No infangentheof for Bill Clinton

Among the many hairy old institutions we have here in England, few are hairier or older than our most ancient military honour, the post of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.

A Royal Charter of 1155 established the original ports (Sandwich, Dover, Hythe, Romney and Hastings), which maintained ships that could be called upon by the Crown in times of strife - there was no navy in those days. In return, the members of the Cinque Ports had the right to:
"soc and sac, tol and team, bloowit and fledwit, pillory, tumbril, infangentheof, outfangentheof, mundbryce waives and strays, flotsam and jetsam and ligan".

This meant that the sailors from these ports could do what they wanted, including wrecking, grounding and plundering other ships. For many years they got away with what amounted to open piracy around the Kent and Sussex coast; they were a sort of legit mafia.

The title of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports was held by Henry d' Essex in 1155, then by a succession of famous or totally obscure people such as Walerland Teutonicus, Hugh de Bigod, Hamo de Crevequer, the 1st Duke of Wellington, W H Smith (the bookseller), Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

Since the latter's death in 2002 the position has remained vacant. Joe Trussler, the speaker of the Cinque Ports, Mayor of Sandwich and clearly a major league dingbat, asked the Queen and the Prime Minister to consider appointing Bill Clinton, because “his appointment would improve relations with the USA and he likes playing golf”.

However, it has been decided that the new Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports will be Admiral the Lord Boyce, GCB, OBE, who will be installed in office at a session of the Grand Court of Shepway, to be held in Dover on Tuesday 12 April, 2005.

The position, like so many other things in Britain today, has no significance whatsoever other than ceremonial, and we may have every confidence that Lord Boyce will carry out his non-existent duties splendidly. Hello sailor!

Many Happy Returns to a vicious killer

Today is the 88th birthday of the veteran actor Herbert Lom, born Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru in Prague. I never thought his comic turn in the Pink Panther films was very funny but he has graced many fine, good, mediocre and awful movies with brilliant portrayals of silken villainy. It was nice to see him on TV the other day still working, this time as a sinister character who turns out to be OK really.

I do not think anyone other than me has ever remarked that in earlier days Lom bore a striking facial resemblance to the young Brigitte Bardot (though this is not apparent in these particular photos).

Perhaps it had something to do with the pout, the shape of the nose and the curve of the eyebrows. The hair, of course, was quite different, so it is unlikely that there was ever any confusion. Fifty years on, he has worn rather better than she has.
[Later: Herbert Lom's family have stated that his birthday is actually 11th September and not the date above. Just goes to show that you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet.]

The Family Phasianidae

Included in this family of birds is the grouse species, among its subspecies being Lagopus lagopus scoticus, the red grouse of Britain, and Lagopus lagopus lagopus, the willow grouse, known in North America as the willow ptarmigan.

This piece of information might have made the next in my series of Not Very Interesting Facts, but is actually from another entry in the mighty Oxford Companion to Food. I have already noted one of the editor’s occasional tongue-in-cheek comments which enliven this immensely serious work, and under GROUSE there is another example:
Grouse, plump and chicken-like, are chiefly ground-dwelling birds. However, at least in Britain, ‘sport’ requires that they be not shot on the ground. Thus grouse-shooting calls for beaters, whose task is to advance through the terrain where the grouse lurk, beating the heather or bushes, and making a commotion sufficient to frighten the birds into the air, where they present a legitimate target for the shooting party. The subspecies of the human race which is the chief predator of the grouse used to be readily recognizable, whether male or female, by its raiment of heathery tweed; but in the course of the 20th century increasing numbers of foreign predators came on the scene, often of a different and less appropriate coloration, yet still to be identified by the tell-tale guns which all carry.

This entry also quotes from an 1855 Eliza Acton recipe for roasting grouse, recommending that during the roasting “a buttered toast should be introduced under the bird in the dripping pan….” Nowadays, of course ,we do not refer to a toast but always a piece of toast, but the French have as an irritating Anglicism un toast.

Star-Spangled Hastings

Very few Americans know that nearly two hundred years ago their flag flew proudly and defiantly over part of the small seaside town of Hastings in the county of East Sussex in England.

Nowadays Hastings is known for its battle (which actually did not take place there at all), as a small fishing port, as the place where John Logie Baird did much of the work that led to the development of television (or would have done if Marconi had not invented a much better system), for its winos and druggies and for its thriving artistic community which has nurtured the talents, if that is the right word, of many deservedly little-known figures such as Goswell Frand and Godfrey Horsecroft.

The present Victorian town centre was once part of the sea: it was the Saxon and Norman harbour of the rich and important Cinque Port and town of Hastings. The great storms of the thirteenth century changed the coastline dramatically, destroying the harbour and the prosperity of the town. Over the following five hundred years the harbour was gradually transformed into land. This lay empty until 1800, when enterprising merchants built warehouses, rope walks and dwellings on the former waste beach, which they occupied until 1835.
At some time during that period, the Corporation of Hastings attempted to take control of the area. The inhabitants rioted and raised the flag of the United States of America as a symbol of their independence, and thus the area became known as THE AMERICA GROUND.

Sadly, this Declaration of Independence was not as successful as the better-known one. The Government claimed the site as it had once been sea and therefore belonged to the Crown, and in 1835 it was cleared and lay empty until it was leased and then developed from 1850 as The Crown Estate (now three streets, mostly of shops, in the centre of the town).


It would not do to make too much of this transatlantic link, and it is not even known whether any contemporary American ever heard about their flag being raised in Hastings. But on the site there is a mural (occasionally floodlit) commemorating the events of those years, and a plaque was unveiled in 2001 by a very junior US Vice-Consul, with celebrations featuring schoolboys re-enacting it all, the Town Crier proclaiming something or other and, inexplicably, bungee jumping in the town centre.

[Whether the contemporary US flag featured in the mural is quite correct is not clear; it should have had 24 stars. It was about that time (1831) that it was first called “Old Glory”.
The full story of The America Ground is HERE but switch your sound off before going to this site so as to avoid hearing one of those awful MIDI files beeping “Yankee Doodle"]

P.S. I shall be pleased to welcome personally any Americans who come to Hastings with their wives and daughters to visit the site of The America Ground, and to accept an invitation from them to dinner at either of the town’s excellent restaurants, during which I can tell them more about the town and about myself.
Goswell Frand

A Dictionary of Slang

What riches are here!

The sub-title of the 1400-page reference book originally compiled by the great Eric Partridge, published in 1937 and now in an eighth edition scrupulously edited by Paul Beale is “…and Unconventional English, Colloquialisms and Catch Phrases, Fossilised Jokes and Puns, General Nicknames, Vulgarisms and such Americanisms as have been naturalised”.

Then there are the appendices, which include Australian surfing slang, Army slang in the South African War, Railwaymen’s slang and nicknames, Clergymen’s diction in the Church of England, Spanglish, Canadian adolescents’ slang 1946 and around ninety other recondite and fascinating topics.

The details under these headings could provide material for weekly posts throughout 2005, but for the moment I will just mention one thing that has struck me while glancing idly at random entries in the body of the dictionary: some of the words or phrases which sound as if they mean something improper are in fact quite innocent, while some respectable-sounding ones would seldom be used in polite society. Examples of the former are toss in the alley (to die), null-groper (a street-sweeper) and prick-louse (a tailor). And of the latter nugging-dress, number nip, and nurtle (buy the book and look them up; they are all on the same page).

Beach volleyball in Athens

Actually, an informant reporting from Athens (a senior retired MoD mandarin, now a sports administrator of international repute) told me that “the ladies in the photo are not genuine participants in beach volleyball, but a distraction to take spectators' minds off the dullness of the action. The organisers are so aware of this that they play rock music between points and bring on the dancing girls for each (frequent) time-out. The female athletes were nothing much to write home about, but one enterprising press photographer had set up a tripod near ground level at the end of the playing area so that he could guarantee close-ups of bikini-clad bottoms, which appeared next day in the Greek equivalent of the Daily Sport.”

Hey there, Pierre de Coubertin!

Richter 9

As I write this the death toll is already in the tens of thousands. And maybe a million homeless.

I think I will post no more until the New Year.

The man with no name

I chose my fifty films from those I would like to see again but of course in later viewings one is sometimes disappointed. Bearing this in mind, I excluded all the great classics of the early cinema and some later films which I knew would have dated by now.

But a more recent film got in because I remembered it as being exciting. The first of two hundred spaghetti Westerns, Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, was a remake of Kurosawa’s splendid Yojimbo.

Seeing it on TV the other day, I found it boring and silly, with the Italian cast dubbed by rotten actors speaking poorly translated dialogue. Clint Eastwood did much better things later, both as actor and director.

Anyway, out it comes, and to replace it I chose The Way Ahead, Carol Reed’s memorable wartime semi-documentary, written by Peter Ustinov and originally intended as a training film.

[By the way, the character played by Eastwood in AFOD is actually referred to as Joe, and by different names in later films]

A Gladsome Yuletide to One and All

“It's always seemed to me, after all, that Christmas, with its spirit of giving, offers us all a wonderful opportunity each year to reflect on what we all most sincerely and deeply believe in - I refer, of course, to money.”
Tom Lehrer

Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens.
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.

But, all the same, here's a wish:
A prayer when dry: Tipsy as a charm. Amen.

But it was the way they said it…

Everyone knows a few of the classic lines from films – “Frankly, my dear…”, “Infamy! Infamy!..”, “Fasten your seatbelts…”, and most of the things Groucho said. There are certain rich veins: things said to Bogart (as well as by him), Alastair Sim's horrified yelps (e.g. "..and boys! Remember Nicky, the nark!") and, curiously, Brief Encounter which, besides the one below, has "Can I help? I'm a doctor" and the husband's remark as Celia Johnson comes out of her reverie: "I don't know where you've been, my dear, but thank you for coming back to me".

Here are a few that I treasure; some are in the popular collections of movie quotes, but most are not.

• Alastair Sim to Trevor Howard, who had called him a flat-footed copper: “The police force does not have a monopoly of fallen arches, Doctor Barnes” (Green for Danger)
• Lionel Barrymore to Greta Garbo when she had agreed to give up her relationship with his son: “Gawd bless yew, Marguerite Goad-i-ay!” (Camille)
• Katherine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart: “Human nature is what we are put on this earth to rise above, Mr Allnutt” (The African Queen)
• Alfonso Bedoya to Humphrey Bogart, after being accused of not being a real policeman: “Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!” (Treasure of the Sierra Madre)
• Joyce Cary as the woman in charge of the refreshment room, bridling at a flirtatious remark: “I don’t know to what you’re referrin’, I'm sure…” (Brief Encounter)
• Orson Welles to Joseph Cotton: “Sure, we’re speaking, Jed. You’re fired.” (Citizen Kane)
• Marlene Dietrich to Orson Welles: “He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?” (A Touch of Evil)
• Fortunio Bonanova as the music master trying to teach Kane’s wife to sing: “Impossible! Impossible!” (Citizen Kane, again)
• Robert Newton calling his dog to be drowned: “Gammeeryeaough!”, possibly meaning “Come ‘ere you!” (Oliver Twist)
• Moore Marriott, after a train runs over his watch: “It’s stopped!” (Oh Mr Porter)
• Fred MacMurray, confessing on tape: "Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?" (Double Indemnity)
• One soldier to another: “You essence of stench!” (subtitle in a Kurosawa film)
• French soldier to King Arthur’s knights: “Go and boil your bottoms, you sons of silly persons!” (Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
• Jean Gabin to Michèle Morgan, as he lies dying in the street: “Embrasse-moi! Vite, on est pressé!” (Quai des Brumes)

If you’re called Arthur Wilkins I've no interest in you

If there is a defect in my character – and this is a matter much disputed between those who hotly maintain that there are none and those who with equal vehemence declare that there are several, citing in particular my excessive modesty, the gentleness of my nature which makes me easily cowed by stronger personalities and silenced by vociferous opposition, and, most of all, my predilection, probably stemming from exposure at too early an age to the works of Henry James, for the composing of sentences which, though perfectly coherent and of lapidary grace, develop such inordinate length and complexity that people reading them sometimes give up in the middle, believing that life is passing them by and that they would be well advised to go away and do something else – then it is my perverted romanticism or baseless xenophilia, call it what you will, which causes me to take a disproportionate interest in (or sometimes, even, feel unjustifiably attracted towards) people with exotic names.

This is a defect of no great consequence. I have never come to any harm through seeking closer relationships with people called, say, Chintaman Rambocus or Tarsilla Castelnuovo-Tedesco, nor did it prevent me twenty years ago from making a very sound move by marrying someone called Anne. So it is not disabling, though it is undoubtedly a misguided impulse.

I have been watching on TV an extremely silly spy series called Spooks. There are several women in the cast, including two who are both quite attractive though neither of them to such an extent as to fill me with uncontrollable lust. One of them, called Nicola Walker, is pretty in a conventional way; the other is not really pretty at all but has a vaguely sinister charm, with a slight lisp and cold, hooded eyes; her name, as I would have expected, is Olga Sosnovska. No need to ask which one I kept my eyes on.

The lunacy of my exotic-name fixation was brought home to me when, after the last episode, I examined the cast list more closely and found that I had got it quite wrong: it is the boringly pretty one whose name is Olga Sosnovska.

Musical Family

The last of the Goossens family has died at the age of 105: Sidonie Goossens was a harpist of world renown for more than half a century.

This musical family, which came to England from Belgium in the nineteenth century, included three Eugenes—grandfather, father and brother to Sidonie. Another brother, Leon, was a famous oboist; here he is playing the Tarantella from Scarlatti’s Concerto No 1.
It is absolutely not true that he gave rise to the phrase ….wouldn’t say oboe to a Goossens.

You don’t have to be pregnant

People have been rather sniffy about it, but I think the offer by the hotel group Travelodge, silly PR gimmick though it may be, is not altogether without merit. They will give a free night’s accommodation over the Christmas season to any couple named Mary and Joseph, “…to make amends for the failure of the Bethlehem hotel industry”.

Sixty years at the movies

I started to make a list of films that I have enjoyed with the intention of putting it into my profile, but I discovered that my Blogger template not only insisted on calling them Favorite Films, but limited the list to six hundred characters. This would restrict the number of films to be included to about twenty-five, and as during some decades I went to the pictures up to three times a week this would have meant leaving out many essential ones.

Anyway, for the moment I have selected fifty and put them on a separate page. They are listed HERE.

Each title has a link to a review, mostly from The New York Times, IMDb or the invaluable www.filmsite.org .

God can harm your moral health

It has been my observation that strong religious beliefs do not make anyone more virtuous; few of the really good people I have known have been particularly devout, and few of the pious ones have been notably good. There is, as statisticians would say, zero correlation. Or, to put it another way, as a force for the moral improvement of mankind the Bible simply doesn’t work.

Further, I have long suspected that there is actually a negative correlation (i.e., the more godly, the less pure in heart), and an article in The Sunday Times by Andrew Sullivan, from which I quote below, suggests that there might be some evidence for this.
What is certain is that in the United States of America the god-fearing parts where "traditional values" are upheld are not those parts where traditional values are healthiest.

Consider:

• The states with the highest divorce rates are AL, AR, AZ, FL, GA, MS, NC, OK, SC, and TX. All voted for Bush in the recent election.
• The states with the lowest divorce rates are CT, MA, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI and VT. All voted for Kerry.
• The Bible Belt divorce rate is about 50% higher than the national average.
• There is no measurable difference in divorce rates between those who are “born again” and those who are not.
• In Texas, where the religious right and its rhetoric against teen-age sex is strong, teen births as a percentage of all births are 16.1%, while in liberal, secular Massachusetts they are less than half, 7.4%.
• In America, where the religious right ferociously condemn abortion, there are 21 abortions per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44; liberal Holland has 6.4%, less than a third of this.
• The leading members of the forces of social conservatism in America are hardly exemplars of the values they purport to espouse: Rush Limbaugh has had three divorces and an addiction to painkillers, Bill Reilly has just settled a sex harassment suit that indicated a highly active adulterous sex life, and Bob Barr, the congressman who wrote the Defense of Marriage Act, has had three wives.

The article was entitled: Where the Bible bashers are sinful and the liberals pure. This is perhaps a crude generalisation, as is the suggestion that Republicans are vociferous about sin but commit more than their share, while Democrats don’t talk about it so much but commit rather less. America is more complicated than that: as Sullivan points out, Bill Clinton was a product of a Republican state while Bush was for more than half his life a dissolute wastrel from a Democrat-state family.
Of course, all this is fairly incomprehensible from a UK standpoint. As the most secular nation of the western world, we do not expect, or even want, our leaders to be publicly devout. Religious zeal is regarded as bad form and our Prime Minister’s sanctimony is an electoral handicap (as are his wife’s dotty superstitions).

Not Very Interesting Facts

[No 162 in an occasional series]
“The best things in life are free” is an anagram of “Nail-biting refreshes the feet”.

Keeping our spirits up

Following the piece I wrote last week about Struwwelhitler, a friend has emailed to remind me of other jokes about the Nazis that were going round in the 1940s, most of which were either very feeble or excessively optimistic: we never actually did Hang Out the Washing On the Siegfried Line.

On TV in the seventies Private Pike repeated one of the childish wartime chants (“…Hitler’s barmy, so’s his army...”) in the presence of a captured U-boat commander, who angrily demanded to know his name so that retribution could be exacted after the war (“Don’t tell him, Pike!”).

Perhaps the most effective slander on the Nazi leaders was the one that was said to have been based on confidential information supplied by Unity Mitford, who knew them well; it went to the tune of Colonel Bogey:
Hitler…..has only got one ball
Goering…..has two, but rather small
Himmler…..has something simmler
And poor old Goebbels has noebbels at all.

No they don’t, and never did

If you put warm beer plus English into Google you get nearly ten thousand results. If you add John Major you still get a couple of hundred and I imagine that quite a few of the ten thousand stem from these.

In this way is a misconception perpetuated by a fatuous idiot’s misquotation.

Shock-headed Führer

I wrote recently about a Victorian children’s book called Struwwelpeter. In 1941 Robert and Philip Spence wrote and illustrated a version of it called Struwwelhitler. Not only does it cleverly adapt Dr Hoffman’s stories to a twentieth-century wartime setting, but the style of both the verse and the drawings mimics the original very closely; the booklet is a little masterpiece of parody. It was published by The Daily Sketch to raise money for the War Relief Fund which provided comforts to the armed forces and to air raid victims, and the authors took no fees or royalties.




The Story of the Inky Boys has become the Story of the Nazi Boys, and the black-a-moor has become a little bolshevik boy. Stalin is the giant and dips them into red ink. I would guess that the booklet was written after his pact with Hitler but before Operation Barbarossa when the Russians became our allies, for although he plays the good giant who teaches the Nazi boys a lesson he's not presented as the cuddly old Joe which he later became. It was a confusing time.

The booklet has a special resonance for me in that it inspired the only really successful investment I have ever made in my whole life: I bought it in a second-hand bookshop in Malvern in 2001 and after having a colour photocopy made I sold it on eBay for three times the price I paid. When first published exactly half a century earlier it cost the same as my hardback Struwwelpeter had cost five years before that: 1/6d (7½p).
A slight shadow was cast over my satisfaction when later I saw that booksellers were offering other copies of the booklet for sale at five times the price for which I had let mine go.

The ultimate question

Even the most eminent philosophers may be unaware that some complex questions have simple answers. There is an old and, sadly, apocryphal story told by a cabby: 'Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him, "Well, Lord Russell, what's it all about, then?" And, do you know, HE COULDN’T TELL ME!'

The answer is, of course: You do the Hokey-Cokey and you turn around, and that’s……

There is also the story about Larry La Prise, who wrote it. When he died in 2002 his family had great difficulty with the funeral: they put his left leg in the coffin, and it was all downhill from there…