Septuagesimo Uno is often believed to be the smallest park under the purview of the Parks Department of the City of New York. It’s not. (By my reckoning, the Abe Lebewohl Triangle where Stuyvesant Street meets 10th Street near St-Mark’s-in-the-Bowery is the smallest.)
Though not the smallest, this park on West 71st Street is charming all the same. The site was acquired in 1969 thanks to Mayor Lindsay (or “Lindsley” as my maternal great-grandfather always mispronounced his name) and his Vest Pocket Park initiative. The small building on the lot was condemned and demolished by the City though it was only handed over to the Parks Department in 1981.
Originally known as the “71st Street Plot”, Parks Commissioner Henry Stern thought the name was too boring so rechristened it under the Latin moniker Septuagesimo Uno — Latin for ‘seventy-one’. (more…)
• France’s Year of de Gaulle has marked the fiftieth anniversary of his death earlier this month and what would have been the general’s one-hundred-and-thirtieth birthday yesterday. Julien Nourian has put together a Weberian analysis of the general and his charismatic mystique.
• President Trump is a very different kind of leader to de Gaulle, and his chances of continuing in the White House are not looking great at the moment. (Our head of legal in New York thinks he’s still got a chance, however.)
Regardless of who will be inaugurated in January of next year, Trump managed to win the highest proportion of minority votes of any Republican candidate since 1960 (when the GOP choice was a member of the NAACP). Meanwhile, Trump lost votes among old, white, well-to-do men.
What is the future of American political conservatism? Ben Hachten points out It’s Not Your Father’s GOP.
New England poli-sci professor Darel E. Paul explores The Future of Conservative Populism, pointing out the big increase in the Hispanic vote for Trump — especially Hispanics living in Texas along the Mexican border.
• In Britain, Ferdie Rous says the Conservative party is having difficulty reconciling the business wing of the party with our rural roots, but suggests that The writings of Lewis and Tolkien embody conservative environmentalism.
Meanwhile David Skelton asserts It was working class voters who delivered this majority – and Johnson must not abandon them now.
• Here in London we’re still in the middle of the second lockdown. Instead of following the science, governments around the world are implementing the exact opposite of effective measures to combat the pandemic. It’s The Greatest Scandal of Our Lifetime according to R.J. Quinn.
• We can always do a with a dose of Metternich and Wolfram Siemann’s 900-page doorstop has provided a chance for many to analyse the master diplomat. Ferdinand Mount examines The Prime Minister of the World.
• And finally, the Museum of Literature Ireland features an online exhibition on the American writer, speaker, reformer, and statesman Frederick Douglass’s visit to Ireland 175 years ago. (Available as Gaeilge too.)
Is this the earliest-known depiction of badminton in art?
Apparently not, as the sporting accoutrements depicted herein are of the much older game of Battledore and Shuttlecock — an antecedent of badminton.
It was painted by William Williams, the sailor, writer, and painter born in Bristol in 1727 and shipwrecked in the Caribbean before living in Philadelphia.
While the subject is uncertain, he is believed to be a boy of the Crossfield family, for whom it is known that Williams had depicted other young family members.
Since 1965 it has been in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum but is not currently on view.
Williams was also the author of what is arguably the first American novel — The Journal of Llewellin Penrose, Seaman — though he couldn’t find a publisher so it was only printed in 1815 nearly a quarter century after his death.
GOVERNOR CUOMO — is there anything that man won’t fiddle with? Is there nothing that can escape his grasping hands? Are we to suffer from the incessant interference of this megalomaniac forever?
The latest trespass His Excellency has committed is to encroach upon the very sacred symbols of the Empire State itself: our beloved coat of arms — and, by extension, the flag which also bears it aloft.
Gaze upon its beauty, for you will see it fade. Azure, in a landscape, the sun in fess, rising in splendour or, behind a range of three mountains, the middle one the highest; in base a ship and sloop under sail, passing and about to meet on a river.
This beautiful device was adopted by the very first Assembly and Senate of the State of New York back in 1778, having been designed a year earlier. It has remained substantially unchanged since the 1880s until Governor Cuomo in one of his fits of fancy decided to sneak a change via the state budget, of all things.
“In this term of turmoil, let New York state remind the nation of who we are,” Governor Cuomo said in his State of the State address in January of this year. “Let’s add ‘E pluribus unum’ to the seal of our state and proclaim at this time the simple truth that without unity, we are nothing.”
Why the national motto should be interjected into the state flag when we have our own motto is beyond me. Rather than introduce a bill that would allow an open debate on the matter, the Governor decided to sneak it into the state budget. This passed in April, so the coat of arms, great seal, and flag of the state of New York have all now been altered to include the superfluous words.
That said, I have a sneaking suspicion the change might be honoured more in the breach than in the observance. Flag companies doubtless have a large back supply of pre-Cuomo flags to shift and customers are rarely up to date on matters vexillological and heraldic. I suspect that the next time you float down Park Avenue and see the giant banners fluttering from corporate headquarters very few will have updated their state flag.
Many of the architects of the “other modern” in architecture were forgotten or at least neglected once the craft moved in a more avant-garde direction.
The British Expressionist architect F.X. Velarde who produced a number of Catholic churches in and around Liverpool in the interwar period and beyond is the subject of a new book from Dominic Wilkinson and Andrew Crompton.
There will be a free online lecture tomorrow on ‘The Churches of F. X. Velarde’ given by Mr Wilkinson, Principal Lecturer in Architecture Liverpool John Moores University. Further details are available here.
The book is available from Liverpool University Press with a 25% discount through the Twentieth Century Society. (more…)
Last week was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the foundation of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, one of the most successful democratic political parties in postwar Europe.
Indeed, under Adenauer the CDU was one of the institutions which transformed relations between the peoples of Europe and started the process of integration which, alas, has not aged well.
Nonetheless, here are some election posters from the early years of the CDU — plus one from the 1980s. (more…)
Speaking to a friend the other day, I mentioned this quotation which is often incorrectly attributed to Rommel (including by me).
The actual source of these words is Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, a four-star general of the German army, who described the four types of officer and their place along the axes of being 1) either clever or stupid, and 2) either hardworking or lazy.
There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined.
Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff.
The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up ninety percent of every army and are suited to routine duties.
Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions.
One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.”
I am sure the experience of many would confirm that Hammerstein’s typology is also applicable in the civilian world.
Hammerstein was a brave man, who unsuccessfully attempted to see President Hindenburg personally in the hopes he would intervene to stop the massacre on the Night of Long Knives.
His friend and regimental comrade General Kurt von Schleicher, the last Chancellor of Germany before Hitler’s appointment, was among those murdered on the evening and Hammerstein defied army orders by attempting to attend Schleicher’s funeral only to be stopped by the SS.
Nonetheless, his reputation and skill ensured he was given command during the war, although Hitler later personally dismissed him for his opposition to national socialism.
As Hammerstein was dying of cancer in 1943 he told the art historian Udo von Alvensleben-Wittenmoor: “I am ashamed to have belonged to an army that witnessed and tolerated so many crimes”.
His family refused to allow Hammerstein to be buried with a military funeral as it would have meant his remains being draped in the swastika flag.
Despite being a conservative Protestant nobleman of the old school, two of his five children ended up as communists, though his youngest son became a Protestant theologian.
IN PREPARING these notes the same response was given by many of Dr Antony Conlon’s friends – “I’ve got lots of stories, but they’re not really suitable for an obituary”. This is in itself an obituary, as it sums up Antony Conlon’s profound sense of fun and friendship; without ever being in the slightest scandalous, yet often hilarious, anecdotes of him are intensely personal. One of his informal nicknames among many of his friends in conversation (more about the other one later) was ‘our mutual friend’ – one knew immediately who was meant, and it reflects his wonderful ability to bring his friends together; there was nothing solitary about Antony Conlon, he lived through and for people.
This quality of openness, while sometimes misunderstood by those who seek clerical detachment in their priests, was an essential part of his priesthood, one which made him deeply pastoral at all times in the everyday world. There was no ‘off-duty Conlon’, even in his lightest moments the same priestly and paternal respect for others was always there, which, paradoxically, attracted non-Catholics to him so readily. His educated and amusing conversation on the widest spectrum of subjects, rarely ‘churchy’, opened the door to everyone.
As one friend said recently, there was never a telephone call, however serious or sad the initial subject, which at some point did not descend (ascend?) to peals of childlike laughter. Even his well-known indignation and fury with those people and institutions he did not agree with (usually because they were opposed to the traditions of the Church or another firmly-held principle) for all their bluster, and the occasional swear-word, were never unkind, and never quite lost sight of human absurdity. (more…)
Belarus was heavily affected by the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the neighbouring Ukraine back in 1986 when both countries were part of the Soviet Union. In the thirtieth anniversary year of that event, the Belarusian Catholic community in London dedicated a new chapel built to a striking modern design but evoking the folk churches of the old country.
Founded in 1947 as the White-Ruthenian Catholic Mission of the Byzantine-Slavonic Rite, the church grew out of the postwar migration to London of Belarusians who had served with the Polish army during the Second World War.
Succeeding the chapel of Sts Peter & Paul in Marian House, the new chapel is dedicated to St Cyril of Turau and All the Patron Saints of the Belarusian People.
In terms of church hierarchy, this mission is under the wing of the Ukrainian Catholic eparchy in Great Britain, part of the eastern-rite Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church which is in union with Rome. (more…)
The category of the Stave Church is the only great Norwegian contribution to architecture.
Sigrid Undset attempts to explain why other contributions are scant:
As one of the most extensive and thinly settled countries in Europe, Norway possesses only a few architectural monuments.
There is a good reason for this.
In the Middle Ages Norway belonged to a united, Christian Europe. At that time art flourished here, though the artists themselves are nameless because their work was deeply rooted in the people. Their power of expression streamed from the people through them. This creative power left its imprint on us in the form of buildings and pictures, poems and music.
Then came the spiritual earthquake of the sixteenth century, the Renaissance and the Reformation. Norway was cut off. It became a land apart, and lost touch with the spiritual life of Europe. Much later our increasing world trade again brought us into contact with other countries.
But at least we have the stave churches.
Flicking through the argiewe the other day I stumbled upon this little report from Johannesburg’s Sunday Express of 26 May 1957 describing the displays of disrepute at the annual Intervarsity match, when the University of Cape Town takes on Stellenbosch.
At Stellenbosch many students made the intervarsity match the occasion for a grand drinking spree. A number of them became drunk and disorderly; and here are some of the results of their liquor intake:
- A Cape Town student was hit on the head with a bottle, and was taken to hospital to have a gaping wound stitched.
- Another student was escorted from the pavilion by the police.
- A constable was hit by a bottle, thrown by a student.
- Flying bottles narrowly missed a number of other policemen.
- Although no damage was done, cardboard darts were thrown in the direction of the Prime Minister, to the accompaniment of insulting jeers.
- The pennant on a Cabinet Minister’s car was stolen.
- The chauffeur of the Governor-General’s car hid his pennant (which cost £7.10.0) in case it too disappeared.
- One Cape Town student was found lying drunk among the coloured spectators.
According to a police official, many drunk students armed with bottles of liquor, turned up for the match. So bad was it that he eventually told the gate keepers not to allow them in. A policeman was obliged to stand guard over Ministerial cars.
I’m pleased to say the Sunday Express revealed that “the worst offenders were the Cape Town students”, not the Maties. “Bottles of whisky, vodka, wine and champagne were much in evidence on [the UCT] stands.”
While the Salon bleu in Quebec’s parliament used to be green, the Salon rouge has kept its lordly colour. Conservative Quebec was the last of the Canadian provinces to abolish its unelected upper house which faced the chop in 1968, that year so beloved of duty-shirkers and ne’er-do-wells.
Thirty-three years earlier, the Salon rouge was the scene of a more regal ceremony: the official installation of the Scots writer and statesman John Buchan as Governor General of Canada. Being a Presbyterian with an in-built (but in his case only occasional) tendency to dourness, Buchan wanted to go as an ordinary commoner but the King of Canada insisted on a peerage for his viceregal representative in the dominion.
Thus it was Lord Tweedsmuir who arrived in Quebec in 1935 and was installed as Governor General in the Salon rouge on All Souls’ Day of that year. Above, the Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King gives an address after the swearing-in.
Buchan proved an influential Governor General and helped set the tone of Canada’s monarchy in the aftermath of the 1931 Statue of Westminster that recognised the distinct nature of the Commonwealth realms. He also orchestrated the King’s successful 1939 trip across Canada — which also featured the King and Queen holding court in the Salon rouge of Quebec’s Parliament.
By the time of his death in post in 1940, John Buchan had become His Excellency The Right Honourable The Lord Tweedsmuir GCMG GCVO CH PC. Not a bad end to a good innings.
A delightful episode is relayed in the Daily Telegraph’s obituary of the late Vice-Admiral David Leach of the Royal Australian Navy.
Leach was the last RAN Chief of Naval Staff to have served in the Second World War but the incident in question dates from the 1950s when he was at the gunnery school in Whale Island in Portsmouth Harbour here in England:
In 1955 he was the course officer for a class of sub-lieutenants who decided to have some fun on their last morning parade, on April 1, by bringing a circus elephant on to the island. The duty officer, warned of the elephant’s approach by the bridge sentry, thought that his leg was being pulled and gave the order to let the pachyderm proceed.
Subsequently the class marched on to the parade ground with the elephant in their midst, surmounted by a mahout dressed as a sub-lieutenant. The beast, being well-trained, picked up the band’s marching step nicely, but Captain “Bunjey” Rutherford, the saluting officer in command of Whale Island, was not amused.
Leach had not been party to the April Fool’s joke, but later that morning, when he took the class results to the captain, he had placed Sub-Lieutenant L E Fant at the top. Rutherford was still not amused, demanding “Fant? Fant? Who’s this feller, Fant?” When the news reached the Admiralty, the Second Sea Lord took a personal interest and called Rutherford to announce, somewhat unkindly: “This is a trunk call.”
R.I.P.
• Some enthusiasts like to go bird-watching, but James Panero of The New Criterion likes to go house-watching. “[O]ur country is fertile ground for good house-watching. Fine examples, of just about any style of any period, abound. What stories they tell if only we listened to their calls.”
• Psephologists are still extrapolating ideas and conclusions from the results of December’s general election here in the UK that handed Boris Johnson a handy majority. One of the most important analyses comes from the philosopher John Gray in the New Statesman: Why the Left Keeps Losing.
• For years, EU leaders have insisted that Brexit would be a disaster for Britain, leaving your country hopelessly isolated, Alexander von Schoenburg, the editor of Europe’s highest-selling newspaper, reports from Berlin. “According to the relentless propaganda of the pro-EU cause, Europe would forge ahead on the global stage, ever more united, while the UK would slide into insularity and decline. But that narrative is starting to look like a delusion.”
• British liberals have created a Europe of their imagination, Ed West writes at UnHerd. But how closely does it resemble reality?
• As the founder of the Anglo-Gaullist Working Group I often ask myself “What would de Gaulle do?” James Pinkerton (the American Conservative) argues that when it comes to Afghanistan, the great Frenchman would advise President Trump to stand his Deep State antagonists down and bring the troops home.
• For centuries Spain faced a perfect storm of enemies that fostered an anti-historical legacy of lies collectively known as the Black Legend. In the University Bookman, Alberto M. Fernandez reviews the surprise Spanish best-seller written by a woman who, according to one newspaper, “has liberated thousands of ideological hostages from a national cancer”.
• The 1930s Oxford social anthropologist J.D. Unwin studied five thousand years of human existence and discovered you can either have a high level of cultural achievement or widespread sexual freedom but never both. Kirk Durston explores why sexual morality may be far more important than you ever thought.
• America’s secular liberalism isn’t secular at all: it is merely the latest stage in the adaptation of an inevitably deracinated Protestantism, Patrick Deneen argues.
• René Rémond’s model of France’s three right wings — Legitimist, Bonapartist, and Orleanist — is breaking down because, Luke Nicastro argues, Emmanuel Macron is co-opting both Orleanists and Gaullists into his electoral family.
• And finally, a historic note, it’s been more than a quarter-century since the late Anthony Lejeune went on A Tour of New York’s Clubland.
For devoted fanatics of Netherlandic architecture — I’m sure you’d count yourself as one as much as I do — a curious example of Dutch revival architecture can be found at No. 316 Green Lanes in the Borough of Hackney. Alighting from Manor House tube station the other day I was surprised to find myself confronted by a fine building which, it turns out, used to be the pub that gave its name to the Underground station.
The first ‘public house and tea-gardens’ of that name was built in the 1830s, and in 1843 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert stopped there for a change of horses. This tavern soldiered on until the arrival of the Piccadilly line which necessitated street widening and the demolition of the pub in 1930.
It was rebuilt in a very handsome brick Netherlandic revival in 1931 and continued on as a pub supplied by the London brewers Watneys.
A purist would object that the style of windows on the gables suggests a vulgar pakhuis (warehouse) on the Amstel while the stepped gable itself is more informed by domestic architecture. But is the privilege of architectural revivals to mix and match, so I don’t think we should complain.
Evidence suggests the pub shut in 2004 and the building was converted to its current retail use.
Alas, I can find no record of the architect, and the building remains un-listed, but I’m glad Hackney is home to this happy Hollandic interloper.
• In Spiked, James Heartfield urges us to spurn Labour’s counsel and instead stop apologising for the past.
• Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review wonders if Republican Missouri senator Josh Hawley might be the next Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
• Why would an Eton- and Oxford-educated man assert he ‘supports’ Aston Villa, a football team based in a slum in Birmingham, a city with which he has no connection? Theodore Dalrymple ponders David Cameron’s Big Lie at Law & Liberty.
• At the American Conservative, Rod Dreher ponders the radicalism of today’s left and whether its religious fervour to deny scientific realities like biological sex is driving Trump-hating lefties to back the Donald for president.
• And, for a decent long read, politics professor Daniel E. Burns examines how critics and defenders of liberalism often argue past one another:
It refers, on the one hand, to a set of political practices, and on the other hand, to a political theory that purports to explain those practices. Defenders of liberalism are thinking first and foremost about liberal political practice, which they (almost all) defend by drawing selectively on liberal theory. Critics of liberalism are thinking first and foremost about liberal political theory, which they (almost all) attack by pointing selectively to liberal practice.
In National Affairs, it’s a question of Liberal Practice v. Liberal Theory.
One Westminster tradition replicated in many times and places across the Commonwealth is a convention of colour: the lower house of a parliament is decorated in green, while the upper chamber is decorated in red. This reflects the green benches of the House of Commons and the red ones of the House of Lords.
Officially the plenary chamber of Quebec’s unicameral parliament is boringly the salle de l’Assemblée nationale but because of the colour of its walls it is more often known as the Salon bleu. One’s never surprised when Quebec bucks a trend or (more specifically) rejects an Anglo convention but it turns out the province’s plenary chamber did in fact used to be green until relatively recently.
When the members of the Legislative Assembly (as it then was) first convened in the Hôtel du Parlement in 1886 the walls were actually white. By the opening of the 1895 session the desks had been reappointed in green, but Le Soleil still made reference to the room as the “chambre blanche”. It was only in 1901 that the room was painted a “soft green” and the carpets and other furnishings changed accordingly. It even made an appearance in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 film “I Confess”.
From then the chamber was a Salon vert until 1978, when the decision was taken to begin broadcasting the proceedings of the Assemblée nationale.
The television specialists complained that the dark green of the chamber was not visually conducive to the TV cameras available at the time and, looking at the evidence from the 1977 test session (above), one can see their point. Walls of either beige or blue were the options recommended in an official report, and unsurprisingly the national colour was chosen.
The historian Gaston Deschênes has mentioned the technical requirements of broadcasting also coincided with a desire to break with a “British” tradition. Certainly the government of the day, René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois, didn’t mind the change, while Maurice Bellemare — “the old lion of Quebec politics” and sometime leader of the old Union nationale — was deeply pleased that the chamber adopted the colour of Quebec’s flag.
So the walls were repainted sky blue and the furnishings changed accordingly, resulting in the Salon bleu we know today (below).
A tweet from the Assemblée’s official account shows two photos looking towards the chamber’s entrance from before (above) and after (below) it was made ready for television.
All the same, green is not universal amongst Commonwealth lower (or only) chambers. It’s not even universal in Canada: Manitoba joins Quebec in its azure tones while British Columbia’s is red-dominated.
Quebec was the last of Canada’s provinces to abolish its upper house, the Legislative Council, in 1968 (at the same time the lower house was renamed the National Assembly). The Legislative Council’s former meeting place is, of course, red, and the Salon rouge is used for important occasions like inductions into the Ordre national du Québec or the lying-in-state of the late Jacques Parizeau.
In Rome the other week I was sorry to hear from a mutual friend that Angela Wrapson had died. She had been fighting cancer for a while, but she was quite a fighter and was one of those people you thought would always go on.
Angela was, amongst many things, a fixture of that strange yet familiar galaxy known as the Scottish arts world. She was, for example, director of the Stanza poetry festival for some years.
She was a keen listener, a good conversationalist, and a very welcoming hostess in the wing of Brunstane House that she and her husband George bought back in the 1970s.
From 2015 to 2017, George was the MP for East Lothian and I am still ashamed in those two years I never managed to reciprocate Angela and George’s hospitality by having them round.
Nonetheless, I was pleased to see she got the plaudits she deserved with obituaries in the Scotsman, the Times, and the Herald.
May she rest in peace.