Leach: Is art any use?

Is art any use? Is anything any use? So asked one of Britain’s most famous potters, Bernard Leach, in his diary exactly one hundred years ago today. And, he gave himself an answer - of sorts! Historically, there are not many craftspeople who kept diaries, but Leach did, and, according to Archives Hub, they make for ‘illuminating reading’.

The Archives Hub - which provides access to descriptions of unique and unpublished primary source material held in universities, colleges and research institutes - gives a good short biography for Leach. He was born in 1887 in Hong Kong and lived in the Far East until the age of ten, when he came to school at a Jesuit college in England. At 16, in 1903, he was admitted to Slade, as their youngest student, and subsequently studied etching, and in 1909 went to work in Japan as an etcher. Soon, though, he discovered ceramics and trained with Japanese masters. After befriending a young potter named Shoji Hamada, the two of them came to England, to St Ives, Cornwall, and set up the Leach Pottery, which over time was to become hugely influential.

During the 1930s, Leach started teaching at Dartington Hall, and he set up a pottery in Shinner’s Bridge. He also worked as a draughtsman and, according to the Archives Hub biography, was hugely influential as a writer and thinker. During an extremely active life, he was continually at the centre of developments in the studio crafts, leading and participating in demonstrations, conferences, and exhibiting and touring around the world. It is estimated that Leach made about 100,000 pots during his lifetime and sold well over that number of his most famous written work, A Potter’s Book. Moreover, Archives Hub says, his letters and diaries, which are housed at the Crafts Study Centre in Farnham, make ‘illuminating reading’.

Historically, many priests, writers and politicians have kept diaries, but very few craftspeople have. Of over 500 diarists listed by The Diary Junction only five are categorised as craftspeople, and none as potters (there is no data on Leach himself yet). So Leach is quite a rarity. VADS, the online resource for visual arts in the UK, has nearly 1,000 images for Leach, including, of course, his ceramics, but also photographs, letters, and many pages from his diary.

One of those pages is for 30 August 1908, one hundred years go today. Leach, then aged 21, was in a philosophical mood. He wrote this in the diary: ‘Question: What is the greater - the artist (Raphael) who appeals to all the multitude and the senses or the artist (Blake) who appeals only to the highest minds. What the devil has the ‘mot’ to do with art? What is the ratio between art and humanity? Is art any use? Is anything any use? To live happily one must take it for granted it is!’

Normandy to Victory

A major World War II diary is about to be published for the first time. It chronicles the activities of General Courtney Hodges and the First US Army from D-Day to the German surrender, and, according to the publisher, offers ‘an intriguing glimpse into the personalities and operations of Allied military leaders’. Although the diary has not been published hitherto, it was used extensively in a biography of Hodges. For an insight into the enemy, albeit at a political rather than a military level, see the diary of Galeazzo Ciano.

Normandy to Victory has just been published by University Press of Kentucky in the US (Amazon) and is due out in the UK (Amazon) on 1 September. It’s subtitled, The War Diary of General Courtney H. Hodges and the First US Army, but the writing is credited to two of his aides - Major William C. Sylvan and Captain Francis G. Smith Jr. - who recorded daily entries, which Hodges reviewed and approved. According to the publisher, the book chronicles Hodges’ ascent to Commanding General in August 1944, as well as his viewpoints on strategy and the enemy; and it follows Hodges and the First Army ‘through savage European combat until the German surrender in May 1945’.

During World War II, officers were encouraged to record their everyday activities and those of their units, and this diary, about Hodges and the First Army, the publisher says, is one of ‘the most important’. Only available to researchers until now, retired US Army officer and historian, John T Greenwood, has edited the entries for a more general readership. However, the publisher stresses that Hodges’ aides were not privy to the top-level discussions with Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton and others, and so the diary mostly recounts ‘on-the-ground’ details.

A release from University Press of Kentucky on 22 August gives more details. It says the diary opens on 2 June 1944, as Hodges and the First Army prepare for the Allied invasion of France, and closes on 7 May 1944 with a representative of the High German Command signaling surrender of all German land. It highlights the crucial role that Hodges’ Army played in the execution of Northern European battles, ‘being the first army to cross the German border, the first to cross the Rhine, and the first to close to the Elbe’ which enabled it to spearhead successful operations for the troops who followed.

Although the promotional material for the book does not include any extracts from the diary itself, Stephen T Wishnevsky used the diary extensively for his biography - Courtney Hicks Hodges - published in 2006 by McFarland. Many pages from this are available to view on Googlebooks. Here is an extract which includes a bit of the Hodges diary.

‘One visit to the 30th led ‘the General’ as Sylvan referred to him, to remark that there were two kinds of offices, ‘the quick and the dead, and he preferred to be among the former.’ On that visit, shells screamed overhead, and Hodges and his aide were close enough to hear the short range ‘Screaming Meanies’ and the crackle of small arms fire. On this day there was a briefing at Montgomery’s HQ, with Patton in attendance. He scowled in his diary, ‘Monty went to great lengths explaining why the British have done nothing.’ ’ And here’s another snippet from later on in Wishnevsky’s book: ‘There is no evidence he [Hodges] ever took a whole day off and the War Diary records only two evenings he didn’t work until midnight.’

For a first-hand view from the other side in the conflict, one can turn to Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, who left a good set of diaries. Having married Mussolini’s daughter Edda, Ciano rose to become a member of the Fascist Supreme Council, then secretary of state for press and propaganda, and eventually minister of foreign affairs. In 1939, he signed the Pact of Steel with Germany’s Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Diary Junction provides more information on Ciano and links to his texts. Here, though, is an example from the diaries, from 8 December 1941, the day after Pearl Harbour:

‘A night telephone call from Ribbentrop. He is overjoyed about the Japanese attack on America. He is so happy about it that I am happy with him, though I am not too sure about the final advantages of what has happened. One thing is now certain, that America will enter the conflict and that the conflict will be so long that she will be able to realize all her potential forces. This morning I told this to the King who had been pleased about the event. He ended by admitting that, in the long run, I may be right. Mussolini was happy, too. For a long time he has favored a definite clarification of relations between America and the Axis.’

More authoritative information about World War II diaries (and other sources), however, is available from World War II Plus 55, a website run by American journalist, David H Lippman. In a discussion on methodology for his history articles, for example, he refers to a number of original diary (and other) sources. This is Lippman on Ciano’s diary. ‘[His] cynicism is brutal and raw, revealing the tawdry nature of the Fascist state and its drive for empire at the expense of others. The diaries were intended as Ciano’s blackmail weapon when he was arrested for helping to overthrow Mussolini, but they did not save his life. Instead they stand as a testament to the aggressive and incompetent leadership of the Fascist regime.’

Hymn writer in sex scandal

Charles Wesley, one of Britain’s greatest hymn writers and a founder of Methodism, was plagued by a sex scandal while staying in the new American colony of Georgia. This information has, apparently, just come to light because a professor at Liverpool Hope University has deciphered coded passages in Wesley’s diaries. (However, the story may not be as new as the professor or some British newspapers are suggesting.) Both Charles and his equally famous reverend brother, John, were committed diarists, and their diaries (not including coded passages!) are all freely available online.

Charles and his older brother John were born at Epworth, Lincolnshire, and educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. According to the website of the Methodist Church of the UK, Charles was ‘a bit of a lad’ in his early Oxford days, but then formed the Holy Club for prayer and bible study. Subsequently, John joined and became its leading light. Other students nicknamed the members of the group as ‘Methodists’. Charles was ordained in the Church of England in 1735, and that same year went to the British colony of Georgia, with John. There, he held the post of secretary to the colonial governor, James Edward Oglethorpe, but - apparently because of ill health - returned to the UK more than a year earlier than his brother.

According to a news story just published in The Daily Mail, however, it now seems Charles ‘fled home amid allegations that he had sex with a colonist after trapping her husband under a tree’. This scandal - from 270 years ago - was uncovered, says The Daily Mail, by Reverend Professor Kenneth Newport, of Liverpool Hope University, who finally managed to decipher passages of Wesley’s diaries written in code. He did this by realising that Wesley had used the same code to transcribe parts of the King James Bible.

The coded paragraphs, explains The Daily Mail, show that Wesley was accused of sexual misconduct by a woman named Mrs Anne Welch, wife to the colonists’ doctor. And they also reveal that he was concerned because, while walking with a maid, a pair of colonists had shouted at him: ‘There goes the parson with his whore. I saw her and him were under the bushes.’ According to The Daily Mail and The Times (which shuns any mention of the sex scandal), the newly decoded passages also reveal significant tensions between the two brothers, particularly about each other’s marriages.

But Jeff Campbell, from Wharton, New Jersey, says these ‘new’ facts are not so new. In a comment submitted to The Daily Mail’s website, he says he found out about Charles Wesley’s difficulties in Georgia ‘over four years ago’ at a seminary class with someone called Dr. Charles Yirgoyen! Campbell thus claims Wesley fell in love with the daughter of the head of the colony, and when she did not return his affections and asked to be married to another man, he refused to marry them and was locked up. Campbell adds ‘it is said that someone broke him out of jail and he ran back to England’. He also says that the strained relations between John and Charles over the years has been well documented.

The Diary Junction provides a brief biography for both John and Charles Wesley, both of whom went on to develop Britain’s first widely successful evangelical movement, and gives links to websites where the text of their diaries can be found. John kept a diary for most of his life until his death in 1791, but Charles, who died three years earlier, stopped in the 1750s (perhaps because he was too busy writing hymns, such as Hark, the Herald Angels Sing).

Here are two extracts from Charles’ diary from 1736. The first is taken from a published edition of his diary online (thanks to A Vision of Britain Through Time), and the second, a day later, is one of the decoded passages provided by today’s story in The Times online (there is no entry for 22 March 1736 in the published edition).

21 March
‘Mr Oglethorpe had ordered, more often than once, that no man should shoot on a Sunday. Germain had been committed to the guard-room for it in the morning, but was, upon his submission, released. In the midst of the sermon a gun was fired. Davison, the constable, ran out, and found it was the Doctor; told him it was contrary to orders, and he was obliged to desire him to come to the officer. Upon this the Doctor flew into a great passion, and said, ‘What, do you not know that I am not to be looked upon as a common fellow?’ Not knowing what to do, the constable went, and returned, after consulting with Hermsdorf, with two centinels, and brought him to the guard-room. Hereupon M. H. charged and fired a gun; and then ran thither, like a mad woman, crying she had shot, and would be confined too. The constable and Hermsdorf persuaded her to go away. She cursed and swore in the utmost transport of passion, threatening to kill the first man that should come near her. Alas, my brother! what has become of thy hopeful convert?

In the afternoon, while I was talking in the street with poor Catherine, her mistress came up to us, and fell upon me with the utmost bitterness and scurrility; saying she would blow me up, and my brother, whom she once thought honest, but was now undeceived: that I was the cause of her husband's confinement; but she would be revenged, and expose my hypocrisy, my prayers four times a day, by beat of drum, and abundance more, which I cannot write, and thought no woman, though taken from Drurylane, could have spoken. I only said, I pitied her, but defied all she or the devil could do; for she could not hurt me. I was strangely preserved from passion, and at parting told her that, I hoped she would soon come to a better mind. . . .

. . . At night I was forced to exchange my usual bed, the ground, for a chest, being almost speechless through a violent cold.’

22 March
‘While I was persuading Mr Welch not to concern himself in this disturbance, I heard Mrs Hawkins cry out: ‘Murder!’ and walked away. Returning out of the woods, I was informed by Mr Welch that poor blockhead Mrs Welch had joined with Mrs Hawkins and the Devil in their slanders of me. I would not believe it till half the town told me the same, and exclaimed against her ingratitude.’

The origin of pirate legends

Captain Henry Morgan is one of the most famous pirates in history, largely thanks to Alexander Exquemelin, one of his buccaneers, who wrote a diary. Originally published in the 1670s, this diary (or more strictly speaking a memoir) has rarely been out of print, but HarperCollins has just brought out a new, fancy edition - The Illustrated Pirate Diaries - complete with maps, paintings and even photographs! However, Exquemelin’s full text, with beautiful illustrations, can be downloaded freely from the web.

HarperCollins in the US has just published The Illustrated Pirate Diaries: A Remarkable Eyewitness Account of Captain Morgan and the Buccaneers; and, according to Amazon, it is being released in the UK shortly, in September. Of all the pirates to terrorise the Caribbean waters, says HarperCollins, none are as notorious as Sir Henry Morgan. But his fame comes largely from the diary of buccaneer Alexander Exquemelin, who sailed under Morgan and recorded his infamous and bloody adventures.

Exquemelin (also spelled Esquemeling and other variants) was probably born around 1645 in France, but aged 21 or so he went to work for the French West India Company in the Caribbean. There he enlisted with the buccaneers, and Henry Morgan’s band, possibly serving Morgan directly as a barber-surgeon. On returning to Europe, he settled in Holland, and his diary was first published in 1678, in Dutch, as De Americaensche Zee-Roovers. Since then, the book has had an interesting history.

The Lots of Essays website, which has a useful extract about the diary, explains that it was soon published in a Spanish translation in 1681, and then in English in 1684. However, while the author was originally listed as Alexander Olivier Exquemelin in the Dutch original, his name was transformed to John Esquemeling for the English translation. His book is considered to have been very influential in forming a stereotype image of a pirate, one that persists to this day; and it has been published in many editions. Indeed, Wikipedia’s article on Exquemelin says this: ‘It has rightly been said that perhaps no book of the seventeenth century in any language was ever the parent of so many imitations and the source of so much fiction.’

In 2006, Constable & Robinson published The Mammoth Book of Pirates which included Exquemelin’s ‘fly-on-the-wall account’ of the ‘wicked order of pirates, or robbers of the sea’. But this new book from HarperCollins is ‘a special illustrated edition filled with maps, paintings, photographs, and fascinating background on pirate culture’, and promises that the ‘unforgettable diary comes to new life, bringing the authentic world of the buccaneers to a modern audience far better than any movie could’. HarperCollins provides a quote: ‘Morgan hurled himself at the fuse, and saved all his comrades’ lives. His bravery was already the stuff of legend, and this exploit made his men even more determined to follow him anywhere.’

However, a lovely 1914 edition of the book - complete with swashbuckling pictures by George Alfred Williams - can be downloaded for free from the Internet Archive. The full title is The Pirates of Panama or Buccaneers of America a true account of the famous adventures and daring deeds of Sir Henry Morgan and other notorious freebooters of the Spanish Main; and the author is given as ‘John Esquemeling, one of the buccaneers who was present at those tragedies’.

Here is an extract from Exquemelin’s book. It concerns Captain Morgan’s expedition in 1670 to take the city of Panama (which I’ve chosen simply because it’s about the same day as today - 26 August).

‘Captain Morgan sent two hundred men before the body of his army, to discover the way to Panama, and any ambuscades therein: the path being so narrow, that only ten or twelve persons could march abreast, and often not so many. After ten hours’ march they came to a place called Quebrada Obscura: here, all on a sudden, three or four thousand arrows were shot at them, they not perceiving whence they came, or who shot them: though they presumed it was from a high rocky mountain, from one side to the other, whereon was a grot, capable of but one horse or other beast laded. This multitude of arrows much alarmed the pirates, especially because they could not discover whence they were discharged.

At last, seeing no more arrows, they marched a little farther, and entered a wood: here they perceived some Indians to fly as fast as they could, to take the advantage of another post, thence to observe their march; yet there remained one troop of Indians on the place, resolved to fight and defend themselves, which they did with great courage till their captain fell down wounded; who, though he despaired of life, yet his valour being greater than his strength, would ask no quarter, but, endeavouring to raise himself, with undaunted mind laid hold of his azagayo, or javelin, and struck at one of the pirates; but before he could second the blow, he was shot to death. This was also the fate of many of his companions, who, like good soldiers, lost their lives with their captain, for the defence of their country. The pirates endeavoured to take some of the Indians prisoners, but they being swifter than the pirates, every one escaped, leaving eight pirates dead, and ten wounded: yea, had the Indians been more dextrous in military affairs, they might have defended that passage, and not let one man pass. . .’

A lady of old Japan

‘I was brought up in a distant province which lies farther than the farthest end of the Eastern Road. I am ashamed to think that inhabitants of the Royal City will think me an uncultured girl.’ So begins what is called The Sarashina Diary and which is considered one of the very earliest and most beautiful of travel diaries. The author, whose real name is not known, was a Japanese lady-in-waiting born 1,000 years ago.

It is not clear how the famous diary, and its author, came to get their name, but it probably arose because the geographical district, Sarashina, is alluded to in one of the book’s poems. However, it is known that Lady Sarashina was related to another (and slightly earlier) famous diarist, also without an exact name, but who’s referred to as the mother of Michitsuna. Lady Sarashina was probably born in 1008, in other words one thousand years ago (at a time when Ethelred the Unready was still trying to protect England from Danish invaders, and nearly a century before the first university would be founded in the western world, at Bologna).

What we know today about Lady Sarashina comes mostly from the diary, and Wikipedia has a good summary. In her childhood, she traveled to the provinces with her father, an assistant governor, and back to the capital some years later. She married late, in her 30s, and became a lady-in-waiting. Apparently, though, she was indifferent to her husband and children, and too shy and old for a successful career in court.

The diary was translated in the early part of the 19th century by Annie Shepley Omori and Kochi Doi and published along with others in Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan. The full text of the diary, as translated for that book and now out of copyright, is available online thanks to The Celebration of Women Writers website. Many pages and some illustrations from the book can also be viewed at Googlebooks

Here is another extract from The Sarashina Diary.

‘Mount Fuji is in this Province. In the Province where I was brought up I saw that mountain far towards the West. It towers up painted with deep blue, and covered with eternal snow. It seems that it wears a dress of deep violet and a white veil over its shoulders. From the little level place of the top smoke was going up. In the evening we even saw burning fires there. The Fuji River comes tumbling down from that mountain. A man of the Province came up to us and told us a story.

‘Once I went on an errand. It was a very hot day, and I was resting on the bank of the stream when I saw something yellow come floating down. It came to the bank of the river and stuck there. I picked it up and found it to be a scrap of yellow paper with words elegantly written on it in cinnabar. Wondering much I read it. On the paper was a prophecy of the Governors to be appointed next year. As to this Province there were written the names of two Governors. I wondered more and more, and drying the paper, kept it. When the day of the announcement came, this paper held no mistake, and the man who became the Governor of this Province died after three months, and the other succeeded him.’

There are such things. I think that the gods assemble there on that mountain to settle the affairs of each new year.’

Conrad, Hottot and the Congo

One hundred years ago today (19 August), the Belgian government finally approved the annexation of Congo Free State - the entire area of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo - from Leopold II, the king of Belgium. During the previous 20 years or so, some 10 million Congolese had died because of ruthless exploitation for rubber production. The international outrage, which had led to the annexation, was partly stoked by Joseph Conrad’s famous novel, Heart of Darkness, based on a journey he took in 1890. Conrad kept a diary of that trip. There are also diaries by a French explorer, Robert Hottot, travelling in the Congo Free State in 1908. Much more recently, of course, Che Guevara kept a diary of his exploits in the country.

In 1876, a few years after his famous search for Dr Livingstone (see online diary text at Project Gutenberg), Henry Morton Stanley undertook some exploration for Belgium’s king Leopold II who was keen to colonise an area of Africa which would become the Congo. Professing humanitarian objectives, Leopold then managed to play off various European rivals against each other and formally acquire the territory for himself at the Conference of Berlin in 1885. Thereafter, it was a corporate state - he called it Congo Free State - privately controlled by him through a dummy non-governmental organisation, Association Internationale Africaine. For the next two decades, the state was mercilessly exploited for rubber production to meet a growing demand for car tyres. Wikipedia’s history, of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, explains that an army called the Force Publique (FP) would cut off the limbs of the Congolese to help enforce rubber quotas.

The appalling situation in Congo Free State began to attract international criticism, not least from writers such as Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad, and eventually led to an important report in 1904 by the Irish/British diplomat Roger Casement. He estimated that the population had been decimated by three million because of indiscriminate war, starvation, reduction of births and tropical diseases, (while other estimates suggest that around 10 million Congolese died in this period). Casement’s report also led to the arrest and punishment of white officials, and ultimately - on 19 August 1908, one hundred years ago - to the Belgian government agreeing to annex the territory. A treaty to that effect was signed the following November. The territory was renamed Belgian Congo and administered by the Belgian parliament until independence in 1960.

Conrad went to Congo Free State in 1890, and used his experiences there for a novella, Heart of Darkness, first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899 as a three part serial. However, earlier he had published The Congo Diary, which in modern editions is often coupled with Heart of Darkness. Although the novella is freely available online at several sites (such as Ria Press), The Congo Diary is not. Some pages are available at Googlebooks, but thanks to Rod McLaren and his Rodcorp blog for providing a few extracts and relating them to Heart of Darkness. He says that stylistically, the staccato sentences of The Congo Diary are ‘the opposite of the elliptic, questing prose’ of Conrad’s later Heart of Darkness , but that it’s ‘an important precursor in content and emotion’.

A French explorer, A. Robert Hottot, also a diarist, travelled to Congo Free State three times in 1906, 1907 and 1908, the year Belgium finally acted to annex the territory from its king. Hottot died young in 1939, but had moved to Oxford in 1932 and had become a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. His papers, including diaries, and many fabulous photographs are held by Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which has an online exhibition about the man. One of the online photographs shows two pages from his 1908 diary, in which Hottot describes the measurement of the local Kango people (pygmies) at Lake Tumba and lists objects he’s collected: three women’s belts, nine units of the local copper currency, and forty poisoned arrows.

Sixty years later, a diarist of a very different ilk would head for Belgian Congo - Che Guevara. His Bolivian diary was in the news a few weeks ago (see Che’s Last Days), and The Motorcycle Diaries were made famous by a recent film. But he also wrote a diary about his time in Africa - The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo. There’s quite a lot about Che’s time in the Congo on Wikipedia; The Guardian provided some extracts prior to the book’s belated publication in 2001; a few pages are viewable on Amazon; and etext.org has a longish review. Also, BBC world affairs correspondent Mark Doyle followed in Che’s footsteps and made a programme about his trip.

A Banjo and a Swagman

Original poems by one of Australia’s most famous poets, Banjo Paterson, have been found in the back of a soldier’s Boer War diary. The first line of Waltzing Matilda, probably Paterson’s most famous poem, talks of a jolly swagman, and, as it happens, there is a not-so-jolly swagman who kept a jolly good diary.

A local newspaper from the outskirts of Sydney, The Parramatta Advertiser, claimed a world exclusive last week when it ran the following story: Original Banjo Bush Ballads Discovered. According to the newspaper, the ballads were unearthed in a filing cabinet, in a tin shed at the back of the Royal New South Wales (NSW) Lancer Barracks in Parramatta, by former soldier and barracks spokesman, Ian Hawthorn. The ballads, both penned in 1899 and published in 1900, are called There’s Another Blessed Horse Fell Down and Johnny Boer.

What makes the ballads, and thus the find, so special is their author, none other than Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson, one of Australia’s greatest poets. At the time, Paterson was a correspondent with The Sydney Morning Herald, and was travelling on the SS Kent from Sydney to South Africa during the Boer War. Hawthorn told The Parramatta Advertiser that he was ‘150 per cent sure’ the handwritten poems were authentic Paterson, but that A$1,500 would be needed to verify the signature scientifically.

After The Parramatta Advertiser broke the story it surfaced in the national Australian press, and picked up some more details on the way. According to the Courier Mail, which is part of the news.com.au network, the poems were actually written in the back of a diary kept by Major G. L. Lee, who was commanding a squadron of NSW Lancers in South Africa during the Boer War. According to Hawthorn the diary itself is also ‘hugely significant’.

Paterson was born in 1864 and, when young, was educated at a bush school in Binalong. Later, he went to a grammar school in Sydney and trained to be a solicitor. His first poems were published in the mid-1880s under a pseudonym - ‘The Banjo’. Subsequently, he became a journalist, but also worked with horses. He is most well remembered, though, as the author of many ballads and poems reflecting life in the outback areas, such as Binalong. He died in 1941. His image appears on the A$10 note.

Paterson’s most famous poem, Waltzing Matilda, starts as follows:
Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,
Under the shade of a coolibah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited ‘til his billy boiled
‘Who'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me?’

Interestingly, there is a Welshman, named Joseph Jenkins, who immortalised the lifestyle of a swagman - perhaps not a very jolly one - by keeping detailed diaries of his itinerant lifestyle in Victoria state for 25 years. He was born in Blaenplwyf, Cardiganshire, in 1818, and lived on his parents farm until the age of 28, when he married and tried to start his own farm. But in 1868, aged about 50, he ran off to Australia, working as a labourer in central Victoria, and eventually settling in Maldon. He only returned to Wales when his health started to fail in 1894; and he died four years later. Many volumes of detailed diaries he’d kept were discovered in Wales 70 years later. Extracts about his time in Australia were first published in 1975 with the title Diary of a Welsh Swagman. I can’t find any extracts of this online, but second hand copies are available through Abebooks.

The State Library of Victoria acquired the Australian diaries in 1997, and its website explains their importance: ‘The diaries are a reflective view of Jenkins’ life and detail the day-to-day tasks in a developing colony – splitting timber, digging ditches, hanging gates and fencing. . . Jenkins was an astute social commentator, and his diaries offer invaluable insights into 19th-century rural Victoria and the problems facing the young colony. Critical of much of the farming practices he saw around him, Jenkins had a keen interest in land management and sustainable agriculture. He did not confine himself to commenting on agricultural matters, deep though his interest and knowledge of the subject was. The diaries also contain observations on human nature, Jenkins’ poetry, and provide an indication of his reading habits. They also show an empathy with indigenous people and interest in world affairs.’

More recently, the diaries have been re-edited to provide a fuller picture of Jenkins life in a title published in 2002 - Pity the Swagman: The Australian Odyssey of a Victorian Diarist. GWALES.com says this about the man and his diaries: ‘Readers will find a rather different, though sympathetic, portrait in Bethan Phillips’ excellent biography, fifteen years in preparation, which has drawn on all Joseph’s surviving diaries. A melancholy and introspective man, he called his diary ‘this long lonely affair with myself’ and considered he was ‘doomed’ from his birth in 1818, at Blaenplwyf near Talsarn. He kept his diaries and notebooks as a ‘monument’ to his life.’

Tōjō’s resistance to surrender

Pages from a diary kept by Hideki Tōjō, Japanese Prime Minister, in the days before Japan’s surrender in the Second World War have just come to light. They show that despite the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, he was in favour of fighting on. Tōjō, who was executed in 1948, also kept a prison diary, and this was first published in 1991. An English translation, which is freely available online, includes this extract: ‘It is natural that I should bear entire responsibility for the war in general’.

Tōjō, born in 1884, entered the Imperial Japanese Army at a young age, and steadily worked his way up the ranks. In July 1941, he was appointed minister of war by the prime minister, Fumimaro Kondoye; and, a few months later, succeeded to the post of prime minister himself. Initially, he backed efforts to reach agreement with the US but then ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor in December. He also pressed on with advances throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific region. However, with the fall of Saipan in the Mariana Islands in 1944, he was forced to resign, and went into seclusion. After Japan’s surrender, in September 1945, he was arrested, found guilty of several war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and hanged.

Recently, the National Archives of Japan released approximately 20 pages of diary notes written by Tōjō in the final days of the war, and these were published for the first time in Nikkei newspaper earlier this week (to mark the 63rd anniversary of Japan’s surrender). The story was then distributed around the world by Associated Press and others, focused largely on the key point that Tōjō was keen for his country to carry on fighting even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed by the US’s nuclear bombs. The AP story quotes Kazufumi Takayama, curator of the Archives, who puts it like this: ‘The notes show Tōjō kept his dyed-in-the-wool militarist mentality until the very end’.

Various extracts of the diary have been published. The Daily Telegraph has this one from 10 August 1945, the day after the Nagasaki bombing: ‘The Japanese government has accepted the notion that Japan is the loser and it appears to be going to accept unconditional surrender. . . Such a position frustrates the officers and soldiers of the imperial armed forces. Without fully employing its abilities even at the final moment, the imperial nation is surrendering to the enemies’ propaganda . . . I never imagined such torpor in the nation's leaders and its people.’

The AP story has a couple of extracts from a few days later, 13 August 1945: ‘We now have to see our country surrender to the enemy without demonstrating our power up to 120 percent’; and, ‘we are now on a course for a humiliating peace, or rather a humiliating surrender.’ And here’s another extract: ‘Now that the diplomatic steps have been taken after the emperor’s judgment [for surrender], I have decided to refrain from making any comments about it, though I have a separate view.’

However, Tōjō also kept a diary while in Sugamo prison, after the war, awaiting trial. The text of this diary, in English, is available online thanks to VHO, which calls itself ‘the world’s largest website for historical revisionism!’ ! (the second exclamation mark is mine) and a 1992 issue of its Journal of Historical Review. (In the same issue is an article entitled Hoover-era American plan for war against Britain and Canada uncovered.)

The Journal of Historical Review says the Tōjō diary consists of several essays, and a reconstructed daily log of the critical period of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, and says that it was composed in part as an aid for his trial proceedings. Unknown to the world for 4o years apparently, it was first published in Japan in 1991 by historian Sanae Sato. The VHO translation was jointly prepared by General Hideo Miki, retired professor of Japan’s National Defense Academy, and Henry Symington, an American specialist of Japanese economic and social affairs.

There is not much diary-like material in the diary, but here is an interesting, but undated, extract: ‘It is natural that I should bear entire responsibility for the war in general, and, needless to say, I am prepared to do so. Consequently, now that the war has been lost, it is presumably necessary that I be judged so that the circumstances of the time can be clarified and the future peace of the world be assured. Therefore, with respect to my trial, it is my intention to speak frankly, according to my recollection, even though when the vanquished stands before the victor, who has over him the power of life and death, he may be apt to toady and flatter. I mean to pay considerable attention to this in my actions, and say to the end that what is true is true and what is false is false. To shade one’s words in flattery to the point of untruthfulness would falsify the trial and do incalculable harm to the nation, and great care must be taken to avoid this.’

Memories of Dylan Thomas

A diary written in a school exercise book by Caitlin Thomas, two years after her husband Dylan Thomas died, has been put up for sale by Rick Gekoski, an independent London bookseller. In a collection with other letters and books, he’s calling it ‘the finest Dylan Thomas material ever put together’ and is charging nearly half a million dollars (quarter of a million pounds), three times more than anything else in his current catalogue or on his sales website.

Dylan Thomas, a Welsh poet born in 1914 but who died of alcohol poisoning before he was 40, became particularly well known for his speaking voice, captivating American audiences during tours in the 1950s, and recording over 200 broadcasts for the BBC. His most famous work is probably Under Milk Wood, a poetical radio play set in Llareggub, a fictional Welsh fishing village.

In July 1937, Thomas married Caitlin MacNamara, and they had three children. After Dylan’s death in 1953, she moved to Italy and had another child with Giuseppe Fazio. She died in 1994. According to Wikipedia’s article, she replied to a question on a talk show about how she remembered her husband, by saying he ‘was an utter shit’. There is also a widely reported anecdote which tells of Caitlin bursting into a hospital room where Dylan lay dying and asking, ‘Is the bloody man dead yet?’ In her autobiographical book - Caitlin: Life With Dylan Thomas - Caitlin not only revealed squalid details of financial distress, infidelity, and alcoholism, but claimed the marriage had turned from a love story to a tragedy and was close to breaking down at the time of Thomas’s death. All of which fits in well with the image of Dylan Thomas as a womanising drunk, which has endured since John Malcolm Brinnin’s 1955 biography Dylan Thomas in America.

Nevertheless, there is another side to the story. According to Library Journal quoted by Amazon and others, Caitlin’s book also recorded ‘the tenacity and tenderness, the barely defined homeliness and dependence gently simmering, like her perennial pot of soup, above the turbulence’. And now a diary written by Caitlin in 1955 in a yellowing exercise school book has turned up, and it reinforces the more positive sides of the marriage.

The diary is part of a larger collection of Dylan Thomas material being sold by a New York enthusiast through Rick Gekoski. On his website, Gekoski calls himself a ‘rare book dealer, academic, publisher, critic, bibliographer, and broadcaster’, and as having been described as ‘the Bill Bryson of the book world’. Gekoski has cleverly attracted substantial publicity from the media for the collection, perhaps by providing a number of extracts. He says it’s for sale at $480,000 or £250,000 million. The collection is not, though, listed on his catalogue yet, where the most expensive item at present is a James Joyce ‘typescript schema for Ulysses’ in a collector’s case and priced at £75,000. On Abebooks, his highest priced item is a first edition of T S Eliot’s Ara Vos Prec, priced at $39,351.

An article in The Independent gives one extract about Caitlin imagining Thomas in his grave: ‘Oh God, oh Dylan, it must be cold down there; it is cold enough on top, in November: the dirtiest month of the year that killed you on the ninth vile day. If only I could take you a bowl of your bread, and milk, and salt, that you always drank at night, to warm you up.’

And the The Times adds this: ‘I am not going into that waste allotment of a T. S. Eliot elegy of a cemetery. Dylan will have to move up, in his single ditch, snug under the cliff, and make room for me; then we can keep each other warm, or cold, or maggot breeding.’ It also quotes this passage: ‘And sometimes I have the nerve to pretend that this Dylan love never was. I can make myself believe in the superfluity of this love for quite a long time; then it catches up with me, and it is all the crosser for being ignored.’

According to WalesOnline, Gekoski said the diary ‘is frantically over-written and overwrought’ and that Caitlin ‘never used one clause when she could use three’. Although, in his opinion, the writing isn’t good enough to be published, it is very frank, and ‘very raw, beautifully so’. He told WalesOnline ‘none of this has ever been seen before’ and that it is ‘the finest Dylan Thomas material ever put together’. He added, ‘when you have material of this quality someone will want it - £250,000 is actually a very reasonable price.’

Simon Gray’s Coda

Simon Gray died on Wednesday aged 71. Already many obituaries have been published on both sides of the Atlantic, most of them focusing as much on his diary writing as on his plays. Earlier this year, a third volume of his so-called Smoking Diaries were published, entitled The Last Cigarette, and another volume - Coda - is scheduled for publication in November.

Gray was born in Hayling Island, Hampshire, and educated at Westminster School and Cambridge. He married twice, the first time to Beryl Kevern, with whom he had two children, and the second time to Victoria Rothschild. In December 2004, he was awarded a CBE for services to drama and literature, having not only written more than 30 plays but taught English for many years at London University’s Queen Mary’s College.

There are a multitude of obituaries of Gray already available online, each one noting how much of a diarist he had become of late. The Daily Telegraph obituary starts as follows: ‘Simon Gray . . . was a prolific playwright of black comedies, and thrived off professional and personal conflict; during the last decade he found a new audience with a series of memoirs . . .’ And The New York Times obituary begins: ‘Simon Gray, who wrote bitingly comic plays like Butley, Otherwise Engaged and Quartermaine’s Terms about the educated British middle class and whose almost manically confessional late-in-life memoirs turned his sardonic intelligence upon himself, died on Wednesday in London.’

The Diary Junction Blog mentioned Gray recently, when The Last Cigarette was published, in an article entitled Smoking, heroin and opium (and it pointed to several online extracts of Gray’s diaries). Now it seems another, and presumably final, volume of diaries is to be published later this year - Coda. Because Granta is also a publisher (like John Murray - see Lees-Milne’s centenary) that doesn’t bother with a website, here is the blurb from Amazon.

‘It’s coming up to 4 am on a Friday morning, and I’ve just promised myself, a self loaded with and lightened by a couple of sleeping pills, that I will go on with this tomorrow. So begins Simon Gray’s powerful account of the year in which he struggles to come to terms with terminal cancer. From heartbreaking reflections on his own mortality to characteristically outrageous asides - ‘everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who was given six months to live, and here they are, only just dead, eight years later or, in exceptional cases, here they still are, eating oysters and boring the shit out of people’ - Gray’s self-proclaimed ‘last written words on the subject of myself’ records his extraordinary emotional journey. . . Written with exceptional candour and a poignant reluctance to leave this world behind, Simon Gray’s Coda is as life-affirming as it is heartrending.’

Famous flight at Le Mans

Although Orville Wright’s first controlled, powered and sustained flight famously took place on 17 December 1903, today, 8 August 2008, is the 100 year anniversary of a flight by Wilbur Wright which was the first official public demonstration of the Wrights’ invention. Both brothers kept diaries of their aviation experiments, and many of these entries are freely available online.

Wilbur and Orville, born into a large religious family, in 1867 and 1871 respectively, started their professional lives in Dayton, Ohio, as printers, but then opened a bicycle repair and sales shop in 1892. In less than five years they were manufacturing their own design and brand of cycles. The business brought in enough money for them to fund a growing interest in flying machines, and they set their focus on how such machines might be balanced and controlled in the air.

Before the end of the 1890s, the brothers were already deeply involved in the technicalities of flying, and were experimenting with gliders. But it was not until December 1903, that they made the first sustained, controlled flights in a powered aircraft (at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on the shores of the Atlantic). It was to be another five years before they would officially launch the idea of powered flight with a public demonstration (at Le Mans, France).

There is a wealth of information on the Wright brothers’ story available on the internet: Wikipedia’s article is extensive and informative but a bit dense; the Wright Brothers Aeroplane Company has good resources on its First-to-Fly website; and the National Air and Space Museum (Washington DC) maintains an excellent online exhibition about the brothers.

Very usefully for aviation historians, the Wright brothers kept technical diaries about their experiments. Two websites provide good extracts from these diaries. Wikisource has extracts of Orville’s diaries of 1902 and 1903, including a long extract from 17 December 1903, the day of the first flight. Here’s a part of that entry:

‘When we got up, a wind of between 20 and 25 miles was blowing from the north. We got the machine out early and put out the signal for the men at the station. . . . After running the engine and propellers a few minutes to get them in working order, I got on the machine at 10:35 for the first trial. The wind, according to our anemometers at this time, was blowing a little over 20 miles (corrected) 27 miles according to the Government anemometer at Kitty Hawk. On slipping the rope the machine started off increasing in speed to probably 7 or 8 miles. The machine lifted from the truck just as it was entering on the fourth rail. Mr. Daniels took a picture just as it left the tracks. I found the control of the front rudder quite difficult on account of its being balanced too near the center and thus had a tendency to turn itself when started so that the rudder was turned too far on one side and then too far on the other. As a result the machine would rise suddenly to about 10 ft. and then as suddenly, on turning the rudder, dart for the ground. A sudden dart when out about 100 feet from the end of the tracks ended the flight. Time about 12 seconds (not known exactly as watch was not promptly stopped). The lever for throwing off the engine was broken, and the skid under the rudder cracked. After repairs, at 20 min. after 11 o'clock Will made the second trial. . .’

Unfortunately, I cannot find any diary entries online for 8 August 2008, the day of the first official public flight. There is, though, a good description of the event on the WrightStories website.

Joyner Digital Library, at East Carolina University, has a digital exhibit on the Wright Brothers which includes many diary extracts by Orville and Wilbur, as well as their brother Milton, and these cover more than a decade from 1900 to 1911. Here is Wilbur on 2 May 1908:

‘We spent a comfortable night, the air being more quiet than the preceding night. We spent the day on actuating devices, &c. As this is all new work it takes much time. Charley worked most of the day on track and finished up a dozen rails each about 14 ft. long. The sitting position for the operators will probably be more comfortable but will require practice before we can tackle high winds. The N.Y. Herald has telegraphed the Weather Bureau operator at Manteo for information regarding us. Mr. Dosher also telephoned the K.D. Station today for information. He evidently had been asked by some paper to get news.’

As a postcript, and apropos of nothing but my inner bicycle being, I’d like to include a link to a photo of one of the beautiful Wright bicycles at the National Air and Space Museum. Only five still exist in the world.

Lees-Milne’s centenary

Today is the centenary of the birth of James Lees-Milne, one of the most celebrated and prolific literary diarists of the 20th century. To mark the anniversary, the ‘official James Lees-Milne website’ says, an exhibition has been organised near Oxford, and a new edition of the diaries is about to be published. This blog, however, will mark the day by using Lees-Milne’s own words, taken from birthday diary extracts.

Lees-Milne was born on 6 August 1908 into a wealthy family in Worcestershire, and was educated at public schools and at Oxford University. After working at Reuters for a while, a job he hated, he joined the National Trust, and was instrumental in its acquisition of many important buildings, not least Sissinghurst. He also pursued a writing career, producing novels, some of them autobiographical and books on architecture. However, he is best remembered for his diaries, initially published with some hesitation. They cover more than 50 years of his life, and have been published in many volumes.

Lees-Milne’s private life, involved with men and women, was colourful from an early age. In 1951, though, in his 40s, he married Alvilde Chaplin, a prominent gardening and landscape expert, and a lesbian. Their marriage is said to have been similar to that of Harold Nicolson (another famous literary diarist) and Vita Sackville-West, who lived at Sissinghurst, both of whom were, in fact, witnesses for James and Alvide at their wedding. They were also their lovers at one time - James with Harold in the 30s, and Alvide with Vita in the 50s! James and Alvide lived an unconventional life, only partly together, in France, and then at Alderley Grange where Alvilde created a garden, in Bath, and finally at a property on the Badminton estate. She died in 1994, and he in 1997.

The Diary Junction and Wikipedia have short biographical summaries on Lees-Milne, but the ‘official James Lees-Milne website’ created by Michael Bloch, Lees-Milne’s literary executor, carries a much more detailed biography. It also notes that two events will take place in August 2008 to mark the writer’s centenary.

Firstly, the third and last volume of a new edition of the diaries - edited by Bloch himself and covering the years 1984-1997 - will be published by John Murray. Incidentally, I am astonished to find that John Murray - one of Britain’s ‘most distinguished literary publishers’ - has no website presence, other than a small paragraph on Hodder Headline’s website. Thus, it is necessary to go to Amazon to find the publisher’s blurb which says: ‘Witty, waspish, poignant and self-revealing, James Lees-Milne’s last diaries contain as much to delight as the first, and confirm his reputation as one of the twentieth century’s great English diarists.’ Secondly, the centenary is being celebrated, apparently, by the calligrapher Andrew Moore giving an exhibition devoted to Lees-Milne at St Katherine’s Church, Chiselhampton near Oxford.

Here, though, are a few of Lees-Milne’s own words, extracted from birthday diary entries.

1943 - ‘My birthday. I am thirty-five. The horror of it! Except for my incipient baldness, fortunately on the crown of my head and on account of my height not always noticeable, I do not think I have changed much. My figure is the same as it was fifteen years ago.’

1944 - ‘My birthday, and the less I think about it the better. Only members of the family remember; for I suppose they are the only people to whom one’s existence does matter just a little.’

1973 - ‘Today I became a pensioner. If I wished to get a job I couldn’t. Henceforth I receive a pension from the state.’

1988 - ‘I am eighty. Have been so since 1:30 this morning. A beautiful day dawns, misty sunlight. . . . On front page of literary section [of The Daily Telegraph] an article about me by sweet Hugh Massingberd, which gives me enormous pleasure. Too eulogistic, but most welcome.’

1990 - ‘My eighty-second birthday. Heralded by Hugh Massingberd’s interview with me yesterday in The Daily Telegraph, which I can’t fault for kindness and understanding.’

(Massingberd was an Editor of Burke’s Peerage and considered an innovative obituaries editor for The Daily Telegraph. He died almost exactly 10 years after Lees-Milne, last December, and most of the obituaries about him, such as the one in The Independent, mention Lees-Milne for one reason or another.)

Here is a last Lees-Milne entry, not one from his birthday but just two days before it in 1973, which exemplifies both his high literary pretensions and his interest in sex: ‘It is too easy to be impatient with and censorious of sex when one is 65: the squalor of it, the repetition, the inanity. Yet there’s ground for disagreement that to be in communion with God all carnal appetites should be eschewed because the very actions of fornicating, over-eating, over-drinking are ephemeral, finite. Lusts being mortal are in consequence negative, without injury to man’s immortal gnosis. Whereas cerebration, devotional exercise, worship being perdurable and victorious remain unaffected by them. I daresay the old Fathers would dispute this ratiocination.’

A mad housewife’s daughter

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is 50 today. She’s a native American writer and poet, and a literary performer of some power it seems. Interestingly, though, in the midst of the most terrible childhood, aged only 11, she wrote a diary - Diary of a Mad Housewife’s Daughter - and tells a very affecting story about it in her memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer.

Hedge Coke was born in Texas, on 4 August 1958, with cerebral palsy and temporal lobe epilepsy; and her childhood was dominated by one serious illness after another, by one kind of abuse after another, and by having a chronic schizophrenic for a mother. As a teenager and young adult, she lived outside for periods, and moved around, sharecropping tobacco, breaking horses, waiting tables, working in construction and commercial fishing. The Pen American Center website gives details of her colourful but disturbing biography.

However, for many years, Hedge Coke has been a celebrated writer with various books to her name. The Pen article says she has been called ‘a passionately unique and compelling writer’, and a Wikipedia articles suggests that ‘if William Blake were a twenty-first-century American Indian woman, he would be Hedge Coke’. Like Blake declaiming against soul-destroying ‘dark Satanic mills’, the article explains, ‘Hedge Coke calls for us to recognise the sanctity of ancestral land and to protect it, for ‘no human should dismantle prayer’. ’

In 2004, University of Nebraska Press published a memoir by Hedge Coke - Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, subtitled A Story of Survival - which looked back over her early life. ‘A name creates life patterns,’ Hedge Coke says, ‘which form and shape a life; my life, like my name, must have been formed many times over then handed to me to realise.’ Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer is Hedge Coke’s narrative of that realisation, the publisher explains. In it the author describes the horrors of her early life: ‘her schizophrenic mother and the abuse that often overshadowed her childhood; the torments visited upon her, the rape and physical violence; and those she inflicted on herself, the alcohol and drug abuse’. Nevertheless, the publisher adds, Hedge Coke ‘managed to survive with her dreams and her will, her sense of wonder and promise undiminished’.

In Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, Hedge Coke provides a small (but I think very interesting) anecdote about a diary. Aged 11, she was inspired by an English teacher to write stories. So, she wrote one, with the title, Diary of a Mad Housewife’s Daughter taken from the title of a film she’d never seen (Diary of a Mad Housewife). She explains in the memoir how she worked diligently in her father’s toolshed, compiling the book from diary notes. Her teacher, not realising that Allison was, as she says of herself, ‘living the diary’, praised it as fiction, called her ‘unusually talented’, and suggested she meet some people involved in writing.

‘A stinger lodged deep in my spine and I panicked’, she writes in the memoir, ‘my English teacher intended to share this book with other adults. People who didn’t already know my mother would find out about her mental illness. Grabbing the pages, I ran from the classroom and raced home. . .’ Once there, she burnt the manuscript in an old stove. ‘Pages curled toward my face, paper blackening around the words, flames taking hold of the stories . . . I carried the ashes to the garden, hoping something could grow of it. Staying inside almost all night, I prayed my teacher wouldn’t tell anyone my story. I never mourned this book, but sometimes I wonder about the lost contents: hazardous, unaffordable.’

Orwell's DOMESTIC diaries

The Orwell Prize website has cleared up the mystery it created when teasing readers with a story about an Orwell diary blog. According to tidbits given to national newspapers, it intended to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the start of Orwell’s diaries. But Orwell certainly wrote a diary over 72 years ago, The Road to Wigan Pier Diary, in 1936 - see yesterday’s blog. In fact, it turns out, the website is celebrating the 70th anniversary of what it calls Orwell’s ‘domestic diaries’.

Here is the site’s announcement: ‘ ‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens. From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.’

In The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, the authors note that Orwell wrote two diaries covering the periods 28 May 1940 to 28 August 1941 and 14 March 1942 to 15 November 1942. The Orwell Prize website is clearly including these two in its blog, but, given the 9 August 1938 start to these ‘domestic diaries’, there must be others, dating from between The Road to Wigan Pier Diary and the so-called war-time diaries.

When DID Orwell start a diary?

From tomorrow (Wednesday 30 July), the diaries of George Orwell, the famous British author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, will begin to appear online and be freely available. The Orwell Prize website, which is taking this initiative, says it is to mark the 70th anniversary of the day Orwell began writing a diary in 1938. Orwell’s diaries have never been published in collected form, nevertheless the Orwell Prize website should know better - Orwell was certainly keeping a diary already in 1936, as evidenced by his Road to Wigan Pier Diary.

The Orwell Prize calls itself ‘the pre-eminent British prize for political writing’ and awards annual prizes for a book and for journalism. This year the book prize was won by Raja Shehadeh for Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape; and the journalism prize was awarded to Johann Hari of The Independent.

The Orwell Prize website is run in conjunction with the Orwell Trust, Political Quarterly and Media Standards Trust. It gives much information about the Prize, as well about Orwell himself. It also provides a few photographs of his publications and manuscripts (including diaries). The site has now announced that tomorrow, on Wednesday 30 July, it will officially launch ‘an exciting new addition, which will be a must-read for all lovers of Orwell and a valuable historical resource’. As of today, Tuesday, it gives no further information other than to provide links to two news organisations which have published teasers about the forthcoming ‘addition’.

The Guardian’s Browser blog reveals that the Orwell Prize will begin publishing Orwell’s diaries as a daily blog, 70 years after he began writing them. This is the first time the diaries, it says, which cover Orwell’s thoughts on everything from communism to cookery, will be published in full. But, the Browser asks, ‘does a blog by a dead person count as a real blog?’ Not sure I care about the answer to that one.

The Times teaser is more confusing: ‘The website for the Orwell Prize . . . is to mark the 70th anniversary of the release of George Orwell’s diaries by running them as a blog. It begins with Orwell’s first entry in 1938. ’ Personally, I don’t understand the reference to an anniversary ‘of the release of’ the diaries; and, surely, the ‘release’ and ‘the first entry’ cannot have been on the same day! The Times makes up for the confusion by having found a cute short extract from Orwell’s 29 August 1939 entry: ‘It appears from reliable private information that Sir O. Mosley is a masochist of the extreme type in his sexual life.’

I am not clear as to when Orwell started writing a diary, nor when he finished. There appear to have been no published editions exclusively devoted to his diaries. However, what are called his two war-time diaries were published in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (in the second of four volumes). These are discussed at some length by L J Hurst who also looks at the links to the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, within which the main character Winston also keeps a diary. See also the Orwell Today website for more on Winston’s diary

Hurst begins his essay as follows: ‘George Orwell’s war-time diaries were a book that failed. Their failure provides an interesting study of how Orwell thought and wrote because the Second World War provided him with much of the material for his last two novels, and one might have expected his diaries to record the development of his ideas, but those developments are more conspicuous by their absence.’

However, also within The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, in volume one, is The Road to Wigan Pier Diary. A one sentence introduction in the book, says it was a typescript found among Orwell’s paper, and, along with other notes, formed the basis of The Road to Wigan Pier, a sociological analysis of pre-war living conditions in the industrial north of England. This was written in the first three months of 1936, more than two years before 30 July 1938, the date being celebrated by the Orwell Prize website.

Some have argued, it seems (Bernard Crick in George Orwell: A Life), that the diary was not a real day-to-day diary but something that was ‘worked up afterwards’, and perhaps this is why the Orwell Prize website is ignoring it. However, Robert Pearce, writing in 1997 for The Journal of the Historical Association, argued cogently, with many examples, that Orwell treated his journal writing as a personal record not intended for publication, and therefore WAS a real diary. The full text of Pearce’s essay, entitled Revisiting Orwell’s Wing Pier, is available online for a price.

Here is a sample of Orwell’s diary from 13 February 1936: 'Housing conditions in Wigan terrible. Mrs H tells me that at her brother’s house (he is only 25, so I think he must be her half-brother, but he has already a child of 8), 11 people, five of them adults, belonging to 3 different families, live in 4 rooms, ‘2 up 2 down’. All the miners I meet have either had serious accidents themselves or have friends or relatives who have. Mrs H’s cousin had his back broken by a fall of rock - ‘And he lingered seven year afore he dies and it were a-punishing of him all the while’ - and her brother-in-law fell 1200 feet down the shaft of a new pit. Apparently he bounced from side to side, so was presumably dead before he got to the bottom. Mrs H adds: ‘They wouldn’t never have collected t’pieces only he were wearing a new suit of oilskins.’

And here’s another sample, from 12 June 1942, when he was working at the BBC: ‘The only time when one hears people singing in the BBC is in the early morning, between 6 and 8. That is the time when the charwomen are at work. A huge army of them arrives all at the same time. They sit in the reception hall waiting for their brooms to be issued and making as much noise as a parrot house, and then they have wonderful choruses, all singing together as they sweep the passages. The place has a quite different atmosphere at this time from what it has later in the day.’

Gladstone’s library and diaries

An auction of William Gladstone’s books at the weekend raised far more for the sellers than expected, partly because a single lot of original Gladstone family diaries sold for over ten times the auctioneer’s estimate. Gladstone, himself, of course was a prolific diarist, keeping near daily entries for 70 years. Unfortunately, they are not as interesting or as colourful as the man himself.

Last Saturday (26 July), Taylors Auctions of Montrose in Scotland, auctioned a large collection of books from the library of Fasque House, the former Gladstone home in Aberdeenshire. The library comprised many books collected by William Gladstone, four times a Liberal prime minister in the 19th century. According to Scotland on Sunday, the auctioneer, Jonathan Taylor, estimated the sales takings as in excess of £65,000, ‘a bit more than we were hoping for’.

Lot 204 was described as ‘a large collection of handwritten diaries and other papers by the Gladstone family in tin deed box, wooden box and cabin trunk and various boxes’, and was estimated at £100-£200. According to the Press Association, also quoting Taylor, some of the handwritten diaries were by Gladstone’s brother, Thomas, and were in a distressed condition having been kept in an attic. The lot sold to an unnamed Edinburgh professor for £3,400. A second auction, including another 2,000 books from the library at Fasque, is likely to take place in October.

Apparently, according to Taylor interviewed by The Times before the auction, William Gladstone was once told by his father, ‘If you want a library at Fasque, go and get it started.’ And some of the earliest books at Fasque were those bought by William while still a student at Oxford.

Gladstone, himself, began writing a diary while still a teenager at Eton, and he kept on doing so for 70 years, until the last years of his life. An extraordinary man in many ways, he won his first term as Prime Minister in 1868, and held the position until 1974, and then served three more times as Prime Minister, the last time being 25 years after the first, in the 1890s. He had a particular interest in prostitutes. He used to wonder the streets at night trying to persuade them to start a new life; moreover, he and his wife, Catherine Glynne, started a home to rescue prostitutes.

All the more disappointing then to find the man’s extensive diaries rather bald and unemotional. Here is an online extract, thanks to Portsmouth University’s geography department, from 3 Dec 1879: ‘Wrote to Miss Rose - Sir J. Watson - Eytinge (Tel.) Worked hard on my Glasgow Address: perhaps 6 hours or more. Walk after luncheon: fine bright frost all this time. Mr Campbell sang incomparable comic songs in evg. Conversation with Pr. Tulloch - & others.’

Arthur Ponsonby, in his book, English Diaries, says this about Gladstone’s diaries: ‘It is all strenuous, lofty and profound to an extreme degree, ‘with few reflections on life’. And he gives an example of how, even at a young age, his diary pattern was already set fast. Gladstone delivered a speech at the Oxford University Union in 1831 which a contemporary thought was so powerful that he wrote ‘we all of us felt that an epoch in our lives had occurred’. But all Gladstone wrote in his diary was: ‘Cogitations on reform etc. Difficult to select for a speech, not to gather it. Spoke at the adjourned debate for three quarters of an hour immediately after Gaskell who was preceded by Lincoln. Row afterwards and adjournment. Tea with Wordsworth.’

Princess Mary’s marathon

According to a detail in her diary, Princess Mary, wife of the Prince of Wales, soon to be King George V, watched the start of the Olympics marathon one hundred years ago today and then went for a drive to Virginia Waters. That marathon has become famous for various reasons. Not only did Princess Mary herself affect the distance of the marathon (which subsequently became the standard), but the Italian winner was disqualified for being helped over the line.

The 1908 Olympics had been scheduled to take place in Rome. However, the eruption of Vesuvius in 1906 led the Italian government to divert funds for the reconstruction of Naples. London was chosen in Rome’s place, and the games were held at White City. They opened on 13 July that year, and on 24 July, exactly 100 years ago, the famous marathon race was staged.

A Wikipedia article explains how the marathon distance was established: ‘The original distance of 25 miles was changed to 26.22 miles so the marathon could start at Windsor Castle and then changed again at the request of Princess Mary so the start would be beneath the windows of the Royal Nursery.’ The marathon distance was altered again in 1912 and 1920, but from 1924 on reverted to the 1908 distance of 26.22 miles.

Born Victoria Mary of Teck in 1867, Mary was chosen to marry Albert Victor, eldest son of Edward (himself Queen Victoria’s eldest son), and in direct line for the throne. According to Time Magazine’s review of Queen Mary (a biography written by James Pope-Hennessy), she was approved of by Victoria because of her ‘lineage, decorum and diligence (constant letter writing and diary keeping)’. But Albert died, so she married the second son, George, Duke of York, in 1893. In 1901, Edward succeeded to the throne, and later the same year George was created Prince of Wales, and Mary became Princess of Wales. On King Edward VII’s death, in 1910, they became King George V and Queen Mary.

I cannot find any evidence on the internet that Mary’s diaries have ever been published, but I am sure they were used by James Pope-Hennessy in his biography. However, the ‘Official Website of the British Monarchy’ carries a photo of one page of the diary - from 24 July 1908. It reads as follows: ‘Lovely day. Sat out. At 2 we went to see the start for the Marathon Race from the East Terrace - there were 56 [sic] runners. Later we all drove to Virginia Water for tea and went on the lake. Mr Waddington arrived. We heard first that an Italian had won but he was disqualified owing to his having been helped in - an American won.’

The Italian was Dorando Pietri, and the American Johnny Hayes, but, according to an excellent Los Angeles Times article on the race, there were only 55 runners.

‘Tens of thousands of spectators lined London’s roads to cheer on the 55 runners (from 16 nations) sweltering in the afternoon heat,’ the article states. ‘Longboat held the lead at the 17-mile mark, when he suddenly dropped out. Unconfirmed reports indicated that he had ingested strychnine, the performance-enhancer of choice during this era. Wearing red pantaloons that reached his knees and a white kerchief to shield his dust-covered hair, Pietri took control at the 25-mile mark. But he had reached the edge of human endurance; he collapsed repeatedly, only to be aided to his feet. ‘He was helped by the officials,’ says Olympic historian Bill Mallon, ‘in clear violation of the rules.’ A groundbreaking photograph captured Pietri‘s desperate last effort at the finish, supported by two attendants (one of whom was falsely identified as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes). Medical staff carried away Pietri as the Italian flag was hoisted. Meanwhile, Hayes entered the stadium and completed his lap. The U.S. team lodged a protest. Pietri was disqualified and Hayes awarded the gold medal.’

In London today, apparently according to the Inside the Games website, the race is being re-enacted by the Flora London Marathon organisation, and the Royal Mail and Royal Mint are releasing a specially-designed commemorative stamp and coin cover respectively.

Yes, Minister, thanks to Hunt

Lord Hunt of Tanworth has just died. Lord who? Tam Dalyell starts his obituary of Lord Hunt for The Independent by remarking that, alas, people often lodge in the public mind and are remembered by posterity on account of comparatively minor episodes in the course of their otherwise long and distinguished lives in public service. For Lord Hunt, a Cabinet Secretary, the episode concerned his attempt to stop the publication of Richard Crossman’s diaries. If he had been more successful (which might have been the case if he'd been less rigid a negotiator), there might have been no Yes, Minister.

John Hunt was born in 1919, and after serving in the Royal Navy joined the civil service in 1946. In 1973, he was appointed Cabinet Secretary by Edward Heath, but then served under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan before retiring in 1979. According to The Daily Telegraph obituary he was ‘percipient, considerate and businesslike’ and his ‘self-confidence and zest for a workload were a by-word among his Civil Service colleagues’. After retiring, he worked for various businesses, including Prudential Corporation and Banque National de Paris, and headed various official committees, such as one looking into cable television and another on European Union issues. He was made a life peer in 1980. He died last week, on 17 July.

Richard Crossman, who died over 20 years ago in 1974, was a prominent left-wing intellectual, an MP for nearly 30 years, and a writer/editor for the New Statesman. From 1964 until 1970, he served in Harold Wilson’s cabinet, and his diaries of that time were posthumously published. Today, those diaries are much celebrated for being the first to reveal the inner workings of government, and, slightly less intellectually, for being a key source of one of the BBC’s most-loved comedy series - Yes, Minister.

But if Hunt had had his way there would have been no Yes, Minister. In 1974, after the election of a Labour government under Harold Wilson, Crossman’s diaries were sent to No 10 and passed to Hunt for clearance. But Hunt objected to their publication because of detailed references to cabinet meetings. Nevertheless, in January 1975 the first extracts of the book were published in The Sunday Times without Hunt’s consent. The Attorney General immediately sought an injunction to prevent publication of the book or extracts from it on the grounds that cabinet proceedings were confidential.

An informative House of Commons report in 2006 on the publication of political memoirs looks back at the Crossman affair. It recalls that the court did in fact uphold the principle that there was an obligation of confidentiality imposed on a cabinet minister in the public interest of collective responsibility. However, it also found that there was a time limit on this obligation. As ten years had passed between the events described and publication of the Crossman diaries, it was judged that the book would not undermine cabinet confidentiality. The report also notes, however, that no injunction was sought against the latter volumes of the text, even though they were published less than ten years after the events they described.

Interestingly, Dalyell in his obituary, remembers Graham Greene, then managing director of Jonathan Cape, publishers of the diaries, telling him that if John Hunt had not been so rigid he would have been prepared to make cuts in the diaries. Hunt was so difficult, so uncompromising, the obituary says, that Jonathan Cape decided to publish without alteration. Dalyell also writes about how, years later Hunt had told him that he himself had been ‘agog to read Crossman’s diaries’.

Here are a couple of snippets from Crossman’s diaries. This one is from his introduction (as reproduced in the House of Common’s report): ‘Memory is a terrible improver - even with a diary to check the tendency. And it is this which makes a politician’s autobiography (even when he claims his rights and uses official Cabinet papers) so wildly unreliable . . . If I could publish a diary of my years as a minister without any editorial improvements, I would have done something towards lightening up the secret places of British politics and enabling any intelligent elector to have a picture of what went on behind the scenes between 1964 and 1970.’

And thanks to the BBC for this one which provides the genesis of a now-famous catch phrase: ‘In a way it is just the same as I had expected and predicted. The room in which I sit is the same in which I saw Nye Bevan for almost the first time when he was Minister of Health and already I realize the tremendous effort it requires not to be taken over by the Civil Service. My Minister's room is like a padded cell, and in certain ways I am like a person who is suddenly certified a lunatic and put safely into this great, vast room, cut off from real life and surrounded by male and female trained nurses and attendants. When I am in a good mood they occasionally allow an ordinary human being to come and visit me; but they make sure that I behave right, and that the other person behaves right; and they know how to handle me. Of course, they don't behave quite like nurses because the Civil Service is profoundly deferential, ‘Yes, Minister! If you wish it, Minister!’ ’

Diary twist in Ron Arad story

Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force navigator, was shot down over Lebanon in 1986 and captured by Amal, a Shia militia. For more than 20 years, Israel has been trying to rescue him, or to find out what happened to his body, and his story has gripped a generation of Israelis. Now, in one more excruciating twist, sections of a diary he wrote in 1987 have been returned to his family as part of a wider Israel-Hezbollah prisoner swap deal.

Wikipedia provides an excellent resumé of the uncomfortable Arad story. After being captured by Amal, he was bartered in negotiations for the release of Shia and Lebanese prisoners held by Israel. Letters Arad had written and photos of him were used to prove he was alive, but, in 1988, the talks broke down. Since then, the Israelis have never stopped trying to find him. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they captured and interrogated first Abdul-Karim Obeid, a member of Hezbollah, and then Mustafa Dirani, Amal’s security chief. Dirani indicated that Arad had been handed over, in some way, to the Iranians. In 2003, Israel’s Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, admitted that an intelligence agent had been killed during an operation to find Arad.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz (also recently the source of this blog’s Kafkaesque diary story) gives a detailed explanation of the various theories about Arad’s fate, and the ongoing debate within Israeli about whether to accept Arad is dead. Other Haaretz articles have followed the brokering of a new deal (by German negotiators over two years) which culminated yesterday in the exchange of five live Lebanese prisoners, including a notorious murderer, and the remains of many others, for the remains of two dead Israeli soldiers. The BBC called it a day of great emotion on both sides of the Lebanon-Israel border - of triumph and defiance in Lebanon, but of grief and anger in Israel.

Interestingly, though, it seems that a comprehensive report from Hezbollah on Arad paved the way for the prisoner/remains swap - even though the report was considered inadequate. According to Al Jazeera (which, like Haaretz, quotes Israel’s Channel 10), the Hezbollah report is simply an updated version of a similar one in 2004. It details further efforts to find Arad, but the conclusion remains the same: he went missing on the night of 4 May 1988.

However, the new Hezbollah report does also include previously unseen photographs of Arad, from 1987, and letters, as well as sections from his diary, and these seem to have been an important element in making the prisoner deal work. In the last couple of years, one or two photographs and bits of video footage of Arad, dating from the 1980s, have turned up, but this appears to be the first time diary fragments have been returned. According to Haaretz, Israeli officials said the diary and the pictures had only sentimental value and did not shed light on Arad’s fate. Nevertheless, it is thought there might be more of the diary still in Lebanon’s possession.