john-tyrrell-SPIN

A neighbour, only slightly younger than the Duke of Edinburgh, and a firm supporter of the monarchy on the rational basis that the alternatives look worse, was very surprised when I told him of the Duke's appointment as Lord High Admiral. We both agreed that to make a 90 year old the head of a once great navy in which there are presently more Admirals than ships smacks of "Ruritania", and seems particularly inappropriate at a time when the monarchy is trying to create a more modern image, with a Royal Prince and presumably future King, marrying a commoner and working as a helicopter pilot.

I think I would struggle to explain the appointment to my grandsons.

Some lines from Gilbert & Sullivan spring to mind:

.. now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navy

Now, landsmen all, whoever you may be
If you want to rise to the top of the tree
If your soul isn't fettered to an office stool
Be careful to be guided by this golden rule
Be careful to be guided by this golden rule
Stick close to your desks and never go to sea
And you all may be Rulers of the Queen's Navy
Stick close to your desks and never go to sea
And you all may be Rulers of the Queen's Navy

Norway is a neighbouring country with which the inhabitants of the western part of the British Isles have been entangled since Viking times, but about which they know little.

Rich in oil and gas, with one of the highest standards of living in the world, increasingly multi-ethnic, a transformation which is bringing its own strains, it has long outgrown its roots as a country of simple farmers and fishermen, and its buoyant service orientated economy now offers employment to many Swedes, who were formerly the dominant people of Scandinavia.

Although I feel, probably mistakenly, that I know the country well, this was my first experience of Constitution Day.


I had expected the procession of brass bands, school children and traditional regional costumes, but I was surprised by the large number of spectators wearing suits and ties.



I cannot conceive of any national celebration in the UK in which people would turn out on the streets wearing what used to be known in my youth as "Sunday best."

So what's this May 17th all about?

In 1814 Norway was ceded to the Swedish crown by Denmark, which had been on the losing side in the Napoleonic wars. In an effort to avoid the loss of Norway, the Crown Prince of Denmark-Norway, Christian Frederik, the resident viceroy in Norway, called a national assembly. This assembly produced a constitution, a very liberal document for its time, which was signed on 17th May 1814.

The constitution eschewed the republicanism of the United States and created a constitutional monarchy, with Christian Frederik as the first King. The lack of international backing, particularly from Great Britain, sealed Norway's fate, and after a very short military campaign it bowed to the inevitable: Christian Frederik abdicated, and the Storting unanimously elected Charles XIII of Sweden as King Charles II of Norway.

With minor amendment only the constitution remained in place after the acceptance of the Swedish King, and so it remained after the attainment of full independence in 1905, accomplished by the deposition of the Swedish monarchy and the election of a new King and Queen, Haakon VII, formerly Prince Carl of Denmark and Iceland, and his wife, formerly Princess Maud of Wales, grand daughter of Queen Victoria, cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm and sister of King George V. It is then the oldest single document constitution in Europe, second only to that of the United States in the world as a whole. I can understand why, in a fast changing and often bewildering world, it means so much to Norwegians.

For anyone interested The Foreigner , an English language web site for non-Norwegians living in Norway, provides an interesting perspective on the country, and an excellent account of the historical background and meaning of the 17th May celebrations.

As a non royalist, and one of the majority of the people in the UK who neither watched the Royal Wedding on television nor attended a street party, I was interested to read an account of the event in Britain's best newspaper.

Dominating the front page was a rather mocking article by Matthew Engel:

This short intense piece of music, one of Sir Edward Elgar's lesser known works, here beautifully played by Sol Gabetta, an Argentinian of Russian and French parentage, never fails to calm me down in times of anxiety and stress.

It was first conducted by Sir Henry Wood in August 1914 at the Queen's Hall in London, just two weeks before the beginning of the First World War.

Elgar's wife said it was "like a breath of peace on a perturbed world."

David Mellor, playing it on the radio on Remembrance Sunday in 2010, placed it in the context of Elgar's sadness at the coming of war, particularly because of the popularity of his music in Germany. In fact this appears to be a misreading: in 1914 more patriotic music was in vogue; this is more a reflection of the mood of 1918. The more likely explanation is that Elgar wrote this out of love for a lady not his wife, reflecting sadness at their mutual decision to stay with their respective spouses, and significantly the provisional title of the work was Soupir d'Amour .


The technically proficient might like to read this brief description by Phillip Cooke. I just like to listen to it. With his eye for the ladies I think Sir Edward would have appreciated this video too!

This novel must surely be the only one ever written in which the author is also the nephew of one of the main characters! It is of course a blend of fact and fiction, telling the story of the excavation of the ship-burial at Sutton Hoo in 1939 and the discovery of the priceless Anglo-Saxon treasures now exhibited in the British Museum, which radically altered our view of what used to be called the "Dark Ages".



In my youth I must have passed the Sutton Hoo site over a thousand times, probably without giving it a second thought, although I knew from local history at school that some important find had been made there some years earlier. More interesting for me as a child was to see whether there were men standing guard on the nearby bridge over the Deben, a relatively common occurrence indicating that borstal boys had escaped from Hollesley Bay. I often wondered though whether this served any purpose other than to frighten local residents, which it certainly did me, for all the escapees had to do was make a detour and cross the Deben at a narrower point further upstream!

The novel itself is highly evocative of time and place: sleepy class conscious Suffolk in the 1930's, with the sense of the impending war hanging over the excavation and giving it an urgency and a poignancy it otherwise would not have had. Peggy Piggot (the author's aunt) comments that "it seemed an especially cruel joke that we should be unearthing the remains of one civilization just as our own appeared to be on the brink of annihilation."

Preston provides no single narrator, the excavation at Sutton Hoo is explored through the eyes of its principal characters: the landowner Edith Pretty, a Lancastrian, marrying late after the death of her father, surprisingly giving birth at the age of 47 to her only child, Robert, and now trying to get in touch with her dead husband through a spiritualist; Basil Brown, the local archaeologist recommended to Mrs Pretty by Ipswich Museum, without the right letters after his name as his wife comments, he is inevitably pushed aside by academic archaeologists when the importance of the discovery becomes apparent; Peggy Piggott, a young archaeologist recently married to a Professor, she is taken by her husband from a passionless honeymoon to participate in the dig at the request of the Cambridge archaeologist, Charles Phillips.


The novel forces us to confront the meaning of an existence in which even the body of a Saxon King, Raedwald, may have decayed, teeth and all, becoming virtually indistinguishable from the soil in which it was long ago buried. So also Edith Pretty's photographer nephew points out that Victorian street scenes appeared devoid of people because the photographic plates needed long exposure: "All those ghostly, transparent people making no lasting impression." Peggy Piggott says that she wanted to be an archaeologist because "so much of life just slips by and with so little to show for it. I suppose I wanted to make sense of what does endure." Mrs Pretty of course finds the treasure she had always thought was there, but never manages to make contact wth her dead husband. "There were no voices to be heard, no messages coming from some unimagineable beyond. That surely was the truth. Everything else was a delusion. Crumbs of comfort to keep the pangs at bay."


Inevitably in a work of this nature one wonders what is true and what is fiction. It appears that the main liberty taken is the compression of the dig into the hot summer of 1939, when in fact it took place over 1938 and 1939.



I was intrigued to find a picture of Mrs Pretty on the web, and to find that she lived with her father, a Manchester industrialist, for a number of years at Vale Royal House in Winsford, Cheshire, where she is remembered for giving the Dempster Challenge Cup (her maiden name) which is still awarded annually for the best local allotment. So her name will always be associated with digging.

Anyway I found this a delightful read: one of a pile of books taken away with me on a recent holiday; as soon as it was finished I read it again. I can pay a book no greater compliment.

A powerful end to what has been a great winter season at the Royal Exchange: Dr Faustus, The Lady From the Sea, The Bacchae, Zach and now the world premiere of Vivienne Franzmann's Bruntwood Award winning play, Mogadishu. Set in an inner city London school, the play is performed throughout within a somewhat battered rusty wire cage. It is fast moving, well directed and superbly acted by a young cast.

It is now nearing the end of its run at the Royal Exchange, but is transferring to the Lyric, Hammersmith. Anyway, even if you have no wish to read the rest of this blog, I strongly recommend that you look at this rehearsal video.

I was struck by the different modes of discourse that take place within the cage - the fast and at times incomprehensible language of the street in which every other sentence seems to end with "innit", the angry exchanges between children and adults, and the bureaucratic discourse used by the school authorities in their efforts to protect children and maybe their own backs.

The audience was white, middle class and predominantly grey haired! Regrettably that is not untypical of theatre audiences, unless a GCSE set text is being performed. The following advert from the theatre programme maybe gives the game away!
There were perhaps some young people there: at any rate two of the young male black actors received wolf whistles! The disconnect between subject of the play and audience is probably even better illustrated by the programme's usual advertisement for Manchester Grammar School, where I am sure the multi ethnic children who largely commute in from the outer parts of Greater Manchester still communicate using the language of Burke and Gibbon.



Anyway a powerful, gripping play. I cannot recommend it too highly, and I urge anyone who lives near London to go and see it at the Hammersmith Lyric.

Why Mogadishu? As is noted in the play , it is a place, although none of the kids can locate it. In a piece headed "Battleground", the programme associates the word with chaos and danger. In trawling the net I found the following comment written by an angry man who like most of us has probably never been there but is an expert nevertheless:

Mogadishu is a shithole because the people who live there is genetically inclined to be violent and criminal.
I’m not racist, but this is the historical truth.
We should throw a nuke bomb on that den of fanatics.
They don’t deserve any help from western countries. 
Within 20 or 30 years they will extinguish.