Ignorance compounded by stupidity, and a longed-for homecoming denied

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

A friend of mine once told me how little she liked those lines. Crass nationalism she found them, and I can see her point. After all, it doesn’t even talk about Britain but merely about England – as so often with the English, the Scottish, Welsh and (arguably) Irish are simply left out of account.

She may be right. And yet to me the key word is the last: ‘home’. These are lines expressing a wistful longing for home, and the speaker’s heartbreak at knowing it will never be realised. England is named only because he happens to be English.

The poet, Rupert Brooke, was indeed English. And he was never to return home. There is some corner of a Greek island that he’s made forever England. 

Rupert Brooke's grave on the Greek island of Skyros

In April 1915, he was shipped out to the far easternmost parts of the Mediterranean, to join an army that was tasked with landing on Turkish territory, on the Gallipoli peninsula that guards the entrance of the Dardanelles. This is the first part of the narrow waterway linking the Mediterranean with the Black Sea. Where it opens into the Bosphorus stands Istanbul, then capital of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire.

The army’s mission was to seize that capital and force the Turks out of the First World War.

Some weeks ago, I had dinner in Berlin with a German-American colleague and her German partner. He, the partner, at one point said to me, ‘Have you read Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson? Because if you haven’t, you should.’

It took the advice of a young German for me to discover a book by an American that would illuminate a strange and painful episode of British history.

Lawrence in Arabia isn’t the same thing as Lawrence of Arabia though it chiefly focuses on the same man. It’s a remarkable study of the duplicity and incompetence principally of the British, but also of the French and Turks, in the Eastern Theatre of World War One. It’s also an enthralling retelling of the stories of some extraordinary men: the Jewish agronomist and spy Aaron Aaronson, the American oil man and spy William Yale (yes, his family founded the university), the German anthropologist and spy Curt Prüfer and, above all, the larger-than life figure of the British warrior and spy, T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.

T. E. Lawrence in Arab dress

When the British decided to land their forces at Gallipoli, they did so against Lawrence’s advice. He argued for a landing instead at Alexandretta, modern day Iskenderun, where the Turks were desperately vulnerable – as they knew themselves, given that the roads were terrible and the railway in a desperate state following heavy flooding. For Lawrence, a force of only a few thousand could capture it and threaten to split the Ottoman Empire in two. Even less optimistic colleagues felt 20,000 would do it.

But the British chose the Dardanelles instead. They made several attacks before the main landings, giving clear warning of what was to come. It also made no sense to go for the end of the Gallipoli peninsula. The main German adviser to the Turks couldn’t believe his luck when they did, as he had expected them at a far more difficult spot to defend further up the Dardanelles. Scott Anderson points out that ‘one would be hard pressed to find a worse landing site most anywhere on the three-thousand-mile long Mediterranean coast of the Ottoman Empire’.

Yet it was here that they attacked. Their first day objective was to ‘secure a small village some four miles inland, and then to advance on the Turkish forts just above. Over the next seven months, the British would never reach that village, but would suffer nearly a quarter of a million casualties trying.’

A quarter of a million lost in failure when 20,000 might succeeded elsewhere.

Meanwhile, an army from British India went gaily up the Tigris with little idea of what lay ahead of it. At Baghdad, they were turned back and retreated to the town of Kut where they were surrounded and besieged. The British lost a golden opportunity to save their men when Indian troops stumbled into a Turkish citadel which had been left undefended, but were ordered out because it hadn’t been properly bombarded beforehand. When they tried to capture it later, they failed at a cost of 4000 men. Two relieving forces lost 10,000 each and the garrison at Kut was obliged to surrender ignominiously.

Lawrence himself would write, ‘British generals often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance.’

Rupert Brooke died even before his generals would compound their ignorance with stupidity. A mosquito bite became infected. In those pre-antibiotic days, sepsis was impossible to treat. He died aboard ship on 23 April 1915, two days before the landings started.

Lawrence also spoke of the simple soldiers sent out by Britain. ‘We were casting them into the fire of the worst of deaths, not to win the war but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours… All our subject provinces to me were not worth one dead Englishman.’

Not a single death was worth what the British Army had been sent out to win. Brooke had been washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home. A lamentable waste that he and thousands of others weren’t left there to continue enjoying them.

Burying Turkish dead at Gallipoli

Forced march to a metaphor for life

For months – or is it years now? – my wife Danielle has been joining Nordic walking sessions run by one of Luton’s fine leisure centres.

‘It’s excellent exercise,’ she would tell me, ‘you really know you’ve done some sport when you’ve finished. It’s a lovely setting, too. And the people are great. You ought to come along.’

Somehow, I always had something else to do. Excuses, of course, for not taking part. What I don’t understand is why I was even looking for excuses. I enjoy walking. I enjoy sport, for that matter. And when we used to live in Germany, I even took part in Nordic walking sessions there, and they were tough: they started at 6:00 in the morning. Ah, yes. The Germans. When you’re doing something demanding, you just have to make sure it really is demanding.

Having followed Danielle into Nordic walking,
I followed her around the Nordic walk

For whatever reason, I dodged and ducked and avoided taking part. Until just now. Which is pretty silly, since we’re planning on moving away (from the country, not just the town) early in February. If I’m to enjoy, and benefit from, these Nordic walking moments, I’m truly going to have to get my act together: I only have a few weeks to do so.

Because I really did enjoy it. And no doubt benefited, too. Certainly, if the ache in my legs was anything to go by, I must have done. As a good Englishman, steeped in the country’s puritanical traditions, I know that it’s only if it hurts that a thing can possibly be doing you any good.

It surprised me that it was so much fun. For me, walking is something I do with the dogs. And I do it – slowly. Generally I’m chatting with the other people out with me or, when alone as is more commonly the case, I have earphones in and I’m listening to an audio-book. Recently, that’s been some Le Carré novels (or his autobiographical sketches, The Pigeon Tunnel) interspersed with a couple of recommendations from colleagues: Prisoners of Geography, a highly readable account of how geography often determines a nation’s behaviour, and Lawrence in Arabia (note the ‘in’ rather than ‘of’) which is proving a fascinating study not just of Lawrence but of all the extraordinary, seismic events that took place in the Middle East in World War One and whose consequences we’re still feeling today.

What that means, of course, is that though I pick places I like, I tend not to notice them that much. I’m generally listening to the book and paying little attention to what’s going on around me. Which is a bit sad. Sometimes I become aware of that and decide I should snap a photo of a scene that’s particularly striking in its beauty, but that only means I’m looking at things through my phone instead of listening to it.

Sometimes I stop listening to the phone
and use it to take a picture of the scenery

Nordic Walking’s different. It’s a social activity so something as solitary as listening to a book is out. And, in any case, it’s much more of a forced march than a country stroll, so I’m not sure I’d be able to spare the attention to a book. That may have been what put me off.

But, naturally, it has other charms. It’s certainly more physical. It feels a little more like a challenge. And it isn’t that bad: I had no trouble keeping up with the leaders. Which gave me a certain satisfaction.

Of course, I found myself following Danielle all the way round. Straining to keep up with her. But that was satisfying too.

After all, there’s no better metaphor for a marriage that has lasted 35 years – so far.

To Rome - by broomstick?

My Italian colleague Paola has asked me to meet a friend, who is also a business contact, at a hospital in Rome.

That was an easy decision. Rome is where I was born and one of my favourite cities. I agreed without hesitation. On the other hand finding a time all three of us could make proved significantly more difficult. In the end, we settled on Monday 7 January. But, since my confidence in the ability of airlines to run to schedule is strictly limited, I decided to fly in the day before, 6 January, and told Paola so.

‘Ah,’ she replied, ‘will you be coming by broomstick?’

At first, the allusion struck me as obscure. Or possibly offensive. Was she referring to my age? To my looks? To my inclination to transform perfectly innocent people into field mice and feed them to the cat?

On the other hand, I get on well with Paola. Perhaps she meant it in a more complimentary way. Was she referring to my wisdom? My constant willingness to help out the virtuous needy? My ability to find a positive way through any dilemma, however difficult?

But then I remembered the Befana.

The Befana’s on her way.
And so am I. Though probably by plane. And without the gifts

She’s a witch who pops into children’s houses, with gifts and sweets for the good ones and lumps of coal for the others. It has to be said that as a general rule, Italians being Italians and doting on children, kids are pretty automatically deemed to have been good. 

The Befana shows up in time for Twelfth Night, on 6 January. Strictly speaking, that means she makes the trip on the 5th, but the kids enjoy the presents on the following day. Even so, it’s clear Paola was assimilating my arrival to the Befana’s.

That’s really quite flattering. It suggests my visit is welcome. Which is preferable to the alternative.

Interestingly, the myth says that one of the things the Befana does is sweep the floor before she heads off again. That may be a metaphor for clearing away all the problems and the bad events of the previous year, so that we can start the new one with a clean slate. Curious, isn’t it? Is that the source of the association of witches with broomsticks? Of course, generally we think of witches as travelling on their broomsticks, rather than using them to sweep stuff away.

It has to be said that the idea of brooms for sweeping, rather than flying, is at least rather more plausible. Though I’m not sure whether, in a story about witches, plausibility really comes into it.

In any case, and I hope this won’t come as a major disappointment to Paola, I’m not travelling by broomstick but by British Airways. My hope is that BA will make the trip less cold. Quicker and more reliable would be good too, but I don’t want to ask for too much.

The other thing is that I shan’t be bearing gifts. Just a presentation of a hospital information tool, which may be useful – I hope it will be – but rather lacks the allure of presents from a witch. And there’ll certainly be nothing there that’s good to eat.

Oh, well. It looks as though my friend Paola may have to swallow quite a bit of disappointment. I just hope she can take some comfort from the fact that I won’t, at least, be bringing her a lump of coal. Unless she decides that my presentation is worth no more than that.

Oh, the pressure, the pressure.

Half a loaf may be better than none, but a sourdough loaf's better than either

Preserving and developing its skills is vital for any society.

Back in the European middle ages, there was quite a structure for doing that. Young people, sometimes as young as 10, could bind themselves to a master craftsman in order to learn the elements of the trade. The master took the apprentice into his house (mostly it was his rather than hers, though some trades, such as seamstresses, included women) and had his cheap assistance for a period of some seven years in return for little more than board and lodging.

The apprenticeship ensured that the set of skills of one generation was transmitted to the next.

Apprentice bakers at work. A while back

On completion of this period of learning, the new craftsman typically became a journeyman. I used to think that journeymen were so-called because they journeyed from master to master. In reality, the name comes from the French word for day, ‘journée’, as journeymen could charge by the day for their work (it has to be said that it was also the word ‘journée’ that gave English the word journey, since the day was the unit for measuring a voyage).

However, it was not uncommon for journeymen to journey. Often they travelled for three years, as ‘wandering journeymen’. This was the way new technology spread. The journeyman might travel to a master who had some smart new technique, and learn it by working with him for a while. On his return, he would bring the new skills with him and, if he became a master, he’d pass them on to the next generation.

Incidentally, to become a master, a journeyman was generally required to produce a sample of his skill, to persuade the existing masters that he was worthy of being admitted to their number. That sample was called a ‘masterpiece’. It’s a glorious misuse of the term to apply it, as we do, to an outstanding work by an established master of a trade or, more commonly, an art – a masterpiece wasn’t an outstanding work by a master, but the final examination piece for admission to master’s status.

Overall, it was a pretty intelligently designed system. It meant craft skills could pass from generation to generation, and improvements to them would spread across society. It has, in part at least, survived right up to our days.

That made me delighted to learn that my wife, Danielle, was undertaking an apprenticeship. She recently became an enthusiastic convert to sourdough bread. And, as generally happens when she discovers a type of food that appeals to her, she has focused attention and energy on learning to produce it herself.

Jo's loaves for sale. Jo on the left

That made it all the more welcome when she found a local baker, Jo Bottrill, making a huge range of sourdough loaves, which she sells through Jo’s loaves. At first, Danielle was merely a client. Then Jo gave Danielle some starter dough, to get her going. Since then we’ve had more and more varieties of sourdough bread, and we haven’t bought a loaf from a shop for weeks.

Which led to the latest stage in Danelle’s journey into the sourdough world. She volunteered to work a day a week with Jo as an unpaid apprentice. And that’s what she’s been doing since last week.

So Danielle is a new recruit to a wonderful, time-tested system for ensuring that we maintain and extend our skills. And she’s using the system to keep us provided with excellent bread in a variety of forms. Win-win, I call it.

Danielle's latest load,
ready to come out of the Dutch oven, in our English oven

On the other hand, back then apprentices could start as young as 10, and not generally over 15. Does Danielle fit in that range? Not quite.

But hey, what’s half century between friends? Especially when really important skills are at stake. And some excellent loaves.

Labour languishing where once it soared

They’re funny old things, opinion polls. A bit discredited, in Britain. At the 2017 general election, they pointed towards a sizeable Conservative win, which would have justified Theresa May’s calling of an early General Election. She’d hoped to increase her small majority in the House of Commons. In the event, she did far worse than the polls suggested and lost her majority altogether.

That left egg on the faces of the pollsters, Theresa May, and those, including me, who felt that Jeremy Corbyn would lead Labour to a defeat of historic proportions.

Indeed, Corbyn supporters never tire of telling the rest of us that under his leadership, Labour achieved the biggest increase in its popular vote since World War 2. Which is true. It’s also true, however, that he still lost the popular vote to May and emerged with far fewer MPs. His supporters are less inclined to mention that, though it’s also true.

Given how much better their man performed than the polls predicted, they now like to dismiss unfavourable polls as fake news. Curiously, that doesn’t stop them triumphing on those occasions when a poll, even a single, isolated one, shows a Labour lead – not a frequent occurrence these days. I suppose its very rarity makes it all the more welcome to those frantic to prove that Corbyn is proving effective.

Well, the polls may indeed be only a poor guide to what will actually happen in an election. But between elections, we have no other indication of the state of the parties. And in the past, they’ve often proved more accurate than in 2017.

For instance, most of us in Labour went into the 1997 general election confident, though not complacent, about winning. The confidence was justified by the massive win, and it was based on excellent poll standings. Take a look at the graph. It shows the standing of the two main parties, as an average of the previous fifteen polls, from the moment where there are fifteen onwards.

How Labour fared in the polls in the runup to victory, and now

The lower pair of lines shows how, in the first seventeen months following the 1992 election, Labour had gone from trailing the Conservatives to establishing a healthy lead over them. The lead tightened in the actual election but Labour still won a landslide victory.

They were helped by the fact that the Conservatives were massively split, above all over Europe. The then Prime Minister, John Major, even called his anti-EU colleagues ‘bastards’. It has to be said that he was also rather a colourless figure, short of charisma or even any manifest talent for his office.

Today, the Conservatives are led by a colourless, uncharismatic leader with no manifest talent for her office. Her party is even more split than Major’s over the issue of Europe. Moreover, some of the most outspoken among her Brexiter critics, notably Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg, have set a new benchmark in bastardy.

Now look at the upper pair of lines, covering the seventeen months since the 2017 election. Unlike 1992, Labour under Corbyn started with a lead over the Tories, which seems to have dissipated. Now the two main parties are essentially level-pegging, and Labour may well be a little behind, though the difference is well within the margin of error for any opinion poll.

Things can change, of course, as they did in the 2017 election. But there is one big difference: back in 2017, Jeremy Corbyn was still a fresh face, a break from the old style of politics represented by establishment figures who were beginning to look well past their sell-by date. Since then, Corbyn has become far better known. He’s tried to steer a careful course between Brexiters and anti-Brexiters, committing to neither side, in order to avoid offending Labour voters from either. Unfortunately, that is very much the old-style, tired electoral game, where it matters more to count votes than to defend principles. His is a stance which rather takes the sheen off his appeal as a fresh, more principled figure and leaves him, instead, looking just as stale as his predecessors.

That might not matter if the approach were working. But the polls suggest it isn’t.

A big last-minute surge? Well, it can’t be ruled out. But given the image Corbyn projects today, I think it would be reckless to count on it.

Back in 1993, we’d already had fourteen years of Tory rule. But John Smith had taken the Labour Party to a position where, for the first time, our poll standing meant we could look forward to a forthcoming election with some optimism.

That is emphatically not the case today. At the moment, it looks as though Labour might win enough seats to form a minority government, as May leads now. Or it might lose again.

Opinion polls may not be reliable, but we have no other measure of where we stand. And the picture they paint today is far from pretty.

Corbyn supporters, and Corbyn himself, are calling for an early general election. Maybe they ought to be more careful what they wish for.

Jews: what goes around comes around.

Do you remember the jingle ‘In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue’?

I learned that at school. It was much later that I realised that 1492 was also the year in which King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain took other major steps, at least as significant as the decision to send an Italian sailor on his expedition westward – an expedition on which he left with no idea where he was going and came back with no idea of where he’d been.

It was in 1492 that Spain decided to rid itself of its Jews. 

Jews leaving Spain after August 1492

And 1492 saw Christians complete their reconquest of Spain from the Muslims.

My mother, who always enjoyed history, used to say that the decline of Spain as a great power dated from those times.

By moving against the Jews, Spain deprived itself of its most skilful financiers and traders. That’s no anti-Semitic slur: there is nothing inherent in Jews that makes them good with money, and few Jews were involved in high finance anyway. The law prohibited Jews owning land, forcing them into other professions such as finance, and some became very good at it.

Meanwhile, the most advanced and effective agriculture in Spain was carried out by the Muslim landowners of the south. Moving against them would carry a terrible price for the country. Like the financiers, they were outstanding wealth creators – literally feeding the nation – and it made no economic sense to drive them away.

Paradoxically, at the very moment that Spain was launching the exploration of the Americas which would turn it into a world power, it was ridding itself of the skills it needed to support itself in that position.

This kind of self-harm is what happens when nations deprive themselves of the skills that communities seen as ‘other’ bring with them. The converse is also true: when a nation drives those communities out, their neighbours benefit and move ahead of them. In 1685, France repealed the Edict of Nantes that tolerated Protestantism. Over the next thirty years, other countries such as Britain, Holland and Prussia took advantage of the flood of refugees, many of them skilled artisans – weavers, cabinet makers, clock makers – who fled with skills that enriched their hosts while their loss weakened France.

By 1720, some 11% of the population of Berlin was French-speaking. And the nation whose capital it was, Prussia, was on the way to becoming a European Great Power, one that would, indeed, overtake France in the next century.

Building bridges to take people in enriches a nation where expelling them, or building walls to keep them out, only impoverishes it. A lesson American fans of Trump need to learn. Or British fans of Brexit.

Curiously, over five centuries on Spain has made an effort to learn that lesson. A Spanish law of 2014 offered citizenship to anyone who could prove descent from the Sephardi Jews the nation threw out after 1492. They don’t have to give up their existing citizenship if they have one. They have to pass a language test and a test of culture, but they don’t even have to live in Spain.

Why, they don’t even have to be practising Jews.

The government that enacted this legislation presented it as an attempt to redress the error of 1492. I don’t know whether it does or not, but I feel it’s a remarkable aspiration. One to be admired.

Oddly, I only found out about it through the New York Times. That’s the paper that Donald Trump likes to refer to as ‘the failing New York Times’, though it seems to be flourishing. Perhaps it thrives on his criticisms.

The paper had picked up the story because a number of the Jews who had to get out of Spain decided to follow in the steps of Columbus, to the New World. That way, they remained in Spanish territory though they left Spain.

A number arrived in Mexico and some moved into the northernmost territory of that country, including New Mexico. Which was absorbed and made into a state by the US following its war on Mexico in the 1840s.

It seems that the Mexican authorities kept excellent records. So did the state of New Mexico. Consequently, a number of US citizens from that State are now well placed to prove that they are indeed descended from the persecuted Jews of Spain. With antisemitism on the rise in America, that curious Spanish law offers some Jews a potential bolthole – not one they intend to take, but one that it’s good to have available, just in case.

Through Columbus, 1492 opened up a new land of refuge. Through a law of the same year, made by the sponsors of his expedition, many Jews needed a land to which they could flee. And, in a beautifully cyclical movement – you know, what goes around, comes around – some of their descendants, now less safe in the land where their ancestors sought refugees can now claim citizenship of the land that that persecuted those same ancestors.

One thing hasn’t changed over the centuries. Nations still build walls and persecute minorities. Even it means shooting themselves in the foot.

And we don’t like learning lessons from history.

Deadly anniversary and cautionary tale

While in Zagreb a little while ago, my wife Danielle and I visited the Croatian Gallery of Naïve Art. There I came across painters I didn’t know but many of whose paintings took my breath away. There were some extraordinary scenes, perhaps above all a string of magnificent landscapes, though there were also intriguing depictions of quite different scenes.

Ivan Lacković, Long Winter: a curious, haunting impact

What struck me most was a surprising painting entitled ‘Guyana 78’ by one of the leading painters in this Naïve movement, Josip Generalić.

Bodies litter the ground, a cross in among them symbolising that they died in the name of a distorted Christianity. There are children among them. In the background, two apes look on, displaying a truer Christian spirit as they apparently share a banana, uncomprehending of the weird human spectacle below them.

Josip Generalić, Guyana 78

The reference is to the mass suicide – or, more properly, the massacre – at the People's Temple Agricultural Project, usually called Jonestown after its founder, Jim Jones, leader of a cult that professed both Socialistic and Christian thinking. The killings took place on 18 November 1978, forty years ago today.

Danielle pointed me to the story of a survivor published by the BBC this morning. It made harrowing reading. The cult members practised mass suicide, taking supposedly poison-laced drinks, only to be told that it was innocuous. Until, one day, it wasn't.

That was after a visit to Jonestown by an inspection delegation led by a US Congressman, Leo Ryan. As it was leaving, members of the cult attacked the delegation, killing five including the Congressman. Jim Jones issued a new  command for mass suicide, but this time for real. He warned that following the murders, Guyanese authorities would attack the cult and take the children. Some 300 children were among the 900 who died.

It was the worst deliberate killing of US civilians before 9/11. An extraordinary, horrific event, worthy of the artistic talent of a Generalić.

Bodies strewn across the ground at Jamestown

It isn’t, however, just the coincidence of seeing the painting so soon before the anniversary that prompted me to write about it here. It’s more because the kind of mindset that drove the Jamestown massacre seems to be growing once more. It’s cult thinking, where a single person is identified as a Messiah, the source of all authority, whose views are not to be questioned however contrary they may be to all evidence. He, and he alone, is to be the source of truth.

These leaders demanding total, unquestioning loyalty, are growing in numbers in nation after nation. Look around yourself and see whether you can’t see some of them emerging near you – or already in power.

They don’t necessarily take their demands for unqualified obedience quite as far as Jim Jones did. But their demand for total commitment is often destructive. And there are many ways people can be persuaded to commit collective suicide.

Some just take longer than at Jamestown.