Welfare State, meet your end

Peter Hitchens hits the nail on the head again today. Under the headline "Our drug-addled louts are the REAL reason we need migrants" he runs through the four plagues withering Britain:

- undisciplined, fatherless children;
- the failure of the education system to differentiate - not to access the same learning in many different ways (turning teachers into overworking, PC-ridden drudges), but to teach what is most suitable to that child's abilities, including vocational skills;
- giveaway welfare, and a laissez-faire approach to the habitual intoxication that lets youngsters grow up feckless and feral;
- courts that don't enforce the law

Michael Heseltine appears to second Hitchens' solution. While he now says "There have to be controls on immigration across Europe" - which I think is a forced change from his previous position - he points out the shortage of manpower in the public services:

"There is no alternative supply of skilled labour from our own population...It would take a decade to train up enough British workers to fill the gaps."

Fine, do it. Yes, let's admit foreign labour to remedy our shortfalls, but let's also tackle the real problems we have in our disorderly society. Because if we don't, goodbye the Welfare State.

75 years ago, William Beveridge produced his report, aiming to slay the "five giant evils of society": squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease. We now have them again, but in a different guise - their modern versions are voluntary.

The long-term solution is not more immigration. The country is already incapable of feeding itself without massive food imports, which will become much more expensive for us as the differences in global pay narrow. If somebody comes in and pays less in taxes (direct and indirect) than he and his family take out, the wealth of the country declines; especially if by coming in ready and able to work he helps cement his British underclass counterpart in toxic idleness.

Our system doesn't challenge enough. The social workers I meet think that for a client to have a need is to have it met, and I'm not hard-hearted enough to say that underfed children should continue to sleep on sofas in dingy, dogbeshitten houses; but nobody seems to want to strengthen the family by enforcing marital/quasimarital responsibilities, particularly on men - but even if they did, where's the work and training? Where are the negative consequences for crime? What, other than pleading, wheedling and emotional manipulation (and they are trying, believe me), are teachers allowed to do to enforce discipline in the classroom?

People respond to game rules:

"I have a little boy, younger than you, who knows six Psalms by heart: and when you ask him which he would rather have, a gingerbread-nut to eat or a verse of a Psalm to learn, he says: 'Oh! the verse of a Psalm! angels sing Psalms;' says he, 'I wish to be a little angel here below;' he then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety."

- Charlotte Bronte, "Jane Eyre", Chap. 4

The rules are long past due an overhaul. We've helped create the underclass in pursuit of other objectives: Labour and the LibDems, riding their hobby-horse of melting-pot immigration; the Tories, exploiting their opponents' Johnny-Head-In-Air idealism to bring in cheap labour and swell the bottom line of their business backers. Who defended our industry and its domestic ownership, our intellectual property, our R&D, our trade in real things?

If the decline continues, Beveridge's wonderful system will crack.

"Elitist" education and Britain's survival

James Delingpole on the famous scientist James Lovelock:

Born in 1919 into a working-class Quaker family, [...] Lovelock’s experiences at a grammar school in Brixton made him a firm believer in selective education.

‘It wasn’t the teaching, it was the kids,’ Lovelock says. ‘When I came back from the summer holidays when I was 13 there was one boy called Piercy, who said: “I’ve been spending the hols swotting up on quantum theory.” This was 1933. It was utterly new. It wasn’t taught in universities. “And if any of you are interested in discussing it…” And we did. Now this is the unique education only a grammar school could give because it had selected. No bullies. No nasties. Just kids who were intelligent enough to be interested in the world around them… Egalitarianism is utterly evil. It’s contra Darwin.’ (i)

Whereas:

"If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland."

- Anthony "Tony" Crosland, in 1965, as quoted by his wife in her biography of him. (ii) "Tony" attended an independent school (Highgate) and went on to Trinity College, Oxford, returning after the War to read PPE and become a don there.

As so many others have done, I ask, why grammar schools? Why not abolish private schools, if he was so intent on eradicating privilege?

Or was there some subtler plan? Was it to kick away the ladder of opportunity for talented working-class children like Lovelock, so that their resentments would fester and burst out when the chance of Revolution came?

Perhaps it was not so bad as that. Maybe the aim was more to blur the social boundaries by sending all secondary school children to comprehensives.

The first comprehensive I taught at - then the largest school in Birmingham - was ferociously disciplined and high-achieving in the late 70s/80s, under a whisky-drinking workaholic martinet who didn't live to pick up his pension; but he was exceptional and had turned the school around from earlier underperformance.

I was told that when the school was first "comprehensivised" in the Sixties it had enjoyed the support of the sort of parents who previously would have sent their children to grammar or private schools. Over time, as they perceived that great experiment was turning out a failure, many of them took their offspring elsewhere.

Part of the turnaround was to sort the c. 400-a-year new intake into streams and sets, with annual exams and re-setting children as appropriate. This certainly suited the many aspirant working-class parents - but I'm pretty sure that it had attitudinal consequences for those classed as being varying degrees of "failure". High - and sometime physical - discipline and staff coordination maintained order and made even unacademic children sought after by employers in the area, who wanted smartly-dressed regular attenders used to taking instructions.

But there were lots of other schools not run by overworking heads with first-class brains. Lovelock is right - there needs to be somewhere for "swots" to develop their minds, without having their heads forced into the lavatory by chippy thugs.

And we all need those grammar school children. Ironmonger's son General Bill Slim was one (iii), and without him the Japanese might have overrun not only Burma but India.

Today, as Britain continues (as it has done for decades) to be undermined by the Left and sold off piecemeal by the Right, we need to lead in science and technology again if we are to feed our overpopulated nation. Agricultural self-sufficiency is not an option.

Grammar schools; and a belated defence of our industrial base.

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(i) https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/james-lovelock-on-voting-brexit-wicked-renewables-and-why-he-changed-his-mind-on-climate-change/
(ii) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tony-Crosland-Susan/dp/022401787X
(iii) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Slim,_1st_Viscount_Slim#Early_years

FRIDAY MUSIC: Hiromi, by JD

The BBC Promenade Concerts are always good value and have become more varied in scope during recent years. There is now a regular evening of big band jazz but this year's offering was rather lacklustre as Wiggia pointed out in his post the other day. The whole evening was rescued with the appearance of Hiromi who gave a very hyperactive and barnstorming performance. Absolutely magnificent!

She has the spirit and the exuberance of Dorothy Donegan who featured here in January of this year- http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/friday-night-is-music-night-dorothy.html

But Hiromi is not just a brilliant jazz pianist, she plays classical music equally well having started at the age of five: from her Wiki profile:

"Hiromi started learning classical piano at age five, and was later introduced to jazz by her piano teacher Noriko Hikida. At 14, she played with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. When she was 17, she met Chick Corea by chance in Tokyo, and was invited to play with him at his concert the next day. After being a jingle writer for a few years for Japanese companies such as Nissan, she enrolled to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. There, she was mentored by Ahmad Jamal and had already signed with jazz label Telarc before her graduation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiromi_Uehara

Her natural talent is self-evident in the videos below but especially so in the first one, an inspired version of the famous Canon in D by Johann Pachelbel. Beginning with a metallic damping of the strings to make the piano sound rather like a harpsichord, she then weaves in and around the melody but at no point does she lose the tempo or deviate from the chord structure of the piece. This is pure genius!

The Old Boy Network

December 1970: we meet up with an older school acquaintance for a drink the night before our Oxbridge interviews. In the Turf Tavern and by the warm light of candles (power cuts, again) we sup delicious, fruity cider - hardly like alcohol at all. Which come first light violently disagrees with me, repeatedly.

After breakfast - dry cornflakes that nevertheless trampoline back up - the dons ask me whether Shakespeare's plays had to be based on real experience. White-faced, which doubtless they take for nerves, I say no. And don't elaborate. Next I have to meet the Principal, crossing his deep pile white carpet determined not to decorate it in a way that will never come out. Since my family are in Cyprus, he asks me if I know the Governor. Honestly and bovinely, I say no.

Somehow they didn't hold it against me.

Not so for lion-hearted Monty Modlyn in the 1940s:

You know, it's terribly difficult for an ordinary bloke who's been to an elementary school to get a job in life with any position in some big organisations. I remember applying for a job as an outside broadcast reporter for radio with the BBC, and being invited to attend an interview in Portland Place.

The Chairman of the Board was a very tall, slim gentleman, and even when he was sitting down he seemed about 6 feet tall. His name was Lotbiniere but he pronounced it Lowbinyare.(i) I had to go in front of him and two or three other people who were nearly as high, and he said. “Why do you want this job?” And I said, well, I think I've got the dash I'm able to chat, I like meeting people. At this time there were very few reporters on the BBC, just after the war.

Then he said to me, “May we ask you, what school did you go to?” When I filled in the application form I'd put down Westminster School, you see, so he said, “You went to Westminster School?” and I said, “Yes, Westminster Bridge Road Elementary LCC School.”

Well, the poor man nearly had an apoplectic fit. I thought he was going to drop down dead, and the three other people with him seemed nearly as bad. I felt that I wanted to rush forward and give them water from the jug which was on the table. “Westminster Bridge Road Elementary LCC school!” It was enough to give anyone in his position a nasty shock.

I discovered of course afterwards that he was an old Etonian, this Mr Lotbiniere, a very fine gentleman, well spoken, with a very distinguished position in BBC radio and later in television. I believe his sons are there now;(ii) it's a kind of tradition there, that there's always a Lotbiniere, or Lowbinyare if you pronounce it correctly.

I told the story to a producer many years afterwards, when he asked me why I never had a regular job with the BBC, but always had to get free-lance work. He was a fellow who worked for many years as a producer on the BBC. He told me that when he had to go before a board and was asked what school he went to, he'd been more on the ball than me and said he went to Canterbury School. There's a very big public school at Canterbury, and they all assumed he been there, but actually he went to a very ordinary school in Canterbury. When the Chairman of the Board said to him, “Did you know Mr So-and-So?” he said “Oh yes, very well.” “What a charming man,” said the Chairman of the Board. “Yes, isn't he just,” said my friend. “Right, now. Yes, the job’s yours,” said the Chairman.

Until this very day, my friend told me, they still don't realise that he never went to that famous Canterbury school. Very much the old tradition. (iii)

But just perhaps, they did indeed realise. Here is Northcote Parkinson who, having explained the traditional British method of candidate selection by family connection, goes on to discuss the Navy version:

The Board of Admirals  were unimpressed by titled relatives as such. What they sought to establish was a service connection. The ideal candidate would reply to the second question ["To whom then are you related?"], “Yes, Admiral Parker is my uncle. My father is Captain Foley, my grandfather Commodore Foley. My mother's father was Admiral Hardy. Commander Hardy is my uncle. My eldest brother is a Lieutenant in the Royal Marines, my next brother is a cadet at Dartmouth and my younger brother wears a sailor suit. “Ah!” the senior Admiral would say. “And what made you think of joining the Navy?” The answer to this question, however, would scarcely matter, the clerk present having already noted the candidate as acceptable. Given a choice between two candidates, both equally acceptable by birth, a member of the Board would ask suddenly, “What was the number of the taxi you came in?” The candidate who said “I came by bus” was then thrown out. The candidate who said, truthfully, “I don't know,” was rejected and the candidate who said “Number 2351” (lying) was promptly admitted to the service as a boy with initiative. This method often produced excellent results. (iv)

Was there really a "So-and-So" at Canterbury? One wonders...

A major reason why such an approach could be useful, apart from the ability to draw on a well-developed network of social links, is that in the days before Welfare, kinship and friendship had iron rules and responsibilities - think how Lydia's foolishness in "Pride and Prejudice" risks social ruin for all the Bennets. A man from an old Navy family would be prepared to die horribly rather than dishonour his own people.

But I'm glad to have had that chance to be one of what, some years later, a fellow boarding-house guest scornfully referred to as "Lord Nuffield's thousands" - something that a generation before, pre the expansion of tertiary education, would have been almost unthinkable.

_____________________________________________
(i) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_de_Lotbiniere
(ii) not excatly: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/anthony-joly-de-lotbiniere-1587366.html
(iii) Monty Modlyn, “Pardon My Cheek” (Hutchinson,1973), pp. 51-52
(iv) C Northcote Parkinson, "Parkinson's Law" (1957), chap. 5

Modern Jazz: A Japanese Thing ! - by Wiggia

I know JD is doing a piece on the Japanese pianist Hiromi, who saved a dire BBC Proms big band night after the band leaders decided to indulge themselves in their favorite instruments to such excess as to be boring - over two hours of mainly trumpet and asst brass is an indulgence too far. I only watched it because my nephew was playing in one of the bands; to feature one sax solo in that time from him who was voted by his peers this year as the best saxophonist in the country is a real waste of talent. But this is not about that. Having got it off my chest, it is about the impact Hiromi had that night and everywhere she plays, it is a talent extraordinaire.

What she did do is draw attention to the fact that modern jazz is very popular in Japan. Much of the music is original and they do seem to have more females playing in the genre than anywhere else.

It appears that jazz started to be played in Japan in and around 1910. The reason it filtered back there was that the ocean liners that plied their trade into the States at that time had bands/orchestras on board and when docking in places like San Francisco the musicians would go to see the local jazz bands and buy sheet music and records that they took home with them. Some also played in hotel lobby orchestras while in town.

With the advent of popular music in the late twenties Japan became exposed to American music in films. Much of the music had jazz overtones and the hip guys and girls of the period became in effect flappers and dandies in the dance halls.

It was after WW11 that the floodgates opened, Many American soldiers who were stationed in Japan after the war were musicians and formed dance bands to play locally, but to fill the numbers they recruited Japanese musicians.

In the fifties and sixties Japanese musicians started to make an impression in their own right, the most famous being Toshiko Akiyoshi the pianist, an uncompromising lady from the start who would play be bop and insist to the clubs that she played there would be no vocalist, just her and her band playing be bop; not always the popular choice amongst club owners.

By this time they were being recognised abroad especially in the States but not necessarily treated as equals, there being a comparative tone to the reviews of their music, rather like Matt Munro was referred to as the English Perry Como rather than just Matt Munro.

The Japanese started to go their own way as simply being an outpost for American music was a dead end, so they experimented with various set ups and incorporated Japanese music in their jazz, especially when playing abroad, for obvious reasons: playing Count Basie when Basie was still alive was pointless in America.

Today the music is seen as hip and sophisticated, a culture of its own. In popular terms it is on a par with the same music in say the UK: not much exposure on the radio or TV but it has a fan base, and it has made its mark abroad with now Hiromi and the sax player Takuya Kuroda who landed a Blue Note contract which in itself is an accolade.

I am not going to put up anything by Hiromi as JD is going to do an extensive post on her. I have drawn the short straw and have had to ferret through unknown territories to come up with the weird and the hopefully wonderful.

Toshiko Akiyoshi is an international star as a pianist and a bandleader, plus she won the Best Composer and Arranger award in the reader's poll in Downbeat, the first woman to do so. Here she is with her trio in 1958:


And here playing the Village at her 60th anniversary concert:


and here conducting her big band with Long Yellow Road:


and finally at the Monterrey jazz festival in ‘75 with Clark Terry on trumpet:


Takuya Kuroda playing RSBD now on Concord records; this from 2016:


and here with "Everybody Loves the Sunshine":


The Swing Girls - First and Last concert !


In Tokyo, the Teikyo High School Band, the Swinging Honey Bees:


Another of many talented lady Japanese pianists, Junko Onishi with her trio:


and the last of these, Senri Kawaguchi (the drummer) has a blast with her all-girl group and "Lover Come Back to Me":


- follow that!

Nice !

Strong Men And Food

“A man in the Berwick garrison, in 1597, when times were hard and inflation had increased rapidly, got a daily ration of a twelve-ounce loaf, three pints of beer, one-and-a-half pounds of beef, three-quarters of a pound of cheese, and a quarter of a pound of butter – this was a considerable reduction in what his ration had been some years earlier.”[i]

In the old days, you needed more calories.

And more muscle. There’s a lovely moment in Michael Crichton’s “Timeline”, a novel about a group of time travellers who go back to fourteenth century France to test their historical understanding. One of them, a fit young fellow, gets challenged to a joust. The squire assigned to help our horonaut into his armour looks at the American’s gym-buffed physique and enquires politely, “You have had a fever?”

For today’s soft life, a man needs c. 2,500 calories a day[ii] but many eat much more.[iii] However in wartime it’s a different story – in the cold, sodden trenches of WWI “it was the stated aim of the British Army that each soldier should consume 4,000 calories a day”.[iv]

In WWII, the Japanese – then a smaller-bodied people because of a shortage of protein in the national diet – were issued less in the way of rations, but supplemented it with local foods and vitamin pills.[v] American field rations varied from the 2,830-calorie “K” (short duration; overuse could lead to malnourishment) to 4,000 calories for jungle warfare and 4,800 for mountain missions.[vi]

In 1970s civvy Britain, it was lino floors, no central heating and much walking. Maybe that’s where I’ve gone wrong. I could save a fortune if I turned off the CH and garaged the car; but would the cost of a high protein diet wipe out the advantage? Still, I’d be fitter…

Mine’s a double quarterpounder with cheese – Cheddar, not that yellow plastic stuff.

---

[i] George MacDonald Fraser, “The Steel Bonnets” (1971) - Collins Harvill edn, p.55

[ii] http://www.nhs.uk/chq/pages/1126.aspx?categoryid=51

[iii] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2722815/Daily-calorie-intake-countries-world-revealed-surprise-U-S-tops-list-3-770.html

[iv] http://www.express.co.uk/news/world-war-1/502452/The-Battle-to-feed-Tommy-The-diet-of-a-WW1-soldier

[v] http://www.lonesentry.com/articles/intelligence-report/japanese-army-rations.html

[vi] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_ration

Music and prophecies of war

I'm not a musician, but some pieces thrill and intrigue. I was listening last Thursday to Debussy's String Quartet on Radio 3 and was planning to buy it when I found I already had it.

Debussy's work was followed ten years later (1903) by Ravel's - adapted by Stephen Edwards (at the age of 20!) for the BBC's 1992 serialisation of Mary Wesley's "The Camomile Lawn", an explosive story of reckless sexual relations in the context of WWII. The whole opus but especially the pizzicato in the second movement communicate an intense love of life, enhanced by a consciousness of its fragility. It has one near tears.

Partly this intensity may be because Ravel was 28 at the time he composed it, an age when the senses still burn; maybe also, like some other art and music (think of Stravinsky's brash Rite of Spring) it was a canary in the mine, warning of great wars to come; as they did, starting very soon after with Japan against Russia in 1904 and all that followed.

Both works are on the Deutsche Grammophon CD of the Melos Quartett, which I have; but there is another version of each online as below: