Transacting some business in March before the plague struck us here in London I found myself with a moment to spare and made a brief pilgrimage to No. 7, Stratford Place. It was in this handsome townhouse that Martin van Buren, the first New Yorker to ascend to the chief magistracy of the American Republic, had his residence when he served as the United States’s minister to Great Britain in 1831.
While I often claim that Calvin Coolidge was America’s greatest president in reality my chief devotion in that contest is to the Little Magician himself, the Red Fox of Kinderhook.
Among the many characteristics of this esteemed Knickerbocker is that English was not his native language and throughout his career as a democratically elected politician he spoke with a thick Dutch accent. To his wife, he spoke almost entirely in Dutch.
Jay Cost and Luke Thompson’s Constitutionally Speaking podcast at National Review recently released the first of a two episodes about van Buren and while I’m no fan of podcasts in general this was worth listening to.
One of the factors Cost and Thompson highlight is the utility of the party machine structures of the day in solidifying the practice of America’s democracy and acting as a vehicle of accountability, something too little appreciated by most later observers of the period.
We keen Kinderhookers and Van Buren Boys await the second instalment with anticipation.
Shamefully I have not yet made the pilgrimage to Kinderhook itself, but it’s pleasing to learn that the dominie of the Dutch Reformed Church is a graduate of the greatest university in the southern hemisphere.
The visitor arriving at Albany, the capital of the Empire State, might be forgiven for presuming the riparian French gothic mock-chateau he first views is the most important building in town.
Built as the headquarters of the Delaware & Hudson, a canal company founded in 1823 that successfully transitioned into the railways, the chateau now houses the administration of the State University of New York. (Indeed, the Chancellor once had a suitably grandiose apartment in the southern tower.) That building, with its pinnacle topped by Halve Maen weathervane, is worthy of examination in its own right.
But next to this towering edifice is an altogether smaller charming little holdout: the ticket office of the Hudson River Day Line.
In the nineteenth century the Hudson River Valley was often known as “America’s Rhineland” and travel up and down the river was not just for business but also for the aesthetic-spiritual searching that inspired the Hudson River School of painters.
The Day Line’s origins date to 1826 when its founder Abraham van Santvoord began work as an agent for the New York Steam Navigation Company. Van Santvoord’s company merged with others under his son Alfred’s guidance in 1879 to form the Day Line. (more…)
For such a prolific church architect of such high quality, not much is known about Ludwig Becker and, alas, he seems to be little studied. Born the son of the master craftsman and inspector of Cologne Cathedral, Becker had church building in his blood. He studied at the Technische Hochschule in Aachen from 1873 and trained as a stone mason as well.
In 1884 Becker moved to Mainz where he became a church architect and in 1909 he was appointed the head of works at Mainz Cathedral, a position he held until his death in 1940. His son Hugo followed him into the profession of church architecture.
That’s about all I can find out about Becker. But here are a selection of some of his churches, to get a sense of his agility in a wide variety of styles.
St Joseph, Speyer, is my favourite of Becker’s churches for the beautiful organic fluidity of its style. Here Art Nouveau, Gothic, and Baroque are mixed somehow without affectation. Rather enjoyably, it was built as a riposte to a nearby monumental Protestant church commemorating the Protestant Revolt. These two rival churches are the largest in the city after its famous cathedral. (more…)
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.
Such paintings were widespread in Catholic England where they served as a vital reminder to the faithful worshipping below of not just the torments of Hell but also the joys of Heaven. In the aftermath of the Protestant revolt, however, such vivid imagery was frowned upon, and the Salisbury Doom was painted over with limewash in 1593. Christ in Majesty was replaced by the royal arms of the usurper queen, Elizabeth I.
It was then forgotten about til its rediscovery in 1819 when hints of colour were discovered behind the royal arms. The limewash was removed, the remnants of the painting were revealed, recorded by a local artist, and then covered over yet again in white. Finally in 1881 the Doom was revealed to the world and subject to a Victorian attempt at restoration with mixed results.
Work on the church’s ceiling in the 1990s allowed experts to better examine the Doom which determined that, while there was a bit of fading, dirt was hanging loosely to the painting and it would be ripe for restoration. It has only been more recently, however, that money has been raised to restore the Doom.
There are other glories in this church yet to be restored, about which more information can be found on the parish’s website.
The Salisbury Doom before restoration (above) and after (below).
Ralph Adams Cram was not just one of the most influential American architects of the first half of the twentieth century: he was a rounded intellectual who expressed his thinking in fiction, essays, and books in addition to the buildings he designed.
Cram (and arguably even more his business partner Goodhue) had a gift for bringing the medieval to life in a way that was neither archaic nor anachronistic but instead conveyed the gothic (and other styles) as living, organic traditions into which it was perfectly legitimate for moderns to dwell, dabble, and imbibe.
His literary efforts include strange works of fiction admired by Lovecraft and political writings inviting America to become a monarchy. These have value, but it’s entirely justifiable that Cram is best known for his architectural contributions.
All the same, amidst the clamours of the First World War this architect of buildings played the architect of peoples and sketched out his idea of what Europe after the war — presuming the defeat of the Central Powers — would look like.
In A Plan for the Settlement of Middle Europe: Partition Without Annexation, Cram set out his model for the territorial redivision of central and eastern Europe “to anticipate an ending consonant with righteousness, and to consider what must be done… forever to prevent this sort of thing happening again”.
Cram, who provided a map as a general guide, predicted the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, the Trentino and Trieste to Italy, much of Transylvania to Romania, Posen to a restored Poland, and Silesia divided in three.
Fundamental to the architect’s thinking was that “neither Germany, Austria-Hungary, nor Turkey can be permitted to exist as integral or even potential empires”. Austria and Hungary would be split and Germany needed to be partitioned (not, as some later plans had it, annexed). (more…)
Alongside some of its neighbouring streets in Camberwell, Grove Lane has some of the best preserved rows of Georgian houses in south London, interspersed with a few buildings of a more recent vintage. The latest addition to this street is no ostentatious interloper but a contextual classic showing admirable humility and good manners.
Designed by Leicester Square-based MATT Architecture, it’s easy to see why the Georgian Group deemed 4a-6 Grove Lane worthy of a Giles Worsley Award for a New Building in a Georgian Context in 2015.
“The long, thin, wedge–shaped site had lain derelict for decades before being purchased by the current owner,” the architects note.
“The elevation is deliberately split into three to echo the plot width of neighbouring terraces and relies heavily on high quality detailing to lift it beyond pastiche.”
JUST WHERE THE elegant Edwardian urbanity of Waterloo Place turns into Regent Street there is an edifice that announces itself as home to the “Agent General for British Columbia”. Built in 1914-1915, it was designed by a not particularly prominent architect named Alfred Burr who did a lot of work for the Metropolitan Police and is also responsible for designing the charming little curator’s lodgings next to Dr Johnson’s House (which he restored 1911-1912).
The listing that protects British Columbia House, at 1-3 Regent Street, describes its style as “rich Baroque with both Roman and Genoese palazzo features composed on a large scale”.
The main entrance is on Regent Street with the province’s delightfully sunny coat of arms carved above the portal, guarded by allegorical figures of Justice and the like above. On the corner with Charles II Street, the inscription on the foundation stone proclaims its laying at the hands of Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught on the sixteenth day of July in 1914.
But who or what on earth was the Agent General for British Columbia? (more…)
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.
A giant of Argentine journalism died this summer: Andrew Graham-Yooll.
Born in Buenos Aires early in 1944 to a Scottish father and an English mother, Graham-Yooll made his name at the premier institution of Anglo-Argentina, the now-defunct daily Buenos Aires Herald which he joined aged 22 in 1966.
“The Herald newsdesk supped for Dutch courage a local brandy,” the Times notes, “supplemented with a pâté that Graham-Yooll made of goose livers lashed with gin. A chain-smoker, he would construct tiny houses from matchsticks.”
As the Herald’s news editor during Isabel Perón’s presidency he published the names of dissidents who had gone missing or “disappeared” and, more bravely, continued to do so after Señora Perón was succeeded by a military junta.
The new rulers, who Borges warmly welcomed as “gentlemen”, put Graham-Yooll on trial for publishing interviews with the guerrillas who were terrorising the country. He was acquitted, but accepted the gentle advice of the judge who suggested he might find existence more comfortable outside the borders of the Argentine Republic.
Graham-Yooll continued writing for the Daily Telegraph and Guardian in Great Britain but made a brief foray home in 1982 during the Falklands War before being permanently welcomed home by a democratic government in 1984. Ten years later he was appointed editor of the Herald.
“Things you think you can rely on and trust are just not there,” Graham-Yooll said in Edinburgh when picking up his OBE in 2002.
“You can’t trust the bank, you can’t trust the post office or the people who sell you a house. You can’t trust the politicians, obviously. It’s a friendly society but it lacks strict rules. It’s evil, but it is also attractive to live in a place where you don’t have to live by rules.”
“I don’t know where I could go now. It was always home, even in the worst days, and it still is.”
Academics John Rodden and John Rossi have an interesting but poorly argued piece in the normally-quite-good American Conservative “asking” the question of whether Brexit could unite Ireland at last. While ostensibly they merely posit the question, they lay out an unintended-consequences scenario for Irish political unity coming about.
If Brexit goes “wrong” then the imposition of a hard border in Ireland will drive Northern Ireland’s Protestant/Unionist community into the arms of the Republic. If there’s no hard border, then Northern Ireland and the Republic will progress down a path of natural economic integration while, Rodden and Rossi argue, “economic divergence from Britain with no hard border will show northerners that their long-term interests now lie with Dublin”.
There are some obvious problems with the Rodden/Rossi scenario.
First, the EU’s customs and economic union has already applied to Northern Ireland and the Republic for decades now and yet Northern Ireland is not economically integrated into the Republic. Of goods that leave Northern Ireland, the rest of the UK is still the strongest destination: In 2016 £10.5 billion of goods left NI for Great Britain, compared to £2.7 billion to the Republic.
True, Ulster is more vulnerable in that a bigger chunk of their exports head south of the border than the Republic’s exports head north of it. But after decades of trade barriers being torn down by the EU these two economies remain very much distinct.
Second, Rodden and Rossi fall into the trap of economic determinist thinking. The roots of Republic of Ireland/Northern Ireland divide are not economic. Ireland’s six north-easterly counties were excluded from the Irish Free State in 1921 because of the tribal fears of those counties’ Protestant/Unionist majorities of being powerless in a state that would have an overwhelming Catholic/Nationalist majority. Some of these fears were well-reasoned and considered, others were wildly irrational and bigoted.
The important thing to realise is that the divide between Nationalists and Unionists is not formed on the basis of economic arguments, though either side can deploy economic arguments in their favour. It is simply not the case that a significant chunk of Northern Ireland’s Protestant Unionist community are going to wake up some day soon and think “Well, I’ve always liked our Union Jacks, Orange marches, and devotion to the Queen but Northern Ireland might be able to achieve a 2.3% better rate of growth if we join the Republic so I’ll run up the tricolour and paint my curbside green, white, and orange”.
Third, as Rodden and Rossi confusingly point out, the coming demographic majority Catholics will achieve in Northern Ireland does not automatically equate to all-Ireland unity: An astonishingly large proportion of Northern Irish Catholics wish to maintain links to the United Kingdom. They will continue to vote for Sinn Féin and the SDLP in elections because these parties are viewed as those who vie to look after their community’s interests. But that does not necessarily mean they want to cut all ties to the UK or sign up for a 32-county unitary republic.
“Ah!,” they say. “But hard Brexit!” This is the fourth point why Rodden and Rossi are wrong. They argue that a hard Brexit would necessitate a hard border with the imposition of frontier infrastructure, tolls, taxes, etc. Rodden and Rossi claim that “[t]he only workable plan for Brexit that will prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is for the north to stay in the EU customs area despite Brexit.”
This is simply not true. By now almost everyone has conceded, including civil servants in both London and Dublin, that even in the event of a No Deal Brexit (which has pretty much been ruled out) the technology already exists to provide a fairly seamless border. The few companies whose cross-border trade would fall into the relevant categories could be checked not at the border but electronically. While anti-Brexiteers spent months arguing that this was an impossible pipe dream, the number of researchers, customs agents, civil servants, and others who point out that the technology exists and has been used in similar scenarios for years is now so voluminous as to render the argument irrelevant.
(Rodden and Rossi are also entirely incorrect in claiming that Northern Ireland has adopted “quite restrictive” laws on “abortion and gay rights”. In fact, Northern Ireland’s post-1998 democratically elected representatives have mostly decided against taking action to change existing laws on these subjects even though they have been altered or repealed in England, Wales, and Scotland.)
There are other problems with the Rodden/Rossi economic determinist case for a united Ireland. For one thing, there is an economic determinist argument against it. The Republic of Ireland is a relatively prosperous country, though obviously not without its problems. Though romanticism and patriotism have deep roots, the Republic’s taxpayer base might balk at taking on the highly subsidy-reliant Northern Irish economy, even if only with a mind to transitioning it to a more free-market scenario.
Furthermore, sources in the Irish Defence Forces are quick to express their anguish at the army’s much diminished capacity even to carry out its existing commitments with the United Nations. Northern Ireland separating from the United Kingdom and joining the Republic would almost certainly spark a revival of violence amongst a minority of the province’s loyalists. Are voters in the Republic really that keen to take on an economic and counter-terrorist burden?
All this may sound a bit Cassandra-like, especially coming from a writer with traditional “Up Dev” Fianna Fáil sympathies, but these are all factors that need to be considered and which significantly inhibit the likelihood (completely separate from the wisdom) of Irish political unity in the near future.
Namibia spent more than twice as long under South African administration then it did when it was German South West Africa, but its formative years under the Germans continue to have an influence.
For one thing, you can stumble around streets marked Zeppelinstraße and Bismarckstraße, not to mention the quite quaffable beer the country produces. Germany’s most remembered act in Namibia, alas, is the massacre of the Herero tribe, whose women are today known for their colourful pseudo-Victorian traditional dress.
Still, a third of the country’s white population are of German descent and German was an official language until 1990, though Namibian Black German (which linguists debate whether it is a dialect or a pidgin) is now nearly extinct. Most German Namibians today would speak Afrikaans on an everyday basis and have a strong grasp of English too.
But what does the average Namibian on the street know of Germany? In the above video a man goes about asking precisely that. Particularly interesting is that moneyed Frankfurt seems to be much better known than the political capital of Berlin. If only there was a video asking Germans what they know of Namibia…
The patroonship of Rensselaerswyck was erected in 1630 giving its patroon, Kiliaen van Rensselaer, feudal powers over a large parcel of land on the banks of the Hudson River. Despite exercising a strong influence on the growth and development of New Netherland and the Hudson Valley, Kiliaen never actually stepped foot in the new world but kept close control of his domain from across the ocean in Amsterdam.
Jan Baptist was Kiliaen’s second surviving son, and served as director at the ‘colony’ as it was often known from 1652 to 1658. He commissioned Evert Duyckinck to make this painted-glass window displaying his coat of arms in 1656 and gave it to the Dutch Reformed Church in Beverwyck (today’s Albany).
While the congregation still exists — and celebrated its 375th anniversary in 2017 — the original church was demolished in 1805 and the window moved to the Van Rensselaer Manor House which itself survived til 1890 before facing the wrecking ball. The window was preserved and was left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the 1951 bequest of Mrs J. Insley Blair and while well documented it does not appear to be on display at the moment.
The patroonship itself was converted into a manorial lordship by the English authorities after they took over and survived until it was broken up amongst relatives after the death of Stephen van Rensselaer III in 1839.
This last great patroon had proved an indulgent lord and the efforts of his inheritors to claim uncollected back rents led to the 1839-1845 “Helderberg War” or “Anti-Rent War” of tenants revolting against the system. The great landholders, seeing the end was nigh, were convinced to sell up and in 1846 the state of New York adopted a new constitution abolishing feudal tenure. The era of patroonships and manors in the Hudson Valley had come to an end.
A nice tradition!
’n Lekker tradisie!
There has been a distinct increase in the number of missives sent out from Huis Cusack to editorial offices across Europe and beyond as part of my slow but inevitable transformation into “Disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells”. It all started with an extremely pedantic letter to the TLS regarding PG Wodehouse, banking, and the collapse of the rupee that was printed in October 2008.
It escaped my notice at the time but it turns out the editors of The Times of London were short of anything decent to print last November so stuck one of my letters in. Very kind of them.
Sir, There is a parallel to the situation of Britons involuntarily losing their EU citizenship: the unionists who fell on the southern side of the border when Ireland was partitioned in 1921. Like the British in Europe today, many Irish then felt themselves secondarily or primarily British or at least strongly associated with Great Britain, given the unitary state which had existed for more than a century. More Irish volunteered their service and their lives for the British crown than ever did for an Irish republic.
As an Irish citizen resident in the UK I appreciate the generosity of spirit whereby Ireland is not a “foreign” country. Irish in Britain today have full civil and political rights above and beyond those of other EU citizens, and this is reciprocated in the Republic (except for presidential elections and referendums).
Were the EU to extend such generosity and reciprocity to the UK after Brexit it would go a long way to furthering our common identity and friendship.
ANDREW CUSACK
London SW3
Of course I am as poblachtánach as anyone else — Up Dev and all that — but one does appreciate the difficulty of those Irish who also identified as British once the Free State was erected. But then given my background (Irish New Yorker educated there, in Argentina, Scotland, and South Africa, resident in London) I don’t see any problem with a multiplicity of overlapping identities. All the same, when people imply they will somehow mystically cease to be European come 29 March it just makes them look silly. Great Britain has always been a European country and always will be.
I blame Ulster, the French Revolution, and the Fall of Man.
The dome of the old Police Headquarters Centre Street in New York.