Ackerley and his women

‘Today Queenie bit my hand. I do believe she was horrified as soon as the accident occurred. She grovelled on the pavement before I had rebuked her; no doubt she both tasted and smelt the blood that was dripping from my hand. I was angry and upset and gave her a number of cuts from the lead. [. . .] Indeed, she loves me so much, it must have been dreadful for her to have hurt me.’ This is the celebrated mid-20th century English writer, J. R. Ackerley - born 130 years ago today - writing in his diary about his dog, who he counted as one of his three women (the others being his sister and an aunt) and his closest friend for 15 years!

Ackerley was born on 4 November 1896 in Herne Hill, south London, the younger son of a fruit importer and an actress, who married in 1919. He attended Rossall School in Fleetwood, Lancashire. The First World War delayed his studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he took a third in English in 1921. He served as an officer in the 8th Battalion, East Surrey Regiment. He was wounded twice, taken prisoner in 1917 and later transferred to Mürren, Switzerland, as part of a prisoner exchange. His older brother, Peter, was killed in action in 1918.

After Cambridge, Ackerley moved to London and wrote poetry. In 1922, E. M. Forster wrote to him after reading his poem Ghosts, and the two became close friends. At Forster’s suggestion, Ackerley went to India in 1924 and spent five months as secretary to the Maharaja of Chhatarpur. His experiences there provided the material for his comic memoir Hindoo Holiday. His play The Prisoners of War, based on his wartime internment, was first staged in 1925. In 1928 he joined the BBC’s Talks department, and from 1935 to 1959 he was literary editor of The Listener, where he championed writers including Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.

In his early thirties, Ackerley discovered that his recently deceased father had led a double life, supporting a second household with three daughters. Ackerley took on financial responsibility for his sister, Nancy, and his elderly aunt, Bunny. He lived openly as a gay man and searched unsuccessfully for what he called his ‘Ideal Friend’. Around the age of 50 he acquired an Alsatian named Queenie, who became his closest companion for the next 15 years. He called the day she died the saddest of his life. He wrote about her in My Dog Tulip (1956) and fictionalised how he acquired her in We Think the World of You (1960). He completed My Father and Myself shortly before his death in 1967. It was published posthumously the following year.  Further information is available at Wikipedia, Gay History and Literature, The New Yorker, and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Ackerley drew on his Indian diaries for Hindoo Holiday, a carefully worked journal that Eliot Weinberger described as ‘as perfectly constructed as A Passage to India’. First published in 1932, the book was reissued in 1952 with some cuts restored. The first unexpurgated edition appeared in India in 1979. New York Review Books published the unexpurgated text in 2000 with an introduction by Weinberger.

In 1982, Hutchinson published My Sister and Myself: The Diaries of J. R. Ackerley, edited by Francis King. In his introduction, King explains that Ackerley left him a large brown paper parcel containing 17 small notebooks and five larger ones, with no instructions about what to do with them. After Nancy’s death, King drew on the smaller notebooks for My Sister and Myself, its title echoing Ackerley’s My Father and Myself. Most of the entries he omitted, King says, were about Queenie, Ackerley’s walks on Putney Heath and his travels around London. ‘What I have concentrated on in this selection is the extraordinary relationship between Joe and what he would call, in the tones of a sultan speaking of his often refractory harem, “my women”: meaning by that not merely Nancy and his ancient, twice-married Aunt Bunny, but also the Alsatian bitch.’

‘At the time covered by these diaries,’ King summarises, ‘Joe’s and Nancy’s symbiosis was a ghastly caricature of the kind of marriage, devoid of sex, that is held together merely by feelings of obligation, pity and guilt. But, as in many marriages, the two participants, exhausted by their conflicts, eventually reached an understanding and even mutually helpful modus vivendi.’ Here are several extracts from My Sister and Myself.

30 September 1948
‘Today Queenie bit my hand. I do believe she was horrified as soon as the accident occurred. She grovelled on the pavement before I had rebuked her; no doubt she both tasted and smelt the blood that was dripping from my hand. I was angry and upset and gave her a number of cuts from the lead. Then I took her back to the flat so that I could bathe and bandage the wound. She went straight down the passage into my dark bedroom and stayed there, not coming out again for some time, which she would ordinarily have done, hearing me moving about (in search of bandages, scissors, etc.) outside. It was only when I had finished attending to my wound and, feeling slightly faint, sat down for a moment on the stool in the bathroom to rest, that she came in, looking very unhappy, and, gently putting her front paws on my lap, rose up, smelt my face and then licked it. I petted her and said it didn't matter. I felt awfully sorry I'd hit her. After that I took her down the towing path a short way, so that she could do her shits. There were dogs about so I put her on the lead, but they followed us back to my front door, Queenie barking at them and then looking up into my face as though to say, ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’ Indeed, she loves me so much, it must have been dreadful for her to have hurt me.’

14 February 1949
‘A dreadful, dreadful week of worry and self-torment. I have not been able to sleep at night without aspirins, and only patchily then. It has gradually emerged, from phone conversations with Brodie, that Nancy’s present condition is little better than that of a lunatic, that she can hardly walk or hold her water, has gone quite out of her mind. She is having this electrical convulsion treatment. Dr Brodie would not let me see her; he told me that he would send me word when I might go if I would keep in touch with him.

Alas, in my guilty mind, I see what happened as surely as though I had deliberately willed it to come to pass. She has been accusing me lately of never being the same, as always being different whenever she sees me; and of course it is true. I am deeply attached to her, my sister, in my way, and in emergencies, when I am deeply touched by her, or frightened for her, as when I took my letter down to Worthing after Haywards Heath, or burst into tears in Worthing Hospital, or saw her, so gentle and sweet in Chichester, I can love her and am ready to do or promise anything. But then I leave her, and remember the past, and become worried and anxious, and see, for instance, old Bunny, quietly and uncomplainingly packing up her gear to go and live elsewhere, and my consideration and affection or feeling turn elsewhere, or simply withdraws, and Nancy sees it going, and feels it gone.’

14 March 1949
‘Graylingwell again yesterday. And I was astounded by the improvement which Nancy showed since I last saw her. She walked in, not altogether steadily, but by herself and sat with me, and conversed in a comparatively sensible way. Though still vague in many respects, she was now in possession of much of her mind. She asked for some money, complained about the food, and seemed to expect to be able to come and join me quite soon. Some of her luggage, she said, was missing, and she was concerned about that. She asked after my health, and seemed to take an interest in my replies. Her head was still too heavy for her neck and hung forward rather, but she was altogether, excepting for a cold, a well woman compared with what she had been before. She had even written me a letter, which I had not then got, but have since received - uncertain in writing, and rather rambling in thought, but wonderfully encouraging. She said she was having insulin now every day except weekends. I asked her if she had had electrical treatment too; she said no, not to her knowledge.

Oh dear. What was it that sent her down and out at the Acre? What thought, what anxiety, what revulsion - if any? And when her mind is able soon to embrace once more all the problems of her life, will she come up against that thought, that anxiety again, and fade out once more? At the moment there seems no reason why she should not be with me in a week or two - as Dr Brodie prophesied.’

19 September 1949
‘I see there is a correspondence between tapeworms and my sister - perhaps women generally. Tapeworms are two or three yards long and composed of segments. A well-grown worm may consist of 800-900 segments. Each of these segments is hermaphrodite, and though it is not certain how fertilization occurs, it must sometimes be incestuous. A ripe segment, ready to fall off the end of the worm, contains 30,000-40,000 eggs, each already developed into a little six-hooked embryo and protected by a shell.

To the worm’s monstrous body is attached a blind and mouthless head no bigger than a pin’s, by a neck as thin as sewing cotton. But how aggressive it is, grappling itself to the wall of its host’s gut by four strong muscular suckers, and a circle of rose-thorn hooks to make doubly sure. What chance has one to get rid of a thing like that? As it lives a long time - probably its length of life is only limited by the death of the host. One man was known to keep the same tapeworm for thirty-five years. It is stubborn, resisting all attempts to get rid of it; even if you manage to get rid of the main body, the head remains and soon grows a new one, inch by inch. However, it takes no holidays, and Nancy is going off for one on Wednesday for three weeks. Bunny comes to take her place.’

4 March 1950
‘Never a dull moment, I think to myself when I look back over four years with Queenie. What a rare thing to be able to say of any relationship.

That is why one is never free from anxiety and fear. Life is so insecure. Happiness is so insecure. At any moment, some disaster. Now, travelling to Notts., I look at my watch and say, “She’s having a fine walk on Wimbledon Common with Nancy.” Then I think, Perhaps at this very moment she has been run over and is screaming in her death agony.

Georges [DuthuitJ said of dogs: “How sad and frustrating for them: never quite able to say, to convey, what they wish and try to convey.” Georges also said, about women: “Each one believes herself to be the centre of the cosmos.” ’

This article is a revised version of one first published on 4 November 2016.

The sieges of Limerick

‘This day also the French forces departed for Galway to the great satisfaction not only of the inhabitants, but of all the garrison that remained in town. They remained some time at Galway till ships came to carry them into France, thinking it impossible Limerick should hold out a siege, offering to lay wagers it would be taken in three days.’ This is John Stevens, who died three centuries ago today, writing in a diary about his time as a soldier in Ireland fighting for the Jacobite cause. Although he went on to settle in London and work for many years as a translator from Spanish and Portuguese, his diary remains an important primary source about the Jacobite war in Ireland and the siege of Limerick in 1690.

Stevens was born in London, in 1662 or thereabouts, the son of a page to Queen Catherine of Braganza. His mother may have been Spanish. He began a military career, and accompanied the second Earl of Clarendon to Dublin as one of his gentlemen-at-large when Clarendon was appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1685. Two years later Stevens was appointed collector of excise at Welshpool, for an area covering mid-Wales and the borders. As a Catholic and supporter of James II, he fled to France after the Glorious Revolution, and then travelled with the Jacobites to Ireland. In Dublin, though penniless, he eventually obtained a lieutenant’s commission in the regiment of Henry Fitzjames, Lord Grand Prior and an illegitimate son of James II, and served in the ensuing Jacobite war in Ireland.

By 1695, Stevens was back in London, where he settled down to write and make a living translating Portuguese and Spanish texts. Over the next 30 years or so he published over 20 translations, including a revision of Shelton’s version of Don Quixote. He also published a translation and abridgement of William Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum, a history of English religious houses, followed by two supplementary volumes. From 1712 to 1715, he was editor of the British Mercury. He died on 27 October 1726. Further biographical information can be found at Wikipedia, the out-of-copyright Dictionary of National Biography, or the modern Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (which requires log-in).

Stevens’s journal was not published until 1912, when Clarendon Press brought out The Journal of John Stevens, containing a brief account of the war in Ireland 1689-1691. The book’s editor, Rev. Robert H. Murray, explains the diary’s history and its previous use by historians in his long introduction. He also notes that the manuscript he consulted (now held by the British Library) was not itself the original journal, kept day by day, but a version written up afterwards from daily notes. And although the diary is ‘barren of some personal details’, Murray adds, ‘it is a very human document indeed.’ It is plain, he says, that a scholar like the author did not relish his life as a soldier: ‘He is conscious of the mistakes of his generals, of the loss of promotion, of the lack of pay, of the blisters on his feet, and of the hunger in his stomach.’

Stevens’s journal is considered a major primary source of information about the Jacobite war in Ireland, and, in particular, about the siege of Limerick in 1690. The surviving text breaks off during his account of the battle of Aughrim in July 1691, before the second siege. See, for example, And So Began the Irish Nation by Brendan Bradshaw; Jacobite Ireland, 1685-91 by J. G. Simms; The Williamite Wars in Ireland by John Childs; or Conquest and Resistance: War in Seventeenth-Century Ireland by Pádraig Lenihan. The journal itself is freely available online at Internet Archive or the CELT website hosted by University College Cork. Here are several extracts.

2 July 1690
‘At break of day those few drums there were beat as formally as if we had been a considerable body, but it was only mere form and we scarce the shadows of regiments, the bodies being dispersed and gone. What was left in dismal manner marched as far as Dublin, where when each commanding officer came to view his strength, shame of marching in such case through the city we not long before had filled with expectation of our actions and hopes of gathering part of the scattered herd caused us to halt in the fields without the town. The colours of each regiment being fixed on eminences that all stragglers might know whither to repair, in the space of near three hours each regiment had gathered a small number, the Grand Prior’s as one of the most considerable being then 100 strong. Thus we marched through the skirts of the city, passing over the river at the Bloody Bridge, which is the farthest off in the suburbs, being now only the remains of four regiments, the others being either quite dispersed or gone other ways, we halted again in a field at Kilmainham, a hamlet adjoining to the city. The general opinion was that we were to encamp in the park till such time as our men came up, and what forces had not been in the rout as also the militia should join us, and then either maintain the city, or, if it were judged expedient, give the enemy battle, which gave occasion to some of our small number to steal away into town thinking they might soon be back with us. But about noon we were all undeceived, the other three regiments having orders to march, and ours only left there without any or knowing whence to expect them. Being thus left by all our lieutenant-colonel marched us away, which we did not hold above a quarter of an hour when we were reduced to only twenty men with the colours. On the road we overtook the Lord Kilmallock’s Regiment, which was untouched, being quartered in Dublin when the defeat at the Boyne. The whole day was a continual series of false alarms, the greatest reached us within two miles of the Naas, where Kilmallock’s officers attempting to draw up their men to line the hedges, the confusion and terror of the soldiers who had never seen the enemy was such they were forced in all haste to march away, It was ridiculous to see the brother of the traitor O’Donnell who had the name of lieutenant-colonel reformed in our regiment, pretend to take authority upon him here, and order us to line the hedges, when at that time our whole strength was but six musketeers, eight pikes, four ensigns, and one lieutenant besides myself, to this was that but the day before hopeful regiment reduced, and yet not one of the number killed, unless they perished who were left drunk when we fled which were four or five. For our comfort no enemy was within twenty miles of us, but fear never thinks itself out of danger. We followed Kilmallock’s men with such speed it had been hard for an enemy to overtake us, and that regiment though till then untouched was in such a consternation that when they came to the Naas they were not 100 strong. Here being quite spent with marching two days without rest or food I used my utmost endeavours to persuade O’Donnell, who as I said pretended to act as lieutenant-colonel, to take up quarters for the few men that were left, to refresh them that night, and be the better able to march next morning, but all in vain. The general infection had seized him and he fancied each minute he stayed was to him time lost and an opportunity given to the enemy to gain ground upon us. Therefore following the dictates of his fear he hasted away commanding all to follow him, but necessity pressing more than his usurped authority, I stayed a while in the town with an ensign who had a lame horse, and having refreshed ourselves with bread and drink which was all the town afforded, we followed both on the same lame creature five miles to Kilcullen Bridge, where we could hear no news of our men, though they lay there that night. So inconsiderable was a regiment grown that it could not be heard of in a town where there are not above twenty or thirty houses and but three good ones. Here we took up for the remaining part of the night in a waste house, and rested the best we could till break of day.’

28 July 1690
‘We continued here. Brigadier Sarsfield marched away with the horse under his command who had quartered in the neighbourhood. At our setting out of Limerick there marched also four pieces of cannon and a body of horse and dragoons, all which took the way of Loughrea for the conveniency of the road which is hard and fit for draught, whereas the way the foot took (as I said before) was unfit for heavy carriages, but being the shorter was judged best for the foot, both for their ease and that they might the sooner relieve Athlone, which was thought to be pressed and in danger and by their coming might be strengthened the better to expect farther relief. But upon the news of the enemies quitting the siege, the foot marched back the easiest though the longest way, and where they could have quarters to refresh them.’

2 August 1690
‘Most of our horse and dragoons, some on the one side of the river some on the other, marched towards Athlone. This day also the French forces departed for Galway to the great satisfaction not only of the inhabitants, but of all the garrison that remained in town. They remained some time at Galway till ships came to carry them into France, thinking it impossible Limerick should hold out a siege, offering to lay wagers it would be taken in three days. Immediately upon their departure His Grace the Duke of Tyrconnel ordered it to be proclaimed that no person should presume to ask above thirty shillings for a pistole, thirty-eight shillings for a guinea and seven and sixpence for a crown in silver, pistoles before being sold for five pounds in brass and silver crowns for thirty or forty shillings. Nay this day the French marched out some of them gave a crown for each silver three-halfpenny piece.’

29 August 1690
‘The enemy’s cannon played as before and enlarged the breach to above forty paces. At the bridge one shot cut both the chains of the drawbridge and did some other damage but not of much moment, because the enemy’s battery had not a full view of it, and their shot came slanting towards one end, yet the passage was very dangerous. The Grand Prior’s detachments were all relieved this afternoon except that where I commanded, which continued in the same place till night, when being relieved we only marched into the street, and having joined the rest of the regiment to the trenches on the south-west side of the town, where we continued all night expecting an attack. The night was extreme cold, dark and rainy and we almost spent for want of rest. For my own particular as appears by this relation I had had none at all for three nights before this and but very little during the whole siege, nor indeed was it possible to have much being upon duty every other day and continually alarmed when we expected to rest. Our cannon and small shot fired the whole night round the walls, and much railing was betwixt our men and the enemies, for we were so closed up on all sides that though the night was stormy we could easily hear one another.’

This article is a revised version of one first published on 27 October 2016.

The Theresienstadt Diaries

The Theresienstadt Diaries, by Pavel Fischl, is published in the UK today. Fischl, later known as Gabriel Dagan, survived both Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, and became an actor, writer and psychotherapist in Israel. His wartime notebooks survived separately, passing between prisoners before being returned to him after the war. Decades later, their rediscovery by his son Michael led to their publication.

Fischl was born in Hradec Králové, Czechoslovakia, in 1922. His parents died before the war, and his siblings escaped from occupied Prague. In 1941, aged nineteen, he was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where he worked, performed in plays and wrote. He was subsequently sent to Auschwitz. After the war, he returned to Prague, studied theatre with E. F. Burian and worked in radio.

In 1949, Fischl fled the communist regime for Israel. Under the name Gabriel Dagan, he worked as an actor, playwright, screenwriter and director. During the 1960s, he studied psychotherapy in New York, and continued practising until his death in 2008.

Before his deportation to Auschwitz, Fischl entrusted his notebooks to a friend. They passed from prisoner to prisoner, eventually reaching a woman who brought them to his door in Prague after the war. In 2023, Michael discovered them while going through his parents’ home. They revealed aspects of his father’s life he had not previously known.

Published by Bokförlaget Stolpe, The Theresienstadt Diaries brings together the diaries and a short novel about Fischl’s experiences in Auschwitz and the subsequent death march. The diary writings cover 1941-1943 and include poems and prose drafts alongside his personal reflections. The English diary edition has introductions by Michael Dagan and the Czech scholar Michaela Rozov, with an afterword by historian Ulf Zander.

Notes from the Genocide

‘On this day last year, Israel killed my grandmother, my uncle and his wife, their sons and grandchildren, and my other uncle, his wife, and their three children, and my aunt. Israel targeted the house they had fled to with three F-16 rockets.’ This is from the harrowing diary - published in Britain earlier this year - kept by a young Palestinian doctor, Ezzideen Shehab, in 2024 and 2025. Subtitled Notes from the Genocide in Gaza, Shehab’s book bears witness to the destruction everywhere around him, as well as to the intensity of his own professional and family losses. 

Ezzideen Shehab was born in 1995 and grew up in Jabalia, northern Gaza. He attended Arafat Gifted Secondary School before studying medicine at the University of Isfahan in Iran. On 2 October 2023, he returned to Gaza, where his family gathered to celebrate his qualification. Within days, he was treating casualties of the war; on 11 October, dozens of members of his extended family were killed in an Israeli airstrike. He volunteered for more than eight months at the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, treating severely injured patients amid bombardment and shortages of medicines and equipment.

In December 2024, Shehab helped establish the Al-Rahma Medical Clinic, working with fellow healthcare professionals to provide free treatment in northern Gaza. Repeatedly damaged, the clinic was forced to close in July 2025. By then, he and his family had been displaced five times, their home destroyed. Alongside his medical work, he recorded his experiences and shared accounts of his patients and daily life online. In an interview with the student newspaper Honi Soit, he described medicine and writing as mutually sustaining: treating people gave him hope, while writing helped him find the clarity to continue working.

His Diary of a Young Doctor: Notes from the Genocide in Gaza was published in Australia by Readers and Writers Against the Genocide in November 2025; Scribe issued the 192-page British edition on 12 March 2026. Its dated entries combine accounts of medical work with bereavement, displacement and the struggle for food and water. The writing moves between precise observations and anguished reflection, preserving individual lives and encounters within the wider destruction. See Kill Your Darlings for a few extracts, and Googlebooks for a preview.

11 August 2024

‘Today was one of the most terrifying and exhausting days at the hospital, as we received dozens of bodies. Others were severely injured with amputations and severe burns, and there were heaps of flesh from those who could not be identified. Some patients arriving in a state that defies description. I never imagined in my life that I would witness such a scene; the pain and sorrow are overwhelming me, and the sight is beyond what any human can bear. Amidst this destruction, I felt helpless and powerless in the face of all the lives we lost. Today was a nightmare that will never be erased from my memory.’

28 August 2024

‘We are just forty-eight days away from a whole year of genocide in Gaza. Read that again: A whole year! How can the world stand idly by as a whole generation of Palestinians is erased? The clock is ticking, and with each passing day, more innocent lives are lost.’

11 October 2024

‘On this day last year, Israel killed my grandmother, my uncle and his wife, their sons and grandchildren, and my other uncle, his wife, and their three children, and my aunt. Israel targeted the house they had fled to with three F-16 rockets. They were trapped under the rubble, and the search for them continued in the hope that they might be alive for two consecutive days. Some of them, we haven’t found to this day. It was a dark day in our family’s memory. A year has passed, and I still can’t believe they are gone.’

2 April 2025

‘We have descended into a kind of existence where the sun rises not to awaken the living but to expose the damned. Our days are rituals of humiliation, long lines for water, a single container passed like a holy relic among the parched, as if thirst were a sacrament now. The water trucks hadn’t come for three days, and when at last they did, the line stretched endlessly. My brother and I waited in that dust-heavy silence, and all we could fill was one gallon - one - enough, perhaps, for a single day, if we are careful, if we are lucky.

And bread, what a tragic word. Once a symbol of life, now reduced to a memory my mother resurrects through smoke and exhaustion, kneeling at the clay oven as if begging the fire for mercy. We went looking for flour, foolishly perhaps, still possessed by the hope that something might remain. A twenty-five-kilo sack, once 25 shekels, now 400. The price of bread is now the price of despair, the cost of feeding a family now measured in the currency of cruelty. We stood there, not even angry, just hollow. Not because we were noble, but because even rage had abandoned us.

The news, when I dared to read it, was another layer of despair: a chorus of distant screams translated into headlines. And when I tried to withdraw my own money, the system - what remains of it - asked for forty percent to convert it into cash. As if desperation were something to be taxed.

Now the planes return. Their scream is no longer terrifying, it is familiar. It is the lullaby of ruin. They rip through the sky not with intent but with hunger. I feel it in my bones: tonight they will take again. And still, absurdly, we breathe. That is the miracle. That is the punishment. This is not life. This is the theatre of divine abandonment, a test with no answers, a fire with no light. And we, the scorched, keep pretending we are not ash.’

Bassompierre in London

The dashing nobleman, François de Bassompierre, a one-time favourite of King Henry IV of France who later fell out with Cardinal Richelieu, died 380 years ago today. He left behind memoirs of his life and accounts of his diplomatic missions, including an embassy to England undertaken four centuries ago this autumn. His account of that visit, translated into English in 1819, offers lively glimpses of the court of Charles I.

François de Bassompierre was born in 1579 into an aristocratic family at the Château de Haroué in Lorraine (now France). He was educated with his brothers in Bavaria and Italy, and, in 1598, was introduced to the court of Henry IV, where he became a favourite of the king. As a young man, he took part in military campaigns in Savoy in 1600 and in Hungary against the Turks in 1603. He supported Marie de’ Medici against the nobles in 1614, but sided with Louis XIII against her supporters in 1620. His service against the Huguenots earned him promotion to marshal of France in 1622, and he subsequently participated in the siege of La Rochelle in 1628. He was sent to raise troops in Switzerland when Louis XIII marched against Savoy in 1629.

Bassompierre also served as a diplomat. In 1621, he went to Madrid to settle a dispute concerning the seizure of the Valtelline forts by Spain. In 1625, he was dispatched to Switzerland, and a year later (400 years ago this autumn) to London, to negotiate over Charles I’s dismissal of the French Catholic clergy and attendants serving his wife, Henrietta Maria. Bassompierre was secretly married to Louise Marguerite, widow of François, prince de Conti, and a close friend of Marie de’ Medici. His connections with the queen mother’s faction aroused Richelieu’s suspicions, and he was imprisoned in the Bastille from 1631 until 1643, the year after the cardinal’s death. His offices were restored on his release, but he died a few years later, on 12 October 1646. Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica have further biographical information, largely drawn from the out-of-copyright 1911 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.

Bassompierre’s memoirs, written during his imprisonment, were first published in 1665 and have been reissued many times since. Accounts of his diplomatic missions to Spain, Switzerland and England followed posthumously in 1668. The English embassy account appeared in John Wilson Croker’s translation as Memoirs of the Embassy of the Marshal de Bassompierre to the Court of England in 1626, published by John Murray in 1819. Both the French memoirs and the English translation can be read freely at Internet Archive. Here are several extracts.

15 October 1626
‘Thursday the 15th, on which the Earl of Britswater came with the king’s coaches to fetch me to Hampton Court; then the duke shewed me into a gallery, where the king was waiting for me, who gave me a long audience and well disputed. He put himself into a great passion, and I, without losing my respect to him, replied to him in such wise, that, at last, yielding him something, he conceded a great deal to me. I witnessed there an instance of great boldness, not to say impudence, of the Duke of Boukinkam, which was, that when he saw us the most warmed, he ran up suddenly and threw himself between the king and me, saying, “I am come to keep the peace between you two.” Upon which I took off my hat, and as long as he staid with us I would not put it on again, notwithstanding all the intreaties of the king and of himself to do so; but when he went I put it on without the king’s desiring me. When I had done, and that the duke could speak to me, he asked me why I would not put on my hat  while he was by, and that I did so, so freely, when he was gone. I answered that I had done it to do him honour, because he was not covered and that I should have been, which I could not suffer; for which he was much pleased with me, and often mentioned it in my praise. But I had also another reason for doing so, which was, that it was no longer an audience, but a private conversation, since he had interrupted us, by coming in, as a third, upon us. After my last audience was over, the king brought me through several galleries to the queen’s apartments, where he left me, and I her, after a long conversation; and I was brought back to London by the same Earl of Britswater.’

16 October 1626
‘Friday, the 16th, I was to see the Earl of Holland sick at Inhimthort. The king and queen returned to London. M. de Soubise came to see me. Afterwards the duke sent to beg of me to come to Sommerset, where we were more than two hours disputing about our business.’

17 October 1626
‘Saturday, the 17th, I went to make my bow to the queen at Withal, and to give her an account of my conference of the day before with the duke.’

18 October 1626
‘Sunday the 18th. I was visited by the secretary, Couvai, who came to speak to me from the king.’

20 October 1626
‘Tuesday, 20. Viscount Hamelton (Wenbleton) and Goring came to dine with me. After dinner I was heard at the council, and on my return the Venetian ambassador came to visit me.’

21 October 1626
‘Wednesday, 21st. I wrote a despatch to the King (of France). I was to see the queen, and afterwards to confer with the duke in Sommerset (House).’

22 October 1626
‘Thursday, 22d. I was in the morning to see the ambassador of Danemark. The duke, with the Earls of Carlile and Holland and Montaigne, came to dine with me; I  saw, en passant, the ambassador of the States on business, then I was to the queen’s, and that evening at Madame D’Estranges.’

23 October 1626
‘Friday, 23d. I was to see the Earl of Carlile and the Venetian ambassador.’

24 October 1626
‘Saturday, 24th. I was to see the queen where the king came, with whom she pick’d a quarrel. The king took me to his chamber, and talked a great deal with me, making me complaints of the queen, his wife.’

25 October 1626
‘Sunday, 25. The Earls of Pembrac and Montgomery came to see me, then I went for the duke, whom I took to the queen’s, who made his peace with her; which I had brought about with infinite trouble. The king came in afterwards, and he also was reconciled with her, and caressed her very much - thanked me for having reconciled the duke and his wife - then took me to his chamber, where he  showed me his jewels, which are very fine.’

26 October 1626
‘Monday, 26th. I was, in the morning to see the ambassador of Danemark; after dinner I went to the queen at Sommerset, and fell out with her.’

27 October 1626
‘Tuesday, 27th. The Duke, the Earls of Dorset, Carlile, Holland, Montaigu, and Goring, came to dine with me. I went afterwards to see the Earl of Pembroc and Carleton. In the evening I had a courrier from France.’

28 October 1626
‘Wednesday, 28th. I was at Withal in the morning to speak with the duke and Secretary Couvai, because the king was going to Hampton-Court. After dinner I went to see the queen at Sommerset, with whom I made it up. In the evening the duke and Earl of Holland took me to sup at Antonio Porter’s, who was entertaining Dom Augustin Fiesco, Marquis of Piennes, the Chevallier de Jars, and Gabellin. After supper we had music.’

29 October 1626
‘Thursday, 29th. In the morning I had visits from the Earl of Holland and the Earl of Carlile. After dinner I went to see the ambassador of Holland.’

30 October 1626
‘Friday, the 30th. I was to see the queen at Sommerset, and the duke at Valinfort. The resident of the king of Bohemia came to sup with me.’

31 October 1626
‘Saturday, last day of October. The ambassador of Danemark came to see me, and afterwards I came to see Madame D’Etrange.’

1 November 1626
‘Sunday, the 1st of November, and All Saints Day. I performed my devotions, and afterwards was to see the Duchess of Lennox and Secretary Couvai. A council was held to-day for my business.’

This article is a revised version of one first published on 12 October 2016.

Looking for a snowbow

Benjamin Banneker, a free black American who not only worked his own tobacco farm but was a self-taught astronomer and mathematician, died 220 years ago today. He is remembered today for a series of almanacs he wrote in the 1790s - an extraordinary achievement for a black man at the time - and for writing to Thomas Jefferson about racial equality and the abolition of slavery. He kept a diary as well as astronomical notebooks, but most of his personal papers were destroyed in a fire at the time of his funeral, though one journal and a few other papers survived. The surviving journal shows that Banneker was not only mathematical, philosophical and self-analytical, but he was a keen observer of nature. Several entries record dreams, in another he writes about the periodic cycle of cicadas, and in another he jokes about looking for a snowbow.

Banneker was born in 1731, in Baltimore County, Maryland. His parents were black, and his father was a freed slave. Some biographers believe that his grandmother, on his mother’s side, may have purchased his grandfather, then a slave, set him free, and then married him. Aged 6, Banneker was named on the deed of his family’s 100-acre tobacco farm in the Patapsco River valley, where he lived for most of his life. He received some elementary schooling, probably at a local Quaker school, but was largely self-taught. Somehow he learned to read, write, to play several musical instruments, and in his early 20s he crafted a wooden clock by observing the mechanics of a pocket watch. His father died in 1759.

A decade or so later, the Ellicott family - also Quakers - moved into the area, and began building mills along the Patapsco. Banneker supplied the workers with food, studied the workings of the mills, and became friendly with several of the Ellicotts. In 1788 - in his mid-50s - he began to study astronomy with books and instruments borrowed from George Ellicott, who was also interested in the subject. In 1791, at the invitation of George’s cousin Major Andrew Ellicott, Banneker joined, for a few months, a surveying team that was setting the boundaries for the new federal capital.

By 1792, Banneker had become so knowledgeable that he felt able to write and publish an astronomical almanac based on his own painstakingly-calculated ephemeris and which included solar and lunar eclipse predictions - Benjamin Banneker’s Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris, for the Year of Our Lord, 1792. It sold well, and quickly went into a second edition. Annual almanacs followed each year until 1797.

Banneker was well aware of his unusual position as a black man contributing to the sciences, and he used his almanacs to further his political views on the abolition of slavery and racial equality. He also engaged in a correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, who himself owned many slaves, and would soon become the third President of the US. Banneker never married. In his last years, he sold much of his farmland to the Ellicotts, but continued to live in his log cabin, where he died on 9 October 1806. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, PBS, or Bio.com, and from a Memoir of Benjamin Banneker by John Latrobe.

On the day of Banneker’s funeral, a fire, of unknown origin, burned the cabin, destroying many of his belongings and papers, including most of his journals and notebooks. However, one astronomical journal, a day book and a few papers survived. These were left to George Ellicott, and by the mid-19th century had been deposited with the Maryland Historical Society (now the Maryland Center for History and Culture) where they were bound together. Subsequently, the bound copy was returned to the Ellicotts, and remained hidden until 1987, when it was again given to the historical society. Some extracts from this can be found in Latrobe’s memoir about Banneker - as follows:

‘Besides his aptitude for mechanics,’ Latrobe writes, ‘and his ability as a mathematician, Banneker was an acute observer, whose active mind was constantly receiving impulses from what was taking place around him. Many instances of this are to be found in the record of his calculations, which he seems to have used occasionally as a common-place book. For instance, under date of the 27th August, 1797, he writes: “Standing at my door I heard the discharge of a gun, and in four or five seconds of time, after the discharge, the small shot came rattling about me, one or two of which struck the house; which plainly demonstrates that the velocity of sound is greater than that of a cannon bullet.” It must have been a philosophic mind, which observing the fact as here stated, drew from it the correct conclusion, and then recorded it in appropriate terms as a simple and beautiful illustration of the law of nature, with which, in all probability, he first became acquainted through its means.

Again on the 23d December, 1790, he writes: “About 3 o’clock, A.M. I heard the sound and felt the shock like unto heavy thunder. I went out but could not observe any cloud above the horizon. I therefore conclude it must be a great earthquake in some part of the globe.” A similar conclusion from the same facts was drawn by a greater man than Banneker near eighteen hundred years before, and recorded to be commented on in after ages.

Nor was Banneker’s observation confined to matters of a philosophical character. There is evidence in the memoranda of his record book that natural history was equally interesting to him. The following, independent of its connection with the subject of our memoir, possesses general interest as an authentic statement by an eye-witness of a curious fact in entomology. In April, 1800, he writes: “The first great locust year that T can remember was 1749. I was then about seventeen years of age, when thousands of them came and were creeping up the trees and bushes. I then imagined they came to eat and destroy the fruit of the earth, and would occasion a famine in the land. I therefore began to kill and destroy them, but soon saw that my labour was in vain, and therefore gave over my pretension. Again in the year 1766, which is seventeen years after their first appearance, they made a second, and appeared to me to be full as numerous as the first. I then, being about thirty-four years of age, had more sense than to endeavour to destroy them, knowing they were not so pernicious to the fruit of the earth as I imagined they would be. Again in the year 1783, which was seventeen years since their second appearance to me, they made their third; and they may be expected again in the year 1800, which is seventeen years since their third appearance to me. So that if I may venture to express it, their periodical return is seventeen years: but they, like the comets, make but a short stay with us. The female has a sting in her tail as sharp and hard as a thorn, with which she perforates the branches of the trees, and in the holes lays eggs. The branch soon dies and falls. Then the egg, by some occult cause immerges a great depth into the earth, and there continues for the space of seventeen years as aforesaid.” [. . .]

The last extract we shall make from the record book is one which indicates a relish for the beautiful in nature, as well by his undertaking to record a description of what he saw, as by the language which he uses. The extract is from the last pages of the book, when he was in his seventy-first year. His writing is still distinct, but the letters have lost their firmness, and shew that his hand trembled as it held the pen.

“1803, Feb. 2d. In the morning part of the day, there arose a very dark cloud, followed by snow and hail, a flash of lightning and loud thunder crack; and then the storm abated until afternoon, when another cloud arose at the same point, viz: the north-west, with a beautiful shower of snow. But what beautified the snow was the brightness of the sun, which was near setting at the time. I looked for the rainbow, or rather snowbow, but I think the snow was of too dense a nature to exhibit the representation of the bow in the cloud.” ’

The Maryland Historical Society blog, Underbelly, gives a brief description of Banneker’s journal: ‘Some of the more remarkable pages in this ledger show graphic projections for solar and lunar eclipses. In addition to these formulas there are also practical descriptions of how Banneker obtained the geocentric latitudes of planets, the movements of stars, and the different quarters of the moon in every day language. This journal is much more than a mathematical ledger though - its contents give a much fuller glimpse of who Banneker was as a person. It is interspersed with accounts of his day-to-day life, including descriptions of his interactions with his neighbors and friends the Ellicotts, close encounters with armed intruders on his property, descriptions of the a brood of 17-year cicada from 1749, and the most notable section, a copy of the correspondence between Benjamin Banneker and Thomas Jefferson. But in this writer’s opinion, the most unique contents of the journal are Banneker’s detailed descriptions of the dreams and nightmares that woke him in the night. A transcription of his mysterious dream accounts appear below in chronological order.’

The blog then quotes a few extracts, as follows:

5 December 1791
‘On the night of the fifth of December 1791, Being a deep Sleep, I dreamed that I was in a public Company, one of them demanded of me the limits of Rassanah Crandolph’s Soul had to display itself in, after it departed from her Body and taken its flight. In answer I desired that he show me the place of Beginning “thinking it like making a Survey of the Land.” He replied I cannot inform you but there is a man about three days journey from Hence that is able to satisfy your demand, I forthwith went to the man and requested of him to inform me place of beginning of the limits that Rasannah Crandolph’s soul had to display itself in, after the Seperation from her Body; who gave me answer, the Vernal Equinox, When I returned I found the Company together and I was able to Solve their Doubts by giving them the following answer Quincunx.’

13 December 1797
‘I Dreamed I saw some thing passing by my door to and fro, and when I attempted to go to the door, it would vanish and reapted [?] it twice or thrice, at length I let in the infernal Spirit and he told me that he had been concerned with a woman by the name of Beckey Freeman (I never heard the name as I remember) by some means we fell into a Skirmish, and I threw him behind the fire and endeavored to burn him up but all in vain- I know not what became of him but he was an ill formed being- Some part of him in Shape of a man, but hairy as a beast, his feet was circular or rather globular and did not exceed an inch and a half in diameter, but while I held him in the fire he said something respecting he was able to stand it, but I forget his words. B. Banneker’

24 April 1802
‘I dreamed I had a fawn or young deer; whose hair was white and like unto lamb’s wool , and all parts about it beautiful to behold. Then I said to myself I will set this little captive at liberty, but I will first clip the tips of his ear that I may know him if I should see him again. Then taking a pair of shears and cutting off the tip of one ear, and he cried like unto a child hath the pain which grieved him very much altho then I did not attempt to cut the other but was very sorry for that I had done I got him at liberty and he ran a considerable distance then he stopped and he looked back at me I advanced toward him, and he came and met me and I took a lock of wool from my garment and wiped the blood of wound which I had made on him (which sorely affected me) I took him in my arms and brought him home and hold him on my knees, he asked the Woman if she had any trust and she answered him in the affirmative and gave him Some, which he began to eat and then asked for milk in a cup She said the dog had got the cup with milk in it under the house but there is milk in the cupboard.

My dream left me. B. Banneker.’

24 April 1802
‘Being weary holing for corn, I laid down on my bed and fell into a deep sleep and dreamed I had a child in my arms and was viewing the back part of its head where it had been sore, and I found it was healed with a hole through the skin and Skull bone and came out at forehead, that I could see very distinctly through the child’s head the hole being large enough to receive an ordinary finger – I called some woman to see the strange sight, and she put her spectacles on and Saw it, and she asked me if I had previously lanced that place in the Child’s head, I answered in the affirmative.

N.B. the Child is well as any other.’

This article is a revised version of one first published on 9 October 2016.

Václav Havel as diarist

Václav Havel, the Czech political dissident and human rights activist who became the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic, would have been 90 today. He was also a playwright of some distinction, and, as a young man, used his plays to criticise the Communist regime. A few years before his death, he published a memoir which included a diary he kept during 2005; and in 2016 the Václav Havel Library published a previously unknown diary Havel had kept while in prison during 1977.

Havel was born in Prague on 5 October 1936 into an intellectual and wealthy family, though much of the family’s property was confiscated after the Communist takeover in 1948. Disallowed from studying humanities because of his bourgeois background, he worked as a lab technician before enrolling in the economics faculty at the Czech Technical University, though he dropped out after two years. Following military service in the late 1950s, he found work in the theatre and soon began writing plays, such as The Garden Party (Zahradní slavnost) and The Memo (Vyrozumění). At the same time, he became increasingly involved in literary and political life. In 1964, he married Olga Šplíchalová.

By the mid-1960s, Havel had become one of the leading figures at Prague’s Theatre on the Balustrade. He made a brief trip to the US for a production of The Memo in New York, which helped establish his international reputation. Back home, he was a prominent supporter of the liberal reforms of 1968, known as the Prague Spring. But following the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion in August, Havel’s plays were banned and his passport confiscated. He moved to live in the countryside, where he maintained his political activities, largely on behalf of human rights, and continued writing plays. He was a co-founder of Charter 77, and in 1978 wrote one of his best-known essays, The Power of the Powerless, which explored how individuals and civil society could resist a totalitarian system. It was secretly but widely circulated in Czechoslovakia and other Warsaw Pact countries. He was repeatedly arrested in the 1970s and 1980s, serving several years in prison, but resisted pressure to emigrate.

In late 1989, Havel, by then a leading figure in Civic Forum, emerged as one of the leaders of the Velvet Revolution. By unanimous vote of the Federal Assembly in December, he was elected President; and following the first free national elections for over 40 years in June 1990, in which Civic Forum and its Slovak counterpart Public Against Violence emerged victorious, the Federal Assembly re-elected him as president. He stepped down in 1992 as Czechoslovakia moved towards break-up, but was elected first president of the independent Czech Republic in early 1993. His wife died in 1996, and the same year he was diagnosed with lung cancer and underwent major surgery. He was re-elected president in 1998, though by this time, with most power vested in the prime minister’s office rather than the presidency, and amid various domestic controversies, he was more popular abroad than at home. He stepped down in 2003, having by then married the actress Dagmar Veškrnová.

Havel returned more fully to writing, producing a new play in 2008, which was enthusiastically received, and publishing a memoir of his time as president. Paul Wilson translated the latter, which was published in English, also in 2008, by Portobello Books under the title To the Castle and Back. Havel died in 2011, having received, from the early 1990s onwards, many state honours and international awards. Further information is available online from Wikipedia and many obituaries, for example the BBC, The Guardian and The New York Times.

Although Havel was not a committed diarist, or so it seems, he did keep a diary at different times in his life. In 2016, the Václav Havel Library published in facsimile a previously unknown diary he had kept in 1977 while in investigative custody following the launch of Charter 77. Entitled Zápisky obviněného (Notes of the Accused), it consists of fragmentary and often abbreviated entries made in an ordinary appointment diary between January and July 1977. Havel himself had apparently never mentioned its existence. It was discovered decades later among the papers of his friend and adviser Zdeněk Urbánek, when Urbánek’s grandson, David Dušek, was sorting through his grandfather’s estate. The facsimile was published with explanatory essays by Dušek, Anna Freimanová, Martin Palouš, Paul Wilson and Michael Žantovský.

Havel also kept a diary during 2005 while working on his memoir, To the Castle and Back. The book is made up of three elements: substantial extracts from dated memos to his staff during his time in office as president, answers to a series of interview questions, and sometimes lengthy extracts from his 2005 diary - see below for two such extracts. The book can also be previewed online at Amazon and Google Books.

29 April 2005
‘I have been to two more “political dinners” at Madeleine’s; many important people were there, such as the former secretary of defense William Cohen; the director of PBS, Mrs. Pat Mitchell; Senator Barbara Mikulski; the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, Mrs. Nancy Pelosi; the deputy secretary of state, Mr. Nicholas Bums; and many others. Many of them I had met on earlier occasions, others I had once been introduced to, but I had forgotten those earlier encounters. Madeleine, once again, moderated the discussion wonderfully; it was lively and spontaneous and exhausting, naturally. I had the constant feeling that I was speaking of things about which these people knew more than I did, and moreover I was doing so in a language I don’t know very well. Now that it’s over I’m glad I did it, and I’m grateful to Madeleine.

It’s paradoxical: every evening I meet with the most important people here, and then, during the day, I run afoul of banal American red tape. Yesterday, for example, we had to return our rental car and then turn right around and rent it again, even though we’d already paid for another month. I understand the thing itself - it’s an accounting matter. What I don’t understand is why the transaction consumed almost an entire, valuable American day. Standing at the window where all this took place, and where more and more complications kept surfacing, I found it hard not to lose my temper. My Czech pistoleer often uses a trick I don’t much like: he reveals who I am - if I’m not recognized, that is. But in this democratic country, favoritism is out of favor, and so the results are always the same: great delight that they’ve met me, great astonishment that I, of all people, have turned up here, of all places - and then an immediate return to the original situation. It doesn’t speed things up by even a minute. That was yesterday. I barely had time to change for dinner at Madeleine’s.

But that wasn’t the end of it; two unpleasant things happened this morning. The first was something I knew was bound to happen, that is, our Barnabas, Mr. Edler, was nowhere to be found, and so they wouldn’t let us into our parking spot. (Later the director of the Kluge Center had to sort things out himself at the entrance.) And the second thing was something I could not have known would happen, and which says something about the state of my memory. At the entrance to the library, where they put my bag through a scanner, they discovered a metal kitchen knife in it, which is not allowed. I expressed surprise and denied it, of course, because I’d completely forgotten that I’d put the knife in my bag that morning so I could spread jam on my roll. They searched the bag and I was caught red-handed. There was nothing to do but hope I wouldn’t be arrested, then go outside and toss the knife in the garbage. (Fortunately it was not made of silver.) I felt very silly.

I often can’t understand Americans when they speak, especially black Americans, and this is the source of many other embarrassing moments. Yesterday, for example, a young black man who was with me in the elevator told me how much he admired me and asked me for my autograph. Then he mumbled something I didn’t catch, though it was evidently a question. For the sake of simplicity, I replied, “Yes.” As soon as I’d spoken, I realized that he was asking me if I had written The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I couldn’t very well change my answer, and there was no escaping, so I had to remain in a state of embarrassment until the moment of liberation when our elevator arrived at the right floor. A truly Kunderian situation.’

28 November 2005
‘For the whole of September and October I never stopped. Yet what did I actually do? I visited several European countries, had a lot of meetings and visits and discussions, and made countless speeches - and all at a time of year when I’m usually under the weather. I’m quite surprised that I survived it all without any damage to my health. I’m at Hradecek once more, but there’s a lot of snow here now and the trees are beautifully cloaked in white. I’m really like a hermit here. (Hradecek is off by itself and my only neighbor is my friend Andrej Krob, who has a cottage nearby, but he’s not there now.) Yesterday I watched a thriller on television and then I realized that for the first time in my life I felt afraid here. The very thought that I might suddenly glimpse the movement of a human shadow gave me goose bumps and heart palpitations. I stopped getting the newspapers a while ago, and my news comes from television. I read the papers only when I happen across one. The last time that happened was several days ago on the plane from Budapest, when I discovered I was the subject of a scandal. The Czech media are up in arms because I have apparently supported our new prime minister. The whole thing obviously started a while ago, when he invited me for coffee, and as we were leaving we were waylaid by a journalist who asked me how I’d have gotten along with the current prime minister if I were still president. I said I thought we’d hit it off. By that I meant that I would not have been having constant public squabbles with the prime minister over how to interpret the constitution, as our current president does. I should have expressed myself more precisely or concretely, but still, why there should have been a controversy or even a scandal over this, I have no idea. But obviously I can’t understand everything.’

This article is a revised version of one first published on 5 October 2016.

V happy with E

‘Oh E, how can I live separated from you? What have I done to us? If I stopped caring, I should never care for anything. If I stopped fearing this, I should fear nothing again.’ This is Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat born 120 years ago today, writing in his diary - which he often did - of his love for the British writer Elizabeth Bowen. They lived very separate lives, often in different countries, and were both married, yet their passionate love for each other - documented in his diary and her letters - survived more than 30 years, indeed until Bowen’s death.

Ritchie was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 23 September 1906. His father, a lawyer and 25 years older than his mother, died when he was 10. He was educated at a series of schools, at least one in England, before moving on to spend a considerable amount of time at universities in Halifax, Oxford and Harvard. While still a teenager, he had received an unexpected letter from Sir Robert Borden, then Canada’s Prime Minister and his father’s former friend. In the letter, Borden explained that he was hoping to set up a Canadian foreign service, and he suggested that Ritchie might like to consider working there. Thus, in mid-1934, Ritchie joined the Department of External Affairs. His first posting abroad came in 1936, to Washington, and then in early 1939 he was transferred to London.

According to Ritchie (in The Siren Years - see below), wartime London was a forcing ground for love and friendship, and so it proved for himself. In 1941, he met and fell in love with the writer Elizabeth Bowen. She had been married for 18 years, and was seven years older than Ritchie who had never been married. Their relationship would last more than 30 years, for the rest of Bowen’s life, surviving the death of Bowen’s husband and Ritchie’s own marriage (to Sylvia Smellie), though they would never spend more than a week or so together at any one time. After the war, in the mid-1950s, Ritchie was promoted to ambassador in West Germany.

Subsequently, Ritchie served as Canada’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations (1958-1962), as ambassador in Washington (1962-1966), and as High Commissioner in London (1967-1971). On retiring he returned to Ottawa though he continued as a special adviser to the Privy Council. He also began editing his diaries for publication. He died in 1995. See Wikipedia, Bout de Papier, The Independent’s obituary, or this Robert Fulford article for more information.

The first collection of diary extracts Ritchie put together was published by Macmillan (as were all his diaries) in 1974 under the title The Siren Years: A Canadian Diplomat Abroad, 1937-1945 (later issued as Undiplomatic Diaries.) See Googlebooks for a preview and The Captive Reader for a review and extracts. An Appetite for Life: The Education of a Young Diarist, 1924-1927 followed in 1977 (see Googlebooks for a preview), as did Diplomatic Passport: More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962 in 1981, and Storm Signals: More Undiplomatic Diaries 1962-1971 in 1983. A compendium of the undiplomatic diaries was brought out in 2008 by McClelland & Stewart - see Amazon. Also in 2008, Simon & Schuster published Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Letters and Diaries, 1941-1973, as edited by Victoria Glendinning with Judith Robertson. See The Guardian for an article by Glendinning on her book.

In his foreword to The Siren Years, Ritchie explains how he came to be a diarist: ‘It was with adolescence that the diary addiction fixed its yoke on me - a yoke which in the succeeding fifty years I have never been able entirely to shake off, although there have been merciful intervals of abstinence. The habit had begun even earlier - had sprouted furtively when I was a schoolboy. Its seed was perhaps already sown when I would write on the front of school books, Charles Stewart Almon Ritchie, King’s Collegiate School, Windsor, Nova Scotia, Canada, North America, The World, The Universe, September 23rd, 1918, 3:17 p.m. - an early compulsion to fix myself in space and in time. Once given over to this mania there was no cure for it. With obstinate obsessiveness I continued to scribble away. Now the toppling piles of my old diaries are mountains of evidence against me, but I still postpone the moment to destroy them. Their writing and subsequent concealment were intentionally secretive - to have them discovered and read would have meant to be caught in the practice of “solitary vice.” ’

The following extracts from Ritchie’s diaries are all taken from Love’s Civil War except the first, which comes from The Siren Years.

28 September 1938.
‘We are now on the very edge of war. Already my feelings have changed since I last wrote. Perhaps I am already beginning to suffer from war blindness. I feel more and more part of my generation and my country and less an individual.

The war offers us no ideal worth dying for - we make no sacrifice for a noble cause. We fight with no faith in the future. It is too late to pretend (though we shall pretend) that we are defending the sanctity of international obligations or the freedom of individuals. We are fighting because we cannot go on any longer paying blackmail to a gangster. Whoever wins, we who belong to what we call “twentieth century civilization” are beaten before we start. We have had our chance since 1918 to make a more reasonable and safer world. Now we have to go and take our punishment for having missed that chance. We have willed the ends but we have not willed the means to attain those ends. That must be our epitaph.

Here in America it is “business as usual.” Tonight I have been listening to the radio for hours. It reflects the stream of normal American existence, the advertising, the baseball games, the swing music, but every few moments this stream is interrupted by a press bulletin from Europe. More mobilizations. Hitler may march before morning. These warnings from another world give Americans shivers down their spine, make them draw the curtains closer and huddle around their own fireside thanking God that they are safe from the storm outside.’

18 October 1941
‘My bed smells of her over-sweet violet scent. It is queer that she uses such an obvious scent - the perfume that goes with blondes and floating veils and sentiment . . .

I am reading The Death of the Heart in her special edition. It is an exact description of her house and of her husband. The position of the sofa in the drawing-room, the electric fire in his ‘study’ are all described exactly as they are. What is alarming is the husband is an unsparing portrait of A. I read this novel with most curious feelings as ‘a work of the imagination’; it has been destroyed for me by my knowledge of the particular circumstances. . . . She took that from here, she copied that turn of speech, that must be so-and-so, these thoughts go through my mind as I am reading. It is like eating an elaborate dish after seeing the materials of which it is made up lying about in the kitchen, or being so near the ballet that you can see the make-up.’

20 February 1947
‘V happy with E. We have spent the weekend huddled over the weak radiator and the whiskey bottle or on the enormous ‘made for love’ bed. It’s like life on board ship, we sally out on the windswept deck-like boulevards for a ‘blow’ and are glad to be back in this cabin-like flat - which more than anything else is like a suite on a luxury liner.’

16 October 1949 [Hotel de la Paix, Geneva]
‘To understand one’s own destiny, to have some framework in which to see this floating shifting mass of experience, to chart these currents, these shocks and depths and dangerous rocks, not to die without knowledge. Oh E, how can I live separated from you? What have I done to us? If I stopped caring, I should never care for anything. If I stopped fearing this, I should fear nothing again. . . In a dim way I like this feeling of being alone and taking up this monologue. I miss my wife. I want her. I am waiting for her. Yet this time of recuperation is quietly, sadly pleasant.’

9 February 1952
‘I think that part of my reaction of boredom and distaste for Spender’s book comes from being reminded by it of countless pages of similar self-absorption in my own diaries. When I first knew E, I was surprised and rather disconcerted by her lack of concern with her own ‘interesting personality’. I found it difficult to accept when she, the leading psychological novelist of the day, told me that she was not interested in people and their motives and characters. I now understand what she meant. The exercise no longer amuses me. In fact it is only from obstinacy that I write this private diary at all.’

18 August 1952
‘With me love for a woman is always linked with a need to betray that love; a compulsion which I dread and desire. But there are times when that interminable dialogue of marriage seems interminable. It gives one a feeling of pure pain to think that it must go on and on and on. I am pretty sure that I should feel that whoever I had married.’

17 June 1956
‘Sad, lonely, undemanding letter from E. The truth is that I am anaesthetized to this existence, even quite enjoy it. Someone said I look ten years younger. I am all right if I keep going - much more cheerful than this diary shows.’

11 March 1957
‘I cannot describe the state I was in yesterday (can it have been only yesterday?) when I flew back from Ireland - the hallucinatory depression, the complete undermining of all confidence, the corroding guilt and sorrow. I never expected to feel all this again. E says that it is a ‘natural’ consequence of our parting, but it went much deeper than that. . . She says she can’t bear to think of me sealed away from life. I can’t bear to think of that myself, and it is true; but if that last day is life, can I bear it? She says she feels it is some deficiency in her love which drove me to it, but isn’t it some deficiency in me? No, this strain was too great. I cannot forgive myself for my impatience, my unlovingness, my dry irritability, my inability to accept. Yet I can entirely forgive myself. I understand and must never forget that all my cut and dried plans are the amusement of a bored man and bear no relation to reality. No, it was heart-breaking. How can I bear the memory of that last morning at the Shelbourne. How can I ever forget it. Surely I can’t go on as I did before, yet I feel that is just what I will do; that the scales will form over my eyes, that merciful banality will set me off from life in my Cologne Nursing Home. Oh Elizabeth!’

The Diary Junction

The king of Madagascar

Maurice Benyovszky, later Count de Benyovszky, was born 280 years ago today. A gloriously romantic figure, a nobleman who fought for different countries across Europe and became involved in the American Revolution, he was also famous for his claim to have been proclaimed ruler of part of Madagascar. He sought, at various times, French, Austrian and American backing for his ambitions there. He died, killed in a skirmish with the French, when only 39; nevertheless, he left behind a journal/memoir of his colourful life.

Benyovszky (spelled in various ways) was born into a noble family on 20 September 1746 in Verbó (then within the Kingdom of Hungary, part of the Habsburg Monarchy, now Vrbové in Slovakia). His parents died when he was 14. He later became involved in a legal dispute over family inheritances, which led to him fleeing the country. Accounts of his early military career, including his claim to have served during the Seven Years’ War, are now regarded with some doubt.

In 1768 Benyovszky joined the Confederation of Bar, a Polish national movement against Russian intervention. He was captured by the Russians, interned in Kazan, and later exiled to Kamchatka, in the east of Siberia. Before long, though, he had helped organise a rebellion among fellow exiles and local supporters, seized weapons as well as a Russian vessel. He sailed through the northern Pacific Ocean, landing at Taiwan and Macau, where the party exchanged their vessel. He eventually reached France in mid-1772.

Benyovszky travelled to Madagascar in 1774, with French royal approval and a large number of volunteers, to establish a colony. He set about building a fortified settlement and hospital and establishing relations with local communities. Benyovszky later claimed that local chiefs had proclaimed him their Ampansacabe, or supreme ruler - the origin of his enduring reputation as the ‘king of Madagascar’ - although the precise nature of this acclamation has long been disputed. On returning to France, he was made a French general and awarded the Order of Saint Louis. He became friends with Benjamin Franklin, in Paris at the time, and the Polish nobleman and military commander Casimir Pulaski. However, his further proposals for Madagascar were rejected by the French, and he returned to Central Europe. There, he obtained a pardon from the Austrian Empress and Queen of Hungary, Maria Theresa, who also promoted him to the status of Count in 1778. A few years later, Emperor Joseph II gave his support to Benyovszky’s plans for Madagascar, though nothing seems to have come of this.

After serving in the Austrian army during the War of the Bavarian Succession, Benyovszky turned his attention to the American colonies and the revolution there. His friend Pulaski was killed at the siege of Savannah in 1779; later accounts claimed that he died in Benyovszky’s arms, though this story is disputed by some. In 1782, Benyovszky was in North America and, with a plan to raise a body of European troops for America, was introduced to George Washington. Although initially well received, the plan failed to materialise. Back in Europe, he approached the British government to give support for an expedition to Madagascar, which was not forthcoming. With the help of Franklin, Hyacinth de Magellan and American commercial backers, he then developed another trading venture involving Madagascar.

In 1785, he arrived once again on the island, where he developed a trade settlement, Mauritania, named after himself. His activities brought him into conflict with the French authorities on Mauritius, who regarded his settlement as a threat to French interests. During a French attack in May 1786, Benyovszky was killed. Further information is available from Wikipedia and Andrew Drummond’s Benyovszky biography website.

In the early 1780s, Benyovszky gave his friend Magellan four volumes of memoirs written in French. Magellan had them translated into English and they were published for the first time in 1789. A century later, in 1893, they were published again by T. Fisher Unwin as Memoirs and Travels of Mauritius Augustus Count de Benyowsky Magnate of the Kingdoms of Hungary and Poland, one of the Chiefs of the Confederation of Poland etc. etc., with an introduction, notes and bibliography by Captain S. Pasfield Oliver. This, and earlier editions, are freely available at Internet Archive. 

The memoir starts with a biographical account of Benyovszky’s early life, written in the third person but nonetheless inspired by Benyovszky himself. Benyovszky’s journal/memoir commences in January 1770 and finishes in late 1776. Some of the narrative does read like a journal, with dated entries, but more often it reads like a memoir written in retrospect (e.g. ‘On the 6th, in the Straits, we joined a Spanish armed frigate, named the Pallas; and on the 16th of March, we arrived safely in France.’) The following extracts come from the Oliver edition.

15 October 1771
‘On the 15th, the associates met by my order. I informed them, that I was assured that a number among them were discontented with me; for which reason 1 thought proper to declare to them, that all those who were desirous of seeking their fortune elsewhere, were at liberty to quit me; and that as they had all received a retribution at my hands at the island of Formosa, I thought myself acquitted from them. I had scarcely made an end, before Mr. Stephanow loaded me with invectives, and charged me with an intention of depriving the company of their share of the advantages I was about to receive, from the knowledge I had acquired during the voyage; and that the moderation I had shewn at Formosa, in delivering my share of the presents of Prince Huapo, was merely a scheme to deprive them of greater advantages. He then excited the companions to throw off my authority, by assuring them that he would secure them a large fortune the instant they should determine to put my papers in his hands, and follow his party. The infamous plot of this wretch was nothing extraordinary; hut when I understood that he was supported by Sir. Wynbladth, my ancient Major, the companion of my exile, and my friend, I was incapable of setting bounds to my indignation, and could not avoid declaring, that their proceedings were highly disgraceful; and to confound them, I displayed their secret projects to the company, and justified my words by shewing Mr. Jackson’s letter, which convinced them that Messrs. Stephanow and Wynbladth, under pretence of serving the company, were desirous of securing the five thousand pounds to their own use. They were highly irritated, and threatened them; but Stephanow preserved a party of eleven, with whom he went to my lodgings; and while I remained in conversation with my friends, he seized my box, in which he supposed my papers were deposited. As soon as I heard of this outrage, I went to his chamber, followed by twenty associates; and as he refused to open the door, I broke it down. On my entrance he fired a pistol at me, which missed. In consequence of this attempt, I gave orders for seizing and keeping him in strict confinement; and as it was necessary likewise to secure Mr. Wynbladth, I went to his chamber; but he had retired into the garden, armed with a pair of pistols and a sabre. I determined to shut him in, being convinced that he could not get over the walls on account of their great height. This whole affair passed without the least alarm without, as the doors of the house were shut.’

16 October 1771
‘On the 16th, Mr. Wynbladth, fatigued by a continual rain, and perhaps urged by hunger, requested forgiveness, and surrendered himself to two companions I had appointed to watch him. Having thus made sure of these two turbulent men, I thought it proper they should be separated from the company; and they were therefore conducted to the castle by permission of the Governor: the officers of our company, being desirous of avenging themselves on the English emissaries, played them a trick, the whole effect of which fell upon a Jewish agent, who was severely flogged. Upon this wretch there were found minutes of proposals which he made to the companions, as follow:
1. That the English would pay to each associate one thousand piastres, in case they would serve the company, and put my papers in his hands.
2. That in case the associates refused to take the English party, the company would arrest them by force, in the name of the Empress of Russia, to deliver them up.
3. That the company would answer for obtaining the Empress’s pardon for them, if they would determine to make a voyage to Japan, and the Aleuthes Islands.

Such proceedings cannot attributed to men of sense. It was in my opinion a forgery, concerted between Mr. Stephanow and the Jew, to excite the associates against me.’

2 January 1772
‘On the 2d, I sold my vessel to a Portugueze merchant, for the sum of four thousand five hundred piastres, ready money, and as much on credit: the Governor reserved to himself the whole of the stores.’

14 January 1772
‘On the 14th, we quitted Macao, where the Governor saluted me with twenty-one guns, from the principal fortress; and, after a tedious passage, we arrived at last at the mouth of the Tigu; where we were very civilly received by a Mandarin, though he at first refused to permit us to go on shore: the sight of a purse of piastres, however, abated his severity; which was so much altered by this circumstance, that he offered permission for us to take lodgings in the fort.’

12 April 1772
‘On the 12th, we anchored at the Island of Madagascar, where I went on shore at Fort Dauphin. Some particulars of information I had received from the Governor of the isle of France, induced me to wish for more ample information, respecting this fine and extensive island; but unfortunately for this purpose, I could not prolong my stay.’

This article is a revised version of one first published on 20 September 2016.