Saville and Jarndyce

Bleak House happens to be one of my favourite novels by Charles Dickens. It centres in part on an interminable legal battle, a case known as Jarndyce v Jarndyce. Nobody quite understands the original causes of the case. All they know is that it's a dispute over a will, a dispute that serves only the interests of the lawyers, people for whom time is money; for the more time they spend wrangling over Jarndyce v Jarndyce the more of the legacy is eaten up in fees and expenses. In the end the case is settled...but only when there is nothing left.

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.

So says Charles Dickens in the novel. I'm sure he would be pleased to discover that nothing much changes; that the inquiry of Lord Saville into the events of Bloody Sunday, the shooting by British troops of Irish protestors in Londonderry back in 1972, took twelve years to report at a cost to the tax payer of almost £200million.

Actually, on reflection, even the Lord Chancellor in Jarndyce v Jarndyce may have been shocked by this mad profligacy, this legal joke at public expense. Let's have a look at the figures, shall we? According to a report I read today in the Daily Mail Saville spent £34million on computers alone. That means that every page of his report cost £7000; yes, every page. It actually gets worse. His lordship spent more than £200,000 on furniture and £62,000 on something called 'media monitoring', paying a company to check the press, the television and the radio to see what they were saying about Jarn...sorry the Saville Inquiry.

The dear old judge claimed a mere £20,000 in personal expenses, not bad, I suppose, for twelve years. But, wait a moment: look at his travel expenses. For bills which involved commuting between London and Londonderry he claimed £322,413. It seems to me that it would have been better to buy this man a private jet; it may have been a lot less expensive in the end.

The tedious bill goes up and up and up: the fourteen barristers involved made several millions from the inquiry, with the best rewarded pocketing four million pounds each. Eversheads, one of the legal firms involved, was paid more than £13million for interviewing witnesses. And then there is the £23million that went on offices and halls, as well as £25.8million listed in the accounts as 'operation of systems/maintenance.' Best not to say anything about the £2.5million written off as 'general office expenditure'

In the end the whole bill came to exactly £191.2million, roughly the equivalent of £4 for every man, woman and child in the whole of the United Kingdom, and that is not the end; for legal bills and other expenses are still coming through. It's a joke but sadly the joke's on us.

This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give--who does not often give--the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!"

Health to your spirit, dear lady

In January I wrote a blog about tests being carried out by the University of Bristol to determine if a 1000 year old skeleton, discovered in Magdeburg Cathedral in 2008, were those of Eadgyth or Edith, an Anglo-Saxon princess (Ferthu hal, Eadgyth) Here is what I wrote in my opening paragraph;

Princess Eadgyth-or Edith-of Wessex, daughter of Edward the Elder, granddaughter of Alfred the Great, and half-sister of Athelstan, the first king of all England, has come home after a thousand years, or at least part of her has. Fragments of her body arrived this week at Bristol University, where tests are expected to confirm that the woman found in a lead coffin inside a stone sarcophagus at Magdeburg Cathedral in Germany is the princess who left this country more than a millennium ago to marry Otto the Great, the first Holy Roman Emperor.

Well, it is! The tests have now proved conclusively that the bones belonged to a woman who grew up in the ancient kingdom of Wessex. Professor Harold Meller, the director of the project, has said of this;

Medieval bones were moved frequently, and often mixed up, so it required some exceptional science to prove that they are indeed those of Eadgyth. It is incredible that we have been able to do this using the most recent analytical techniques.

The remains were thought to be lost forever in 1510 when they were last moved and that the monument in Magdeburg was merely a cenotaph in her honour. Not so; she was there, resting down the ages. Once again, health to your spirit, dear lady.

De Gaulle and the Myth of Resistance

Tomorrow is one of the most famous days in French history. It marks the anniversary in 1940 when Charles de Gaulle appealed on BBC radio in London to his countrymen urging them to continue to resist the Germans, even though the government of the day had formally surrendered to the invading army. Famous, yes, an event being marked by commemorations across the land. President Sarkozy himself will attend a ceremony at Mont Valereien near Paris, where a memorial to the French Resistance is situated, before flying to London to visit studio B2, from where de Gaulle made his broadcast, saying, in noble words, that "Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not and will not be extinguished."

There is only one small problem: it’s a myth. Oh, not the broadcast; that's real enough, something that happened because Winston Churchill, the prime minister, allowed it to happen in the face of opposition from the rest of the war cabinet. It's a myth because de Gaulle was probably heard by enough people to fill a village hall. The chances are, moreover, few of those who did listen on that bleak day in French history, when a great part of the nation was on the road fleeing from the German advance, had ever heard of this figure, a senior soldier but a minor politician. It's a myth - and here is the uncomfortable truth -because the vast bulk of the French population were relieved by the call for the armistice. The vast bulk of the French population rallied behind another soldier altogether and were to remain behind him for years to come. He was Philippe Petain, the new Prime Minister and subsequently head of the French state established at Vichy.

But history is often made retrospectively. De Gaulle, in the end, was on the side of the winners and Petain, Petain, whose side was he on? The losers, the answer has to come because he was tried and condemned as a traitor in 1945. But Petain was not Pierre Laval, who did more or less take the side of losers he believed were to be winners; Petain, rather like de Gaulle, took the side of France, though there are few now who would admit to this, preferring to sweep Vichy into a shameful oblivion. There is much about the Vichy regime that is shameful but the shame is not Petain's it is not even Laval's: the shame is France’s

No matter; in the end the obscure figure in London, stiff, totally lacking in humour, unimaginative and uncompromising came like a new Joan of Arc to save the conscience of the nation. He came in time to create the myth of resistance passing into shameful memory the realities of collaboration. Thus is history born; thus are nations made.

Pissing on the Palace

Earlier this year I wrote a blog about blogging on another blog site, one I share with other bloggers! I called the piece The Happy Blogger, added to my contributions to My Telegraph, a reader’s forum run by a British national daily. Amongst other things it was intended as an indirect swipe at people coming from another multi-author site only to solicit recruits, because in their gloom-and-doom estimation nothing was right with My Telegraph, which seemed to mean that it was not the same as it was, not the same as when they were yoofs. This is part of what I said;

I have to say that I for one find it immensely irritating when people criticise this site, looking for goodness knows what forms of perfection. If you do not like the place the answer is simple – leave, go somewhere else. But please, please don’t keep coming back only to solicit recruits for this faction or that gang. I know if I were a moderator that is one thing I would come down on quite heavily. Please do not misunderstand me; people have every right to blog elsewhere as well as here. I just think it really bad form when the only reason for being here is to talk the place down.

The person who runs that other site, which I did not name then and refuse to name now, decided to rein-in his gang – and it is his gang-, making a general statement based, in part, on a perverse misinterpretation of my words. He also told them that I should be treated like “any other troll.” The whole thing was just too, too funny.

The site itself is a bit of a joke, mostly with shallow and tedious contributions, though there are some decent people there with some interesting things to say. But there are others, bears of very little brain and two-faced clots whom I encountered on My Telegraph and quickly dismissed for their obvious lack of intelligence and basic comprehension. Yes, there are decent and thoughtful people in the place, people, I have to say, who are strangely blind to the awful matey cliquishness.

I stopped going there to look over shoulders, so to speak, weeks ago but recently another blogger told me that he had joined – against my advice, I have to add- and that he was coming in for some fairly rough treatment. I had a look and it was as much as I expected. It’s a bear-baiting pit, and he was the bear. Although he attracted some support there are those who clearly went out of their way to make fun at his expense, to make him feel uncomfortable and unwelcome, first because he was something new and different and second because he has a style that does not easily lend itself to blog small talk, and the site he joined is most definitely a ‘small talk blog.’

So, is there any point to this? No, not really. I’m just venting some annoyance over stupidity, insularity and small-mindedness. But if Gulliver will visit the land of Lilliput what can he expect? The best thing to do is to piss over the palace and leave.

The Power of Penguin

My introduction to the classics of world literature came through Penguin Books. I must have been about ten when I read their editions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, moving on from my reading of Robert Graves' book on the Greek Myths. Over the years I’ve covered so much more, with the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France lodged as favourites, books to which I return repeatedly for reassurance on some point or other.

I never really thought about the publishers themselves, never really thought about Penguin Books, not until now. The latest issue of History Today has drawn my attention to this publishing institution, launched by one Allen Lane almost seventy-five years ago.

Lane joined the publishing company of Bodley Head, founded by John Lane, his mother’s cousin, in 1919 when he was sixteen years old. He took up a fairly humble position, the intention being that he should learn the trade from the bottom up. Gifted with natural ability, his rise was swift. He became a director when John died in 1925 and chairman five years later though still only in his twenties.

In 1934 on returning to London by train from Devon he was annoyed to find that there was nothing in the Exeter station worth reading for the trip back. With nothing else to do he reflected on the possibility of publishing high-quality fiction and non-fiction at an affordable price, sixpence in pre-decimal money being the amount he alighted on, which I think is about a penny or so in present values.

When he put his idea to the other directors of Bodley Head they were unenthusiastic because paperbacks at the time had a low reputation, generally considered to be ‘dirty rubbish’, but they agreed to let him go ahead, though only in his own time. With the help of his brothers Dick and John he went about the project with enthusiasm. After toying with the names of Dolphin Books and Porpoise Books they eventually settled on Penguin.

The aim was to get away completely from the image of the paperback format that had so unsettled the directors of Bodley Head. There were to be no bosoms and bottoms on the covers, just some simple colours – green for crime stories, orange for other fiction and blue for non-fiction, with the title in plain lettering on a white band across the middle. Ten books were picked for the launch in July 1935, including The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.

Despite the reservations of his colleagues the venture was an immediate success, with most of the books selling out rapidly. Lane introduced more titles and on New Year’s Day 1936 Penguin was launched as a separate company with himself and his brothers as directors. The following year Penguin was joined by Pelican, specialising in non-fiction, with George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism being the first on the list. After the war came Penguin Classics, beginning with a translation of Homer’s Odyssey.

In 1950 a leader in The Times saluted Lane, who died in 1970, for making up for the loss of the British Empire by using the English language and affordable books to spread British influence across the world. I don’t suppose there is a better accolade than that.

Great but not Good

I was asked once in class to choose the person I considered to be the greatest political leader of the twentieth century. That’s easy enough but I also had to defend my choice. It’s always difficult to make assessments of this kind because of all of the variables that have to be taken into consideration; but as far as I am concerned the real political giant of the twentieth century was Joseph Stalin. This does not mean to say that I like him; I do not: not by any measure. But I cannot help but admire him: I admire his ruthlessness, his intelligence, his political skill and his determination.

The son of a cobbler, born of the fringes of the old Russian Empire, he outwitted time and again those better placed than him within his own party, not excluding Lenin. Rising to the top, he industrialized his country in a way that surely saved it when the great test came in 1941. He defeated Hitler- and, yes, it was the Soviet Army that bore the brunt of the fighting against the Germans and several of their allies- going on to outplay Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman. He stands across the twentieth century like a true colossus. He may not have been a good man, but he was a great one. Are the great, I have to ask myself, ever good?

The Death of Essex

Arthur Capell, earl of Essex, was one of the senior figures arrested in the wake of the Rye House Plot of 1683. He had no involvement in the botched scheme to assassinate Charles II and his brother James, but his opposition to the Stuarts was of long standing. His subsequent death in prison, immediately attributed to suicide, was a cause of much speculation.

Did he kill himself or was he murdered? One should begin, I suppose, by taking the mantle of Cicero- Cui bono?-who benefited from Essex's death? In other words, what political purpose did it serve? Well, the evidence against the Plotters was very weak. Essex supposed suicide was taken by a good many people as a direct admission of guilt. In the trial of Lord William Russell, two of the prosecutors, Francis North and the infamous George Jeffreys, immediately argued that it proved the guilt of the accused. On that basis, and on that basis alone, Russell was convicted and condemned to death.

Essex, moreover, had formerly been involved in the highest reaches of government, a royal minister and servant of the king, and thus not at all in the same class as the conspirators with whom he was associated. It is possible that a trial would have revealed dealings of the inner workings of government, which would hardly have been welcome to Charles or his brother James. It is also not entirely immaterial that Essex's servant, Paul Bromley, who served him in the Tower, and was the first to discover the earl's body, was paid £50- a huge sum at the time- after the inquest delivered a verdict of suicide.

But more than anything else the manner of Essex's death helped to discredit the Whigs, even those who had no association at all with the Rye House Plot. One has to remember the horror with which 'self-murder' was viewed at the time. But for the king's clemency, Essex's body could, by practiced custom, have been buried outwith hallowed ground, usually by a cross-road or on a highway, with a stake driven through his heart.

The Whigs immediately raised questions, saying that the earl could not possibly have committed so loathsome an act, and looking for royal complicity. Pamphlets began to circulate in London saying that Essex had been murdered, and documents were intercepted accusing James of ordering the crime in person. None other than John Locke, a close associate of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, the greatest of the Whigs, wrote a paper promoting the murder theory. Robert Ferguson, another Whig exile, wrote a pamphlet detailing supposed irregularities at the inquest, which was published in 1684 and smuggled into England. The government was so alarmed by this that it took the unusual step of publishing a transcript of the inquest in full.

After the Glorious Revolution in 1688 the victorious Whigs began a serious search for evidence that Essex was murdered, a quest approved by the Convention Parliament and supported by Gilbert Burnet. One Captain John Holland was arrested and accused of participating in the crime. It is likely that, in the political circumstances of the day, the verdict of the 1683 inquest would have been overturned but for the intervention of the dowager Countess of Essex, who asked that proceedings be stopped. Thus the official inquiry ended, though the speculation did not. Burnet himself began to doubt that Essex had been murdered; and when his History of My Own Times was published in 1724 he supported the suicide theory.

This is a matter that will never be resolved. It still continues to divide historians, right down to the present day. Do I think he was murdered? No, I do not; but then I am no Whig. :-)