Ace Warriors and a Very Old Joke

In last week’s exciting episode of “The History of Ancient Britain” (The Roman Invasion AD 43 to AD 410)Neil Oliver informed us that the name of the ancient British tribe  the Catevellauni means “Expert Warriors”.  Oh tosh! What a lousy translation.  I live in the Catevellauni territories – their tribal capital was about six miles to the north just the other side of St Albans – and I can tell you straight we would never have called ourselves “Expert Warriors”.  Not a chance.  We would have referred to ourselves as “Ace Warriors.” Get that Neil Oliver? Ace!

The leader who took on the Romans and regrettably lost was known as Cassiovellaunus which apparently translates as ‘Head of the Expert Warriors’ but he was clearly known to his mates as Cassio because it is in that familiar diminutive form that he is commemorated around Watford in local place-names such as Cassiobury, Cassiobridge etc. 

Quite why he is remembered so fondly in Watford is not at all clear but he may be the king who gave the town its name.  Legend has it that a king was riding casually one day through the ford at the bottom of the high street when he turned to his companions and said memorably “What ford is this?”  Thereafter the town became known as Watford but without the question mark.

The fact that nobody can remember which king or the name of his companion has led some historians to doubt the accuracy of this story, some going so far as to claim it is entirely apocryphal.  They insist that the name was coined by some peasant called Wat who lived on the banks of the river, possibly conning passing traffic out of a small fee by allowing them to cross the ford, thus giving the town the name Wat’s ford.  If that were so it would be called Watsford and since there is no more evidence for the plebeian Wat than there is for the geographically-challenged king I go with the king. 

If it were not Cassio, who was after all a local Hertfordshire man so should have known where he was at, then I nominate Ethelred the Unready whose soubriquet please note does not mean unready but is Anglo-Saxon for ‘ill-advised’.  I’d say that someone who rides into the middle of a river and then asks where he is would be most definitely ill-advised.

Anyway, after the king cracked this memorable joke it seems that for ages afterwards countless travellers felt it incumbent upon themselves to repeat it ad nauseum until the locals ceased to be amused, then ceased to show polite amusement, then got really narked and built a bridge. End of.

If you would like to know more about Watford's local history try The Ghostrider available in kindle and paperback editions.

If you would like to know more about Celtic Warriors try The Wonderful History of The Sword in the Stone also available in kindle and paperback editions.

Strictly Come Dancing - The Early Years

Strictly Come Dancing has cornered the market in celebrity glitz and glamour with its combination of stardom and ballroom dancing.  But it was not always thus. 

I well mind the time when the height of ambition for a ballroom dancer was to be picked to represent Home Counties North as a member of the formation dancing team.  In those days gas fitters and spot welders sewed their sequins on themselves and that was just the girls.  Nevertheless back in the 1960s being able to dance ‘properly’ was still regarded as a useful social skill. 

My friend’s mother, appalled by our weekly habit of dancing round our handbags at the Top Rank and fired by the romantic vision of us being swept off our feet by a nice middle class boy in a smart tuxedo, arranged for us to attend weekly ballroom dancing classes instead which were held in a room over The Tudor Inn which is neither Tudor nor an Inn but that is neither here nor there. 

The lady who ran the dancing school was tiny.  I mean tiny.  The top of her head barely reached my shoulder and I am only five foot tall.  Bearing in mind she was never to be seen without six inch stiletto heels I reckon she must have been about four foot five in her stockinged feet.  There was a professional dancer, male, who retained extraordinary rigidity no matter what the dance rhythm.  Definitely no hip action there.  He was polite but distant. Possibly he was more afraid of me than I was of him but I never thought of that at the time. In fairness he did wear his own suit.

 There were two other young people in the school, both of whom were long-standing dance partners and keen to enter competitions.  They knew all the steps to all the dances and all the fancy stuff so they gave us a wide berth and just danced with each other.  I don’t think we ever spoke. The other members of the class were all very elderly gentlemen who to our teenage eyes – admittedly poor when it comes to the judgement of actual age – were about ninety. They were definitely all pensioners.

One chap really was ninety.  He sat in the corner all evening until it came to the Last Waltz  (which was always danced appropriately to “The Last Waltz”) when he used to rise with difficulty and gallantly ask me to dance.  Unfortunately he could only manage one turn around the floor after which he had to retire exhausted leaving me to stand abandoned in the middle swaying pathetically in time to the music until I could shimmy discreetly to the door.  I have never danced all through “The Last Waltz”.  Such is the gap between the romantic dream and real life. 

I’m sorry to say we didn’t last the course.  We never realized my friend’s mother’s dream by meeting a well-mannered young man in possession of his own suit.  Within a few weeks we were back at the Top Rank dancing round our handbags. Ah well.

Downton Abbey

Last night I watched the latest episode of Downton Abbey having noted criticism in The Mail that it was going downhill.  I have to agree that despite prodigious efforts to introduce emotion and high drama, the hero seriously wounded, one of the characters dying, a deathbed marriage etc. I did find myself singularly lacking in feeling.  I remained obstinately dry-eyed throughout. Downton Abbey is a very handsome drama with an excellent cast so where is it going wrong?  I put my finger on the size of the cast.  There are simply too many characters.  The writer has also clearly taken on board the lesson repeatedly given in screenwriting classes that in film drama scenes should be kept short.  Unfortunately in this case they are too short.  The narrative flits about all over the place so that in no scene are the actors given enough time to build their characters.  They are expected to create a character out of  sometimes a single line.  The fashion in TV drama for the short scene has reached epidemic proportions.  I often remark that in CSI Miami I think David Caruso must be paid by the word his character has become so laconic.  He certainly doesn't have to work very hard as he rarely has to memorise more than a line. The result is very shallow characterisation. In drama the audience learns about the character through the things they say.  It is true that in film speech is less important than in theatre - you can show something of the character's mood and responses in close-up - but they still need to say something. Downton Abbey needs to concentrate on just one or two of the main characters and allow the actors a bit more space to develop them instead of taking the scatter-gun approach which paradoxically makes the story neither more interesting nor dramatic.  Normally, being a writer, I like to lay the blame on everybody else when a drama goes wrong but in this case I'm afraid I think the writing is to blame unless of course its the editing in which case I apologise. 

Hogarth and his World

The Foundling Hospital, London

The Foundling Hospital was established by Royal Charter in 1739 after a tireless campaign throughout the 1720s and 1730s by Thomas Coram, who made his fortune as a shipbuilder in the American colonies.  G. M. Trevelyan describes the period as “an age of aristocracy and liberty; of the rule of law and the absence of reform; of Latitudinarianism above and Wesleyanism below; of the growth of humanitarian and philanthropic feeling and endeavour; of creative vigour in all the trades and arts that serve and adorn the life of man.”  The Foundling Hospital represents that trend towards public philanthropy which sought to reconcile personal wealth with public virtue.  It also represented a new moral attitude that insisted that children were born innocent and should not be punished for the sins of their parents. In this respect John Locke’s ‘Some thoughts concerning Education’ (1693) was highly influential.  He argued that a person’s moral character is formed during childhood and that children could be moulded through education to develop into virtuous adults.

Thomas Coram was a social outsider but he had strong connections with the establishment, notably with the Prime Minister Robert Walpole and his brother Horatio.  With their help he persuaded George II to grant the Royal Charter and building began in 1742 on Lamb’s Conduit Fields which site was bought from the Earl of Salisbury.  

 The Building was designed by Theodore Jacobsen, an amateur architect of German descent who was a steel merchant by profession.  He was also a Hospital Governor so he offered his services free of charge.  His assistant was John Sanderson and the Surveyor was James Horne who was replaced in 1751 by Henry Keene.  The design reflects a strong Palladian architectural influence but ornamentation is kept deliberately plain as the charity did not wish to be accused of extravagance, but this is also in keeping with the English Protestant style of baroque architecture which keeps the Palladian proportions but eschews extravagant rococo decoration.

 A temporary building was acquired in Hatton Garden during the building of the main Hospital and this opened its doors to children in 1741.  The West wing for boys was completed in 1745 and the East wing for girls in 1752.  The Hospital’s Chapel built between 1747 and 1752 was formally opened in 1753.  Located between the two wings, its completion was partially financed by concerts given by Georg Frederic Handel who was also elected a governor.

A most notable feature of the Hospital which was a private charity is the part played by the artists of the day in financing it.  This reflected a sea-change in the status of artists and musicians who had up until this date been dependent on aristocratic and royal patronage subsisting on meagre pensions and treated as servants by their great masters.  The rise of the prosperous merchant class and a good grasp of commercial techniques allowed artists like Handel and Hogarth to make considerable fortunes without the need for aristocratic patrons.  Handel had begun as a court composer but tiring of his subservient position switched from opera to oratorio which was presented in the form of a subscription concert.  In this way he achieved financial independence.  Hogarth similarly made his money independently through the sale of engravings and prints which enabled him to maintain his position as a satirical observer of the evils and hypocrisy of his time. 

 The Foundling Hospital benefited from the donation of the works of many of the finest artists of the day and by making its collection available to the public it became in effect the nation’s first public art gallery.

 Inside the Hospital building are several fine original 18^th century interiors.  In one there is an exhibition of foundling tokens, small items, sometimes just a button, given by mothers on leaving their babies in the hope that they would one day be able to return to claim them and by these tokens be able to identify them.  Few of them returned and the Hospital retained them.

 The Committee Room, which is where mothers were interviewed before leaving their children, contains a fine painting by Hogarth, The March of the Guards to Finchley of 1750

The Picture Gallery is also an original 18^th century interior.  In the Court Room, where the Court of Governors used to meet, there is more display as this room was designed to impress future governors and donors.  The ceiling is a plaster work by William Wilton.  The paintings on display include Hogarth’s Moses before Pharoah’s daughter and Gainsborough’s picture of London Charter House.

William Hogarth is featured as a character in The Devil and the Bag of Nails by Carol Richards now exclusively available on Kindle from www.amazon.com

Hero or Villain?

Following on from my review of Stendhal's The Red and the Black I should say that I sympathize with Stendhal in that I had a similar problem with The Lady in Grey in that the hero, French novelist Guy de Maupassant is in some ways not a very likeable character and he in turn had a similar problem with his hero Bel-Ami.  We all know that a hero has to have a few flaws to come across as human and real - even Superman has to be vulnerable to kryptonite to make the plots more interesting - but too many flaws can make the hero unapproachable.  Maupassant himself was described by his contemporaries as rather cold and distant - his eyes, they say, drank everything in and gave nothing out.  His motto appropriately was 'Cache ta vie' - Hide your life.  He could clearly be very charming when he wanted to be but he had that writer's tendency to play the part of the observer looking at his world from the outside, a trait exacerbated by his training and the influence of the school of Zola which attempted to try to turn the novelist into a social scientist.  It was what made him a very good reporter. 

I am myself trained as a social scientist but there is a difference - one of which Zola was very well aware.  As a social scientist I expect my audience to be as objective as I am whereas as a novelist I wish to engage their hearts and minds.  Stendhal I imagine was attempting something of the sort in trying to write a very cynical and objective report of his own time but in making his hero so cold and distant he disengages the audience and loses their sympathy.  It is hard to decide if Sorel is a hero or a villain.  What makes the difference?  In the case of The Lady in Grey I think the answer lies in the characters around the hero.  They are warm and attractive.  You can get close to them if not to Maupassant himself who remains as enigmatic on the page as he seems to have been in life.  In engaging sympathetically with them I hope the reader finds the characters come off the page.  Did I succeed in making Maupassant a hero rather than a villain?  He comes perilously close to being the latter.  You will have to judge for yourselves.  He was a fascinating character. The Lady in Grey is now available in paperback and in a Kindle Edition.  Not an easy read perhaps but I trust my readers will find it a rewarding one. 

The Red and The Black by Stendhal

<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14662.The_Red_and_the_Black" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Red and the Black" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1311645389m/14662.jpg" /></a><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14662.The_Red_and_the_Black">The Red and the Black</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1481537.Stendhal">Stendhal</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/187199149">3 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
Struggled to read this.  I found I failed to empathize with any of the characters.  The hero and heroines are so shallow - and I realize this is the point of the book - that it was hard to care what happened to them so in that respect Stendhal shoots himself in the foot.  It needed at least one sympathetic character to make you care.  As it was the final scene in which the hero gets his comepuppance failed to move me at all.  By that time frankly I couldn't care less.
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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5830548-carol-richards">View all my reviews</a>