Founding Father Franklin

Today marks the 310th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin. From humble origins, he not only became a very wealthy businessmen, but also a scientist of distinction, postmaster to American colonies, an international statesman and one of the founding fathers of the United States - in short a giant of 18th century American history. He wrote much and often through his life, but not often in diary form - a brief journal of a journey by ship when he was returning from England for the first time as a young man, and no more than fragments later in his life.

Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 17 January 1706, one of 10 children born to Josiah Franklin with his second wife, Abiah Folger. He attended Boston Latin School briefly, but went to work for his father very young, at age 12 being apprenticed to his brother James, a printer. In 1721, James founded The New-England Courant, an independent newspaper. When told he couldn’t write letters for publication in the paper, Franklin adopted the pseudonym of Mrs. Silence Dogood, a middle-aged widow, whose letters were published. When his brother was jailed for a few weeks, he took over the newspaper and had Mrs. Dogood (quoting Cato’s Letters) proclaim: ‘Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.’

Aged still only 17, he absconded from his apprenticeship, running away to Philadelphia where he worked in printing shops. He caught the attention of the Pennsylvania Governor Sir William Keith who offered to help him set up a new newspaper if he went to London to acquire the necessary printing equipment. But, having made the journey, he soon found Keith had failed to deliver any letters of credit or introductions. He found employment with a printer, and enjoyed much of what London had to offer. Eventually, with the promise of a clerkship from the merchant Thomas Denham, he returned to Philadelphia in 1726. Aged 21, he launched Junto, a discussion group whose members sought ways to help improve their community - the idea was, in part, based on his experience of English coffee houses. One of the group’s early ventures was to set up a subscription library, which, in time, became the Library Company of Philadelphia.

On Denham’s death, Franklin formed a partnership with a friend, in 1728, setting up a new printing house. Within a couple of years, though, he had borrowed money to buy his partner out, and to become sole proprietor. One of the company’s first successes was to win an order to print all of Pennsylvania’s paper currency, a business it would soon secure in other colonies too. The company invested in further profitable ventures, including the Pennsylvania Gazette, published by Franklin from 1729 and generally acknowledged as among the best of the colonial newspapers, and Poor Richard’s Almanack, printed annually from 1732 to 1757. Franklin’s business ventures spread, as he developed franchises and partnerships with other printers in the Carolinas, New York and the British West Indies.

In 1730, Franklin entered into a common-law marriage with Deborah Read. He had known her since she was 15 and he 17, and, before leaving for London, had promised to marry her. However, while in London, she married a man who had then fled the country, leaving her unable to remarry. Franklin brought with him to the union an illegitimate son, and he had a further two children with Deborah, though one of them died in childhood. By the late 1940s, Franklin was a very wealthy man, and decided to retire from any direct involvement in business and to become a Gentleman, occupying himself with various cultural pursuits, not least science experiments. He is credited with a number of innovations in the field of electricity, such as the Franklin stove and the lightning rod, as well as demonstrating that lightning and electricity are identical.

In 1753, Franklin moved directly into public service as deputy postmaster for the Colonies, a position he held for over 20 years. However, from 1757 until 1774, he lived in London (apart from a two year return to Philadelphia in 1762-1764) where he acted as the colonial representative for Pennsylvania in a dispute over lands held by the Penn family. Deborah having remained in America, he and William resided with a widow, Margaret Stevenson, near Charing Cross, and mixed in elevated social circles. Very much a royalist (he managed to get his son William appointed royal governor of New Jersey), he was at pains to bridge the growing divide between Britain and her colonies, and is said to have written over 100 newspaper articles between 1765 and 1775 trying to explain each side to the other.

On his return to America, the War of Independence had already broken out. In 1776, he helped to draft, and was then a signatory to, the Declaration of Independence. William, however, remained loyal to Britain, causing a rift that lasted for the rest of Franklin’s life. Later that year, Franklin and two others were appointed to represent America in France. He negotiated the Franco-American Alliance which provided for military cooperation between the two countries against Britain, and he ensured significant French subsidies to America. In 1783, as American ambassador to France, Franklin signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the American War of Independence. Having been very loved, and very happy in France, he returned, once again, to America in 1785, but received only a lukewarm welcome. He died in 1790.

Encyclopædia Britannica gives this assessment of the man: ‘Franklin was not only the most famous American in the 18th century but also one of the most famous figures in the Western world of the 18th century; indeed, he is one of the most celebrated and influential Americans who has ever lived. Although one is apt to think of Franklin exclusively as an inventor, as an early version of Thomas Edison, which he was, his 18th-century fame came not simply from his many inventions but, more important, from his fundamental contributions to the science of electricity. If there had been a Nobel Prize for Physics in the 18th century, Franklin would have been a contender. Enhancing his fame was the fact that he was an American, a simple man from an obscure background who emerged from the wilds of America to dazzle the entire intellectual world. Most Europeans in the 18th century thought of America as a primitive, undeveloped place full of forests and savages and scarcely capable of producing enlightened thinkers. Yet Franklin’s electrical discoveries in the mid-18th century had surpassed the achievements of the most sophisticated scientists of Europe. Franklin became a living example of the natural untutored genius of the New World that was free from the encumbrances of a decadent and tired Old World - an image that he later parlayed into French support for the American Revolution.’ Further biographical information is readily available at Wikipedia, the BBC, US History, PBS, or Franklin’s own autobiography.

Franklin wrote many texts through his life, not least his autobiography which has been published and republished often. One version, readily available at Internet Archive, is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - the Unmutilitated and Correct Version Compiled and Edited with Notes by John Bigelow published by G. P. Putnam’s & Sons in 1916. This edition includes one of the rather few Franklin diaries - the Benjamin Franklin Journal of a voyage from England to Philadelphia 1726. The same text can be sourced elsewhere online, at American History, and the Online Library of Liberty (where it can be found in the first of 12 volumes of The Works of Benjamin Franklin).

Here are several extracts from that diary.

22 July 1726
‘Yesterday in the afternoon we left London, and came to an anchor off Gravesend about eleven at night. I lay ashore all night, and this morning took a walk up to the Windmill Hill, from whence I had an agreeable prospect of the country for above twenty miles round, and two or three reaches of the river, with ships and boats sailing both up and down, and Tilbury Fort on the other side, which commands the river and passage to London. This Gravesend is a cursed biting place; the chief dependence of the people being the advantage they make of imposing upon strangers. If you buy anything of them, and give half what they ask, you pay twice as much as the thing is worth. Thank God, we shall leave it tomorrow.’

23 July 1726
‘This day we weighed anchor and fell down with the tide, there being little or no wind. In the afternoon we had a fresh gale, that brought us down to Margate, where we shall lie at anchor this night. Most of the passengers are very sick. Saw several porpoises, &c.’

24 July 1726
‘This morning we weighed anchor, and coming to the Downs, we set our pilot ashore at Deal, and passed through. And now, whilst I write this, sitting upon the quarterdeck, I have methinks one of the pleasantest scenes in the world before me. Tis a fine, clear day, and we are going away before the wind with an easy, pleasant gale. We have near fifteen sail of ships in sight, and I may say in company. On the left hand appears the coast of France at a distance, and on the right is the town and castle of Dover, with the green hills and chalky cliffs of England, to which we must now bid farewell. Albion, farewell!’

27 July 1726
‘This morning, the wind blowing very hard at West, we stood in for the land, in order to make some harbour. About noon we took on board a pilot out of a fishing shallop, who brought the ship into Spithead off Portsmouth. The captain, Mr. Denham, and myself went on shore, and, during the little time we stayed, I made some observations on the place.

Portsmouth has a fine harbour. The entrance is so narrow that you may throw a stone from Fort to Fort; yet it is near ten fathom deep, and bold close to; but within there is room enough for five hundred, or, for aught l know, a thousand sail of ships. The town is strongly fortified, being encompassed with a high wall and a deep and broad ditch, and two gates, that are entered over drawbridges; besides several forts, batteries of large cannon, and other outworks, the names of which I know not, nor had I time to take so strict a view as to be able to describe them. In war time, the town has a garrison of 10,000 men; but at present ’tis only manned by about 100 Invalids. Notwithstanding the English have so many fleets of men-of-war at sea at this time, I counted in this harbour above thirty sail of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Rates, that lay by unrigged, but easily fitted out upon occasion, all their masts and rigging lying marked and numbered in storehouses at hand. The King’s yards and docks employ abundance of men, who, even in peace time, are constantly building and refitting men-of-war for the King’s Service.

Gosport lies opposite to Portsmouth, and is near as big, if not bigger; but, except the fort at the mouth of the harbour, and a small outwork before the main street of the town, it is only defended by a mud wall, which surrounds it, and a trench or dry ditch of about ten feet depth and breadth. Portsmouth is a place of very little trade in peace time; it depending chiefly on fitting out men-of-war. Spithead is the place where the Fleet commonly anchor, and is a very good riding-place. The people of Portsmouth tell strange stories of the severity of one Gibson, who was governor of this place in the Queen’s time, to his soldiers, and show you a miserable dungeon by the town gate, which they call Johnny Gibson’s Hole, where, for trifling misdemeanors, he used to confine his soldiers till they were almost starved to death. It is a common maxim, that, without severe discipline, ’tis impossible to govern the licentious rabble of soldiery. I own, indeed, that if a commander finds he has not those qualities in him that will make him beloved by his people, he ought, by all means, to make use of such methods as will make them fear him, since one or the other (or both) is absolutely necessary; but Alexander and Caesar, those renowned generals, received more faithful service, and performed greater actions, by means of the love their soldiers bore them, than they could possibly have done, if, instead of being beloved and respected, they had been hated and feared by those they commanded.’

4 October 1726
‘Last night we struck a dolphin and this morning we found a flying-fish dead under the windlass. He is about the bigness of a small mackerel, a sharp head, a small mouth, and a tail forked somewhat like a dolphin, but the lowest branch much larger and longer than the other, and tinged with yellow. His back and sided of a darkish blue, his belly white, and his skin very thick. His wings are of a finny substance, about a span long, reaching, when close to his body from an inch below his gills to an inch above his tail. When they fly it is straight forward, (for they cannot readily turn,) a yard or two above the water; and perhaps fifty yards in the furthest before they dip into the water again, for they cannot support themselves in the air any longer than while their wings continue wet. These flying-fish are the common prey of the dolphin, who is their mortal enemy. When he pursues them, they rise and fly; and he keeps close under them till they drop, and then snaps them up immediately. They generally fly in flocks, four or five, or perhaps a dozen together and a dolphin is seldom caught without one or more in his belly. We put this flying-fish upon the hook, in hopes of catching one, but in a few minutes they got it off without hooking themselves; and they will not meddle with any other bait.’

5 October 1726
‘This morning we saw a heron, who had lodged aboard last night. It is a long-legged, long-necked bird, having, as they say, but one gut. They live upon fish, and will swallow a living eel thrice, sometimes, before it will remain in their body. The wind is west again. The ship’s crew was brought to a short allowance of water.’

6 October 1726
‘This morning abundance of grass, rock-weed, &c., passed by us; evident tokens that land is not far off. We hooked a dolphin this morning, made us a good breakfast. A sail passed by us about twelve o’clock, and nobody saw her till she was too far astern to be spoken with. It is very near calm; we saw another sail ahead this afternoon; but, night coming on, we could not speak with her, though we very much desired it; she stood to the northward, and it is possible might have informed us how far we are from land. Our artists on board are much at a loss. We hoisted our jack to her, but she took no notice of it.

7 October 1726
‘Last night, about nine o’clock sprung up a fine gale at northeast, which run us in our course at the rate of seven miles an hour all night. We were in hopes of seeing land this morning, but cannot. The water, which we thought was changed, is now as blue as the sky; so that, unless at that time we were running over some unknown shoal, our eyes strangely deceived us. All the reckonings have been out these several days; though the captain says it is his opinion we are yet a hundred leagues from land; for my part I know not what to think of it; we have run all this day at a great rate, and now night is come on we have no soundings. Sure the American continent is not all sunk under water since we left it.’

8 October 1726
‘The fair wind continues still; we ran all night in our course, sounding every four hours, but can find no ground yet, nor is the water changed by all this day’s run. This afternoon we saw an Irish Lord and a bird which flying looked like a yellow duck. These, they say, are not seen far from the coast. Other signs of lands have we none. Abundance of large porpoises ran by us this afternoon, and we were followed by a shoal of small ones, leaping out of the water as they approached. Towards evening we spied a sail ahead, and spoke with her just before dark. She was bound from New York for Jamaica and left Sandy Hook yesterday about noon, from which they reckon themselves forty-five leagues distant. By this we compute that we are not above thirty leagues from our Capes, and hope to see land to-morrow.’

9 October 1726
‘We have had the wind fair all the morning; at twelve o’clock we sounded, perceiving the water visibly changed, and struck ground at twenty-five fathoms, to our universal joy. After dinner one of our mess went up aloft to look out, and presently pronounced the long wished-for sound, LAND! LAND! In less than an hour we could decry it from the deck, appearing like tufts of trees. I could not discern it so soon as the rest; my eyes were dimmed with the suffusion of two small drops of joy. By three o’clock we were run in within two leagues of the land, and spied a small sail standing along shore. We would gladly have spoken with her, for our captain was unacquainted with the Coast, and knew not what land it was that we saw. We made all the sail we could to speak with her. We made a signal of distress; but all would not do, the ill-natured dog would not come near us. Then we stood off again till morning, not caring to venture too near.’

10 October 1726
‘This morning we stood in again for land; and we that had been here before all agreed that it was Cape Henlopen; about noon we were come very near, and to our great joy saw the pilot-boat come off to us, which was exceeding welcome. He brought on board about a peck of apples with him; they seemed the most delicious I ever tasted in my life; the salt provisions we had been used to gave them a relish. We had extraordinary fair wind all the afternoon, and ran above a hundred miles up the Delaware before ten at night. The country appears very pleasant to the eye, being covered with woods, except here and there a house and plantation. We cast anchor when the tide turned, about two miles below Newcastle, and there lay till the morning tide.’

11 October 1726
‘This morning we weighed anchor with a gentle breeze, and passed by Newcastle, whence they hailed us and bade us welcome. It is extreme find weather. The sun enlivens our stiff limbs with his glorious rays of warmth and brightness. The sky looks gay, with here and there a silver cloud. The fresh breezes from the woods refresh us; the immediate prospect of liberty, after so long and irksome confinement, ravishes us. In short, all things conspire to make this the most joyful day I ever knew. As we passed by Chester, some of the company went on shore, impatient once more to tread on terra firma, and designing for Philadelphia by land. Four of us remained on board, not caring for the fatigue of travel when we knew the voyage had much weakened us. About eight at night, the wind failing us, we cast anchor at Redbank six miles from Philadelphia, and thought we must be obliged to lie on board that night; but, some young Philadelphians happening to be out upon their pleasure in a boat, they came on board, and offered to take us up with them; we accepted of their kind proposal, and about ten o’clock landed at Philadelphia, heartily congratulating each upon our having happily completed so tedious and dangerous a voyage. Thank God!’

Much later in his life Franklin also kept a diary very occasionally, and fragments can be found in, for example, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin (Volume 1 published in 1818). Here are a couple of extracts from that volume.

26 June 1784
‘Mr. Waltersdorff called on me, and acquainted me with a duel that had been fought yesterday morning, between a French officer, and a Swedish gentleman of that king’s suite, in which the latter was killed on the spot, and the other dangerously wounded: that the king does not resent it, as he thinks his subject was in the wrong.

He asked me if I had seen the king of Sweden? I had not yet had that honor. He said his behavior here was not liked: that he took little notice of his own ambassador, who, being acquainted with the usages of this court, was capable of advising him, but was not consulted. That he was always talking of himself, and vainly boasting of his revolution, though it was known to have been the work of M. de Vergennies. That they began to be tired of him here, and wished him gone; but he proposed staying till the 12th July. That he had now laid aside his project of invading Norway, as he found Denmark had made preparations to receive him. That he pretended the Danes had designed to invade Sweden, though it was a known fact that the Danes had made no military preparations, even for deface, till six months after his began. I asked if it was clear that he had had an intention to invade Norway? He said that the marching and disposition of his troops, and the fortifications he had erected, indicated it very plainly. He added, that Sweden was at present greatly distressed for provisions; that many people had actually died of hunger! That it was reported the king came here to borrow money, and to offer to sell Gottenburg to France; a thing not very probable.’

15 July 1704
‘The Duke de Chartres’s balloon went off this morning from St. Cloud, himself and three others in the gallery. It was foggy, and they were soon out of sight. But the machine being disordered, so that the trap or valve could not be opened to let out the expanding air, and fearing that the balloon would burst, they cut a hole in it which ripped larger, and they fell rapidly, but received no harm. They had been a vast height, met with a doud of snow, and a tornado which frightened them.’

I’m looking at dying

Harold Frederick Shipman, one of the most prolific serial killers in modern times, would have turned 70 today had he not committed suicide in prison on the eve of his 58th birthday. Subsequently, the prison authorities produced a report on the circumstances surrounding his death, and this became the source for widespread publication of extracts from a diary, mostly concerning his suicidal thoughts, Shipman had kept while incarcerated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good-natured books

‘Went over from High Elms with Lubbock, Huxley and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to call on Darwin [. . .] As we returned, Huxley expressed the opinion, which was probably correct, that no man now living had done so much to give a new direction to the human mind. “Ah,” said Lowe, “you think him the top-sawyer of these times.” “Yes,” said the other.’ This is from the diaries of Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, a Liberal Party politician and Governor of Madras, who died 110 years ago today. Duff said at the time that he edited his diaries in such a way as to create the ‘most good-natured books of its kind ever printed’.

Duff was born in Eden, Banffshire, northeast Scotland, in 1829. He was the son of a well known Indian official in the Bombay Presidency, part of British India, and was named after the Scottish statesman, Mountstuart Elphinstone, who had been governor of Bombay until 1827. Duff was educated at Edinburgh Academy and Balliol College. He studied law at the Inns of Court and was called to the bar at Inner Temple in 1854. He also taught at the Working Men’s College, wrote articles for the Saturday Review, and joined the Liberal Party.

Duff was elected the Liberal MP for Elgin in 1857. Two years later he married Anna Julia Webster, and they would have eight children. In time, they bought York House in Twickenham, and played host to many famous politicians and literary figures. He served with Prime Minister William Gladstone as Under-Secretary of State for India (1868-1874) and as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies (1880-1881). But, in 1881, he was appointed Governor of Madras, a position he held until 1886. On returning to Britain, he was knighted. He became, in turn, president of the Royal Geographical Society in 1889 (until 1892) and the Royal Historical Society (1892-1899), after which, in 1903, he became a trustee of the British Museum. He died on 12 January 1906. A little further information is available from Wikipedia,  the Twickenham Museum website, or The Times obituary.

Duff began keeping a diary in his late teens, and continued throughout his life. But it was only in his later years that he set about editing them, for publication by John Murray. There are seven books, two volumes each, making 14 volumes, all freely available online at Internet Archive: Notes from a Diary 1851-1872 (volume one and volume two, 1897); Notes from a Diary 1873-1881 (volume one and volume two, 1898); Notes from a Diary, kept chiefly in Southern India, 1881-1886 (volume one and volume two, 1899); Notes from a Diary 1886-1888 (volume one and volume two, 1900); Notes from a Diary 1889-1891 (volume one and volume two, 1901); Notes from a Diary 1892-1895 (volume one and volume two, 1904); Notes from a Diary 1896-January 23, 1901 (volume one and volume two, 1905). A generation later, in 1930, Methuen published A Victorian Vintage: being a selection of the best stories from the diaries of the Right Hon. Sir M. E. G. Duff, as edited by A. Tilney Bassett. Inexpensive copies of this can be found at Abebooks.

In his preface to the first volume of the first book of diary extracts, Duff explains his diary habits and reasons for publishing. In particular, he notes his determination to ensure the published diaries include as little about his work as possible (he having had, as he says, ample other opportunities to state his views on public matters); and he repeats this idea in prefaces to the later two books of diaries.

‘In the year 1847 I determined to keep a diary, and began to do so on my eighteenth birthday, making an entry in it, longer or shorter, for every day that passed over me. It was not, however, till I had continued this practice for something like a quarter of a century, that it occurred to me to read through what I had written. Having done so, I came to the conclusion that I had seen much about which it was desirable I should leave some permanent record, but that the record I possessed would not be intelligible to any one save myself. I extracted from it accordingly all that I thought likely to be interesting to persons whose tastes were similar to my own, threw it into a fairly readable shape [. . .]

It will be observed that I have said very little about the House of Commons, although fifteen of the years included in the portion of my notes now published were passed in that Assembly. I have done so for three reasons: first, because I wished to make these pages as light as possible; secondly, because I was anxious to leave behind me one of the most good-natured books of its kind ever printed, and I apprehend that for a politician to write truthfully of the political struggles in which he has been engaged, without paying to some of the combatants “the genuine tribute of undissembled horror,” would be a hopeless enterprise; thirdly, because I had, during these fifteen years, frequent opportunities of stating my views upon all public matters, in Parliament and out of it, opportunities of which I availed myself pretty freely. [. . .]

To relegate to the background nearly all the more serious part of life, and to ignore every disagreeable person and thing I have come across, would, if I were writing my memoirs, be a very indefensible proceeding. I am not, however, writing my memoirs. Heaven forbid! I am merely publishing some notes on things that have interested me, and this being so, I consider myself quite justified in saying, like the sundial - “Horas non numero nisi serenas.” [I count only the sunny hours.]’

It is worth quoting Arthur Ponsonby (author of English Diaries) on Duff: ‘With the exception of the first two volumes, which concern travels in India and Palestine, the fourteen volumes of diary (1851 to 1901) issued by Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff [. . .] consist for the most part of a vast collection of anecdotes, good stories and memorable sayings, many of which have appeared elsewhere. That he succeeded in making the books “light reading” we may venture to doubt. To flutter a page or two occasionally may help to pass the time, but to read consecutively anecdote after anecdote, epigram after epigram, joke after joke, however good some of them may be, is practically impossible. There are dinner party lists and occasional references to books, a few appreciations of scenery and gardens, but he strictly adheres to his intention of introducing nothing in the way of personal opinions, private reflections or serious matter.’

Here are several extracts from a few of the Duff diary volumes.

10 November 1853
‘Mr. Peacock talked to me to-day at much length about Jeremy Bentham, with whom he had been extremely intimate - dining with him tete a tete once a week for years together. He mentioned, amongst other things, that when experiments were being made with Mr. Bentham’s body after his death, Mr. James Mill had one day come into his (Mr. Peacock’s) room at the India House and told him that there had exuded from Mr. Bentham’s head a kind of oil, which was almost unfreezable, and which he conceived might be used for the oiling of chronometers which were going into high latitudes. “The less you say about that, Mill,” said Peacock, “the better it will be for you; because if the fact once becomes known, just as we see now in the newspapers advertisements to the effect that a fine bear is to be killed for his grease, we shall be having advertisements to the effect that a fine philosopher is to be killed for his oil.” ’

7 March 1856
‘Looked over the old betting book at Brooks’s. It is not very interesting, but here and there is a curious entry. On the 11th March 1776, for example, Mr. Charles Fox gave a guinea to Lord Bolingbroke, on the understanding that he was to receive a thousand guineas from him when the National Debt amounted to 171 millions. He was not, however, to pay the thousand guineas till he was a Cabinet Minister. In 1778 he gave Mr. Shirley ten guineas, on the understanding that he was to receive five hundred whenever Turkey in Europe belonged to a European Power or Powers.’

15 February 1858
‘Made my maiden speech, on the second reading of Lord Palmerston’s India Bill.’

2 November 1860
‘A singularly clear and beautiful moonlight night has been followed by a most perfect day. To-night we have the aurora borealis streaming from nearly every part of the sky up to the zenith.’

4 May 1863
‘Gladstone’s great speech on the Taxation of Endowed Charities, which I think, on the whole, the most remarkable I ever heard him make.’

4 April 1864
‘Went down to Brooke House in the Isle of Wight, belonging to Mr. Seely, M.P. for Lincoln, to meet Garibaldi, who had just come to England, and is on a visit to him.

It was a strange miscellaneous party. Menotti Garibaldi [politician son of the famous Giuseppe Garibaldi] and Ricciotti his brother, the latter little more than a boy. [. . .] I had a pretty long talk with Garibaldi, walking up and down a long orchard house full of fruit trees in flower. He spoke English badly but preferred speaking it, although his French was more agreeable to listen to in spite of a strong Italian accent. His conversation did not at all impress me, but he spoke only of trivial subjects. He wore while at Brooke sometimes a grey and sometimes a red poncho.’

15 January 1871
‘Went over from High Elms with Lubbock, Huxley and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to call on Darwin, whom Lowe had never seen since they met as quite young men, on two neighbouring reading parties forty years ago. We stayed as long as it was safe, for a very little too much talking brings on an attack of the violent sickness which has been the bane of the great philosopher’s life. As we returned, Huxley expressed the opinion, which was probably correct, that no man now living had done so much to give a new direction to the human mind. “Ah,” said Lowe, “you think him the top-sawyer of these times.” “ Yes,” said the other.’

16 January 1881
‘Again at High Elms, where my wife has been staying. Talking of the want of young people in our society she said to me to-day: “For goodness’ sake ask some one who belongs, at least, to this geological period!”

Miss Lubbock remarked to Mr. Arthur Balfour, who was sitting between her and me, that she would like to hear Disraeli’s conversation. “You needn’t do that,” he replied. “You have only to imagine a brazen mask talking his own novels.”

In the afternoon we walked up to see Darwin. He has of late been studying earthworms, and said to Lubbock, “You antiquarians ought to have great respect for them; they have done more to preserve tessellated pavements than any other agency. I have ascertained, by careful examination, that the worms on a single acre of land bring up ten tons of dry earth to the surface in a year.” ’

18 January 1881
‘The worst day I ever saw in London, or anywhere else, except when I crossed the Cenis in December 1860. My wife, who was coming up to London from High Elms, was happily sent back by the station-master at Orpington, and only regained the house with great difficulty; the carriage being almost stopped in the deep wreaths of snow.’

8 May 1882
‘I was just starting to breakfast with Bashir-ud-Dowla, the brother-in-law of the Nizam, who is staying at Ootacamund, when a telegram was brought to me. It contained the terrible news of the murder of Frederick Cavendish, and, of course, altered all my arrangements.’

11 May 1882
‘Attended the Wellington races and lunched with my staff, who have a pretty camp near the course. Wild weather, with thunder, rain, hail, and what not, cut short the proceedings, and we drove back in a deluge, accompanied by the largest flashes of lightning I ever beheld. The four horses never shied nor flinched.’

18 May 1882
‘Daud Shah, the late Commander-in-Chief of the Afghan Army, one of the handsomest and most gigantic men I ever saw, dined with us. In the evening, someone showed him a picture of Mecca, in a recent number of the Graphic. He asked, “Where is the Caaba?” And, on its being pointed out to him, lifted it to his forehead and kissed it.’

2 June 1882
‘Our new daughter, born 16th March, was to-day christened Iseult Frederica by Bishop Gell. Her godmothers are Mrs. Greg, the companion of so many of our journeys, associated, too, with our visit to Brittany, the meeting-place of the Iseults, and Lady Malmesbury, the youngest daughter of my old friend John Hamilton. Her godfather is Sir Frederick Roberts.’

2 July 1882
‘I received this morning a cipher telegram from the Viceroy, warning me that we might have to send troops to Egypt. I saw accordingly the Commander-in-Chief, as well as the Military Secretary, and telegraphed to alter the arrangements for my approaching tour, some portions of which, as originally settled, would have taken me too far from the railway.’

11 July 1882
‘Just as the fireworks began at Vellore a telegram, announcing that the bombardment of Alexandria had commenced, was placed in my hands.’

12 July 1882
‘While the municipal address was being read to me this morning at Chittore, a huge elephant, belonging to the Zemindar of Kalastri, a great temporal chief, charged a smaller elephant belonging to the Mohunt or High Priest of Tripaty, thus dis-establishing the church much more rapidly, alas! than we did in Ireland. The stampede of the crowd was a sight to behold. The natives took to the trees like squirrels.’

The Diary Junction.

Diary briefs

Michael Clarke’s Ashes Diary 2015 - Pan Macmillan Australia, Googlebooks, The Australian

WWI diaries tell of starvation in Middle East - National Army Museum, The Telegraph

Japanese American internment diary - Beinecke Library

Walter Hain’s WWII battle diaries - Wales Online

McGavock’s civil war diaries - USA Today

Diaries reveal Zhou Enlai may have been gay - Reuters, The New York Times

New biography of George H. W. Bush - Penguin Random House, Fox News

Andy Coulson to publish diaries? - Daily Mail

WWI diary reveals xmas truce in 1915 - BBC

WWI hospital diaries now online - The National Archives

Elizabethan drama diary

Philip Henslowe, one of the great theatre impresarios of the Elizabethan period, died four centuries ago today. It is thanks to an accounts book he kept - generally referred to as his diary - that we have details about the plays and playwrights of the Elizabethan period, as well as information about the practical and financial details of providing entertainment in London at the time.


Henslowe was born in Lindfield, Sussex, around 1550, the son of a forest game manager. He moved to London, was apprenticed to a dyer, and then, when his master died, married his rich widow, Agnes Woodward. The couple bought much property in the Southwark area of London, and Henslowe became involved in building theatres, the most famous of which was The Rose, on the south bank of the Thames. He was also a churchwarden and held minor court offices, becoming a groom of the chamber.

North of the river, Henslowe, with the famous actor Edward Alleyn (married to Henslowe’s step-daughter), built the sumptuous Fortune Theatre. In 1613, he built the Hope Playhouse, designed for plays as well as bear baiting. Henslowe’s theatres and company (The Admiral’s Men) gave the first productions of many Elizabethan dramas. Later in life, he served as one of the governors of the nearby free grammar school, and, with four others, purchased the rectory of St Saviour’s ‘for the general good of posterity’. He died on 6 January 1616. For further information see the Luminarium Encyclopaedia Project or Wikipedia.

Henslowe’s papers are mostly housed in the Wodehouse Library at Dulwich College, which was founded by Alleyn in 1619 as a ‘hospital’ for orphans and homeless pensioners. Among the papers, Henslowe’s diary - although no more than a business record book - is undoubtedly the most important, for it provides unique information about the Elizabethan theatre world. Thanks to The Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project, co-sponsored by the University of Reading and King’s College London's Centre for Computing in the Humanities, images of every page in the diary are available online.

Arthur Ponsonby, in his early 20th century classic English Diaries, suggests that Henslowe’s record is not a diary: ‘It consists of memoranda of receipts and payment connected with the plays produced between 1592 and 1603 in the theatres of which he was proprietor. While it contains much valuable information from the point of view of literary archaeology, it cannot by any stretch of the definition be classed as a diary.’

Nevertheless, Henslowe’s record book was first edited by J. Payne Collier and published for the Shakespeare Society in 1845 as The Diary of Philip Henslowe, from 1591 to 1609, and ever since it has been referred to as Henslowe’s diary. In the diary, Henslowe mentions payments to 27 Elizabethan playwrights, though not Shakespeare whose name never appears in the diary, probably because Shakespeare was not connected with Henslowe’s theatres. However, Henslowe does mention a number of plays with titles similar to Shakespearean plays, yet with no author listed. Most of these occur during a period when Henslowe’s troupe, The Admiral’s Men, joined forces with The Chamberlain’s Men (for whom Shakespeare wrote) as a consequence of the plague closing many playhouses.

Collier’s edition of the diary is freely available at Internet Archive, as is a further edition edited by W. W. Greg and published as Henslowe’s Diary by A. H. Bullen between 1904 and 1908 (Part One - Text; Part Two - Commentary). In 1961, Cambridge University Press published a new edition of Henslowe’s Diary, as edited by R. A. Foakes, and a newer, second edition of this, can be previewed at Googlebooks. All three editions have informative introductions and notes providing a history of the diary itself, much background, and plenty of context needed to understand the importance of the contents.

Speaking of The Possessed

‘To London, mainly for another Prime Minister’s dinner party [. . .] I continue to find Mrs Thatcher very attractive physically. Her overhanging eyelids, hooded eyes, are the only suggestion of mystery (a characteristic I like in women). This is Anthony Powell - born 110 years ago today - the British author of A Dance to the Music of Time, making a somewhat surprising confession to his diary. He was not far off 80 at the time, and she was closing in on 60.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modesty, prudence, piety

’I never knew a man of a more universal and generous spirit, with so much modesty, prudence, and piety.’ This is the diarist John Evelyn writing about his friend, Thomas Tenison, who died 300 years ago today. Indeed, Tenison was an industrious cleric, rising rapidly through the church’s hierarchy, bringing order and renewal to his successive parishes. He was particularly active as rector of St Martin-in-the-Fields (now in Trafalgar Square) developing charity schools, a library, and the building of chapels. He won the favour of King William III with his firm stance against the Church of Rome, and served as Archbishop of Canterbury for the last 20 years of his life.

Tenison was born in 1636 into a clerical family in Cottenham, Cambridgeshire. He attended Norwich School, going on to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, as a so-called Parker scholar (Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1559 to 1579 who instituted financial reforms at Corpus Christi and endowed various scholarships). Tenison graduated in 1657, but his prospect in the church looked uncertain so he turned, briefly, to medicine. He was ordained privately (Anglican ordinations being still forbidden) in 1659; and was briefly rector at Bracon Ash. In 1662, he was made fellow of Corpus Christi, while Francis Wilford, the college master and new dean of Ely, presented him to the prestigious parish of St Andrew the Great, Cambridge. There he became highly regarded during the plague for being the only college fellow to remain in residence.

In 1667, Tenison married Anne, daughter of a former dean of Ely, and he was presented to the living of Holywell-cum-Needingworth, Huntingdonshire. Three years later he added the living of St Peter Mancroft, Norwich. By this time, Tenison was starting to make a name for himself as a writer with The Creed of Mr Hobbes examin’d, A Discourse on Idolatry and Baconia. Also, he became chaplain to the king. Further advancement followed when he was recommended for the living at St Martin-in-the-Fields in 1680 (the same year, in fact, that he was made Doctorate of Divinity). He became well known as a staunch opponent of the Church of Rome, but also a man of liberal religious views - he preached at the actress Nell Gwyn’s funeral representing her as truly penitent.

While at St Martin-in-the-Fields, during a time of rapid population expansion, Tenison oversaw many parish changes, and the building of new chapels; he pioneered the development of charity schools; and he built the first public library in London. He was recommended to King William III for early preferment, and was appointed archdeacon of London, then to the large see of Lincoln. However, in 1695, having been in constant attendance at the bedside of Queen Mary prior to her death in December 1694, and preaching at her funeral, he was elected archbishop of Canterbury. Subsequently, he attended the King on his deathbed, and crowned William’s successor, Queen Anne. But his influence declined as he fell out of favour with the new queen, who preferred John Sharp, Archbishop of York.

Tenison is considered to have been the first archbishop to take sustained personal interest in the church’s mission overseas, especially in the American colonies, encouraging, in 1701, Thomas Bray to found the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Much afflicted by gout in his later years, Tenison was still able to perform the coronation service for George I. He died, not long after, on 14 December 1715. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (requires log-in) quotes James II as calling Tenison ‘that dull man’ with ‘languid oration’, and Jonathan Swift as describing him as ‘the dullest good for nothing man I ever knew.’ Further information is also available at Wikipedia.

There is no evidence that Tenison left behind diaries, but he is mentioned frequently in the diary of his friend, John Evelyn, who had an altogether better opinion of the man. There have been various editions of Evelyn’s diaries, many of which can be found online at Internet Archive. The following entries about Tenison all come from the second volume of a 1901 printing of The Diary of John Evelyn, as edited by William Bray. (See more on Evelyn’s diaries in an earlier Diary Review article - Virtues and imperfections - about the death of Charles II.)

21 March 1683
‘Dr. Tenison preached at Whitehall on 1 Cor., vi. 12; I esteem him to be one of the most profitable preachers in the Church of England, being also of a most holy conversation, very learned and ingenious. The pains he takes and care of his parish will, I fear, wear him out, which would be an inexpressible loss.’

15 February 1684
‘Dr. Tenison communicated to me his intention of erecting a library in St. Martin’s parish, for the public use, and desired my assistance, with Sir Christopher Wren, about the placing and structure thereof, a worthy and laudable design. He told me there were thirty or forty young men in Orders in his parish, either governors to young gentlemen or chaplains to noblemen, who being reproved by him on occasion for frequenting taverns or coffee-houses, told him they would study or employ their time better, if they had books. This put the pious Doctor on this design; and indeed a great reproach it is that so great a City as London should not have a public library becoming it. There ought to be one at St. Paul’s: the west end of that church (if ever finished) would be a convenient place.’

23 February 1684
‘I went to Sir John Chardin [. . .] Afterwards, I went with Sir Christopher Wren to Dr. Tenison, where we made the drawing and estimate of the expense of the library, to be begun this next spring near the Mews.’

7 March 1684
‘Dr. Meggot, Dean of Winchester, preached an incomparable sermon [. . .] Afterwards, I went to visit Dr. Tenison at Kensington, whither he was retired to refresh, after he had been sick of the small-pox.’

30 March 1684
‘Easter day. The Bishop of Rochester preached before the King; [. . .] I had received the sacrament at Whitehall early with the Lords and Household, the Bishop of London officiating. Then went to St. Martin’s, where Dr. Tenison preached (recovered from the small-pox); then went again to Whitehall as above. In the afternoon, went to St. Martin’s again.’

15 February 1685
‘Dr. Tenison preached to the Household. The second sermon should have been before the King; but he, to the great grief of his subjects, did now, for the first time, go to mass publicly in the little Oratory at the Duke’s lodgings, the doors being set wide open.’

17 March 1686
‘In the morning, Dr. Tenison preached an incomparable discourse at Whitehall, on Timothy ii. 3, 4.’

25 March 1687
‘Good Friday. Dr. Tenison preached at St. Martin’s, on 1 Peter ii. 24. During the service, a man came into near the middle of the church, with his sword drawn, with several others in that posture; in this jealous time it put the congregation into great confusion; but it appeared to be one who fled for sanctuary being pursued by bailiffs.’

10 August 1688
‘Dr. Tenison now told me there would suddenly be some great thing discovered. This was the Prince of Orange intending to come over.’

7 October 1688
‘Dr. Tenison preached at St. Martin’s, on 2 Tim. iii. 16, showing the Scriptures to be our only rule of faith, and its perfection above all traditions. After which, near 1,000 devout persons partook of the Communion. This sermon was chiefly occasioned by a Jesuit, who in the Masshouse on the Sunday before had disparaged the Scripture and railed at our translation, which some present contradicting, they pulled him out of the pulpit, and treated him very coarsely, insomuch that it was like to create a great disturbance in the City.’

18 July 1691
‘To London to hear Mr. Stringfellow preach his first sermon in the new-erected church of Trinity, in Conduit Street; to which I did recommend him to Dr. Tenison for the constant preacher and lecturer. This church, formerly built of timber on Hounslow-Heath by King James for the mass-priests, being begged by Dr. Tenison, rector of St. Martin’s, was set up by that public-minded, charitable and pious man near my son’s dwelling in Dover Street, chiefly at the charge of the Doctor. I know him to be an excellent preacher and a fit person. This church, though erected in St. Martin’s, which is the Doctor’s parish, he was not only content, but was the sole industrious mover, that it should be made a separate parish, in regard of the neighbourhood having become so populous. Wherefore to countenance and introduce the new minister, and take possession of a gallery designed for my son’s family, I went to London, where . . .’

19 July 1691
‘. . . in the morning Dr. Tenison preached the first sermon, taking his text from Psalm xxvi. 8. “Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house, and the place where thine honour dwelleth.” In concluding, he gave that this should be made a parish-church so soon as the Parliament sat, and was to be dedicated to the Holy Trinity, in honour of the three undivided Persons in the Deity; and he minded them to attend to that faith of the Church, now especially that Arianism, Socinianism, and Atheism began to spread amongst us.  In the afternoon, Mr. Stringfellow preached on Luke vii. 5, “The centurion who had built a synagogue.” He proceeded to the due praise of persons of such public spirit, and thence to such a character of pious benefactors in the person of the generous centurion, as was comprehensive of all the virtues of an accomplished Christian, in a style so full, eloquent and moving, that I never heard a sermon more apposite to the occasion. He modestly insinuated the obligation they had to that person who should be the author and promoter of such public works for the benefit of mankind, especially to the advantage of religion, such as building and endowing churches, hospitals, libraries, schools, procuring the best editions of useful books, by which he handsomely intimated who it was that had been so exemplary for his benefaction to that place. Indeed, that excellent person. Dr. Tenison, had also erected and furnished a public library [in St. Martin’s]; and set up two or three free-schools at his own charges. Besides this, he was of an exemplary holy life, took great pains in constantly preaching, and incessantly employing himself to promote the service of God both in public and private. I never knew a man of a more universal and generous spirit, with so much modesty, prudence, and piety.’

12 January 1691
‘My grand-daughter was christened by Dr. Tenison, now Bishop of Lincoln, in Trinity Church, being the first that was christened there. She was named Jane.’

27 April 1693
‘My daughter Susanna was married to William Draper, Esq., in the chapel of Ely House, by Dr. Tenison, Bishop of Lincoln.’

9 December 1695
‘I had news that my dear and worthy friend. Dr. Tenison, Bishop of Lincoln, was made Archbishop of Canterbury, for which I thank God and rejoice, he being most worthy of it, for his learning, piety, and prudence.’

The Diary Junction

Life and fate

‘Stalingrad is burned down. I would have to write too much if I wanted to describe it. Stalingrad is burned down. Stalingrad is in ashes. It is dead.’ This is from the diary notebooks kept by Vasily Grossman, born 110 years ago today, during his 1,000 days with the Red Army during the Second World War. After the war, he fell foul of the Stalinest regime which prohibited publication of his novels, and he died without knowing how famous one of them would become.

Iosif Solomonovich Grossman was born on 12 December 1905 in Berdychiv, Ukraine (then in the Russian Empire) into a Jewish family. A Russian nanny is said to have been responsible for first calling him Vasya (a diminutive of Vasily). His parents separated, and for several years he lived in Switzerland with his mother, before returning to Kiev to stay with his father. He studied physics and mathematics at Moscow State University, and married Anna (Galia) Petrovna Matsuk from a Cossack family in 1929. They had one child, born in 1930, but divorced two years later.

Grossman went to work in Donbass as an engineer-chemist, writing occasional articles for the Literary Donbass. After recuperating from tuberculosis, he returned to Moscow and worked in a pencil factory. However, he was determined to pursue a literary career and, in 1934, published a much-admired short story, In the Town of Berdichev, and a novella, Glyukauf, about the Donbass miners. In 1936, he married Olga Mikhailovna, days after her divorce from a friend of his. During 1937, Grossman was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers, but also Olga was arrested for not having denounced her former husband, considered an enemy of the state. Grossman first registered himself as guardian of Olga’s two children, and then bravely wrote to the state authorities arguing for, and winning, Olga’s release. Grossman’s first full novel Stepan Kolchugin was published in instalments between 1937 and 1940.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Grossman’s mother was murdered in Berdychiv along with thousands of other Jews, and although exempt from military service he volunteered for the front, becoming a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). He used his experience - covering many of battles of the war years, not least Stalingrad - for novels such as The People are Immortal and For a Just Cause (not fully published until after Stalin’s death). Also, he is credited with reporting some of the first eyewitness accounts - as early as 1943 - at Treblinka of what later became known as the Holocaust. He worked with other writers on a project known as The Black Book to document the horrors suffered by Soviet Jews at the hands of the Nazis, but became disillusioned with Stalin’s regime when it suppressed the work.

Grossman became critical of other Soviet policies, a dissident, and few of his works, thereafter were published. After submitting, what is now considered his magnum opus, the novel Life and Fate (a semi-autobiographical sequel to For a Just Cause), the KGB raided his flat and confiscated all related manuscripts. He appealed to Nikita Khrushchev, but to no avail; and he died in 1964, not knowing whether Life and Fate would ever see the light of day. In fact, it was finally published in 1980 in Switzerland thanks to dissidents smuggling out photographs of the text, and then in the Soviet Union in 1988. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia, New World Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia of Soviet Writers, and Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature (page 64, viewable at Googlebooks).

During the war, while embedded with the Red Army, Grossman kept detailed diaries or notebooks. These were edited, translated and weaved into a narrative by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova for publication by The Harvill Press in 2005 as A Writer at War - Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945. The authors say: ‘The notebooks reveal a good deal of the raw material which he accumulated for his novels as well as his articles. Grossman, a special correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda, or Red Star, proved to be the most perceptive and honest eyewitness of the Soviet frontlines between 1941 and 1945. He spent more than a thousand days at the front - nearly three out of the four years of war. The sharpness of his observation and the humanity of his understanding offer and invaluable lesson for any writer and historian.’ The book (now in paperback under the Pimlico imprint) can be previewed at Random House or Googlebooks. And a review by Andrey Kurkov can be read in The Guardian.

Much of Grossman’s writing, as translated, in the book does read like a diary. However, as all of his words are woven into the authors’ text, particular entries are rarely given a specific date (whether or not there was one in the originals) - thus all the extracts below are undated.

1941
‘The headquarters has been set up in the Paskevich Palace. There is a wonderful park, and a lake with swans. Lots of slit trenches have been dug everywhere. Chief of the political department of the front, Brigade Commander Kozlov, receives us. He tells us that the Military Council is very alarmed by the news that arrived yesterday. The Germans have taken Roslavl and assembled a great tank force there. Their commander is Guderian, author of the book Achtung-Panzer!.

We leafed through a series of the Front newspaper. I came across the following phrase in a leading article: ‘The much-battered enemy continued his cowardly advance.’

We sleep on the floor in the library of the ‘Komintern’ club, keeping our boots on, and using gas masks and field pouches as pillows. We have dinner at the canteen of the headquarters. It is situated in the park, in an amusing multicolored pavilion. They feed us well, as if we were in a dom otdykha [Soviet house of rest] before the war. There’s sour cream, curds, and even ice-cream as a dessert.’

***

‘We came under fire near a cemetery. We hid beneath a tree. A truck was standing there, and in it was a dead rifleman-signaller, covered with a tarpaulin. Red Army soldiers were digging a grave for him nearby. When there’s a raid of Mssers, the soldiers try to hide in ditches. The lieutenant shouts: ‘Carry on digging, otherwise we won’t finish until the evening.’ Korol hides in the new grave, while everyone runs in different directions. Only the dead signaller is lying full length, and machine guns are chattering above him.’

***

‘Cucumbers. Four men from the fruit and vegetable store load cucumbers at the station, during a bombing raid. They are crying with fear, get drunk, and in the evenings they recount, with Ukrainian humour, how scared they were and laugh at one another, eating honey, salo [pork lard], garlic and tomatoes. One of them imitates wonderfully the howling and explosion of a bomb.

B. Korol is teaching them how to use a hand grenade. He thinks they’ll become partisans under German occupation, while I sense from their conversation that they are ready to work for the Germans. One of them, who wants to be an agronomist for this area, looks at Korol as if he were an imbecile.’

1942

‘Spent the night  in the house of the RAIKOM chairman. He talks about collective farms, and about chairmen of collective farms who take their livestock far into the steppe and live like kings there, slaughtering heifers, drinking milk, buying and selling. (And a cow now costs 40,000 roubles).

Women talking in the kitchen of the RAIKOM canteen: ‘Oh this Hitler, he’s a real Satan! And we used to say that communists were Satans.’

***

‘Stalingrad is burned down. I would have to write too much if I wanted to describe it. Stalingrad is burned down. Stalingrad is in ashes. It is dead. People are in basements. Everything is burned out. The hot walls of the buildings are like the bodies of people who have died in the terrible heat and haven’t gone cold yet.

Huge buildings, memorials, public gardens. Signs: ‘Cross here.’ Heaps of wires, a cat sleeping on a window sill, flowers and grass in flowerpots. A wooden pavilion where they sold fizzy water is standing, miraculously intact among thousands of huge stone buildings burned and half destroyed. It is like Pompeii, seized by disaster on a day when everything was flourishing. Trams and cars with no glass in their windows. Burned-out houses with memorial plaques: ‘I. V Stalin spoke here in 1919’.

Building of a children’s hospital with a gypsum bird on the roof. One wing is broken off, the other stretched out to fly. The Palace of Culture: the building is black, velvety from fire, and two snow-white nude statues stand out against this background.

There are children wandering about, there are many laughing faces. Many people are half insane.

Sunset over a square. A terrifying and strange beauty: the light pink sky is looking through thousands and thousands of empty windows and roofs. A huge poster painted in vulgar colours: ‘The radiant way’.

A feeling of calm. The city has died after much suffering and looks like the face of a dead man who was suffering from a lethal disease and finally has found eternal peace. Bombing again, bombing of the dead city.’

Carry on carping

The British Library has just bought, for over £200,000, the personal archive of Kenneth Williams, including all his diaries and many letters. Williams was one of Britain’s great 20th century comic personalities - a star of 26 Carry On films and several long-running and very popular radio programmes - his camp character seemingly becoming more and more exaggerated with age. Although a selection of his diaries was first published in the 1990s, and was acclaimed for revealing him as an intimate, gossipy (and often bitchy) diarist,  the British Library says that more than four-fifths of Williams’s diary material, never before seen by researchers, will - from next year - be publicly available for the first time.

Williams was born in 1926 in London, the son of a hairdresser, and educated at Lyulph Stanley School. At 18 he joined the army, and went with the Royal Engineers survey section to Bombay, and then to Sri Lanka, but managed to transfer to Combined Services Entertainment. After the war, he tried to establish himself as a serious actor in the theatre, but gravitated to radio where his voice and style suited programmes such as Hancock’s Half Hour and the Kenneth Horne shows. Indeed, he remained a radio star for the rest of his life, appearing, for example, in Just a Minute for over 20 years.

Having established a comic persona with radio, Williams did win roles in television and films, most notably in the Carry On series of films. Despite all the bawdiness of his comedy, he publicly insisted that he was celibate, and his diaries later revealed unconsummated passions towards various men. Stanley Baxter was a lifelong friend; and Williams was known to take holidays with Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. He died, in 1988, from an overdose of barbiturates. It was never established whether his death was accidental or suicide, but some have argued that he would not have committed suicide without leaving a note for his dearly loved mother. Further biographical information can be found at Wikipedia, from a selection of obituaries at the Kenneth Williams Appreciation Society website, or at Dangerous Minds.

Williams kept diaries all his life, from as young as 14 until his death. The earliest surviving diary is from 1942, but there are no diaries for 1943-1946 when he was touring with the army. His last diary entry was written on 14 April 1988, the day before his death: ’By 6.30 pain in the back was pulsating as it’s never done before . . . so this, plus the stomach trouble combines to torture me - oh - what's the bloody point?’

In 1993, HarperCollins published The Kenneth Williams Diaries as edited by Russell Davies - nowadays it’s called an ‘outrageous bestseller’. Substantial parts of the book can be freely read online at Googlebooks and Amazon. At the time of publication, the book was reviewed with frenzied adjectives, recently echoed by the Daily Mail in describing the diaries as ‘excoriating, furious, bitter, resentful, occasionally self-hating and almost always bitchy on an epic scale’. See also a review in The Independent - Carry on carping with Ken.

Having been kept locked away, Williams’s 43 diaries (along with 2,000 letters) have now been bought by the British Library for £220,000, although copyright remains with the Williams estate, owned by Paul Richardson, his friend and neighbour. According to the British Library press release: ‘It is estimated that 85% of the newly-acquired archive is unpublished material never before seen by researchers, and the archive will be of huge interest to social historians of post war Britain, detailing the experience of a gay man both before and after the Wolfenden Report and the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1968, alongside the mundane details of everyday life in London. The diaries and letters also record the actor’s experience of the dying days of the repertory theatre system and the growth of modern celebrity culture, something he seemed both to love and loathe.’

In announcing the purchase, the British Library has committed itself to making the diaries available in its Reading Rooms from March next year. It has also made available - courtesy of the Kenneth Williams estate - a number of extracts, from the diaries, not published before.

21 August 1950
‘Dreary day spent watching the lousiest production of ‘Seagull’ in rehearsal. It was monumentally boring. Can’t see it EVER being a success. CE [Clifford Evans] in London, R [Richard West, assistant director] rehearsing company. Very dreary for him. Performance in evening bad. Lousy house.’

12 June 1954
‘It seems almost incredible to me now, that I have come through 6 weeks of this kind of purgatory. I am genuinely perplexed as to how I have come through it. A team of people for whom I have practically no affection whatsoever. Plays so wretched that I blush to think I’ve helped to propagate them: and a kind of acting which is so dirty that I mentally vomit. This lesson has been learned. Proximity with such muck is dangerous. It is also futile artistically. One achieves nothing. One is in danger of losing everything. How right everyone was in London! What a fool I was to venture near such crap!’

10 January 1957
‘I’ve had my hair cut short again so it doesn’t blow about in the wind. Eden has resigned. That equally mediocre fossil-Macmillan has taken over! The Tory situation is quite pathetic since that old hypocritical ratbag Churchill left. He excelled so greatly in the oratorical sense - in the corruption of the poetic consciousness.’

4 May 1966
‘We went to see DR ZHIVAGO - the Robert Bolt screenplay - directed by David (dreary) Lean. Starring Omar Sharif. This may be the Great Russian Novel, but it’s a pain in the arse as a film. Then same old faults with Lean:m- pretentious shots that mean NOTHING, and a story that is almost without any really interesting & dramatic momnets. Everyone has LONG PROFOUND looks at each other - they frequently cry on meetings, or seeing people shot or something. But the fact is that no film should be boring, and this one is.

With the exception of ROD STEIGER’s performance. When he was on, it really came to life. I’m astonished on reflection, to find that his scenes are still clear in my mind, tho’ most of the others have vanished entirely. Him pacing up and down in the house during the attempted suicide - him in the restaurant when the workers go by singing - him being shot, and his stoical reaction at the Ball - his asking the girl to leave and falling down the stairs - all the sugar etc. It all stays clearly in the mind. Vivid. V. good actor.’

19 July 1967
‘Sitting in their lounge, in the quiet of the evening. I felt I would love to have a place of my own where there was such peace. I suppose one never really does get it in London. I should think I’ve heard more noise and drilling these last few years than ever before in my life. O! for those old days of quiet when new building was rare, and road mending was once in a blue moon!’

17 February 1969
‘Home by 4.30. Purchased black leather address book & blotting paper on the way. 4.45 JOHN SIMMONDS rang. He talked in v. hushed & mournful tones about KH and said Barry Took said this and that and I said ‘Its Barry Took who should go’ and he said he rather agreed. I said we should bring back the team & re-vamp the show and carry on. Phoned Hugh P. after and he agreed with me. (Rang Gordon [Jackson] and the boys told me he was opening tonight in HAMLET at the Roundhouse! I’d forgotten (if I ever knew) and didn’t send him a wire. This study is so cold - I’ve had to put my jacket on! ) I feel particularly annoyed about the radio series being cancelled, because its another source of revenue gone bust. Thank goodness I started the ‘Just A Minute’ series because that’s a source of income. Peter Eade telephoned to say that Bill Cotton had been on the phone saying that they’d take 6 of the Kenneth Williams (Pilot) series but they couldn’t afford more than £400 each, including the writer’s fee!! (We’re asking 500 an episode and 150 for the writing) so Peter said he’d have to discuss it with me. Then Cotton said they were going to repeat the Int. Cabaret series on BBC2 at the same TIME! This sounds like LUNACY to me.’

15 April 1969
‘At lunch I had the great shouting match with Joan Sims. Her patronage & assumption at times that she should tell me what to do, is intolerable. I shouted ‘You cow cunted mare’ and Hattie intervened and told me to stop it. Afterwards, Joan apologised and then of course, I apologised as well & suddenly I remembered that it has all happened before! The same sequence in ‘Camping’ – ugh! I loathe her standards & her mouldy respectability but not her personally. Oh! I don't know tho. I don’t like her either. Not anything about her really.’

21 April 1969
‘Did SMA at the Paris. Peter B drove me there. Joan S was v buoyant and performed quite brilliantly in the show - her characterizations and singing are quite superb. There’s no doubt, she’s an asset all right.’

22 June 1979
‘On the news they announced that JEREMY THORPE had been acquitted!! So that lying crook Scott has not succeeded in his vindictive quest!! They were cheering Jeremy outside the Old Bailey, and he rather spoiled it by making a sanctimonious speech about JUSTICE etc. Whereas he should have just expressed satisfaction and breezed away!’

29 June 1984
‘Up at 6.40. Got papers round corner at 6.45. Went out at 9.20 to get fags. Returned at 9.50 and Almanac asked where Louie was… Nosey nit… He’s left telephone directories lying in foyer for DAYS. HE pointed to them and told me ‘that’s what they waste your money on!’ and railed against wastage. Never heard such humbug.

Did the accounts for the month and walked with them to Smee handing the stuff over to Lynn. Walked home via Aldwych. Reflected that nothing really changes. I’m still walking about this city dragging my loneliness with me, putting on a front, whistling in the dark. It is getting darker all the time.

Went to Tesco’s and got fish and ham and tomatoes and had that at 5.30. Tried doing a bit more writing but my heart, it isn’t in it. Think I’ll have to leave it for a bit. Feel more like weeping.’

12 October 1985
‘TURNED OFF HEATING ‘cos the weather is so WARM.

Up at 7.15 and got papers on Warren Street. Quite a lot of letters to answer AND the endless invitations to speak at functions… I sent the usual printed refusal. … Now PAUL came at 11.45 and we walked with Louisa to VECCHIA where he gave us lunch. It was very good. PAUL said he was v busy with ‘Merry Widow’ production at the Wells. We got a cab back and I felt very tired so went to lie down, but the rest was all intermittent and uneasy.

M came at 7.30 and we went to ROYS where he gave me dinner. It was fine til the table next to us filled with dreadful people: one sneezing and spraying germs everywhere. Thankfully we’d finished the meal and M readily agreed to leave these loathsome neighbours. That DAVID (John Maynard’s friend) was very kind to us. M said of the clientele ‘bit off-putting seeing such a gathering of clones’ and I agreed. Society NEEDS women because it wants the leavening only THEY can provide. There is something very unhealthy about the homosexual world: no wonder they arouse such antagonism.’

And here are a few further extracts, from The Kenneth Williams Diaries as edited by Russell Davies.

2 June 1948
‘Feeling awful. Will probably die tonight at about eleven.’

11 June 1949
‘Went to the Bank and arranged to have my account transferred to Newquay. Deposited £7 - which means that £3.10.0 a week saved, since I started on full salary, which is not so good. Must do better than this.

Richard came to my room and read this! - funny he’s the only one I’ve ever allowed to read my private and so personal! diary. But s’pose that apart from S., he’s the only one I can really trust, who will never abuse my confidence.

Met some queers in the New, and got sent up by two young matelots - rotten! awful!’

22 May 1951
‘Letter from Robert Sheaf, asking me to take part in a Shakespearean tour of villages. Sounds delightful. He saw me in Bordeaux, obviously thinks I’m young and inexperienced and would be delighted to join him and a few intense young men, doing Romeo all over Oxfordshire. Very funny reely. This little chic stays single. Read ‘The City and the Pillar’ by [Gore] Vidal. Wonderful book. Commended by Stanley in his last letter.’

28 November 1952
‘Fred Treves came to tea and there was a furious argument - spiritual versus rational. Hell! Roman Catholicism from the foundation by Peter, Christ’s meeting with John the Baptist, Individual Revelations - Church Antipathy to, etc. etc., the end. I was angry about getting worked up as I always do when discussing organised religion. I hate the aggressiveness which automatically follows its assumption of power.’

5 January 1953
‘It is always so easy for me to read what I have just written and find it vastly entertaining and well done. It seems that everything I accomplish is of enormous interest to me and I am full of admiration for myself. Is this a good thing? Or does it much matter whether it is or not? Enough of this self-analysis. Too fashionable by half in this day and age.’

17 March 1955
‘The business of actually sustaining a performance night after night is peculiarly difficult for me: my temperament seems so against it. I am by nature erratic - given to enthusiasm which wane after a time; quick to grasp the bones of a subject, slow to develop them.’

15 March 1963
‘Stanley B. [Baxter] rang me. I was delighted & I shot up there to see him on the 30 bus. He drove out to Bucks. & we talked & talked. There are times (when he is prepared to be vulnerable)) when he is just superb. Disarming, honest, charming, and hilariously funny all at once. When he’s like this one could die for him. It was so good for me to see him.’

The Diary Junction