BRITAIN IN PICTURES - NUMBER 7

 

#65   Wildflowers in Britain by Geoffrey Grigson

 

I was at university when a friend told me about “only watching”. Reproved me, actually, for getting it wrong; and set me on a life-long crusade to watch where the word “only” is placed in a sentence.  Not a crusade in the sense of overt pedantry [until now!], or with the aim of hunting down and rebuking the miscreant, merely a private resolve to watch where I put the "only".  Manically similar, I suppose, to ensuring at all cost that an infinitive is not split – something that I and the world should have given up on long ago; although I remain an unrepentant closet non-splitter, even though hardly anybody to-day cares a fig. You’ll remember – no, perhaps you won’t! – the early days of Star Trek, where Captain Kirk and his brave band were enjoined each episode “to boldly go where no man has gone before”, causing projectile vomiting among the grammatical purists who insisted the Enterprise and its crew were okay “to go boldly where no man has gone before”, or, at a pinch, “boldly to go where no man has gone before” - but not "to boldly go".  In the intervening 55 years a lot less angst has been caused by Star Trek's split infinitives, and the focus has shifted and a lot more heat generated over the outrageous sexism of the one boldly going before being a man!

 

Yet while the Star Trek fracas has died down, and I no longer un-split infinitives with religious zeal, I remain on alert for "onlys" in the wrong place.  Hence, barely even concealing my contempt, I pounced on Geoffrey Grigson’s opening sentence: “Very few flowering plants are only found in the British Isles”.  He should have said: “Very few flowering plants are found only in the British Isles”, or “found in the British Isles only”. The distinction is important.  Having already spent 300 words, though, I have no desire to explain further.

 

In a series whose subjects are sometimes too esoteric for the general reader the topic of wildflowers surely ranks; but in this book there’s always something absorbing, something to learn.  Geoffrey Grigson was knowledgeable beyond our right to expect, and his anecdotal way of writing is welcoming.  His CV - not the words provided by his publishers but provided by Wikipedia 75 years later - ranges from naturalist and botanist, through teacher, essayist, journalist, broadcaster, editor, writer and anthologist – to poet, which was his principal pursuit.  He lived from 1905 to 1985, and it rather surprises that 80 years was enough to cover everything.  Wikipedia lists 82 Grigson publications.  He wrote and published a guidebook to English plants, The Englishman’s Flora, in 1955.  I expect that it’s an expansion of his 1944 48-page contribution to the Britain in Pictures series.  At 542 pages, some expansion!

 

 In Wildflowers in Britain Grigson ranges widely, with chapters on the introduction of plants from abroad; on the rarity of plants; on the geographical distribution of growing conditions; and on writing about plants, including anthologies, and books on plants ranging from handbooks to botanical texts.  At times the cavalcade of species can be pretty dense, and the desire to skip over pretty irresistible, but there is such a lot to learn.  Here are a few of my gleanings, some factual, some romantic:

 

·              It is rare for plants in Britain to be more than 50 miles from the sea, so the influence of the seas was fundamental to species selection.

·              On the whole Britain is a mild and moist place – plenty of rain, little enduring cold, little enduring heat.

·              Very few plants are found in the British Isles only.

·              Climate is more important than soil.  A bomb site, or a ruined landscape, will soon enough be colonised by plants.

·              Seeds are always on the move through the world - by sea, in the air, attached to birds' feet, on dragonflies' wings, and through men. Tomato plants come up on sewage farms!

·              We cannot, emotionally, separate a flower from the place, or the conditions, we usually find it in.

·              The attraction of any plant is increased by any curious fact about it.

·              Apropos of plants: to find what is rare is the last pleasure left to millionaires.

·              If you are a garden plant you are regarded, well regarded, just so long as you stay in the garden.  Go outside, go on to the streets, and you lose your reputation. You become a rogue.

·              In the context of Australian seeds brought to Britain in bales of wool:  it is not easy for a species to find room to live, even if it can stand the climate. In a garden it is one thing, but a foreign plant which tries to get out of a garden, or one that comes in at a seaport, has to face the close trade union of plants already there, already well adapted to temperature, and dampness, and soil.

·              Notwithstanding the previous point, an expert survey in 1931 established that, at the time, there were 4468 species of plant growing in Britain (without human assistance), comprising 2270 natives, plus 399 foreign species virtually naturalised, and 1799 foreign species from Europe and the rest of the world that were growing in Britain but not expected to be able to colonise successfully.

 

One of the joys of riffling through old books is the occasional discovery of a dedication, or some pencilled commentary in the margin, or some slipped-in newspaper cutting.  Taped to the rear endpaper of Grigson’s volume is a cutting from Melbourne's The Herald.  I gauge its vintage through the reverse-side article by Professor Walter Murdoch (see the Britain in Pictures blog I posted on 21 June this year), and I reckon it dates from the 1950s.  It is a picture of a plant in a large pot, with the following caption:  “Twisted Hazel.  Here’s an uncommon, decorative small tree that can be grown in a tub or anywhere in the garden.  It’s a twisted hazel or cobnut tree (Corylus Avellana ‘Contorta’).  This deciduous species was propagated from one found by a hedgerow in England in 1863. It’s fairly expensive, but very attractive.”

 

 

#64  The Londoner by Dorothy Nicholson

 

The obvious place to start with The Londoner was to assume that I was picking up the book – in 1946 from the first retailer; or to-day from a second-hand bookshop; or, heaven forfend, from my own shelf where it has languished unread for maybe forty years – and imagining, sight unseen, what the book was about.  I would have been wrong.  Expressed straightforwardly, the words “The Londoner”, much the same as “The New Yorker”, convey to me the sense of a present-day inhabitant, an habitué or a denizen of that place.  But Nicholson’s book has no temporal limitation: it describes and celebrates Londoners from earliest times.  Then, not content merely to discuss the inhabitants of London, the author describes London itself through the years; and by way of background to people and place, she also gives us a comprehensive thousand-year history lesson, the history of the microcosm that is London, including what we might term history at street level.  And all this from a scholar who was an archaeologist by profession.  The blurb on the fly leaf asserts that “……...in the present book scholarship and entertainment are admirably combined to delight both the erudite and curious reader”.  Although meant as praise, those words I think sell the book short.  And to pick a nit, why can't a reader be both erudite and curious?

 

Dorothy Nicholson [nee Lamb] (1887 to 1967) was an honours graduate in classics from Cambridge and, until the First Balkans War in 1912, she was based in Greece.  For some years she catalogued the terracotta figurines held in the Acropolis Museum. She was married to Sir John Reeve Brooke from 1920 until his death in 1937; and to Sir Walter Nicholson from 1939 until his death in 1946.  At the time of writing The Londoner she was known as Lady Dorothy Brooke Nicholson.  How did she manage to accumulate the sweep of her London knowledge while surrounded by the dusty shards of Greek antiquity?  A long life and an enquiring mind, perhaps?  Whatever, the book is a trove of facts and impressions.  Some snippets and elaborations follow.  

·              Alfred the Great might be said to have “made” London when, in the year 886, he expelled the Danes and re-built the walls; and brought into the town people from neighbouring areas, and enjoined them henceforth to keep the Danes out.    Thereafter, the Londoners  “developed a most exemplary aptitude for their own defence” and the consequent protection of their trade, and their liberties. 

·              Added to these freedoms, the Londoners have always been keen to see within the City “a pleasant life of industry, sport, pageantry, and the free practice of their religion, with peace and orderly rule to secure them”.  Remember that the “City” of London is a separate area from Westminster, the seat of government.  Often over the centuries the principal impediment to the pleasant life of the Londoners of the City has been their own king – “in early times rapacious, war-mongering, regarding the City as a place unblushingly to plunder”.  Down to the eighteenth century the Londoners of the City carried on a running fight with the Crown, or with Parliament, and with frequent riot and bloodshed.

·              Even before the Norman Conquest Londoners had acquired wealth and prestige.  “They fought at Hastings, but when disaster befell they accepted William with philosophy and William accepted them with a most comprehensive and positively deferential charter.”

·              From King John London got the right of the Court of Aldermen to choose a Mayor; and from the Magna Carta a specific clause confirming the City’s “ancient liberties and customs both by land and water”.  Thereafter London was “almost a city-state, which neither the sovereign nor his armed forces may enter without permission”, and in which the Lord Mayor took precedence over everyone except the sovereign.

·              In the fourteenth century life for the 100000 or so citizens "packed within the walls of the City" was neighbourly and intimate, and the common punishments of the stocks and the pillory exemplified the torment of having to bear the neighbours' ridicule.  Rich and poor lived close together, not in separate districts.  Relief of poverty and infirmity was everybody's business: the wealthy citizen had to provide everything now provided by authority, including hospitals.

·              The Londoners accepted Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, not only because Henry was determined, but also because the Roman Church was an encroachment which they were glad to shake off.  By the time of the Stuart kings London was fiercely Protestant.

·              The independent-minded Londoners defied James I (a Protestant, but son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots).  The clergy resisted his Book of Sports, which he'd ordered to be read from the pulpit to encourage working men to take exercise on the Sabbath.  When the royal carriage was refused passage into the City, James threatened to leave London - to which the Lord Mayor retorted that it didn't matter where he went so long as he left the Thames behind him.

·              Fifty years later the great plague (1665-1666), and the great fire (2 September, 1666),  "cut a hideous gash" in London.  Those who were able to do so, fled.  But the doctors, city officials, constables, attended to their grim and dangerous duties. Samuel Pepys wrote to a military friend: "You sir took your turn of the sword; I must not grudge mine of the pestilence."  The poor showed contempt of infection.  Some sat in such taverns as were open hoping to meet their end drinking.  "There was a great friendliness.  Even Dissenting and Episcopal congregations and clergy forgot their quarrels and mixed freely at worship."  But lo: "the Londoner's power of recuperation was almost excessive. "  Within about four years of the fire everything in London seemed as flourishing as before.

·              Street fighting was much practised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Not roughhouse, but with rules, the crowd forming a ring to ensure fair play.  A gentleman could fight a butcher and no one must interfere even if the gentleman was being thrashed.

·              "London of the eighteenth century was a mixture of humanitarianism and urbanity.  People lay starved to death in deserted tenements.  Bedlam and the prisons were heart-rending; hangings at Tyburn were public holidays with gin sold in the crowd for refreshment."  And yet, nearly all the great hospitals were founded in the mid-1700s; and Handel played the organ and conducted The Messiah at the Foundling Hospital.

·              In the hundred years from 1750 to 1850 the population of London grew from one million to over two million souls.  The old villages had spread out to meet one other, and in the central London slums the air was so foul from smut, smoke, drains and cesspools that the tulips died.  And, too good an anecdote not to repeat:  "In 1836 the directors of the Bank of England were startled to see a man appear suddenly in the middle of the floor in the bullion room at the bank, having come in by an old sewer."

·              "The contrast between rich and poor eventually disturbed the complacency of the prosperous Londoner, and with the Factory Acts came movements to cleanse, feed, uplift, study the poor, even to educate them."  From the middle of the nineteenth century much effort was expended in dealing with London slum life.  It was said that the three great agencies of social reform were the London City Mission, Dickens's novels, and the cholera.  Still, better days (and enabling legislation) didn't arrive with any haste; and Nicholson concludes that real reform wasn't apparent until about 1911. 

 

This selection has taken us through to the twentieth century; and, given the time of writing, it is not surprising that Nicholson's post-1900 comments predominantly evoke the times of the then War.  And it's not surprising that, finally, the Londoner has become the hero of the story.  I offer some extracts, some verbatim, some paraphrased:  

# At the start of the War many Londoners were evacuated, either voluntarily or under pressure from the authorities.  Those who stayed through the ensuing "phoney war" wondered whether their civil defence training would ever be needed.  

#  The implications of the fall of France were not perhaps fully grasped, and there was a tendency to regard the Battle of Britain, while it was being fought, as the world's transcendent sporting event.  

#  Shelter life began confusedly, but soon the miracles of organisation - sanitary and alimentary - and the joys of communal life, were so much appreciated that many were loth to relinquish them when the need for shelter passed.  

#  In any case, two-thirds of central Londoners made no use of shelter of any kind, public or private.  

#  A virtuosity of ingenuity was displayed in the punctual arrival of milk, newspapers and letters, over broken glass and craters at addresses that were little else; and in maintaining an existence in battered houses with the remnants of household chattels.

#  Every Londoner felt that anything he did, or refrained from doing, that helped to keep the daily wheels of life revolving and the ordinary routine alive was a blow to Hitler; and he was right.  The Londoner's endurance was not passive, but aggressive.

 

And, Nicholson's final tribute to the wartime Londoner - sentimental and flowery no doubt, but forgivable:  "The Londoner was called upon to fight and to suffer till the very eve of victory:  the roar of the last rocket had scarcely died when VE Day dawned and the Londoner, with an elation almost angelic in its calm, walked the streets of his city which seemed like the New Jerusalem bathed in the May sunshine under a sky of limpid, tranquil blue from which no missiles fell."

 

Observant readers will have noticed that I have mostly excluded reference to the numerous great names who have been born in London or who have lived there.  That list is endless.  In view of the book's title, The Londoner, this might be construed as a fatal omission, but how to select, and where to stop?  In any case, "the Londoner", to me, implies a type rather than an individual.  But was there such a "type" in 1946?  I would venture "no"; and much less so today, with the mass migrations into the United Kingdom in the most recent half-century.  

 

I had thought to allow Nicholson to peer beyond the cross-hairs and to describe the people she sees.  But her descriptions and her musings are so extensive that they would need to be heavily redacted [thank you CIA for that onomatopoeic gem].  Suffice to allow to Nicholson a short final comment: "A typical London character is hard to find", and to leave it at that.  

 

Gary Andrews

 

MY COUSIN GRAEME

 

When my cousin Graeme Lee died in 2010 I was unable to attend his funeral in Perth, but I was prompted to record some memories - because I had known Graeme for longer than anyone then living.   Some of what follows was used in Graeme's eulogy. The whole memoir may be of interest to those attracted to a bit of social history and, indeed, may be "news" to my family.

 

Graeme and I were both born in 1939, me in the August and Graeme in the December.  We were cousins – my father Gordon was the younger and only brother of Graeme’s mother Cath.

 

It isn’t just that we were cousins, but we spent a lot of our early years together.

 

Graeme’s father, Alec Lee, was a policeman, and died tragically when Graeme was very young, before the age of two.  Graeme’s mother married again, to Ron Napier.  I never knew Napier, or ever heard a word spoken about him.  The marriage clearly failed, although Aunt Cath in her professional life always went by the name Napier.

 

There was a lot of dislocation during the Second World War, and Graeme and I were thrown together – although I have no personal recollection, and am relying on photographs and the memory of later conversations.  Where Aunt Cath and Graeme spent most of the War I have no idea. Gordon, as a farmer, was reserved from active service but, in the down-time from wheat farming, worked at the Maribyrnong munitions factory.  I believe that at those times he stayed with his aunt Em Templeton at Essendon, and that Graeme was there too.   There are photos of me and Graeme together at Essendon, but no firm evidence of how much time we spent together during the War years.

 

But our lives really came together after the War was over.  Farming in the Mallee region of Victoria had become a disaster because of prolonged drought, and my parents Gordon and Gloria, were forced to leave their share farm, and the land.  Their farm was only a mile or so from Pa Andrews' farm near Chinkapook, land that he had selected around 1910.     Meanwhile Cath Napier was operating a delicatessen in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne.  I never learnt the story first-hand, but by whatever means Cath and Gordon in 1946 pooled their resources and took over a delicatessen in Chapel Street, Windsor.  The arrangement was a lifeline for Gordon and Gloria (and, by extension, for me and my sister Margaret - who was just a little over a year old at the time).  It was also a lifeline for my grandparents, Fred and Margaret Andrews, who had had to leave their Chinkapook farm of 35 years after foreclosure by the bank. The upshot was that while the delicatessen operated at street level, behind and above the shop the private dwelling housed two grandparents, the four Gordon Andrews family, and Graeme and his mother.

 

Graeme and I went to Windsor State School, just a couple of hundred yards away.  My only recollection of the School is that we were given hot cocoa at morning break!  Graeme and I were in grade 2.  After school we were playmates in the paved yard behind the shop.

 

Doubtless the living arrangements at Windsor were rather cramped.  But we stayed there for around six months only; and then we moved to Bridge Road, Richmond.  

 

The Richmond “shop” – numbers 294 and 296 Bridge Road - was really two shops in one – a delicatessen and a cake shop.  The place was very large [see the background photo to this Blog, taken circa 1990], mirror image premises, but opened structurally into one at both ground floor and upstairs levels.  Behind the delicatessen were a work space and a huge cool-room, and three other rooms - an office, a storeroom, and a kitchen.  Behind the cake shop were two rooms that made up the bakehouse, a produce storeroom, a scullery, and a laundry.  Upstairs the residence comprised eight spacious rooms. 

 

Aunt Cath ran the delicatessen, my mother Gloria ran the cake shop, and Gordon ran the bakehouse – and, in the process, taught himself to be a pastry-cook.

 

Grandma and Pa Andrews were with us at the start.  Pa stayed on, but Grandma soon moved out to run a rooming house in Hawthorn.  Graeme and I shared a bedroom.

 

All this time Aunt Cath’s romance with Bill Warren was developing.  Cath and Bill had met on Flinders Street Station [shades of Brief Encounter].  This was back when Cath was running the delicatessen in Elizabeth Street.  Bill was living at Cheltenham, I expect having recently been demobbed.  Cath and Graeme and Grandma Andrews were living at Aspendale. I'm not sure where Pa Andrews was residing at the time – maybe still back on his farm at Chinkapook, more likely with Gordon and Gloria (and me) at the nearby share farm – but he’d certainly caught up with us by the time we all got to Windsor; and he later moved with us to Richmond.

 

Cath and Bill were married; Bill moved in with us at Richmond, and there was another re-arrangement of the sleeping quarters.   Graeme and I moved in with Pa Andrews.  

 

So Graeme and I were kids together from age six.  We were different in size and shape and every other way, and I recall that we brawled a fair bit.  But I also recall that we played incessantly in the back yard at “cowboys and Indians”.  Since Graeme always played Tom Mix and I always played Hopalong Cassidy (or was it the other way around?) it must be that Beverley Cummings, our tomboy friend from school, always played the Indians. 

 

Our years of living under the same roof ended when Cath and Bill managed to extricate the Andrews family farm from the foreclosing bank (where it had languished unsaleable for five years), and with Graeme and Pa Andrews moved to Chinkapook – for Aunt Cath and Pa Andrews a return to their roots, for Bill the life-changing experience of rural life, and learning to be a farmer.  Graeme would have been eleven at the time.

 

Graeme simply loved farm life.  Bill was an easy-going and non-judgemental step-father.  The four or five years together on the farm were wonderful bonding years, and Graeme always thought of Bill as his dad, and always called him Dad.  If Graeme ever missed city life I never heard of it.    

 

I spent several school holidays at the farm; but saw a lot more of Graeme when his family sold the farm and returned to Melbourne in 1954.  Cath, Bill and Graeme moved into their newly-acquired place in Brighton; and the connection with Graeme strengthened again when he later became apprentice pastry-cook to my father, Gordon.  Given the early-morning start time in the bakehouse, Graeme was always there when I went off to school or university, sometimes still there when I got home. We saw a lot of each other in those days, one reason being that Graeme had by then become a member of the water polo squad based at the Richmond Pool. He had taken lessons from the legendary Tom Donnett, and was an excellent swimmer and water polo player.

 

We saw a lot more of each other after my father Gordon died in 1960.  Some time in the mid-1950s Gordon had acquired a second cake shop in Bridge Road, a few hundred yards closer to the city, number 158A.  The vendors had baked behind the shop, but Gordon discontinued the bakehouse, and supplied the new shop with deliveries from the original shop.  After Gordon died my mother, Gloria, continued the businesses, with Graeme as her mainstay pastry-cook.  But she could not cope, and the original delicatessen and cake shop were closed – and my family moved to Canterbury.  But Gloria continued to run the new shop, and Graeme stayed with her and re-commissioned the bakehouse.  Graeme was an excellent pastry-cook.  That arrangement continued for another year or so.  I doubt that this was an easy time for Graeme, but he showed true kindness and loyalty.

 

Graeme and I had an inevitable drifting apart.  My career took me in one direction; and marriage to Kaye and young children took Graeme’s interests in a different direction.  Then Graeme and family moved to Western Australia, and for some years Graeme was an ore train driver based at Dampier.  After returning to Perth he established a wedding-car hire business. In later years Graeme and I rarely saw each other.  

 

But our lives were intertwined right into our twenties, and that can not be gainsaid.

 

By way of postscript, and something that I did not reference for Graeme's funeral, I note that Graeme was dyslexic.  The condition was not diagnosed early, and he had difficulty in his school years. He read very little, and wrote even less.  But despite the drawback he was able to complete his pastry-cooking apprenticeship, and to qualify as a train driver - persistence and hard work overcoming adversity.

 

 

Gary Andrews