Ponderings

Tag: writing

  • The People’d Wound

    On the 10th October, 1930 the esteemed English playwright, screenwriter, director, actor and Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter was born. He was the only son of an East-End Jewish tailor. He was a thoughtful and bookish child, who later excelled as a scholar, cricketer and athlete at Hackney Downs Grammar School. His English teacher, Joseph Brearley recognised his aptitude for drama and poetry and encouraged him to write and to act. Brearley became a prominent and influential figure, and an important mentor who helped to shape his future career.

    He was awarded a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but his attendance was poor and erratic. He was distracted and alarmed by the political situation that was gradually unfolding. The country was ostensibly at peace, but he could still sense a creeping authoritarianism and militarism. He was a conscientious objector and he was fined several times for refusing national service.

    He continued his studies at the Central School of Speech and Drama and acted in repertory theatre productions across England and Ireland. His acting work enabled him to think much more profoundly about the art and craft involved in the construction and performance of plays.

    In 1951 he performed in a series of Shakespeare productions staged in theatres across the Republic of Ireland. Here he met another important figure and mentor who helped to mould his literary imagination. Anew “Mac” McMaster was an Irish Shakespearean actor-manager whose expertise left an indelible impression upon the young and budding actor/dramatist.

    He described the collaboration with Mac as “electric”, and it inspired Pinter to write his own unique tribute to the Bard, in an essay entitled “A Note to Shakespeare”. He argued that the plays were a precious and delicate resource and must be approached in the same way that a doctor or a surgeon treats his or her patient, “The mistake (the actors) make, most of them, is to attempt to determine and calculate, with the finest instruments, the source of the wound”. He explains that this initial approach can be ham-fisted and crude to the point of bluntness.

    However even though the actor-practitioner fully understands the dilemma, he concludes through years and years of striving in the roles that any remedy is futile, “They turn to the wound with deference, a lance, and a needle and thread. At the entrance of the lance the gap widens. At the use of needle and thread the wound coagulates and atrophies in their hands. Shakespeare writes of the open wound and, through him, we know it open and know it closed.” This is a vivid and striking analogy, which he pursues with alacrity and vigour.

    He observes that the stage is the operating theatre, or the medical clinic, where all the hopeless cases are brought forward for examinations. However everyone who participates in these examinations becomes resigned to the fact that the suffering will never actually end, only perpetuated. The desperation is detailed in unsparing prose, “one discovers a long corridor of postures, fluid and hardened at the quick, gross and godlike, putrescent and copulative; raddled; attentive, crippled and gargantuan; crumbling with the dropsy; heavy with elephantiasis, broody with government; severe; fanatical; paralytic; voluptuous; impassive; muscle-bound; lissom; virginal; unwashed; bewildered; humpbacked; icy and statuesque. All are contained in the wound which Shakespeare does not attempt to sew up or reshape, whose pain he does not attempt to eradicate. He amputates, deadens, aggravates at will..” Evidently Pinter developed a great insight into the humanity that imbues the canon, all facets of the human experience are reflected back at the audience, even the ugliest elements that are seemingly beyond hope.

    He concludes his essay in stark, unforgiving and unequivocal tones that ultimately “The fabric never breaks. The wound is open. The wound is people’d”. The gallery of pitiless human grotesques infused and informed his perspective. It was this tireless dedication to Shakespeare and his philosophy which allowed him to create his own characters for the stage. He drew on themes of isolation, alienation and terror. Every character appears disconnected and disturbed, detached from reality. This was deliberate, it was actually summoned from real childhood memories.

    Pinter was evacuated from London when he was barely ten years old. It was at the peak of the Blitz, and he endured a prolonged period of isolation, dissociation and dislocation. He was forever haunted by the memory of that time. In 1957, it was fortuitous and fortunate that he reconnected with his old school friend, Henry Woolf. Woolf was another protege of Joseph Brearley and played in the same cricket team at Hackney Downs. Woolf was in the final year of a directing course at the University of Bristol and he asked Pinter if he could write a play for him.

    He obliged and wrote “The Room”. Woolf directed the play and played the main character Mr Kidd at his graduation ceremony. It was a one act play featuring a cast of eccentric outsiders with no obvious connection with each other. Pinter was unorthodox for the time, and the play deliberately subverted all of the conventions of polite drawing room dramas. The dialogue was punctuated with uneasy silences, unsettling the audience.

    In that same year he wrote “The Birthday Party” and the play premiered at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge in April 1958. This play was written in the same style, with similar characters and the first set of audiences were totally unprepared, and somewhat bewildered by it. His career as a playwright would have sunk without trace if it had not been for the encouraging words of the theatre critic Harold Hobson, who immediately understood the motivations behind the piece. His review was called “The Screw Turns Again” and it was published in The Sunday Times.

    The article ultimately salvaged Pinter’s reputation, and career. However he was frequently subject to vicious criticism throughout the fifties, sixties and beyond. Most of the criticism was undeserved, and merely a spiteful reflection of a shallow culture that regards artists and writers with contempt.

    It is a uniquely British trait to mock and belittle anyone who dares to express themselves, it ultimately stems from a sense of envy and fragility. Anyone who tries to be creative or thoughtful is considered pretentious or pompous, and their earnestness is never admired, instead it is looked on with suspicion.

    The sixties became the pinnacle of Pinter’s career, but this did not stop the attacks from the media. Unfairly his plays were castigated and maligned by the press as “absolute drivel and incomprehensible nonsense”. These angry missives sound rather too familiar, and resemble the hollow insults meted out today on social media.

    However Pinter remained undeterred. In the face of continuing criticism he kept returning to the fond memories at Hackney Downs with Joseph Brearley and the extended walks that they took through the park, where they discussed and debated drama and poetry in long and animated exchanges. Hackney was the epicentre of his world, it is where he observed society changing, much of it for the worse. In spite of the peace and harmony promised by a succession of post-war governments, the reality was stark. Utopia never materialised. The landscape was desecrated, the people were left battle scarred, angry and resentful. The promise was never fulfilled, and everyone was broken.

    Nothing of any value or worth remained, functionality and utility were poor and pitiful substitutes for the sacred and the beautiful. Ugliness resounded, in the brutalist architecture, and deep within the layers of the industrial military complex. The country was rendered a machine and run for the benefit of the faceless bureaucrats. They created the modern world in their own image, a black and soulless void. A country without a soul will only engender degradation and chaos. Pinter’s lonely, alienated, atomised characters are not far fetched, they are visible and all around us. We must remember his prophetic voice.

  • The Hollow Men

    On the 26th September, 1888 the Anglo-American poet, essayist and playwright T.S Eliot was born. His work was considered modernist in style despite Eliot’s sincere traditionalist beliefs. He was born in St Louis, Missouri and he was the son of a prominent and wealthy family who had relocated to the area from Boston.

    The Eliots were a highly influential family in Boston and were part of an elite group of families that soon became known as the “Boston Brahmins”. The Boston Brahmins were a very select and distinct group of privileged people who inhabited the upper echelons of society, and kept their ancestral and cultural connections to Britain. In Eliot’s case, his ancestral home was situated in East Coker, Somerset.

    Eliot developed a prodigious talent for poetry and was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford in 1914. However when the First World War broke out, this changed his fortunes, and his outlook. He left Oxford after a year and moved to London. He took various teaching jobs and continued to write poetry where he eventually attracted the attention of fellow poet and compatriot Ezra Pound. Pound soon became a friend and a mentor.

    In 1915 he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood. However the marriage was destined to fail right from the beginning, Vivienne was nervous and fragile. Her emotional vulnerabilities proved to be too difficult for both of them to cope with and she was committed to an asylum. Eliot felt profound guilt and was on the verge of a mental breakdown himself. His poetry was imbued with this guilt and pessimism, and coloured by the political instability of the world.

    Consequently he used his strident poetic voice to elicit greater truths that transcended the often petty concerns that bedevilled mortal humans. In his mind, modernity was a lie, it simply detached mankind from its natural environment and only diminished men and women to things. Throughout the nineteen twenties he composed dark verse that epitomised the mood of those times. In his poetic journey he took his own spiritual journey towards enlightenment, and he ultimately found succour in the Anglican faith of his forefathers.

    However it was a long and arduous path, strewn with self-doubt and recrimination. In a world that was gradually turning its back on any semblance of peace, harmony or universal understanding, it must have felt like a pointless and thankless task with no conceivable end point. The most striking poem from this period is “The Hollow Men” which was written at the peak of his personal crisis in 1925.

    The poem reveals a world bereft of morality, humanity and meaning. It is a world only populated with dead souls. Three years earlier he published “The Waste Land” a solemn lamentation of a lost landscape devastated by the thoughtless actions of empty, deadened men.

    It is incredibly apposite that these poems were published in the interwar years when a far greater horror was hovering on the horizon. However his experiences of the Second World War inspired the bleak majesty of “Four Quartets”, a series of elegiac poems dedicated to the eternal elements that remain with us even amidst war and death. We must remember his potent poetic voice as the world turns dark once more.

  • Dogs of Lust

    On the 21st September, 1327 King Edward II died. The circumstances surrounding his death have been disputed for centuries and sordid accounts suggesting that he was tortured and humiliated before his death have not been historically verified. However his final years were marred by controversy and infamy, and rumours of sexual deviancy. Many historians have questioned the veracity of these rumours, and maintain that this was just malicious gossip and black propaganda from his rivals and enemies.

    It is easy to see the origin of these lurid tales. Edward made the deliberate decision to co-operate with the nobles, a starkly different style of rule from his predecessor, his father King Edward I. His close affinity to the nobles sparked suspicion, it was unlike a King to present such an affable nature, it looked weak, and it was a challenge to his supremacy. The nobles, in turn, competed with each other to be the King’s favourite. They knew how to flatter and to fawn for their own advantage.

    However it was clear from the very start who the King favoured, Piers Gaveston. Gaveston was amply rewarded for his loyalty and friendship, but raised the hackles of his wife, Isabella when he gave him her jewels as a present. Isabella herself was no ordinary Queen. She became a legend in her own right, appropriating traditionally male traits. She was ruthless and indomitable and was renowned for her lust for ultimate power. Consequently she received public opprobrium and the nickname “she-wolf”. Although she initially accommodated Gaveston into the court, she grew increasingly frustrated by him and plotted to have him removed. Gaveston was initially banished to Ireland to bolster support for the King in that realm.

    On his return the King sought to consolidate his power in Scotland and Wales. Gaveston abhorred his rivals. He scorned them because he sought the King’s affection solely for himself. He called the other nobles childish names like Burst Belly, the Cuckold’s Bird and the Black Dog of Arden. Such insults only hardened their resolve to destroy Gaveston. In March 1313 a warrant was issued for his arrest. Gaveston and the King tried to escape but they were captured by the earl of Warwick, the so-called “Black Dog” who had offended him so much. Warwick and four other nobles condemned him to death and he was beheaded at Blacklow Hill, just outside Warwick.

    Edward had lost his closest confidante and was humiliated. He tried to regain his power in his pursuit to acquire Scotland, but he was no match for the Scots and he lost the battle of Bannockburn. At this time, Isabella and Edward were estranged. Isabella acquired a new circle of loyalists, including Hugh Despenser and a secret lover, Roger Mortimer the earl of March. She fled to France with Mortimer and her son and heir, the future King Edward III.

    She was planning a coup, while her husband was imprisoned at Berkeley Castle. This was where the murky murder took place. Some accounts claim that he was pressed down upon a table by heavy weights until he suffocated. The most notorious account which is still widely believed, was that he was disembowelled by a red hot poker. However the whole sorry affair simply illustrates the gruesome nature of power in medieval England, which we are too inclined to forget.

  • Bitter Fruit

    William Blake represents the united voice of England and the English people. This is an immense accomplishment. It is a rare feat to leave such a memorable and meaningful legacy within a nation that throughout its history has struggled to define itself. England, and its people have sustained numerous attacks from cynics who refuse to believe that the English have a unique identity and culture. Bizarrely, these are the same cynics who have become the greatest champions of Blake’s work. It is strange that they share their admiration with traditionalists, their ideological enemies.

    However both camps are in agreement with Blake’s savage critique of the untrammelled industrialisation of England, and the pernicious effects of it. Anyone with emotional attachments to the English landscape feels the same way. Blake had a great insight into these sentiments. He had an acute awareness of the spirit of place, for him England was sacred. It is extremely unusual for any cultural figure to simultaneously appeal to the counterculture and to the Establishment. Very few figures aside from Blake resonate with two very different audiences.

    However Blake transcended these arbitrary political categories. His convictions were solely spiritual ones. He maintained a profound belief, but his belief system also defied conventional religion. He also understood the universal follies of human nature, once describing anger as a tree growing with poisoned fruit. Other human follies are exposed in his writing. Blake was a visionary, a prophet, a poet and expert draughtsman and engraver. All of his imaginative and creative skills were honed from childhood.

    His inspiration was also derived from the long walks that he took throughout London. He observed everyday life and reflected upon the remarkable and often disturbing scenes that he had witnessed. One morning was especially memorable. Walking through Peckham Rye he experienced a dramatic epiphany. He looked up and saw “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough”. Angels are a perennial theme in his art and in his poetry.

    However his stellar reputation is a relatively recent development. Today he is revered as a seer and a genius, but in his lifetime he was condemned as a lunatic and a dissolute. He was castigated as a disruptive and subversive influence and was shunned by polite society. Consequently he struggled to make a living and lived an austere life. When he died, his friend and fellow artist George Richmond kissed him, closed his friend’s eyes and prayed “to keep the vision in”. The vision has waxed and waned over the centuries, but at the time of his death, his passing was left unacknowledged. He was considered just another obscurity. He was buried in an unmarked grave at the Bunhill Field dissenters graveyard in London.

    However it wasn’t until 2018 that the Blake Society redressed this and paid for a new gravestone. Once more, the timing of this exposes a great paradox. It occurred at the peak of the vicious and vituperative “Brexit wars” when an ideological divide threatened to tear the nation apart. Paradox is at the heart of Blake’s sensibilities, he understood that it was vital in the journey towards moral and spiritual enlightenment,

    “Without Contraries”, he explained, “is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human Existence. Opposition is true friendship”. Unfortunately, such challenging perceptions are too difficult to comprehend in a dying culture.

    The emotional depth rendered in his poetry and art still evades most modern audiences who are more familiar with the shallow and trivial. Blake’s point has been made, a society that is more concerned with material accumulation is essentially a moribund one.

  • The Hunters and the Hunted

    On the 10th September, 1931 the English author Isabel Colegate was born. Her most acclaimed work was her 1980 novel “The Shooting Party”. The narrative focuses on a society event on a grand estate on the eve of the First World War. It captures a place and time that has now vanished, as before the Great War there was a sense of familiarity and order. There were seasons, a pattern and a routine to life on the grand estates. Everyone and everything had a place in a fixed hierarchy.

    On this particular estate, life revolved around the annual shooting party. The quarry were bred and reared to be prey at exactly the same time every year. Every creature played a part, from the lowliest moth to the most magnificent specimen of deer. It ran like clockwork.

    However as the narrative unfolds, it soon becomes apparent that there are vague but palpable signs threatening both the social order and the cycles of nature. The first sign manifests itself in the form of a stranger arriving on the grounds of the estate. He arrives to spread subversive and dangerous ideas, disturbing the sense of peace and harmony. He makes a declaration in words that sound eerily prophetic, stating, “Until we can recognise the universal kinship of all living creatures we shall remain in outer darkness”. The atmosphere is redolent of an outer darkness and it strikes a chord within the reader, who senses that there is an inevitability to the brief existence faced by the animals. The reader accepts, albeit with resignation and sadness that these animals have no rights, and no agency.

    These animals exist as the hunted and their fate is sealed immediately from the point of their conception. They remain a constant and interchangeable feature whose entire destiny is inextricably entwined with the earth that sustains them. Their lives are so short that their fleeting presence seems negligible.

    It is a pattern of life that has a solemn futility to it. The lives of the agricultural workers who toil the land are an exact mirror of the brutal, limited lives of the animals. Nature appears like a cruel mimic, as these desperately poor men eventually succumb to the same meaningless deaths when they are hunted down and killed on imperial battlefields. Their lives are virtually the same, as the author readily admits. She can see the obvious parallels, she expounds upon this theme,

    “The sacrifice now was not of men but of birds, handsome creatures, bred in every luxury a bird could wish for…fed, protected from predators, set loose for a few months of life in what was to be presumed might be a pheasant’s Eden, only to be cast forth by a whole host of rustic angels, bearing not so much flaming swords as sticks and whistles, forced to take to the air reluctantly- heavy birds, a flight of more than a few feet exhausts them-forced up and out to meet a burst of noise and a quick death in that bright air”. However, the ominous words of that stranger come back to haunt the hunters when tragedy strikes.

    A minor member of the party is accidentally shot, and he dies of his injuries. In an instant, he is a martyr. A greater sacrifice of young men ensues when war breaks out. The aftermath of this loss was devastating, not just of youth but tradition, old money and hierarchical society. The diminishing members of the old guard who survived these seismic events were the last remaining witnesses of a vanished world. Their numbers continued to dwindle in the modern era. These changes simply swept everything of value away, Colegate reveals one character’s insights, stating, “Although he felt himself now too old to be able quite to make out what were the assumptions, orthodoxies, hypocrisies even events of the new age, he was certain that they embodied changes for the worse, a sort of mass loss of memory, and the replacement of the common understandings of a civilised society by the destructive egotism of a barbaric one”. Even now, the historic parallels seem strangely similar in our contemporary postmodern society.

  • Memories of Aragorn

    On the 2nd September, 1973 the English academic, poet and novelist J.R.R Tolkien died. He was the renowned author of the “Lord of the Rings” novels and an esteemed professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. He dedicated his entire career to the revival of a once distant and obscure culture, almost buried by modernity.

    One of his main inspirations was the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf, who proclaimed, “Hail Earendel, most bright angel!”. This was a devotional composed to an entity which we now understand as Venus, the morning star. When he read this he was so haunted by the power of the words that it summoned in him a deep atavistic longing, “I felt an unconscious thrill,” he said, “as if something had stirred me, half-wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words”. This remote voice from our ancient past reawakened him, and revived his dormant imagination.

    Cynewulf’s verse explored the landscapes of the ancient kingdom of Mercia, a sylvan wilderness situated deep within the heart of England. This region of England is now lost to the realm of myth, aside from a few rural areas. It no longer exists in any meaningful sense as it has been transformed by the untrammelled forces of urbanisation. Tolkien spent his early childhood in Birmingham, in the shadow of Sarehole Mill. He remembered it as a blissful, bucolic existence. This peace and harmony was shattered by the First World War and the almost ceaseless drive towards efficiency and progress.

    The First World War and its aftermath was a watershed moment in our history. It was devastating, not just in terms of the lives that were lost, but also in terms of the tremendous impact that it left upon society. The old aristocracy went into rapid decline due to the loss of heirs, and the increase in taxes on estates. This impacted upon every strata of society, especially those who relied upon aristocratic noblesse oblige. Consequently, new and malign political ideologies were stirring amidst an increasingly discontented and insecure populace.

    This barren and austere world provided the inspiration for “Lord of the Rings”. He depicts the old Anglo-Saxon world as a paradise threatened by the forces of evil. This evil was personified by Sauron, the Dark Monarch who reigned over a nihilistic kingdom called Mordor. This was a military-industrial complex replete with black furnaces, munitions factories and slag heaps.

    Tolkien was a veteran of the Battle of the Somme and had witnessed death and destruction first hand. He saw how the destruction of human life and the natural world was simply pitiless and senseless. He imagined an alternate world, and a more benevolent ruler, the polar opposite of Mordor. This was Aragorn, the exiled King who was due to return to deliver his people from the yoke of Sauron. These tales are rich in religious symbolism, and correlate strongly with the author’s Roman Catholic faith.

    The Biblical allusions were deliberate and were encouraged by his friend and Oxford contemporary C.S Lewis. Both became convinced that modernity, and modern literature in particular was devoid of purpose, and essentially moribund. They both realised that the ancient world provided a fertile ground of inspiration and also contained vital moral lessons for future generations. Lewis was definite in his assertion that re-imagining this long forgotten world was necessary for those who “wish to visit strange regions in search of such beauty, awe or terror as the actual world does not supply”. Lewis maintained his own Christian beliefs, and were the source of his literary inspirations.

    Clearly, the philosophies that dominated the modern, secular world have not delivered humankind out of its own misery. In fact they have compounded it. A society that prioritises economic and scientific progression and growth is essentially lost. The decline of spirituality has corresponded with a decline in empathy and humanity. In this mindless and futile quest to achieve perfection on Earth we have simply become less human. Our ancestors had much more profound connections, and thanks to the tireless work of poets, scholars and authors like Tolkien we have learned so many valuable insights.

  • Prometheus Found

    On the 30th August, 1797 the English author Mary Shelley was born. Her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, were radicals and intellectuals standing on the cusp of a new world. It was the first stirrings of “the Enlightenment”, a rapidly progressive age of cultural, scientific innovation and political change. Europe was soon convulsed by revolution and counter revolution. The old certainties were waning and dramatically new ideas were emerging in their place.

    It was also a fraught and uncertain time in history. Ideas were perceived as dangerous, treasonous, heretical or blasphemous but amidst danger there was a groundswell of hope. The changing social and political fortunes in France provided vital succour to intellectuals and artists who observed that dictatorial systems could founder and fairer, more equitable societies were possible.

    However the French Revolution was not seamless, and despite the hopes and aspirations of the newly liberated people it quickly descended into anarchy and violence. It seems ironic to reflect that a political system that was supposedly driven by reason eventually transformed into an arena of chaos.

    The violence and terror that was unleashed did not deter luminaries in this country from championing their cause. The “Lunar Society” in Birmingham were prominent supporters, as a collective of scientists and philosophers they had great sympathy with the grand ambitions of the French revolutionaries.

    The British public, however, were not so enamoured by them and their presence provoked riots. When a celebratory dinner was held to mark the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, rioters broke into the house of Joseph Priestley and set fire to all of his furniture and books.

    The riots continued for a week. Rioters daubed “Church and King for ever” on the walls. The continent of Europe was disintegrating, and there were genuine fears that the same devastating scenario would be replicated in England. Edmund Burke was one of the first to sound the warning bell. He outlined his many objections in a remarkably prescient letter to the Jacobite politician Lord Bolingbroke, written in 1757.

    Burke’s words were prophetic, and it is incredible that he had enough foresight to realise what could happen in a post-revolutionary society. Utopia was a foolish pipe dream. He explains it all in startlingly lucid and convincing prose, clearly stating that “I have sometimes been in a good deal of doubt, whether the creator did ever really intend man for a state of happiness. He has mixed in his cup a number of natural evils (in spite of the boasts of stoicism they are evils) and every endeavour which the art and policy of mankind has used from the beginning of the world to this day, in order to alleviate, or cure them, has only served to introduce new mischiefs, or to aggravate and inflame the old”. Decades would pass before anyone took his warnings seriously.

    In the meantime, scientists and philosophers continued in their ceaseless quest to perfect human society. It was met with a combination of admiration and scepticism. Coleridge was unimpressed, in spite of the initial enthusiasm expressed by his contemporary poet Wordsworth. He seriously doubted the claims made by these learned men and in a letter to him, he complained vociferously that the notion that, “Man’s having progressed from an Ouran Outang state is contrary to all history, to all religion, nay, to all possibility”. Such cynicism was common. However a young poet named Percy Shelley was inspired by the bold theories presented by the scientists and thinkers.

    According to literary legend, Shelley recounted these alarming scientific discoveries to his wife on that stormy evening on Lake Geneva when the assembled guests of Lord Byron were challenged to conceive ghost stories. Mary Shelley, haunted by the notion that life could be manufactured by godless scientists with supernatural ambitions, was stricken with a nightmare. In her diary she remembered this dream of “a pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man…It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet”. Now we recognise “Frankenstein” as the embodiment of science divorced from human ethics, the personification of a mortal man believing himself to have Godlike powers. This novel continues to resonate today.

  • Love and Poison

    London is a city of extremes. It is the financial, cultural and political capital of England and the centre of the global mass media. It looms large in the popular imagination as an exciting, vibrant hub of art and ideas. On the surface it offers opportunity, fame and wealth. However, beneath this glossy exterior lies a hidden seam of exploitation, violence and venality.

    The Celtic word for “cruel” is “londos”, and the city is aptly named, if indeed this is where the name actually comes from. The most malevolent side of the capital, in an ironic twist, has created a new market of dark tourism. The Whitechapel murders and the mystery of the identity of the murderer remain a perennial source of fascination, and tours are conducted of the area to willing participants who are even prepared to pay good money for the privilege.

    The murders were real events, but over the past century they have acquired the status of myth and legend. Most of the fascination focuses on the murderer and his motives yet scant attention is paid towards his victims. Everybody has heard of “Jack the Ripper”, but very few remember the names of the women he murdered. Not many people are aware of the personal details of these unfortunate women either.

    However this is merely a reflection of a sad and pitiful feature of human nature. It seems that less interest is garnered towards ordinary lives but morbid curiosity is perpetually centred upon the evil doers. The media mirrors popular sensibilities but it also profits from the worst elements. Over time the victims of crime are gradually dehumanised, while the perpetrators are humanised and even sympathised with, because their personalities are discussed and analysed in obsessive detail. Human empathy is dwindling, while the most brutal and sadistic characters are lionised. It is a strange inversion of a civilised society.

    “The Ripper”’s eleven victims were Emma Elizabeth Smith, Martha Tabram, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly, Rose Mylett, Alice McKenzie, Frances Coles and tragically, a woman whose name and identity was never ascertained. They were all murdered in the Whitechapel district between 1888 and 1891, and the perpetrator was never found despite the combined efforts of the police and the local people. However the gruesome nature of these crimes were recorded for posterity by Inspector Dew. Dew was the police officer who attended the scene of one of the murders, he stated that “what happened there, the old nausea, indignation and horror overwhelm me still..It was all before me now, Jack the Ripper at his most devilish. No savage could have been more barbaric. No wild animal could have done anything so horrifying…On the bed, which was drawn obliquely across the small room, was all that remained of a good looking and buxom woman. There was little left of her, not much more than a skeleton. Her face was terribly scarred and mutilated”. The tawdry aspects of East-End existence were put under media glare for the first time.

    The vulnerability of the poorest, most downtrodden women was exposed to the public and it generated an outcry. It led to a vociferous campaign to change the living conditions in the most neglected part of London. Acts of Parliament were passed to guarantee a minimum standard of housing and over the following two decades the East-End slums were demolished. The East-End still has an insalubrious reputation for crime, villainy and vice but it also has a proud history of community, jocularity and solidarity. That is the most important thing to remember.

  • Infinite Gifts

    On the 7th August, 1941 the Bengali poet, thinker and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore died. His work was praised for its depth and compassion. His life, and his legacy was celebrated all over the world, but he was revered with particular devotion in his native birthplace, and this has consolidated over the decades. His writing and philosophy remain a formative influence in India and in modern day Bangladesh and he is still regarded as an integral part of contemporary Bengali identity.

    Tagore became a prominent literary voice during the “Bengal Renaissance”. This was a unique period of Indian history when radically new ideas and artistic innovations developed. India was continually shaped and reshaped by multiple imperial conquests and occupations.

    The British arrival moulded India in a truly distinctive way, but it was a double edged sword. The Raj helped to improve prosperity, educational prospects and health outcomes but with significant costs to the liberty and freedom of ordinary Indians. It was an imperial realm, the “jewel” of the British crown, but administered under martial rule.

    India’s progression and dynamism as an emerging and thriving nation rested on this paradox. However unlike other imperial forces, the British were comparatively benign. The Mughal emperors, in comparison, were intolerant of the native religion and suppressed Indian identity. Islam was a violent imposition, and anyone who dared to resist was murdered.

    In stark contrast, when the British colonised India many of the administrators acquired an affinity for Indian culture and history. One was an esteemed and respected judge based in Calcutta, Sir William Jones. Jones was overwhelmed by the extent of India’s rich classical past. Its wealth and sophistication rivalled Ancient Greece and Rome. He devoted his life to the preservation of India’s antiquity, mastering Sanskrit, translating ancient Indian texts and using this knowledge to uncover India’s hidden history.

    Jones enthused about his new passion, declaring that the Sanskrit language was “more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either…the warriors of the Mahabharata appear greater in my eyes, than Ajax and Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad”. However while the histories of Ancient Greece and Rome were detailed in written sources, India’s past left no trace.

    It was a painstaking challenge to reconstruct the history purely from the remnants of archaeology. In 1794, the governor-general, Warren Hastings, became the patron of the Asiatic Society, and Jones was its original founder. The society recruited a collective of volunteers, mostly British civil and military officers who searched vast areas of the Indian countryside for historical artefacts.

    The Bengal Renaissance coincided with this new effort to reclaim Indian identity and culture. The first notable figure was the Brahmin sage Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Roy’s gifts as an intellectual and persuasive polemicist were recognised by the East India Company who employed him as a translator. Roy understood that conciliation was the best tactic. He was useful to the British as he was an effective mediator and could even quell any nascent rebellion.

    Roy was also an eminent scholar, a fluent linguist and expert theologian. He was also a practicing Hindu and was resistant to Christian conversion. In fact, he felt deeply affronted by the very suggestion. He criticised the British missionaries who “travel to a distant country for the purpose of overturning the opinions of its inhabitants and introducing their own”. In spite of this, he acquired an insight into the benevolent intentions of Christianity.

    Roy attempted to reconcile and adapt to the religion, culture and sensibilities of the British. He acknowledged that the education system that was established under British rule was fairer and more equitable than the system that preceded it. Under the previous regime, education was restricted to higher caste Indians, as learning was conducted in temples or mosques where the so-called “untouchables” were forbidden to enter. The British built schools on public land, allowing every Indian child the chance to be educated.

    Roy went on cultural exchanges, visiting officials in Britain and he soon became an instrumental figure. He managed to convince his fellow co-religionists that the practice of widow burning was heretical, quoting a verse from the 7th century Sanskrit poet Bana. Bana called these unnecessarily cruel and pointless deaths as a “mere freak of madness, a path of ignorance”. Roy’s pioneering work endeared him to the British, and to the Indians. However as Indian confidence grew, his collaboration with the imperialists was perceived with suspicion.

    He died in 1833, but for decades afterwards his work was dissected and analysed, and his reputation was mixed. Many other Indian thinkers attacked him, and sought to eradicate him from Indian history. However Tagore soon became his greatest champion, and defended his allegiance with the British.

    He admired his work in Indian education and corrected his critics. He stated that “Roy had the full inheritance of Indian wisdom. He was never a school boy of the West, and therefore had the dignity to be a friend of the West”. Tagore, as a fellow Brahmin and Hindu followed his example, and continued in the proud tradition of learning and seeking wisdom.

    Tagore’s most revered collection is “Gitanjali”, which was published in 1910. Three years later an English translation was published, entitled “Song Offerings”. These are powerful, lyrical meditations on the conflict between the spiritual and material, and the attempts to find a semblance of harmony with both. A truly harmonious existence is never truly realised, and it is intensely onerous for the narrator to find any degree of equanimity.

    The narrator is engaged in a perpetual search for transcendence, but is continually thwarted by worldly concerns. Enlightenment is clearly a luxury and indulgence in a state of material penury. However, attaining wisdom is an example of true courage in a world inhabited by those who are fixated by superficial, earthly concepts like money, status and possessions. Very few individuals are brave enough to divest themselves of these elements to seek substance and meaning. Even now, his message of universal love continues to resonate, not just in the East, but all over the world.

  • Shooting the Elephant

    On the 25th June, 1903 the author George Orwell was born. Orwell was the literary pseudonym of Eric Blair and he was born into a lower middle-class English family in India. All of his ancestors had deep and enduring connections to the British Empire. He returned to England for his education at the age of five. He won a scholarship to Eton in 1911 and although he loathed it, his nascent literary skills were honed at this august institution. He became a prolific contributor to the in-house magazine.

    When he left Eton he found employment as a military policeman in Burma. This heady experience informed and shaped his political perspective. He acquired a very real and visceral understanding of imperialism and the effects, both direct and indirect on the psyche and sensibility of the British people. It politicised him in a truly profound way, even more significantly than his school days at Eton when he was embedded with the sons of the English elites.

    Orwell’s formative years coincided with seismic historical events, and shifting epochs. Concepts of nation, and Empire were subverted throughout the twentieth century. The presence of the British in South and East Asia was fraught and complicated. The British sent administrators and military personnel to a region of the world steeped in culture and heritage. Over time, they developed a great affection for these places, and many sought to preserve and conserve the history of this fascinating corner of the world. In spite of their valiant efforts they were not always appreciated by the local people. They were met with resistance, which sometimes turned violent.

    Orwell was frustrated and even confined by this contradiction, complaining that he “was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible”. It inspired him to write a polemic entitled “Shooting an Elephant”, based on his work as a military policeman in a rural enclave of Burma.

    The essay details an incident involving an unruly elephant threatening the villagers. He is reluctant to kill this magnificent but dangerous beast but in the face of an angry and terrified populace he is coerced into shooting it. The tale itself is an allegory of the British Empire. The Empire focussed upon bringing the benefits of British political systems to enable other countries to develop and thrive, but in practice only served to alienate.

    It remains a bitter irony that this was a project initially conceived to revitalise the world. However it altered the nature of the countries that were colonised in a fundamental and irrevocable way, and ruined the ambitions of enterprising young men seeking fortune and adventure.

    However the failures of the Empire are actually overstated, and the benefits are often ignored. It is easy to castigate a historical entity in hindsight. Modern commentators, lacking the lived experience of the Empire builders, enjoy criticising it. It is almost a fashion, resulting from ignorance and cynicism. The same tired tropes are constantly reiterated. It is tiresome to even attempt to counter them.

    However one important distinction must be made, between English nationalism and British imperialism. These two concepts are polar opposites, and Orwell was one of the first writers to explain the difference. Orwell loved England, its culture, its history and its people. He loved the quaintness of “stamp collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts players and crossword-puzzle fans”. And, in spite of his numerous adventures and travels over the world, he longed to return to the familiarity of England, “the sleekest landscape in the world”. The British Empire was an early incarnation of globalism, and the neo-liberal economic experiment. It is like that lumbering elephant and it needs to die.