We are in, easily

‘Went to Bromley with D for the count. We are in, easily. Majority about 2000 higher. Our Liberals were 5000 last time. 1000 have abstained; 2000 to me and 10000 to my opponent. This gives gives me over 12000 majority. Spent the afternoon listening to results on radio. . .’ This is the Conservative politician Harold Macmillan writing in his diary on the evening of the 1951 General Election, exactly 70 years ago today. The Tories had been out of power for several years, and with this success led by Churchill, Macmillan was about to begin a series of ministerial career moves that would lead eventually to him becoming Prime Minster. His diary, published posthumously, is said to be ‘one of the fullest and most entertaining’ of 20th century political journals.

Macmillan was born in London in 1894 to a publisher and his American artist wife (his paternal grandfather, Daniel MacMillan, had founded founded Macmillan Publishers). He was educated at home, then at Summer Fields School (Oxford), at Eton College, and, thanks to a scholarship, at Balliol College, Oxford. Volunteering as soon as war was declared, Macmillan was commissioned in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps but soon transferred to the Grenadier Guards. He served with distinction as a captain but was wounded on several occasions. He did, in fact, spend the final two years of war in hospital undergoing a series of operations, followed by a long convalescence which left him with a slight shuffle in his walk and a limp grip in his right hand. 

After the war, Macmillan joined the family publishing business. In 1920, he married Lady Dorothy Cavendish, the daughter of the 9th Duke of Devonshire, and the couple had four children together. However, from 1929, Lady Dorothy began an affair, and thereafter the couple lived separate lives. As a Conservative party candidate he was elected to the House of Commons for Stockton-on-Tees in 1924, though he then lost the seat in 1929. However, before long, he was re-selected to stand for the same seat, and in 1931 and was returned to the House.

Macmillan spent the 1930s on the backbenches but he was very active politically, publishing The State and Industry, The Next Step, The Next Five Years, and The Middle Way. During this time, he also became increasingly concerned at the appeasement of Nazi Germany. When Winston Churchill formed his World War II coalition government in May 1940, Macmillan was appointed parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Supply; and in 1942 he was sent to northwest Africa as British minister resident at Allied Forces Headquarters, Mediterranean Command. At the end of the war in Europe, he was briefly - for a few months in 1945 - secretary of state for air in Churchill’s ‘caretaker’ government. When the Conservatives regained power in 1951, he was appointed, successively, minister of housing and local government and minister of defence by Churchill; he then served as foreign secretary and chancellor of the exchequer under Anthony Eden.

When Eden resigned as Prime Minister in early 1957 after the debacle of the Suez crisis, Macmillan took his place. He restored the Conservative party fortunes winning an increased majority in the 1959 General Election. However, Macmillan’s second term of office was beset with crises: a failed application to join the European Economic Community, economic troubles, the so-called ‘night of the long knives’, and the Profumo affair. Macmillan resigned as leader in October 1963. He refused a peerage and then retired from the House of Commons in September 1964. His later years were devoted to writing several volumes of memoirs. He did, later, accept a peerage and was created an earl in 1984. He died in 1986. Further information is available online at Wikipedia, UK government website, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Guardian obituary, Spartacus Educational, and the BBC.

As well as being a memoirist, Macmillan was also a diarist. A first volume of his edited diaries was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1984: War Diaries: Politics and War in the Mediterranean, January 1943 - May 1945. His later diaries were only published posthumously, by the family firm, in two volumes (2003 and 2011): The Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years 1950-57 and The Macmillan Diaries: Prime Minister and After 1957-1966. According to the publisher, Macmillan ‘kept one of the fullest and most entertaining political diaries of the twentieth century’. The publisher further adds: ‘He was an acute observer of events and people not just in his own country or party, but on the wider international and political scene. His Diary provides wry portraits of many of the leading political figures of the period and records his personal take on the great issues and events of the day. In the process Macmillan’s wider activities and inner concerns are also revealed, casting light beyond the famously ‘unflappable’ exterior onto the character of one of the most enigmatic figures in modern British political history.’ See the History of Government blog for an interesting article which compares the diaries of Macmillan and William Gladstone.

The following extracts, taken from the first volume of post war diaries, begin with one written on the day of the 1951 General Election. (Trailing dots without brackets are part of the quoted passage; trailing dots inside square brackets, however, indicate where I have edited some text out.)

26 October 1951
‘Went to Bromley with D for the count. We are in, easily. Majority about 2000 higher. Our Liberals were 5000 last time. 1000 have abstained; 2000 to me and 10000 to my opponent. This gives gives me over 12000 majority. Spent the afternoon listening to results on radio. . . 

Altogether, 23 seats gained by Conservatives. No losses, except 1 in Belfast. Megan Lloyd George is out, which is a very good thing. Davies will not be so frightened if she is not there to bully him!’

27 October 1951
‘. . . Attlee went to the King as soon as we topped 313 members of the new House! This seems rather strange. How relieved he must be. So Churchill must have kissed hands at about 6pm last night to form his third administration . . .

The process of Cabinet making, always difficult, seems to have begun. According to the 6 o’clock news the following ministers have been appointed. P.M. First Lord and Minister of Defence - Churchill; Foreign Secretary and Leader of Commons - Eden; Ld President - (with control of Food and Agriculture) - Woolton; Ld Privy Seal and Leader of Lords - Salisbury; Home Secretary - Maxwell Fyfe; Minister of Labour - Sir W Monckton; Dominions Secretary - Ld Ismay; Chancellor of the Exchequer - O Lyttelton. These ministers were sworn in tonight.

This seems an extraordinarily maladroit move - I should say the combined effort of Bracken and Beaverbrook. It is just folly for Churchill to become Minister of Defence. It almost justifies the Daily Mirror! He should have been Prime Minister only, thus showing that he is as interested in economic and social affairs, as in military matters. This is a major blunder and may have most serious results. It might even endanger the ministry, because I think a difficult by-election after this gaffe cd easily be lost. It is also surprising that Eden shd demand to lead the House as well as take the Foreign Office. It is obvious that this cannot be an effective management. There was a hint by the ‘Parliamentary commentator’ that a deputy leader may be appointed. Lyttelton’s appointment is odd, and will (I fear) be a disappointment to him. He had worked hard to fit himself for economic and trade affairs. Fyfe’s appointment is a good one. He will be a better Home Secretary than Minister of Labour. His speeches and writings thoroughly frightened the unions, and in spite of Churchill’s denials during the campaign, made them alarmed and caused them to rally their forces. He will be a good Home Secretary. It seems he is also to be Minister for Wales. This means, I suppose, that Clem Davies has refused to come in. I have heard nothing, as I have stayed in Sussex all day resting. Monckton’s appointment is unexpected, but good. He has a more subtle and a more flexible mind than Fyfe. He shd do very well. Ld Ismay’s appointment as Minister of Defence was generally expected and was explicable. His appointment as Dominions Secretary is unexpected and inexplicable. [. . .]’

28 October 1951
‘. . . It is now possible to form a view of what has happened at this election. The nation is evenly divided - almost exactly even. For if allowance is made for unopposed returns, the votes cast on either side are just about the same. The Liberal party has practically disappeared in the House of Commons. But whereas last time they polled over 2 million votes in the country, this time (since they had only 100 odd candidates) the Liberals have had only the choice of abstention, voting Conservative, or voting Socialist in 500 odd constituencies. As far as one can see, north of the River Trent they have gone 2 to 1 - 2 Conservatives, to 1 Socialist. This is very marked in Scotland, and in places like Durham and North Yorkshire which have suffered under the Socialist tyranny. By this means both Middlesborough and Darlington were won by us. In the midlands, the Liberal vote has either abstained, or gone fifty-fifty or even worse. This explains Lincoln, Birmingham, Nottingham etc. The Liberals of this area have too much of the Civil War radical and roundhead tradition to join a cavalier vote. In suburban constituencies, like Bromley, the Liberals have split on a class basis. The bourgeois Liberal, pillars of chapel and League of Nations Union and all that, voted for me. (2 to 1 was about the figure, but 3/4 only voted - the rest abstained.)

So the result is, once again, a moral stalemate. This follows a long innings by a Govt wh has made a tremendous number of mistakes; has egregious failures in administration; and has been thrown about, like a rudderless hip in a storm, from crisis to crisis. At first sight, therefore, one can only form the most gloomy forebodings about the future. [. . .]

Message from Churchill to come out to Chartwell. I expected this. On arrival, at 3pm, found him in a most pleasant and rather tearful mood. He asked me to ‘build the houses for the people’. What an assignment! I know nothing whatever about these matters, having spent 6 years now either on defence or foreign affairs. I had, of course, hoped to be Minister of Defence and said this frankly to Churchill. But he is determined to keep it in his own hands. I gather the reason is the frightful muddle in which defence has been allowed to fall. In this ‘setup’ the service ministers become in effect under-secretaries (in spite of their grand titles) and will not be members of the Cabinet. I asked Churchill what was the present housing ‘set-up’. He said he hadn’t an idea. But the boys would know. So the boys (Sir Edward Bridges, Head of the Civil Service and Sir Norman Brook, Secretary to the Cabinet) were sent for - also some whisky. It seems that there is much confusion in all this business. Broadly speaking, the old ministry of Town and Country Planning retains these functions, but is now called Ministry of Local Government and Planning. All teh functions of supervising local govt in general remain with it. [. . .]

When I get home, I begin to realise what a terrible burden I have undertaken. Churchill is grateful and will back me; but 1 really haven't a clue how to set about the job. (Among other minor problems, James Stuart, who is motoring south, has disappeared! But he is wanted, to be Secretary of State for Scotland. Nobody can say the Tories stand about waiting for office. It is a job to get hold of them!)

Went in to talk all this over with Maurice. Carol came to dinner. (I have now a lot to arrange - first of all, with my brother and affairs at St Martin’s St). So to bed. What a day!’

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

A classic Wild West confrontation between cowboys and sheriffs, subsequently made famous by books and movies and dubbed ‘Gunfight at the O. K. Corral’, took place in Tombstone, a silver boom town near the Mexican border, exactly 140 years ago today. Extraordinarily for the time and place, one resident of Tombstone, George Whitwell Parsons, was also a keen diarist. Though not in town on the day of the gunfight itself, he returned to Tombstone the following day, and wrote about the gunfight, and how ‘bad blood’ had been brewing for some time.

The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral took place on 26 October 1881. Although it lasted less than a minute, three of the cowboys were killed, and three of the sheriffs’ group (two of the Earp brothers, but not Wyatt, and Doc Holliday) were wounded. It is generally regarded, Wikipedia says, as the most famous gunfight in the history of the Old West and has come to represent a time in American history when the frontier was open range for outlaws confronted only by sparse or non-existent law enforcement. The inter-personal conflicts and feuds, however, leading to the gunfight were complicated - see Wikipedia or History Net for more information.

The gunfight’s path to iconic status began in 1931 when author Stuart Lake published a fictionalised biography of Wyatt Earp. John Ford’s famous movie, My Darling Clementine, based on a Stuart Lake book, came out in 1946. And a decade later, John Sturges directed Gunfight at the O.K. Corral with Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday. Since then, the same story has been portrayed with varying degrees of accuracy in many other Western films and books.

The Earps and Doc Holliday were charged with murder but were eventually exonerated. However, in December the same year, Virgil Earp was maimed in an assassination attempt, and in March the following year, Morgan Earp was killed. This led to a series of further killings and retributions, Wikipedia notes, with federal and county lawmen supporting different sides of the conflict, which became known as the Earp Vendetta Ride.

Given the seeming familiarity of Wild West towns, especially the lawless ones like Tombstone which have been recreated so often in movies, as well as their inhabitants and their lifestyles, it comes as a something of a surprise to learn that one of Tombstone’s long-term residents was a diarist. George Whitwell Parsons was born in Washington, D.C., in 1850, and guided towards a career in law by his father.

However, Parsons must have wanted more excitement because he moved to Florida, where he helped with the salvaging of shipwrecks. He nearly drowned in a hurricane, and took off, in mid-1876, for Central America, before returning by ship to the US West Coast, where he took employment as a bank clerk in Los Angeles for several years. He then went to Tombstone, Arizona, to establish, with a friend, a new mining company, Parsons and Redfern. In time, he became a prominent citizen, a member of the Council of Ten, a vigilante committee, edited The Tombstone Epitaph, and founded the town’s library.

Parsons returned to Los Angeles in 1887, where he became a charter member of the Chamber of Commerce, and did much to promote the mining industry as well as oil and mineral exploration. He was involved in developing the Los Angeles harbour, and other civic projects. He died in 1933. There is a little more information about Parsons at Wikipedia, The Earp Gang website, and The Earp-Holliday Trial: An Account.

Parsons began keeping a diary in 1869, after his mother’s death, and continued for most of the rest of his life. A portion of these diaries was given to the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society, and these were transcribed and published by the Department of Library and Archives of the State of Arizona in 1939 as The Private Journal of George Whitwell Parsons. The full transcription is freely available online thanks to the HathiTrust, a partnership of major research institutions and libraries ‘working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future’.

Much more recently, in 1996, Westernlore Press published A Tenderfoot in Tombstone: the Private Journal of George Whitwell Parsons - The Turbulent Years, 1880-82 edited by Lynn R Bailey. Another version - The Tombstone Years 1879-1887: The Private Journal of George Whitwell Parsons - was transcribed and edited by Carl Chafin.

Chafin - who claims to have spent 30 years transcribing 51 years of the diaries and identifying the more than 6,000 people - says (on the Find a Grave website, as well as elsewhere): ‘This current publication of his journal covers the period from March 27, 1879 to March 31, 1887 (in two volumes of about 400 pages each), six weeks after he arrived in Los Angeles. I have transcribed the Los Angeles years 1887 to 1929 and they will be published in the near future. The period from June 28, 1882 to October 31, 1882 was serialized in The Tombstone Epitaph from December 1967 to April 1968, and the entire year of 1880 ran in The Tombstone Tumbleweed during 1996.’

Here, though, are several extracts from Parson’s diary (as found on the HathiTrust website) concerning the gunfight at the O. K. Corral, and its aftermath.

26 October 1881
‘Started out again this AM and first saw the ‘Phoenix’. Seems more promising than any other claim. Ledge about 18 inches and going down straight. ‘White Star’ next. Small ledge, rather flat, but fair rock. I left at Bells and went home. Rain this afternoon and very pleasant. Fired at mark this afternoon and I beat with rifle, 75 and 250 yards. Tailings sampled by Wendt this evening and liked. Chicken dinner. Skunk excitement tonight, but didn’t get him. Tomorrow for Tombstone.’

27 October 1881
‘Snow this morning. Windy and extremely cold and disagreeable. Wendt, Heyne and I started this AM for Tombstone and Ray went with us over the mountains to where a wagon was which H & W had, driving the burro before him loaded down with samples from different mines. Very disagreeable ride till we harnessed and drove out of the cold mountains into the sunshine on the Mesa beyond. I led Haynes horse and read of one of the Strallus’ long European letters given me this morning by Capt Hanson who arrived at last, much the worse for his 3 weeks absence. It seems almost as though the Capt was gone in. I hope he has not yet lost his grip.

At Charleston we dined by invitation of H and reached Tombstone about 5 o’clock. Much excitement in town and people apprehensive and scary. A bad time yesterday when Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp with Doc Holliday had a street fight with the two McLowerys and Bill Clanton and Ike, all but the latter being killed and W and M Earp wounded [in fact it was Virgil wounded not Wyatt]. Desperate men and desperate encounter.

Bad blood has been brewing some time and I was not suprised at the outbreak. It is only a wonder it has not happened before. A raid is feared upon the town by the Cowboys and measures have been taken to protect life and property. The ‘Stranglers’ were out in force and showed sand. My cowboy appearance and attire was not in keeping with the exited mind. Loud talking or talking in groups was tho’t out of place. Had to laugh at some of the nervousness. It has been a bad scare and the worst is not yet over some think.’

31 October 1881
‘Met Wyat Earp in hotel who took me in to see Virgil this evening, he’s getting along well. Morgan too. Looks bad for them all thus far.’

28 December 1881
‘Was much provoked at Capt H this AM and told I was sorry to have ever met him. I have stood more than any of his friends and have had enough. Was quite short with him. Hohstadt cannot seem to get him out of town. Every liquor saloon is a stumbling block. Bad times in office too. I wish whiskey was all poured in gutter.

Tonight about 11:30 Doc G had just left and I tho’t couldn’t have crossed the street - when four shots were fired in quick succession from very heavily charged guns, making a terrible noise and I tho’t were fired under my window under which I quickly dropped, keeping the dobe wall between me and the outside till fusilade was over. I immediately tho’t Doc had been shot and fired in return, remembering a late episode and knowing how pronounced he was on the Earp-Cow-boy question. He had crossed through and passed Virgil Earp who crossed to west side of 5th and was fired upon when in range of my window by men 2 or 3 concealed in the timbers of the new 2 story adobe going up for the Huachuca Water Co. He did not fall, but recrossed to the Oriental and was taken from there to the Cosmopolitan being hit with buck shot and badly wounded in left arm with flesh wound above left thigh.

Cries of ‘there they go’, ‘head them off’ were heard but the cowardly apathetic guardians of the peace were not inclined to risk themselves and the other brave men all more or less armed did nothing. Doc had a close shave. Van and I went to the hospital for Doc and got various things. Hotel well guarded, so much so that I had hard trouble to get to Earps room. He was easy. Told him I was sorry for him. ‘It’s hell, isn’t it!’ said he. His wife was troubled, ‘Never mind, I’ve got one arm left to hug you with,’ he said.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 26 October 2011.

Scandal in the Papal chapel

Giovanni Antonio Merlo, a 16th century papal singer, left behind one of the very earliest of diaries. Though largely full of financial details, it also covers some historical events and a few insights into choir politics. One entry, for example, from 450 years ago, details the internal squabbling over the recruitment of a new singer, and how the pope himself (Pius v, pictured) became involved. Other entries record some (amusing) remedies for common health complaints.

There is very little biographical information about Merlo available online (not even a Wikipedia entry), and what is known comes from his diary - a paper manuscript of thirty-six folios bound in parchment - housed in the Vatican archives. He joined the papal chapel in September 1551 after having served in the Cappella Giulia, and remained until his death on 28 December 1588. At various times he seems to have been in the employ of Cardinal Sermoneta (in 1559) and Cardinal Farnese (in 1569), and in later life (1575-1580) receiving a pension from the pope.

Merlo’s manuscripts were the subject of a paper read by Richard Sherr before the New England Chapter of the American Musicological Society in Boston 1977. The following year, the paper was published in Current Musicology (issue 25) - available online here. It has since been reproduced in other publications, most recently Sherr’s own Music and Musicians in Renaissance Rome and Other Courts (Routledge, 2019), which can be previewed at Googlebooks.

According to Sherr, the manuscript contains notes and jottings made between 1559 and 1588, in approximately chronological order. Included are drafts of correspondence and memoranda, lists of assets and debits, and mention of historical events (there is even a fragment of music), all combining to give an idea of the daily concerns of a typical papal singer in the second half of the 16th century. 

The majority of entries in the diary concerns Merlo’s finances. As a member of the papal chapel, he received a monthly salary, gratuities by celebrants of masses and by newly created cardinals, as well as special payments made in the period between the death of one pope and the election of his successor. Apart from the financial records, important feast days are mentioned (the celebrant, the number of singers attending, and the tip given each singer). Historical events are occasionally recorded - such as this one: ‘On 6 March 1561, Cardinal Caraffa was strangled in the Castello, and his brother the Duke had his head cut off along with the Count di Alife his brother-in-law and Don Leonardo de Chardini. Requiescant in pace.’

Merlo also describes, from his own experience, an ‘event of much importance’ involving Pope Pius V, as follows.

‘In 1571 in the time of Msgr. Sacrista and our maestro di cappella named Giuseppe, there occurred an event of much importance, which was this. It being the occasion for us to receive singers into our chapel, our maestro proposed three, one called M. Ippolito, another M. Tomasso, and the third M. Francesco. We voted, and the first had twelve votes, the second seven, and the third nine, and there were eighteen of us voting, so that none of them had the number of votes required by our statutes, and they were all rejected. But nonetheless, the said maestro with the help of our protector Cardinal Morone [obtained] by telling him certain things against us, managed to get them admitted even though it was against our statutes, and one Saturday morning gave them the cotta all without our consent. We immediately sent a memorandum to His Holiness telling him what had happened and that he had been deceived, and that we, having sworn fealty to him were only doing our duty in letting him know, although His Holiness was the master and could do anything he wished. And also we went to Msgr. Carniglia as superintendant of the papal household and asked him if he would please have a word with His Holiness, and the said Msgr. talked about it to the pope who, hearing that they (the singers) had not been admitted according to the correct manner, ordered that they be sent on their way. And the three singers served with cotta for a whole month including a papal Mass, and at the beginning of the next month they were fired all three by the said maestro, something which had not occurred in many years. I say this honestly so that you who will come after us will maintain our constitution and do as we did for the good of those who will come later, as our predecessors have done for us. Furthermore, after fifteen days, we reconsidered the contralto of the three named M. Ippolito because Msgr. the maestro di cappella said that this Ippolito had complained to His Holiness saying that he had had two-thirds of the vote, and since only one [more vote] was needed, asking that His Holiness have the goodness to admit him into the chapel, even more so because one of our singers named Don Paulo Biancho was sick and therefore could not attend on the day of the voting, but was there when the said singers were auditioned and, having heard him and being satisfied, gave him his vote in writing. And this was given to the maestro so it appeared that he should be admitted because of this, although there was much debate concerning this vote sent in writing; whether it was valid or not. But the thing was not decided for lack of precedent and rested impending in the time of Pius V, 1571, the month of February.’

The diary ends with a number of miscellaneous notes, Sherr says: a homily to patience, information concerning indulgences, fragments of poetry, and some home remedies, two of which he quotes ‘for the benefit of those who may find themselves stranded and afflicted in Italy some day.’

‘Prescription for constipation. Take six ounces of fine steel which is not rusty and heat it (red hot] and then plunge it in water. And then polish it finely and soak it in strong white vinegar and remove the foam that appears. And continue to change the vinegar four times a day for three days in a row. Then let [the steel] dry on a clean and dry wooden cutting block, and then put it in a flask of mature, very clear white wine, and leave it for the space of three days. And then begin to take six ounces of that wine in the morning when the sun rises and take five ounces in the evening three hours before dinner, and get used to doing this in the morning and the evening continuing to take the said amount of wine and replacing in the morning and evening the amount taken until you judge that there is enough left in the flask to last until the end of a month.’

‘For the liver. Take three gold ducats [weighing] three cogni and take a white clay saucer with running water [in it], and make the sign of the Cross over the water. Turn to the East and take one of the ducats and touch your body or clothes and say, “Bile return to the cow and gold return to water, bile return to the ox and water return to gold.” And each time throw the ducat in the water, and do this nine times. And this should be done on Thursdays and on Sundays before the sun rises and before it sets.’

The Pepys of Paris?

‘The diaries of Pierre de l’Estoile ‘do for the Paris of Henry IV what Pepys does for the London of Charles II, and a great deal more . . .’ This is the opinion of Nancy Lyman Roelker, an American history professor who first translated into English and edited l’Estoile’s diaries. L’Estoile - who died 410 years ago today - was a royal secretary and very well placed to observe the religions and political shenanigans of the age. Most recently, his diaries have been used extensively by Durham University’s Tom Hamilton for a first biography of the man in English.

Pierre de l’Estoile was born in Paris in 1546 into a middle class family. His father and grandfather had both held prestigious positions in the royal bureaucracy. His father, though, died when Pierre was only twelve, and he was placed under the care of Mathieu Béroalde, a Hebraic scholar with Protestant inclinations. In l’Estoile’s earliest foray into writing, a miscellany on the early Wars of Religion, he adopted a neutral tone, presenting the attitudes and opinions of both Catholics and Protestants, while supporting the Crown’s efforts at mediation.

L’Estoile studied law at Bourges, trained as a notary, and like his forefathers became a royal secretary, though not achieving particularly high office. He married Anne de Baillon, but she died in 1580, shortly after the birth of a daughter. Two years later he married the 18 year-old daughter of Colombe de Marteau. During the latter years of his life, he maintained a close interest in religious and papal controversies, all the while amassing a huge library. He died on 8 October 1611. There are only very sketchy biographical details available online, at Wikipedia.

L’Estoile’s main claim to historical fame stems from the diaries he left behind - these are also the main source of information about his life. A century or so after his death, one of his descendants, the abbot of  Abbey of Saint-Acheul, deposited the diaries in the abbey’s library, and when the abbey was dissolved they passed through the hands of a bookseller before being acquired by the Royal Library. Although the diaries were not intended for publication they have been used as a prime first hand source for histories of the reigns of Henry III and IV of France. 

Extracts from the diaries were first published in English by Harvard University Press in 1958 in The Paris of Henry of Navarre as seen by Pierre de l’Estoile - Selections from his Mémoires-Journaux, as translated and edited by Nancy Lyman Roelker. Here’s a paragraph from the introduction in which the editor likens l’Estoile to Samuel Pepys.

‘The Mémoires-Journaux of Pierre de l’Estoile do for the Paris of Henry IV what Pepys does for the London of Charles II, and a great deal more, because l’Estoile was a serious student of politics and morals, and combined his acute observation with keen judgment of men and events. In his diary, which covers thirty-seven years, 1574-1611, the reader finds an eyewitness account of the wars of religion, the court of the Valois, and a full account of the reign of Henry IV, complete with an enormous cast of characters who take part in these events, their idosyncrasies, their clothes, their food, their jokes, diseases, and love affairs - so that the reader knows many of them more intimately than the family across the street. In effect, that family has ceased to be across the street, for the reader is living in the quarter of St. André-des-Arts on the left bank of the Seine opposite the Palais de Justice, and the Palais, seat of the Parlement de Paris, the highest court in France, has become the hub of the universe, as it was to the diarist, who earned his living as audiencier, or lerk-in-chief of the Parliament. Seated with Pierre de l’Estoile in his cabinet the reader has a window on Paris; he sees too the events of the great world as they are seen at the Palais, where men are hotly disputing the merits of Mary Stuart’s execution, or laughing at the sign which been informally posted, “Lost! The Great Invincible Naval Army . . . [Armada] if anyone can give news of it . . . let him come to St Peter’s Palace where the Holy Father will give him wine.” ’

More recently, the diaries have been used extensively for a biographical work by Tom Hamilton (Oxford University Press, 2017): Pierre de L’Estoile and his Word in the Wars of Religion. Some pages can be freely read at Googlebooks. Hamilton says the diaries ‘provides a fascinating portrait of his private life, his social world, his role as a collector of curiosities, and his own personal experiences of living through the era of the French religious wars.’ And there is an informative review available online at H-Net (Michigan State University Department of History).

Here are several extracts of the diaries from Roelker’s 1958 work. (However, it is worth bearing in mind that Hamilton argues, in his book, that the early diaries, at least, were composed after Henry III’s death, “relying on previous drafts that are now lost.” He bases this on an analysis of l’Estoile’s handwriting style, which is identical to the style of other writings that appear after 1589.)

30 May 1574
‘Sunday, May 30,1574, the day of Pentecost, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Charles IX, King of France, worn out by a long and violent illness and loss of blood, which had caused his death to be predicted for more than three months, died in the Château of Vincennes near Paris, at the age of twenty-three years, eleven months and four or five days, after reigning about thirteen and a half years full of continual war and strife. He left one daughter, about nineteen months old, named Isabella of France, by his wife Madame Isabella of Austria, and the kingdom of France troubled by civil wars (on the pretext of religion and the public welfare) in most of its provinces, especially Languedoc, Provence, Dauphiné, Poitou, Saintonge, Angoumois, and Normandy, where discontented Huguenots and the Catholics associated with them have seized various towns and strongholds which they hold with great force.’

31 May 1574
‘Monday, the last day of May, the Court of Parlement assembled in the morning, in spite of the holiday, and deputed certain presidents and conseillers to go to the Château of Vincennes to request Madame Catherine de Medici, mother of the late King, to accept the regency and undertake the government of the kingdom until the arrival of her son King Henry, who was in Poland. To this effect, the same afternoon . . . [she] willingly accepted the task, according to the intention of the late King, her son, who had decreed it a few hours before his death.

That same afternoon the body of the late King, who had lain in his bed . . . with his face uncovered for everyone to see . . . was opened and embalmed by the physicians and surgeons and placed in a metal casket.’

2 June 1574
‘Wednesday, 2nd, the Queen Regent had all the entrances to the Château of the Louvre locked, except the main gate . . . which had a large troop of archers stationed inside and one of Swiss outside. . . Rumor has it that she did this in fear of enterprises and secret conspiracies discovered at Easter, which had already resulted in the execution of Tourtet . . .  La Mole . . . and Coconas . . . in the Place de Grève in late April, and in the imprisonment of the Marshals Montmorency and Cossé.’

4 June 1574
‘Friday, June 4, three well-known gentlemen were sent by the Queen, in her own name and that of M. le Duc d’Alençon and the King of Navarre . . . to Poland to announce to the King the death of his late brother, congratulate him on his accession to the crown of France, and to urge him to hasten his return to his kingdom, to establish himself and to obviate the great evils and inconveniences which might be brought about by any further delay. . .’

1 July 1574
‘On Sunday,  the first day of July, in the great church Notre Dame in Paris, a solemn vow was taken taken in the name of the whole city, to Notre Dame de Lorette that if the city were delivered from the siege, they would present a silver lamp, and other ornaments. . . There was such a crowd at this occasion that a poor pregnant woman was suffocated in the mob, with her child.’ 

5 July 1574

‘Thursday, July 5, La Chapelle-Marteau, Prévost des Marchands, assembled the city [officials], read to them letters which the Duke of Mayenne had written to the Parisians, in which he exhorted them to hold fast and to cheer up, promising aid at the end of the month at the latest, and if he should fail, he gave them his wife and children to do with what they would. These beautiful words served the people for bread . . . although Boucher . . . and others have assured them of deliverance in two weeks, they were content to settle for a month, so anxious are they to gain that wonderful paradise which the preachers assure them will be gained by dying of hunger.’

8 July 1574
‘Thursday, July 8, the heart of the late King Charles was carried to the Célestins in Paris by M. le Duc, his brother, and there interred with all the solemnities and ceremonies usual in such cases.’

Animate the marble

‘Oh! how I wished I had the power to petrify the living, and animate the marble.’ So wrote Gideon Mantell, a 19th century doctor and obsessive fossil hunter, one hundred and seventy years ago today, following a visit to the Great Exhibition.

Both Mantell and The Great Exhibition have been the subject of past articles in The Diary Review - see Gideon Mantell - geologist and A terrible ordeal - but I can’t resist one diary entry that combines them both. By 1851, Mantell was living in London where he enjoyed being a very active member of the city’s scientific societies and forums. He was also very enthusiastic about The Great Exhibition and visited often, recording many and various thoughts in his diary.

One visit was on 8 October 1851, and these are his thoughts, as found in The Journal of Gideon Mantell, Surgeon and Geologist, published by Oxford University Press in 1940: ‘Went again to the Exhibition; the crowd tremendous; at the time I entered 97,000 persons were in the building; in the course of the day nearly 110,000 - one hundred and ten thousand! Vulgar, ignorant, country people; many dirty women with their infants were sitting on the seats giving suck with their breasts uncovered, beneath the lovely female figures of the sculptor. Oh! how I wished I had the power to petrify the living, and animate the marble: perhaps a time will come when this fantasy will be realised, and the human breed be succeeded by finer forms and lovelier features, than the world now dreams of.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 8 October July 2011.

The most beautiful poem

‘The most beautiful poem there is, is life - life which discerns its own story in the making, in which inspiration and self-consciousness go together and help each other . . .’ This is the French moral philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel, born 200 years ago today, writing in his diary on his 31st birthday. Today, he is largely remembered thanks to this diary, which, in a way, he turned into a beautiful poem of his life.

Descended from a Huguenot family that had been driven to Switzerland, Amiel was born on 27 September 1821 in Geneva, but lost his parents at an early age. He travelled widely, and studied German philosophy in Berlin. In 1849, he was appointed professor of aesthetics at the academy of Geneva, and five years later became professor of moral philosophy. A few biographical details are available in English at Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica, but Jean-Marc Cottier runs an informative website in French.

Amiel is remembered today largely because of his diary first published in Geneva as Fragments d’un journal intime in 1882, and translated by Mrs Humphrey Ward into English as Amiel’s Journal: The Journal Intimé of Henri-Frédéric Amiel in 1884 (freely available at Internet Archive). The diary has been reprinted many times in English (currently lots of versions - see Amazon) and has been translated into many other languages.

According to Ward’s original introduction to the first English edition, Amiel’s literary heirs inherited thousands of sheets of his diary, covering a period of more than thirty years. She says Amiel recorded his various occupations, the incidents of each day, his psychological observations, and the impressions produced on him by books. But his journal was, ‘above all, the confidant of his most private and intimate thoughts; a means whereby the thinker became conscious of his own inner life; a safe shelter wherein his questionings of fate and the future, the voice of grief, of self-examination and confession, the soul’s cry for inward peace, might make themselves freely heard.’

Here are several extracts - on religion, nature, motherhood and self-analysis - which give a sense of Amiel’s daily cogitations.

27 September 1852
‘To-day I complete my thirty-first year. . .

The most beautiful poem there is, is life - life which discerns its own story in the making, in which inspiration and self-consciousness go together and help each other, life which knows itself to be the world in little, a repetition in miniature of the divine universal poem. Yes, be man; that is to say, be nature, be spirit, be the image of God, be what is greatest, most beautiful, most lofty in all the spheres of being, be infinite will and idea, a reproduction of the great whole. And be everything while being nothing, effacing thyself, letting God enter into thee as the air enters an empty space, reducing the ego to the mere vessel which contains the divine essence. Be humble, devout, silent, that so thou mayest hear within the depths of thyself the subtle and profound voice; be spiritual and pure, that so thou mayest have communion with the pure spirit. Withdraw thyself often into the sanctuary of thy inmost consciousness; become once more point and atom, that so thou mayest free thyself from space, time, matter, temptation, dispersion, that thou mayest escape thy very organs themselves and thine own life. That is to say, die often, and examine thyself in the presence of this death, as a preparation for the last death. He who can without shuddering confront blindness, deafness, paralysis, disease, betrayal, poverty; he who can without terror appear before the sovereign justice, he alone can call himself prepared for partial or total death. How far am I from anything of the sort, how far is my heart from any such stoicism! But at least we can try to detach ourselves from all that can be taken away from us, to accept everything as a loan and a gift, and to cling only to the imperishable - this at any rate we can attempt. To believe in a good and fatherly God, who educates us, who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, who punishes only when he must, and takes away only with regret; this thought, or rather this conviction, gives courage and security. Oh, what need we have of love, of tenderness, of affection, of kindness, and how vulnerable we are, we the sons of God, we, immortal and sovereign beings! Strong as the universe or feeble as the worm, according as we represent God or only ourselves, as we lean upon infinite being, or as we stand alone.

The point of view of religion, of a religion at once active and moral, spiritual and profound, alone gives to life all the dignity and all the energy of which it is capable. Religion makes invulnerable and invincible. Earth can only be conquered in the name of heaven. All good things are given over and above to him who desires but righteousness. To be disinterested is to be strong, and the world is at the feet of him whom it cannot tempt. Why? Because spirit is lord of matter, and the world belongs to God. “Be of good cheer,” saith a heavenly voice, “I have overcome the world.”

Lord, lend thy strength to those who are weak in the flesh, but willing in the spirit!’

31 October 1852
‘Walked for half an hour in the garden. A fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn. The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant mountains, a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all sides like the last illusions of youth under the tears of irremediable grief. A brood of chattering birds were chasing each other through the shubberies. and playing games among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. The ground strewn with leaves, brown, yellow, and reddish; the trees half-stripped, some more, some less, and decked in ragged splendors of dark-red, scarlet, and yellow; the reddening shrubs and plantations; a few flowers still lingering behind, roses, nasturtiums, dahlias, shedding their petals round them; the bare fields, the thinned hedges; and the fir, the only green thing left, vigorous and stoical, like eternal youth braving decay; all these innumerable and marvelous symbols which forms colors, plants, and living beings, the earth and the sky, yield at all times to the eye which has learned to look for them, charmed and enthralled me. I wielded a poetic wand, and had but to touch a phenomenon to make it render up to me its moral significance. Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail. True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able at most to attain as a final result. The soul of nature is divined by the poet; the man of science, only serves to accumulate materials for its demonstration.’

6 January 1853
‘Self-government with tenderness - here you have the condition of all authority over children. The child must discover in us no passion, no weakness of which he can make use; he must feel himself powerless to deceive or to trouble us; then he will recognize in us his natural superiors, and he will attach a special value to our kindness, because he will respect it. The child who can rouse in us anger, or impatience, or excitement, feels himself stronger than we, and a child only respects strength. The mother should consider herself as her child’s sun, a changeless and ever radiant world, whither the small restless creature, quick at tears and laughter, light, fickle, passionate, full of storms, may come for fresh stores of light, warmth, and electricity, of calm and of courage. The mother represents goodness, providence, law; that is to say, the divinity, under that form of it which is accessible to childhood. If she is herself passionate, she will inculcate on her child a capricious and despotic God, or even several discordant gods. The religion of a child depends on what its mother and its father are, and not on what they say. The inner and unconscious ideal which guides their life is precisely what touches the child; their words, their remonstrances, their punishments, their bursts of feeling even, are for him merely thunder and comedy; what they worship, this it is which his instinqt divines and reflects.

The child sees what we are, behind what we wish to be. Hence his reputation as a physiognomist. He extends his power as far as he can with each of us; he is the most subtle of diplomatists. Unconsciously he passes under the influence of each person about him, and reflects it while transforming it after his own nature. He is a magnifying mirror. This is why the first principle of education is: train yourself; and the first rule to follow if you wish to possess yourself of a child’s will is: master your own.’

28 April 1871
‘For a psychologist it is extremely interesting to be readily and directly conscious of the complications of one’s own organism and the play of its several parts. It seems to me that the sutures of my being are becoming just loose enough to allow me at once a clear perception of myself as a whole and a distinct sense of my own brittleness. A feeling like this makes personal existence a perpetual astonishment and curiosity. Instead of only seeing the world which surrounds me, I analyze myself. Instead of being single, all of apiece, I become legion, multitude, a whirlwind - a very cosmos. Instead of living on the surface, I take possession of my inmost self , I apprehend myself, if not in my cells and atoms, at least so far as my groups of organs, almost my tissues, are concerned. In other words, the central monad isolates itself from all the subordinate monads, that it may consider them, and finds its harmony again in itself.

Health is the perfect balance between our organism, with all its component parts, and the outer world; it serves us especially for acquiring a knowledge of that world. Organic disturbance obliges us to set up a fresh and more spiritual equilibrium, to withdraw within the soul. Thereupon our bodily constitution itself becomes the object of thought. It is no longer we, although it may belong to us; it is nothing more than the vessel in which we make the passage of life, a vessel of which we study the weak points and the structure without identifying it with our own individuality.

Where is the ultimate residence of the self? In thought, or rather in consciousness. But below consciousness there is its germ, the punctum saliens of spontaneity; for consciousness is not primitive, it becomes. The question is, can the thinking monad return into its envelope, that is to say, into pure spontaneity, or even into the dark abyss of virtuality? I hope not. The kingdom passes; the king remains; or rather is it the royalty alone which subsists - that is to say, the idea - the personality begin in its turn merely the passing vesture of the permanent idea? Is Leibnitz or Hegel right? Is the individual immortal under the form of the spiritual body? Is he eternal under the form of the individual idea? Who saw most clearly, St Paul or Plato? The theory of Leibnitz attracts me most because it opens to us an infinite of duration, of multitude, and evolution. For a monad, which is the virtual universe, a whole infinite of time is not too much to develop the infinite within it. Only one must admit exterior actions and influences which affect the evolution of the monad. Its independence must be a mobile and increasing quantity between zero and the infinite, without ever reaching either completeness or nullity, for the monad can be neither absolutely passive nor entirely free.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 27 September 2011.

H.D.’s diary fragments

Hilda Doolittle, an American poet who wrote under the pen name H.D., died 60 years ago today. She was associated with the avant-garde imagist group of poets which included her friend Ezra Pound and husband Richard Aldington. Although certainly not known as a diarist, there are three diaries listed in the archive of her papers held at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. A very few details about one of these is available online in two biographical essays.

Hilda Doolittle was born in 1886, into the Moravian community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Her father was an astronomer, and her mother a musician. When she was 10, the family moved to Philadelphia, where she attended a local school. She entered Bryn Mawr College in 1904. Around the same time she formed friendships with Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound (to whom she was briefly engaged) and William Carlos Williams, all at the nearby University of Pennsylvania. Ill health led to her leaving college in 1906. 

By 1911, Doolittle found herself in Europe, and settling mostly in London, where Pound introduce her to the city’s literary circles. There she met and married (in 1913) the novelist Aldington (divorced in 1938). By this time, she was publishing her first poems under the initials H.D., which thereafter remained her nom de plume, not least in Poetry magazine, Pound’s anthology Des Imagistes and The Egoist edited by her husband.

Doolittle’s first volume of verse, Sea Garden, was published in 1916, and established her as an important voice among the young so-called Imagist poets. Other volumes, classical translations and occasional prose works followed in the first half of the century, establishing her as a major literary figure. In 1918, she met born Annie Winifred Ellerman (a novelist who took the name Bryher from one of the Scilly Isles) and the two started, what would become, a lifelong love affair. They travelled as cousins, and were together through affairs/marriages with others for some 40 years.

Poets.org has this assessment: ‘[Doolittle’s] work is characterised by the intense strength of her images, economy of language, and use of classical mythology. Her poems did not receive widespread appreciation and acclaim during her lifetime, in part because her name was associated with the Imagist movement even as her voice had outgrown the movement's boundaries, as evidenced by her book-length works, Trilogy and Helen in Egypt. Neglect of H. D. can also be attributed to her times, as many of her poems spoke to an audience which was unready to respond to the strong feminist principles articulated in her work.’ Doolittle died on 27 September 1961. Further information is also available at Wikipedia and the Poetry Foundation.

Doolittle is not known as a diarist. Nevertheless, she seems to have kept three diaries (as listed in the Beinecke Library archive notes). One of these, for 1911-1912, is mentioned briefly in two biographical essays. Caroline Zilboorg’s essay - H.D. and R.A.: Early Love and the Exclusion of Ezra Pound - is freely online at Imagists.org. Here is a paragraph: ‘H.D. and Aldington thought of themselves as “Greeks”; on June 15 H.D. noted in her diary that they had spent the morning in the Luxembourg Gardens, “R deep in Greek choruses H-sketching caste of gladiator-” They probably also consummated their love that summer. When Pound joined them for tea on June 10, H.D. recorded in her diary that she said to Pound, “ ‘You see I am taking your advice.’ (The advice weeks since in Luxembourg gardens ‘You better marry Richard’).” On the facing page is a poem by H.D. beginning “I love you. . . .” The diary also reveals the emotionally intense but formally conventional poems both were producing. They are writing on the Greek or the personal subjects that would become characteristic of their mature poetry but in strict meter and rhyme, formal elements that both would soon reject for the vers libre of early modernism.’

Peter Firchow, in one of his essays to be found in Reluctant Modernists: Aldous Huxley and Some Contemporaries says: ‘Hilda Doolittle’s diary of the Paris portion of this trip [. . .] is mostly dull stuff: notations on the taking of a toast and tea, visits to the Louvre, and so on. But towards the end of the little volume there are several drafts of poems - quite conventional ones, perhaps surprisingly - including one by Aldington, a fact that suggests that these two fledgling poets kept few secrets from each other. So that here too there must have been happy moments.’

An awful lot of sore ears

’We did enough bombarding to last us a lifetime, I guess the Cleveland and us still hold the title of firing more shells than any other ship in this invasion and that includes the Japs and maybe any warship afloat anywhere in the world. There are an awful lot of sore ears, the cotton and ear plugs are no good.’ This is able seaman and gunner, James J. Fahey, who died 30 years ago today. He served on a light cruiser in the Japanese naval theatre of WW2, and, secretly, kept a diary with detailed accounts of the fierce war going on around him, ‘with all its glory and horror, achievement and boredom’.

Fahey was born in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York in 1918. Both of his parents died when he was very young, leaving him and his siblings to be raised with an uncle’s family in Waltham, Massachusetts. He enlisted in the navy in 1942, and six weeks later boarded the light cruiser U.S.S. Montpelier with the rank Seaman First Class, charged with firing a 40 millimetre machine gun. The vessel fought in nearly every battle in the South and Central Pacific achieving 13 battle stars, the most of any ship in the Pacific during World War II. The Montpelier was also among the first ships to visit Hiroshima after the bombing, where Fahey walked through the city - later suffering health problems from the radiation poisoning. On returning to Waltham, he worked as a rubbish collector and later drove a rubbish truck.

During the war, Fahey kept a diary - against all regulations - on any paper he could find. Back home, at the end of 1945, he hid these scraps in a tin box under his bed. In 1960, Samuel Elliot Morrison, an admiral on the Montpelier, was writing a memoir about his service during the war and asked Fahey for his memories. Fahey offered his diary and the admiral was astounded by its contents. He suggested Fahey show it to the publisher Houghton Mifflin who then published it as Pacific War Diary, 1942-1945 (1963). The book was a bestseller, and led to Fahey receiving an award from the city of Waltham. He was also honoured with a visit to President John F. Kennedy to gift him a copy of the book. In 1964, he was recognised as the national Garbage Man of the Year.

Fahey donated all of his proceeds from the book to help build Our Lady of Dolors, a Roman Catholic Church in the village of Mettupatti in southern India. With money donated by Waltham residents, he traveled there in 1967 to be an honoured guest at the church’s dedication. And three years later he married Adele (Fuller) Darrah there. He died on 23 September 1991. A little further information is available from the United States Naval Academy, the The JFK Library, The Chicago Tribune, or Good Reads.

Some pages of Pacific War Diary 1942-1945, reissued in 2003, can be read at Googlebooks. Morison contributed a short foreword to the first edition of the book. He concludes: ‘The great merit of Mr. Fahey’s diary is that it gives the American bluejacket’s point of view about the naval war in the Pacific, with all its glory and horror, achievement and boredom; it tells how sailors felt going into battle, their opinions of their officers, their hunger of Okinawa when the long logistics line grew thin, and their fortitude in meeting the menace of the Kamikaze Corps.’

Here are several extracts from the diary.

7 October 1942
‘I got up early this morning for my trip to Boston, on my way to Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Chicago, Illinois.

Before leaving I shook my father’s hand and kissed him goodbye.

It was a clear cool morning as my sister Mary, brother John and I headed for the bus at the corner of Cedar Street. The bus and trolley car were crowded with people going to work. When we reached the Post Office Building in Boston I shook John’s hand and kissed Mary goodbye.

After a long tiresome day of hanging around we were finally on our way to the train station. The group was very large and they came from the New England states. We were called the Lexington Volunteers in honor of the carrier Lexington. It was sunk by the Japanese Navy May 7, 1942, in the battle of the Coral Sea.

With a big band leading the way we marched through downtown Boston before thousands of people. It took about half an hour to reach the North Station and at 5:30 P.M. we were on our way.

When the train passed through my city it was beginning to get dark and I could picture the folks at home having supper. There would be an empty place at the table for some time. It would have been very easy for me to feel sad and lonely with these thoughts in my mind but we should not give in to our feelings. If we always gave in to our feelings instead of our judgment we would fall by the wayside when the going got rough.

It will be a long tiresome trip and our bed will be the seat we sit in, two to a seat.’

17 June 1944
‘Well here I am back again with my pen in hand, last Tuesday June 13, 1944 was the last time I wrote in the diary, good old number thirteen is still my lucky number, a lot of things have happened since I last wrote. I am sitting on the communication deck, quite a bit of it has been blown away, the concussion from our guns did it. We fired the 5 & 6 inch guns from Wed. morning at 3 a.m. until Saturday morning at 7 a.m.

We did enough bombarding to last us a lifetime, I guess the Cleveland and us still hold the title of firing more shells than any other ship in this invasion and that includes the Japs and maybe any warship afloat anywhere in the world. There are an awful lot of sore ears, the cotton and ear plugs are no good. I will try to write down some of the many things that happened and what I saw. I do not know how to begin, I am no newspaper reporter, but here goes. 

Wednesday morning at 2 a.m. June 14, 1944 all hands went to battle stations and stayed there until 7:30 a.m., Sat. morning June 17, 1944, you can just imagine the few winks of sleep we got in that time. We also had to get more ammunition in the meantime, now back to my story of what happened. About 3 a.m. Wed. morning a Jap sub surfaced and one of our destroyers sunk it. The ships firing made a good target in the dark, about 4:30 a.m. the same morning a big Jap cargo ship tried to sneak out of Saipan, but we sent one of our destroyers after it and they sunk it. We could see the high hills of Saipan, it was rather dark. Our guns continued to fire all day, we were very close to land. In the daytime we fired low and point blank, but at night we fired higher and further into the shore. Hollywood could get some great pictures, it was like a movie. Big alcohol plants were blown sky high, assembly plants, oil storage plants, ammunition dumps, miles of sugar cane, buildings, railroads, trains, trucks, etc., not to mention the military side of the picture, such as thousands of troops, planes, tanks, airfields etc. Thick smoke miles high was all over the island. I never saw anything like it before, it was like the great Chicago fire. Any large city would be in ruins if it took the shells and bombs Saipan took for almost a week. Our planes spotted for us, and we would knock the targets sky high, with direct hits. One time 25 Japs ran into a building and we got direct hits on it blowing it sky high. You could see freight cars and tracks blow up. A big ammunition dump was blown to bits. Our troops tried to take a hill with tanks, but the Japs artillery on top of it stopped them. We opened up on them and wiped them out. Another time the Japs tried to put radar and radio equipment into a truck, and we blew everything up, troops and equipment. We knocked out pillboxes etc. It was just like a movie. You could see big explosions everywhere. At night we fired a lot of star shells so our troops could see the Japs, if they tried to sneak into our lines. Our ship knocked out a twin 5 inch turret, on Magicienne Bay. Our five inch shell entered the Japanese five inch twin turret through a gun opening causing an explosion which put the Jap battery out of action, thus permitting our ships to enter Magicienne Bay without opposition. On another occasion Jap shore guns opened up on us and we were forced to put up a smoke screen. We then commenced firing on the Japs, and it was not long before we silenced their guns. The battleship California was hit by Jap shore batteries and thirty men were killed, not to mention the wounded. We fired at the Japs day and night, the idea was to have them punch drunk, but if you ask me I think some of us are also punchy. The men on the 5 & 6 inch guns had a rugged time. They were in those hot stuffy mounts and turrets all those days and nights with very little time off for rest, they spent most of the time passing the shells and powder cases into the guns and they had very little to eat. They were dirty from the dust and sweat. The deck of the mounts and turrets was covered with their perspiration, they looked like ghosts when it was over. If they did lay down to get some rest the concussion and noise from the guns shook them up and made sleep impossible. Some of the fellows passed out from exhaustion. They took quite a licking, you cannot go day and night. We had a candy bar for breakfast, two cookies and an apple for dinner, and at night we did not have very much either. The fellows on the machine guns, like myself, had it easier, not much to do. We could see everything that was going on. In the daytime it was quite a show. Our planes would go through a hail of machine gun fire, drop their bombs on the Japs and go like a bullet, straight up in the clouds and away. This island got the worst bombardment of them all. They said we landed 40,000 troops and the Japs have a good 30,000. Our Marines landed Thurs. June 15, 1944, 8:30 A.M. They ran into murderous gunfire when on their way in planes in them.

At 11:30 a.m Sat June l7, 1944 we finished carrying ammunition and left this area. We are going to join another task force. A big Jap fleet is heading this way and our job is to intercept them. They have carriers, battleship, cruisers, destroyers and subs. They are not going to lose Saipan without putting up a fight. We are on our way to the open sea and we will not see any land for some time.

This afternoon Sat. June 17, 1944 at 4 P.M. we met a task force of warships, it consisted of five battleships, the New Jersey was one of them, two big carriers, two smaller ones, one heavy cruiser, thirty destroyers and also light cruisers, the Cleveland and Birmingham are two of them. We might meet more ships later. While I was writing this at 4:05 in the evening Jap planes were picked up and all hands went to battle stations, but nothing happened. I will try to continue writing, it is up to the Japs to stop me. 

Friday while we were bombarding we received word that Japan was bombed by the Big B-29 Super Flying Fortresses. They are the largest in the world and have the longest range. They came from our base in China, a big cheer went up when the announcement came over the loudspeaker. This is the first time Japan has been hit since Jimmy Doolittle did it in 1942.

Then they flew their B-25 twin engine bombers off carriers. 

Later this evening we met another big task force. It looks like it is in four groups. It must consist of hundreds of warships, as far as the eye can see, this is a fleet now this is the Fifth Fleet, it is one piece, what a sight. Before we met on the other side of the horizon there was nothing, but later you could see little specks appear and then they got larger and before long, you could see the complete outline and then more would appear and before you knew it, the ocean was covered with all sorts of warships, as far as the eye could see. They are all very fast ships. This is the most powerful fleet of warships the world has ever seen. We have carriers, battleships, heavy and light cruisers, destroyers and submarines. This is the 5th Fleet, Admiral Spruance is in command. We are part of Task Force 58, with Admiral Marc Mitscher in command. It was a beautiful evening, as we had sunset General Quarters. We are now in no man’s sea a long way from the U.S.A. but close to Japan. I hit the sack at 8 p.m., it looks like I will get some sleep, it will be the first night’s sleep in about a week, it will be under the stars.’

7 November 1944
‘This is what happened during our stay at Pearl Harbor. I got a special pass to visit my brother Joe on Ford Island. He censors mail б days a week. He has 1 day off, and no watches to stand. His hours are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. He also showed me where he was on Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor. He came very close to being hit by Jap machine guns and bombs. You could still see the spot where the Japs hit. He also showed me around Honolulu and we took in a pro football game, we had a nice time. The climate here is very good, you can’t beat it. Joe will have 9 years in the Navy, March 1945. He is going to put in 20 years and then retire, he will be 42 then. The people here are very small, the girls are good-looking. The war news for the last week of October said that our Navy knocked the Jap Navy out and our troops landed in the Central Philippines on Leyte. The Jap fleet lost many warships, all kinds. They called it the greatest sea battle in history, the Japs lost 64 warships. We will be out there soon. Today is election day, I think Roosevelt will get elected again. Everyone here thinks he will get in by a big margin. We left Pearl Harbor this morning at 8 a.m. for a couple of days of gunnery.’

My ether was acid

‘The substance dissolves much more readily in Ether than in Alcohol. A hot solution of Ether deposits crystals as it cools. A glass rod dipped in it and exposed to the air is instantly covered with the substance in white powder from the evaporation of the ether. Query acidity of solution? My ether was acid.’ This is an early entry in the prosaic scientific notebooks kept by Michael Faraday, a great English scientist born 230 years ago today. Although all the entries - spanning over 40 years - are technical in the extreme, full of scientific notation, they were first published, in seven volumes in the 1930s, as Faraday’s Diary.

Faraday was born on 22 September 1791 in what is now Southwark in south London. His father had been apprenticed to a blacksmith, and young Michael received little education before he was apprenticed to a bookbinder and bookseller at the age of 14. The position gave him access to books, and he read avidly, trying to improve himself and to learn about science, especially electricity.

In 1812, Faraday attended lectures given by the chemist Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution. Subsequently, Faraday wrote to Davy asking for a job, which led to him being appointed as a chemical assistant at the Royal Institution. Davy also took Faraday with him on an 18 month tour of Europe, during which time they met many prominent scientists. In 1821, he married Sarah Barnard, but they were to have no children. That same year, he published his work on electromagnetic rotation (the principle behind the electric motor); and in 1826 he founded the Royal Institution’s Friday Evening Discourses and Christmas Lectures, giving many of the lectures himself.

In 1831, Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, the principle behind the electric transformer and generator, and thereafter he continued to help pave the way for the widespread development of electricity as an accessible source of energy. He is credited with coining many now-familiar words, such as electrode, cathode and ion. He was appointed Scientific Adviser to the Admiralty in 1829, was Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, between 1830 and 1851 and Scientific Adviser to Trinity House from 1836 to 1865. He died in 1867 at Hampton Court (where he had been given official lodgings in recognition of his contribution to science). Further information is available at Wikipedia, the Royal Institution, the BBC, Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Science History Institute.

Faraday kept very detailed observations about his work and experiments for over 40 years. These scientific notebooks or diaries were bequeathed by him to the Royal Institution which then oversaw their publication - as Faraday’s Diary - in seven volumes in the 1930s. In 2008, the institution reprinted the whole series ‘as edited by Thomas Martin with index, photographs and thousands of illustrations in Faraday’s own hand’. According to institution: ‘Faraday is generally held to be one of the greatest of all experimental philosophers. Nearly every science is in his debt: and some sciences owe their existence mainly to his work. The liquefaction of gases, benzene, electro-magnetic induction, specific inductive capacity, lines of force, magnetic conduction or permeability, the dark discharge, anode, cathode, magneto-optics, electro-chemical equivalent; all these terms suggest fundamental researches which he made, and many of them were called into existence in order to describe his discoveries.’

The new edition can be previewed here, and some volumes of the first edition are freely available at Internet Archive. However, although titled ‘diary’ the work would be better described as scientific notebooks. There are no entries with domestic or personal details, for example, they are all focused entirely on his scientific work - here’s a couple of sample extracts from early on in the first volume, and a screenshot of one double-page spread in the third volume.

3 October 1820
‘Put Oleft. oil into a retort - exhausted - introduced chlorine- exposed to light - after the action introduced a little water - this absorbed the M.A. Gas and made a fresh vacuum - let in more chlorine and again exposed to light, shaking the retort - fresh action, then more chlorine - when the substance all changed, filled up the retort with water so as to wash out the acid well - repeated washing - dissolved the substance in alcohol and crystallised. This saves exhausting by the air pump which is very injurious to the instrument.’

5 October 1820
‘The crystals of the substance (from a strong alcoholic solution) were very brittle and crumbled into a white powder very easily. It is on this account difficult to preserve them. They were taken out of the Alcohol, dried by pressure between filtering paper, exposed to the air for half an hour and then put into a bottle. The substance was then a white dry powder.

The Alcoholic solution spontaneously evaporated; left crystals of the substance but they evaporated also in an hour or two afterwards.

The crystals by sublimation are much tougher than those formed from solutions.

The substance dissolves much more readily in Ether than in Alcohol. A hot solution of Ether deposits crystals as it cools. A glass rod dipped in it and exposed to the air is instantly covered with the substance in white powder from the evaporation of the ether.

Query acidity of solution? My ether was acid.

A drop of the etherial solution put on a glass plate instantly expands, evaporates and its surface becomes covered with square crystalline plates, the crystals being dendritic and their axes lying parallel to the diagonals of the square. In this way the substance may be got very dry.

Water dissolves but a very small portion of it when boiled with it.

The solution of it in Alcohol is not acid - and is not precipitated by Nitrate of silver.

Solution of potash does not dissolve it perceptibly by boiling -  nor Ammonia (strong). Muriatic acid does act on it.

Nitric acid (strong) boiled upon it dissolves a portion but does not decompose it: as it cools the substance deposits again unaltered. The concentrated acid diluted lets more of the substance fall; and then filtered and tested by N. of Silver gave no precipitate - hence no chlorine separated from the substance by it.

Put into strong Sul. Acid it very slowly sinks to the bottom, hence its S.G.; boiled with the acid the acid became brown, probably from some little pieces of dirt that were mixed with the substance. The substance sublimed from and through the acid unaltered and the acid tested contained no Mur. Acid or chlorine. It was not precipitated by water, hence no substance dissolved.’

Ye largest Funeral

‘Went to Boston. Saw ye largest Funeral perhaps that was ever in Boston. 8 or 10 thousand present.’ This is from a diary kept by the reverend John Marrett, born 280 years ago today, who visited Boston immediately after the infamous so-called massacre. A few very brief extracts from Marrett’s diary have been published - thanks only to his being a descendant of a more famous relative and clergyman, Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard College.

John Marrett was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 10 Septenber 1741, the sixth and youngest child born to his mother, Mary (née Dunster). His father died when he was six years old. He entered Harvard College in 1759, graduating in 1763, but remained working on the family farm for a while. He was ordained in 1774, and preached in various places through Massachusetts and Maine. In 1775, he moved to Woburn. He married Martha Jones in 1779, and they had two children, though one died soon after birth. He remained in Woburn, and died in 1813. 

The only biographical information about Marrett available online, it seems, can be found in Henry Dunster and his Descendants by Samuel Dunster published by Central Falls in 1876 (and freely available at Internet Archive). The book includes around 10 pages with details of Marrett’s life, as well as brief extracts from his diaries and letters. The first entry below concerns the Boston Massacre, when British troops shot and killed several people while being harassed by a mob on 5 March 1770. The editor has added a note to this entry stating that the original contains a much longer and graphic account of the Massacre.

8 March 1770
‘Went to Boston. Saw ye largest Funeral perhaps that was ever in Boston. 8 or 10 thousand present - four men buried in one grave who were shot by the Centry Guard of regulars on Monday night last.’

17 June 1775
‘Preached at home very thin meeting the men gone down to the Army on the Army yesterday. Last night 3000 of our army went to Charlestown and entrenched on a hill. But before they had prepared their cannon the shipping and Regulars by land attacked them. After much fighting we were obliged to quit the entrenchment and the town. Many killed and wounded on both sides The shipping annoyed us much. The town laid in Ashes! The adjacent country gone down - 1000 of the Regulars killed & wounded not more than 200 of ours.’

19 May 1780
‘Morning, Thunder & rain at home. An uncommon Darkness from 1/2 past 10 clock A. M. to 1/2 past one P. M. So dark that I couldnt see to read common print at the window nor see the hour of the clock unless close to it and scarcely to see to read a Bible of large print, people left off work in the house and abroad. The fowls, some of them went to roost. It was cloudy, wind S. W. The Heavens looked yellowish and gloomy what is the Occasion of it is unknown. The moon fulled yesterday. Many persons much terrified never known so dark a day People lit candles to see to dine.

25 August 1803
‘Mrs M dangerously Sick of a Fever.’

11 September 1803
‘Preach’d A.M. - dismissed the People P.M. 1/4 past 4 o’clock my wife died.’

12 September 1803
‘Busy in sorrow preparing for the funeral.’

14 September 1803
‘fair - The funeral of Mrs Marrett. Ministers Revd Messrs. Clark, Stone Dr. Cummings Dr. Osgood, Fisk, Adams - A very large collection of People. The procession reachd from meeting house into the Burying Yard & not all went. The whole conducted with Great Decency and propriety. My people exceedingly Kind and helpful. They propose to defray the funeral Charges.’

18 September 1803
‘Sabbath. Preached at home. Funeral Sermon on the death of my wife.’

16 June 1806
‘The great and Solar Eclipse. The Sun totally covered. The Stars appeard bright Dark as a Moon-Shine night as the eclipse went off could see the moon with the sun.’

Showered with flowers

‘In the evening to the first performance of Le Prophète. The public called me out after acts 2, 3, 4, and 5, twice in fact after act 4. At the end I was showered with flowers and garlands. The king summoned me to his box after act 4 to express his satisfaction.’ This is from the diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer, a German composer born 230 years ago today. He became hugely popular in the mid-19th century for his spectacular romantic operas, but his reputation took a downturn after his death partly thanks to Richard Wagner. Meyerbeer kept daily diaries for much of his life, and although the originals have been lost, a transcription survives, and this was translated into English and published for the first time some 20 years ago.

Jacob Liebmann Beer was born on 5 September 1791 in Tasdorf (now part of Rüdersdorf), near Berlin, then the capital of Prussia, to wealthy well-connected Jewish parents. (He adopted the surname Meyerbeer on the death of his grandfather in 1811, and he Italianized his first name to Giacomo while studying in Italy around 1817.) He was educated by tutors at home, and his first keyboard instructor was Franz Lauska, a favoured teacher at the Berlin court. He made his concert debut at the age of 11. He studied composition in Berlin and completed his first work for the stage in 1810, the ballet Der Fischer und das Milchmädchen. Shortly after, he went to Darmstadt to study with Abbé Vogler, whose students then included Carl Maria von Weber. After nearly two years of instruction, during which he wrote two operas and numerous other works, Meyerbeer left for Munich, ready to test his skills as a composer and performer. It was there that his second opera (but first surviving), Jephtas Gelübde, was unsuccessfully premiered in December 1812. 

After a journey to Paris and London, he settled in Italy, where he produced five operas in the style of Rossini. In 1825, he moved to Paris. The following year, after the death of his father, he married his cousin, Minna Mosson. They had five children, of whom the three youngest (all daughters) survived to adulthood. Meyerbeer first French opera, written in association with Eugène Scribe, was Robert le Diable produced in 1831 on an extremely lavish scale. Its success was immediate, and became a model for French grand opera, being performed throughout Europe. Five years later he scored another triumph with his opera Les Huguenots. In 1842, he temporarily returned to Berlin, where he became music director to the King of Prussia and where he aided production of Richard Wagner’s first opera Rienzi. During this time, he wrote a German opera, Ein Feldlager in Schlesien. His third romantic opera on a libretto of Scribe, Le Prophète, was given in Paris in 1849. He then turned to a lighter style and produced two works in the tradition of the opéra comique. His last opera, L’Africaine, was in rehearsal at the time of his death in 1864.

Encyclopaedia Britannica has this assessment: ‘Meyerbeer enjoyed an enormous vogue in his day, but his reputation, based on his four Paris operas, did not survive long. Yet he exercised a considerable influence on the development of opera by his conception of big character scenes, his dramatic style of vocal writing, and his original sense of orchestration - particularly his novel use of the bass clarinet, the saxophone, and the bassoon.’ However, following his death his work was subject to sustained assault by Wagner and his supporters and this contributed to a decline in his popularity; his operas were suppressed by the Nazi regime in Germany, and were neglected by opera houses through most of the twentieth century. Further information is also available at Wikipedia and the Jewish Encyclopedia. 

Meyerbeer kept diaries for much of his life, and though the original manuscripts are missing, a transcription made by Wilhelm Altmann is held by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Between 1999 and 2004, these diaries were published in English in four volumes by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press - The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer - as translated, edited and annotated by Ignatius Letellier. In his preface, Letellier states these volumes provide the ‘first full text of Meyerbeer’s diaries in any language’. He adds: ‘I hope that it can play some part in helping to rediscover the life and work of a great composer, indeed a luminary of the operatic firmament, who for too long has been misunderstood and unjustly overlooked.’ All four books can be previewed at Googlebooks, and volume two can be digitally borrowed through Internet Archive. The following extracts are taken from volume 3 (subtitled The Years of Celebrity).

30 January 1850
‘In the evening to the first performance of Le Prophète. The public called me out after acts 2, 3, 4, and 5, twice in fact after act 4. At the end I was showered with flowers and garlands. The king summoned me to his box after act 4 to express his satisfaction. After the performance a deputation from the orchestra brought me a laurel wreath. The singers were also repeatedly called out. I nevertheless felt that the public’s reception of the individual musical pieces was lukewarm, and this could not have been otherwise: the singers and the chorus were, on the one hand, exhausted, because yesterday, and the day before yesterday, there had been two dress rehearsals with the performance today following immediately - without even a day of rest. Then, on the other hand, out of the desire to do everything correctly, they were unduly anxious and self-conscious, and all of them, with the exception of Michalesi, sang untidily. This was particularly true of Tichatschek in the role of the Prophet. Michalesi, on the other hand, was marvelous and carried all the rest.’

31 March 1850
‘The funeral of my beloved brother, which was marked by a great manifestation of sympathy for the deceased: representatives of the arts, science, the civil authorities, and the magistracy, as well as the ministers Brandenburg, Rabe, and Ladenberg, all were present. Over one hundred carriages followed the procession. The king sent his personal equipage as escort; he had already, the evening before, written my mother a letter of condolence in his own hand. The preacher Auerbach read the oration over the coffin before it was carried out of the death-chamber. The funeral indicated just how much the deceased, in spite of so much hostility, had been esteemed and honored by his fellow citizens. Stayed with Mother all day.’

31 May 1851
‘Tremendous celebration for the unveiling of Rauch’s monument of Frederick the Great. I watched the event from a window of the Academy, even though the king had ordered that Cornelius and I should be part of the academic deputation. In the evening, by royal command, a gala performance of my opera, Ein Feldlager in Schlesien, with admission by royal invitation only. After act 2, the king summoned Rauch and me to his box and expressed his satisfaction in the friendliest, kindliest manner. The performance itself passed by coldly and without interest.’

26 June 1754
‘Sorrowful, inauspicious day. At noon my beloved mother’s fearful, mortal agonies began and ended only two hours after midnight. What a terrible fourteen hours! What a mother I have lost!’

28 June 1856
‘The proposal by Herr von Korff for the hand of my daughter, and the manner in which Blanca responded to this news, preoccupied me to such an extent that I was incapable of any musical work.’