Endnotes, March 2024

Cruiser HMS Sheffield, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, March 2024

In this edition: George Lloyd’s Arctic symphony, plus Nicola LeFanu’s path across the dunes, reviewed by Stuart Millson

Recently issued by Lyrita is a definitive collection of symphonic music by one of our country’s many overlooked composers, the Cornishman George Lloyd ~ a figure who, after war service in the Royal Navy on HMS Trinidad, sought mental refuge and spiritual self-repair in the peace of Switzerland; and when back in England, in market gardening and mushroom farming but with the early mornings of his horticultural day devoted to composing.

The Symphonies 1-6 and the Agincourt-themed overture, John Socman (written for the 1951 Festival of Britain) are presented on Lyrita’s handsome box set, with not only detailed programme notes by Paul Conway and a fascinating assessment of Lloyd’s life and times ~ childhood in St. Ives, to inter-war years questing for recognition ~ but a photo-album, too, of the composer with fellow musicians, friends and supportive family. Lloyd’s father wrote the libretto for the opera John Socman; and the composer’s marriage very likely saved his sanity, following the trauma of war spent in the Arctic convoys.

From the box set, the hugely impressive, splendidly designed musical architecture that is the lyrical, hour long Symphony No. 4, written at the war’s end and subtitled, ‘The Arctic’, stands out. How poorly served for choice we are by our orchestras today. Lloyd’s Fourth Symphony is a masterpiece but is rarely played or broadcast in this country. It fell to New York State’s Albany Symphony Orchestra to perform the piece under the composer’s baton (in a rich, wide acoustic) ~ although to be fair to our own native musicians, the bulk of the box set displays the no less virtuosic playing of Manchester’s BBC Philharmonic.

Noble horn and brass statements give a proud stoicism to this extensive musical drama; not an obvious programmatic description of frozen wastes, perhaps, but a complicated, personal response, in terms of heightened feelings, to extraordinary surroundings and times. A first movement of Sibelius like stored up energy gives way to moments of sustained lyricism. In the carefree, slow movement there are echoes of the American composer, Roy Harris, evoking a vision of black pine forests and rivers of snow water. But nothing prepares you for the 20 minute long final movement. With perfect, sure footing in its initial sequences that make complete ‘conversational’ sense (no idle note spinning here), a quietly confident, march theme sweeps up through the orchestra ~ bringing out playing of an infectious, even hypnotic spirit. The marching theme reappears in the movement, leading to a great, optimistic conclusion ~ and causing the listener to ask: could this really be the work of a man so recently scarred by war? Evidently George Lloyd possessed great inner strength.

From the metier label comes music of more astringent proportions: short, Webern-like pieces for small chamber ensemble (in this recording, the players of Gemini) written by Nicola LeFanu ~ a figure with a great artistic pedigree, her mother being the composer Dame Elizabeth Maconchy.

The Same Day Dawns (1974) opens the CD, and consists of 17 haunting sections which puts one in mind of Britten (or Warlock’s The Curlew): a chilly wind on a lonely coast, and faltering woodwind sounds just audible through reedbeds, with lines for the vocalist, such as:
‘The winter night’s river wind was so cold
that the sanderlings were crying…’

A similar, not quite tonal atmosphere is to be found in the intense 2020 ‘scena’, The Moth Ghost, setting James Harpur’s words ~ the sea-goddess mourning her son, Achilles:
‘And now you cannot see the seaweed on the sand/the path above the dunes where you would stroll/the cave that came to life with flitting wings.’

Herewith, music that lives in its own fleeting dimension, and which is superbly recorded in glowing detail.

CD details: George Lloyd, Symphonies 1-6, Lyrita, SRCD.2417 

Nicola LeFanu, The path above the dunes/Gemini, with soprano, Clare Barbier Serrano. metier, mex 77112.

Stuart Millson is Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review

 

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor, 7 February 2024

According to a Mr Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (the Daily Mail, December 30, 2023), western liberal capitalist countries are best because they “produce the most danceable pop songs,” the “biggest blockbuster movies,” and “the best night clubs”; oh, and superlatively free and democratically effectual elections. What most serious analysts of current affairs cannot dispute, however, is the comparative geo-strategic decline of the West, aggravated by economic turmoil, transnational terrorism and trafficking, Chinese and Islamist resurgence, plus an unprecedented sub-Saharan birth-rate. Concerning the latter, according to Steve Jones (writing in The Language of the Genes) “A third of the world’s population may be of African origin by 2050”. 

Hitherto dogged by what Correlli Barnet calls “overstretch coupled with underperformance”, our overcrowded island is currently a sitting-duck yet countenances WMD conflict against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, an “Evil Axis” whose area jointly exceeds 10 million square miles. The political class has allowed British defences to become weak and inefficient, highlighted by the Royal Navy’s recent sea-lane action in a situation nevertheless provocative of regional explosion. Meanwhile, the Chief of the General Staff calls for war-footing “mobilisation” of the “whole nation”.  But “Britain’s collapsing birth rate could lose us the next war”, warns Michael Deacon (Daily Telegraph, 27 January 2024). The ONS expects a 6 million population increase by 2036, almost entirely from immigration. Just how many of these polyethnic incomers would willingly join a perilous offensive on behalf of Bibi Netanyahu, Volodymyr Zelensky, or Lai Ching-te?

Our military vulnerability is compounded by the insidious combination of internal social decline and a dominant ideology that impedes its reversal. Data on crime and behaviour, health and addiction, education and childcare, transport and communication, banking services, tax-aided charities, council funds, asylum management and landscape conservation, show that the sheer numbers of people requiring cure, care, coaching or control are beginning to overwhelm the available personnel competent adequately to provide the facilities required. Declining national intelligence is doubtless another key factor, for which environmental causes are proposed, although genetics cannot be excluded. Regarded as a primary cause of the decline and collapse of several great empires, differential birth-rates between creative elites and citizens of limited abilities remain a legitimate concern of thoughtful, albeit sometimes execrated, observers.

“The burdens of civilised life grow heavier in each generation,” observed W. R. Inge, back in 1927. Science and technology can solve many problems, including some they previously helped to create. But they require enough scientists and engineers for innovation and implementation, and wise leadership. Can we escape the present grip of inertia and incompetence, complacency and corruption, and rescue civilization from woke induced decadence or nuclear annihilation?

From David Ashton

         

  

 

Posted in QR Home | 4 Comments

Tough Crowd

Pictured here is a scene still from the 1916 film “Intolerance.” Credit Wikipedia

Tough Crowd

Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, Graham Linehan, Eye Books, hb, 288 pp, £19.99, reviewed by Edward Dutton

In the summer of 2000, queuing up outside the Almeida Theatre in London to attend Celebration by Harold Pinter, your reviewer noticed, standing behind him, Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, the writers of Father Ted, the most beloved sitcom on TV, and the creators of Big Train. The latter brilliantly played with conventions and did something new with a tired, decades-old format – the sketch show. Celebration itself was a comedy which explored darker themes, such as incest, and which tried, albeit in a clunking way, to highlight the poignancy of life beneath a veneer of humour.

There is nothing “clunking,” however, about Tough Crowd, the autobiography of the creator of two of the best sitcoms ever, to wit, The IT Crowd and Father Ted. A superb read, it examines the vicissitudes of his career as a comedy writer. If you want celebrity gossip, this is present in abundance. For example, it transpires that Dermot Morgan, who played Father Ted, was a prima donna who took calls about other jobs during rehearsals and who assumed that any ban on mobile phones didn’t apply to him. Such is the mind-set of the narcissistic thespian.

The standard stories you would expect are all here: how Father Ted was conceived, how to write a successful joke, how jokes are tested, refined, and thought of. And there are also childhood recollections and revelations. Linehan never went to university but began his career writing about film and contemporary music for the Irish press. He subsequently turned to comedy sketches, submitting them to shows such as Alas Smith and Jones.

Continue reading

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Endnotes, February 2024

The Valkyrie’s Vigil, by Edward Robert Hughes, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, February 2024

Wagner from Denmark, reviewed by Stuart Millson

Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) by Richard Wagner is a music-drama comprising three Acts and forms the second part of the composer’s epoch-making operatic achievement, Der Ring Des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs). Set in the Teutonic forests in a time out of mind, the opera was first produced at Munich in the June of 1870, but as music-writer J. Walker McSpadden notes in Opera Synopses, it, did not receive a performance to the composer’s exacting standards until the August of 1876, when it came to the stage of Wagner’s own Bayreuth opera-house. And as McSpadden also observes:

“In order to understand the purport of “Die Walküre” as related to the “Ring” a certain amount of narrative is necessary which is not represented on the stage. Wotan, foreseeing the doom of the gods because they are pledged to respect the power of the magic ring, endeavours to protect Walhalla by creating a band of Valkyrie or warrior-maidens; their duty is to convey on their winged steeds the bodies of the noblest warriors, slain upon the field of battle, to the abode of the gods, where the warriors will live again, a mighty race to defend Walhalla. Upon the earth, also, Wotan has begotten two children of his own, Siegmund and Sieglinde, who grow up in ignorance of each other.”

To provide us with a revelatory reading of this opera, the STERLING CD label has issued a three-disc box set of a 1987 live recording, given at Den Jyske Opera, Aarhus; the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Francesco Cristofoli, with ~ centre-stage ~ the distinguished soprano, Laila Andersson-Palme as the Valkyrie, Brunnhilde.

The curtain goes up and a storm is raging through the German forests ~ the hut of Hunding (sung by Aage Haugland, bass) providing shelter to Siegmund (Sven-Olof Eliasson) who, we learn, is a foe of Hunding. Sieglinde (Lisbeth Balslev), Hunding’s wife, ushers Siegmund in from the gale, but as they converse, a (fatal) attraction begins to envelope them, despite their true relationship ~ unknown to each other… of brother and sister.

Continue reading

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Defiance

 

Charlotte Salomon, Kristallnacht, credit Wikimedia Commons

Defiance

Resisters; How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany, Wolf Gruner, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2023, h.b., 212 pp, reviewed by Leslie Jones

In a letter to Arnold Zweig, dated December 15, 1935, the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky concluded, “Judaism is defeated, as much defeated as it deserves”. Judaism, according to Tucholsky, “just does not fight”. This notion of Jewish passivity, of the Nazis leading the Jews like “sheep to the slaughter”, was subsequently endorsed by other commentators. Historian Raul Hilberg, in The Destruction of the European Jews (1963), bemoaned their “almost complete lack of resistance”. Saul Friedländer agreed, upping the ante by suggesting that the Final Solution was facilitated by “the willingness of the victims to follow orders”. More recently, in KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (2015), Nikolaus Wachsmann averred that “defiance is rare in totalitarian regimes”.

Wolf Gruner, Professor of History at the University of California, once subscribed to this conception of “the passivity of the persecuted”. But in 1998, Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer pointedly asked him, “where are the victims in your narrative?”, setting in motion an eventual change of perspective. Professor Gruner came to realise that, hitherto, studies of Jewish resistance had concentrated on organised, armed resistance at the group level, generally ignoring a multiplicity of individual acts of resistance. Yet concerning the latter, police reports, Gestapo files, prison cases, judgements from the Special Courts in numerous German cities contained a wealth of evidence hidden in plain sight. Survivor testimonies in the form of video interviews held at the Visual History Archive, University of California, and perpetrator files in the Yad Vashem archive and US Holocaust Memorial Museum archives have enhanced this picture.

The author’s thesis is neatly elaborated by a series of biographical studies which identify the different historic forms taken by “the forgotten resistance of German and Austrian Jews”. Daisy Gronowski is the subject of chapter five, entitled ‘Acting in physical self-defense’. Born in Königsberg, East Prussia in 1921, her father Bruno was a merchant and manufacturer and the proud possessor of the Iron Cross. In the mid-1930’s, Daisy practised martial arts under the auspices of Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist group. In 1938, she enrolled in a Jewish agricultural camp in Urfeld, to prepare for eventual emigration to Israel or Latin America. During Kristallnacht (the November pogrom) the camp was attacked by anti-Semites. Daisy recalls that she stabbed and head-butted the gang leader, thereby refuting the Nazi libel of the “weak Jew’.

Those who protested in writing against the Nazi regime risked torture, incarceration in a concentration camp, prosecution under the Treacherous Attacks Law of 1934 and/or arraignment for treason before the People’s Court in Berlin. Witness the fate of members of the White Rose group. Ditto that of Benno Neuberger, the subject of chapter four. Born in Munich in 1871, his father Max was a real estate broker. After Kristallnacht, Benno Neuberger was incarcerated in Dachau concentration camp. The persecution of Jews instigated by the mayor of Munich Dr Karl Fiehler and Hitler’s eliminationist rhetoric incensed Neuberger. The proverbial last straw was the 1941 decree requiring all Jews over six to wear the “yellow star”. During 1941 and 1942, he mailed anonymous postcards replete with abusive comments about Hitler, such as “The eternal mass murderer”. Arrested by the Gestapo in March 1942, he was sentenced to death by the People’s Court and duly guillotined. His family were required to foot the bill for his execution.

In The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory, Tim Grady identifies two contrasting narratives. “All Jews are shirkers” was a recurrent Nazi motif. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had accused the Jews of avoiding front line service. But there was also a ‘national conservative’ take on the role of the Jews in the war. According to President Hindenburg, anyone “good enough to fight and to die for Germany” deserved to be commemorated on war memorials. In July 1934 he insisted that a new war medal should be issued to all veterans, regardless of race or religion. But after Hindenburg’s death in August 1934, all German-Jewish war veterans were dismissed from public service and excluded from German citizenship (see History Today, June 2013, review by Leslie Jones of The German-Jewish Soldiers…).

In chapter two, ‘Verbal Protest Against the Persecution’, Professor Gruner highlights the shameful treatment of German-Jewish patriots, such as Henriette Schäfer, after 1933. Born in 1882, the daughter of a Jewish shoemaker, she had worked in an ammunition factory during the First World War. The allegation that German Jews were traitors incensed her as did the harassment by the municipal authorities of the large Jewish community in Frankfurt where she had lived with her husband since 1909. On the morning of November 10 1938, the day after the Nazi leadership instigated the nationwide pogrom called Kristallnacht, she told her landlord that the members of the government were “…black-guards, scamps, and criminals” and that “Hitler is the biggest bandit”. In November 1939, she was sentenced to six months in prison and was deported to Theresienstadt in February 1945. She survived, thanks to the vagaries of war.

“Toute notre dignité consiste…en la pensée”. “Travaillons donc à bien penser” (Blaise Pascal, Pensées). We commend, accordingly, Professor Gruner’s endeavours.

Dr Leslie Jones is Editor of Quarterly Review

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Labyrinthine Linguistics

Theseus & the Minotaur, Attic black-figure lekythos, 500-475 BC, credit Wikipedia

 Labyrinthine Linguistics

Stanley E. Porter, The Pastoral Epistles: A Commentary on the Greek Text. Baker Academic. 2023. Pp.i-xxi, 1-969. $70.00, reviewed by Darrell Sutton

This important book is the result of close reading and scrupulous study. The approach is linguistic, guided by the rules of Formal Systemic Functional Grammar, which is ‘a system-based functional linguistic model that connects socially grounded meanings with instances of language usage… defining and examining various theoretical strata that connect context to expression’ (p.3). Stanley Porter (henceforth SP) maintains, however, that The Pastoral Epistles: A Commentary on the Greek Text is not a full-blown linguistic commentary. It is.

Terminology.
To begin with, readers may well struggle with SP’s language. He provides functional explanations, definitions, and classifications to aid the reader: monosemy ‘is the principle, or perhaps the orientation or predisposition, of seeing singular rather than multiple meanings for any linguistic element’ (p.4); grammatical monosemy posits that ‘grammatical features also have abstract semantics that are modulated or constrained by contextual features, including grammatical environments’ (p.5). He does find many common descriptions to be outmoded, saying ‘there are some who still use the terminology of VSO (verb, subject, object)… but this assumes a grammatically explicit subject… which many Greek clauses simply do not formally express (they have an implied subject with verbal morphology)’ (p.7). On the Greek verb, SP’s views are governed by his notions regarding ‘aspect’. As he maintains, ‘the Greek verb is aspectual, with the aspects realized by the so-called tense forms. The aspect system functions within the ideational metafunction. He sees three forms of aspects: (1) perfective, realized by aorist tense for a process seen to be complete, (2) imperfective: realized by represent and imperfect tenses for a process seen to be progressive, and (3) stative: realized by perfect and pluperfect tenses for a process seen to represent a state of affairs (p.9). He concludes this section professing ‘I do not believe that interlingual translation is a particularly reliable or even useful indicator of understanding of a language’ (p.17).

INTRODUCTION
The author accepts Pauline authorship of the Pastoral epistles and does not find multiplicity in speech or in theological themes to be an impediment to reaching that conclusion. As he says, ‘diversity in language is not a necessary or sufficient indicator of difference in authorship but may instead reflect only a difference in what is often called register or genre’ (p.21). Some critical views provoke his derision. SP ridicules Raymond Brown’s assertion that few academics believe Paul wrote the Pastorals: ‘his estimate that 80-90 percent of scholars hold this skeptical view shows that Brown probably needed to extend his circle of scholarly friends’ (p.22,fn.2). Through thirty pages, beginning on page 44, SP outlines Authentic Pauline Authorship, looking into linguistic differences and statistical studies.

Continue reading

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Letter to the Editor

 

Letter to the Editor, 7th January 2024

I entered University College Hospital in the Euston Road for the second time last year after several heart attacks. Later I also had spells in the Royal Free Hospital in  Hampstead and Barts Hospital.

Much to my astonishment, I found that the aforementioned hospitals had embraced a much wider duty of care than is generally recognised as reasonable. In practice this meant that these hospitals were able and willing to prevent patients from leaving even if they wished to do so. It also imposed what amounted to imprisonment  without trial by insisting that patients are kept in hospital longer than is strictly necessary.

The current  madness in the NHS seems to be  this, they assume that everyone must not be exposed to the slightest risk. This means that anyone can be in effect forced to undergo treatment. Carried to  extremes in the NHS is this is not only deeply unpleasant but potentially financially ruinous.

To police this situation the hospitals employ a computer system whereby only the  staff can enter and leave without permission. This is policed using a swipe card system. No card, no entry.

To enforce these rules the hospitals employ heavy handed security personal – – I was assaulted on several occasions when I attempted to get past the door systems.

The legal mechanism of what is effectively imprisonment without trial is probably Deprivation of Liberty orders https://www.gov.uk/guidance/deprivation-of-liberty/ These require much less justification than, for example, criminal charges.

My advice to those contemplating going into hospital is to think very carefully about any treatment other than the most obvious emergency procedure although even that can result in a Deprivation of Liberty order. Something, evidently, is profoundly wrong with the NHS.

From Robert Henderson

Posted in QR Home | 2 Comments

Endnotes, January 2024

Hans Knappertsbusch, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, January 2024

In this edition: music from Iceland; vintage Bruckner from the Berlin Philharmonic, reviewed by Stuart Millson

Orchestral music for the stage is the theme of a recent disc from Chandos, except that the composers concerned are ~ until now ~ almost completely unknown to British audiences. Iceland’s Jon Leifs is known to audiences here at home (a dramatic piece of his was performed at the Proms some ten years ago) but his fellow countryman, Pall Isolfsson (1893-1974), and countrywoman, Jorunn Vidar (1918-2017) are surely making their debut.

Vidar’s ballet score, Eldur ~ or Fire (a work from 1950) starts the programme, occupying just under ten minutes of the disc. Written for the, then, new National Theatre in Reykjavik, Vidar’s piece brings the element of fire from Iceland’s rocky landscape into the concert hall. The performers here, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, field a very fine woodwind section, whose clarinet player particularly stands out; the instrumental sound captured as if in a chamber hall. But the orchestral combustion spreads and the listener will enjoy (as in Wagner), a motif, representing flames; then a waltz-like touch to the writing; and a growing sense of overpowering forces, via brass ~ the horn section, in particular., but it seems that this Icelandic composer has a near-unique style of her own: not quite romanticism, and certainly not atonality, but a simplicity, a directness, no doubt sculpted by her island-nation’s remoteness, darkness and elemental forces. One listens in vain here for echoes of Nielsen and Sibelius

However, for Vidar’s second ballet on the CD, Olafur Liljuros (1952), a more nostalgic, old-world, storybook-style emerges ~ perhaps reminiscent, in part, of Grieg’s setting of antique, baroque tunes in his Holberg Suite (or even similar folk-like pieces by our own Warlock and E.J. Moeran). And the eight-part ballet sequence presented here works like a suite, rather than a work for dance, charting the adventures of one Olafur ~ a figure from the old Norse ballads of Iceland ~ whose life is in peril after chancing upon a group of elf-maidens. Beware of appearances is the moral of the story. Yet despite its simple, fairy tale quality, there is ~ once again ~ some beautiful writing here: ravishing violin playing by the Icelanders, which achieves a rare quartet-like intimacy; and crystal-clear brass, with a trombone tone that ‘hangs’ in the air. Curiously, this Super-Audio CD creates an all-enveloping acoustic, as if you are sitting in the very heart of the orchestra pit in the Reykjavik Theatre.

Finally, Isolfsson’s incidental music to Ibsen’s The Feast at Solhaug adds a true flourish to the disc, not least through a four-minute maestoso Overture, and gentle andante, entitled, The Mountain Dweller. Anyone seeking national flavour in music, or an enthusiast for lesser-known Nordic composers will derive endless pleasure from this well-recorded disc. Conductor Rumon Gamba leads his forces with total conviction: a triumph for this orchestra at ‘the edge of the world’.

Our last recommendation for the New Year edition is in the category of ‘historic performance’: a gripping reading by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Hans Knappertsbusch of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, ‘The Romantic’, recorded on the 8th September 1944. As Allied Forces closed in on the soon to be defeated and exhausted German army, artists of the calibre of those recorded here still found it within themselves to conjure a 19th-century idyll of forests, folk-festivals, hunting horns ~ all leading to one of those towering finales for which Bruckner is famous.

The Archipel label serves the history of recorded music well on their remastered Bruckner disc, allowing us to absorb the power which came from conductors such as Knappertsbusch and Furtwangler ~ figures for whom Beethoven, Wagner and Bruckner were gods. Here on Archipel, players from 80 years ago are on the edge of their seats as the world spins, and war and ruin advance. Yet music, as Carl Nielsen memorably remarked, remains inextinguishable.

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review

 CD details:

Icelandic Works for the Stage, Iceland Symphony Orchestra/Gamba, CHSA 5319.
Bruckner, Symphony No. 4, ‘Romantic’. Berlin Philharmonic/Knappertsbusch. ARPCD 0044.

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The Missing Link

        

Malcolm McDowell as Alex DeLarge, in A Clockwork Orange, credit Wikipedia

The Missing Link
Bill Hartley hits Stockton

Recent remarks by the Home Secretary, wherever they were directed, shone an unaccustomed spotlight on Stockton. [Editorial note; James Cleverly allegedly called Stockton a “s**thole” in the House of Commons]. Some towns never really succeed. Others go through a period of prosperity before sinking into decline. Stockton, on the north bank of the Tees, falls into the latter category. Like many councils Stockton’s local authority pours out optimistic propaganda but the townscape has all the signs of a decline which may be impossible to curtail. There is a revival plan though and it is going to cost a great deal of public money.

The high water mark of 19th century prosperity is often reflected in town centre architecture. Some places possess handsome commercial buildings and arcades adorned with sandstone facades, ornate windows and other decorations. Stockton is a depressing exception. The original port on the Tees was Yarm which had the good fortune to be superseded by Stockton, before it could be overwhelmed by industrialisation. Hence it retains the charm of a Georgian market town. In contrast, Stockton has a ragged row of undistinguished buildings along its high street.

Stockton was predestined to fail despite becoming the terminus for Mr Stephenson’s new railway, built to reach the Tees by the shortest route. From here South Durham coal could be shipped out. Even back then though, farsighted businessmen such as Joseph Pease who promoted the Stockton and Darlington Railway, saw it as merely a stepping stone. The ultimate destination was Middlesbrough, a place with more room for expansion. Stockton continued as a port serving the coal trade but no-one was going to spend money on handsome buildings which might signal confidence in the future.

There are today two Stockton’s. Just out of town along the A135 towards Yarm lie new housing developments, office parks, trading estates and car showrooms. In effect, people and businesses have gone elsewhere. These places may have the same postcode but it is quite possible to live here and never enter the town centre, which is only a short bus ride away.

Stockton’s life as a river port effectively came to an end with the opening of the Tees barrage in 1995. It was done with the aim of controlling the river’s flow to prevent flooding. The Tees is still in theory navigable and it is possible for light craft to reach Yarm. However, the operators PD Ports, ‘do not encourage’ recreational craft to travel upstream. Looking out over the wide expanse of river at Stockton, there is no sign of any craft, even of the light variety.

Behind the high street there are a few surviving Georgian town houses tucked away and enthusiastically promoted as ‘heritage’ by the council. Unfortunately the overriding impression is of worn out 1970s shopping developments whose tenants have fled, and for which demolition would be a merciful release. Pictures of the High Street from the 1980s show a last gasp of prosperity at a time when people still went to town on the bus to shop. The nostalgia sections of online local media feature memory lane pictures plundered from the archives. For long term residents of Stockton it must all seem rather poignant.

A walk down the bleak high street prompts a comparison with Durham’s dying coalfield communities further to the north. There are former retail premises with sufficient floor space to have been transformed into low end night spots. In close proximity lies a pawnbrokers and a slots arcade, plus of course the ubiquitous tattooist and a place where you can have your nose or eyebrows pierced. These are poverty row businesses found in low rent corners of most northern towns. In Stockton they have most of the high street.

Futurology plays a big part in local government planning, dutifully reported in the Northern Echo. For example, back in 2020 there was headline telling readers, ‘What the future could look like for six Teesside town centres’. Stockton and its hinterland have been the unfortunate recipients of boundary changes, done in a series of mainly futile attempts to create a sense of place under the banner of Teesside. In 1968 seven local councils were merged into a single district. Then in 1974 ‘reform’ came to the rescue when a new county called Cleveland was invented. Stockton came under the same authority as Middlesbrough, even though they lie on opposite sides of the river. Teesside now has a combined authority dishing out development grants. Looking back on the recent history of local government in the area, it might be understandable if the average person is completely baffled by who does what. The term six towns incidentally, is hardly common currency. It seems unlikely that the residents of genteel Yarm will wish to be associated with Stockton. Essentially it’s an artificial construct of the sort beloved by local government lifers, to try and give meaning and coherence to something dreamt up in a committee meeting.

More recently in 2021 the Guardian carried an article headlined, ‘Bulldoze the high street and build a giant park’. The story referred to what the local council, funded by grants from the combined authority, plan to do to rescue the place. The idea is to make the river an asset once more. A library is to be built and the local bureaucracy merged in a new council headquarters close by. In order to achieve this a gargantuan open space is to be created; essentially a huge landscaping project with an ‘urban park’ and a piazza. These spaces are seen as having potential for festivals and the like. All very well of course but such events don’t happen on every day of the year. Currently there are earthworks hidden behind hoardings next to the bush shelters. These are decorated by an artist’s impression of what life is soon to be like. Racing shells are depicted languidly rowing past parkland, like the Oxford Eights Week transported north. This forms part of an imagined aerial view with river and town blended seamlessly together. In this scene the high street has been purged of bookies and tattooists.

The problem with such a development apart from its sheer size (anticipated to be three times larger than Trafalgar Square) is the lack of ownership. Opening up such a large space will make it hard to integrate with the high street or dovetail into the town. Making it the venue for occasional festivals and other one off events leaves a gap during the remainder of the year. A gap if the example of similar projects is anything to go by, which will be filled by street drinkers and drug users. In turn others will find the place less inviting. Elsewhere when this has occurred the ‘solution’ is to employ street wardens to liaise with these people; additional unforeseen expenditure together with increased cleaning costs. It doesn’t solve the problem of course, merely demonstrates that it is being ‘managed’.

A better approach might have been for the council to acknowledge that economically speaking the high street is beyond salvaging. The places where people wish to live and work are up the road. Rejuvenation might have a better chance of success by seeking ways to bring old and new Stockton together, accepting that the nexus has moved. A riverside location has an aspect which could make it attractive for housing. Instead they have opted for a vast open space.

William Hartley is a Social Historian

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , | 3 Comments

The Darkened Light of Faith

Frederick Douglass, credit Wikipedia

The Darkened Light of Faith; Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought, Melvin L. Rogers, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2023, 380 pp, hb, reviewed by Leslie Jones

The European is to the other races of mankind “what man is to the lower animals; – he makes them subservient to his use” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835). Tocqueville despaired of ever seeing an aristocracy “…which is founded upon visible and indelible signs”, ever disappear. The habit of servitude, in his estimation, had given the slave “the thoughts and desires of a slave”. He noted that the prejudice of race was even stronger in the states which had abolished slavery, where the white “…fears lest they [the blacks] should someday be confounded together”.

Tocqueville’s pessimism about Europeans ever mixing with blacks was shared by several American commentators, notably Martin Robinson Delany. Born in 1812 in Virginia, Delany’s father was a slave, but his mother was free. Between 1850 and 1851, he was one of only four African Americans allowed to attend Harvard Medical School. He left in March 1851, never to return. The Dean, Oliver Wendell Holmes snr and many of the students had vehemently opposed the admission of black students. Professor Rogers considers Delany’s The Condition, Elevation, Emigration; and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852) a “powerful indictment of American life”. Delany espoused a theory of history in which the role of elites was pivotal. Human nature, he averred, “generally produces political and ethical hierarchies to organise human relations” (Rogers, p158).

For Delany, his dismissal from Harvard Medical School and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 underlined the unequal status of blacks in the United States, based on prevalent notions of their inborn racial inferiority. Unlike Frederick Douglass and David Walker, author of the incendiary Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), Delany regarded the white citizens of the United States as beyond redemption. The law, as Tocqueville maintained, is an expression of the underlying ethos of the people and it made African Americans “alien to the polity” (Rogers, p119). Frederick Douglass, in contrast, believed that man “is still capable of apprehending and pursuing that which is good”. He opposed Delany’s support for an independent black state by colonisation and emigration, accusing him of spreading “hopelessness among the free colored people …and thereby…resigned to the degradation which they have been taught …must be perpetual”. According to Delany, however, Douglass obfuscated the alien status of black people. In a letter to William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, dated May 1852, he confided, “I have no hopes in this country – no confidence in the American people – with a few excellent exceptions – therefore I have written as I have done”.

Could the revolutionary spirit of 1776 transform America into what the author calls “a racially just society” (page 160), or the “more perfect union” referred to by Barack Obama, in a speech in 2008? Douglass, for one, concluded his eloquent 1852 Address ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ on a relatively positive note, stating “I do not despair of this country…I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope”.

However, “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11: 1). Faith is transcendental, whereas social science endeavours to be realistic, evidential and empirical. Professor Rogers acknowledges that in the 1890’s even Douglass’s faith in democracy dimmed, as, towards the end of his life, did that of W.E.B. Du Bois. In his autobiographical work Dusk of Dawn (1940), Du Bois states that the focus of his Souls of Black Folk (1903) was “the admission of my people into the freedom of democracy”. The lynching of Sam Hose in 1899, he also informs us, disrupted his sociological work of the 1890’s, as “one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved…” “Chin up”, he urged a friend, “and fight on, but realize that American negroes can’t win”.

Melvin R. Rogers regards Donald Trump as a supporter of “white supremacy [and] nativism” (p 3). And while he generally eschews Afro-pessimism, he advises black Americans to “always look on their white counterparts with suspicion”.

“Men”, Marx contends, “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). We commend Professor Rogers for his indefatigable labours.

[Editorial note; many thanks to Judith Cannon for her technical prowess]

Dr Leslie Jones is the Editor of QR

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments