The Cowley Dump, by Wiggia

I had the pleasure of visiting the Paul Nash exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich on the UEA campus. I have visited before for other exhibitions but this was a bit hurried as the exhibition closes on the 20^th of August and a couple of “promises” to go did not materialise.

Nash of course is renowned for his work in the First World War after he fought on the Western Front and the impact it had on him which he translated into his paintings.

Between the wars his work changed direction into the fantastical world and surrealism in many cases using the landscape as a backdrop to his visions.

At the start of the Second World War he was employed as the official artist attached to the RAF and produced a series of paintings of aircraft depicted as aerial creatures in animated positions ready for action, and then a series of crashed enemy aircraft.

But the interesting painting was his most famous Second World War work "Totes Meer" (German for “Dead Sea”), painted in 1941.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/N/N05/N05717_10.jpg

The work was a version by Nash of the Cowley dump, not one of the most obvious by products of war but a necessary place for the disposal of crashed enemy aircraft. It also contained as much British material but Nash focused on the German. It's a place I had not heard of before and not the only one of its kind in the UK, but it is the one immortalised in the painting.

It was of course on the site of the motor works, much of which had been turned over for the manufacturing of aircraft, and the salvage yard was a valuable resource of materials for refurbishment cannibalisation and reuse of valuable metals at this time of shortage.

The painting was done shortly after the Battle of Britain and this is what Nash said of his work.

'The thing (the salvage dump) looked to me, suddenly, like a great inundating sea. You might feel – under certain circumstances – a moonlight night, for instance, this is a vast tide moving across the fields, the breakers rearing up and crashing on the plain. And then, no, nothing moves, it is not water or even ice, it is something static and dead. It is metal piled up, wreckage. It is hundreds and hundreds of flying creatures which invaded these shores (how many Nazi planes have been shot down or otherwise wrecked in this country since they first invaded?). Well, here they are, or some of them. By moonlight, the waning moon, one could swear they began to move and twist and turn as they did in the air. A sort of rigor mortis? No, they are quite dead and still. The only moving creature is the white owl flying low over the bodies of the other predatory creatures, raking the shadows for rats and voles. She isn’t there, of course, as a symbol quite so much as the form and colour essential just there to link up with the cloud fringe overhead.'

And here is Nash himself sketching at the dump:

https://bbm.org.uk/airmen/Nash-Cowley1-opt.jpg 

What also comes out of this story is that it could be multiplied many times world wide during the war, showing the incredible production during the war effort, most of which ended up in places like this or the bottom of the sea.

So a fascinating snippet emerged from my morning of culture, that I would not otherwise have learnt about, time well spent.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/TGA/TGA-7050PH/TGA-7050PH-54-1_10.jpg

Language, evolution and social class

It’s interesting how social stratification encourages people lower down in the scale not only to mock the accents of their superiors but to adopt them, with the result that in some cases the ‘refined’ version has become the standard for all:

From W G Elliot’s “In My Anecdotage” (1925)

Page 233:

Let me confess, there is one sort of person who is about still - though there were more before 1914 - whom I cannot bear. We all know the Cockney accent is hideous, and the Glasgow accent still worse, but the accent of some of the swagger and fashionable people takes the cake. They speak thus - men and women alike : “Shall we lunch heah or theah, were they have some first-class beah ? Heah ? - good - heah, heah !” This horrible accent is supposed to be a sign of one who “goes the pace” and consists, as I have shown, in turning word such as “here” into much the same pronunciation as “dear” or “Leah.”

Page 242:

I wonder if any of my readers have ever noticed that when two common people meet and one of them recounts a conversation of his with a “toff” he always reproduces the “toff’s” tones thus: “Ai saye, old cheap,  can you tell me how Ai can get to Ba-aker Street?” I suppose that, to them, the voices of the upper classes all sound the same, full of false refinement and artificiality, like that of the “refined” lady at the Telephone Exchange who, if you ask for “549 Gerrard” almost invariably answers” “Gerard faive four naine.” I thought this disgusting pronunciation was quite modern, but on turning up an old book of Thackeray’s stories written in the ‘fifties, I found that that he makes a middle class lady say to one of her husband's old brother officers when he calls there: “I’ll ask my husband to put the ‘waine’ upon ‘aice.’” My idea is that in some remoter period Society people used to talk with these mannerisms of speech and that they are now the property of some of the middle and lower classes.

From Maurice Baring’s “The Puppet Show Of Memory” (1932)

Pages 58-59:

A picturesque figure, as of another age, was my great-aunt, Lady Georgiana Grey, who came to Membland once in my childhood. She was old enough to have played the harp to Byron. She lived at Hampton Court and played whist every night of her life, and sometimes went up to London to the play when she was between eighty and ninety. She was not deaf, her sight was undimmed, and she had a great contempt for people who were afraid of draughts. She had a fine aptitude for flat contradiction, and she was a verbal conservative, that is to say, she had a horror of modern locutions and abbreviations, piano for pianoforte, balcŏny for balcōni, cucumber for cowcumber, Montagu for Mountagu, soot for sut, yellow for yallow.

My wife’s father (born in the early 1930s) would sometimes say “cowcumber” as a humorously self-conscious archaism. And her mother, as a child, would play “Chainies” with her friends, that is, dig up bits of old crockery and use them as imaginary Chinese tea-sets.

Samuel Pepys’s diary (25 September 1660) [http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1660/09/25/]:

“...afterwards I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before, and went away.”

I suspect ‘tee’ was then pronounced to rhyme with ‘say’, as in modern German, and among the Irish until recently in English as well as Gaelic [http://www.bitesize.irish/inirish/1259].

I wonder if some professor of old languages such as Anglo-Saxon, if sent back undercover in a time machine to the period of his study, would be instantly spotted as an interloper as soon as he opened his mouth.

"He's Got 'Em On": a literary ramble

In Jerome K Jerome's “Three Men In A Boat” (1889)^[1] there is a passage where the men get lost and are relieved when they hear someone playing a popular melody:

"I do not admire the tones of a concertina, as a rule; but, oh! how beautiful the music seemed to us both then — far, far more beautiful than the voice of Orpheus or the lute of Apollo, or anything of that sort could have sounded. Heavenly melody, in our then state of mind, would only have still further harrowed us. A soul-moving harmony, correctly performed, we should have taken as a spirit-warning, and have given up all hope. But about the strains of “He’s got ’em on,” jerked spasmodically, and with involuntary variations, out of a wheezy accordion, there was something singularly human and reassuring."

Intrigued by this, I attempted to find out more about the song. This proved more difficult than I had expected. Via Google and Google Images, I now know it's from the Beefsteak Club's 1878 "Forty Thieves" burlesque, originally performed at the Gaiety Theatre (see W G Elliot, "Amateur Clubs and Actors" [1898] Chap. 6)^[2] and (I think) re-staged there from 1880 onwards. An image of the front page of the song sheet is on the V&A website at 

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1274591/hes-got-em-on-sheet-music-spalding-william/ ...

- but I couldn't find the words or music.

However there is a reproduction of the same thing in "The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860-1914" by Christopher Breward^[3], and there it says it's in the Bodleian's John Johnson collection under Entertainers and Music Hall Singers.

I emailed the Bodleian to ask for a copy/transcript of the lyrics and notation - and they replied the same day ! - but they only have the cover. I then use the V&A’s contact form and asked the same thing - silence, so far.

The  libretto of the Forty Thieves is still available^[4]. Written by Robert Reece,  W.S. Gilbert  (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) and a couple of others, it was a highly successful production which raised a lot of money for charity.

Having some experience of amateur drama myself I looked up Elliot’s book and then came across another that he wrote later in life called “In My Anecdotage” (1925)^[5] I bought the latter and have just finished reading it. It's a fascinating insight into the mind of an upper class man from less than a century ago.  Educated at Eton and Cambridge, Elliot was writing in 1924, two years after the foundation of the British Broadcasting Company (radio) and five years before the first UK television broadcast and the first British talking feature film.^[6] Cinema was only just beginning to replace live theatre as a profitable form of mass entertainment and Elliot could still recall a time when a theatre could make money even when only half the seats were taken.

In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras upper-class gentlemen and ladies were expected to have amateur personal accomplishments such as acting and singing and many a grand house would entertain its guests with skits and parlour games such as “dumb crambo” (a kind of Charades with costumes and props). The head of the household would lead the family in prayers and the country was run by a relatively small and tightly-knit group educated at a handful of public schools and Oxbridge.

But the UK had just (1924) elected its first Labour Government. Of women, so far only householders had been granted the right to vote (1918); Liberal and feminist sympathisers like Elliott welcomed their new freedoms while at the same time being somewhat taken aback by how some of them exercised it. Not far ahead were the General Strike, the Wall Street Crash, the Depression and another world war.

A rapidly vanishing world.

---

^[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Men-Boat-Jerome-Klapka-ebook/dp/B004UJL1KK

^[2] Online text: https://archive.org/details/amateurclubsacto00ellirich

^[3] Page 224: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BjY0_hN-hOIC&q=forty+thieves#v=snippet&q=forty%20thieves&f=false

^[4] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/1515113876/ref=tmm_other_meta_binding_new_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=new&qid=1501940736&sr=8-1

^[5] https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/in-my-anecdotage/author/elliot-w-g/

^[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue_of_the_New_Pin_(1929_film)

Portsmouth Historic Dockyard

HMS Victory

Portsmouth dockyard is home to historic warships alongside museums showcasing naval history. The dockyard has many attractions so you need at least two days to get the best out of it. A good place to start is HMS Victory, Lord Nelson’s flagship and the world’s oldest commissioned warship. Victory is in dry dock so unable to sport full mast because the weight would cause her hull to bow. In 1805 she was Lord Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar, the battle in which Nelson died a hero’s death and which also marked the end of Napoleon’s attempt to invade Britain by the seas.

The inside of Victory gives an insight into what life would be like at sea. I found it a lot more compact inside than I imagined; even I had to duck my head at times. I found it strange to think that I was on the vessel where Nelson spent the last moments of his life.

The Mary Rose

In a dry dock behind HMS Victory is the new Mary Rose museum.  The building was purpose built to house the remains the flagship of King Henry VIII which capsized and sank in the Solent in 1545. The museum is very well done; the remains of the Mary Rose are on its starboard side and on the port side the artifacts that were found with the ship were displayed laid out as they would have been on the ship. The starboard side was preserved by silt whilst the port-side was exposed and so decayed and was lost. The Mary Rose is currently behind Perspex because she is being dried out as part of the final stages of the work undertaken to preserve her. It was good for me to have seen Victory first because the layout of the two ships is similar which allowed me to interpret clearly what I was seeing of the Mary Rose.

Another historic sailing ship housed at Portsmouth is HMS Warrior. Built in 1860 she was the first armour-plated iron-hulled warship, the most revolutionary warship built. She rendered every other battleship of the time obsolete. Warrior was propelled by steam power as well as being fully rigged for sail.

HMS Illustrious with HMS M.33 in the foreground

Historic dockyard No. 1 houses HMS M.33 a Coastal Bombardment vessel built in 1915. M.33 is one of only two British warships to survive from the First World War. The ship fought in the Gallipoli Campaign and went on to play a part in the Russian civil war. She is currently being renovated and it is planned that the work will be completed, allowing full public access, in time for the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli Campaign later this year.

The dockyard is still a working naval dockyard and current ships of the Royal Navy can be seen in the harbour. They can also be viewed from Victory museum’s viewing platform. During my visit, one of the museum’s curators explained about the decommissioning of HMS Illustrious within Portsmouth Dockyard. She then produced a book on warships and showed some of the ships that were currently in dock. Another prominent ship in the docks at the time was HMS Dragon (Type 45 air defence destroyer) which was being refitted prior to her current deployment in the South Atlantic.

The curator next pointed out a Victorian structure that covered the place where Queen Victoria alighted her train before boarding a ship to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. I was also pointed in the right direction to find W L Wyllie’s excellent Panorama of Trafalgar which I otherwise would have missed. The painting was displayed as a ’son et lumiere’ which was an excellent way of showing it off but it also meant I couldn’t linger to study it as long as I would have liked.

Ships in Port

The best way to see the ships that are docked in the port, along with other more permanent features is to take a boat trip around the harbour. The tour includes a commentary naming the ships in harbour on the day and pointing out other various features of interest.

It is also possible to take a free water bus to Gosport to see HMS Alliance at the Submarine Museum and the Museum of Naval Firepower which is situated nearby. I ran out of time so this is on my list for the next time I visit.

Royal Marines Museum

Another attraction included in the entrance ticket is the nearby Museum of the Royal Marines which is housed in the former Royal Marines Officers Mess at Eastney Barracks. The museum provides an in depth history of the Royal Marines and gives insight into what modern Royal Marines basic training involves and what it takes to be a Royal Marine. The videos of recruit’s stories as they undertook their basic training are quite touching and enlightening. I spent the whole morning there and I could have done with a little bit longer.

The dockyards are also home to the National Museum of the Royal Navy which is dedicated to past and present men and women of the Royal Navy. In addition to the fine ships and Naval history that can be seen at the dockyards there are many other historical landmarks that are worthy of notice.

• Dockyard Landmarks

I thoroughly recommend a visit to the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard and its associated attractions, not all of which I have mentioned.

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Mechelen

Martin’s Patershof breakfast room

Last Christmas Mr C and I didn't really want anything in the way of presents so we decided to treat ourselves to a relaxing weekend away instead. This ruled out flying because that would mean several (non-relaxing) hours in an airport waiting to fly…

As luck would have it an email arrived from the Belgian hotel chain that we used when we stayed in Bruges. It gave us inspiration and I fell in love with one of the hotels in the chain. The Hotel, Martin’s Patershof, is a converted Church. I researched the hotel’s town, Mechelen (Malines in French rather than Flemish), and found that it had many things of interest. The guidebooks describe it as a beautiful medieval town, with charm and outstanding architectural treasures.

We decided that the best way to travel was by train. The ‘end to end’ journey could easily be booked via the Eurostar site. As well as travel to Brussels by Eurostar, we also booked travel by rail to London and onward from Brussels.

The Town Hall viewed from the Grote Markt

The journey to and from Mechelen by train including Eurostar was enjoyable and relaxing. We had the luxury of being served with meals and drinks on both inward and outward journeys. On arrival in Mechelen we quickly unpacked our bags before setting off to explore the town. During my stay one thing I couldn’t help but notice was the abundance of bicycles both with and without riders. I will always remember Mechelen as the town of bicycles. This inspired me to purchase a Dutch style bicycle shortly after I returned home from my travels.

The hotel lived up to expectations. Architectural features and stained glass windows are prominent throughout the hotel and our room had a stained glass window and stone pillars. The breakfast room is quite stunning being situated in what was the choir of the church. The breakfast buffet was one of the best I have ever seen. There was even a decadent option of having a complimentary glass of Cava; I decided not to indulge so early in the morning.

St Rumbold’s Cathedral from the Grote Markt

Although this hotel is no longer a place of worship there are many historic churches still in use and eight are promoted as especially worthy of a visit. St Rumbold’s Cathedral with its wonderful architecture, artworks and stained glass windows was on our ‘to visit’ list but it was difficult to decide which others to include. We settled on the Beguinage Church (which we found to be full of amazing artworks and treasures), Church of our Lady Hanswidj (whilst there we learned that it would shut for renovations in just two weeks’ time for four years), and the Church of our Lady across the Dyle. The custodians of each of the churches were very proud of their churches and keen to point out the special features of each to us. Being English we were somewhat of a novelty to them, with Mechelen not being an obvious choice for British travelers.

Kazerne Dossin military barracks viewed from the museum

Mechelen played a sobering part in the history of WW2 so the Kazerne Dossin museum and military barracks were also on our ‘to visit’ list. The barracks and museum serve as a permanent history and memorial to the Jews who were held there awaiting deportation. I found the museum thought provoking. It serves as a poignant reminder that atrocities still occur today and invites the visitor to ask questions and look for answers. Alongside the barracks is a restored railway goods wagon that had been used to transport the Jews from the barracks to Auschwitz Birkenau.

Haverwerf on the banks of the River Dyle

We visited many other things of interest; the garden of the former palace of Margaret of Austria (Belgium was, at one time, a part of the Holy Roman Empire, which was ruled by the Austrian Habsberg dynasty), an art exhibition of the work of Rik Wouters which is housed in the Schepenhuis, the toy museum, the Beguinages and we strolled through the botanic garden to see the ancient wooden fulling mill and also along the River Dyle passing the Haverwerf and three noticeable houses from the sixteenth and seventeenth century. We were even lucky enough to find ourselves next to the Grote Markt when the annual carnival was in full flow. The town has its own brewery as do many towns in Belgium, although we didn’t go inside we passed it on more than one occasion as we explored Mechelen.

No visit to Belgium is complete without sampling some chocolate. We came home with a box for ourselves and some as gifts. The lady in the shop guided us through the different options and helped us to choose a bespoke collection for someone who has nut allergies. The delicious chocolates didn’t last long…

I enjoyed my stay in Mechelen and the Hotel Patershof; there is more than a passing chance that I may return there one day.

You can read the unabridged version of my travels in the following links; Mechelen Day One, Mechelen Day Two, Mechelen Day Three, Mechelen Day Four and Mechelen Day Five.

The best place to find out about the attractions of Mechelen is the official tourism site.

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All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.