# 67 English Inns by Thomas Burke
The first reaction to one possessing expertise on hostelries is, surely, that that one must be well acquainted with ale. With author Thomas Burke I shall never know, but I do know that the author of this volume not only had a lifelong acquaintanceship with his subject matter, but also accumulated sufficient authority to pen several books on the subject. In The Book of the Inn (1927) he aggregated 200 literary extracts relating to inns and the culture of the inn. In The English Inn (1930) he tells of his experiences: "tales of good hospitality and generous meals, old songs and stories and disputes and comfortable beds and 'shovel-board' and darts, in a seemingly unending journey across the country". In Will Someone Lead Me to a Pub? (1936) he suggests, in light-hearted vein, that the pub "is the only place where a man may meet and talk with strangers on level terms". And in English Inns (1943) he offers a distillation of his lifetime gleanings.
But, think again if you think that "the inn" might have been a single-minded lifetime focus for the author. Thomas Burke, who lived from 1886 to 1945, wrote four books of poetry, 28 other non-fiction books (including the aforesaid four about inns), and 16 books of fiction - including one of which, incidentally, contains the story The Chink and the Child, filmed in 1919 by D.W. Griffith as Broken Blossoms, starring Lillian Gish, Donald Crisp and Richard Barthelmess.
Returning to our theme, though, what does a lifetime's exposure to inns produce? In short, Burke's little book is an affectionate and delightful tribute. There is no grand theme, no overarching structure, no "message", merely a survey from which I shall take away, and share, a few of Burke's thoughts.
* The first English inn was born when the first English road was made.
* The inn has always been an essential factor of English life, as familiar to English eyes as the church, the castle, and the cottage.
* Not only did the inn afford shelter and entertainment to the traveller, it was a semi-official centre of town. The England that we cannot find in the Town Hall we can find in the inn.
* The inn was regularly used for official meetings, sometimes the Quarter Sessions, sometimes Council Meetings.
* In the centuries before the railway, every man who travelled twenty miles from his home had need of the services of an inn and its amenities, and it was in the inn-keeper's interests to provide these in as good measure or better than those of the traveller's own house. Mostly he did.
* And this is why, today, the old inn is often the noblest building of its town.
* By their lifelong aim to keep up with the times, old inns now afford examples of the architecture of many centuries.
* In the early days nobody travelled for pleasure or for the delight of looking upon rural scenery,
* In the first thirty years of the nineteenth century coach travel and post-chaise travel was at its peak. The kitchen fire was never out; post-boys worked in relays through the twenty-four hours.
* But just when the main-road inn was enjoying record business the bustle was stilled by the arrival of the railway. The railway followed its own route. Hundreds of inns were ruined, and disappeared.
* In their place evolved the railway hotel; but such places had all the faults of the old inn and none of its graces, and never succeeded in winning the affections of their customers.
* However the inns (the ones that had survived) emerged from their long sleep when the car and the cycle opened the roads again. The inns saw boom time once more.
Postscript: For those with a tweaked interest let me recommend The Old Inns of England, by A.E. Richardson, published by Batsford in 1934, with numerous subsequent editions. This volume has the added advantage of "A Selected List of Notable Inns" arranged alphabetically by county. It also has a quirky Foreword by the famous architect, Sir Edward Lutyens [think the Cenotaph, London and the Australian National War Memorial, Villers-Bretonneaux]. While applauding the new roads and the burgeoning motorists who have brought new life to the old inns he bewails the new "olde worlde" creations that are disfiguring the landscape. He also bewails, somewhat contemptuously, the continuing restrictions left over from the [First World] wartime Defence of the Realm Act: "It is amazing, in these days, that .....work should be hindered and hampered by Act of Parliament bearing the initials that can but justly relate to some dotty old woman, D.O.R.A.".
#3 English Music by W.J. Turner
The promo on the flap of this volume asserts that: "The common fallacy that we are not a musical nation has persisted so long that we have almost come to believe it ourselves". The flap note continues: "We are indeed a nation not only of music-lovers but of music-makers"; and that Turner's book "shows how glorious is the heritage that the great English composers have left to us". There's an element of "protesting too much" here. Why not let W.J. Turner dispel the fallacy of national unmusicality in the course of his treatise without implying, before we even open the book, that he is embarking on some sort of sisyphean undertaking, or some sort of apologia for the inferior English product? The likely consequence of this introduction is that we shall - wittingly or otherwise - have our thoughts about English music directed towards inferiority. Why set up unprovable propositions that the author's efforts will be judged against?
Walter James Redfern Turner (1889 - 1946), the author of English Music (1942), wrote nearly 20 books on music, including biographies of Beethoven, Wagner, Berlioz and Mozart. In addition, he published some 16 volumes of poetry; and was the General Editor of the Britain in Pictures series. He was born in Melbourne - where his father was organist at St. Paul's Cathedral - but lived and worked in London from age 18. He was a significant figure in English literary circles. He was not musically trained which, as one writer quizzically put it, left him "unhampered by any excess of technical knowledge".
As a topic, "English music" could be approached from several angles, but it is notable that Turner adopts a very broad-brush approach, not nearly so focussed on the "heritage of the great English composers" as the flap note would suggest. In his execution Turner gives us two principal chapters: one on the "development" of secular music, and one on the "development" of non-secular music. There is an introductory chapter styled "Music in England", and there is a concluding chapter on "The Revival of Music". That very title has a foreboding: surely what needs to be revived must already be dead or nearly so. We'll come to this point soon enough.
Turner's opening chapter has some startling propositions, all directed towards confirming his assertion that whereas in the sixteenth century England was known as "Merrie England", through to the nineteenth century it was known (in Europe) as "The Land Without Music": so at least a couple of hundred years of sterility in the middle. This is clearly not the expectation to be drawn from the words of the dust jacket.
Turner supports his assertion with the following chronology:
* music died with the Civil War and Cromwell and the rise of Puritanism from 1642;
* the Restoration of Charles II, returning to England after years in exile and bringing with him a large number of foreigners, did little to revive the court and its connection with the people;
* the successive monarchs were indisputably "foreign", starting with William III from Orange, and George I from Hanover, right through the other Georges to Victoria;
* furthermore, the Puritan movement flared up again through the extreme Protestant evangelical movement of John Wesley......and while "there was a fresh outburst of popular music in the form of hymns" there was "no corresponding development among the professional musicians, as the Court and society encouraged only foreign musicians";
* moreover, the industrial revolution was of "such colossal proportions during the first half of the nineteenth century" that it wasn't until the slow-down in England caused by the rise of German and American industry "that a renewed interest began to be taken in music by the upper classes and the educational authorities".
Pretty bold stuff, and is there some way to validate the proposition that England from say 1650 to say 1850 was a musically bleak place?
In answering this question I shall focus on serious music (because I think that's what Turner's thesis was doing, too), and I shall seek help from The World of Music (editor: K.B. Sandved), a 2,239-page mega-volume from 1954 - not because it is likely to be more authoritative than any other source but because it contains useful composer timeline charts. The composers I have noted had to be no younger than 20 years of age at 1650 and, at the other end of the range, alive at 1850 but at least aged 20. According to Sandved the prominent British composers who fit these criteria are five in number:
Henry Purcell (1659 - 1695)
Thomas Arne (1710 - 1778)
William Boyce (1711 - 1779)
John Field (1782 - 1837) - Irish!
Sir Henry Bishop (1787 - 1856).
French composers who fit the same criteria were 15 in number, Italian composers 17, and German composers 20. It seems that Turner has a point: English serious music was more or less in recess for 200 years. And it seems that the blurb on the dust jacket, referred to above, is somewhat overblown.
Turner's chapter on the development of English religious/non-secular music does little to fire the blood, and why should it? And why should the music itself fire the blood? It is mainly choral, mainly madrigals, music much of which to this day remains in manuscript only and is thus not generally accessible. Turner makes no reference to the existence of English religious music in his own time or during the immediately-prior era. Perhaps the landscape of English religious music expanded little after 1850, and confined itself to the Anglican hymnal - Hymns Ancient and Modern, published 1861.
As to Turner's take on English secular music: although wide ranging it is, I think, lightweight. That is to say, he devotes his extensive knowledge and talents to the backwater in preference to the mainstream. But, in fairness, focussing on the gravy rather than the roast beef is a needs must response to the beef being thin on the plate. This chapter deals at length with secular carols, folk songs, and sea shanties; and with the music that accompanied dramatic performances, evolving towards opera. Here we have Henry Purcell (The Fairy-Queen and Dido and Aeneas) and Thomas Arne (some 90 stage works with music), and the ballad-opera written by John Gay, The Beggars' Opera. As to enduring orchestral music: nothing to see here.
The potage thickens in Turner' final chapter, The Revival of [English] Music. Coming off 200-odd barren years, hopefully there will be much to say about that revival. Well, not so much. Turner posits that "a genuine and inspired popular music can only come direct from the life of the people, and so far, the intense industrialisation of Great Britain in the twentieth century has proved unfavourable to the creation of any popular musical art " - remember, this was being said in 1942. Turner, however, concedes that the rise of the music halls produced enormous quantities of music. But cop this bit of spleen: "This tendency (towards absence of sincere emotional expression) became much accentuated during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The love song, as it has been known in the past, has entirely disappeared, and its place has been taken by a cheap imitation of the negroid sentimental ditties of America. The total absence of sincerity and passion in the popular music of the twentieth century is a most striking phenomenon............". His overall proposition was probably wrong, and he was certainly wrong-headed. Some judicious editing would have been advisable.
As to serious English music during the 100 years since 1850, Turner's observations are brief. But he does mention Elgar, Delius, Vaughan Williams, Holst and Britten; and whether Turner recognised it or not, the revival had indeed arrived.
# 96 British Dogs by A. Croxton Smith
Not one of the great mysteries of the ages, I suppose, but how can a volume that has uncut pages, and thus has never been read, at the same time have lost its dust jacket? I make this minor complaint simply because, without the front flap, I'm deprived of the ability to read the publisher's comments. In the event, this is a handsome volume (in a series of invariably handsome volumes), and in pristine condition. And, in any case, the internet has told me a lot.
Arthur Croxton Smith (1865 - 1952) was a prolific writer on canines, with a number of his books still in print today. The internet is replete with opportunities to buy them. As always, the editors of Britain in Pictures have selected an author who clearly knew his stuff.
The nomenclature of Smith's chapters is itself a window into the story of the British dog, and invites us to enter and to follow. This is not to be a breed by breed analysis, rather a journey through the history of the dog in Britain.
In the first chapter of British Dogs (1945), Dogs of the Dim Ages, Smith suggests that historically there were no dogs native to Britain. Dog skeletons from the neolithic period were discovered at Avebury in Wiltshire in 1928, but these species of dog are thought to have died out. All modern dog species - their ancestors, at least - are believed to have been brought from overseas. Mastiffs were known in Britain at the arrival of Julius Caesar in 55 B.C.E. and, having originated in Assyria, may well have come with the Phoenicians in their quest for tin (which quest went back as far as 2000 B.C.E.). Archaeological research from the Roman military settlement of Corbridge in the north of England (occupied from 80 to 120 A.D.) revealed skeletons of numerous dogs, including greyhounds and dachshunds, that presumably came with the invaders.
Smith next discusses a period of history when large areas of the countryside were set aside for the exclusive use of the monarch and the nobility. In the chapter Under the Forest Laws we learn that such laws were first promulgated by King Canute in 1016, and that they were harsh and oppressive. "Hunting in Forests is sport for Kings and Princes, and therefore not to be used by every common person........." And from a description of the situation still pertaining some 500 years later: "If a man started his hounds on game of any sort outside a forest, and the animal crossed the boundary, then the hounds had to be called off.......and , if they killed, their owner was regarded as a trespasser and made himself liable to penalties........".
As further deterrence there was the maiming of mastiffs. These dogs, the most formidable guard dogs, were widely kept about farmers' houses - provided they had been expediated in accordance with the laws of the forest. The brutal custom of maiming by expediation was introduced by Henry II (1154 - 1189). "Three claws of the fore feet shall be cut off.......by setting one of his fore feet on a piece of wood eight inches thick, and a foot square, and then setting a chisel of two inches broad upon the three claws of his fore foot, to strike them off at one blow........". Interestingly, this mutilation was applied to mastiffs only, not to greyhounds, equally adept pursuers.
In his next chapter, The Years Roll On, Smith takes us to more civilized times, although the "sport" of bull and bear baiting rates a mention. But, so too, does the use in the mid-1800s of dogs to draw the small carts of hawkers, and for the deliveries of butchers, bakers and the like. He spends some time detailing the earliest references to various breeds.
The chapter, Dogs at Work, allows Smith to expound the attributes and uses of various breeds of spaniel, setter, retriever, and pointer - the gun dogs. And we move straight on to the complementary breeds , Hounds that Hunt by Scent, Smith claiming that "any picture of the sporting life of Great Britain would be wholly incomplete without reference to the greatest of all sports - foxhunting".
With this assertion I was fast losing interest in Smith and his opinions, and I swiftly passed by his chapters on greyhounds, the terriers, and other sporting breeds. Furthermore, I was happy to give The Little Ones the bum's rush, having a personal anathema to yappers and snappers; and my disdain lasted through The Non-Sporting Breeds (collies and Alsatians, for instance).
My new-found disdain faded a little with Smith's final chapter, A New Era in Dogs. This is a summary of the advancements of the century previous to writing - advancements in the developments of dog breeds, the role of dog shows (the first in Britain dating from 1859), and the establishment of the Kennel Club in 1873 and its role in preserving the purity of breeds. As of 1873 there were 40 breeds of dogs recognised, and categorised into Sporting and Non-Sporting sub-groups. Some 70 years later, as at the time of Smith's publication, there were 95 breeds recognised by the Kennel Club, classified thus: Sporting (19), Gundogs (19), Terriers (20), Non-Sporting (25), and Toys (12). And, as of today, the Kennel Club recognises 218 dog breeds. Whereas 2000 years ago there were no British breeds of dog, nowadays many breeds have been imported from the Continent and elsewhere, and nationalised. I have not ascertained how many of the 218 breeds have been invented in Britain, but each of them that has, I daresay, is more freaky than the previous.
Postscript: Croxton Smith's confident use of the word expediate got me searching for more detail. Several dictionaries drew a blank, as did a simple Google search for the word. But I found the following description........on an English/Turkish Dictionary website no less!
To injure (a dog) by cutting away the pads of the forefeet, thereby preventing it from hunting. The statute, which prohibited all but a few privileged individuals from keeping greyhounds or spaniels, provided that farmers and substantial freeholders dwelling within the forests might keep mastiffs for the defence of their houses within the same, provided such mastiffs be expediated according to the laws of the forest. This "expediating", "hambling" or "lawing", as it was indifferently termed, was intended to maim the dog so as to reduce to a minimum the chances of his chasing and seizing the deer, and the law enforced its being done..........in the manner described above.
# 71 British Photographers by Cecil Beaton
In an earlier one of these Britain in Pictures Pieces I mentioned Australian, Frank Hurley, who accompanied Mawson to Antarctica (1911 to 1914) as photographer, and then went with the 1914/1916 Shackleton expedition. At one end of the scale, Hurley might be described as an action photographer; at the other end, Cecil Beaton's celebrity portraits captured the still life of a world away. Hurley was undoubtedly a self-promoter, but would have been eclipsed by Beaton's Eddie Everywhere flair. [Incidentally, their lives overlapped by 58 years - the years 1904 (Beaton's birth) to 1962 (Hurley's death) - but I have no knowledge of whether they ever met.]
My lens of fifty-plus years ago sees Cecil Beaton in the rather unfavourable light of a self-promoting showman, but reference to his biography reveals a lifetime of achievement way beyond the dress-ups in a picture hat. We are breathlessly informed by Wikipedia that Beaton was bullied by Evelyn Waugh at his first school; and that at a later school his fellow students were overwhelmed by the beauty of his singing at school concerts! These may or may not be clues to the later Cecil, but seek no further than his nanny with a camera, who taught him about photography and film processing.
Once he was proficient he sent photographs to London society magazines. Following his first exhibition in London, he moved to New York and built a reputation there. At one time he worked for both Vanity Fair and Vogue. He was a favoured portraitist for the Royal Family. But enough tattle! Except for the encompassing Wikipedia headnote: Fashion, portrait and war photographer; diarist; painter; interior designer; costume designer for theatre and film; and Oscar winner. Clearly Beaton was a high achiever.
And despite all this, in British Photographers (1944) Beaton does not mention himself or any of his achievements (although the illustrations include three Beaton photographs). So flamboyance, yet modesty. Go figure!
Beaton's book is a leisurely panorama of and about photography, not confining itself strictly to British, and not much interested in the photographic process. Beaton himself was not over-concerned with technology and the latest developments, and he spares us the dry minutia of his trade. But he does detail and pay tribute to his photographer predecessors, numerous names that no longer prod a memory. And he gives us some history, remembering that, at the time of writing, "photography" was barely a hundred years old; moreover, it hadn't yet encountered the digital world.
With a brief pause to mention Da Vinci's manuscript describing the "camera obscura", and the later pin-hole realisation of the concept, and the later again efforts to "fix" the image, Beaton brings us to Henry Fox Talbot. Talbot spent years finding a way to attach camera obscura images permanently to paper; and he succeeded. But his slow progress proved to be too slow: by 1835 he had created the negative, and had found a way to affix positive images to paper, but it was the Frenchman, Daguerre, who in 1839 announced the discovery of photography.
Daguerre, too, had spent years in perfecting his photographic process, his breakthrough having come when he inadvertently placed a camera obscura plate in a cupboard overnight and found next morning that the image on the plate had been "developed". There were vapours of mercury in the cupboard. Eureka! "We can count the paving stones, see the dampness produced by rain, read the name of a shop," said one observer. Said a famous painter: "From to-day painting is dead."
When Talbot heard of Daguerre's discovery he hurriedly released details of his own research; and later in 1839 read a paper before the Royal Society. The two processes were quite different - the Daguerre process produced one image only, the Talbot process produced a negative from which limitless photographs could be taken off. This ease of reproduction, coupled with the small cost of such re-production, the rise of the middle class, and the increase in leisure time, ensured that photography "took off".
The props provided by the emerging photographic studios facilitated theatrical poses, and the photographic art form was born; and, in time, ways were found to enhance the sitter's appearance by retouching - softening features and obscuring double chins. This ironical turning back from the "reality" that the camera provided over painting was a practice that did not last.
The arrival of photography, Beaton observes, made the Victorian age more real than any previous period. "Compared with the work of the writer, the efforts of the photographer may seem crude and superficial, but it is the camera that brings Gladstone and Disraeli, Thackeray, Dickens and Tennyson before our eyes complete down to the very smallest detail, their clothes, their expressions, the attitudes they affected." "No less significant are pictures of the London streets, at a time when London low-life was still Dickensian."
Beaton enumerates a number of British photographers and discusses each modus operandi and each contribution to the history and the development of photography. Concerning both the private and the ephemeral nature of much of the photographic field, he references the (then) recent "Salvage Campaign" conducted by Country Life magazine. The magazine ran a competition for the most interesting Victorian photographs found in family albums and old trunks. Many treasures were unearthed.
And Beaton talks of the tribulations of outdoor photography. Not until 1880 did factory-prepared plates and paper become available. A fleck of dust or a fly might ruin the plate, only distilled water could be used, and there was a running battle with cumbersome apparatus. And there was the risk of inhaling fumes of mercury. A leading still life photographer, Roger Fenton, resolved to photograph the Crimean War - and took with him 36 large chests of photograph paraphernalia. Later, Herbert G. Ponting went with Scott to the Antarctic - pre-dating photographer Frank Hurley's Antarctic trips with Mawson and Shackleton. "Ponting brought back extraordinarily beautiful photographs of icebergs, of the grottos in icebergs, of the Terra Nova in ice floes under the midnight sun, of penguins, and of dog teams resting under Daliesque formations of ice and snow."
Much of Beaton's book concerns the field of celebrity (and studio) photography, and the photographers practising in that genre. His attitude towards the near past is somewhat tepid, but tempered by some more recent developments. "There is no doubt that the 'candid camera' pictures, at first as great a shock to the beholders as to the sitter, have had a most refreshing influence and have opened studio windows to invigorating breezes." And praise for innovation abroad: "The technical brilliance of the photographs in American magazines has helped to counteract our slipshod tendencies......We can now look at photographs caught in a hundred-thousandths of a second, aerial photographs taken many miles in the sky, and photographs taken without visible light."
Writing in 1944, Beaton included some topical observations. "To-day, the best photography comes from the front line. The Germans, during their meticulously well-organised invasion of France and the Low Countries, had arranged that their victories would be given full propaganda value; and there resulted 'stills' that might have come from the studios of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In the first years of war, outstanding British photographs were as rare as British victories; but now the Army photographers have got into their stride, and some of their latest photographs of the war have the romantic quality of Delacroix paintings."
He concludes with a hope for the (post-war) future. "Photography is a medium with enormous possibilities: we must endeavour to bring it into always closer and closer relationship with the problems of contemporary life. It has its limitations, just as painting and sculpture have theirs. But there are some textures, some visual impressions, some aesthetic moods, that no other means of representation yet discovered can render with such delicacy, such accuracy or such dramatic distinction."
Beaton was clearly much more than an affected show pony.
Gary Andrews
