If I die a violent death

It is 30 years to the day since Indira Gandhi, a major figure in the National Congress Party and India’s third prime minister, was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards. There is scant evidence available online that she was a diarist, although one or two sources do refer to a diary. One of her senior aids, B. N. Tandon, kept a daily diary for nearly two years so as to document a political crisis; it reveals a rather unflattering portrait of his boss. Meanwhile, India’s recently elected Bharatiya Janata Party has chosen to downplay Gandhi’s memory on this significant anniversary of her death.

Indira Nehru was born in Allahabad in 1917. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, led India’s political struggle for independence from British rule, and became the first prime minister of the Dominion (and later Republic) of India. He was often away, and her mother was frequently bed-ridden. Indira was educated mostly at home, although at times also in Switzerland, before attending Viswa Bharati University in Shantiniketan, and then Oxford University. She left Oxford before completing her studies. While in Europe, she became better acquainted with Feroze Gandhi (unrelated to Mahatma Gandhi), whom she had known from Allahabad, and who was studying at the London School of Economics. They married in 1942 according to Hindu rituals, and against the wishes of Indira’s father, and had two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay.

In the 1950s, Indira Gandhi served her father unofficially as a personal assistant during his tenure as prime minister. After his death, in 1964, she was elected to the Rajya Sabha (upper house), and Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had succeeded her father as prime minister, gave her a place in his cabinet. And when he died abruptly, the Congress Party sought a docile successor, and appointed Gandhi; but she proved anything but docile, surprising her father’s old colleagues by sacking high-level officials and leading with a strong hand. She brought about great change in agricultural policy which improved the lot of her country’s poor, and, for a time, was hailed as a hero. In 1971, she intervened in the Pakistan Civil War, in support of East Pakistan, and was influential in the creation of an independent Bangladesh.

Increasingly, Gandhi ruled with an authoritarian hand, and corruption was rife within her administration. She was found guilty of a minor infraction, and then there were demands for her resignation. Gandhi responded by calling for a state of emergency which allowed her more central control, in particular of states ruled by opposition parties. In 1977, though, her popularity slumped, and the Congress Party lost an election. Subsequent efforts by opponents to bring her to trial only served to gain her more support, and in 1980 she won a landslide election. That same year, her son Sanjay, who had been serving as chief political adviser, died in a plane crash. Thereafter, Indira’s younger son, Rajiv, took over as Indira’s heir apparent. (He would become prime minister on the death of his mother, and then be assassinated himself in 1991.)

In the new term of office, Gandhi was preoccupied by efforts to resolve political problems in the state of Punjab. In an attempt to crush the secessionist movement of Sikh militants, led by Jarnail Singh Bindranwale, she ordered an assault upon the holiest Sikh shrine in Amritsar, the Golden Temple. ‘Operation Bluestar’, as it was called, in June 1984, led to the death of Bindranwale and many civilians, and caused damage to the sacred Golden Temple itself. Many Sikhs bitterly resented Gandhi for the attack, and she was assassinated by two of her own Sikh bodyguards on 31 October 1984. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, Cultural India, a Guardian review of a modern biography, the BBC, or a Googlebooks preview of Mother India: A Political Biography of Indira Gandhi by Pranay Gupte.

I have not been able to find online any definitive information that Indira Gandhi kept a diary, but there are a couple of sources which imply that she did at different times. Pupul Jayakar, in her biography (published first by Viking, New Delhi, in 1992), quotes several entries from Gandhi’s childhood diary, (although they appear as though they might have been taken from an agenda rather than a journal). She says that 12 year old Indira was angry at being denied active participation in the freedom struggle by Congress and so set about, with vigour and determination, to form her own children’s brigade, the Vanar Sena (army of monkeys): ‘Indira’s diary, written neatly in a tiny scrap book, indicates her precise down-to-earth mind - adult in its planning and concerns, with an understanding that it is the little things that make great events possible, an astonishing state of mind for a twelve-year-old child.’

6 September 1930
‘Papu’s interview at 10:00 A.M.
Meeting of the Students’ Working Committee at 12:30
Meet Gupta about Vanar Sena’s work in different wards.
Katra Vanar Sena’s meeting at Katra Ashram at 6.00 P.M. to 9.00 P.M.
Drill and meeting of Vanar Sena & Bal Sangh at Swaraj Bhawan at 5.00 P.M.’

8 September 1930
‘Boycott week Programme for Vanar Sena.
The whole week Prbahat Pheris - 6-8 A.M.
Procession starting at Khadi Bhandar at 5:30 P.M.
Meeting at Purshottam Das Park.’

13 September 1930
‘Strike in schools on behalf of Jatindra Das
Procession and meeting.’

Jayakar quotes also from other diaries, notably the prison diary kept by Gandhi’s father Jawaharlal Nehru (more about which can be read in Sankar Ghose’s biography available to preview at Googlebooks).

Then there are also the prophetic words Gandhi wrote on the day before her death which are widely quoted on the internet, and which some sources say were culled from her diary. However, an article in India Today about the memorial at her old office, 1 Safdarjung Road, states that these words were found among her private papers.

30 October 1984
‘If I die a violent death as some fear and a few are plotting, I know the violence will be in the thought and the action of the assassins and not in my dying; for no hate is dark enough to overshadow the extent of my love for my people and my country and no force strong enough to divert me from my purpose and my endeavour to take this country forward.’

Finally, it is worth noting that Bishan Narain Tandon, a senior official in Indira Gandhi’s office kept a diary for 20 months, during a period of political crisis. This diary was published in two parts, by Konark Publishers, as PMO Diary-I: Prelude to the Emergency (2002) and PMO Diary-II: The Emergency (2006). According to Konark, ‘the reader gets an accurate and fascinating glimpse into the persona of Indira Gandhi as well as her working style.’ But reviews of the diary, such as one at India Today, reveals a rather unflattering portrait of Gandhi.

Perhaps - I’ve no idea in truth - Tandon’s diary has helped undermine the memory of Gandhi. Many Indian-sourced media articles in the last few days, reporting on the 30th anniversary of her assassination, have drawn attention to how the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party), which took over government from the National Congress Party earlier this year, has been downplaying Indira Gandhi’s legacy in favour of (Sardar or Chief) Vallabhbhai Patel, who was another leader of the Congress Party, and deputy prime minister under Jawaharlal Nehru. See: India Today - Congress cries foul on Indira Gandhi being ‘sidelined’; The Times of India - [Prime Minister] Modi hails Sardar Patel, links Indira Gandhi’s death anniversary to 1984 riots; and Wall Street Journal blog - Is Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Eclipsing Indira Gandhi?.

N. tinkering with diaries

It is half a century since the death of Nettie Palmer, one of Australia’s most well known literary figures of the 20th century. She and her husband, Vance, were very active supporters of Australian writers, and promotors of Australian literature. In their 50s, and at their own expense, they published a diary - or more accurately an anthology in journal form - called Fourteen Years. Although initially only 500 copies were printed, the book came to be seen as a unique record of Australian culture between the wars, and has been much studied, and reprinted.

Nettie was born in Bendigo, Victoria, the niece of Henry Bournes Higgins, a leading Victorian political figure and later a federal minister and justice of the High Court of Australia. She studied education at the University of Melbourne, and literature in Germany and France. In 1908, she met Vance Palmer, and they married in London in 1914. With the outbreak of war, they returned to Australia, and campaigned against conscription.

The Palmers lived in the fishing village of Caloundra, Queensland, and had two daughters - Aileen and Helen. They focused mostly on their writing, short stories, poetry and journalism. In 1924, Nettie published an academic study of Australian literature, and, in 1931, a biography of her uncle, Higgins. In the mid-1930s, the Palmers travelled to Europe, but before returning to Australia, one of their daughters, Aileen, joined the International Brigades in Spain.

By the time of the Second World War, neither Vance nor Nettie were in the best of health, but they continued their literary endeavours. Nettie, in particular, became one of Australia’s foremost literary critics, and was a great champion of Australian literature. Aileen suffered a mental breakdown in 1948, and Vance was attacked as a communist ‘fellow traveller’ in the 1950s. Nettie died on 19 October 1964. Further biographical information is available at the Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Library of Australia, and Wikipedia.

According to Robin Lucas, who studied Nettie Palmer at the University of Melbourne, she ’was an indefatigable and life-long diary and notebook-keeper’. A fragment of an early European diary can be found on the university’s website. Information on her ‘Commonplace book’ 1907-1936 can be found at the National Library of Australia. However, Palmer herself published, in 1948, a book of diary entries, and called it Fourteen Years: extracts from a private journal. This book has become a classic of Australian literature, and was republished in 1988 by the University of Queensland Press in Nettie Palmer: Her private journal Fourteen Years, poems, reviews and literary essays (edited by Vivian Smith). This latter tome - all 550 pages of it - is freely available as a pdf at UQP’s ‘institutional digital repository’.

Also freely available online are various texts by Robin Lucas about Fourteen Years - a masters thesis and an article entitled A Fine Ruddy Mess for the La Trobe Journal. Lucas argues that, although the original book was published under the Meanjin Press imprint (based in Melbourne), it was effectively self-published with the Palmers paying the production and other costs for the initial print run of 500. She explains how the whole process involved ‘confusion and frayed tempers’, hence the title of the La Trobe article. Lucas also notes that Fourteen Years was not so much a straightforward diary, but that it was ‘compiled from a miscellany of sources: work diaries, notebooks, letters, articles and family memories’. Prior to publication, both Nettie and Vance had worked on the book since 1945.

Vivian Smith, in her introduction to Nettie Palmer, says: ‘There is no other work quite like Fourteen Years in Australian writing and it is a text that has gained increasing importance for historians and those interested in the development of Australian culture between the wars.’ She explains how Fourteen Years is ‘in part a reconstruction, and in part a highly selective reassembling of original materials’; and she then provides some extracts from Palmer’s pocket diary for 1947 to illustrate the process that had been involved in assembling the book. Here are a few of those extracts:

2 Sept 1947
‘V. let N. read through some Notes. Decided time now come to sort them out into 8 period-places (Caloimdra, Kalorama, Barcelona, Melbourne, etc.). Need folders for what material I had here by now. Each folder has at least something, some a great deal already in it.’

3 September 1947
‘V. looked through N.’s file of rejected printed articles and advised on keeping only a few. Notes already done are enough on general literary subjects: those need interweaving with more personal ones. Drew up a list of names that must be included in some way practising writers and their purposes. Must get some characteristic phrases and appearances for each from appropriate periods. V. began re-reading old family diaries V. had bought for me, 1934, fitting in with some literary notes on visitors: Pfeffer, Ravitch, Huebner. But need to follow our own writers now - it’s just a matter of sorting more than writing.’

4 September 1947
‘N. tinkering with diaries and fitting persons in like mosaic. N.B. must write some of it . . .’

8 September 1947
‘Did notes. V. says too warm, too much informed after the event, on Len Mann at Kalorama 1933. Found phrases of his in old diary. Moral: keep good diaries with people’s phrases in them.’

4 October 1947
‘N. finishing note on Masefield in Melbourne; begin one on E.T. Brown . . . . Our worst years were 1937-39, when we were entangled in politics to no avail. We knew what was coming and no one would believe us except some fanatics who believed everything in advance. We knew too many people, for insufficient reasons.’

13 October 1947
‘Grey day. V. planning to begin on London and N. sat down to it after breakfast without doing a stint of housework first, and wrote two London pieces in the morning: on Shelley Wang and Christina Stead (and her husband). Tried to do Ogden too, but got wrecked on his learning.’

Fourteen Years, Smith says, is best looked on as an anthology in journal form. It is divided into eight sections which correspond to the main places in which the Palmers lived for varying lengths of time during this period: Caloundra 1925-29; Melbourne 1929-32; Green Island 1932; Kalorama 1932-35; Paris 1935; London 1935-36; Barcelona 1936; and Melbourne 1936-39.

Here then are several extracts from Fourteen Years itself.

20 September 1925
‘Early this morning, we watched a man on a ridge behind Mrs. T.’s house lassooing the branch of a tree with a length of rope. What was he doing? Stretching a clothes-line? But why so high up, and on that slope?

Here in South Queensland, life moves lightly and intimately; you’re always looking out of doors at this sunny end of winter. From the narrow shelf of the front veranda, there’s the bush sloping towards the ocean in one direction, and towards the Passage with its wide water in another. Along the western skyline stand the unbelievable Glasshouses. Then from the back windows, you look across the open ridges to forest country. You see the casual events of your neighbours’ lives, especially when you sit at breakfast in the open sun.

You see dreamily, and often without understanding. That clothes-line? I met Mrs. T. at the end of the morning while we both waited for our mail at the lighthouse post-office. She was bubbling kindly: ‘My son-in-law from town’s just fixed a radio aerial, and the crystal set he’s brought is clear as can be. Would you come in this evening and hear it? It’s the first wireless set in Caloundra.’

This evening we went along in the moonlight. In Mrs. T.’s open lounge there must have been sixty visitors. Fishermen and their women; lighthouse-keeper and ex-keeper, wives and families. Children sucking large black humbugs solemnly. And in the place of honour, the new miracle of communication, the wireless. (The son-in-law was a self-effacing showman. At eight o’clock, and before we noticed the instrument was turned on, came heavy strokes - the Post Office clock, Sydney: ‘as if they were right in the room,’ sighed someone voluptuously). Then came a weather report: squally, we heard, as the calm moon listened in with amusement.

What next? Some ‘music’ so nondescript that people mostly relapsed into friendly talk while it lasted - as if it were real-life music. So far no statics or interference. The son-in-law muttered technicalities to the few eager youths who could lap up his learning. A speech is announced on the air: ‘it’s a lecture on Christian Science,’ says the son-in-law. For five minutes of it, everyone listens; even the children with their still-revolving jaws. It’s so wonderful to have any opinion conveyed whole, like eggs by plane from Sydney. Then people begin asking one another questions. Can everything be caught up by wireless? Could you use it like a listening telescope and direct it to a cathedral service or a trade union meeting? No? Well, who decides what you’ll have? It all comes so clear it might be important some day.

The Sydney clock struck the hour again. The children had sucked away their issue of humbugs. Time to thank Mrs T. and her son-in-law and go home. We drifted in the moonlight along the strip of rough road. There stood that other aerial mast, the lighthouse, mild winds humming in its flagpole ropes. Its light blinked regularly against the moon, that supreme mistress of communication. Long before wireless, the light was: long before the light, the moon. What was it Andrew Tripcony said yesterday, as patriarchal fisherman in these parts: ‘Th’ moon’s useful; y’ always know the tides by her. Quarterflood over the Bar at moonrise. Same at moonset.’

Will the wireless ever catch up with such established guides of mankind?’

19 March 1931
‘For a long time I’ve been paying, in casual articles and notes, my humble tribute to Edmund Wilson as the most penetrating critic in the modem literary world - the Anglo-Saxon one at any rate - and yesterday an unlooked-for response came from him in the form of a signed copy of his new book ‘Axel’s Castle.’ I’ve found it hard to keep my mind from it ever since. It has all the brilliant clarity of his occasional critiques, together with the thematic backbone you expect from a book - in this case the idea that the six writers he chooses as significant figures in the literature of today are guided, like Axel, by a will toward refusal.

The six figures are Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Gertude Stein, Proust and Paul Valéry. At first you are a little surprised at the choice of names, but Edmund Wilson shows how certain socially-minded writers before the war - Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Anatole France - have lost credit, while his half-dozen have gained by producing masterpieces in isolation, almost secretly.

These books revealed new discoveries, artistic, metaphysical, psychological; they mapped the labyrinths of the human consciousness; they made one conceive the world in a new way. What wonder then that for those who survived the war these writers should have become heroes and leaders?’

7 April 1932
‘THIS island, now we’re here, is a flat oval of jungle-covered coral sand (almost forty acres, they say) on the inner edge of the Great Reef. Not even eight feet above sea-level, it’s protected from the outer seas by an irregular circling reef that encloses a lagoon - shallow enough to wade through when the tide’s out, but deep enough to float a small fleet when the tide rushes back again through the narrow opening. There’s always five or six feet of water at the end of the long ricketty jetty that gives a berth to the Cairns launch bringing the Sunday crowd of holidaymakers - and our supplies and mail. Our camp is on the sheltered side of the island, looking toward the mainland. Sometimes at high tide the water softly laps the roots of the great trees that lean over our tent and down over the beach.

Before I came here I’d imagined the Barrier Reef as a great wall running along the line of the coast - a rampart of pure coral rising from the depths. Now, looking out from our knob on its edge, it seems a straggling assortment of honeycomb reefs in all stages of growth, varied by fragments of sunken mainland, such as the great hump of Fitzroy Island to the south. Our island is one of the coral cays that have come to maturity. It has fully emerged from the sea, collected its cover of humus, created a beautiful safe jungle in which you can lie unaware of the sea, though never fifty yards from the beach.

This gleaming little forest of vines and evergreens can seem at times even more wonderful than the coral reef itself. There’s a gentleness about it - no thorns, poisonous reptiles, stinging insects. Instead, there are the unafraid birds - tiny silver-eyes, ground-pigeons with lustrous wings of dark-green - and the bright, flickering butterflies, all seemingly sure of being in some forest fastness.’

The Diary Junction

Washed out exoticism

‘If in a hundred years we have not established contact with some other planet (but we will), or, next best, with the earth’s interior, humanity is finished.’ This dramatic prophesy was made by Henri Michaux, a Belgian-born experimental writer and artist, in a diary he kept while on a trip to Ecuador in the late 1920s. He died 30 years ago today, but is remembered as much for his books on mescaline as for his poetry and painting.

Michaux was born in Namur, Belgium, in 1899, the son of a Catholic lawyer, and raised in Brussels, being educated at a Jesuit school. He planned to join the priesthood, but, after a religious crisis, took up medicine before dropping his studies altogether in favour of a life at sea in the French merchant navy. He travelled widely in Europe, in the Americas, and in Asia. He was inspired to write by reading the poetry of Comte de Lautréamont, and attracted some attention with his poems Qui je fus (Who I was) in 1927. Through meeting artists such as Paul Klee and Max Ernst in Paris, he also took up painting and held his first one-man exhibition at the Librairie-Galerie de la Pléiade in 1937. In time, he took up residence in Paris, and became a French citizen.

In 1941, the French writer, André Gide published a study that made Michaux’s poetry popular for a while. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Michaux’s view of the human condition is bleak; his poems emphasize the impossibility of making sense of life as it impinges on the individual. Against the futility of real life, Michaux sets the richness of his imagination, and the contradictions of his surrealistic images serve as a foil to the absurdity of existence.’

Following the death of his wife in a fire in 1948, Michaux began experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs; and in the 1950s published several books dealing with his experiences of taking mescaline. His painting at this time was also affected by these experiences. A large exhibition of his works was held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1957; and a retrospective was organised in Frankfurt/Main in 1959. In 1966, he published the autobiographical Les grandes épreuves de l’esprit et les innombrables petites, translated into English in the 1970s as The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones (Secker and Warburg). Michaux died on 19 October 1984. Further, somewhat scanty, information can be found at Wikipedia, the Poetry Foundation, the Tate, Art Directory, and Moma; and there is an interesting article on Michaux by the Mexican writer, Octavio Paz, freely available at The Guardian.

Early on in his travels, Michaux tried out the diary form on a trip to Ecuador, and this became one of his earliest published works - in 1929. It was reissued in 1968, and then translated by Robin Magowan and published in English with the title Ecuador: a travel journal. Some of this can be read freely at Googlebooks.

22 January 1928
[After Panama] ‘The sea resolves all difficulties. It brings on few. It’s a lot like us. It lacks the earth’s hard, pulseless heart, and, be it ever so prompt to drown, we have only to take against this eventuality reasonable precautions for it to be once again our friend, quite brotherly, and understanding us perfectly.

It does not offer us these unmatched spectacles wherein the earth excels (provided we journey a few hundred miles), spectacles that make utter strangers of us, as if we were newly born and unhappy.

Who knows one sea knows the sea. Its anger, like ours. Its inner life, like ours. What is more, it does not like the earth offer in a single vista thousands of independent, different, and personal points - trees, rocks, flowers.

To the Ancients these personal points were not negligible, and it was My Lord Rock, Madam River. The professors, after the Jews and Christians, ruined all that.

Who can speak fittingly of a grove?’

1 February 1928
‘No, I have already said it elsewhere. This earth has had all the exoticism washed out of it. If in a hundred years we have not established contact with some other planet (but we will), or, next best, with the earth’s interior, humanity is finished. There is no longer a means of living, we explode, we go to war, we perpetrate evil of all sorts; we are, in a word, incapable of remaining any longer on this rind. We are in mortal pain; both from the dimensions as they now stand, and from the lack of any future dimension to which we can turn, now that our tour of the earth has been done to death. (These opinions, I know, are quite sufficient to have me looked down upon as a mind of the fourth order.) ’

Mid-February
‘A countryside or foreign city may be set apart as much by what it lacks as by what is uniquely its own. One explanation is this: as you can say about a work of art, ‘Oh, that’s very lovely, but it’s not alive, there are too many vital details left out’; in the same way you cannot wholeheartedly accept a new town, and if the trip there takes too little time, nothing remains and you end up exclaiming, ‘This trip passed like a dream.’ Exoticism has played a trick on us.

Despite the three weeks or so I have been here, Quito does not yet seem to me completely real, with that kind of naturalness and homogeneity a city we know well has (however varied its aspects may be to a stranger). What I miss in a foreign scene - and I am saying foreign - is never grandeur, but smallness.

Let’s examine my impressions calmly, then, and I will tell you what I miss in both Quito and its surrounding countryside. I miss pushcarts, pine trees, ants. There is not one tree (aside form the eucalyptus), not a single click of wooden wheels, no cart of any description, or cats during the day (by the way, the wheel was not invented by the Incas).’

The Diary Junction

The Kon-Tiki man

Today marks the centenary of the birth of Thor Heyerdahl, the great Norwegian adventurer who, by sailing primitive rafts and canoes, showed that ancient peoples could have made oceanic voyages, across the Pacific, and across the Atlantic. An archive of his papers, now registered of world importance by Unesco, holds some diaries, though there is no evidence of these ever having been published in their original form. Heyerdahl wrote several international bestsellers about his adventures, and these occasionally refer to the diaries.

Heyerdahl was born in Larvik, Norway, on 6 October 1914, the son of a brewer. He studied zoology and geography at the University of Oslo, but also became very interested in Polynesian culture and history. He was able to consult books and papers in the Kropelien Polynesian library, then the largest such collection in the world. In 1936, he married Liv Coucheron-Torp, and together they travelled to the island of Fatu Hiva, part of the Marquesan archipelago, in the Pacific. They remained a year studying the indigenous plants and animals, but Heyerdahl became more interested in cultural anthropology than zoology. They had two sons.

During the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany, Heyerdahl served with the Free Norwegian Forces from 1944, in the far north province of Finnmark. After the war, he persisted with his anthropological studies, developing a theory that Polynesian people might have originated from South America, having travelled across the Pacific Ocean in pre-Columbian times.

To test his idea, Heyerdahl mounted an expedition - funded by private loans, with US army equipment, and the help of a Peruvian dockyard - which would become one of the most famous adventures of all time - the Kon-Tiki expedition. With a small team, Heyerdahl built a raft, named Kon-Tiki, out of balsa logs and other native materials with the design and know-how as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadores. The trip began on 28 April 1947, and the raft sailed for 101 days, over 6,900km, before smashing into a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands - i.e. in Polynesia - on 7 August. Heyerdahl soon published a book on the experience; it became a best seller, and has been translated into many languages.

Following the Kon-Tiki success, Heyerdahl campaigned often on environmental issues, and undertook further adventures. In 1955–1956, he organised the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Rapa Nui, which uncovered much new, of scientific and popular interest. In 1969 and 1970, he twice tried to cross the Atlantic, from Morocco, in canoes built from papyrus based on Ancient Egyptian designs. The first expedition - in Ra - failed, but the second - in Ra II - made it from Morocco to Barbados, thus showing that seamen from long ago could have crossed the Atlantic using the Canary Current. He also undertook expeditions in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, as well as in Azerbaijan (searching for an ancient civilisation with links to Odin).

Heyerdahl married again in 1949, to Yvonne Dedekam-Simonsen, and they had three daughters. They divorced in 1969. Heyerdahl married a third time in 1991, to Jacqueline Beer, and they lived in Tenerife, Canary Islands, actively involved in archaeological projects. Heyerdahl died in 2002. He was given a state funeral by the Norwegian government. Indeed, he had been much honoured in his life, by state and academia, including being awarded the Grand Cross of the Royal Norwegian Order of St Olav in 1987, and the UN International Pahlavi Environment Prize. More biographical information can be found at Wikipedia, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Royal Scottish Geographic Society, the The Thor Heyerdahl Institute. For an alternative view of some of Heyerdahl’s theories, see The Maldives Royal Family website.

Many of the Thor Heyerdahl archives are kept at the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, and were recently included in the Memory of the World Register, a Unesco initiative to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity. According to the Register, the Thor Heyerdahl collection of documents ‘encompasses diaries, original book and article manuscripts, private letters, expedition plans, articles and newspaper clippings.’

Although I have not been able to find any evidence online of Heyerdahl’s diaries being published, there are various references to such diaries in publications by him, or about him and his expeditions. A feature published by Business Insider earlier this year includes a photograph of a page from Heyerdahl’s diary on the day the Kon-Tiki expedition found land (held by The Explorer’s Club in New York). There are other documents about the expedition available online at the Kon-Tiki Museum, though these are largely log books rather than diaries.

Heyerdahl, himself, refers to something called ‘the diary’ in The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas (first published in Norwegian in 1948, and in English in 1950, but since republished many times, most recently by Simon and Schuster in 2013, titled simply Kon-Tiki - partly available online at Googlebooks). In the book, Heyerdahl writes about the marine life they saw, and caught and ate, and then says: ‘But we did not run up against acquaintances [i.e. fish they knew the names of] only, as we lay drifting over the sea’s surface. The diary contains many entries of this type:’

11 May 1947
‘Today a huge marine animal twice came up to the surface alongside us as we sat at supper on the edge of the raft. It made a fearful splashing and disappeared. We have no idea what it was.’

6 June 1947
‘Herman saw a thick dark-coloured fish with a broad white body, thin tail, and spikes. It jumped clear of the sea on the starboard side several times.’

16 June 1947
‘Curious fish sighted on the port bow. Six feet long, maximum breadth one foot, brown, thin snout, large dorsal fin near head and a smaller one in the middle of the back, heavy sickle-shaped tail fin. Kept near surface and swam at times by wriggling its body like an eel. It dived when Hermann and I went out in the rubber dinghy with a hand harpoon. Came up later but dived again and disappeared.’

18 June 1947
‘Knut observed a snakelike creature, two to three feet long and thin, which stood straight up and down in the water below the surface and dived by wriggling down like a snake.’

There are slight references, also, to diaries kept during the Ra and Ra II expeditions, but actual extracts from such diaries are elusive, at least online. In The Kon-Tiki Man - Thor Heyerdahl by Christopher Ralling (BBC Books) which accompanied a documentary in 1990, or thereabouts, Ralling employs texts from Heyerdahl’s own books. And, indeed, the book’s blurb says it is ‘profusely illustrated with photographs’ and ‘the text includes many excerpts from Heyerdahl’s diaries and published works’.

Personally, I could find only one reference to a diary in this book, as follows: In writing about the first attempt to sail west from Morocco in a papyrus boat, Ralling says Heyerdahl and his team made ‘remarkable progress’ but ‘Thor was much more worried than he was prepared to admit. He had sent radio messages to Yvonne to send out a photographer in a motor vessel in order to take some shots of Ra at sea. In his heart, he confided to his diary and later recorded in The Ra Expeditions, he knew that this might turn into a rescue mission, for the hurricane season was beginning.’

And Rawling then quotes an extract dated 9 July and other dated extracts as though they were quotes from a diary (i.e. the date on one line, and the quotes starting on the next). Reference, however, to Heyerdahl’s original book The Ra Expeditions shows that the quotes by Ralling were actually taken from Heyerdahl’s continuous narrative (written up later, possibly from his diaries, but not actually quoting them). Here is part of that narrative for 9 July - it would be only days before he and his crew abandoned Ra to the waves (and soon after that, they would be starting work on Ra II).

‘On July 9th we had just discovered that the sea which had gone over the cabin roof had also forced its way through the lid of a cask containing almost two hundred pounds of salted meat, which soon rotted. It was during this morning inspection that an agitated Georges came to report something much worse. All the main ropes which secured the outermost papyrus roll on the windward side to the rest of Ra had been chafed through as the floor of the cabin shifted to and fro under the onslaught of the waves. Georges was pale and almost speechless, In one leap I was on the other side of the cabin with Abdullah. The boat was split in two lengthwise. The big starboard bundle, supporting one mast, was moving slowing in and out from the rest of the boat down its entire length. The roll was attached to Ra only at bow and stern. Every time the waves lifted the big papyrus roll away from the rest of the boat we stared straight down into the clear blue depths. Never had I seen the Atlantic so clear and so deep as through that cleft in our own little papyrus world. Abdullah would have turned pale, had he been able. With stoic calm, and without a tremor in his voice, Abdullah said coolly that this was the end. The ropes had worn away. The chain was broken. The rope links would unravel themselves one by one and in an hour or two the papyrus reeds would be drifting away from each other in all directions. [. . .]

Then Norman was suddenly standing beside us, glaring like a tiger about to spring.

“Let’s not give up, boys,” he said through clenched teeth.

Next moment we were all on the go. Carlo and Santiago pulled out coils of rope and measured and chopped up lengths of our thickest cordage. Georges plunged into the waves and swam crosswise under Ra with a thick rope end. Norman and I crawled all over the boat examining the chafed lashings to find out how long it would be before we fell apart. Papyrus stems were floating in our wake, singly and in sheaves. Abdullah stood with the sledge-hammer, driving in Ra’s huge sewing needle, a thin iron spike with an eye at the bottom, large enough to take a rope one quarter of an inch thick. With this needle, we were going to try to sew the ‘paper boat’ together. Yuri stood the gruelling turn at the rudder-oar alone, hour after hour. First Georges swam crosswise under the boat four times with our thickest rope, which we cinched up on deck like four big barrel hoops, in the hope of holding the bundles together so that the straddled mast would not burst open at the top. Then he ducked under the papyrus bundles to the spot where Abdullah’s big sewing needle had been pushed through. In the depths Georges had to pull the thin rope out of the needle’s eye and re-thread it a moment later when Abdullah pushed the needle down again empty in another place. In this way we got the fatal gap ‘sewn’ up again to some extent, but we had lost a lot of papyrus on the starboard side and were consequently lying harder to windward than ever before. The straddled mast was askew, but Ra was still sailing so fast that Georges had to be held on a rope. We were delighted to be able to haul him on board for the last time without his having been spiked through the head by the sharp giant needle.

Carlo apologized for the meal: spume was constantly washing into the galley chest and putting out the fire.’

Go and wash and see

Miguel de Unamuno, one of the most influential Spanish thinkers of his time, was born 150 years ago today. A scholar, writer, and rector of the University of Salamanca, he is considered to have been an early existentialist, but was often in trouble with the authorities for his political views. An early insight into both his intellect and the themes that would preoccupy his writing over the next 30 years came with a diary written during, and in response to, a kind of spiritual (or, indeed, existential) crisis he experienced in 1897.

Unamuno was born in Bilbao, Spain, on 29 September 1864; and, as a teenager, he witnessed a siege of the city by Carlist forces (in the so-called Third Carlist War) - a formative experience according to biographers. Aged but 16, he went to study philosophy and belles-lettres at Madrid university, and then did a thesis on the Basque language. From 1884, he worked as a private teacher, but was also writing articles. In 1891, he married his childhood sweetheart, Concha Lizarraga, and they would have nine children.

The following year, having failed to find an academic appointment in the field of philosophy, Unamono took up the chair of Greek at the University of Salamanca, an institution to which he would stay attached for the rest of his life. Around this time, he began writing the essays that would be published in 1902 as En torno al casticismo. His first novel - Paz en la guerra (Peace in War) - was published in 1897, and a second - Amor y pedagogía (Love and Pedagogy) - in 1902. By then, still in his 30s, he had been named rector of the University of Salamanca. In 1905, the García brothers opened Café Novelty in Plaza Mayor, and it soon became a focus for the city’s political and cultural life - Unamuno was a regular patron, often giving talks.

Unamuno was a man of wide interests, with a passion for poetry - he published several collections - and for languages. He read a dozen or more modern languages, as well as Latin and Greek, all the better to understand philosophers from their original texts (he learned Danish to read Kierkegaard, for example). He was also a renowned Lusophile. As a philosopher, he became recognised, latterly, as an early European existentialist.

Unamuno’s most important work - Del sentimiento trágico de la vida - was first published in 1913, and translated into English in 1921 as The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples. In 1914, Unamuno was dismissed from his post as rector by the Minister of Education, for political reasons. But in 1920, he was elected fellow in the philosophy and arts faculty, and re-appointed rector in 1921. By 1924, though, his attacks on the king and the dictator, Primo de Rivera, led to him being forced out again. This time, Unamuno went into exile, first to Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands, where his house is now a museum, and from there to France, first Paris, and then Hendaye, a border town in French Basque country.

Unamuno remained in Hendaye until after the fall of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, and in 1931, he was reappointed, for a third time, to be rector of the University of Salamanca. At first, Unamuno welcomed General Franco’s Second Republic, but he soon became disillusioned with the regime’s harsh tactics. In 1936, he had a public quarrel at the university with the Nationalist general Millán Astray. He was sacked again, and put under house arrest. He died ten weeks later, on the last day of that same year. There is not much biographical information about Unamuno online in English, but try Wikipedia (and a translation of the Spanish entry too) or Kirjasto. Fundación Zuloaga has a Spanish language page on Unamuno.

In 1897, Unamuno underwent a deep depression, a kind of spiritual crisis. This is well documented in his biographies - see Stefany Anne Golberg’s essay at The Smart Set. During this time, he kept a diary, although only a few entries are actually dated, and most of them are philosophical ruminations. These writings were somewhat rough and ready, yet he copied and circulated them to friends. They were not published in English, however, until 1984, as part of Princeton University Press’s seven volume series, The Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno. Volume 2 is titled The Private World - Selections from the Diario Intimo and Selected Letters 1890-1936, as translated by Anthony Kerrigan, Allen Lacy and Martin Nozick.

Lacy’s introduction explains that Unamuno’s Diario intimo, most of which was written in the months immediately following his crisis, in five bound notebooks, was circulated (except for the brief and scanty entries from 1899 to 1902) to several of the author’s closest friends between 1898 and 1901, then hidden among the papers in his study. He continues:

‘The Diario intimo is by no means a polished piece of work. [. . .] Even in the abridged version which is given in the present volume, few readers will fail to notice that it is obsessive, extremely repetitious, and often self-conscious in a rather theatrical way, nor that it lacks the literary merit that, even for relentless non-believers, distinguishes such other examples of confessional writing as St Augustine’s Confessions and Pascal’s Pensées. But it is an important document for two reasons. First, it announces many of the themes that were to occupy Unamuno in later years, especially in The Tragic Sense of Life and The Agony of Christianity. Second, it provides a vivid picture of a sensitive and deeply intellectual man.’

Here are a few snippets from Diario Intimo.

Notebook 2
25 April 1897
‘Quasimodo Sunday. A conventional Mass at the parish church, a sermon by the priest about the fact that many believe that going to church is doing God a favor, when it is we who need God, not He us.

How is it that I imagine myself to be a great personage, one destined to create a sensation in the Church, my conversion providing a model for others? How many ways has pride of surviving!’

28 April 1897
‘Read the ninth chapter of the Gospel of St John. I am a blind man in whom the works of God must be made manifest. Anoint my eyes with clay, Lord, and lead me to wash in the pool of Siloam, in the confessional, so that I may return with sight restored. Give me strength, for I have no will.

And later I will say, to your glory: yes, I am he who sat and begged for human glory. Jesus took clay and anointed my eyes and said to go to the pool of Siloam, and I went, and once I had washed, I saw.

The Lord has made clay out of the dust to which I reduced everything by means of analysis in my passage across the desert of intellectualism, and He has placed it upon my eyes, so that I might desire to see, and then go and wash and see.’

Notebook 3
10 May 1897
‘Yesterday, Sunday, at Canillas. What peace there! If one could live and die like they do. We went to the burial at Calzada of a poor fellow who had died of paralysis. I kept thinking about spiritual paralysis. They told me that he died saying: “What a sweet dream!” He seemed asleep there, at the door of the church.

Later the fields were blessed. The young girls brought all their presents in a procession, shawls, kerchiefs, all strung up on a pole.’

Notebook 5 [which contains only a page and a half of entries - here are the last few]
9 May 1899
‘How is it suddenly, today, the 9th May, 1899, in the midst of my studies, I am overcome by a craving to pray? I have had to lay down my book and retire to my room to say a brief prayer and to read in the Imitation the prayer asking for light for the spirit.’

15 January 1902
‘Today, the 15th of January, 1902, in the middle of reading Holtzmann’s Leben Jesu, p. 102, I again take up this diary.’

Our Father
Always the Father, always engendering the Ideal in us. I, projected to infinity, and you, who are projected to infinity, meet. Our lives, parallel in infinity, meet, and my infinite I is your I, the collective I, the Universe I, the Universe made person, and it is God. And I, am I not my father? Am I not my son?
Thy will be done’

An audience with Alaungpaya

Alaungpaya, one the three greatest kings of Burma, and the founder of the Konbaung dynasty, was born three centuries ago today. He forced out the French and the British, unified the country, and founded Yangon. But, before driving out the British, he negotiated a treaty with the East India Company through its ensign, Robert Lester. Lester’s diary written during that mission has survived, and it provides a first hand account of his meeting with the king.

Alaungpaya (Aung Zeya at birth) was born on 24 September 1714 at Moksobomyo (now Shwebo), a village in the Mu River Valley about 60 miles northwest of Ava (now Inwa), then the Burmese capital. He was the second son of a family that had administered the Mu Valley for generations, his father being a hereditary chief while his uncle was lord of the valley district. In 1730, he married Yun San daughter of the chief of a nearby village, and they went on to have seven children.

The mid-1700s were a period of turmoil in Burma, with the Toungoo dynasty in its dying days. Binnya Dala, prime minister at the time, rebelled against his Toungoo rulers, and rallied the Mon-speaking people. In 1747 they elected him king. It took Binnya Dala until 1752 to capture Ava from the Toungoo, but Alaungpaya refused to become a vassal to the new authority. He organised a resistance movement, declared a new capital at Moksobomyo, and announced his aim to be king. Within a year or so, he had retaken Ava, driven Binnya Dala out of Upper Burma, and established a new dynasty, Konbaung.

However, because Binnya Dala was still strong in Lower Burma and had allied with the French, Alaungpaya concluded a treaty with the British through the East India Company: land (including the island of Negrais) and settlement rights in exchange for a cannon and gunpowder. The treaty did not last long. The British, already at war with the French in India, were reluctant to open a second front in Burma. Alaungpaya, thus, came to suspect them of supporting a Mon revolt. He attacked the Negrais settlement, massacring many of the merchants there. By 1759, Alaungpaya had driven out the British and the French, and re-unified the country. Relations between the British and the Konbaung dynasty would not to be resumed for thirty years.

In 1760, Alaungpaya led a campaign to invade Siam, but, during a siege of the capital, he was wounded. He died during the retreat to Burma. Within a decade, his heirs had subdued much of Laos (1765), defeated Siam (1767), and defeated four invasions by China. The Konbaung dynasty lasted more than a century. From the 1820s, though, it began began losing war after war against the British who finally annexed the last party of the country in 1885. The Konbaung king and ruling family were exiled to India. Further information is available online from Wikipedia, the Burma Library, or indeed from The History of Myanmar by William J. Topich and Keith A. Leitich (ABC-CLIO, 2013) which can be read at Googlebooks.

Several British accounts of meetings with Alaungpaya have survived to this day. The most bona fide diary account, though, was written by Ensign Robert Lesser, Ambassador Extraordinary, who, in 1757, negotiated the treaty (for the East India Company) which provided armaments to Alaungpaya in return for settlement and merchant rights. Lesser’s diary was first published in Alexander Dalrymple’s Oriental Repertory (eight volumes between 1791-1797). This can be accessed freely at Internet Archive. However, it is easier to read a reprint published in the SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, (Spring 2005), also to be found through Internet Archive (and elsewhere on the internet). Here are several extracts from Lesser’s diary, including the day of his audience with Alaungpaya.

22 July 1757
‘This Morning, at break of day, we left the above Town, and now we are come into a wide River, we meet with great numbers of Boats, loaded with Plunder, belonging to the King of Ava, taken at Pegu, and I am informed going up to Prone, Ava, &c. and that the King is not far from us. At 3 this Afternoon, we came to a small Town, on the bank of the River, where we found the King, in his Barge, with great numbers of other Boats attending him: Antonio waited on the King, to acquaint him I was come, and, at 5 o’clock, a Messenger came from Antonio to acquaint me, that the King would give me Audience to-morrow morning and that it was the King’s Desire I should send the Present by the Messenger, which I delivered.’

23 July 1757
‘This Morning, at 7 o’clock, Antonio came to me, and told me, that the King would give me Audience, at the same time he told me, that on going into the King’s Apartment in his Barge, I must leave my Sword and Shoe behind, and on approaching near the King, to the Place appointed for me, I must kneel; I used all the Arguments I could, and told him as an Officer in the Honourable Company’s Service, I could not consent to the above, he then, as likewise other Great Men with him, told me, that no Person, let him be of the highest Rank, could have Audience given them by the Great King of Ava, Pegu, &c. &c. (Allaum Praw, next to GOD) if they did not conform to the above, and that all Ambassadors, from the Negrais before, had done it.

As I hope it will be a means of getting the Treaty of Alliance, with the above King and The Honourable Company, settled, I agreed, and went with Antonio to the King’s Barge, and after congratulating him, on his late conquest of so potent a Kingdom, with other Compliments on the Occasion I delivered him my Credentials. [. . .]

I then desired the Interpreters to inform the King, [. . .] that the English were strongly attached to His Interest; and if His Majesty would now be pleased to consent to the fixing His Chop [seal] to the above, it would be a means of uniting the two Nations together for ages to come. The King then said, that he had sent a Sloop some Months ago to Madrass, with Goods to purchase Powder, &c, and he was informed by the Captain of another Sloop, now arrived at Dagon from the Coast, that the Governor of Madrass had detained his Sloop there, I answered that we had received no Letters, or News of any kind, from Madrass, but I was positive if the Sloop was detained, that the Governor of Madrass did not know that she belonged to His Majesty.

As I had not room to stretch my legs out, and I was somewhat uneasy, I saw a small Stool behind me, which I took, and sat on, this caused a laughter among the Great Men about me, the King asked the reason, and was informed, on which he rose up and came close to me, and laughed very heartily, and asked me what was the reason that Englishman could not kneel? I told him we were not accustomed to it; on which he pointed to the Yard of the Boat, which was close by, and told me I might set there, I told His Majesty I was not insensible of the Honour he did me, he then pointed to the Prince of Persaim, and told me he had given him a new Name (Mungee Narataw) on account of his good behaviour, the King then asked me several Questions, through the above Interpreters, viz. Does your King go to the Wars and expose his Person as I do? Do you understand the use of Ordnance, &c? Could you point a Gun to kill a Man at a great distance? Is there as much Rain in your Country as in this? What is the reason you wear that at your Shoulder, (my Shoulder Knot)? How much Money does The Company pay you [per] Month? Why don’t you black your Bodies and Thighs as we do (at the same time rising up, and shewing me his Thigh)? Let me feel your Hand, feeling my Fingers and Wrist, and said we were like Women, because we did not black as above. Is there Ice in your Country as in mine, small Creeks froze over?

I answered to all the above Questions, which seemed to please them, and to the last Question I told him that I had seen a River, as broad as this His Majesty is now in (meaning London River) frozen over, and an Ox roasted whole, upon the Ice; to which the King, as likewise all the Great Men about him, laughed heartily; the King asked me, what was the reason we did not leave the Negrais, and come all to Persaim, and settle there? I told him that the Negrais was a Key to that River, if we lost it entirely, that the French, who I believe we were now at War with, would likely come there, but that we should come with a firm resolution to settle at Persaim, if His Majesty would indulge us in settling the Treaty, and leave a small Force at the Negrais; The King then said if all the Powers in The World was to come, he could drive them out of His Country; he then asked me, if we were afraid of the French; I told him that the English and French had no great liking for each other but there never was that Englishman born, that was afraid of a Frenchman; the King then told me, that he had taken great quantities of Guns, Bombs, &c. with all kind of Warlike Stores at Pegu, and that he was now going up triumphant (with the former King of Pegu, and his Daughter, the Uppa Rajah, and other Great Men, Peguers, prisoners) to his great Cities, Prone, Ava, &c. and that he would put his Chop, to our Treaty of Alliance, and give us Liberty to trade in any part of his Kingdom; he then ordered me to follow him to the Mouth of the River, which leads to Ava, where there is a House, as above-mentioned, for the King’s reception, and I am informed, he intends to stay two or three days, and he would send me Provisions and settle the above; I desired the Interpreter to return His Majesty my hearty thanks for the Honour done me, and as His Barge was getting in readiness to proceed, I was desired to take my Leave, which I did and came away.

I have made Presents to the Prince of Persaim, King’s Brother, Prime Minister, and other six Great Men, about the King’s Person, of the following things, viz. Scarlet Cloth 30 Yards, 2 Pieces Seersuckers, 1 Piece Pullicat Handkerchiefs, 1 Kittysall, 1 Bottle Lavender Water, 1 Ring, Bristol Stone, with a Brilliant Spark on each side, 1 Black Feather, from my Hat, 1 Piece of Silk Handkerchiefs; this I have done, hoping it may be a means of getting my business done, on The Company’s Account, the sooner; the remainder part of this day we have been following the King to the Place above mentioned, the Fresh in this River is excessive rapid, and we could not come to the Place where the King was, at Night, I believe, at a moderate computation, there’s in Boats, on this River, on this Occasion, One hundred thousand Men, Women, and Children.’

26 July 1757
‘At 10 this Morning we came to the Place, where the House, beforementioned, is built for the King’s reception; the King’s Barge lay close to it, and numbers of other Boats all about it, there being four foot Water, all round it; occasioned by the swelling of the River since it was built; at Noon Antonio came, and told me that the King wanted me, I dressed myself and went with him to the said House, or Island but found the King was gone into His Barge, on which the Prince of Persaim let him know I was come, his answer was I must follow him to Lunzee, a Place much farther up the River, and the King went away immediately. But now the Promise made to Antonio on the 20th instant (as I expected) won’t do, he now tells me that Mr. Brooke, former Chief of the Negrais, promised the Prince, of Persaim, thirty Viss of Silver, and himself twenty; if the King’s Chop was fixed to our Treaty; and that I must give them from under my Hand, in the Name of The Company, that those Sums must be paid, otherwise no Chop should be affixed to our Treaty; I told them, The Company was at a great expence, and must be at a much greater, before they could bring the Negrais, and Persaim, to any Perfection, and this was a very large Sum.

Now, I am certain that nothing can be done without the Interest of the above Men; this Affair has subsisted a long time, and is of the utmost Consequence; there has been many Embassies before, on this head, and attended with a great Expence to The Company, and if I don’t finish now, there must be another Embassy (with a Present) on the same Account, I therefore concluded, within myself, to make them an Offer, and put the finishing stroke to this long Affair, which I did of Twenty Viss, which was not accepted, and on their going into their Boats I made them an Offer of Twenty-five, which was likewise refused; so we parted: the remainder part of this Day we have been following the King, but did not come up with him at Night.’

6 August 1757
‘I this Day had a Meeting with Antonio, and settled the Treaty with him, in the following manner, viz. That we are to have two hundred Bamboos square, (each Bamboo containing seven Cubits) at Persaim, and the King’s Promise of more Ground, after our settling at that Place. That we are to present to the King annually, for the Grant of the Island Negrais, and Spot of ground at Persaim, one Piece of Ordnance to carry a twelve Pound Shot, with two hundred Viss of good Gunpowder, as an acknowledgment, &c. &c. as specified [by] Article the 6th, in the Treaty of Friendship and Alliance. After this we exchanged Treaties, he presented me the Treaty with the King of Ava, Pegu, &c,’s Chop fixed thereto, and done in the above King’s Presence, I presented him with the other, to which Lieut. Thomas Newton, Chief of Negrais, had signed his Name, and fixed the Arms of The Honourable Company.’

Call me Cherie

Well, happy birthday Cherie Blair, 60 today. I wonder how you’re celebrating, and whether you’re likely to have an ‘odd do’, as you did on your 40th, at least according to your husband’s press and policy adviser. I have no idea whether you keep a diary or not, but if you do, and it gets published one day, I’m sure it will be a good read. Meanwhile, I have mined Alastair Campbell’s diaries for a few tidbits about your life during the years when Tony was leader of the Labour Party and then Prime Minister.

Theresa Cara Booth, known as Cherie, was born on 23 September 1954 in Bury, Lancashire, and was brought up in Waterloo, just north of Liverpool on the Lancashire coast. Her parents were both actors, but her father, Tony, left when she was eight, so she and her sister were then brought up by her mother, and Tony’s mother, Vera. The sisters were educated at Catholic schools. Cherie went on to read law at the London School of Economics. While training she taught law at the Polytechnic of Central London, now the University of Westminster, and became a barrister in 1976. Until 1988, her head of chambers was George Carman, a barrister well-known for taking on high-profile cases.

Cherie met Tony in 1976, and they married in 1980. They had three children between 1984 and 1988, and then a fourth (Leo) 12 years later when Cherie was in her mid-40s. Leo was the first child born to a sitting Prime Minister in 150 years. Being the Prime Minister’s wife, she came under much press scrutiny, not least in relation to her friend, Carole Caplin, a kind of New Age style adviser, and Caplin’s boyfriend, Peter Foster, a convicted Australian conman.

Cherie Blair was made Queen's Counsel in 1995. In 1999, she was appointed a Recorder (a permanent part-time judge) in the County Court and Crown Court. She is a founding member of Matrix Chambers in London, and has specialised in employment, discrimination, and public law. She was the third Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University, is a Governor of the London School of Economics and of the Open University, and is a patron of Breast Cancer Care. In 2008 she launched the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, to help support women entrepreneurs in developing countries, and she published Speaking for Myself: The Autobiography. In 2011, she was appointed Chancellor of the Asian University for Women. In 2013, she was awarded a CBE. More about Cherie, the posts she holds, the books she’s written, can be found on her own website.

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s Director of Communications and Strategy between 1997 and 2003, refers often to Cherie Blair in his diaries, first published by Hutchinson in 2007 under the title The Blair Years. (See The Diary Review article A good press secretary for more about Campbell and his diaries.) Campbell says in his introduction to this book that the focus ‘is very much on Blair himself’, but inevitably the Prime Minister’s wife is often part of his daily life, whether because of her presence at formal occasions, or because of issues, such as those revolving around her friendship with Caplin. He notes, in the introduction, how Cherie herself ‘pointed out that I certainly spent more waking hours with him than she did.’ Here are a few snapshots involving Cherie Blair taken from The Blair Years.

23 September 1994
‘Cherie’s 40th birthday party at Frederick’s. Odd kind of do. Didn’t feel right being photographed going in, by Alan Davidson [celebrity photographer] of all people, and I couldn’t quite work out the guest mix. Family, a bit of politics, law, and friends that didn’t always seem like Tony’s kind of people. Maybe he is a lot more eclectic than we are. Cherie had certainly been given a makeover. She looked great, but it was an odd do.’

23 April 1995
‘I had a perfectly nice chat with Cherie, in which we both lamented how much of our time we spent having to talk to TB in his underwear.’

8 September 1995
‘Eventually Fiona said we should discuss Cherie, what role and image she was supposed to be developing, what was good for her and for TB, and how we managed conference. Cherie said we had reached the position where she felt unsupported, and she had a poor relationship with the office because she felt we saw her purely as a problem. She said she had a contribution to make beyond being a ‘rich lawyer/wife’. I said I accepted there was fault on both sides. Things had got off to a terrible start because of Carole [Caplin] at conference last year. I felt Carole was a problem anyway and they had to understand if she became a story again, I would have nothing to do with it.’

27 October 1997
‘CHOGM [Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, in Edinburgh] finished on time, TB telling us how brilliantly he had chaired it. TB was regaling us with a few stories from the receptions. One of the African leaders pinching Cherie’s bum and asking her who she was, then him jumping a mile when she said she was Tony’s wife. Mandela being difficult on a couple of issues and TB saying to him ‘You are so revered you can come out with any old nonsense and nobody is allowed to say it’s nonsense,’ Mandela laughing.’

16 September 1998
‘TB was heading off to Coventry and I was due to come back with CB. We met up at the shop, where I had a brief glimpse of [Prince] Charles, who was showing them some of his organic produce. She said organic farming had taken up most of their conversation at lunch. The rest had been a meandering around foreign affairs. TB was always pretty discreet about his royal dealings, CB less so. She said when she first Princess Anne, Anne had called her ‘Mrs Blair’, to which CB said ‘Call me Cherie.’ I’d rather not, Mrs Blair,’ said Anne. She said she didn’t bother to protest when Charles called her Mrs Blair today.’

25 September 1999
‘I went into the office first thing, then up to see TB. He was now sure. Cherie was pregnant. They worked out it happened at Balmoral. A royal baby!. He said he felt a mix of pleasure and horror. Thank God I’m a Christian, he said. It allows me to assume there must be a reason. We discussed it on the train. At the moment, TB, CB, Fiona and I were the only people who knew, and I was winding them up as to how much money we could make by tipping off the press.’

18 November 1999 

‘At one o'clock. Piers Morgan called and said he had a story and if he told me what it was could he guarantee it would stay exclusive? I said I know what it is. He said ‘How are your christening robes?’ I said I would have to talk to TB. Then I had a meeting with Fiona and we agreed we would just let the Mirror run it and then confirm. But the Sun had heard something and Rebekah Wade [deputy editor] was paging and calling both of us relentlessly. Eventually, after speaking to CB, Fiona gave the story to Rebekah around 8, which was clearly going to be disasterville with Piers. There was no way he would think the Sun got on to it themselves. I got TB to call him to try to mollify him a bit but later Piers was absolutely fuming. ‘Why do those two women (Cherie and Fiona) have such a problem with me? I don't get it.’ CB was clear she didn’t want her pregnancy to seem as somehow being owned as a Mirror story. Once the Sun were on to it, she wanted them to have the story. It was a one-fact story. Dealing with the Sun and the Mirror the whole time was like having two mistresses. It was a fucking nightmare. Both thought they were entitled to some kind of special treatment. It would probably have been better just to have announced it earlier, but Cherie had wanted to keep it quiet for as long as possible, which was fair enough. We had a statement out at 9.10, and it led Sky straight away. There was something amusing about seeing all these hard-nosed characters standing outside Number 10 going on about babies.’

19 May 2000
‘Fiona and Cherie were pretty sure the baby was going to be born fairly soon. TB stayed at the office till about 8 and Anji [Hunter] said later he had been really nervous, nervous about the politics of where we were, nervous about the baby and what it would do for him, Cherie and the way we work. TB called as he was going to the hospital. I called Anji to get Cockerell down there to film the media outside. Fiona kept me in touch through the night. It finally came at 12.25 and we decided not to put anything out until they got home. I was in bed when Fiona texted that it was a boy. I called through, spoke to TB, who sounded very happy about it. I heard the baby and TB said ‘Here you are, Leo, talk to your spin doctor.’

The fifth Beatle

Brian Epstein, legendary manager of the Beatles who died in his early 30s from a drug overdose, would have been 80 today. He lived a hectic business schedule and a complicated private life, being an active gay when homosexuality was still illegal. He left some early diaries/notebooks with his then-bodyguard and chauffeur Bryan Barrett, who sold them at auction in 2000. A good description of these notebooks and their content can be found online thanks to the auctioneers, Christie’s, and to a Beatles fan blog, A moral to this song.

Epstein was born in Liverpool into a small Jewish family on 19 September 1934. His father, Harry, was the son of an East European immigrant who had started a furniture store in the city. Brian’s mother, who everyone called Queenie, came from the successful Hyman furniture family. Brian was moved around from one boarding school to another, being expelled from some. He spent two years at Wrekin College, but then was apprenticed at 16 before joining the family firm.

After a brief spell of national service, three terms at the RADA theatre school, and some department store experience in London, Epstein returned to the family business. Harry put him in charge of the ground floor, in the family’s newly opened store (NEMS) on Great Charlotte Street, where he sold musical instruments, among other things, and gramophone records. This must have suited him because the shop soon become one of the largest music outlets in the North of England. Epstein then opened a second store in Whitechapel, not far, in fact, from the Cavern Club.

Epstein first came into contact with the Beatles (John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney and Pete Best) in late 1961, at the Cavern Club. By early December, he had proposed to manage them; and a first contract was signed a few weeks later in January 1962 (which sold at auction in 2008 for £240,000), and another in October. He formed a management company NEMS Enterprises before signing Lennon and McCartney to a three year NEMS publishing contract, and, within days of that, the Beatles had released their first single Love Me Do.

Despite having no previous experience of managing performers, Epstein did much to mould the Beatles dress and stage presence, and to win them a record contract. After being rejected by many record companies, he persuaded EMI to give the Beatles a deal with its Parlophone label, paying (initially) just 1p per record sold. A first recording session at EMI’s Abbey Road studios took place in June 1962. Pete Best was dismissed by Epstein soon after, and replaced by Ringo Starr, who was already well known to the others. Epstein also organised a hectic shedule of performance tours, as well as appearances for television and film. Epstein’s role in ‘making’ the Beatles has been widely acknowledged in recent years, with McCartney, for example, stating in 1998, ‘If anyone was the Fifth Beatle, it was Brian’. But, in the 1960s, when MBEs were awarded to the four Beatles he was not so honoured.

Epstein seemed to flourish in the new world of pop stars, and as busy as he was with the Beatles, he also successfully managed other groups, like Gerry and the Pacemakers, and singers such as Cilla Black. He did not settle in London until 1965, after when he bought the lease to the Saville Theatre and promoted new plays by young writers, including Arnold Wesker. His personal life, however, was one of unfettered and growing attachments to drugs, gambling, and a promiscuous homosexual life. Although it was not public knowledge until after his death in 1967, Epstein’s homosexuality was an open secret among his friends. Lennon is said to have quipped that Epstein’s autobiography (2004, and ghostwritten by his assistant), A Cellarful of Noise, should have been titled A Cellarful of Boys. Epstein died from a drugs overdose in August 1967, he was only 32 years old. Further information is readily available online at the official Brian Epstein website, Wikipedia, or The Beatles Bible.

Epstein left behind 13 notebooks written between 1949 and 1963, according to amoralto (a Beatles fan blog). Three of these (along with other memorabilia) were put up for auction, at Christie’s London, in 2000 by Bryan Barrett. Barrett (who had also made the notebooks available for a 1998 TV documentary on Epstein) was quoted as saying: ‘It is now well over 30 years since his death and I no longer feel that anyone who was close to him could be hurt by the revelations.’ The diaries fetched £3,290. The auction notes (still freely available online) included information about, and extracts from, all three diaries. Amoralto has republished these notes, and found a few extra quotes (from other notebooks) in archived newspaper articles. Here, though, is the substance of the notes provided by Christie’s in 2000.

Lot notes: ‘The insight these highly personal and tortured notes give us into Epstein’s formative years cannot be overestimated. The mental anguish his sexual orientation caused him, combined with his interest in style as evidenced by his dress and furniture designs, executed in his late teens, give fuel to the thought that Epstein was a talented man who had the misfortune to be born at the wrong time.’

First notebook (59 pages)
‘The earliest of the three notebooks begins with an entry dated October 18th, 1950 Thoughts on Things, the following six pages written in the same month give a poignant insight into sixteen-year-old Epstein’s unhappy school life at Wrekin College in Shropshire, entries include:
 - “To be a success at school one must above all be either distinctly original or good at games (all of them). Intellects of a quiet nature are at school invariably a failure. . .”
- “ ‘Playing Soldiers’ . . . in what is presumed to be an intellectual establishment is . . . futile and childish . . . and a waste of anybody’s time. . .”
- “Depression is the route of all great and important thought”
- “The majority of school boys are lyers . . . Public schools as such encourage lying however they fail to realise it.”

Epstein’s schoolboy thoughts also reflect his interest in modern art, architecture and jazz; the second half of this notebook is filled with Epstein’s pencil and ink designs for furniture, dresses, evening and day outfits and a wedding dress, on several pages Epstein also practises his flamboyant signature in blue ink.’

Second notebook (19 pages)
‘In the second notebook, written in ink in 1957 at the age of twenty-three, Epstein gives a brutally honest account of his life to date, tracing the development of his homosexuality culminating in his arrest for soliciting in 1957, in the first half entitled “Background and History” Epstein outlines the misery of his unsettled school life, moving between nine different schools, the combination of frequent poor reports and entrance exam failures generating his low self-esteem

“The matter of always attaining low marks, being bottom of the class and receiving poor reports and other factors contributed in my thinking of myself even then as a failure, dullard and inferior person . . .”

He was briefly happy in his penultimate school [Claysmore School in Somerset]: “The first half of that third term was I think perhaps the only entirely happy and contented period in my life . . .”

He discusses arguments he had with his parents regarding his artistic leanings and his desire to go to acting school rather than the family business, the personal agony he experienced whilst serving in the army during his National Service in 1952: “I venomously hated nearly everything about the army and suffered at the merciless hands of the R.S.M.”

The development of his awareness of his own latent homosexuality and the misery and mental anguish the suppression of his feelings brought him, writing that in 1954 whilst working in the family business: “My life became a succession of mental illnesses and sordid unhappy events bringing great sorrow to my family . . .”

In the final eleven pages of the notebook Epstein gives a harrowing account of how he was set-up by the police and arrested for Persistently Importuning. After the horror of this experience Epstein wrote philosophically: “I do not think I am an abnormally weak-willed person - the effort and determination with which I have rebuilt my life these last few months have, I assure you, been no mean effort. I believed that my own will-power was the best thing with which to overcome my homosexuality. And I believe my life may have become contented and I may even have attained a public success . . .”

His bitterness at the injustice of his treatment is expressed in his closing comments: “I am not sorry for myself. My worst times and punishments are over. Now, through the wreckage of my life by society, my being will stain and bring the deepest distress to all my devoted family and few friends. the damage, the lying criminal methods of the police in importuning me and consequently capturing me leaves me cold, stunned and finished . . .”

This autobiographical account, clearly written before Epstein had received a verdict, ends with instructions he would like to be followed should he be remanded or given a prison sentence, the feelings of sympathy this frank account provokes are enhanced by the dignity of his closing comment: “I must apologise for my writing which I realise is difficult to read. I was unable to procure a typewriter and my hand is nervous.” ’

Third notebook (five pages)
‘The third notebook comprises four handwritten accounts of Epstein’s visits to various cities and restaurants in 1960; in the first entry apparently written after consuming five whiskies, Epstein expresses a desire: to rid himself “of hum drum, dreary god-forsaken surburbia”; [and] for the joys of Rome and his aspirations to join “that very attractive utterly ridiculous little group that call themselves . . . the International set”. In his final entry, Epstein confesses to being robbed in Barcelona adding rather poignantly: “But, I ask, is this my fault? Yes I think because I behaved foolishly and irresponsibly.” ’

See also Lennon and Linda McCartney

York Factory lady

Letitia Hargrave, firstborn daughter of a Scottish lawyer, married a Hudson Bay Company trader and left behind her privileged life to travel to Canada and live as a pioneer in York Factory, a settlement and fur trade post on the southwestern shore of Hudson Bay. Although Letitia died young - 160 years ago today - she left behind letters, published a century later, which have become historically important as a primary source of information about that period of Canadian history. The published book of her letters also includes a brief diary, written during her journey across the Atlantic.

Letitia was born in Edinburgh, in 1813, the eldest of nine children in a wealthy family. Her father, Dugald Mactavish, was a lawyer, and a sherriff of Argyllshire; and the Mactavish family was well-established in the North American fur trade. One of Letitia’s brothers, William, was posted to York Factory, on Hudson Bay, Manitoba, where he became friends with the chief trader, James Hargrave. When Hargrave travelled to Scotland in 1837, he was warmly received by the Mactavish family, and formed a relationship with Letitia. The two were married in 1840, and Letitia travelled to York Factory with her new husband in June/July that year.

Letitia and James had several children, although a second son died soon after being born. In 1851-1852, the family moved to Sault Ste, but, on 18 September 1854, Letitia died of cholera. Further information is available from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and Wikipedia.

Most of what is known about Letitia, however, comes from a collection of her letters - The Letters of Letitia Hargrave - edited by Margaret Arnett Macleod, and published in 1947 by The Champlain Society (whose mission is ‘to increase public awareness of, and accessibility to, Canada’s rich store of historical records’). Letitia’s letters, written to her family in Britain, are considered historically important as a primary source of information about the life of pioneer women in Canada in the mid-19th century.

The Letters of Letitia Hargrave is freely available to read online at The Champlain Society digital collection hosted by the University of Toronto. Although almost all the book consists of Letitia’s letters, a few pages are devoted to a diary she kept on board the Prince Rupert when travelling from Britain to North American in June and July 1840. Here are a few extracts.

25 June 1840
‘In bed all day yesterday and great part of today. Ship pitching so that we could not dress. The most provoking part is that we have been beating about waiting till the Prince of Wales came out of Stornaway. Mr Hargrave and the Captain went on board of her lest any letters might have been forwarded there from Stromness, but only got a parcel of shortbread from Captain Royal for the ladies here. Nice food for 4 sea sick women. Never knew what sailing was before.’

2 July 1840
‘Shoals of bottle nosed whales playing about the ship. Wind has been westerly ever since we left Orkney.’

7 July 1840
‘On Thursday the wind began and we have had a constant gale since. No sail almost and at night close reefed. The captain says he never saw such a sea, but the waves are whole like large broad hills, lost our jib - sea getting better.’

11 July 1840
‘Second pig killed today. Fresh pork and fowls tho’ the latter old and tough. We have only had salt beef once on board.’

12 July 1840
‘All the ducks and geese are allowed to walk about deck on Sunday. Miserable objects, their bills white and whole appearance wasted. When they got out they picked their feathers and ducked down on the deck thinking themselves in the water. Mr Bolton likened the procession to Bells Sunday School - I shall note down a week’s bill of fare as we have a diet for every day. Breakfast ham and egg potatoes, tea and coffee biscuit and treacle which we always have morning and evening. Dinner. Fowl soup boiled hens, roast ducks, salt pork, plum pudding, always mashed potatoes, cheese wine almonds raisins and figs. Crossing the American line.’

22 July 1840
‘Went on deck before 8am to see a large ice berg. Miss Allan describes it as being like a hay stack. It was about 160 feet above water and an oblong square plenty of ice all round.’

26 July 1840
‘Resolution Island seen from top the entrance to the straits.’

The Diary Junction

Squire vs reverend

John Peter Boileau, a squire of Ketteringham and a well-connected man in Norfolk and London society, was born 220 years ago today. Both he and the local reverend in Ketteringham left behind detailed diaries which were exploited, a century later, by Cambridge professor, Owen Chadwick, to reveal - in the book Victorian Miniature - a fascinating slice of local history, in particular an acrimonious relationship between squire and reverend.

Boileau was born on 2 September 1794, in London, the eldest son in a family that claimed to be descended from Charles Boileau, baron of Castelnau and St Croix, a Languedoc Huguenot immigrant to England in 1691, and from Étienne Boileau, the first known provost of Paris in the 13th century. He was educated at Eton, Oxford and Edinburgh, and then commissioned into the rifle brigade.

In 1825, Boileau married Lady Catherine Sarah Elliot, daughter of the first earl of Minto, and they had nine children. He acquired Thursford Hall, near Fakenham, and the Ketteringham estate, where he built a Gothic hall, and where he came into a conflict with the local vicar, William Andrew.

In 1838, Boileau was created a baronet. He served as a county magistrate and a deputy lieutenant; and he was appointed high sheriff of Norfolk in 1844. Apart from holding various offices in London and being a Fellow of the Royal Society, he was also a founding member of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, and its president from 1849. His wife died in 1862, and he died in 1869. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia and The Peerage. (Thanks to the National Portrait Gallery for the image.)

In 1960, a history professor at Cambridge University, Owen Chadwick, published Victorian Miniature (Hodder and Stoughton) which relied heavily on diaries kept by Boileau and by Reverend William Andrew, and told the story of an astonishing feud between the two Ketteringham characters. Here’s the publisher’s blurb: ‘Owen Chadwick’s Victorian Miniature paints a detailed cameo of nineteenth-century English rural life, in the extraordinary battle of wills between squire and parson in a Norfolk village. Both the evangelical clergyman and the squire, proudly conscious of his Huguenot ancestry, were passionate diarists, and their two journals open up a fascinating double perspective on the events which exposed their clash of personalities. The result is a narrative that is at once deeply informative about Victorian class distinctions, rural customs and festivities, and richly entertaining in a manner worthy of Trollope.’

The book was reprinted in 1991 by Cambridge University Press. Some pages can be browsed at Amazon; and there is further information on the Literary Norfolk website.

Boileau’s diary is deposited with the Norfolk Record Society in the Norwich public library. It begins in 1839, when he left England for a continental tour, and ends in February 1869, a month before his death. Some sections - notably 1846-1850 - remain in private hands, and a couple of short sections were probably destroyed for personal reasons, says Owen Chadwick. William Andrew’s diary is in private hands (or was at the time of the book’s publication). It is in two big volumes, the first from his ordination to 1855, and the second from 1855 to his last illness. Unlike Boileau, he didn’t write in his journal very often or regularly. Here are a couple of extracts from Chadwick’s book (which uses the diaries of both men extensively, but does not, in fact, provide many dated verbatim quotes from them).

Boileau’s diary
January 1841
‘Dined early, and in the evening servants had a ball in the hall, lighted up. There were our ten maids - four indoor and three outdoor, and Cowper - Easton and three gardeners there, besides John Cannell and wife, [ . . .] It went off well as they had supper also, and all over by two o’clock, which was somewhat too late. I took Mrs. Beale to dance in the New Year but she was puffy and obliged to sit down.’

Chadwick comments: ‘Andrew disapproved of these proceedings, and hoped that some of the participants also disapproved. He found villagers like Jonas Horstead, the fiddler, who professed uneasy conscience but nevertheless had attended the ball. He was grieved when he found that Sarah Cooper was among them. When he expressed his grief, Sarah said, “I was miserable all the while and always wished from the first not to have anything to do with the school under Sir John. But he came to me saying, “I know Mr. Andrew does not agree with me that balls are not wrong. I see no wrong and I myself join in the dance. Besides, remember you are now my schoolmistress, not his.” ” This at least was Sarah’s account of her fall, and Andrew found it impossible to be cross with one so penitent and unhappy. He bore his testimony against the pomps and vanities of the world, and took his leave.’

Andrew’s diary
5 January 1842 [while Boileau was away]
‘Drew tooth for old Mrs. Roberts. It was singular that I went round to Ketteringham for the purpose of extracting it and I found her in great pain, upon which I drew from my pocket a pair of pincers which caused the poor old woman to shake and she begged I would use a piece of thread, I at last broke it off which perhaps was better than extracting the fangs.’

16 July 1843
‘Preached from Joshua ii and Jeremiah ii 37 latter part. Good congregation. Boileaus returned, very courteous. But before Mrs. Andrew reached the church they had ordered the first and second classes of girls into their pew, when my dear Ellen properly countermanded the order saying she was manager of the Sabbath School. How much they strive for mastery, but not lawfully. They aim at supremacy.’


The Diary Junction