir James Mackintosh, Mr Whishaw, four selves. I never had met the Chancellor before; he is agreable in his manner and voice, and his language is choice and elegant. After dinner we talked of Napoleon and Bourrienne’s Memoires. Sir James said that the conversation there given between the Emperor and Auguste de Stael (at that time only 17 years old), is quite correct. That he has seen Auguste’s letter to his mother, detailing it just as it is told in Bourrienne. He went to meet Napoleon on his return from Italy, in order to solicit for his mother to be allowed to go nearer Paris - but in vain. The D. of D. is grown more absurd in his costume, more obtuse in hearing, and much duller than he used to be. I had a curious conversation after coffee, in which I dissipated the ill-grounded apprehensions of ___. Edward Romilly and Sir James Macdonald came after tea. The room was hot and the evening fatiguing. It is very painful to see and be in the room with someone one wishes excessively to speak to, without the possibility of doing so without becoming the gaze of the whole party. I went to bed at 12.’

2 December 1829
‘A cold, raw day. I got up late and took no bath. I called on Lady Webster and Miss Monson. The former is a fine, open-hearted, cheerful woman, perfectly good-humoured and devoid of any affectation. She has remains of very extraordinary beauty and is still very handsome. I then went to Lady L. The Chancellor is gone. Before he went she received another anonymous letter from London, threatening to expose her to him, and accusing her of an embrace with me on the steps leading to the Chain Pier on Saturday last, on which day I was in London and she was in her bed. This takes off any apprehension we might feel, for it proves the ignorance of our enemies. Great God! What a dreadful country this is to live in, and how much better for the peace of society and for the agrémens of life is the despotism of one man to the inquisitive tyranny and insolent exactions of a whole nation. She very wisely instantly showed the letter to her husband, at the same time showing The Age with a paragraph about her and Cradock, and desired him to direct her future conduct, which he has done in advising her to continue exactly as if she had never received such letters and not to allow the avarice of blackguards to harass and torment her. . .’

Italy’s Town of the Diary

Some 250km north of Rome and 70km east of Florence, in Tuscany but not far from the borders with Umbria and Romagna, lies Pieve Santo Stefano, otherwise known as the Town of the Diary. For over two decades, it has been the centre of an astonishing project to archive and publicise the diaries of, what the archive calls, common people, and in so doing has developed what might be termed a diary culture.

Pieve Santo Stefano was almost completely destroyed during the Second World War, though an L-shaped town hall survived, and it is there that the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale - or ‘house of memory’ - began to evolve 25 years ago, at the initiative of the journalist and writer Saverio Tutino. A full history can be seen here in Italian, and here translated into English. Today, all the roads into the town bear not only a sign saying its name, but another sign saying ‘Citta del Diario’.

Over the years, many thousands of diaries (and letters) have been deposited in the Archive. A few of their authors are highlighted on the Archive’s website: an architect who was victim to a terrorist attempt in the seventies; a ‘naif writer’ who described his work in a mine and his amorous adventures; a Venetian farmer with a poetic but ungrammatic style; a girl who wrote with deep sorrow to her mother from a drug-addicted community before her suicide; a Sicilian farmer who emigrated to the US; a bricklayer from the south of Italy; and a robber from Rome.

But the Archive is more than just a depository for diaries. There are two panels of readers, one consisting of people ‘on the spot’, i.e. in the locality (‘teachers and attendants, clerks and students, a [vet], an engineer, a trader and some housewives’), and the other consisting of ‘experienced people’(!), such as writers, sociologists and historians. And, each year, these readers select a prize text. By the early 1990s, Italian publishers were already sourcing new titles from the Archives, and since 1999, Mursia has been publishing the prize-winners texts.

Every year now, in September, the town hosts a celebration - the Annual Festival of Autobiography - based around the prize giving. The night before there is a meeting between the two groups of readers, and the following morning the authors and the readers get together. Representatives of similar archives in other European countries also visit and together have formed the European Association for Autobiography. The town hall regularly hosts exhibitions of the rarest diaries and of the original manuscripts sent to the Archives during the year.

Here is part of the Archive’s English page which explains, albeit in a rather awkward translation, some of its philosophy:

‘We have spread the idea that also some personal documents, not connected with market interests, are a new genre of not learned literature (or maybe a ‘semi-learned’ literature). Without doubts, this is a lively cultural genre which is fit for the age we live in. In the meanwhile, students, journalists, writers, scenarists, have come to the Archives and have consulted the texts. When the diaries are collated, we often find parallelisms and convergences. Sometime, we assist to a kind of meeting among the past events which are told in the texts. The micro-history we find in our writings emphasizes every aspect of life, even if some texts were originally written for different aims. Besides, around the Archives, which are sources of memory, an attention to old relationships and new friendships revives. It seems that people, whose memoirs are written on the paper, have the possibility of talking over their past loneliness and of communicating with the world in a new real atmosphere.

Philippe Lejeune, the author of Le Pact Autobiographique, agrees with us in using the word ‘magic’ to explain the combination between the poetics of the past and the scientific study of all autobiographic stories. Lejeune says: ‘The autobiographic texts must not considered to be interesting and meaningful documents which are useful only to the study of past events’. For this reason, we thought right to place the texts at public’s disposal and to confront them, in order to make the personal documents revive. We had an intuition like Lejeune. We wondered how it was possible to localize ‘All the anonymous texts which were passed unnoticed by some local institutions and had survived the loss and the material destruction. The aim was to avoid that one day or another these texts were forgotten by the very authors and by the author’s descendants’. Since when we have founded the Archives, the authors give us their diaries to read them and to keep them after their death. One day, a eighty years old woman, who gave her diary to the Archives of Pieve Santo Stefano, said: ‘I would like that at least a person read my memoirs. Otherwise, I would pass over my life in silence and nobody would notice my presence, because I have not a husband nor children. I would have lived without leaving a little trace’.’

The spirit of millipedes

Three centuries ago to the day, a physician named David Hamilton was treating Queen Anne for gout. He reported in his diary that she was taking spirit of millipedes for the condition, and was feeling much better. Hamilton, who was particularly known in London for his midwifery skills, was also a friend of Mary Cowper, a diarist of some note.

Hamilton was born in 1663 in Lanarkshire, the tenth and youngest son of James Hamilton of Boggs, the first Laird of Boggs and Dalzell, by his third wife. He studied at University of Leyden and the College of Physicians in London. He married in 1689 and again in 1694, fathering two sons with his second wife. He is said to have had a flourishing medical practice, largely because of his skills in midwifery. Indeed, it is possible that he was first brought to the notice of Queen Anne when asked to see if she were pregnant, though there seems to be no evidence that he ever attended her in childbirth - since the last of her many stillborn children predated Hamilton’s appointment.

In 1703, Hamilton was knighted and elected a Fellow of the College of Physicians. The same year he was also appointed Third Physician-in ordinary to Queen Anne but did not attend her until 1708. By 1712, he had been appointed Second Physician-in ordinary. Two years later he was appointed physician to the Princess of Wales, but was not summoned for either of her pregnancies (one was a stillborn child, and the other child died in infancy). There is not much information about David Hamilton online, all the above comes from a lengthy introduction in The Diary of Sir David Hamilton 1709-1714, edited by Philip Roberts and published in 1975 by Clarendon Press.

Hamilton attended the Queen often in the last five years of her life, and so his diary provides not only details of her medical state, but records her ideas and opinions, her relationships with friends, ministers and foes, and gives a good impression of the mood of the times. A short review of the book, found on Pub Med Central, says it provides ‘a valuable account’ of events towards the end of Queen Anne’s reign and gives ‘an excellent portrait of the queen’.

The review, however, is more critical of the book’s (or the diary’s) medical content. It notes that Hamilton is especially exercised over Anne’s gout and discusses the contemporary ideas of etiology and therapy, but complains that ‘the index carries only one reference to any medical treatment of the Queen’ (which, as it happens is to Tipping’s water for urinary lithiasis, and this concerns the Duchess of Marlborough, not the Queen!).

Indeed, Hamilton writes in his diary about the Queen’s gout on one of his first visits. Here is an extract from exactly 300 years ago today, as well as the subsequent entries for 1709.

9 December 1709
‘I’ll begin therefore with an uneasiness which her Majesty appeared to have, about the beginning of December 1709. The particular occasion I was not made acquainted with. But the seeing her inwardly affected, gave me an opportunity to Caution her against disquiets, and as her Phisitian, suggest the Ill consequences that might happen at that time from it. Her receiving this advice with so much Goodness, (I may say Thankfullness) convinc’d me how right my conjecture was. But visiting her the 9th. of that Month I was farther confirm’d therein, for entering the Back stairs I found my Lord Godolphin, then Lord High Treasurer, waiting till her Majesty came out of her Closet, and upon my comming in, he came to inquire for the Queens health (the first time of his doing so, and indeed his great gravity, passing with me as a forbidding Countenance, gave me no inclination to Converse with him). I answerd‚ ‘that her Majesty was better of the Gout that it had been more regular than usual, that she took nothing but spirit of Millepedes, and that since the use of it she had taken few medecines than before’; to which he Replyd the oftner the boards are wash’d, the sooner they are impair’d. Upon this Freedom of Conversation I told his Lordship that it was in his Power to prolong his Majestys life, by laying before her as few disquieting things as possible, but if there was an absolute necessity for it, to shun it at least at some certain seasons. Which he with wonderfull good nature, and seeming pleasure undertook, adding, that if I would send him a line to inform him of every such season, he would do his utmost to keep her easy.

After his returning from the Queen, and my going in, I told her Majesty what had pass’d which She received exceeding kindly; thank’d me, and desir’d me to go on, and do according as he had appointed, only not to trouble too often least he should think it came from her.’

22 December 1709
‘The 22nd. her Majesty acquainted me that she knew I had been with my Lord Treasurer, because he had been with her, and told her, he was not come to discourse of any affairs with her, for if he had occasion to do it, he knew it was not a proper time.’

23 December 1709
‘And on the 23rd. repeated that he would not trouble her with any affairs till after Christmass, which shews how readilly he came in to keep her from disquiet and to act the part of a kind friend as well as a Minister of State.’

24 December 1709
‘The 24th. he sent to me to give him in writing the times he was to omitt Business, at least disquieting business to her Majesty, vid the History. Then he express’d great pleasure in the prospect of keeping her Majesty quiet this way. His after care, and the success of it, prov’d that his words were not complimental, that Freedom from disquiets contributed exceedingly to her health, and consequently that disquiet must injure it. With concern he broke out, saying, You think I disquiet the Queen; what trouble can that give her Majesty for me to read a letter or two to her, or to make her walk to the Councill and hear her Lords discourse upon her affairs; Its Uneasiness from Tattles that injures her most, and craving from her Majesty that which would not look so well for her to grant.’

Philip Roberts, the editor of Hamilton’s diary, provides a note about the ‘spirit of millipedes’ taken from The Essays of Sir William Temple published by Blackie in 1910. This book is freely available online at Internet Archive, and here is what Temple says about the medical benefits of millipedes: ‘The next specific I esteem to be that little insect called millepedes: the powder whereof, made up into little balls with fresh butter, I never knew fail of curing any sore throat: it must lie at the root of the tongue, and melt down at leisure upon going to bed. I have been assured that Doctor Mayerne used it as a certain cure for all cancers in the breast; and should be very tedious if I should tell here, how much the use of it has been extolled by several within my knowledge, upon the admirable effects for the eyes, the scurvy, and the gout; but there needs no more to value it, than what the ancient physicians affirm of it in those three words: Digerit, Aperit, Abstergit. It digests. It opens. It cleanses.’

Finally, it is worth noting that Hamilton’s diary itself has not survived into the modern day, but only a copy made by his friend Mary, Countess Cowper, who herself was a diarist of note - see The Diary Junction. This copy is kept with the Panshanger Manuscripts at the Hertfordshire Records Office, along with a faithful copy of that copy by Mary’s daughter Sarah. In her diary, Cowper mentions Hamilton, and specifically that the stillborn child of the Princess of Wales would have ‘infallibly been alive if she had been laid by Sir D. H.’

Chiang Kai-shek’s diaries

It is sixty years to the day that the Republic of China (ROC), having been defeated by the Communist Party in the country’s civil war, relocated to Taiwan. To celebrate the event, Academia Historica, home to Taiwan’s national archives, is presenting an exhibition based on the 1949 diary of Chiang Kai-shek, the ROC’s leader for many years. The original of that diary, and indeed a lifetime of diaries kept by Chiang, are housed in the US, at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, copies of which have only recently been made available for public inspection under stringent conditions.

Chiang Kai-shek was born in 1887 in a place called Xikou which lies roughly 100 miles south of Shanghai and 300 miles directly north of Taipei. His father was a salt merchant, though he died while Chiang was only eight. An arranged marriage followed, and two children. Chiang trained for a military career, partly in Japan, where he served in the imperial army from 1909 to 1911. On returning to China, he took part in various revolutionary activities, until, in 1918, he joined Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, which was trying to overthrow the warlords and unify the country.

Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, leaving something of a power vacuum, but the following year Chiang won control of the revolutionary forces, and continued the campaign against the warlords. However, he had to fight a bloody battle against a Communist wing within the Kuomintang - involving the murder of thousands - before marching into Peking in 1928 and establishing a new central government. To further consolidate his power base, he married Soong May-ling, the sister of Sun Yat-sen’s widow, but first he had to convert to Christianity, and divorce his wife and concubines, because of the demands by Soong’s parents. Chiang’s government made many advances in the subsequent decade - economic, social, industrial - but was constantly harried by surviving warlords and the ousted Communists.

From 1937, and during the Second World War, Chiang’s resources were focused on repelling and stemming a Japanese invasion. With the help of the Allies, Japan eventually surrendered and withdrew from China. By then, however, Chiang’s rule was suffering badly from corruption and economic inflation, while the Communists, led by Mao Zedong, were growing in strength and influence. The US took a stand and suspended aid payments, but encouraged Chiang to negotiate with Mao Zedong. Wikipedia’s extensive biography of Chiang provides this note: ‘In his diary on June 1948, Chiang wrote that the Kuomintang had failed, not because of external enemies but because of disintegration and rot from within; and it was this, more than any alleged foreign intrigue, that contributed to his defeat.’

In the autumn of 1949, the ROC, defeated by the Communists, moved from mainland China to exile on Taiwan, and exactly sixty years ago today - on 7 November 1949 - its government resumed office there. However, it would be some months before Chiang himself made it to Taiwan and took up his duties as president. He was re-elected several times in subsequent decades, and remained leader of the ROC government in exile, formally claiming sovereignty over all of China, until his death in 1975. In the context of the Cold War, Wikipedia says, most of the Western world recognised this position, and the ROC represented China as a whole in the United Nations and other international organizations until the 1970s.

In memory of that day 60 years ago, Academia Historica is presenting an exhibition of Chiang Kai-shek’s 1949 diary, according to Taiwan Today, quoting from a story in China Times. The special exhibition - Critical 1949: President Chiang Kai-shek’s Resignation and Return - is running in conjunction with a documentary using material from microfilms of Chiang’s diary. The microfilms are in the care of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Taiwan Today explains, where readers are only allowed to make handwritten copies, and therefore, their display in the exhibition and documentary is ‘especially valuable’. The documentary film crew, it adds, took a year going back and forth between mainland China, the US and Taiwan, consulting the diary and drawing on the Academia Historica’s files, as well as on films in the US National Archives and Records Administration. The Taiwan Today story gives one quote from Chiang’s diary, dated New Year’s Day 1949: ‘The enormity of the failures and ignominy of the past year has never been surpassed.’

In fact, Chiang wrote diaries for much of his life, and these are all held by the Hoover Institution. It divides them into four groups: Earliest Diaries, 1917–1931; World War II Diaries, 1932–1945; Postwar Diaries, 1946–1955; and Final Diaries, 1956–1972. But it also provides a detailed inventory of the diaries in pdf form, along with three pages of notes about them and their provenance. In particular, it notes that the diaries were given to the Institution by Elizabeth Chiang Fang Chih-yi, the wife of one of Chiang Kai-shek’s grandsons, and that the diaries will remain in the archives for 50 years ‘or until a permanent repository is found on the territory of China’.

The Journal of the Overseas Young Chinese Forum has an interesting article about the diaries, with many short quotes. It concludes: ‘What is the importance of Chiang Kai-shek’s diaries? This is a lively collection of papers. On August 25, 1929, he wrote: ‘my wife was suffering terribly after an abortion,’ fueling speculation of Chiang and Soong’s family life, for, by the time Chiang married Soong, he had contracted venereal disease and become sterile. In October 1933, when the central This article is a revised version of one first published 10 years ago on 16 November 2009. Communist activities, he ‘watched the moon with wife and sang Manjianghong [a Chinese tragic opera],’ a sensational moment quite different from the typical image of his seriousness and toughness. The diaries, therefore, provide scholars not only with details of major historic events but also insights into the ‘human element’ of history.’

Here is one quote included in the article, dated 14 October 1928: ‘I am so idle and self-indulgent that I have not been keeping my diaries for ten days! With such an unbridled and wanton attitude, how can I endeavor to wash away our national indignity and realize the success of the Chinese revolution?’

The Hoover Institution has kept Chiang’s diaries carefully archived, and only opened them to the public in stages. The Earliest Diaries were opened for inspection in March 2006, and since then one new group of the diaries has been made available each year until the final set was opened last July. However, there are stringent conditions applying: ‘Before examining the paper copies of the diaries, users must sign an agreement stating that (1) quotations from the diaries may not be published, broadcast, or redistributed in any form, without the written permission of the Chiang family, which retains copyright; (2) the diaries may not be photocopied nor photographed, so only handwritten notes may be taken; (3) cameras, cell phones, computers, scanners, and other image capture devices, as well as tape recorders and other recording devices, are not allowed while using the diaries; and (4) violations of the agreement may result in forfeiture of the privilege to access materials at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives.’

Diary briefs

Scott’s diaries to be blogged and twittered - Scott Polar Research Institute

A Times man recalls the buying of Hitler’s ‘diaries’ - The Times

Carl Crow’s The Long Road Back to China - UPI Asia, Earnshaw Books

More on Turkish coup diary - Today’s Zaman

Danish witness to Armenian Genocide - The Armenian Weekly

Jay Parini on Sofia Tostoy’s diaries - The Guardian

Sam Hanna Bell’s A Salute from the Banderol - The Irish Times, The Blackstaff Press

Echoes in the Ear

It’s one hundred and fifty years since the great American man of letters, Washington Irving, died. He was a prolific writer, and a committed diarist, keeping especially enthusiastic records of his travels - such as of the time he visited the Ear of Dionysius in Sicily.

Irving was born in 1783 in New York to Scottish-English immigrants who were such admirers of George Washington that they named their last son (of 11 children) after him. He studied law privately, but did not practice for long. After travelling in Europe in 1804-1806, he represented his family’s hardware business in England until 1818. He served as a military aide to a New York governor in 1812, and was a magazine editor.

However, Irving came early to writing, and it is for his short stories, biographies and journals that he is best remembered. His comic history of New York, by the imaginary Dietrich Knickerbocker, was published in 1809, and The Sketchbook in 1819, under the pen name, Geoffrey Crayon. The latter contained stories that were to become famous: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. By the late 1820s, Irving had gained a reputation throughout Europe and the US as a great writer and thinker.

After spending many years in Europe, he returned to New York in 1832, and established a home at Sunnyside in Tarrytown, a place which then many famous people visited over the years. He remained there for the rest of his life, apart from four years (1942-1946) when he acted as minister to Spain, often nurturing young American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allen Poe. He died on 28 November 1859. See Wikipedia or American Naitonal Biography for more biographical information.

Many of Irving’s books are available for free download at Internet Archive, including the three volumes of his journals edited by William Trent and George Hellman and first published in 1919 by the Bibliophile Society. Lots of extracts can also be found in the three volumes of The Life and Letters of Washington Irving by his nephew Pierre M. Irving (and published by G. P. Putnam in 1883) - again see Internet Archive.

Here is the young Irving, on tour in Europe, fascinated by the Ear of Dionysius in Sicily, and playfully dressing up for a party (taken from The Life and Letters of Washington Irving).

4 February 1805
‘This morning I walked out of town to visit the celebrated Ear of Dionysius the Tyrant. I was accompanied by Dr Baker of the President, Davis, a midshipman, and Tootle, purser of the Nautilus.

The approach to the Ear is through a vast quarry, one of those from whence the stone for the edifices of ancient Syracuse was procured. The bottom of this quarry is cultivated in many places, and being entirely open overhead to the sun and sheltered on every side from the wind by high precipices, it is very fertile.

Travellers have generally been very careless in their account of the Ear. Some one originally started the observation that it was cut in the form of a human ear, and every one who has since given a description of it has followed in the same track and made the same remark. Brydone, among the rest, joins in it . . .

The Ear is a vast serpentine cavern, something in the form of the letter S reversed; its greatest width is at the bottom, from whence it narrows with an inflection to the top, something like the external shape of an ass’s ear. Its height is about eighty or ninety feet, and its length about one hundred and twenty. It is the same height and dimensions from the entrance to the extremity, where it ends abruptly. The marks of the tools are still perfectly visible on the walls of the cavern.

The rock is brought to a regular surface the whole extent, without any projection or curvatures as in the human ear. About half-way in the cavern is a small square recess or chamber cut in one side of the wall even with the ground, and at the interior extremity there appears to be a small recess at the top, but it is at present inaccessible. A poor man who lives in the neighborhood attended us with torches of straw, by which we had a very good view of the interior of the Ear. Holes are discernible near the interior end of the cave, which are made in the wall at regular distances and ascend up in an inclined direction. They are about an inch in diameter. Some of the company were of opinion that they have formerly contributed to the support of a stairs or ladder, but there is no visible place where a stairs could lead to, and the holes do not go above half the height of the cavern.

There are several parts of the Ear in which the discharge of a pistol makes a prodigious report, heightened by the echoes and reverberations of the cavern. One of the company had a fowling-piece which he discharged, and it made a noise almost equal to the discharge of artillery, though not so sharp a report. A pistol also produced a report similar to a volley of musketry. The best place to stand to hear the echoes to advantage is in the mouth of the cavern. A piece of paper torn in this place makes an echo as if some person had struck the wall violently with a stick in the back of the cave.

This singular cavern is called the Ear of Dionysius, from the purpose for which it is said to have been destined by that tyrant. Conscious of the disaffection of his subjects, and the hatred and enmity his tyrannical government had produced, he became suspicious and distrustful even of his courtiers that surrounded him. He is said to have had this cavern made for the confinement of those persons of whom he had the strongest suspicions. It was so constructed that any thing said in it, in ever so low a murmur, would be conveyed to a small aperture that opened into a little chamber where he used to station himself and listen. This chamber is still shown. It is on the outside of the Ear, just above the entrance, and communicates with the interior. Some of the officers of our navy had been in it last summer; they were lowered down to it by ropes, and mention that sounds are conveyed to it from the cavern with amazing distinctness. I wished very much to get to it, and the man who attended us brought me a cord for the purpose, but my companions protested they would not assist in lowering me down, and finally persuaded me that it was too hazardous, as the cord was small and might be chafed through in rubbing against the rock, in which case I would run a risk of being dashed to pieces. I therefore abandoned the project for the present.’

6 February 1805
‘This morning, Lieuts Murray and Gardner, and Capt Hall, of the ship President, Capt Dent of the Nautilus, and myself, set off to pay another visit to the Ear of Dionysius. We despatched beforehand a midshipman and four sailors with a spar and a couple of halyards. On arriving there, we went to the top of the precipice immediately over the mouth of the cave. Here we fastened ourselves to one of the halyards, and were lowered successively over the edge of the precipice (having previously disposed the spar along the edge of the rock so as to keep the halyard from chafing) into a small hole over the entrance of the Ear, and about fifteen feet from the summit of the precipice. The persons lowered were Murray, Hall, the midshipman, and myself, the others swearing they would not risk their necks to gratify their curiosity.

The cavern narrows as it approaches the top, until it ends in a narrow channel that runs the whole extent, and terminates in this small chamber. A passage from this hole or chamber appears to have been commenced to be cut to run into the interior of the rock, but was never carried more than ten or fifteen feet. We then began to make experiments to prove if sound was communicated from below to this spot in an extraordinary degree. Gardner fired a pistol repeatedly, but it did not appear to make a greater noise than when we were below in the mouth of the cavern. We then tried the conveyance of voices; in this we were more successful. One of the company stationed himself at the interior extremity of the Ear, and applying his mouth close to the wall, spoke to me just above a whisper. I was then stationed with my ear to the wall in the little chamber on high and about two hundred and fifty feet distant, and could hear him very distinctly. We conversed with one another in this manner for some time. We then moved to other parts of the cavern, and I could hear him with equal facility, his voice seeming to be just behind me. When, however, he applied his voice to the opposite side of the cave, it was by no means so distinct. This is easily accounted for, as one side of the channel is broken away at the mouth of the cavern, which injures the conveyance of the sound. After all, I doubt very much whether the cave was ever intended for the purpose ascribed to it. The fact is, that when more than one person speaks at a time, it creates such a confusion of sound between their voices and the echoes, that it is impossible to distinguish what they say. This we tried repeatedly, and found to be invariably the case.’

‘But,’ writes Pierre Irving about these journal entries, ‘the antiquities of Syracuse did not engage the exclusive attention of the traveller. He found a romantic interest in visiting the convents, and endeavoring to get ‘a sly peep’ at the nuns [and the] following extract from his journal shows him seeking amusement in another scene.’

10 February 1805
‘In the evening I went to a masquerade at the theatre. I had dressed myself in the character of an old physician which was the only dress I could procure, and had a vast deal of amusement among the ofificers. I spoke to them in broken English, mingling Italian and French with it, so that they thought I was a Sicilian. As I knew many anecdotes of almost all of them, I teazed them the whole evening, till at length one of them discovered me by my voice, which I happened not to disguise at the moment.’

Remembering Fanny Kemble

‘The record contained in the following pages is a picture of conditions of human existence which I hope and believe have passed away.’ So wrote the remarkable English actress and playwrite, Fanny Kemble, in a preface to her 1838 diary about the slaves she had tried to help on her American husband’s plantation some 25 years earlier. The diary, which is freely available on the internet, is considered to be an important early document describing the conditions of plantation slaves. Today is a good day to remember Fanny since she was born exactly two hundred years ago.

Fanny was born in England on 27 November 1809 into a theatrical family - both her parents were actors. She made her first appearance, when about 20, as the heroine in her father’s production of Romeo and Juliet at a theatre in Covent Garden. She proved to be an immediate success, and helped revive the theatre’s fortunes. In 1833, while on tour in the US with her father, she met Pierce Butler, a southern planter. She married him, stayed in the US, and gave up acting.

In 1836, Butler and his brother inherited their father’s Georgia plantation which owned hundreds of slaves. In 1838, Fanny (with her two children) spent four months at the plantations on Butler and St Simon’s islands. Thereafter, the family returned to Philadelphia, but the marriage broke down, and Butler denied Kemble access to her children. She returned to England and the theatre world, but then went back to the US to deal with a divorce suit. The divorce was granted in 1849. Kemble retired to Lennox, Massachusetts, and wrote several autobiographical works some of them based on the journals she had kept. For more information on Kemble, see Wikipedia, the PBS resource bank, or The New Georgia Encyclopaedia.

Kemble was an excellent diarist - a good writer and very observant - and her diaries have been published in many editions. Most recently, in 2000, Harvard University Press brought out a compilation of her writing - Fanny Kemble’s Journals - with extracts from throughout her life, starting when she was an actress and continuing to the last years of her life (she died in 1893). A few pages can be seen on the Amazon website.

Her most famous diary, though, is the one she kept for the months while living on her husband’s plantation, in which she recorded much about the slaves she saw and came in contact with. This was later circulated among abolitionists prior to the American Civil War, but was published once the war broke out - as Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 by Harper & Brothers in 1863. Although a diary in form, it was written as a series of letters, and dedicated to, her friend Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick, a teacher in Lennox and an author. The full text is freely available at Internet Archive. Here is Kemble’s own preface, written some 25 years after the diary itself, and one extract.

‘The following diary was kept in the winter and spring of 1838-9, on an estate consisting of rice and cotton plantations in the islands at the entrance of the Altamaha on the coast of Georgia. The slaves in whom I then had an unfortunate interest were sold some years ago. The islands themselves are at present in the power of the Northern troops. The record contained in the following pages is a picture of conditions of human existence which I hope and believe have passed away. London, January 16, 1863.’

26 February 1839
‘My dearest E, I write to you to-day in great depression and distress. I have had a most painful conversation with Mr –, who has declined receiving any of the people’s petitions through me. Whether he is wearied with the number of these prayers and supplications, which he would escape but for me, as they probably would not venture to come so incessantly to him, and I, of course, feel bound to bring every one confided to me to him, or whether he has been annoyed at the number of pitiful and horrible stories of misery and oppression under the former rule of Mr K –, which have come to my knowledge since I have been here, and the grief and indignation caused, but which can not, by any means, always be done away with, though their expression may be silenced by his angry exclamations of ‘Why do you listen to such stuff?’ or ‘Why do you believe such trash? don’t you know the niggers are all d–d liars?’ etc, I do not know; but he desired me this morning to bring him no more complaints or requests of any sort, as the people had hitherto had no such advocate, and had done very well without, and I was only kept in an incessant state of excitement with all the falsehoods they ‘found they could make me believe.’ How well they have done without my advocacy, the conditions which I see with my own eyes, even more than their pitiful petitions, demonstrate; it is indeed true that the sufferings of those who come to me for redress, and, still more, the injustice done to the great majority who can not, have filled my heart with bitterness and indignation that have overflowed my lips, till, I suppose, is weary of hearing what he has never heard before, the voice of passionate expostulation and importunate pleading against wrongs that he will not even acknowledge, and for creatures whose common humanity with his own I half think he does not believe; but I must return to the North, for my condition would be almost worse than theirs condemned to hear and see so much wretchedness, not only without the means of alleviating it, but without permission even to represent it for alleviation: this is no place for me, since I was not born among slaves, and can not bear to live among them.’

Other far-off things

‘The big cosmological program I shall not live to see,’ Edwin Hubble, born 120 years ago today, told his wife, Grace, near the time of his death. The truth is, though, that not only had he lived through an era of unprecedented new astronomical understanding, but that he was the very pioneer of that understanding. Grace’s diaries are kept with the Edwin Hubble archive but none of them - as far as I know - have been published. A very few extracts can be found on the internet, but many more can be read offline - in a ‘sloppy’ and ‘pretentious’ novel called Hubble Time!

Hubble was born on 20 November 1889 in Marshfield, Missouri, though his family moved to Wheaton, Illinois, before he was a teenager. He studied maths, astronomy and philosophy at the University of Chicago and, on the basis of academic and sporting abilities (running, basketball and boxing) he was awarded one of Oxford University’s first Rhodes Scholarships. There, he completed a masters in Spanish; and on returning to the US taught the language at New Albany High School, Indiana. He longed, though, to return to science and after a year or so signed on at the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago, to study astronomy to PhD level.

During World War I, Hubble joined the army, and quickly advanced to the rank of major. Thereafter, he took up a position at the Mount Wilson Observatory, California, with its Hooker 100-inch telescope. In the early 1920s, he found the first certain evidence of separate galaxies of dust and gas far beyond our own. He established that many such galaxies exist, and he developed the first system for their classification. Further, by the late 1920s, he had shown that these galaxies were receding from ours at velocities proportional to their distance.

Hubble is included in the Time 100 list of most important people in the 20th century. Its profile notes how Albert Einstein visited Mount Wilson to see the telescope and thank Hubble personally because his idea of the universe expanding conformed with his (Einstein’s) theory of relativity, even though other astronomers had insisted this could not be the case. Time goes on say: ‘With the greatest scientific superstar of the age paying him homage, Hubble became a popular superstar in his own right. His 1936 book on his discoveries, The Realm of the Nebulae, cemented his public reputation. Tourists and Hollywood luminaries alike would drive up the mountain to marvel at the observatory where Hubble had discovered the universe, and he and his wife Grace were embraced by the elite of California society.’

After World War II, during which he returned to the army, Hubble helped design and plan the new 200-inch Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory, some 90 miles southeast of Mount Wilson; and, in 1948, he was given the honour of being its first user. Between then and 1975, Hale was world’s largest operating telescope. Hubble died in 1953. Interestingly or not, Wikipedia’s article on the man is roughly one-fifth of the size of the article about the famous space telescope named after him!

In 1924, Hubble had married Grace Burke-Lieb, the recently widowed daughter of a well-connected Southern California millionaire. Throughout their nearly 30 years of marriage, Grace kept a diary, recording her husband’s story. There’s a catalogue of her diaries in the inventory of the Edwin Hubble papers at The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Although I can find no trace of them ever having been published, a couple of extracts can be found on the internet. One (undated) about a visit by the Huxleys comes from Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy by Holly Henry (published by Cambridge University Press in 2003 - see Googlebooks).

‘After dinner we walked to the 100-inch - The moon and globular cluster. Then we came out into enchanting moonlight, a glow in the west, a haze of moonbeams and shadow, all the domes and towers [of the telescope observatories] washed with shining silver. Went to the 60-inch & E[dwin] trained it on the ring nebula and other far-off things. . . Matthew [Huxley’s son] said, what do you expect to find with the 200-inch, sir? and E - We hope to find something we didn’t expect. And Aldous chuckled. Outside the 60-inch Aldous said, ‘Look at the pilasters and the fluting. It is Roman, it is like the tomb of a great queen.’ And it was, under the magic of the moon.’

And another extract can be found in Dan Cloer’s short bio of Hubble at Vision.org (a website designed to ‘challenge readers to examine the historical and philosophical origins of today’s issues’). ‘By September 1953,’ Cloer says, ‘[Hubble] had completed his 176th exposure at Palomar. At the end of the run, he took his wife on a quiet tour of the huge dome and the photographic vault. ‘In two years I will have determined the red-shift [from the new observations],’ Grace recorded him as saying. Her diary entry continued, ‘But the big cosmological program I shall not live to see.’ ’

And then there’s Hubble Time, a novel by Tom Bezzi, who wrote no other novels and died in 1995. The book, first published in 1987 by Mercury House (reissued in 1990 by iUniverse), is narrated by Hubble’s fictional granddaughter, Jane, and ‘explores the private lives of Edwin and Grace Hubble and their compelling legacy’. The blurb explains that the novel contains excerpts from Grace Hubble’s actual diaries as well as previously unpublished material by the Hubbles’ intimate friends such as Aldous Huxley.

But oh dear, here is a review of Hubble Time by Publishers Weekly, posted on Amazon’s website. ‘Astronomer Edwin Hubble and his wife, Grace, a stylish couple who frequented intellectual Los Angeles circles during the first half of this century, make excellent subjects for a historical novel, especially because Grace left behind numerous diaries documenting their life together. Bezzi’s first novel promises much, combining rich material with an innovative premise, but it flounders in execution. The narrative consists of journal entries written by the Hubbles’ fictional granddaughter, Jane, who interweaves excerpts from Grace’s diaries which she is reading into her own. Jane painfully introspective when contemplating her own narrow existence as a lowly copy editor at an inconsequential astronomy magazine turns blindly adulatory when examining her grandparents, reverentially recounting details such as Edwin’s preferred tobacco. Hubble’s significant contributions to his field and the roster of his illustrious friends (among them Aldous Huxley and Charlie Chaplin), however, receive inadequate attention. Jane draws fruitless emotional parallels between herself and Grace, harping ineffectually on the low self-esteem that plagues them both. She also apologizes constantly for her inferior writing abilities, and rightly so, it seems. Bezzi’s prose is sloppy and pretentious, bogging down frequently in awkward repetition and badly chosen phrases in assorted European languages.’

Inside the ice hole

Tomaž Humar, an extraordinary mountaineer from Slovenia, died earlier this month while climbing Langtang Lirung in the Himalayas. Although he left behind no published diaries, PlanetMountain.com has a few of his diary extracts. Here is a typical one: ‘I spend the entire day inside the ice hole to acclimatize more - I do not want to take any risk of edema. The wind is really strong reaching speeds greater than 100 km/h.’

Humar was born in Ljubljana, then part of Yugoslavia, in 1969, and started to climb seriously as a teenager, under the country’s then strict training regime. He was conscripted into the army, and sent to soldier in Kosovo, an experience he hated. He married Sergeja Jersin in 1991, and they had two children before separating. In the mid-1990s, he began a series of climbs in the Himalayas that would earn him a huge following in Slovenia as well as respect from the international climbing community. In 1999, for example, he made a now-famous solo ascent of the south wall of Dhaulagiri, considered one of the deadliest routes in the Himalayas.

However, Humar’s methods were considered hotheaded and even dangerous by some. During a solo attempt to climb Nanga Parbat in 2005, he misjudged the conditions and became trapped by avalanches and melting snow at an altitude of nearly 6,000 meters. After six days in a snow cave - much of it followed on the internet thanks to his webcam equipment - he was rescued by an heroic Pakistani army helicopter crew.

All in all, Humar completed over 1,500 ascents, Wikipedia says, and won a number of mountaineering and other awards, including the Piolet d’Or in 1996 for a climb on Ama Dablam in eastern Nepal. The Guardian, The Independant, and UK Climbing all have obituaries.

But thanks to PlanetMountain.com for nine days of Humar’s diary while climbing the South Face of Annapurna in October 2007. Here are the first five of those days.

24 October 2007
‘I start out with my friend Jagat Limbu. We cross the glacier and weave our way through mixed rock and ice pillars under the main wall at 5800m. We stage our first bivy on a small ice platform at 5800 meters.’

25 October 2007
‘We remain in our bivy at 5800 meters all day due to strong winds and stomach problems. Moreover, I did not feel acclimatized. I had only climbed Tharpu Chuli (5690 m) as a warm-up peak and did not sleep higher than 5300 meters. These are insufficient altitudes to adequately acclimate for an 8000 meter peak.’

26 October 2007
‘I start climbing at 6am - no helmet, no rope, no harness - just bivy gear, some food and gas. I leave everything else with Jagat who would face the descent alone in case I did not come back. At 3pm, I start digging a hole in the ice at 7200 meters. This is my second bivy.’

27 October 2007
‘I spend the entire day inside the ice hole to acclimatize more - I do not want to take any risk of edema. The wind is really strong reaching speeds greater than 100 km/h.’

28 October 2007
The alarm goes off at 6am. I have not slept. I have just been waiting and waiting for a good moment to leave. The sky is clear. The wind is strong . . . and cold . . . I climb very light carrying just 2 liters of juice which freeze within the first hour. After two hours, I make it to the East Ridge at 7500 meters where Loretan and Joss passed in 1984. Despite very strong winds, I continue towards the East Summit. By 10am, I have crossed most of the East ridge and the summit feels close at hand. With each passing hour, the wind grows stronger. As I climb higher, ice and snow falls increase in intensity and frequency and the risk of avalanche becomes more extreme. I am standing on the East Summit at 8047 meters before 3pm. I trust God, I pray, I feel safe! Even if the weather is good I would never dare to continue to the main summit at 8091 m as God gave me the possibility to reach it already once in 1995. It was my first 8000 m, this is the only answer I have to why I chose Annapurna, it’s 20 years since alpinism became ‘my way of life’. I immediately begin my descent. The shadow of the snow cornice is growing long. I call Jagat to tell him that I am on my way back. He is really happy to hear from me. The last contact we had was at 10:00am and since then he has been praying for me. As night closes in, I reach the beginning of the East Ridge. I am very tired and it has been a long time since I have been able to eat or drink. It is completely dark and I cannot see any of my tracks. I am lost, but in my soul I know that God is with me. My headlamp is not working due to low temperatures and I have to wait in the cold and dark for the moon to rise before continuing. I reach my bivy at 7200 meters at 8:25pm. I am totally exhausted. I send this sms: ‘Blessed, in bivac. New route up to 7500m +, then my the longest journey to myself. Annapurna east 8000m + and back after 14 hours in earth time. Everything was o.k., but if is this wind 60 km/h then i drive my car slowly.’ I enter meditation and I prepare a cup of tea as I wait for dawn to come.’

Diary briefs

The diaries of Claretta Petacci, Mussolini’s mistress, to be published - Corriere Della Sera; The Daily Mail, AFP

The Koda diaries: an Indian scandal in the making - DNA

There is no bread

The handwritten diaries of the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones have just been put on display at the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge. It is thought these diaries might represent the only independent Western verification of Stalin’s Ukrainian famine-genocide, known as the Holodomor, in the early 1930s. And Jones himself is now considered a hero in Ukraine for having brought the tragedy to the attention of those in the West. A large amount of material about Jones, including the diaries, is freely available online thanks to a lively website run by Gareth’s niece, Dr Margaret Siriol Colley, and his great nephew, Nigel Linsan Colley.
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Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones was born in Barry, Wales, in 1905. His mother had been tutor to some of the grandchildren of John Hughes, a Welsh industrialist who had founded the town of Yuzovka, modern day Donetsk, in Ukraine, and it was this connection that inspired Jones’ interest in the country. He studied French at Aberystwyth University and then added German and Russian while at Trinity College. In 1930, he began work as a foreign affairs advisor to former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

In 1931, a group of American companies invited Jones to research a book on the Soviet Union, and that summer he toured there with H J Heinz II (of food company fame). Heinz then published a diary of the trip - Experiences in Russia 1931. Wikipedia’s biography of Jones suggests (but without reference) that this diary ‘probably contains the first usage of the word ‘starve’ in relation to the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture’. The diary is narrated by Heinz, but has a preface by Jones. Here is one day’s entry, taken from the Gareth Jones website.

‘Twenty-fifth Day
We were supposed to sail down the Volga yesterday and found today that we could not have done so - yesterday’s boat had not sailed yet. We got on our steamer - a side-wheeler. It was supposed to sail at 11:00am. It did - across the river, and it was nine hours later when we finally left Nijni. It was cold and rainy and there was no place to sit except on our bunks.

Jones struck up a conversation with a mechanic on the boat. ‘I am a Party man,’ the stranger said. ‘There are only four of us on board and only six candidates, and we have a crew of forty-six. On some boats, there is only one Communist. Why? Because the boatmen are mostly of peasant origin and believe in things like private property. The peasants do not like the collective farms because they do not understand. A lot think they are something foreign and not truly Russian. They are superstitious, too.’

It was difficult to get food all day, but finally by the use of some more cigarettes we got the lone waiter interested. The food was not good, although it was very expensive.

The boat was crowded in the third and fourth-class sections. Peasants with huge bundles, dirty clothes, and many babies lay around on every square inch of floor space. There must have been a thousand of them. Smell!

A doctor’s wife on the boat said to Jones: ‘Exiles? The peasants have been sent away in thousands to starve. They were exiled just because they worked hard all their lives. It’s terrible how they have treated them; they have not given them anything; no bread cards even. They sent a lot to Tashkent, where I was, and just left them on the square. The exiles did not know what to do and many starved to death.’

Although there were a fine comfortable lounge and a dining room forward, we could not get the steward to unlock them. He kept insisting that it was against orders to have them open before the boat left port. We finally wore him down with arguing and cigarettes.

So to bed, with rather grim prospects for this trip!’
In 1932, Jones returned to work for Lloyd George even helping him write some memoirs. In early 1933, he went to Germany to cover the Nazis accession to power and was in Leipzig when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor, and flew with him to Frankfurt for a speech there. In March, he travelled to Russia and Ukraine, and on his return to Berlin issued a press release which was published by some newspapers and has since became famous. It started: ‘I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, ‘There is no bread. We are dying.’ ’

Jones’ claim was denied by many in the West and by the Russian authorities who, in 1934, banned him from returning to the country. He continued to travel, though, this time in the East, but was captured by bandits in Japanese-occupied Inner Mongolia, and was murdered, some believe by Soviet agents, in August 1935 just a few days before his 30th birthday. It was only with the fall of Communism, more than half a century later, that many Ukrainians became aware of the truth of the famine, that an estimated four million people had died because of Stalin’s decision to impose farm collectivisation and then to seal the Ukrainian border to punish peasants for supposedly ‘hoarding grain’.

More than 70 years after Jones’ death, in 2006, a plaque was unveiled in his memory in the Old College at Aberystwyth University. The Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK, Ihor Kharchenko, was present and described Jones as an ‘unsung hero of Ukraine’. And two years later, Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge (who had also reported on the Ukraine famine) were posthumously awarded the Ukrainian Order of Freedom.

And today - 13 November 2009 - the Wren Library, of Trinity College, Cambridge, is opening an exhibition which includes Jones’ diaries alongside some other rare items connected to past students at Trinity College (such as Isaac Newton, AA Milne, and Ludwig Wittgenstein). The story has been widely reported in the British press today - see The Guardian.

However, it is the Gareth Jones website (put together by his relations, Dr Margaret Colley and Nigel Colley) which has the most information on the diaries (and much else about Jones’ life). It says that perhaps they represent ‘the only independent verification of arguably Stalin’s greatest atrocity’. The website provides a book-length power point presentation entitled The Gareth Jones Diaries with legible images of some of his diaries and transcriptions of those images. Here is an (undated) extract from the diaries, as transcribed by Dr Margaret Colley (with some words added by Colley, and some Russian words left out by me).

‘In the Ukraine. A little later. I crossed the border from Great Russia into the Ukraine. Everywhere I talked to peasants who walked past - they all had the same story; ‘There is no bread - we haven’t had bread for over 2 months – a lot are dying.’ The first village had no more potatoes left and the store of [beetroot] was running out. They all said ‘the cattle is dying. [Nothing to feed.] We used to feed the world now we are hungry. How can we sow when we have few horses left? How will we be able to work in the fields when we are weak from want of food? Then I caught up [with] a bearded peasant who was walking along. His feet were covered with sacking. We started talking. He spoke in Ukrainian Russian. I gave him [a] lump of bread and of cheese.

‘You could not buy that anywhere for 20 roubles. There just is no food.’ We walked along and talked; ‘Before the war this was all gold. We had horses and cows and pigs and chickens. Now we are ruined. [We are] [the living dead]. You see that field. It was all gold, but now look at the weeds. The weeds were peeping up over the snow.’

‘Before the war we could have boots and meat and butter. We were the richest country in the world for grain. We fed the world. Now they have taken all away from us. Now people steal much more. Four days ago, they stole my horse. Hooligans came. There that’s where I saw the track of the horse.’

‘A horse is better than a tractor. A tractor goes and stops, but a horse goes all the time. A tractor cannot give manure, but a horse can. How can the spring sowing be good? There is little seed and the people are too weak. We are all weak and hungry.’

‘The winter sowing was bad, and the winter ploughing [was] also bad.’ He took me along to his cottage. His daughter and three little children. Two of the smaller children were swollen. ‘If you had come before the Revolution we would have given you chicken and eggs and milk and fine bread. Now we have no bread in the house. They are killing us.’

‘People are dying of hunger.’ There was in the hut, a spindle and the daughter showed me how to make thread. The peasant showed me his shirt, which was home-made and some fine sacking which had been home-made. ‘But the Bolsheviks are crushing that. They won’t take it. They want the factory to make everything.’ The peasant then ate some very thin soup with a scrap of potato. No bread in house. The white bread [of Gareth’s] they thought was wonderful.’

More diary briefs

Good extracts from three WWII diaries:
Robert Uhrig, aircraft engineer (Dayton Daily News);
Tom Holcomb’s life on a destroyer (The Charleston Gazette);
Anton Novak, a Canadian prisoner of war (National Post).

And a Cornish soldier’s experience of the WWI trenches - BBC

Diary briefs

The first poppy? - found in Len Smith’s newly-published war diary - The Independent

Bruce Springsteen ‘to publish diaries’ - Digitalspy

Diaries of kids who gave up technology for 30 days - The Daily Mirror

Lieutenant Mark Evison’s journal about the harsh realities of fighting in Afghanistan - The Daily Telegraph

The fall of the Wall

The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago today - on 9 November 1989 - at least metaphorically, if not physically. A day later, Gorbachev’s Foreign Policy Assistant Anatoly Chernyaev wrote in his diary: ‘This entire era in the history of the socialist system is over’. Two days later, Andreas Ramos would drive to Berlin from Aarhus, Denmark, and write about the playing of alpine horns and ‘flags and flags and flags’. But it would be ten more days before I myself mentioned the historic event in my own diary, and then I wrote about ‘the rush of events in Berlin’ being ‘fabulous’.

The Berlin Wall - thanks to Wikipedia for this and the next two paragraphs - was a concrete barrier erected by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that completely encircled the city of West Berlin, separating it from East Germany, including East Berlin. The Wall included guard towers placed along large concrete walls, which circumscribed a wide area that contained anti-vehicle trenches and other defenses. The separate and much longer inner German Border demarcated the border between East and West Germany. Both borders came to symbolise the Iron Curtain between Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc.

Prior to the Wall’s erection, three and a half million East Germans had avoided Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions and escaped into West Germany, many over the border between East and West Berlin. During its existence from 1961 to 1989, the Wall stopped almost all such emigration and separated the GDR from West Berlin for more than a quarter of a century. After its erection, around 5,000 people attempted to escape over the wall, with estimates of the resulting death toll varying between around 100 and 200.

During a revolutionary wave sweeping across the Eastern Bloc, which included several weeks of civil unrest, the East German government announced on 9 November 1989 - 20 years ago today - that all GDR citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. Crowds of East Germans climbed onto and crossed the wall, joined by West Germans on the other side in a celebratory atmosphere. Over the next few weeks, parts of the wall were chipped away by a jubilant public and by souvenir hunters; industrial equipment was later used to remove almost all of the rest. The fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for German reunification, which was formally concluded on 3 October 1990.

To mark the anniversary - for 9 November 1989 is considered the day the wall fell even though technically it remained guarded for some time - here are three very different texts.

The first is a diary entry made by Anatoly Chernyaev, Mikhail Gorbachev’s Foreign Policy Assistant, on 10 November. This is available at the WBUR website. This extraordinary diary entry, the website says, from inside the Kremlin, the day after the Wall fell, documents in the form of a ‘snapshot’ reaction the revolutionary mood of one of the closest and most loyal of Gorbachev’s assistants. Chernyaev realized that this event meant ‘the end of Yalta’ and of ‘the Stalinist legacy’ in Europe, and in a striking statement, he welcomed this change, saying the key was Gorbachev’s decision not to stand in the way.

10 November 1989
‘The Berlin Wall has collapsed. This entire era in the history of the socialist system is over. . . Today we received messages about the ‘retirement’ of Deng Xiaopeng and [Bulgarian leader Todor] Zhivkov. Only our ‘best friends’ Castro, Ceaucescu, [and] Kim Il Sung are still around - people who hate our guts. But the main thing is the GDR, the Berlin Wall. For it has to do not only with ‘socialism’, but with the shift in the world balance of forces. This is the end of Yalta . . . the Stalinist legacy and ‘the defeat of Hitlerite Germany’. That is what Gorbachev has done. And he has indeed turned out to be a great leader. He has sensed the pace of history and helped history to find a natural channel.’

I would have liked to reproduce here a bonafide diary account about being in Berlin for the fall of the Wall, but I cannot find one on the internet - although there are lots of accounts by people writing retrospectively about the day(s). Here, though, is one paragraph from an account by Andreas Ramos which reads much like a diary, written at the time or very soon after. On hearing the news about the Wall, he and some friends drove from Aarhus in Denmark to Berlin, and this is what Ramos wrote.

11-12 December 1989
‘Everything was out of control. Police on horses watched. There was nothing they could do. The crowd had swollen. People were blowing long alpine horns which made a huge noise. There were fireworks, kites, flags and flags and flags, dogs, children. The wall was finally breaking. The cranes lifted slabs aside. East and West German police had traded caps. To get a better view, hundreds of people were climbing onto a shop on the West German side. We scampered up a nine foot wall. People helped each other; some lifted, others pulled. All along the building, people poured up the wall. At the Berlin Wall itself, which is 3 meters high, people had climbed up and were sitting astride. The final slab was moved away. A stream of East Germans began to pour through. People applauded and slapped their backs.’

And, finally, here is what I wrote - a long way from the action in London - about 10 days after the event, not that there’s anything special about this diary entry, other than it’s mine and it’s about the fall of the Wall.

19 November 1989
‘There appears to be no stopping the unfolding of extraordinary events on the other side of the iron curtain. Poland and Hungary are already being embraced by the West, having overhauled their political systems in the space of a very short period; they are being garlanded with loans and aid and pretty speeches from capitalist world leaders. Now East Germany has joined the throng. Almost overnight the leader fell, the government fell, and the Berlin Wall was, metaphorically speaking, knocked down.

The rush of events in Berlin were so fabulous, that almost every serious mainline radio and TV news programme decamped to that divided city. Freeing the border and allowing unfettered movement from East to West and back again, allowed literally millions of people to explore what they had only ever seen on television, allowed them to visit relatives and friends. Every interview on the subject included questions about the re-unification of Germany, even though the possibility must be many years down the road.

More than Poland and more than Hungary, East Germany’s status is that most likely to affect the emotions of those in the West. The terrible war left not only a divided nation but a divided city as a loud vivid actual symbol of the resulting Cold War. The possibility of greater integration between East and West again exists most seriously through the border of the Germanys: they speak the same language; until just a few decades ago shared the same culture; they are the same people.’

Postscript
The BBC has posted a video of Douglas Hurd, the UK Foreign Secretary in November 1989, reading from his diary.

Trotsky’s indispensability

‘England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.’ Ah, who else but Trotsky could have written that. It’s his birthday today, or would be if he were alive and could have lived to 130. He’s famous for his Marxist theorising, revolutionary ways, and literary ability, but not for being a diarist. Nevertheless, he did very occasionally put pen to journal, especially if cooped up somewhere. Only one diary, though, has ever been published in English, and that’s been out of print for over 30 years.

Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on 7 November 1879 into a Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of Russia. As a teenager, he became involved with Marxism and underground activities which led to him being arrested in 1898. He spent two years in prison, where he married fellow Marxist Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, before being tried and sent to jail in Siberia (where his two children were born). He escaped in 1902, and went to London, joining other Russian emigres, including Lenin, and became a key writer for Iskra, the official organ of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The following year, he married Natalia Sedova.

In 1903, the Social Democrats split. While Lenin assumed leadership of the Bolshevik (minority) faction, Trotsky became a member of the Menshevik (majority) faction and developed his theory of ‘permanent revolution’. He returned to Russia during the 1905 revolution, but was arrested and sent to Siberia again. While imprisoned he wrote one of his major theoretical works - Results and Prospects. Again he escaped, and thereafter pursued his revolutionary activities while travelling in Europe and the US.

After the outbreak of revolution in Petrograd in February 1917, he made his way back to Russia. Despite the previous disagreements with Lenin, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and played a decisive role in the communist revolution. His first post in the new government was as foreign commissar, where he found himself negotiating peace terms with Germany. He was then made war commissar and in this capacity, built up the Red Army which prevailed against the White Russian forces in the civil war. When Lenin fell ill and died, Trotsky was outmanoeuvred by Stalin who, in 1927, threw him out of the party. By 1936, he had settled in Mexico but an assassin called Ramon Mercader, acting on Stalin’s orders, murdered him with an ice pick. Further information is readily available at Wikipedia, The British Library, and Spartacus Educational.

Trotsky never had much time for diary writing, except when he was cooped up somewhere, and this was the case in 1935, when the French government had decided to expel him, but no other country was willing to grant an entry visa. He was kept under police surveillance, without a secretary or regular mail, and not even allowed to visit Paris. Eventually he moved to Norway, where he had more freedom and less time for the diary. But, for that period in 1935, he noted down, more or less daily, various observations about politics, his companion Natalia, the fate of his family in the USSR, and so on. The notebook was found more than a decade after his death among the archives at Harvard University. It was translated by Elena Zarudnaya and published, in 1958, by the university press as Trotsky’s Diary in Exile, 1935.

The dust jacket flap says: ‘This diary of the exiled Trotsky is a powerfully evocative fragment of history and human personality. Of all the great figures of the Russian revolution Leon Trotsky touches our senses as the one who lived, and felt and died as other men. Understandably, we feel curiosity about and some sympathy for the man who was driven out as he had driven others, who wandered the world in danger forseeing assassination, and who was struck down by his enemies in his last sanctuary so close to us. This extremely personal record was written in France and Norway, it gives the day-to-day reflections of a fallen leader, of one who had wielded power and was now in an exceptional position to observe it in the hands of others. Finally, and until now unknown, there is his Testament, written in Mexico in February 1940 near the close of his life. Knowing that death was near, from illness if not from Stalin’s agents, he envisaged the form it might take, restated his defiance of Stalin and his imperishable confidence in the triumph of the People, and once more affirmed his love for Natasha, his second wife. At the end there is the discontinued and unexplained sentence, ‘In case we both die . . .’ ’

Here are a couple of snippets from the diary (found on quotation websites):

5 April 1935
‘Life is not an easy matter. . . You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.’

‘The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves. ‘

11 April 1935
‘England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.’

8 May 1935
‘Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.’

More substantial quotes can be found in two reviews of the book, first published by Fourth International in winter 1959, one by Michael Foot and the other by Pierre Frank.

Michael Foot is much impressed with the diary. He says: ‘Trotsky himself, of course, is the foremost example of his own aphorism. He is, probably in all history, the greatest man of action who was also a very great literary genius. Everything he wrote bears the individual stamp of the man; it has a pulse and urgency which is absent from the writings of those political writers, even the most perceptive, who were only spectators. This applies to the latest Trotsky ‘discovery’, the fragments of a diary he wrote during his exile in France and Norway in 1935, even though he obviously found the diary form awkward and distasteful.’

Foot quotes Trotsky writing about a trip to Lourdes: ‘What crudeness, insolence, nastiness! A shop for miracles, a business office for trafficking in Grace. The Grotto itself makes a miserable impression. That, of course, is a psychological calculation of the clerics; not to frighten the little people away by the grandeur of their commercial enterprise; little people are afraid of shop windows that are too resplendent. At the same time they are the most faithful and profitable customers. But best of all is the papal blessing broadcast to Lourdes by - radio. The paltry miracles of the Gospels side by side with the radio-telephone! And what could be more absurd and disgusting than the union of proud technology with the sorcery of the Roman chief druid. Indeed the thinking of mankind is bogged down in its own excrement.’

And Foot finds Trotsky’s portrait of his wife Natalia (Natasha) very touching: ‘Here, in the diary, he has painted an incomparable picture of his wife, Natasha. The hunt of Trotsky’s children and his friends by Stalin is surely one of the most appalling stories of sustained barbaric revenge of which history has any record. The full brunt of the horror fell on the heart of the dignified and dauntless Natasha. Quotation would mar this immortal tribute of a man to his wife. Read it for yourself.’

Finally, Pierre Frank, in his review, which is longer and much wordier, gives a more substantial quotation, which he introduces thus: ‘Many other passages give food for thought, whether it be his regret at not having had more time to devote to philosophy, or that dream in which he was talking with Lenin. But of this diary, which was not written for publication and which was forgotten by Trotsky among his papers, it is not possible to fail to reproduce this passage, where a Marxist treats of the role of personality in history, this personality being himself, with impressive objectivity.’

Here, then, is Trotsky analysing his own indispensability sometime in 1935:

‘Rakovsky was virtually my last contact with the old revolutionary generation. After his capitulation there is nobody left. Even though my correspondence with Rakovsky stopped, for reasons of censorship, at the time of my deportation, nevertheless the image of Rakovsky has remained a symbolic link with my old comrades-in-arms. Now nobody remains. For a long time now I have not been able to satisfy my need to exchange ideas and discuss problems with someone else. I am reduced to carrying on a dialogue with the newspapers, or rather through the newspapers with facts and opinions.

And still I think that the work in which I am engaged now, despite its extremely insufficient and fragmentary nature, is the most important work of my life - more important than 1917, more important than the period of the Civil War or any other.

For the sake of clarity I would put it this way. Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October Revolution would still have taken place - on the condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it from occurring - of this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to overcome the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders. The struggle with ‘Trotskyism’ (i.e. with the proletarian revolution) would have commenced in May 1917, and the outcome would have been in question. But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin the October Revolution would have been victorious anyway. The same could by and large be said of the Civil War, although in its first period, especially at the time of the fall of Simbirsk and Kazan, Lenin wavered and was beset by doubts. But this was undoubtedly a passing mood which he probably never even admitted to anyone but me.

Thus I cannot speak of the ‘indispensability’ of my work, even about the period from 1917 to 1921. But now my work is ‘indispensable’ in the full sense of the word. There is no arrogance in this claim at all. The collapse of the two Internationals has posed a problem which none of the leaders of these Internationals is at all equipped to solve. The vicissitudes of my personal fate have confronted me with this problem and armed me with important experience in dealing with it. Then is no one except me to carry out the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method over the heads of the leaders of the Second and Third International. And I am in complete agreement with Lenin (or rather Turgenev) that the worst vice is to be more than 55 years old! I need at least about five more years of uninterrupted work to ensure the succession.’