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.

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

A fool’s paradise of poetry

‘Heavens! what fortitude one needs, to become a decent writer. One runs madly through green thickets, enamoured of the bird-notes which last but a few moments; one stumbles, picks oneself up, and emerges into a barren waste; one ruminates miserably for a while, dragging desolate feet through the dust of dead dreams. And then, if one is lucky, one plunges into another fool’s paradise of “poetry”.’ This is Siegfried Sassoon, an English poet born 140 years ago today, writing lyrically about the difficulties of composing poetry. Although a brave and decorated First World War soldier, he is best remembered for his war poetry and autobiographical prose, while his extensive diaries provide an unusually immediate record of his life and wartime experiences.

Sassoon was born at Weirleigh, near Matfield in Kent, on 8 September 1886, and educated at Marlborough College and Clare College, Cambridge. He was the second of three sons born to Alfred Ezra Sassoon, a member of a wealthy Jewish merchant family, and Theresa Thornycroft, an Anglo-Catholic. Alfred had been disinherited by his family for marrying Theresa. After leaving Cambridge without a degree, Sassoon spent nearly a decade doing very little other than hunting, socialising and writing occasional verse. On the outbreak of war, he enlisted as a cavalry trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry, but injured his arm in a riding accident in October 1914. After recovering, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion (Special Reserve), Royal Welch Fusiliers, and was posted to the Western Front. He was considered a reckless soldier, but was awarded the Military Cross for rescuing a wounded lance-corporal under heavy fire in May 1916.

Significantly, while in France, Sassoon met Robert Graves. They encouraged each other’s love of poetry, and Graves’s grittier style is known to have influenced Sassoon. In April 1917, Sassoon was wounded and returned to England. By then, he had grown hostile to the continuation of the war and his poetry increasingly reflected the realities of life in the trenches. The Old Huntsman, containing a substantial group of war poems, appeared in 1917, followed by Counter-Attack and Other Poems in 1918. On 15 June 1917, Sassoon completed A Soldier’s Declaration, condemning what he believed was the deliberate prolongation of the conflict. After he refused to return to duty, the statement was published in The Times and read in Parliament on 31 July. Some called for Sassoon to be court-martialled, but the Army instead sent him before a medical board, which declared him unfit for service and referred him to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. There he met the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers and the poet Wilfred Owen.

Sassoon subsequently returned to active service, first in Palestine and then in France, where in June 1918 he was accidentally shot in the head by a British sentry. After the war, he lived briefly in Oxford, but then settled in Tufton Street, Westminster, in 1919. He became literary editor of the Daily Herald, a role that brought him into contact with many literary names of the day, and became something of a literary celebrity himself. He spent the best part of two decades writing autobiographical or semi-autobiographical books, such as Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Siegfried’s Journey. He married Hester Gatty in 1933, and they had one son before the marriage broke down and the couple separated in 1945. Sassoon lived the last years of his life in relative seclusion at Heytesbury in Wiltshire, converting to Catholicism in 1957. He died of stomach cancer on 1 September 1967, aged 80. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Poetry Foundation or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Cambridge University Library holds what it describes as ‘the world’s richest assemblage of Sassoon’s manuscripts and archival papers’, including a run of diaries stretching from 1905 to 1959. The Cambridge Digital Library has made available images of 23 of Sassoon’s journals, focusing on the war years but covering 1915-1927 and 1931-1932. It describes Sassoon as a ‘gifted diarist’ and the journals as ‘a fascinating resource’ of First World War literature. However, the library does not provide complete transcriptions of the diary pages.

‘Unlike edited printed transcriptions,’ it says, ‘the digitisations allow the viewer to form a thorough sense of the nature of the physical documents. Sassoon wrote in a small but neat and legible hand, frequently using the notebooks from both ends. His war journals were used for a wide variety of purposes: in addition to making diary entries Sassoon drafted poetry, made pencil or ink sketches, listed members of his battalion and their fates, made notes on military briefings and diagrams of trenches, listed locations and dates of times spent at or near the Front, noted quotations, and transcribed letters. The wartime notebooks were small enough to have been carried by Sassoon in the pocket of his Army tunic, and many had enclosures such as letters tucked into the outer cover or inner pouches; some bear tangible evidence of use in the trenches, from the mud on notebook MS Add.9852/1/7 to the candlewax spilled on MS Add.9852/1/9, presumably as Sassoon sat writing in his dug-out by candlelight.’

Printed transcriptions are available in three volumes edited by Rupert Hart-Davis and published by Faber and Faber between 1981 and 1985: Diaries 1915-1918, Diaries 1920-1922 and Diaries 1923-1925 (all of which can be digitally borrowed from Internet Archive). Here are several extracts from the last of these. Hart-Davis notes, however, that most of the text of Diaries 1923-1925 was taken from ‘fair copies’ Sassoon himself made of the original diaries in 1931 and 1932. It is assumed, he says, that the originals were discarded.

This article is a revised version of one first published on 8 September 2016.

I love it in the shed

‘I love it in the shed . . . I tiptoed my way in, past a couple of big sash windows from a skip and a fine semicircular stained-glass window, and eased along to the far end. A legless Windsor smoker’s bow chair: a lovely thing but in need of a set of legs. Another project for my nineties.’ This is Roger Deakin, author and environmentalist who died 20 years ago today, writing in a notebook he kept during the last years of his life. 

Deakin was born in Watford in 1943 in Watford, Hertfordshire, the only child of railway clerk Cyril Deakin and his wife Doris. His father died when he was 17. Deakin was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School and then at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read English. After graduating, he worked as a teacher and then in advertising, while also making films and radio programmes. In 1968 he bought Walnut Tree Farm at Mellis in Suffolk, a timber-framed farmhouse surrounded by meadows and a moat, which he restored and where he lived for the rest of his life.

Deakin became closely involved in environmental campaigning and was one of the founders, in 1983, of Common Ground, an organisation concerned with local landscape, culture and environmental distinctiveness. He continued to work in advertising, broadcasting and documentary production, making programmes for the BBC and other organisations. His first book, Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain, appeared in 1999, following a journey inspired by John Cheever’s short story The Swimmer. Deakin travelled around Britain swimming in rivers, lakes, canals, lidos, the sea and other stretches of open water.

After Waterlog, Deakin began travelling and researching a book about trees and wood, visiting places including France, Greece, Australia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as well as many parts of Britain. He completed Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees shortly before his death. Diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2006, he died at Walnut Tree Farm on 19 August that year, aged 63. Wikipedia, The Outdoor Swimming Society, The Guardian, and University of East Anglia. 

During the last six years of his life, Deakin also kept a detailed record of his daily life, work, thoughts and memories. He filled 45 lined exercise books in his distinctive handwriting, numbering and paginating each one and putting a table of contents on its cover. The entries included observations of the countryside around Walnut Tree Farm, accounts of everyday activities and encounters, memories, travel notes and material gathered for his books and radio programmes.

After his death, extracts from the notebooks were edited by his partner Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker and published by Hamish Hamilton in 2008 as Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (which can be sampled at Googlebooks).. Rather than reproducing the notebooks chronologically, the editors selected entries from different years and arranged them month by month to create a single composite year. Abbreviations were expanded, but otherwise the published extracts retained Deakin’s words. The following three entries are taken from that volume (though none can be dated to a particular year).

9 January

‘A wild, windy night and a bright, clear windy day. I walk out along Cowpasture Lane and up the hill to the pollard hornbeam, definitely a trasmocho tree with its unusually wide bolling. On the way I stand leaning on the little wooden bridge over the stream at the ford, watching the running water. Then a long trudge into the wind to reach the badger sett, still very active and well trodden, with claw marks in the mud everywhere. The wood is creaking, and a sound like a squeaky hinge sings out where two birches are rubbing against each other. From the mud hill-fort of the badger sett, beaten paths radiate into the wood and out across a plank bridge into the weedy set-aside field beyond the wood. In the long shadows of the late white sun it is easy to make them out and to follow one over the field to a ditch crossing and all the way to a gap in the wire fence of the railway embankment, where the badgers scratch themselves against the wire and leave little clumps of their shaving-brush hair on the grass. I walk to the lane in the shadow and shelter of the tall embankment and scuttle home, glad of the shelter of the lane’s hedges.’

15 February

Saturday morning I wake up in London and walk over to the Festival Hall after a hearty bacon and mushroom breakfast. Over Waterloo Bridge, and see a long queue of people eddying and dropping down the narrow well of stairs to the Embankment below like water going down a bath plug.

Amazing forest of placards on pine sticks provided by the Mirror. I found myself marching behind banners I couldn’t read held by a bunch of women, with one reading, as I later discovered after being photographed by the press, ‘Cunt-lovers Against the War’.

There were quite a few dogs on leads, ‘Dogs of War’, as one placard called them, and several poodles, including one led by a priest in full cassock with a banner behind it that read ‘Poodle, Bite your Master’s Leg’.

There were also several beautifully made huge swans, which flapped their diaphanous wings and seemed to fly above the crowd, a striking image in the park. Mike [Hodges] and I spoke up for the daffodils in Hyde Park that were getting trodden down and crushed, and a man climbed up into a plane tree in St James’s Park to watch the march.

There were placards like ‘Pagan Queers for Peace’ and ‘Cold? Wrap Yourself Up in a Woolly Liberal’. Richard discovered long-lost friends like the Berkhamsted CND and the Woodcraft Folk.

Mike, Sarah Martin and Carol [Law] escaped from the park, meeting Caroline Soper and Hanif Kureishi on the way, picked up a free bottle or two of Mecca Cola, and squeezed through a narrow iron gateway with thousands of others to reach Marble Arch and the warmth of a café, then adjourned later to Cigala for a dinner of Caldeirada and rabbit paella, washed down with several bottles of an excellent Ribera del Duero wine called Martin Berdugo. Sarah Martin says she knows of a cork oak forest, where black pigs graze in the woods in the west of Andalusia near Murcia; and the hotel is owned by some people called Chesterton.

Drove home at 1 a.m., arriving at Mellis at 3 a.m., e-mails to Australia (big 500,000 march in Sydney), bed at 4 a.m.’

18 February

‘I had to fiddle about putting the car on the battery charger, then went up the field to rummage about in one of my sheds looking for an architrave. I love it in the shed. Half the tin roof has rusted through and caved in, but, instead of mending it, which would have meant cutting down some brambles to get round the back, I simply moved all the wooden architraves and mouldings into another part of the shed away from the drips.

The whole floor of the shed is under attack from the rabbits whose warren it is, so all the contents are constantly subsiding into the earth. It is a shed with subsidence.

I tiptoed my way in, past a couple of big sash windows from a skip and a fine semicircular stained-glass window, and eased along to the far end. A legless Windsor smoker’s bow chair: a lovely thing but in need of a set of legs. Another project for my nineties.

Removing several sections of stove pipe, I came across the canvas bed that would have been used to convey the grain and chaff to the threshing drum. I moved this and uncovered the pile of architraves and mouldings. All beautiful but all too short, and not a single one matching. I never knew it was possible to plane wood in so many different ways.

None of the pieces was right. A man called David Bill at Shepperton Studios had given them to me years ago, leftovers from commercial sets. Mock-dado rails. Spoof Edwardiana. And now here they were, a palace for spiders, a dust museum, a nuisance for the rabbits. In the end I drove to Diss and bought a new architrave from Jewson’s.’

All sorts of absurdities

‘About 10 at night young George Dixon, clerk to our Union came to my house & gave me some particulars of a séance (Spiritual) he had attended on Tuesday night in Glover Street, & how he found out the “medium”, a late Liverpool sailor named Eades to be an imposter. This Spiritual business, in the shape of Spiritualism is over-riding common sense, & delivering people into all sorts of absurdities.’ This is from the diaries of Anthony Hewitson, a provincial journalist born 190 years ago today. His diaries - which are free to read online - are considered a rare first hand resource for studying journalism in mid-victorian Britain.

Hewitson was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, on 13 August 1836, and was brought up largely in Ingleton by his grandparents. In 1850, aged 14, he moved to Lancaster to begin a seven-year apprenticeship as a compositor on the Lancaster Gazette. He taught himself shorthand and, while still an apprentice, began reporting for the Gazette and sending material to other newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian. After completing his apprenticeship he worked briefly on newspapers in Kendal and Wolverhampton before moving to Preston. In September 1858 he married Margaret Wilson, the daughter of a Lancaster tailor and draper, with whom he was to have a large family.

Hewitson worked successively for several Preston newspapers, including the Preston Chronicle, the Preston Herald and the Preston Guardian, becoming chief reporter on the latter. He also supplemented his income with freelance reporting for newspapers outside the town. Dismissed by the Guardian in 1867, apparently because its proprietor believed he intended to establish a rival news agency, he returned to the Chronicle. In March 1868, aged 31, he bought the paper for £580 and became its proprietor and editor. He developed the Chronicle into a successful business and ran it for 22 years, selling it in 1890. He subsequently launched a newspaper in Lancaster and in 1896 acquired the Wakefield Herald, which was managed by his son Ethelbert.

Alongside journalism, Hewitson was a prolific writer on Preston and its history. His books included Our Churches and Chapels (1869), Preston Town Council (1870), Our Country Churches and Chapels (1872), and his substantial History of Preston (1883), to which he appended a detailed chronology of the town from 705 to 1883. He also edited historical diaries, including that of Thomas Tyldesley, and in later life continued writing historical and antiquarian articles. Semi-retired after selling the Chronicle, he lived at various times in Preston, Morecambe and Yorkshire, while retaining interests in newspapers and property. He died in 1912, aged 75. Further information is available online at Open Book Publishers.

Hewitson began keeping diaries as a young man, with the surviving sequence extending from the 1860s almost to his death. Seventeen manuscript diaries are known, now held by Lancashire Archives, although there are substantial gaps. The fullest surviving run begins in 1865, when Hewitson was working as chief reporter on the Preston Guardian. He usually wrote at the end of the day, recording his reporting assignments, newspaper work, business dealings, reading, journeys and social encounters alongside domestic events and his reactions to the people and events around him. The diaries were also working records: Hewitson returned to them for information which could be reused in his journalism and historical writing. The result is an unusually detailed record not only of one Victorian family but of the everyday mechanics of provincial journalism - meetings and court cases, news gathering, gossip, freelance work, printing, editing and the commercial running of a newspaper. Diaries by nineteenth-century provincial journalists are extremely rare; Hobbs describes Hewitson’s as ‘the only known diaries of a 19th-century provincial journalist’.

The diaries have been transcribed and edited by journalism historian Andrew Hobbs, with work also undertaken by Hewitson’s descendant Margaret Dickinson, Pauline Wainwright and the Friends of Lancashire Archives. The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson, Provincial Journalist, Volume 1: 1865-1887, edited by Hobbs, was published by Open Book Publishers in 2022 and made freely available online. It contains the surviving diaries for 1865-1868, 1872-1875, 1881, 1884-1885 and 1887, together with autobiographical material and extensive annotation. A second volume, covering the surviving diaries from 1891 to 1912, is in preparation. Transcriptions of much of this later material have meanwhile been made available online by Hobbs through his Hewitson Diaries website. The diaries provide a particularly rich source for the history of Victorian journalism, while also documenting family life, politics, religion, entertainment and the changing social and commercial life of Preston.

6 January 1873 

‘Heard this morning - first day of “Great Saturday Horse Fair” - that my friend Jas. Kenyon had rambled off somewhere in “the blues”. Went with a friend to police station & set on two detectives to search. Found out in evening, that Kenyon had rambled home into Claughton. At night I & wife went to a carding party at house of a person called R. Lancaster in Eastcliff rd. Had supper there, & stayed till 1 in morning.’

22 May 1873 

‘Working in shop nearly all day except a little in morning when I had a dip into John Stuart Mill’s work on Utilitarianism. About 10 at night young George Dixon, clerk to our Union came to my house & gave me some particulars of a séance (Spiritual) he had attended on Tuesday night in Glover St[ree]t, & how he found out the “medium”, a late L[iver]pool sailor named Eades to be an imposter. This Spiritual business, in the shape of Spiritualism is over-riding common sense, & delivering people into all sorts of absurdities. To-day young Woods tobacconist went into shop I left in Fishergate. My charge for fixtures is 5/- per week.’

3 February 1874

‘Preston election to-day. Voting began at 8 in morning & closed at 4 in af[ternoo]n. All mills closed from dinner time. Much crowding in Fishergate; but all orderly. The candidates were Mr E Hermon & Mr J Holker (the two previous Conservative members) & Mr Mottershead, who came down from London as a “Working Man’s candidate”. The result of the election was the return of Hermon & Holker. Mottershead polled more votes than was expected. At night after doing some telegraphing, I had something to drink with some Conservatives.’

20 February 1874

‘Violent railway collision this morning between Euxton & Coppull. Scotch limited mail, through a fog, ran into a standing coal train. Much damage & destruction; & driver & stoker of mail af[terwar]ds died through the injuries they received. I went to scene of accident at noon & got some particulars for our own & other papers. Telegraphed it to The Times. Disraeli’s new administration announced at 12.30 to-night.’

1 April 1874 

‘A tolerably easy day; & April joke making confined to children.’

13 August 1874

‘My 38th birthday. I thank God that I have lived thus far & have amid all changes & struggles enjoyed & felt His wisdom & goodness. May my next 38 years & odd be similarly - nay more fully - imbued with & blessed by His excellence. Working all day & home to White Horse at night.’

18 April 1875

‘To Morecambe with Florence my daughter this morning. Walked from Hest Bank to Morecambe along sands side. Beautiful walk - tide in, sea birds flying about. Spent a good part of day on pier where my father in law has a refreshment room.’

30 January 1884

‘My daughter Florence returned to daughter day from America in the SS “City of Chicago” - same boat she & I went out in. I went to L[iver]pool to meet her - sailed down Mersey in a tender as far as New Brighton. Daughter had a very rough voyage & was sick again. To Preston - home - both of us early.’

Tuesday 25 March 1884

‘To St Anne’s-on-Sea to day in order to get materials for an article on the place. Mr T Fair, who will pay me for the article, wants it for one of the Manchester evening papers. I called at his house and had lunch. Then I went with him in his carriage to St Anne’s round which I rode, & then he left me to my own wanderings & musings. Quiet but pleasant. Home at about 7 in evening.’

22 January 1885

‘Same. At night I & my wife went to Gaiety Theatre to see “the claimant” - the alleged Sir Roger Tichborne, who has recently been released on ticket of leave, after ab[ou]t 10 y[ea]rs imp[risonmen]t for perjury. Prior to his trial he paid a visit to Preston, & at a public gathering - anyhow audience - in the Corn Xchange - I put two or three questions to him. He answered them cunningly but badly. The chief questions were - Did he know anybody except himself who had forgotten t[he] name of his mother and the very alphabet o[f] a language he once was well acquainted with. He looked considerably thinner & was going quite grey in whiskers on Thursday night.’

5 February 1885

‘Unwell. Had a Turkish bath in af[ternoo]n - heat during part of time being 225 degrees. Working till 10.5 at night - on leaving the bath. News published of the fall of Khartoum this morning. Great shock to English.’

Last night’s hurricane

‘Wind more moderate, but still blowing hard from opposite shore. On every hand are traces of last night’s hurricane. [. . .] It is with little hope of ever seeing his boat again - except in separate pieces - that the captain finds his way along the road to the vineyard which was the scene of so much adventure last evening.’ This is from a diary kept by Donald Maxwell, an English writer and illustrator who died 90 years ago today. In 1904-1905, he had a small yacht built - The Griffin -  and then undertook an extraordinary journey, sailing through Europe, eventually, to England.

Maxwell was born in Clapham, London, in 1877. He was the son of the Methodist minister and schoolmaster Frederick Charles Maxwell and grew up in an artistic family; his mother was also an illustrator and his younger brother Gordon Maxwell likewise became an author and artist. Maxwell studied at the Clapham School of Art, the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art, training that underpinned both his illustrations and his career as a painter.

Maxwell established himself before the First World War as a prolific travel writer and illustrator, contributing regularly to The Yachting Monthly, The Graphic and the Daily Graphic. His books, nearly all illustrated by himself, recorded journeys across Britain, Europe and the Middle East with a combination of careful observation, architectural interest and understated humour. During the First World War he served as an official Admiralty artist, later drawing on those experiences in The Last Crusade, 1914-1918 and A Dweller in Mesopotamia. He also accompanied the Prince of Wales on his tour of India in 1921-22, producing another illustrated travel narrative.

In the 1920s Maxwell became particularly associated with books celebrating the English landscape and historic towns, including his popular ‘Unknown’ county series on Kent, Sussex, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, together with works on London and the landscape of Thomas Hardy. His paintings of British scenery were widely admired and reproduced, several later appearing as railway carriage prints, while he also illustrated books by writers including Hilaire Belloc and Rudyard Kipling. He died on 25 July 1936. Further information is available from Wikipedia.

In 1904 Maxwell had a small yacht, The Griffin, built at Brunnadern in north-eastern Switzerland, then he hauled it overland to the headwaters of the Rhine before setting off alone on a voyage that carried him from the Swiss Alps to the Thames. The journey followed rivers, lakes and canals through Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands before crossing the North Sea and entering the Thames estuary, eventually reaching Teddington in 1905.

The text of the diary and drawings he entered in a notebook were first published as The Log of the Griffin, by John Lane: The Bodley Head, in London in 1905. The volume was well received and established the formula Maxwell would employ throughout much of his career: a lightly worn, observant travel diary in which words and drawings carry equal weight. The work has since been reprinted in later editions and remains one of Maxwell’s best-known books, valued both as an engaging travel narrative and as a record of early twentieth-century inland waterways and landscapes.

2 October 1904

‘Schmerikon to Lachen. There is a very faint breeze from the direction of Uznach, and The Griffin, at 7.45 a.m., moves out of the harbour under mainsail only. It will be risky to carry more canvas with only one on board, for the wind is very treacherous in these waters, and it is quite common in certain states of the atmosphere to be calmed one minute and the next to be taking in sail for dear life and running with bare mast before the squall. Thus everything must be under easy control in case of emergencies, when a moment’s unreadiness would be fatal - at least for the boat.

Herr Wirth comes aboard for about half a mile, and is landed a little way out of Schmerikon, taking leave of the captain with hearty wishes for a “Gute Reise!” He stands some time looking proudly after the craft he has built, which is making a course for the middle of the lake in the hope that the breeze there will be fresher. But when the village is nearly out of sight, the wind dies down altogether, and The Griffin remains motionless on a surface unruffled. The sun is blazing, but there is a coppery colour about it that looks suspicious, and there is blue sky where the mountains ought to be.

Hour after hour passes, and there is no change. However, it is by no means unpleasant. It is a relief to be quite alone after having been for some time the centre of a sort of show, and it is not half so formidable to steer a ship through the known dangers of wind and sea as to face the unknown difficulties of a Toggenburg village.

A good opportunity, too, it proves, for drying several articles which suffered from the water last night; these are spread on the roof of the cabin, which by this time is quite hot. It is encouraging to find, also, in baling the boat, that the amount of water getting through is growing perceptibly less. The captain takes his field-glasses and has a look round, although little more than the immediate shore of the lake is visible. Astern, near the entrance to the Linth canal, the square tower of Schloss Grynau is to be seen, and to the right of that the woods of Ober-Buchberg slope down towards the water. Ahead there is a faint group of towers, probably Rapperswyl, and to the left of them stretches a long low shore of swamp land, covered with tall grasses which extend in patches out into the lake. Lachen can just be discerned over this waste, and it is there that the captain wishes to find shelter, if possible, for the night, by means of an hour or two’s paddling.

It is not until the sun has set that The Griffin enters the little harbour. It has been very slow work, mile after mile in a dead calm, along the lonely shore, in silence broken only by the monotonous noise of the paddle or the melancholy cry of some startled wild-bird.’

5 October 1904

‘Meilen, morning. Wind more moderate, but still blowing hard from opposite shore. On every hand are traces of last night’s hurricane. Branches of trees are scattered about in the road, and many of the shrubs in boxes at the entrance of the hotel are on their sides in a helpless condition. A steamer has been wrecked at Rapperswyl and another found, broken loose from her moorings, drifting about with no one on board. It is therefore hardly to be expected that The Griffin will be recognizable, considering the fact that she must have been tossed up and down on the stony shore all night. Consequently, it is with little hope of ever seeing his boat again - except in separate pieces - that the captain finds his way along the road to the vineyard which was the scene of so much adventure last evening.

Encouraged and surprised at seeing a mast still appearing over the vines, he scales the wall and climbs down to the lake. The Griffin has been washed up, half out of the water, and wedged in between two large stones. Her bow seems at first sight to have been badly knocked about. Luckily it is where sheet-iron covers it, and it proves on further inspection, although seriously dinted and devoid of paint, to have sustained no structural damage. The wood of the rudder, where it comes below the iron frame, has been torn off, but this will make little difference. If anything, there was a little too much depth before, and as the ironwork will prevent any further tearing away, it is perhaps on the whole an improvement. One of the lee-boards is somewhat bent. These injuries, together with the loss of nearly all the paint on her hull, seem to be the only changes in the craft since yesterday. The well is full, but very little water has found its way into the cabin. The carpenters of Brunnadern have done their work well indeed. Any ordinary boat, even one built for strength, would have been matchwood by now, after last night’s churning up and down on the rocks. The skin of The Griffin is of one-inch planks, each dovetailed to the other with strips of steel. The ribs are two inches thick, and eight of them have three-quarter-inch wrought-iron bars fashioned to fit them all round, so that the hull is a veritable tower of strength against a crushing force from without. Last night has proved this.

The captain calls at the house of his rescuers to thank them for their kindness and apologize for his interruption of their musical evening. He finds it rather difficult to put his sentiments into intelligible form. The part that expresses gratitude is understood at once, but the meaning of his apology for the breaking up of the domestic concert is totally missed. They take it that he is referring to some instrument, and cannot understand what it has to do with the case. Probably they think he would like to hear a tune on the mandoline. Whether this is a correct guess as to their deductions or not, the mandoline that figured in last night’s scene is brought out, and the captain is entertained to a song well sung and tolerably well accompanied, of which he shows immense appreciation. He insists on several encores, by this means making up to some extent for inability to express himself clearly, and establishing most friendly relations with the whole household.

New wine and large pears, an extraordinary alliance, are produced by way of refreshment, and the captain is presented with a card on which is inscribed - Jean Bucher, Maler, Meilen, giving his own in exchange and explaining - for his knowledge of a few words of German tells him what “maler” stands for - that he also is a painter. Encouraged by this additional bond of sympathy, his host takes him all round the house, and shows him certain paintings of his own, executed in hours of relaxation from his sterner moments of professional work. The captain makes the moderately truthful statement that he has seldom seen pictures like them, and points out that the wind has now gone down considerably, so that he ought to be starting.

Herr Bucher will not allow him to leave without first making him accept as a present an enormous pear, and he accompanies him to the spot where the unfortunate Griffin is stranded. It is a cold task, standing in the shallow water and levering the boat inch by inch further into the lake until she is afloat again.’

I want rest

‘My work at F.O. is nearly over, and not to my regret: much of it was interesting, but the constant interruption and disturbance from visitors, the tendency of diplomatists to waste time in unnecessary talk, the impossibility, at this time of year, of getting air and exercise without neglecting official duty, and the difficulty of escaping, even for a few hours, from telegrams and despatches, make the post trying to health and temper. I want rest, and feel that I want it.’ This is from the diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby, a British statesman born 200 years ago today, who served twice as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

Stanley was born at Knowsley Hall, Lancashire, the eldest son of Edward Smith-Stanley, the future 14th Earl of Derby, three times prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, and Emma Caroline Bootle-Wilbraham. Raised in one of Britain’s wealthiest political families, he was educated at Eton, Rugby and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained a first-class degree in classics and became a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the influential intellectual society. He entered Parliament in 1848 as MP for King’s Lynn while still in his early twenties.

Stanley rapidly established himself as a capable administrator. He served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Colonial Secretary, President of the Board of Control, and in 1858 became the inaugural Secretary of State for India following the transfer of power from the East India Company to the Crown after the Indian Rebellion. He was twice Foreign Secretary, first under his father and then under Benjamin Disraeli, and later returned to government as Colonial Secretary in Gladstone’s Liberal administration after breaking with the Conservatives over foreign policy. His political journey from Conservative to Liberal and finally Liberal Unionist reflected his independence of mind on questions of diplomacy and empire.

In 1870, Stanley married Lady Mary Sackville-West, daughter of the 5th Earl De La Warr and widow of the 2nd Marquess of Salisbury. The marriage produced no children. He succeeded to the earldom on his father’s death in 1869 (becoming Lord Derby) and thereafter divided his time between national politics and the management of the extensive Knowsley estates. His health declined after an attack of influenza in 1891, and he died at Knowsley in 1893, aged 63. The title passed to his younger brother, Frederick Stanley, later Governor General of Canada and the donor of the trophy that became the Stanley Cup. Further information is available from Wikipedia. 

Derby’s diaries have become an indispensable primary source for historians of Victorian politics, cabinet government and foreign policy. They have been extensively cited by later scholars, including Geoffrey Hicks, whose Documents on Conservative Foreign Policy, 1852-1878 uses them repeatedly alongside the correspondence of Disraeli and other ministers.

The first substantial publication came with Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party: Journals and Memoirs of Edward Henry, Lord Stanley, 1849-1869, edited by John Vincent, Professor of Modern History at the University of Bristol, and published by Harvester Press in 1978 (freely available online at Internet Archive). It was followed by A Selection from the Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby (1826-93), Between September 1869 and March 1878 (Royal Historical Society, 1994), and The Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby (1826-93) Between 1878 and 1893: A Selection (Leopard’s Head Press, 2003). Together these three editions make available material spanning more than four decades of Stanley’s political life. Here are several extracts from the first publication.

6 July 1866

‘Friday. Went down to Windsor to be sworn in. . . . Appointed a Mr Sanderson my private secretary.

It is not likely that I shall be able to continue this diary further.

My first official act was, with the consent of Ld D, to telegraph to Florence and Berlin supporting the French proposition of an armistice.’

7 July 1866

‘(Saturday). Restless, up early, hard at work from 8.30 to near 6.30, and again two hours after dinner. Dined Travellers. Cabinet at 3, sat 1½ hour: subjects: supply of needle-guns, Fenians in Canada, a sergeant of one of the Irish regts convicted of treason, whom Sir H. Rose wants to shoot, and whose life I think we saved: foreign affairs, and winding-up of the session.

. . . Cleared the office, having neither letter unanswered nor paper unread when I left off.

Before taking office I wrote to Ld Cowley entreating him to remain at Paris - which he consents to do for the present, though making a favour of it. I have not an idea how he could be effectually replaced. Though not a man of first-rate talent, he knows the country and the people thoroughly, and can be relied on. Moreover, as the place is one not given exclusively to professional diplomatists, there will be a great scramble for it, and many attempts to get it jobbed for the interest of the party.’

8 July 1866

‘Sunday. Hatfield for the morning, where met Lowe. . . . Carnarvon was to have come, but was too busy. . . . No business, except reading up memoranda of subjects now being dealt with at F.O. Pleasant day.’

9 July 1866

‘Busy all day from 8 a.m. At 2 the ministers came according to custom, and were received by me in state. (Levee dress.) About 22 appeared successively. The audience lasted three hours. . . . La Tour d’Auvergne frank and straightforward in his ways: Azeglio more than half an Englishman. Altogether I like the diplomatists better than I had expected to do. Very weary at night.

. . . We learn that Prussia accepts the armistice on conditions. . . . Bulow hopes in the general scramble to get back at least Schleswig in a Congress. Musurus greatly afraid that compensation to Austria will be proposed at expense of Turkey. - I reassure him on that point.

Azeglio believes the Italians would consent to leave the Pope Rome with sovereign power and dignity, provided the territory round it, now held by him, were taken away. This is exactly the compromise I have always suggested.

Italians refuse Venetia as a French gift, and want a piece of the Austrian Tyrol. The fact is, they do not like to leave off beaten, nor to owe anything to France, and they are afraid of French demands. . . . Emp. has protested that he wants no addition of territory. . . . It may be so, but Savoy and Nice recur to the mind.’

7 December 1868

‘. . . La Tour called, uneasy, and reasonably so, at the expected rupture between Greece and Turkey: the Porte having announced that unless the laws of neutrality are better observed in future, and certain definite concessions made, they will break off diplomatic relations, close the ports against Greek ships, and give subjects of Greece notice to quit Turkey. This ultimatum however is not to be sent until Saturday, and it is hoped that meanwhile Greece will give way. In the actual situation of the government, it is difficult to see what can be done: but after consultation with Hammond, considering the urgency of the case, I framed a telegram of warning and advice to the Greek government, which pledges the F.O. to nothing, and may possibly be of some use. It is however on the cards that objection may be taken to my having said anything, when de facto I have ceased to be a minister.

. . . My work at F.O. is nearly over, and not to my regret: much of it was interesting, but the constant interruption and disturbance from visitors, the tendency of diplomatists to waste time in unnecessary talk, the impossibility, at this time of year, of getting air and exercise without neglecting official duty, and the difficulty of escaping, even for a few hours, from telegrams and despatches, make the post trying to health and temper. I want rest, and feel that I want it.

. . . Dined Travellers, where much talk with Lord Clarendon on F.O. matters.’

9 December 1868

‘. . . Windsor by special train . . . Council held, after which we severally gave up our seals. The Queen very civil to me, said ‘she was sorry to take them back, they had never been in better hands.’

Emperor’s breast

‘The Emperor blubber itself has a very delicate flavour. As a treat this morning Campbell gave us each a small strip of Emperor’s breast done as a filet-de-boeuf, with a small piece of fat on top, and it was an excellent change after the unvarying stews we have had for months.’ This is Raymond Priestley, born 140 years ago today, writing in his diary while holed up in Antartica with the so-called Northern Party of Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition. The Northern Party survived two winters in the region, and Priestley went on to become a highly respected university administrator, and to maintain his diary habit all his working life.

Priestley was born on 20 July 1886 into a Methodist family in Tewkesbury, England. His father was headmaster of the local grammar school. While studying geology at Bristol university he was recruited to Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition to Antartica (1907-1909). He was also a member of Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition in 1910-1912, and subsequently wrote Antarctic Adventure. He entered Cambridge University, but when the war intervened, he served as adjutant at the Wireless Training Centre, and then with the 46th divisional signal company in France. During the war, he married Phyllis Mary, and they had two daughters. 

After the war, Priestley completed his studies, and wrote several books: Breaking the Hindenburg Line, The Work of the Royal Engineers, 1914-19: the Signal Service, and a work on glaciology. He also helped set up the Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge in 1920.

From the 1930s, Priestley held a series of academic and government administrative posts in England, and then in Australia, in particular becoming Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne (1935-1938), and then Vice-Chancellor of Birmingham University (1938-1952). In 1944, he spent several months in the West Indies with a committee from the UK tasked with investigating the possibility of setting up a university in the region. He was knighted in 1949, and retired in 1952, but continued to work in different capacities (including, for example, being president of the Royal Geographical Society from 1961 to 1963). He died in 1974. Further information can be found at the Australian Dictionary of National Biography, University of Birmingham or Wikipedia.

Priestley kept a diary throughout his life, from his Antarctic expedition days to his chancellorship of Birmingham University. He based his first book - Antarctic Adventure - on the diary he kept while with Scott’s expedition. Published by Fisher Unwin in 1914, this is freely available online at Internet Archive. Although Priestley says, about half way through the narrative, that he has tried to avoid the diary form as much as possible, he then says ‘it is impossible to give a lifelike description of our routine, our thoughts, and our feelings during this abnormal life without the help of some extracts from the records written at the time’. Thereafter, he quotes liberally from his own diary.

The diaries Priestley kept while in Australia were published by Melbourne University Press in 1998 and again in 2002 as The Diary of a Vice-Chancellor: University of Melbourne 1935-1938. An excellent and detailed summary of all 14 of Priestley’s diaries held by Birmingham University, from 1938-1954, can be found on the university’s website, as can a photograph of one of the manuscript diaries. Furthermore, The University of the West Indies website offers two links to the text of a diary Priestley kept in 1944 while visiting the region (but they don’t ever seemed to have worked!)

Here, though, are several extracts from Priestley’s diary as found in Antarctic Adventure.

22 February 1912
‘The worst of a wind is that you can do nothing to it. If you are being annoyed by a man or an animal bigger than yourself, you can at least get on the other side of a fence and throw stones at him or it, but here we are hung up by an infernally cold wind and able to do nothing against it whatever, while it is gradually tearing our tent in pieces. We are all getting less physically fit and feeling the cold more, and this is showing itself by the continual presence of cold feet, and by constant attacks of cramp in different parts of the body. It is to be hoped that the ship is all serene and not blown out north by the wind. Before the gale commenced Levick and Abbott reported that they saw a trail of smoke off the ice tongue, and we therefore think that she may be sheltering in Relief Inlet, but at times like this all of us have strong imaginations. We are all suffering very much, and myself in particular, from an almost intolerable itching of the feet when circulation is restored after they have been very cold. The barometer isn’t much use to us nowadays. As far as I can make out if it goes up it means the gale is going to be stronger, if it goes down the wind is going to increase. When the barometer remains steady the gale remains steady too. Cheerful, isn’t it?’

7 May 1912
‘While still in bed this morning we heard the gale blowing hard outside, and when we got up we found we were snowed in as we have never been before. During the morning Dickason and I tunnelled through the drift and have managed thus to extend the roof of the shaft for about 6 feet in length. We found a regular hurricane outside, but no drift. Levick and Browning have butchered three of the Emperors, and Campbell and Abbott have therefore been cooking under great difficulties, for the galley is full of meat and carcasses, and there is a bad backdraught down the chimney. We had a lot of Emperor penguin meat and blubber in the hoosh to-night. The meat has been a great success, but the blubber has made the gravy pure oil, and has beaten some of us, though I am thankful to say not myself. The Emperor blubber itself has a very delicate flavour. As a treat this morning Campbell gave us each a small strip of Emperor’s breast done as a filet-de-boeuf, with a small piece of fat on top, and it was an excellent change after the unvarying stews we have had for months. I am reading my diary of last year in monthly parts for the amusement of the company. We all find an especial, though a tantalizing pleasure in the few descriptions of meals I have entered as part of our routine at Cape Adare. We still feel the monotonous diet, but are otherwise quite reconciled to our fate.

The cave is keeping quite warm at present, and of course the insulation is much improved by each wind with drift. All the sea ice beyond the bay has gone out again, and the Drygalski Ice Tongue and the moraines are hidden by dense drift, which is just missing us except in the strongest gusts. Dickason and I were both blown down once or twice when we were standing at the entrance to the shaft.’

25 May 1912
‘Westerly wind with heavy drift continues, and we have been drifted up all day. This afternoon we had to do away with the blubber fires because of the smitch, for the drift kept on filling the chimney and preventing the draught from flowing. Afterwards Dickason started the hoosh over the primus, and this rapidly used up our limited supply of oxygen. First of all the reading-lamps went out and refused to be lighted with a flaring spill, and then the spill went out and could not be relighted at the primus. Next the primus went out and could not be relighted because the matches would not burn. By this time we were opening up the chimney and the drift at the entrance to the shaft, and Campbell drove his ice-axe through the latter with immediate relief to everybody. Since then things have gone pretty well, but we all have had bad headaches, which we had put down to the smitch, but which were more probably due directly to lack of oxygen. It is a great nuisance this new danger having arisen after we thought we had avoided the utmost malice of the weather, but it is lucky we were not caught at night and all asphyxiated in our beds. I suppose that the coating of ice which has formed on the inside of the snow-roof has spoiled the ventilation. After dinner Campbell and Abbot cleared the drift from the mouth of the shaft and pushed the flagstaff down the chimney.’

14 June 1912
‘Half a gale blowing. Clear, and stars shining. Another day in bed. Rather smitchier than usual. We have just had a word who should go out and clear the chimney and cut away a projecting piece of sealskin in our passage roof which is a constant menace to our eyes and noses, and which has perhaps been the cause of more hasty language than any other individual thing about the camp. I have not yet mentioned one essential portion of our equipment - the toothpick. Campbell is the only member of the party who still possesses a toothbrush, and the present diet is eminently suited to cause the collection of small shreds of meat between our teeth. In spite of this we are able to keep them in as good condition as we can at home by the judicious use of bamboo toothpicks with sharp points to remove the meat and of pieces of soft wood to rub the front of the teeth. These latter instruments are made from the white wood of the Fry’s chocolate boxes, and their blunt chisel ends are moistened and chewed first to secure pliability. They are rather better than a toothbrush. The hard biscuit, of course, looks after the grinding surfaces for us. I think at present that I am looking forward to a good bath and a clean up as much as I am to a good meal of bread, butter, and jam, which is saying a good deal. Another tin of oil was finished this morning. We have every reason to be satisfied with the oil consumption, which is becoming less and less, while Dickason watches over his primus like a hen over her chickens. The men are just finishing off their private sewing, and then they start work on their tents. The day after one has been messman is always the pleasantest of the three, for one feels one has earned the right to a day in bed.

To-day has been a great day of controversies. First Levick and myself found ourselves at variance about the chocolate ration, and the amount of chocolate left at Cape Adare. The second argument was whether or not one of the expedition fruit-cakes would freeze at spring sledging temperatures, and this was followed by two lengthy battles between Campbell and Levick on points of national ethics and imperial politics respectively. Finally we had a three-cornered battle as to which is the most economical and soul-satisfying way of eating one’s single biscuit. We are all three set in our own way: Campbell eats his at breakfast, Levick part at breakfast and part in each hoosh, and myself part when I feel the want of it, about midday or a little earlier, and part at dinner.’

6 July 1912
‘The worst of our day as messman is the infernal crick we get in our backs from never being able to stand upright. Mine is at present aching terribly, but the pain soon passes off in our bags.

Levick is too broad for our inner door, and we have just spent an amusing five minutes watching his attempts to get through with a joint of meat in one hand and a cooker in the other. Luckily, as a rule we run to slimness, and no one else has much trouble.

The atmosphere is becoming tolerable again, but we have ruined the pure white of the roof and wall until a few more smitchless days enable pure crystals to form over the dirty ones.

Browning has slight indigestion and Dickason has complained of a bad stitch in his side, but otherwise we are in excellent health.

We are running out of penguins and of bones for the fire, and shall be short of sea ice in a day or two, so I hope for fine weather, for the penguins especially make all the difference between palatable and monotonous hooch.’

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