News of the Old Podcast

About News of the Old Podcast

Past lives. simonbarber.substack.com (https://simonbarber.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Simon Barber

Category

history · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

17 Jun 2024

Latest episode

22 Sept 2024

Latest episodes

12 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   22 Sept 2024

   Race: human

   This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com (https://simonbarber.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   14 Sept 2024

   Invitation to a holocaust

   Continuing the story of my great aunt. England got Margery back from the Central Powers on March 7, 1916. As a volunteer orderly with a British Red Cross hospital unit in Serbia, she had spent close to a year with conscripts, wounded and whole, on both sides of the war. Many had been Austrians taken prisoner by the Serbs but that winter she and the rest of her unit had themselves become prisoners of the Austrians and Germans. She drew no distinctions between friend and foe. Had she been allowed, she would have stayed behind when her unit was escorted to Switzerland for repatriation. On the way out, she got chatting in her fluent German with an officer from the Kaiser’s Imperial Guard and charmed him into giving her and her colleagues a tour of Budapest between trains. When she got home, her father, Rev. Robert Barber, would recall, “her chief ambition was to nurse German soldiers to requite the kindness she had received and to satisfy herself that they were well treated.” She wrote to the War Office and received a “curt” reply suggesting she read the newspapers. The March 3 editions of many, both national and regional, had carried a Reuters interview with Dr Graham Aspland, a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He too was just back from Serbia where he had been captured while serving as surgeon-in-chief at the Anglo-Serbian hospital in Kragujevač. He said that he and his fellow prisoners (they included his wife) had been treated respectfully by the Austrians, good fellows who clearly wanted out of the war. The Germans, on the other hand, lived down to stereotype. Having interned all Serb men aged between 17 and 50, they had “cleared the country of everything they wanted, including 60 000 pigs and cattle”. To cap it all, they had no manners. Every Austrian soldier, and even Austrian officers of higher rank than myself, always saluted me in the streets. The Germans never did so, but were always insulting. On the German-controlled railway, we had to travel in horse boxes, but as soon as we came under Austrian administration we were transferred to first and second class carriages…German officers jeered at their Austrian comrades and asked, “Why do you help the English swine.” Margery set about looking for something else. The Red Cross had nothing. Neither, at first, did the Lord Mayor of London’s Armenian Refugees Fund. Then it changed its mind. She and her father were summoned to the House of Commons to meet Aneurin Williams MP, the Fund’s chairman. Would she be interested in joining a “Pioneer Party” the committee was sending to Armenia to assess what could be done for the survivors of the 1915 (and ongoing) genocide? “There are hundreds better qualified than I am who would give anything to go,” she replied, according to her father. “Never mind,” said the MP. “We want you.” “We”, it turned out, included Dr Aspland who had signed on as the mission’s chief medical officer, and Beatrice Kerr who had been nursing in Kragujevač with the redoubtable Mrs Stobart. If they had not directly encountered Doña Quixota, they had surely heard of her. Perhaps it also helped that Rev. Barber was then the chaplain of Ely Cathedral. The Bishop of Ely was one of the Fund’s vice presidents. In the end, though, it was up Rev. Harold Buxton, the leader of the party and the Fund’s secretary, to pick his team. If there had been any objections to Margery, he must have overruled them. Like Margery, Buxton had taken an emigrant ship to Canada early in his career, finding work as a farm hand in Ontario. The author of a glowing profile in Ararat, a London-based journal that described itself as “A Searchlight on Armenia”, thought it was to this experience that Buxton owed “that sense of sympathetic brotherhood with labour which is one of his chief characteristics.” Great-grandson of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, the abolitionist, he took holy orders in 1904 and headed east to serve as chaplain of the Burma Railway Co., ministering to its employees on the line between Rangoon and Mandalay. Ill-health forced him back to England where he landed a curacy with his cousin, Rev. Conrad Noel, the famous Red Vicar of Thaxted who owed his living to Daisy Greville, Duchess of Warwick and founder of Studley, the agricultural college for surplus women that had helped set Margery on her way. Buxton’s brother Noel, MP for Norfolk North, was chairman of the Balkan War Relief Committee and an ardent supporter of Mrs Stobart’s Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps. Another brother, Charles, had become a Quaker and was making himself unpopular campaigning for a negotiated peace with Germany. In a note to Margery’s father dated April 1, Buxton said he was “very glad the Lord Mayor’s Committee agreed to send Miss Barber…It will be a very interesting expedition and I hope we shall be able to render some good service to some of the war victims of the Caucasus. England is very largely responsible for what has occurred because she quarreled with the Russians and has bolstered up Turkish rule these many years.” What had occurred, and was still occurring, was what the Fund, in an appeal published in the Times on April 6, called “probably…the greatest massacres recorded in history”. Islamic at its core, the Ottoman Empire historically granted a degree of autonomy to its populations of different faiths and cultures, but it had been crumbling for generations and the more it crumbled — the more it suffered defeat at the hands rebellious subjects — the more it began to morph into a religiously intolerant Turkic ethnostate, with a particular animus against Armenians. The Young Turk revolutionaries who ousted the last sultan in 1908 billed themselves as modernizers. That did not stop them also being enthusiastic ethnic cleansers. Looking to Germany to help them make Turkey great again, they sided with the Central Powers and went to war with Tsarist Russia, a traditional foe. Armenians living in communities across Ottoman Anatolia and the Russian Caucasus, two million of them on the Ottoman side of the border, were caught in the middle. They fought in both armies, but when, early on, the Russians gained the upper hand, the Young Turks demobilized their Armenians, took their weapons and set about getting rid of them altogether. Some one and a half million would be dead by the time it was over, slaughtered in place or on death marches to the Syrian desert. Why did Buxton blame England? David Lloyd George, the prime minister, writing many years later in The Truth about Peace Treaties, supplies an answer: “Had it not been for our sinister intervention, the great majority of Armenians would have been placed by the Treaty of San Stefano in 1879 under the protection of the Russian flag…The action of the British government led inevitably to the terrible massacres of 1895-7, 1909 and, worst of all, the holocausts of 1915.” The Treaty of San Stefano ended a Russo-Turkish war in which the Russians ended up occupying Ottoman territory full of Armenians. Britain, not a friend of Russia at the time, helped the Turks retrieve its real estate in the peace settlement. Pro quo, the Disraeli administration extracted the the island of Cyprus as a quid plus a promise that Istanbul would be nice to the Armenians who were being returned to its fold. Cyprus the British would keep for 60 years. The promise went unkept. The “very interesting expedition” Buxton had predicted began on the platform on King’s Cross station at 2.20 on the afternoon of April 7. Margery arrived with a large bag packed by her mother “with great ability, putting in just the right things,” her father would write. He was there to see her off. He painted her name on the bag as the train was about to leave. It had all be a bit of a rush. The right things included cobbler’s awls and carpentry tools. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com (https://simonbarber.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   24 Aug 2024

   Chicago Rashomon '68

   I am looking at a photograph taken on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue a little after 8 on the evening of Wednesday, August 28, 1968, and wishing my father was still around to fill in a few details. It’s a dramatic image. Center foreground is a cop in a riot helmet who seems to be weighing whether to use his night-stick on the photographer, Michael Boyer of the Associated Press. Behind him, moving right to left, similarly accoutered colleagues are chasing people down the sidewalk outside the Conrad Hilton. That’s where Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential nominee, is headquartered along with his rival, Senator Eugene McCarthy, for the duration of the Democratic National Convention under way three miles south at the (since demolished) International Amphitheater. Wedged between the chase — perhaps mêlée is better — and the wall of the Hilton is an involuntary chorus of deeply uncomfortable spectators. Most would clearly rather be somewhere else if getting there didn’t entail being beaten bloody by Mayor Richard Daley’s enraged gendarmes on the way. Among the pursued is Dad, dapper in Lob shoes and Savile Rowe suit with silk square billowing from breast pocket. Mother always insisted he be properly dressed. She would not have been amused to see the notebook peeking from his jacket’s side pocket. That’s how you spoiled a good suit’s cut. In his left hand are papers of some sort, in his right a handkerchief to provide rudimentary protection from teargas and the charnel house stench of the stink bombs the Yippies have been tossing about to make some sort of point. A cop a good deal larger than Dad, who was 5’ 3” in his socks, appears to be gaining on him with intent. Is this the galoot who put my father’s arm in a cast? I lucked into the photograph because, with the Democrats once again holding their convention in Chicago (rather more joyously this time), it seemed a good moment to dig into this episode of Dad’s life for the biography I’m working on — tentative title: Chronicler — in tandem with the one about my great aunt. I was 12 when it happened. Dad was the London Sunday Telegraph’s Washington correspondent. My mother and I were holidaying in England at the time and heard about his getting injured from a BBC news bulletin. I was less concerned about his health than thrilled by his fame and derring-do. Mother may have taken a different view. Dad supplied further details in the story he filed for that Sunday’s editions and in person when he joined us, bandaged, the following week. He wrote of it again in his book, America in Retreat (https://www.amazon.com/America-Retreat-1970-how-there-ebook/dp/B0C69XVQFH/ref=sr_1_5?crid=X2UGZ9ZNN7NM&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.vMjQtZesUV7PDezh6fkFO_zZTnLxJxVS-2hv3Mh8T7KFKbE-wVb40V6W6l7P000XqvYhmak20bSsz7E9jczScRX86c53Ml9yu3sf3wybTaJ_us2qQp5Z25NJepnbiA3TZ7a2ZTZv_J2EwYQhZ-eizXDWkSGSVi-QFWpllHOn-VYRjYypyWVpahTh9ri1Zb_JKxNfKi3nUIKSMqydwyzE-CfIi8EAUsuG_u5e9KR-47c.aouvDj2Gfq3nHveotbBY9fJOdCbDewJYQNVYzGOiuFs&dib_tag=se&keywords=America+in+Retreat&qid=1724521713&s=digital-text&sprefix=america+in+retreat%2Cdigital-text%2C85&sr=1-5), which came out in 1970. For all that, and even though we visited the scene together in 1976 en route to covering that year’s Republican convention in Kansas City, I have been never entirely clear on what went down. So it was wonderful — thank you, Google — to run across a picture that put Dad slap in the thick of things to go with the one I have of him with Mussolini’s corpse in Milan’s Piazza Loreto in 1945. Let’s take a step back to consider what was happening that day. Tens of thousands of mostly young protesters had descended on Chicago united in their understandable rage against the war in Vietnam and the possibility of being drafted to fight in it. They had arrived under a smorgasbord of overlapping aegises, among them Abbie Hoffman’s Youth International Protest (Yippies), Dave Dellinger’s Mobilization Against the War in Vietnam (the Mobe), and Tom Hayden’s Students for a Democratic Society. Many had come to help McCarthy somehow wrest the nomination from Humphrey. “Dump the Hump!” was their battle cry. Others preached outright revolution and meant, quite openly, to cause mayhem. All, by the third day of the convention, were fully up the noses of Mayor Daley and his boys in blue at whom they had been throwing epithets (“Pigs!’ being a favorite and among the more polite) and a variety of missiles, ranging from bags of human waste to things that can cause serious injury. At this point, a lot of them were in Grant Park. Daley, who didn’t want them anywhere near the convention proper, thought they should stay there. The main body of the park is bounded by Lake Michigan and Lakeshore Drive to the east and a railroad cutting to the west, on the other side of which, running parallel, is Michigan Avenue. Put riot police or National Guardsmen on the bridges across the cutting and you block access to Michigan Avenue and the rest of the city, at least in theory. By late afternoon, thousands of demonstrators had found their way around or through the various cordons and were seething south down Michigan Ave. towards the Hilton where the Hump was recovering from a collateral dose of teargas and getting ready for his acceptance speech the following night. The Hilton occupies a full block on the west side of Michigan Ave. facing the park and the lake and is bounded by Balbo Drive to the north. Here the police decided to make a stand to keep the mob from the hotel’s main entrance. On of the corner of Balbo and Michigan was the Haymarket Lounge, to which Dad and other members of the fourth estate had, I believe, repaired for early evening refreshments. Its floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows afforded a congenial vantage point from which to observe developments on the street outside. As the action heated up, the more daring of the journos put down their drinks to take a closer look. They were greeted by a phalanx of police advancing toward them down Balbo. Marino de Medici of Rome’s Il Tempo, writing 50 years later, remembered: I saw it coming like the giant wave of a tsunami, mostly policemen swinging batons and hitting people with a ferocity that I could not expect from an arm of the law. Suddenly, I felt that I had become a target and I shared my fear with a colleague standing near me, Stephen Barber of London’s Sunday Telegraph. A few seconds later the arm of the law came crashing down on us, breaking the right arm of Stephen as he was trying to fend off the blow. I was lucky because at that very moment the large plate glass window of the travel agency office facing the street came crashing down. I quickly rushed into the empty space and escaped without injury. Here’s Dad in his piece for the Sunday Telegraph: I got beaten up on the pavement outside the Conrad Hilton hotel right after a bright, bearded lad in sandals with the Oxford Book of English Verse under his arm had informed me: “Now you people are going to feel police brutality. I can tell. Just you watch!“ He could read the signs, I gathered. A group of blue-clad men had materialized from a side street. They were pocketing their numbered badges. “That means they are going to get rough,“ the boy said. Sure enough, it so happened. The pavement was supposed to be sanctuary. But there were photographers at work. The police made them their prime targets all week. In this case, they suddenly exploded upon us, just as the poetry lover predicted. I was lucky to fall in the first wave. People behind me – almost all onlookers rather than demonstrators, as it happened – were driven back in such a panic that the plate glass window of a hotel bar [The Haymarket] shattered. A middle-aged woman screamed. The police sailed on, through the window, still swinging their clubs. “They’ve gone mad,” someone said. It struck me as quite an understatement. It is at this point that Winston Churchill, the statesman’s grandson, Louis Auchincloss, a Kennedy clan in-law, and a young woman, identified by Churchill as Anita Miller, enter the narrative. Churchill, 27, was covering the convention for the London Evening News, Auchincloss for NBC. Dad’s take for the Sunday Telegraph: Anyone was fair game – convention delegates included. And to interfere was to risk arrest or a beating or both. Winston Churchill and, Mrs Jaqueline Kennedy’s half-brother James Auchincloss – both reporters – were chased by three or four policeman on foot and another on a motorbike who rode straight over the curb to try and smash them against a railing, simply for intervening to rescue a young girl who was being brutally slugged by a plainclothes man armed with a cosh. The eyes of these thugs…simply blazed with insanity. There is no other word for it. Hitler’s storm troopers were the same type. And here’s Dominic Harrod, reporting for the Daily Telegraph: A well-dressed 20-year-old Chicago girl who happened to be on the scene was run down from behind by a plainclothes policeman from whom she was running, obeying his yell to “move on“. As his baton hit her shoulder and she fell, Mr. Winston Churchill, reporting for the Evening news, and Mr. Auchincloss, working for the National Broadcasting Company, ran towards her. As she rose, and I was moving towards the mêlée, the plainclothesman darted away across the avenue towards parked police vans. At that instant, a motorcycle policeman hurtled along the road, screeching to a noisy standstill a yard from us, one wheel against the curb, before turning and roaring off across the street again. Within minutes, Mr. Churchill, Mr. Auchincloss, Mr. Stephen Barber, correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph, and I were picking ourselves up after another charge this time on foot, and comparing baton bruises on heads, wrists and thighs. Churchill’s version, as paraphrased by the United Press, went like this: He said he was standing not far from the hotel with Mrs Kennedy’s half-brother when a young blonde girl ran past to escape police attacking demonstrators about 100 yards away. Suddenly, he said, a plainclothes man dashed across the road, pulled a blackjack from his pocket, grabbed the girl and began beating her. He said he and Mr Auchincloss went to help the girl. He said he asked the man his name. “The only answer we got was be be attacked by him also,” Mr Churchill said. “Mr Auchincloss was hit a couple of times and I was knocked to the ground. “As I picked myself up, a three-wheeled police motorcycle charged the two of us and pinioned us agains the wall near the pavement.” Mr Churchill said he and Mr Auchincloss clambered over the wall and got away. Writing America in Retreat (https://www.amazon.com/America-Retreat-1970-how-there-ebook/dp/B0C69XVQFH/ref=sr_1_5?crid=X2UGZ9ZNN7NM&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.vMjQtZesUV7PDezh6fkFO_zZTnLxJxVS-2hv3Mh8T7KFKbE-wVb40V6W6l7P000XqvYhmak20bSsz7E9jczScRX86c53Ml9yu3sf3wybTaJ_us2qQp5Z25NJepnbiA3TZ7a2ZTZv_J2EwYQhZ-eizXDWkSGSVi-QFWpllHOn-VYRjYypyWVpahTh9ri1Zb_JKxNfKi3nUIKSMqydwyzE-CfIi8EAUsuG_u5e9KR-47c.aouvDj2Gfq3nHveotbBY9fJOdCbDewJYQNVYzGOiuFs&dib_tag=se&keywords=America+in+Retreat&qid=1724521713&s=digital-text&sprefix=america+in+retreat%2Cdigital-text%2C85&sr=1-5) a year or so later, my father recalled the scene thus: I had my arm broken when a helmeted lunatic clubbed me as I watched Winston Churchill and Jamie Auchincloss — both reporters on the scene and scarcely militant radicals — rescuing a young girl from a plain­clothes man who was lunging at her with a billy club at least 100 yards from the main mêlée. The girl, we dis­covered, was not even a McCarthy supporter — she was for Nixon — but that made no difference. As far as Daley's boyos were concerned, it was open season on the young and any who might be presumed to sympath­ize with them. In my own retelling over the years — and in spite of knowing better — I have, I confess, often made my father the hero of the piece, having him run to the rescue of both Churchill and Ms. Miller. Churchill died in 2010, the same year Auchincloss went to jail for possession of child pornography, so I have had little fear of contradiction. I now happily spike my version in favor a much better one I found in the memoirs (https://www.amazon.com/You-Wake-Me-Each-Morning/dp/1491753277) of Connie Lawn, a redoubtable radio journalist and dear family friend we sadly lost in 2018. At one point, as I walked through the crowds with press tags hanging clearly from my chest, I was the victim of an attack, and thvus temporarily became an unwilling participant in the news, as well as a reporter. The police charged, and one heavy officer slammed his billy club down on my head. His eyes widened with shock and disbelief when the club bounced back at him. Those were the days of the stiff, teased hairstyles and wigs. My own waist length hair was rolled up under such a wig, and it probably was the only thing standing between the billy club and a skull fracture. One of my colleagues, Winston Churchill II, wasn’t so fortunate. As he and his fellow British journalist, Stephen Barber, strolled through the park that night, Churchill also found himself on the receiving end of the billy club treatment. Barber, desperately trying to rescue his friend from the battering, yelled at the cops, “You can’t hit him – he’s Winston Churchill!” “Right, buddy,” one of the cops sneered, “and we’re the tooth fairy.” They began hitting him even harder, breaking his wrist in the process. Here’s the full chapter from America in Retreat (https://www.amazon.com/America-Retreat-1970-how-there-ebook/dp/B0C69XVQFH/ref=sr_1_5?crid=X2UGZ9ZNN7NM&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.vMjQtZesUV7PDezh6fkFO_zZTnLxJxVS-2hv3Mh8T7KFKbE-wVb40V6W6l7P000XqvYhmak20bSsz7E9jczScRX86c53Ml9yu3sf3wybTaJ_us2qQp5Z25NJepnbiA3TZ7a2ZTZv_J2EwYQhZ-eizXDWkSGSVi-QFWpllHOn-VYRjYypyWVpahTh9ri1Zb_JKxNfKi3nUIKSMqydwyzE-CfIi8EAUsuG_u5e9KR-47c.aouvDj2Gfq3nHveotbBY9fJOdCbDewJYQNVYzGOiuFs&dib_tag=se&keywords=America+in+Retreat&qid=1724521713&s=digital-text&sprefix=america+in+retreat%2Cdigital-text%2C85&sr=1-5) featuring the Chicago rumble. It’s entitled Turning Right and Turning Inwards. Nixon entered the White House in January 1969 as the quintessence of middle-class, middle-income America — the champion, as he sees it, of the “silent majority” of the non-Black, non-young, non-trendy and non-poor: the people who go to Church most Sundays, pay their mortgages, agonize over their incomprehensible children, worry about inflation, the rising crime rate, drug addiction, and pornography, and detest the Vietnam war but find it hard to face losing it. They were fed up with race riots. The gold drain perplexed them. Foreigners seemed to be losing respect for the dollar. It had, surely, been different under Eisenhower — and here was Nixon, blessed by Ike from his sickbed and with the national father figure's grandson, David, be­trothed to his daughter, Julie. His nomination had taken place at the Republican convention at Miami Beach — the archetype of all that is most stridently vulgar about affluent suburban America and its values, a man-made redoubt constructed of neon, concrete and polyethelyne on sand, isolated from uglier realities by a polluted lagoon. America was tired and fretful — not least of all about her world role. In public, Nixon naturally talked about “making the American dream come true” and foreseeing a day when “America is once again worthy of its flag…(and) of respect.” But underlying the tub-thumping was a hard core of realism. He had shelved any idea of “winning” a mili­tary victory in Vietnam. In private — and before he was nominated — he was amazingly candid about it. At a closed session of party delegates, which was surreptitiously tape-recorded by the Miami Herald at the time, he let the cat out of the bag. Someone had asked him, he said, if he thought the war was lost. “I said that if I believed that, I won't say it. The moment we say the war is lost you're not going to be able to negotiate, you see. The only way...is to convince the enemy you've some strength left.” He then went on to claim he would get out of Vietnam the way Eisenhower had from Korea — by negotiating and making the South Vietnamese strong enough to permit a US withdrawal. And “regard­ing the future, there won't be any more Vietnams!” he promised. Similarly, Nixon unveiled his intention to duck the world policeman commitment. He was most warmly applauded when he talked about getting the allies to share the load “so we don't fight their wars for them”. As for Russia, he was for telling its leaders that as neither they nor the US wanted nuclear war so the time had come to negotiate. 'We've got to broaden the canvas from Vietnam — they have no reason to end that war. It's hurting us more than them,” he said. “But we could put the Mideast on the fire. And you could put Eastern Europe on the fire. And you could put trade on the fire. And you could put the power (sic) bombs on the fire...and you say: “Now, look here. Here's the world. Here is the United States. Here's the Soviet Union. Neither of us wants nuclear war...They want something else but they don't want war.”So they'll say: “What are we going to do in order to reduce these ten­sions?”” There was, needless to say, not a word about keeping the allies informed in any of this. Nixon's vision sharply differed from that heroic Camelot-by-the-Potomac of the Kennedy era. It was a vision unlikely to charm the young, the poor and the Black, who remained a minority in this land for all the noise they made. America suddenly seemed middle­-aged, having reached that condition in record-breaking time, compressing British imperial experience of a cen­tury following Trafalgar into not much more than a couple of decades. The nation was quietly throwing in the sponge. The Democratic Party Convention in Chicago of 1968 saw Nixon's opponents locked in bitter battle over the Vietnam issue. Nixon himself was already determined to withdraw from Vietnam as rapidly as he could. There were no longer any hawks in the running — only variants of doves. Even the third party candidate, former Alabama Governor George Wallace, while pick­ing General Curtis LeMay as his running-mate, took very good care to insist that he felt America should never have got into the war in the first place and that he, too, would never keep “American boys” over there indefinitely. The plain, unvarnished truth was that the nation wanted to get out of Vietnam. There was no longer the faintest echo anywhere of Kennedy's famous pledge “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship…to assure the survival of liberty.” Nor was anyone for carrying on as Johnson's “guardians at the gate”. What occurred at Chicago, therefore, was a 'happen­ing' that could have easily been avoided. The spectacu­lar collisions between Mayor Richard Daley's police riot squads and demonstrators outside the Hilton Hotel, where both Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Eugene McCarthy were headquartered, were pure guerilla theatre, along with the sideshow riots in Grant Park and elsewhere. They were a way of letting off steam. It was plain enough that the militant activists of the emerging New Left — the Mobilization Against the War in Vietnam, or Mobe, and the Youth Interna­tional Party, the Yippies — were spoiling for trouble. They wanted to prove that the whole system was rotten, and that the only thing to do was tear it down. Theirs was the “politics of confrontation”. As a studied insult to their elders, the Yippies nominated a pig named Pigasus for the Presidency of the United States. National flags were burned. Communist flags were brandished. By making common cause for the moment with the frustrated McCarthyite youngsters, the New Left calculated that they, too, would become imbued with hatred for the cops as “fascist pigs”, “enemies of the people”, “baby burners” — to cite a few milder epithets employed — and become converts to the revolution. When the police be­haved badly in their turn, which was entirely predict­able in a force that is notable for indiscipline and cor­ruption even by American standards, the young nihil­ists and their allies were delighted and exultant. Public sympathy swung to the side of the police, which shook liberal commentators to the core. As something of a connoisseur of civil disturbance, I reckon the mayor muffed it. Had Daley and his police chief had the wit, they would have profitably permitted the motley demon­stration on the main day of the Convention to march on the hall in the Chicago stockyards, as its organizers wished to. It was a hot and sticky August day. The dis­tance was some five miles. Moreover, the route would have taken the long-haired collegiate and predominantly middle- and upper-middle-class pacifists, with their out­rageous slogans and North Vietnamese flags, right through an area of the city that is largely inhabited by working class “ethnics” who tend towards superpatriotism. Unlike the affluent, the children of these folk have enjoyed less opportunity to dodge conscription for Viet­nam by extending their education year after year and securing student deferments. These were Daley's people. They are the sort that hang out the stars and stripes from their front porches. Had the Yippies and the Mobe led the Minnesota Senator's children through their streets, the scenario would have been rather different: Chicago's police would have appeared on the nation's (and the world's) televison screens protecting the mis­guided offspring of the over-privileged from the right­eous wrath of the less so. As it was, the police went berserk. They cracked not only demonstrators over the head but onlookers as well. I myself had my arm broken when a helmeted lunatic clubbed me as I watched Winston Churchill and Jamie Auchincloss — both reporters on the scene and scarcely militant radicals — rescuing a young girl from a plain­ clothes man who was lunging at her with a billy club at least 100 yards from the main melee. The girl, we dis­covered, was not even a McCarthy supporter — she was for Nixon — but that made no difference. As far as Daley's boyos were concerned, it was open season on the young and any who might be presumed to sympath­ize with them. More serious than the mayhem on Chicago's streets — and far more damaging to the Democrats — were Daley's strong-arm tactics inside the Convention hall. He packed the stands with supporters, harassed anti­Humphrey delegates and tinkered with the public address system to gag them. It was all so blatant, the Republicans were overjoyed. Nixon was reputedly beaten in 1960 largely because Daley's well-greased party machine in Cook County carried the day for Kennedy by wholesale fraud, stuffing ballot boxes and generally rigging the vote in the time-honoured way. This prac­tice is — or was — an accepted feature of Chicago life, as in other big American cities, even if it is slowly dying out. Daley wanted Senator Edward Kennedy, as a fel­low Irishman, to run: when he would not do so, he transferred his loyalty reluctantly to Humphrey. The uproar at Chicago was both a cause and effect of the growing alienation of America's brightest youngsters. Long before Chicago one began to encounter the phenomenon of “turned off” American student youth. Even as McCarthy's children's crusade was in full swing, I met angry young SDS (Students for a Demo­cratic Society) adherents who regarded the adopted leader of the anti-Johnson movement as a fake. They would tell one without equivocation that in their view American society was so hopeless that nothing would do but to scrap the entire “power structure”, McCarthy included. When asked what they would wish to see replace it, they would reply that any attempt to answer that question must of necessity “institutionalize” the revolution, which would mean creating another “power structure” that would be as bad as that which preceded it. An alternative to this somewhat self-defeating line of reasoning occasionally advanced went like this: “Why should we tell your generation what we want? If we do, there is a chance that you will seek to corrupt our revolutionary purity by proposing a seductive compromise!” The popular idols of those who indulged in this circular dialectic were, of course, Che Guevara, the Cuban-Argentinian lieutenant of Fidel Castro, who being dead could not betray the cause by contradicting any propositions advanced in his name hereinafter, and Herbert Marcuse, the ex-German political scientist of San Diego, whose works are almost unreadable and hence seldom seem to have actually been read by his disciples. Then there were Maoists, with the little red book, and dozens of other schisms and factions too numerous to mention or bother about. The most fanatic of all to emerge thus far was a small but wholly violent group who called themselves the Weathermen, a few score of whom deliberately staged “four days of rage” in Chicago in the autumn of 1969 during which they smashed up cars, windows and shop fronts in a frenzy of violence, the sole object of which was to pro­voke “the pigs” into blazing action with CS gas and night sticks flashing. The police duly obliged. It seems almost incredible now but as late as 1964 it was fashionable for American educators and liberals generally to deplore the conformist tendencies of the nation's youth. They were insufficiently politicized, the complaint ran. The assassination of John Kennedy had numbed them and LBJ lacked charisma. A sense of cause began to develop with the passage of Johnson's civil rights legislation. A number — never very large­ — felt impelled to missionary efforts amongst the down­trodden Blacks of the deep South, helping the hitherto disenfranchised to register to vote and taking part in various protest marches — often at considerable physical risk. But it was not until the spring of 1965 that the so-called Free Speech Movement was well and truly launched on the University of California's sprawling campus at Berkeley, San Francisco, by a 22-year-old New Yorker named Mario Savio. Savio, who had been busy as a civil rights activist in Mississippi, announced that he was “tired of reading history — I want to make it!” He organized a series of protests, boycotts, sit-ins and the like, not only for free speech, which meant plain foul language for its own sake, but also, for banning the bomb, against the Vietnam war and denouncing Alabama's Wallace. It culminated in a victory of sorts in forcing the resignation of the university's president, Clark Kerr. There were also clashes with police. Politically it produced the opposite of its intention — a sharp swing to the right in California with the election of Ronald Reagan as law-and-order Republican Governor. Earnest analysis of this early unruliness, which in due course spread eastwards back across America, have tended to put it all down to the frustrations of the com­puter age. They saw the student as being increasingly crushed by the exacting demands of specialization. The bigger US universities are so vast that it is impossible for professors to know or even to meet personally more than a fraction of the boys and girls they teach. It is not uncommon, for example, for 2 000 students to attend a lecture in some vast hall while yet more, often scores of miles away on another campus, are sitting in on the same performance piped in by closed-circuit TV. Several State universities boast 30,000 or more students. The feeling of being little more than an auto­maton in a network of irrelevant studies controlled by punch-cards fed to master automata is easily acquired. Then there are the social and parental pressures on the American child to “make the grade”. Since already one­ half of the youngsters who emerge from the secondary school system are expected to go on to college it flows inevitably from this that a mere bachelor's degree is scarcely a passport to a good job. Indeed, the latest phenomenon is that PhDs are in serious over-supply. This in turn is making it more important to go to a prestige college than to win the highest qualifications a less well-known one can confer. Students tend to be particularly disaffected in the Arts and social sciences — the soft disciplines. Not only do many students doubt whether what they are being taught is worth knowing, but so do some oddly assorted elders. Spiro Agnew, the vice president Nixon picked with uncanny skill to function as his political lightning conductor, is one. Gore Vidal, the novelist, is another. Agnew thinks that overemphasis on higher education is denying many a potentially good plumber useful earning time. Vidal thinks it serves as a means of fudg­ing employment statistics — a parking lot in the passage from childhood into life. Educators, needless to say, disagree — and with one another, too. The problem is compounded, if not caused, by afflu­ence — the same affluence that permits American middle­ class youngsters to indulge their whims in experiment­ing with marijuana, LSD and other more dangerous hard drugs to the degree that it is now becoming a real menace in secondary schools. Parental control, never a strong point with the beneficiaries of Dr Benjamin Spock's popular pediatric teachings, is minimal. Ameri­can youngsters often seem actively to despise their mothers and fathers — certainly to a much more evident degree than in, say, Britain. The generation gap is real. Not only that, but such wiseacres as Dr Margaret Meade, the anthropologist, who ardently supports the cult of youth-knows-best, testify that it is inevitable and right that it should be so. It can be argued that the child is right to question whether it is worth so much effort to attend his classes in order to end up in the kind of dead-end job his father holds down. The computer age is palpably reducing a widening range of middle and upper-middle executives in business and government into little more than mech­anized clerks. The function of decision-making, which alone distinguished the salaried white-collar worker from lowlier, wage-earning office help, can increasingly be turned over to a data-processor. For example, whereas once upon a time it was up to a local bank branch manager to judge a customer's creditworthiness in respect of a loan for a new car or improvements to his house, nowadays he is not encouraged to do anything more than feed the required information on to a card for the benefit of a centralized memory bank, which makes its ruling in the form of a 'read-out'. When a dock worker loses his job to a fork-lift it is seldom before his union has succeeded in coming to terms with management. This has been the pattern in getting automation accepted in America much faster than elsewhere. The union agrees to accelerate retire­ments in return for management's contributing large sums to its pension funds, for example. A bargain is struck. The docker who is duly found redundant has fewer illusions about his place in the scheme of things. He is content to go fishing or start a new career in some other field. But the educated executive, shunted aside by the cybernetic age, is emotionally less able to cope with it. How do you tell a man who has been earning $15,000 a year or more and has his name on the glass door of his cubicle that a thing of plastic tapes, whirling discs and ciphers has effectively displaced him? But his son may interpret the message only too accurately. The modern American child, too, to an even greater degree than his European counterpart, is apt never to have known a situation where three meals a day failed to materialize. His parents may bore him with reminiscences of the Depression years or the War. He will half heed them, if he heeds them at all. He is, in short, pampered and spoiled, much more indulged than loved. On top of this, he — and his sister — are constantly exposed to the mendacities of high-pressure advertising on the TV and in the Press. They are endlessly regaled with news and comment that reveals politicians as charlatans, crooks, self-seekers — and very many indeed certainly are. They cannot visit the drug store news­ stand without being confronted by the assumption that their entire generation (and a good part of the nation) is sex-obsessed or queer, high on pot and copping out. Lawlessness and corruption is condemned by the same elders as condone it — and profit from it. They perceive on all sides abundant evidence that the society they are expected to inherit is a very sick one, whose values and priorities are in a terrifying tangle. The youngsters, who turned to McCarthy as a kind of Pied Piper in 1968, found in him a safety-valve for their pent-up frustrations. It often struck me watching him that they invented him as a symbol rather than that they followed him. He would have made a very strange President if by some astonishing miracle he had been elected. His philosophy of office was so excessively low key he would have been well nigh invisible. He would frequently remark, for example, on how he felt the White House should be turned into a museum with the fences torn down. Except that he was thoroughly against the Vietnam war, he was dispassionate to the point of vacuum on most issues. He could also be bafflingly recondite before mystified audiences. I once heard him deliver a fearsomely technical lecture on the problems of international monetary liquidity to a convivial gathering of master builders and their wives in Wisconsin. It can hardly have won him many votes. But the kids, although sometimes in despair at these antics, adored him to a point where it began to worry responsible adults in his party: what on earth was going to happen to them when the adventure ended? In the eyes of America's well-to-do liberals, the unrest in the nation's schools is largely due to Vietnam. This may be so in their schools, perhaps, but in poorer districts it is more due to racial tension and crime. The common denominator in both is an alarming growth in drug addiction amongst the young. I would not suggest that a mafority are nowadays “hooked”, but rather that it is fashionable both in the ghetto and in white suburbia to be hip to the drug scene. A quarter-million kids slept out at Woodstock at a mass folk music concert, in their bell-bottoms and beads. They experienced the great uni­versal love-in feeling of cause and solidarity by march­ing on the Washington monument to protest. All this may sound as harmless as Beatlemania, but American children do not do things by halves. The pot cult became almost conformist. Spot-checks of public and private schools all over the country in 1969 showed that scarcely any were free of this drug problem and one-in-ten was seriously worried about heroin. Senator Tom Dodd stated in Congress in January 1970 that drug addiction had become the principal medical problem in the US armed forces and that, at a conservative estimate, 12 million Americans have taken marijuana and 250, 000 are addicted to heroin. The “Woodstock nation” was not quite as sweet as it had seemed at first. Time magazine reported on the pop festival in August 1969 in ecstatic terms. It “turned out to be history's largest happening,” the paper re­corded, “…the moment when the special culture of US youth of the '60s displayed its strength, appeal and power…may well rank as one of the significant politi­cal and sociological events of the age.” In fact, this lioniz­ing of a counter-culture spawned by the flower-people of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury and cemented by hard rock music and dope was a foolish attempt on the part of the over-30s to participate vicariously in the seemingly enviable freedom of Youth. Americans of the kind that get to be magazine writers and editors are mortally afraid of seeming square. And doubtless this accounts for their failure to record subsequently that Woodstock died five months later at Altamont outside Berkeley, California, when an attempt to repeat the magical rally ended hideously. It was estim­ated afterwards that 500 000 turned out for this second concert, stars of which were Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. Someone had engaged the notorious Hells Angels — a gang of motorbike-riding thugs — as guards. This in itself was enough to guarantee tragedy, which came surely enough. Four youngsters were killed. A Black boy was ritually stabbed to death by Angels right under Jagger's nose as he sang 'Sympathy for the devil' on stage. Over 100 were beaten up by these same hoodlums with clubs and chains. Perhaps 1000 were treated for LSD overdoses. At least two performers were hospitalized — one of them a pregnant girl singer. Time magazine, having waxed so eloquent about Wood­ stock earlier, overlooked its Californian sequel which was surely quite as “significant...of the age”. It is not my purpose to moralize about drugs. Suffice it to say that youngsters who take even the soft drug do so partly because it is socially accepted but more so because it releases tensions — and it is, in turn, this which they have turned into their excuse. The slum­ dweller is buying oblivion from his miserable surround­ings, and then resorts to robbery with violence to pay the pusher. The better-off suburbanite seeks release from the hang-ups that derive from inner conflicts of a more sophisticated kind. The fact remains that the entire hippie/youth revolt/ghetto riot/crime-in-the-streets/drug scene is stirring up a powerful groundswell of reaction in Middle America against the young—its own young included. Dr Calvin Plimpton, head of the excellent, if expen­sive, New England private school named Amherst, recently wrote an open letter to Nixon ascribing the “turmoil on the campus” to the failure of political leaders to address themselves “effectively, massively and per­sistently (to) the major social and foreign problems of our times”. He was doubtless sincere — and was much quoted in prestige newspapers — when he said the uproar in the universities “derives from the distance separating the American dream from the American reality”. This is a factor and I have touched on it earlier. But in my view it has been the hypocrisy of teaching the young for so long that the dream and the reality are one that has created much of the problem. Dr Plimpton's Amherst statement had it that “huge expenditure of national resources for military purposes...the critical needs of America's 30 million poor, the unequal division of our life on racial issues” are responsible for the “mal­aise of the larger society”. It is probably much truer that his more idealistic students — one of whom is David Eisenhower, Nixon's son-in-law — find it impossible to square dropping napalm on Vietnamese villagers in order to save them from Communism as part of an imperial mission with the anti-colonialist tradition they have been led to believe are their heritage. A less inhibited and probably larger group is just as badly disturbed over the failure of American armed might to produce instant results. Here, then, one comes to the other ugly factor emerg­ing in American politics. Nixon was more haunted in 1968 by Wallace than by Humphrey. George Wallace took 13.5 per cent of the popular vote nationwide and won the five solidly segregationist States of the old South where the American Civil War lives on. There can be no greater mistake than to ignore the phenomenon of his support in the North also. Wallace goes down very well amongst the natural enemies of the better-off, better-educated McCarthy kids — who are to be found amongst the other half of the secondary school output that does not get to go to university. The poor whites of the South and the blue-collar workers who live in big city suburbs in the industrial regions of the Middle West, for example, feel threatened by the advances Black Americans made under Johnson. They know that Blacks moving into the house next door as a result of anti-discrimination laws knocks down the value of their mortgaged homes. Tell them that this will only be temporary and that in due time the problem will iron itself out and you are not apt to get their votes. They also know that the forced integration of State schools depresses educational standards even if this should not be so in theory. It is easy to be liberal, they argue bitterly, in a lily-white suburb or if one is rich enough to send one's youngsters to fee-paying institutions. Nixon may still be haunted by this Wallace spectre. If anything should complicate Nixon's plan to disen­gage from the war, he will be in deep trouble — and so will America: a country divided against itself, full of doubts and fears and looking inwards. The tide may well be turning away from acceptance of the policy recommendations of an educated elite — and against the elite. The day of the simplistic know-nothing yahoo may be dawning. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com (https://simonbarber.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

4. 

   16 Aug 2024

   Missionary position

   Back to the story of my great aunt Margery. Let’s return to where I began (https://simonbarber.substack.com/p/among-the-khirghiz), which is to say in the middle. It is 1932. Margery is living with her five-year-old, Robert, aka Kompro (short for Communist Proletariat) and his Russian father, Pyotr (Peter to family back home in England) in a room by Lake Chalkar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shalkar), forty remote miles south-east of Uralsk on the steppes in the northwestern corner of what has just become the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Peter has found work keeping the books for a collective that smokes and salts the lake’s abundant fish. Margery is attending to her Khirghiz neighbors. Khirghiz is what she and her Russian comrades call the nomadic peoples who have owned and roamed the steppe from time immemorial and are now in the way. Stalin wants them “sedentarized” and converted to communism. Margery is doing her bit. We do not know what she would say if told that one and half million will starve to death in the process. What follows are letters Margery writes her mother, whom she calls Mith, in 1932. The last item hints at a problem that runs in Peter’s family. It will loom large in the years ahead and may explain Peter’s extended stay in Uralsk. Wife and Home, in case you missed the first episode, is the English magazine for young upper-middle class mums to which Mith has subscribed her daughter, and which arrives, rather uniquely, like clockwork. 11 January 1932 No letter for some time from you. The posts here are awful. I hope you hear from me now and then.  I am very busy with my sick people and my health work, painting posters of Khirghiz mothers and children and getting someone to write the words “Don’t swaddle me, I want to grow”, “Bathe me and wash my shirt”, “Fresh air gives health”. The pictures I take from the lovely children in Wife and Home and put in oval eyes and straight black hair and they turn into little Khirghiz quite successfully. They are so like Chinese, the women and children in pants tied at the ankle, then a high waist print dress, then a long sleeveless coat sewn with money and gold braid, and money hanging from their plait of hair behind… January 31, 1932 Last news from you was Wife and Home for November… I am so interested in my work. The Khirghiz schoolmaster is my great friend and a great enthusiast. He asks for health placards for his school and I told him about vitamins and how we must teach the Khirghiz to eat vegetables and get them interested and obtain seeds for the spring for his schoolchildren to plant. I am busy making pictures of Lenin and Stalin, and health placards for the Khirghiz who have cleaned and whitewashed their houses. The children will so love the pictures that they will give their mothers no peace until they have whitewashed. [The Khirghiz] do not understand the value of light. They  formerly lived in felt tents and ate nothing but quantities of meat, keeping herds and pitching their tents wherever good pasture and water was handy. The days are so short, by the time you have had breakfast (with lamplight) and tidied and washed up and done lamps in the intervals of seeing patients, Peter comes in for dinner with Robert and we hustle the guests out as tenderly as possible and lock the porch door for a quarter of an hour while we have dinner which is ready cooked in the stove still hot from the morning. In the evening, the floor to wash and ice to bring in and fuel, and after dark we light the stove to warm up our room and reheat our soup and second dish. Peter is working in the evenings trying to get his yearly accounts ready. This is not allowed. He is supposed to work 7 1/2 hours only but whilst in the office everyone comes to him to verify and help them do their accounts. The fishermen bring in loads of fish which have to be weighed and sorted and priced, and cartons arrive from Uralsk with stores for the cooperative.  From here go loads of fish packed in basket crates or fibre sacks or boxes each with different weights. The fishermen are paid by the poud. What with the two languages there are many misunderstandings and all come to Peter to smooth them out. Result: work at night while there is peace and quiet. They promised him a helper. We are expecting his arrival any time from Uralsk, then Peter will have some spare time. He has bought a gun and is so delighted with it. In the spring there are masses of wild duck, wild geese and wild swans on the lake and you can eat them or give them in and receive materials etc. in exchange. My [sewing] machine is working beautifully just now. One Khirghiz woman is very clever with it and sows for the whole district on it! We allow her this privilege, and her only, and she sews for everyone, otherwise various people would soon spoil it thinking they knew how. We are having a very mild winter and are enjoying it. Robert plays out of doors the whole day long until dark only appearing for half an hour at dinnertime. In the evening he does a hasty lesson in Khirghiz and helps light the stove. He has gained one and a half pounds in weight. We also have a stock of meat and butter and bread quite sufficient even with visitors. In three days time it is Robert’s birthday. I have about 50 wrapped sweets, 15 bought gingerbreads, two tumblers of sugar, last year’s eggs – a little doubtful – and butter and flour ad lib to make buns and feed all the little Khirghiz playmates. I have got cardboard to make a top hat and Robert will dress up as a bourgeois and be blindfolded and make sport for his guests. They will all have red flags stuck on rushes to beat him with! Next letter will tell you how it goes off. I am only afraid of spoiling the buns. February 8, 1932 At last a postcard from you after a silence of three months! So you are not getting my letters! I wrote just before Christmas, then sent Robert’s photo a little later, and now also try postcards. But I have had constant magazines from you, darling Mith… also a glorious parcel with colored bag, pillow cases, rice, sugar, suet and seedless raisins and several picture postcards,  but no line from you. What a lovely present! The pillowcases were so sorely needed and so white beside my bad washing. The suet and raisins have lasted our Christmas, New Year and Robert’s birthday and now are lying hidden for the next great occasion, Easter or May Day. So I have felt that you are safe and well,  thinking of us, and have kept on writing in hopes you got my letters, and it turns out that you haven’t heard also for some time. One writes and feels like in “Tipperary” — “if you don’t receive it, write and let me know”.  But do keep trying postcards; they come better, it seems. Poor little Robert after counting the days all month to his birthday was vaccinated on the 1st (nurses are doing house-to-house vaccination as there is smallpox about) and exactly on the 3rd he was ill and feverish and had to put off his friends. However, the next day we had them and he was quite cheerful, having had two birthdays instead of one. If you could have seen him making a toy himself for a tiny sick neighbor, sawing off, with a real saw, pieces of a stick to make wheels, persevering when they broke and again sawing off until he had two whole ones, and then patiently heating a needle held in my forceps over the lamp until red hot, and burning a hole in the middle of each wheel for the axle. Then his arm hurt and he couldn’t finish his cart and the little boy was taken to hospital… March 11, 1932 You ask about the religion of the Khirghiz. They used to be Mohammedans but you see nothing of this among the young and middle-aged but I caught one old granny at her prayers bowing down her head to the sun and one husband who  read the Koran when his wife’s baby was born. Talking of babies, they stomp round the woman with tire irons to make the baby come quicker and she is delivered on her knees with her arms over a rope tied across the room. The new baby is clad in a shirt with raw edges, not hemmed, to make it grow better. Then there is a belief if a Khirghiz baby is ill it may be saved by wearing a shirt which belonged to a Russian or some other nation. But nothing beats the new child’s bed.  This is a marvel, a low wooden bed with a hole in it and a jar under the hole, the mattress also with a hole in it, the sheet also. The child is laid on the bed accurately over the hole and covered over with a blanket and strapped to the bed with its arms by its side and its legs straight, so tightly strapped that your fingers cannot pass under it. Through the hole and between its legs is put a hollowed-out bone. This is arranged to accurately catch the baby’s urine and conduct it into a receptacle which hangs on the bed. Not satisfied with strapping the child down so tightly that when taken out its body is marked all over by the pressing of the straps, they cover the child with a thick blanket, raised from the face and body by a crossbar like a tent, so the child is in complete darkness and almost complete airlessness. It does not kick or move and soon tires of crying, as its lungs have no air, and lies quietly in its living coffin more dead than alive.  Little wonder that it has chronic constipation. I am attending a baby two miles distant and visit it with a ball syringe and am trying to win over the stubborn mother and the more stubborn granny. The child’s bed is several generations old as also the scooped-out bone. The father and the granny all went through the ordeal. I don’t yet know how long it goes on or when the child begins to walk. They quite enjoyed my laughter at the bed and the father came in to know what was the matter and, when told, quite joined the merriment. But I don’t see much hope of them changing their customs. The nightwatchman has come in and says children walk when one and a half years old… Nearly forgot to tell you of our great holiday, March 8, Woman’s Day. Do you keep this? I made a speech in Khirghiz and all the women in the whole district came to our house and looked at Wife and Home and danced and sang, then all went together to meeting and after meeting a free tea at the restaurant. We communists treated them and I baked biscuits. June 16, 1932 Peter is going to Uralsk…I have never been so busy as now. I have the day nursery entirely alone from 8 am to 7 pm with interval of two hours at dinnertime with  housework, cooking and washing to be done as well. I get up at five and cook a whole day’s meals for ourselves and children with aid of a hay box “thermos”, only boiling tea or occasional special food while the children are here. I have as many as six babies from two months to a year and four older children. Have made them all swimsuits, shirts and pilches for tinies, sun hats, pillowcases, and cot covers out of a gaily flowered red material the co-op gave. Nappies made of odds and ends; sheets our own; beds home-made boxes looking like seed boxes, three in a row on a trestle table on the porch under a beautiful net canopy we bought years ago from Miss Babb, the other three on the floor, two in baskets, one on a wheeled box, also homemade, for the fractious who insist on being rocked to sleep. The height of the season of fish salting is over. My mothers are on temporary work, making bricks for new houses. Peter will be away about a fortnight. This will simplify our home life and cooking. We shall simply cook more for the children and eat it ourselves on the porch so that the flies won’t come into the house. The summer diarrhea is a great anxiety but I have castor oil, bismuth and rice and my hen obliged with her first egg today. Or has she laid elsewhere? She is a tremendously fat person so I shut her in for two days on a diet of water and behold, an egg appeared. The whites I shall use for albumin water and the yolks will provide vitamin A for the rickety children. This is an off day…I have cleaned up and washed the floor and put Peter’s things in order for Uralsk and been at a party meeting about some spoiled fish.  The Communist secretary blames the salter, the salter says the fishermen bought in stale fish, the fishermen blamed the director for not sending carts quicker, the director said the carts which they awaited from Uralsk with salt were delayed by an accident with the ferry on the way to Uralsk, so no one was found to be blamed and the meeting ended and we had dinner. August 3, 1932 Peter has been away in Uralsk for nearly 2 months and expected to be gone 10 days! They kept him there in the office. We hear he is coming any day and bringing our cow with him. Kolkhoz cows are being given back to their former owners, it being found not necessary to socialize cows if  a family has only one. We have heard today that his leather coat has been stolen…Also we hear he has got a new post and that he has earned a lot of money in Uralsk by working overtime in the office. He will most certainly take his holiday (September) in Moscow if this is true. How sad we cannot fix a meeting with you. What can have happened to our line of communication? And we have sent our photos and you don’t mention them either. Do try a postcard. Early September, 1932 Peter (do not rely on him for news) is a terrible correspondent, went to Uralsk for 10 days and it is now three months and only the other day wrote his first letter, very affectionate and promising to come on 20th. He is trying to get our cow back from our kolkhoz and they gave him someone else’s. Also he worked overtime in the office and had to go to law to get them to pay up! I worked on the fish farm for a short time; was most interesting. I am now “Women’s Organizer” and wished to see what the work was like and get to know the Khirghiz women better.  They never quarrel amongst themselves and chatter incessantly while working and are often very idle. They imposed on me as being tall when anything wanted lifting or carrying, calling me “English” or rather “Angliski”. They seem to have a rooted dislike of Russians and are very wanting in political knowledge. I am trying to get simple books for them and have organized lectures. They have never been organized before and their husbands do not wholeheartedly approve of me and do not wish their wives to have a political education, only just a little about children’s illnesses. Their psychology is very interesting and the Russians despise them and think them dirty and they think the Russians dirty! Of course, enlightened people or communists do not make these comparisons but the wives on both sides, if uneducated, are very “grand”. It is amusing to try and draw them together and there is great work to be done in education. I have no friend in my efforts because there are no other communist women among the Russians here and my home and the creche are more than enough to cope with. September 20, 1932 Peter returned…and brought with him new radios, medicines, potatoes, melons, a real young soldier’s trumpet for Robert and many other gifts. The day before yesterday our friend, the Hungarian Boris Douche, unexpectedly turned up on his bicycle and they have fixed up our radio and it talks and plays from Budapest and Czechoslovakia, Moscow, Warsaw, Germany, Tashkent, Tiflis and Italy and Algiers but not from England. I am very stupid about understanding but Peter assures me I will get used to it. I love the music best. All of a sudden,  Chopin or Wagner turns up and I feel so linked up with the big world and home life, especially you. Could you send us some quinine? We are out of it in Uralsk and my little Khirghiz children have got malaria. Robert had an attack…but we dosed him with quinine and it stopped. He is attending school. Peter is not getting his leave because he took time in Uralsk for his own business and they had a little dispute at the office…Unfortunately, my Russian passport was in Peter’s coat pocket when he was robbed, so it will be hard to receive any parcels sent. Parcels are not given without documents being shown that you are you. November 10, 1932 Got your lovely postcard and Wife and Home for October with great enjoyment. Read and reread it on the two days holiday which celebrates the October Revolution. We had a splendid two days, our radio going strong, giving us the crowds in the Red Square, Moscow, yelling “hurrah!”. Robert was splendid in his red coat. He collected all the children, then made a speech in Khirghiz: “Today is a great holiday because in ’17 there was a revolution and the workers killed the bourgeois, hurrah!” Then he dressed up as a bourgeois and let the children enjoy “flouring him”, then handed round the biscuits, then gave each a flag and with his trumpet marched around outside. The next day I dressed him as a “Red Worker” with red neck handkerchief, top boots and Peter’s cap on top of his own and he took a basket of biscuits to all the children who had not come, then after our lunch collected the children again for games. I taught them “oranges and lemons”, calling it onions and apples which Khirghiz love, and Blind Man’s Bluff and everything imaginable and Robert showed them his books. Did I tell you all our men – the director, the salter, the baker, the carpenter and Peter – have bought a large fishing net and go out every evening fishing? Sometimes they get a splendid haul and give them to the state or receive money, flower, bread, millet, tobacco in addition to ordinary rations. Besides, we get the pick of the fish, so fresh that they jump off the table! Undated “Dearest Mith, could you possibly manage to send out to us this medicine. You sent the receipt [formula] a long time ago but I could not get it made up. Medicines here are different or different names. Peter’s sister’s husband and our present director’s wife beg me to ask. They are both against drunkenness. Please, please try. Marg. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com (https://simonbarber.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

5. 

   9 Aug 2024

   Burying my father

   I am just back from a couple of days of thrarrghing around the hills and hollows of southern and West Virginia with my friend Roland, he on his Harley, I on a BMW whose early years were spent under the bum of a New Mexico Highway Patrolman but which remains remarkably lively, nonetheless. In the course of our rundfahrt, we visited my parents. They are buried on a wooded ridge above the headwaters of the James River, he in a traditional casket, she, or more precisely her ashes, in a bottle of Roederer, her favorite champagne. How she came there is a story for another day. Today I will tell of his interment. Or rather, I will have James Srodes do the telling. Jim, also no longer with us, dammit, and his wife Cecile were a huge and much loved part of my parent’s life and mine. His roots were in middle Pennsylvania. He and my father committed journalism from the Washington office of the London Daily Telegraph where dad was bureau chief until, just 58, he died in harness in the early spring of 1980. Both of them were among the best at what they did and they had a lot of fun doing it in each other’s company. What follows is, I hope, self-explanatory. Of Donald Anderson and Daniel’s Mountain, I shall have much more to say. Don included Jim’s letter in his unpublished memoir, Before the Break of Dawn. . 1366 National Press Building Washington, D.C. 20045 April 8, 1980 Dear Mom, I hope you don't mind but this is a round-robin letter to Nigel Wade, Alan Osborn and Karin Swiers who all knew and loved Steve Barber as much as we did and who would be interested, and I hope take some comfort, in the following report of his funeral. I don't know if you ever met Steve's friend Donald Anderson. When Steve and Deirdre first came to Washington in 1963 they lived in an apartment complex down in southwest Washington and met Donald, who at that time was an aide to Adam Clayton Powell. It was rare enough for anyone to have a black friend in the Washington of 1963 and, I think Donald would agree it was a rare thing for a black man to have a friend like Steve at any time. In the years that followed the Barbers were frequent visitors at a farm Donald had built down in the Virginia foothills. The home was on a mountain in a quite extensive bit of property that the Andersons’ white master left his slaves back in the 19th Century. At any rate, when Steve first fell ill but appeared to be recovering, he and Donald fell to chatting and when the conversation drifted around to it, Steve opined that he doubted that he would want to be buried back in England; that he really considered America his home. At that point Donald offered the use of his family burial plot on the hillside of that lovely mountain. Andersons dating back to 1822 are buried there and Steve was mightily amused at the prospect of being the first free-born to buried there. And there the matter rested. So it was last Thursday that we took Steve to Daniel's Mountain. Simon, Deirdre, her other son Charles McLaren, a nurse from the hospital who had grown fond of Steve, Cecile and I, Hugh and Liz Davies from the office and Congressman Wyche Fowler, who has Andy Young's old Congressional seat and was a longtime friend of Steve's and of Donald's. Gawlers’, the Washington funeral home, brought the casket down and the Davies and we brought the overflow of flowers in a rented station wagon. Our trip was marred somewhat by Hugh s inexperience with a car that big and with American super highways where the trucks whiz past at a high rate of speed and finally he came all unstuck when his erratic driving earned him the attention of the Virginia Highway Patrol, a ticket and a good old fashioned you're-in-a-heap-of-trouble, boy, lecture. For someone like myself whose sense of manhood is inextricably bound in the skill with which one drives motor cars, the experience was a trying one for me. Then we arrived at Daniel's Mountain and the fun began. The rutted, washed out track up to Donald's farm rose at a 50 degree angle with a steep drop off at the left down the side of the mountain. We could see the gashes on the hillside to our vright and the tire gouges from where the hearse had preceded us and fully expected to see it on its side several hundred feet down the slope. Not so, however. For when we reached the top there were two drivers smoking as they leaned up against the muddy, branch-scraped side of their "coach" (everything is euphemism in the funeral business — hearse is coach, death is inevitable, the deceased is referred to by the first name and the coffin is now called by its brand name style, e.g. The Monte Carlo with the Tufted Taffeta Lining). "Oh, my God, look what's happened to Hammersmith,”  Cecile cried and I almost passed out. Deirdre's one consolation through it all had been her good natured silver grey Weimaraner which was being brought down for the funeral after three weeks in a kennel. And there he was...with his right hind leg cut off at mid-thigh. Except that it wasn't Hammersmith but Victor, Donald's dog who had been getting around on three legs in fine fashion and was waiting to play with his good friend Hammersmith who had not yet arrived. Catching our breath, we recovered in Donald's modern cabin in the sky, looked down the sunny valley which was just turning green, marveled at his white peacock and inspected the cemetery where we found that the hole was too big to accommodate the automatic rope and pulley mechanism that lowers the Walnut Tudor with Percale Lining after committal. Moreover, in backing the truck through the trees to get to the hole, the firm delivering the cement vault in which the Tudor etc. would be deposited, cracked the vault against a tree and knocked a big chunk out of it. Another vault was sent for from the Clifton Forge plant and it was agreed that we would move the ceremony from the graveside to a pleasant hillock overlooking the valley and then after taking Dierdre back to the cabin, shift Steve to his final rest. Say what you will about the Funeral Industry, they give good value. In our innocence Simon and I had contracted with a D.C. firm merely to transport Steve and did not specify anything else. A Clifton Forge lodge brother joined our service by providing the vault. Neither had any interest in cooperating with the other, both pitched in right away when they saw we knew nothing about what we were doing and within minutes a decorous awning was up, artificial grass was laid, folding chairs were placed and covered with a felt covering and after we placed Steve, the flowers were banked into a truly lovely sight, what with the valley spreading out below the blue sky. It was marvelous. And so was the funeral service itself. Donald recruited Pastor Davis from his local church and we were treated to a genuine Afro-Baptist call to rejoice in the wonderful life of a dear friend who was now gone from this earth but whose memory remained to urge in each of us that each day is a precious gift. Life, Pastor John Davis said, is a moth fretting at the cloth of immortality: he can never succeed. Throughout Victor and Hammersmith romped among us, peeing on the flowers, rolling luxuriously in the warm leaves and causing us all to choke back tears from the sublime marvel of the scene. How Steve would have roared. It was a theme we would repeat throughout the day. How he would have loved it all. FOOD, of course, is an important ingredient in any funeral. Donald had had a delicious corned beef cooking throughout the day and Hugh and I volunteered to get the cooked cabbage from Donald's cousin — Mrs. Arbulla Mack — who lived over on the adjoining mountain top. By the time I had pushed Donald's tiny VW over the second bridge consisting of two simply laid tree trunks across the stream, Hugh was making small animal noises in the back of his throat. Mrs. Arbulla Mack lived up a 60 degree hill in a tiny house where she had lived most of her 81 years, the last 20 alone, gardening, sewing and cooking the finest cabbage on the Eastern Seaboard. "Welcome to hell's half acre," she shouted to Hugh, who promptly fell in love with her. "Now you be careful, this has been cooking all day and it'll scald the pee out of you.” And then she laughed and laughed until we had bumped down the hill out of sight. She had already told Donald earlier in the day to convince Deirdre that Steve was "in a better place and had laid his burdens down and was waiting for us to catch up with him". Interestingly, after a journey to Mrs. Arbulla Mack's, the road to Donald's house looked like a highway by comparison. We returned to find Donald stripped to the waist playing a lament on his bagpipes. His first interest in the instrument was awakened when he was a student at the London School of Economics, and at this point he had been playing the pipes for nine years. He paced slowly across the front yard of the house while everyone took turns freshening Deirdre's drink and insulting Donald's vanity about his well developed torso. At one point the menfolk slipped away to help shift Steve. A new vault had arrived and it was suggested that we put the coffin in the vault and then lower the vault on the truck pulley into the hole. We sweated and strained and finally after crushing a few fingers we got the Walnut-and-so-on into the cement vault. The lid was placed and the pulley began to lift the vault off the ground as the front end of the truck rose higher and higher off the ground and finally snapped the suspension, pitching the vault and coffin on its side toward us in a swinging arc that had about two tons behind it. With one horrific gasp we all lunged at the box, steadied it, lowered it back to the ground and unchained the truck which was driven away in disgrace. All this, mind you, with the dogs romping, Donald's pipes keening, sweat pouring and us alternating between tears and gales of laughter as we became convinced that Steve was amusing himself mightily at our clumsy efforts. A larger truck was obtained. We were all by now quite drunk. Donald was quite bug-eyed from playing laments to distract Deirdre from coming back to the cemetery and dogs were showing no signs of slowing down. The peafowl began to scream. "He's doing it on purpose, you know," Charles McLaren said to me. "He's toying with us." I agreed readily. Steve's laughter was almost audible. Finally we got the vault lowered into place and the two slackjawed local yeoman who had been assisting us stepped calmly onto the vault top and began dropping the clods of earth into the hole just as Deirdre got bored with Donald and came around the house to see what we were doing. With a whoop of tears she fled back into the house. Later when she walked up to the horse stables and saw that Donald had converted the damaged vault into a watering trough for his horses, she was recovered enough to laugh with the rest of us and agree, Steve would have loved it. The rest of the day dissolves into a haze of images. The fireplace, the laughing and the tears, the smell of cabbage and corned beef, the cry of the peacocks, the James River below in the valley, the noise of the freight train out of sight in some other hollow. The four of us left at an early hour that night and slept down below in a motel on the highway. We rose at dawn the next day and drove back in silence. There really was not much to say, after all. Steve is gone. We buried him on Daniel's Mountain in a way that would have pleased him mightily: for all the amateurism and macabre gaffes, it was an act of love and that is all that counts. Love, Jim This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com (https://simonbarber.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

6. 

   26 Jul 2024

   The boss don't like swindle, make it robbery

   The National Enquirer is a shadow of its former self. I worked there for a month in 1981 when it was owned and edited by Generoso Pope. I was no fan of his then but in retrospect I can’t imagine him catching and killing for Donald Trump. His guys would have caught and published, the way they did with Presidential aspirants Gary Hart and John Edwards. They would have ripped the lid off Trump’s encounter with Stormy Daniels in real time, not years after the fact. The Apprentice would have been riddled with moles on the Enquirer payroll. We would have known all there was to know about what was being snorted and with whom the star was getting hot and heavy. The schmuck being told “You’re fired!” would have been Trump himself. Or so I’d like to think. Generoso Pope was weird but knew what he was doing. He hired Brits and Australians with Fleet Street instincts and scruples and used his checkbook to get scoops, not hide them. By the standards of the time, he also paid extremely well. I was a Brit, so they thought I might be a good fit. I wasn’t. This is something I wrote when I go back from my brief encounter. It was published in the now defunct Washington Journalism Review. To understand the National Enquirer, it helps to hear a parable. Actually, the story is more or less true. It is meant as a gentle warning to newcomers, and it was as such that I was told it. A Wall Street Journal reporter, it seems, one day discovered that prestige could no longer meet the demands of mortgage, college fees, alimony and the IRS unless supplemented by a massive, indeed impossible, raise. This common quandary has driven some to drink, others into lobbying. Our man chose the Enquirer.  Confident that his substantial, though sober journalistic talent could be moulded to the tabloid’s taste, he signed on and moved his family to its headquarters in Florida. His salary doubled, the sun shone brightly on his new condominium, he acquired the beginnings of a tan. The Enquirer gives its recruits a month to prove themselves. No problem, he thought. Three weeks in, it was becoming plain he would not make the grade. Either he must produce a blockbuster, or ... well, it didn’t bear much inspection. He began to thrash around. The result was nothing if not inspired. Dallas star Larry Hagman, he wrote, was even more fiendish than the JR he portrayed. Why, even as a child he had delighted in tearing the wings off sparrows and biting the heads off mice. The Amazing Untold Story. The only question was how to stand it up.  In this respect, the author was considerably more diligent than Janet Cooke whose fabrications had so embarrassed the Washington Post; under the circumstances he had to be. More exalted practitioners of the craft may consider the Enquirer’s interpretation of ethics and accuracy a trifle idiosyncratic, but the bladder has standards, and sticks to them.  It uses greed and paranoia to spur reporters to new heights of inventiveness and zeal, but realizes the First Amendment’s mercy can be strained. So there is a balancing mechanism, the Research Department.  Its members are cunningly paid less than the reporters whose work they scrutinize and approach their task with the baneful enthusiasm of Inquisitors.  That the Enquirer is published at all is not their fault. However, Research was no match for the creator of Hagman: Hollywood Caligula.  Their basic strategy is to demand dozens of taped interviews and the names and numbers of all sources in order to re-report each story. His response was to enlist a corps of friends around the country and assign them roles as indiscreet Hagman intimates.  The deception was well‑rehearsed, there was pressure from above, where the story positively screamed record sales, and the splendid act of desperation sailed though the guard rails. Even the libel experts retained from Edward Bennet William’s law firm were impressed. Six million shoppers got their money’s worth. So, alas, did Hagman’s lawyers. After a brief flash of glory, the reporter was given ten minutes to clear his desk under the businesslike gaze of the Enquirer’s armed security men. A tragic end, but better perhaps then simply being branded No Good, or as the Enquirer laconically terms its rejects, NG. The genial Scot at the National Press Club bar painted a pleasing picture of opulence in the Florida sunshine. If there was a touch of the hustler in his broad Glasgow accent, it was belied by the half‑moon spectacles, professorial tweeds and Mont Blanc fountain pen. He had found me at a vulnerable moment. My previous employer, a British newsweekly, had folded, the job hunt was going badly and I was broke.  I could scarcely afford to go to a supermarket, much less scorn the drivel on its checkout counters. Sympathy for Carol Burnett, whose suit against the Enquirer I once cheered, had became a luxury. The recruiter suggested I try my hand at Articles editor. It started at a thousand a week, carried the responsibility of creating and running a network of reporters, and might, in the event of some really spectacular death or disaster, involve a little travel.  Poverty, and the slightly rakish prospect of building a Smileyesque Circus dedicated to ferreting out the Untold, Amazing and Bizarre, were ample stimuli.  Three days later I was on a prepaid flight south. The Enquirer resides in Lantana, one of those countless ribs of real estate whose primary function is to separate Palm Beach from Fort Lauderdale and 1‑95 from the Intracoastal Waterway. A bland tract of telegraph poles, tired palm trees and prefabrication, it is remarkable on two counts, a large population of Finns and numbing soullessness. It was perhaps my misfortune to be ushered into the presence of Mike Hoy, the Executive Editor, at lunchtime. The place was all but empty, and thus conveyed, in its efficiently pastel way, a sense of innocent cheerfulness, like an outsized kindergarten. One of the newsroom cubicles was stacked with exotic toys. I began to suspect that the people who worked here might be having fun.  Hoy, thirtyish, Australian and modeled on the lines of Cliff Richard, offered me a tryout almost immediately, then explained why the company would not, as had once been its practice, rent a car for me. One of my more exuberant predecessors had driven an Enquirer Hertz into the waterway. Then he said something rather strange. “I want you to know that we really are looking for editors.” I thought this scarcely needed saying. That impermanence was an institution at the Enquirer did not occur to me, nor, as yet, did the connection between its desperation for new blood and whatever had possessed the predecessor to sink his car. Every aspect of the Enquirer, from its management techniques to what it prints, is governed by a surgically precise appreciation of human frailty, for this is the great achievement of its own and publisher, the splendidly named Generoso Pope Jr. His relationship with his employees approximates that between the God of the Old Testament and the Children of Israel minus forgiveness. His control is total and awe‑inspiring, his ways mysterious, his retribution swift. When he deals with a man, he likes, to use his own very secular phrase, to “have him by the balls”, and usually succeeds. Under Hoy’s guidance it was hoped I would quickly learn to divine his will. Known simply as The Boss or GP, he dominates the waking thoughts, and more than a few sleeping ones as well, off all at the Enquirer, yet no one, except* perhaps his most trusted henchman Iain Calder (another Scotsman), can be said to know him.  Even Hoy at number three in the hierarchy, lives in terror. An authorized account, published in 1976 by the Miami Herald, describes him as “a tall man, built like a Bronx precinct captain”. 54 years have softened that somewhat, except for the face. Said an editor, one of the few women in the higher echelons, “There doesn’t seem to be anything behind his eyes.” The effect is a mask of staring malevolence, which may be unfortunate, but certainly does little to endear.  There are times when he seems to crave a locker‑room camaraderie with his editors.  This normally occurs in the evening when everyone else has left. He perches himself on a desk and starts to josh. The atmosphere is like an overstretched elastic band.  His humor is coarse, painful and revolves around the attributes of absent secretaries.  I recall one episode vividly. An editor had just been assigned a particularly beautiful girl,  sweet‑natured with long pre‑Raphaelite hair, and, as Pope put it, built. He suggested a swap, then, making an open‑palmed gesture just above his waist, remarked, “I like milk in my coffee.” He is, however, educated. A top of his class graduate in engineering from MIT, he reportedly served in the CIA’s psycholgical warfare unit. That said, glimpses of his life beyond the Enquirer, which he purchased in 1952, are virtually non‑existent His father was the publisher of the New York Italian paper Il Progresso, which has spawned the inevitable legends, none of them proved. I particularly like the one which has a Genovese family boss, back in the early days, distributing the weekly payroll from a cash‑filled black bag. Some see murkiness in the fact that since he moved the operation from New Jersey in 1971 he has never left south Florida. He says he hates to fly.  Such stories add to his eery mystique. Other contributors include the gun‑toting plainclothes security men who haunt the premises, the spot checks on reporters’ telephone conversations, and the uniformed Lantana patrolman who escorts him to and from his car. I cannot say I knew any of this when I started, though day one should have taught me more perhaps than it did. My first mistake was to turn up in coat and tie.  The Higher Authority wore shirtsleeves and an increasingly familiar pair of pants, a style, admonished Hoy,  that I would do well to emulate. I blundered again by trying to strike up a conversation. Apparently one did not talk to colleagues, be they only six feet away, except by internal telephone and with one’s back turned. I needed a coffee. “Put a top on it,” someone hissed as I carried a cup to my desk, “The Boss doesn’t like stains on his carpet.” To atone, I worked through lunch, another miscalculation. “The Boss believes in lunch.” Next day I ate, grateful for a temporary escape, only to be informed that I’d been seen leaving the office with the wrong people. My companions were said to be under some form of cloud and best avoided. Besides, what was I doing having lunch? I wondered whether Pope ever specified his desires before punishing those who transgressed them. The arena in which this curious drama was to be played out might have been a newsroom in any large daily before the age of computers. The open plan layout was symmetrical about a narrow avenue across which two rows of editors, about nine in all, numbers varied, were occasionally polite to one another. Behind them sat their secretaries, each busily pretending to callers that her boss worked in a private office. Next, pinched into lines of narrow, benchlike desks came the 40 or so reporters, each owing allegiance and his job to a particular editor. Finally the writers, responsible for the Enquirer’a deathless prose and probably the happiest group. Deemed creative by the Boss, they were left in peace. At the end of the central aisle, rather too close to where I had been stationed, was a series of glass boxes. Pope had a grander sanctum elsewhere, but it was here he would come when he wished to make his presence felt.  Assistants ensured that a pack of Kents and a lighter always awaited his arrival.  My first impression was that my fellow editors all looked very ill: exchange their typewriters for oars and they would have made perfect, though at $60 000 a year and up, very expensive, extras for the sea battle in Ben Hur. Among the healthier looking was my neighbour to the right, yet another expatriate Scotsman.  The gossip editor,  he had lost his laryngx to cancer and went about his duties in a hoarse, high‑pressure whisper punctuated by clicks. Across the way sat a man with a weight problem, feverishly working his way through a bag of tangerines. Two triple bypass operations had slimmed him down somewhat, a fact Pope considered humorous: “It’s good to see old Levy fits in his chair these days.” And then was a character they called the Poison Dwarf, a wizened homunculus with a peach blossom accent. Had he really been 55, his appearance might not have been so distressing. He was 38. The reporters seemed to be faring better. Many might have been worthy candidates for the SPCA. They had  the furtive look of kicked and beaten labradors.  Foot‑soldiers, they were at least insulated from the Maximum Leader by their editors, whose paranoia‑induced savagery was the mild price of relative security.  The reason I had been brought in from outside was that none of them wanted to risk their necks or their $45 000 a year any more than was strictly necessary. Now and then one or two were forcibly promoted, given the option of leaving or climbing, which regularly amounted to the same thing: climbers who failed at editor could expect to be fired, and the chances of making it were no better than those of a World War One subaltern on the line. One of the luckier ones was the young Englishman sitting to my left. Promoted some months previously, he had begun his career on a small provincial paper outside London, and had been lured to Florida by wealth and warmth. In an earlier age, he might have set out to make his fortune in some tropical colony. He seemed to be doing all that was required of him, his file drawer was full of good stories in progress, yet there was a smell of doom about him. Colleagues shied away, spoke of him with, of all things in this emotional charnel house, compassion. He was being executed, Enquirer‑style. First they cut his salary, then removed his reporters, forcing him to rely on stringers, finally demanded a massive increase in output. “This is the way Pope always does it,” he said one evening towards the end, “They dig you a grave and say climb out if you can. You never can. The grave just gets deeper.” Several days later his deck was empty. It reminded me of a scene from a Bond film. Mr Big holds a council of operatives, one of whom has failed to satisfy. A flick of a switch, and the offender is electrocuted, his remains brusquely flushed through a convenient hole in the floor. In this case the victim was allowed to reincarnate himself as a reporter. A rare privilege. The editor’s defrocking could be ascribed to no particular commission or omission, it was just the way things worked around here. A sympathetic reporter noticed my puzzlement. “The Boss is a toy train freak,” she explained, “I think he likes to see us as a vast train set.  He throws points, sets up obstructions, and races us off bridges just for the hell of seeing what happens.” In terms of how they are put together, there is probably little difference between the National Enquirer and, say, Time. To the structuralist, anyway. Leads are developed and assigned, reporters and stringers turn in voluminous files which are rigorously checked for accuracy, boiled by writers into the house style, and finally, with luck, published. There, however, the resemblance ends. The process begins with the lead. Each editor is expected to submit thirty or so to The Boss every Friday of which perhaps half a dozen may be approved. On the rest he scribbles the ubiquitous initials NG. The ideas come from reporters and stringers (who both receive up to $300 if their offering gets into print), other publications (there is always a race for the new Omni, Cosmopolitan and Self) and the imagination. Memorable specimens from the last, and frankly largest, category include “The Junk Food Diet”, “How Brooke Shields, Loni Anderson and Farrah Fawcett are Wrecking Your Marriage” and “Let’s Get Accredited as a Salvation Army Fundraiser and Go Knocking on Celebrity Doors to See How Generous the Stars are” (in the hope, apparently, that the reporter will get savaged by a guard dog). A number of celebrity leads are preemptive, developed in advance like obituaries. The Elizabeth Taylor‑John Warner separation was probably ready to run before they had even said their vows and certainly for months before it occurred. At this very moment at least one editor is contemplating marriage between Robert Wagner, widower of Natalie Wood, and his television co‑star Stephanie Powers. Even the most grizzled veteran cannot second guess Pope’s taste with any certainty. His notions of what constitutes a contemporary star are quixotic, but seem to derive from movies of the fifties and sixties (hence Sophia Loren, Princess Grace and, by association, her unfortunate daughter Caroline) and the top ten Neilson‑rated shows that he happens to watch (not 60 Minutes). Dudley Moore, of 10 and Arthur fame, fails to register on the grounds that he is, and I quote, “not big enough.” Tom (Magnum PI) Selleck didn’tt have them right stuff either, until Pope was persuaded to poll his secretaries. There are, however, some totally reliable No Good’s, chief among them blacks, except when they practice voodoo, witness aliens, or are child comic Gary Coleman.  I presented Hoy with a heart‑warming story of a young New Orleans man who had survived a grain elevator explosion and 80 per cent burns to become a multimillionaire (a surefire hit under the Rags to Riches category).  Hoy immediately asked me what colour he was. Black. Kill it. Gays, meanwhile, may be beaten up at will.  An outraged account of San Francisco’s demographics was headlined “Sick! Sick! Sick!” That the Enquirer, a self‑styled Equal Opportunity Employer, has no minority employees is not coincidental. Once an approved lead has pleased Story Control, a computer programmed to weed out duplicates, it is ready to be reported, and the ethical mayhem really begins.  If celebrities are the potatoes of tabloid journalism, miraculous medicine is the meat. Unfortunately, the medical fraternity likes to be circumspect about describing its advances, and talks of percentages, hopes, possibilities, rarely of anything so definite as  a cure. This is too grey for the Enquirer which does not recognise the subjunctive mood.  The trick, therefore, is to get the medical man, who in his right mind would never even talk to the Enquirer to say things that would cost him his shingle if he tried to say them in the New England Journal of Medicine, and say them on tape.  This is known as Burning Docs. Technically, the reporter’s path is strewn with regulations. Not only must his interviews be taped, but he has signed a waiver binding him to identify himself as working for the Enquirer and as using a recorder, thus excusing his employers when, as he must, he sidles past the law. If his editor wants him to get a doctor to say something, he is under considerably more pressure to produce than to be an upright citizen. Refusal to carry out an order is treated with military firmness. There are many ways to ease on the record indiscretion from an interviewee, the most popular being the old Twenty Questions ploy. The subject is stroked into a state of trust and then hit with a series of convoluted queries, phrased in Enquirerese, to which he will answer, if the reporter is adroit enough, merely yes or no. These little words can be made to speak volumes. Critical readers may have wondered how it is that supposedly sophisticated professionals, when quoted in the Enquirer, always manage to clutter their remarks with an effusion of amazings, incredibles and fantastics. This method is openly encouraged by Pope. In a memo distributed to all newcomers he commands bluntly: “Ask leading questions.” Lest it be carried too far,  reporters are then reminded, “quotes should not only be appropriate but believable. A Japanese carpenter should not sound like Ernest Hemingway, or vice versa.” Add to this Pope’s rather confining taste in vocabulary, and the results can be bizarre. Reporter Byron Lutz had worked hard to produce “The Biggest Swindle in US History”, the tale of a computer rip‑off inside the federal government. He had even persuaded a Justice Department official to agree that it was indeed “the biggest swindle”, a questionable assertion by itself. Enter the Evaluator, a character whose task it is to condense finished files into single paragraphs for the benefit of Pope and the writers. The following scene ensued: Evaluator: This won’t get through, Lutz. We don’t use swindle. Lutz: But that’s what the guy at the Justice Department called it, it’s on the tape. Evaluator: It’s got to be robbery. Lutz: But there’s a difference. Editor (intervening): He’s right. Let’s look it up in the dictionary. Evaluator: Hey, I don’t care. The Boss don’t like swindle, make it robbery. Editor: Get on it, Lutz, get your guy to say robbery. Now. What makes the reporter’ s mission particularly tough is that he is often covering not a set of circumstances his editor knows or believes to exist, but one that the editor wishes to have happen. A new TV series has emerged, perhaps, and The Boss wants an exciting story about its participants. Or an editor may conclude that there has been too striking an absence of Farrah Fawcett. A reconciliation with Lee Majors is needed to fill the gap. Thanks to a large array of “insiders”, “friends” and “intimate sources” many of Celebrity romance stories are frequently the work of stringers whose main activity is to hang around fashionable watering holes. Maitre d’s and waiters are also retained. Thus the Enquirer usually has a pair of eyes in place when an interesting couple appear in public for the first time, or have a violent quarrel. The venues for the events which led up to the death of Natalie Wood were Iittered with informants. Hollywood sex, in the Enquirer, is a formulaic affair. The starting assumption is that any physical contact represents romance. At the lower end of the scale, hand holding is described by “insiders”, who do not have be told the Enquirer style,  as “they looked like a pair of teenagers in love”. Any kiss less demure than a peck is evidence that the relationship has turned “hot and heavy”.  Full‑scale osculation inspires sources to declare “they are closer than this”, referring to an imaginary pair of intertwined fingers. The distinctions are taken very seriously. “You say they kissed?... What kind of kiss? ... On the lips? ... How long did it last?... Did he put his tongue in her mouth?” Equally earnest is the Enquirer’s attitude towards the paranormal. Cranks are not tolerated, and anyone claiming to have been reborn, sighted UFO’s or communicated with the beyond is subjected to hypnotic regression. This is considered sounder evidence than a lie detector because the latter has the unfortunate habit of sometimes being accurate. The reigning exponent of what may be called the “Hey‑Martha‑Will‑You‑Get‑A‑Look-At‑This” school is Henry Gris. His latest find is Dr Azhazha, eminent Soviet scientist. I was unable to discover much about Azhazha during my time in Lantana except that between himself, Gris and Gris’ editor a fertile mind was at work somewhere. He claimed, and there was an artist’s conception complete with silhouetted Kremlin to back it up, that a mysterious cloud had drifted over Moscow one night causing great consternation. A friend of mine, stationed in Moscow for a well‑known British daily, commented, “I didn’t see this cloud, which was perhaps careless. It might have started World War III.” The Enquirer is inordinately proud of its Research Department. A copy of a glowing account in Editor and Publisher is compulsory reading for all arrivals. E&P tells us that Research is staffed by probing professionals, headed by Ruth Annan, a 16 year veteran of Time. Her team includes “two medical specialists, two lawyers, a linguist who speaks four languages, a geographer,  three with master’s degrees in library science, one with a master’s degree in educational psychology, and an author.” A considerable  brain’s trust, and certainly better qualified than many reporters, some of whom have been heard to discuss George Orwell’s 1984 as “the one about a pig named Churchill who gets to rule the world.” And yet it regularly lets through palpable inanities. The concept of a “4 000‑year‑old Stone Age statuette” does not bother it, for example, but this is a quibble. Most of the rubbish that escapes the tireless fact‑checkers is on a grander scale, even in cases where the facts can actually be checked. My own favorite is the charming story of a young and extremely tall Glasgow girl who showed her true saintliness by marrying a sixty‑year‑old dwarf on crutches. Having never been an optimist when it comes to human nature, I called Scotland. The reality was rather grim. “She’s a well‑known b***h,” said my contact, “He was the doting village idiot. She married him on a bet. Now she’s suing for divorce.” My information was not gratefully received. I have no doubt that Research pursues Truth with genuine vigor but as the adventures of the Wall Street Journal reporter demonstrate, it is hampered by one major defect: literal‑mindedness. If the tapes and copy jibe, and sources when contacted agree to what has been reported, the story must, however reluctantly, be granted the imprimatur of accuracy. One disadvantage of Annan and her gang is that they clog up an already hopelessly slow system—lead time is usually three or four weeks—with haggling that, given the nature of the beast, is utterly unnecessary. On the upside, however, their mere existence enables reporters to tell a suspicious world that, yes, really, the Enquirer does strive after fact. As editor Paul Levy told E&P, “Today any reporter can say with justifiable pride that he works for the most accurate paper in the country.” Christmas is a season tailor‑made for the Enquirer. There is uplift in the air, the urge to consume takes on cosmic proportions. The Boss, like so many dictators, is also a fanatical sentimentalist. The place erupts with nostalgia for the imaginary Yuletides of Dickens and Disney. There will be joviality in Lantana, even if the staff must be bludgeoned into it. I have always thought tropical Christmases disconcerting. The sight of a Santa Claus sweating under mounds of cotton wool and red felt is peculiarly uncomfortable, not least when he is ho‑ho‑hoing through one’s office. I suddenly found myself being saluted by a life‑sized mechanical toy soldier every time I came to work. The grounds,  once elegant and restful, blossomed with creches, Wise Men, reindeer and angels trumpeting seasonal musak from hidden loudspeakers.  Every bush twinkled with myriad fairy lights. Model trains chugged and whistled their way around a gigantic candy mountain in the forecourt. The building all but disappeared under bunting. Employees, glum as ever, now inhabited a world of maniacal festivity. This is the one time that the Enquirer opts to reveal itself to the surrounding drabness. The means is a truly heroic tree, Pope’s pride, and at 150 feet billed as the largest in the country. The splendid growth is felled in Oregon, its branches painstakingly removed and numbered, and the whole thing transported in kit form to the Enquirer’s gates on a flatcar. A team comprised of the Lantana public works department and a benign motorcycle gang then reassembles and proceeds to hide it under several thousand lights. Hundreds descend to watch The Boss turn it on, rendering it visible from Boca Raton to Palm Beach. For an instant the brooding glare gives way to beatification. The ceremony over, he wanders quietly through the crowd, listening for criticism of his display. If anything disappoints, it will immediately be rectified.  The woman was right, I concluded. We really are just a part of his extraordinary toy railway. Found NG, I was glad to be going home. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com (https://simonbarber.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

7. 

   19 Jul 2024

   Friendly enemies

   The story so far: it is 1915 and Margery, my great aunt, is now in Serbia as a VAD or Voluntary Aid Detachment orderly. She is with a British volunteer medical unit organized by James Berry, a surgeon from London’s Royal Free hospital, and his wife, Frances Dickinson Berry, an MD. They have set up shop in Vrnjača Banja, converting a canteen, various sheds and the Terapia, a sanatorium that brings to mind The Shining, into hospital wards. For manpower they have had their pick of POWs on whom, as underdogs, Margery has taken pity and whose load she strives to lighten. The POW’s are survivors of the rout Serbia inflicted on the invading Austrians the previous summer. Struck by her saintly eccentricity, the Berry’s dub Margery Doña Quixota. The typhus epidemic that brought the Berry unit and many others to Serbia at the start of the year is largely tamed by the time Margery arrives in April. Industrial scale slaughter is under way in France and the bloodlands between Russia and Prussia and the Turks are dashing Winston Churchill’s dream of thrusting into the soft underbelly of the Central Powers — Germany and Austria-Hungary — via the Dardanelles. Serbia is relatively tranquil. The Berry’s shift their focus to the health of the local population and begin to wonder whether they might not be more useful elsewhere. Margery writes home in August: Now my work is housework, my old trade…I make night nurses’ beds, then feed the chickens, then have breakfast, then interpret for the English cook and the Hungarian boy who helps in the kitchen, then see to the rooms. An old man is supposed to do this. We are taking civilian patients now, many of them children. One has been partly eaten by a pig. A doctor told me he saw a case of two children entirely eaten, all but their heads and hands and feet. The Berry’s put their POWs to work improving the town’s dire sanitation. Their showcase project is a new slaughterhouse. Margery describes the laying of the foundation stone: There was a service with priests and singing…The priests sprinkle the people with bunches of herbs dipped in holy water and the chief people are offered the cross to kiss while the priest dabs them on the head with the wet herbs. It was funny seeing the Princess’s little hat getting its dab. The Princess is the consort of Prince Alexis Karageorgevich who had a decent claim to be king of Serbia after the previous one was gaudily assassinated in 1903 but has yielded to a more determined cousin. Now he is President of the Serbian Red Cross. His wife is the former Myra Abigail Pratt. She comes from Cleveland money. A golfer of some repute she took bronze in the 1900 Olympics. He is her third husband. She was his second shot at marrying an American. The parents of the first, Mabel Swift of Chicago, refused their consent, apparently because the marriage would have been Morganatic and she would not have become queen had he become king. Margery continues: Did I tell you about the grand concerts we had for three days? Austrian prisoners — three bands were taken prisoner — go round playing to get money for Serb officers’ widows. It was such a treat, except that they missed out German music. Still, we had Dvorak and the 1812 of Tchaikovsky. San Saëns’ Skeleton Dance was horrible in its new light; it made you think it was the poor fellows’ comrades dancing before them. This will be her last letter until January 1916. Her father, Reverend Robert Barber, takes up the story in the Margery Book, the journal he keeps of his daughter’s adventures. Soon after this, Serbia was invaded by the Austro-Germans from the North and the Bulgarians in the East and South.  The Serbs confidently hoped for help from the Allies, indeed Niš was beflagged (with Union Jacks and French tricolores) under the impression that they were coming.  Orders had gone forth to the Serbs not to engage in pitched battle, but to adopt rearguard actions and fall back — this in expectation of British help.  It was very hard for the doctors and nurses to be reproached by the Serbs when help never came.  They felt they had been betrayed. The Times (the London one) of November 11, has this to say: We shall probably almost immediately hear of the capture of Vraniatchka Bania'…the favourite watering-place of well-to-do Serbians in the summer. The enemy will perhaps triumphantly announce the occupation of the summer residence of Prince Alexis, the modest little Villa Agnesa, no more than a country cottage, and the buildings, Shumadia and Terapia, occupied by the British hospital units…It is understood that five units are already in the enemy’s hands. Non-medical staff have the option of joining the Serbian retreat west toward Montenegro, Albania and the Adriatic. The stories of those who survive the trek over snowbound mountain passes clogged with starving refugees in the dead of winter will be the stuff of legend. Margery opts to stay. A colleague who makes it out will tell her parents: Your daughter was divided between the joy of tramping it out through Montenegro and the excitement of being taken prisoner, and finally decided the latter would be the greatest experience. We left her in the best of health and excellent spirits. On October 30, James Berry informs the secretary of his unit’s organizing committee in London: Dear Mr Garratt, I take this opportunity on the chance of getting a letter through by Mr. and Mrs. Gordon and Mr. Blease, who are trying to get home in Montenegro.  In the last fortnight we have been extremely busy, I need hardly say, with crowds of wounded.  Have seen no paper since Oct. 3, and news comes fitfully here. We of course know that the Austro-Germans are advancing on us, and we expect them here within a few days. All our party are very well, though not very pleased at the prospect before us. Frances Berry puts it this way: My dear Willoughby, Probably long before you get this, we shall be prisoners in the hands of the Germans…We are all very depressed, and I really think our prisoners are about as depressed as we are. The POWs, with few exceptions, have no interest in being freed and sent back to the front. Some who surrendered unwounded are afraid they will be shot as deserters. The Austrians duly arrive on November 9, “without éclat or disturbance of any kind”, Frances Berry will recall in “A Red Cross Unit in Serbia”, a memoir co-written with her husband and other members of the unit. Among the soldiers we came across, we found no shade of animosity towards ourselves as representatives of an enemy country…With regard to the behavior of the Austrian soldiers to the Serbian population, that was undoubtedly good…There were practically no stories of atrocities or deeds of violence, and little serious pillaging in spite of the fact that half starved soldiers were for many weeks wandering about the neighborhood and constantly begging for food…In our hospital Serbian and Austrian patients were on perfectly friendly terms…all the more suprising as the (Austrian) soldiers were largely Magyars and between Magyars and Serbs is longstanding animosity…It decidedly tends to show that the responsibility for atrocities is to be laid at the doors of those in authority more than the perpetrators, and that if the “bête humaine” is present in most most natures it requires not merely letting loose, but considerable prodding before it comes out of its hidden dwelling place and displays its horrors.” From Rev. Barber we learn that Margery was not to be denied Christmas: Christmas came when they were still “prisoners.”  Margery was determined to have a Christmas tree.  She and a Serbian orderly went round the cottages and homesteads and managed to purchase small quantities of meal collected in a pillowcase.  An Austrian canteen obliged them with 2 lbs of sugar which cost 16 shillings (an astronomical sum), walnuts, leaves of tobacco in bunches, boxes of matches, a little tinned milk, and rice.  These were made up into sweets of sorts.  This supplied their Christmas dinner and Christmas tree.  Margery cut up the top of a biscuit tin…into sconces to hold candle ends fixed on the tree. The festivities include fancy dress — Margery puts together an impressive cowboy outfit — and amateur theatricals in which she is assigned the lead. Frances Berry again: We dramatised the story of Pepelyouga, the Serbian Cinderella, culled from Petrovitch's "Hero Tales and Legends of the Serbians," and wove into the drama allusions to other Serbian myths and national heroes. With the help of costumes and spindles borrowed or bought from peasants, and with Pirot carpets on the walls, the setting was made as typically Serbian as possible. Doña Quixota made her debut as an actress in the role of the heroine. She threw herself into the part and quite scored a triumph, but it took some coaching and persuasion to induce her to condescend to accept in a proper spirit any lovemaking from the Prince, or to sacrifice her democratic prejudices so as to appear in jewelry and silk attire. However, the fact that these were Serbian and not British mitigated the humiliation. Cowgirl and Indian On January 3, 2016, a postcard reaches the Barbers, now in Ely, the cathedral town north of Cambridge. Dearest Mith, Having a lovely time.  Would not have missed it for anything. May be sent home soon, so look out for another job for me.  Your loving Margery. A letter follows. Dear Mith, We now hear we may be sent home soon.  I do not want to come home yet so if I get a chance, I shall join another Hospital and nurse Serbian prisoners or Austrian soldiers.  I and three sisters want to stay on and do a little more now we are here. But if I have to come home with the rest please be on the lookout for another job for me.  Love to all. Do you hear from Peter? It’s the Serbian Xmas tomorrow.  They eat a pig and put straw on the ground in the cottages, but I will tell you a lot when I come. Love from Marg The Berry party, now 25 strong, sets out by train on February 21. Grateful Serbs give them a roast pig for the journey. Accompanying them as far as Vienna are two guards, “very pleasant fellows”, the Berry’s feel, Hungarian, a prosperous farmer and a traveling salesman in civilian life. The salesman owes this cushy billet to heroics. When the Austrians were thrown back across the Save river the year before, he swam his general to safety though himself wounded. Rev.Barber adds a detail: During the railway journey, Margery disarmed one of the guards in charge of the party by seizing his bayonet and with it cutting up some chocolate which she gave him. At some point before the party reaches Budapest, Margery, in her father’s telling of it, makes friends with a German officer carrying dispatches from Constantinople: She asked him, as he graciously claimed ancient Teutonic relationship, whether he could arrange for them to see round the town. This he seemed most proud to do. The Berry account is fuller but does not mention Doña Quixota’s role in chatting up the officer. We were agreeably surprised by the entry of a pleasant young man in the uniform of the German Imperial Guard and wearing the Iron Cross. He sat down among us and stayed a long time, telling us he came from Hamburg, which was “half English”, that he has visited England many times in his yacht, and had played in a championship tennis tournament at Wimbledon. “The English and Hamburgers are cousins,” he said, “for the English came from our neighborhood,” which was true enough as the original Engel-land was close to the mouth of the Elbe. He spoke almost perfect English and took such a fancy to our party that upon arrival at Budapest he insisted on taking nearly the whole Mission to see the sights of the town while our luggage was being transported to another railway station.” We’ll let Rev. Barber close the Serbian chapter of Margery’s life. Margery arrived home, at Ely, March 7, 1916, little the worse for her experiences.  She had contracted a chill on the very cold journey through Europe — snow all the way. And no wonder, for we found out afterwards that she had parted with most of her underclothing to give to another nurse. We learnt of this through her uncle Fred W. Barber, who at Fulham Military Hospital, on May 25, 1916, met Nurse Murfy, late member of the 2nd British Farmers’ Unit which had been working in Serbia. “She was tremendously enthusiastic about Margery and said she and others could never forget her kindness.  M. did no end for them, and must have denied herself in order to supply underclothing and other necessaries.” She remained in England for less than a month.  Her chief ambition was to nurse German soldiers, to requite the kindness she had received, and to satisfy herself that they were well treated.  She wrote to the War Office for information on this [score], and received a curt reply, referring her to the public press. Next: Armenia This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com (https://simonbarber.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

8. 

   12 Jul 2024

   Doña Quixota

   From The Margery Book, the journal kept by Margery’s father, the Terapia top left. The Serbs sent the Berry unit to Vrnjača Banja,  once a fashionable spa in the highlands 80 miles south of Belgrade. Margery arrived on April 19. The Berrys had been there since February. For their HQ and hospital, they had chosen the Terapia, a grand sanatorium gone to seed but where water and a generator could be made to run with the aid of Austrian POW’s. Of these there was an ample supply, Serbia having routed the initial Hapsburg invasion. Deloused, the prisoners came with many skills and made excellent helpers, only too happy to be out of a war whose point few could fathom. Margery’s German came in handy. On arrival she sent her mother a postcard. “The country is like Switzerland…all the people in fancy dress and so nice to talk to. Lovely, but” — a “but” tinged with disappointment — “I  have struck a most luxurious spot, just like a hotel, with not enough work to go round. The awful time is apparently all over and we have got here too late.” She had not given up hope. “Perhaps a hard time may come.” It came early for Mabel Dearmer, who had also arrived in Serbia that month, but on a different ship. She was wife of the Reverend Percy Dearmer whose name will be familiar to any who read the credits below the hymns in an Anglican hymnal; he would certainly have been well known to Margery’s father. They were an independent couple. He was the socialist vicar of St Mary-the-Virgin, Primrose Hill, London, she was a playwright, novelist, illustrator and gardener. Her chief concern when war came in the summer of 1914 was finding takers for the plums in the garden of her Cotswold cottage. “The murder of an Archduke meant no more to me that some tale of an imaginary kingdom in Zenda.” When Reverend Dearmer officiated at a send-off for the Stobart unit organized by the Church League for Women’s Suffrage at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, she was in the pews to say goodbye to Lady Paget, a friend. “This is only an au revoir,” she heard her husband tell the volunteers, “for I myself am to accompany you to Serbia.” Mrs Stobart takes up the story in her memoir, The Flaming Sword. As I walked down the down the aisle at the conclusion of the service, Mrs Dearmer, with tears in her eyes, came up to me. “This is the first I have heard of my husband going to Serbia. Mrs Stobart, you must take me with you — as an orderly. My sons are at the front and now my husband is going. I must go too.” I’m afraid I was brutal. I pointed at her earrings and pretty chiffons. “This kind of thing isn’t suitable,” I said. “I will leave them all behind, and wear — well, your uniform!” as she looked bravely at my dull grey clothes. “But you would have to obey discipline and as an orderly do all sorts of things disagreeable to you.” “Oh, I should love discipline and I wouldn’t care what I did; anything would better than” — and tears would not be restrained — “being in that house alone.” Mrs Stobart relented and would confess she had been wrong about Mrs Dearmer. “None of her various roles in life were better played than her role of orderly in a Serbian camp hospital…My instinct about her suitability had only been right in regard to her physique.” Soon after arriving at the Stobart camp in Kragujevač, at that point the plague-ridden Serbian capital, Mrs Dearmer was told by a fellow volunteer of similar background: “You know, there is never a tea-party in Serbia that doesn’t begin with lice and end with latrines.” From the lice, you caught typhus; from bad or non-existent latrines, typhoid. It was the latter that did for her. Mrs Stobart caught it too but fought it off. Margery was visiting the Stobart camp at the time and attended the funeral at the Orthodox cathedral. In a card to Mith, she wasted no space describing the obsequies . “It was grand,” was all she had to say before continuing “I am very well indeed, but cut my finger with a scythe mowing before breakfast.” William Coulson, the Stobart unit driver Margery had dazzled on the voyage to Salonika, gave her father additional details. “The Orthodox priest held forth for an hour or so and then others took it up. They tied her feet together at the great toes — but the Serbs wanted to untie [them] so as to put on her shoes.  I would not let them.” Back at Vrnjača Banja, the “hard time” Margery seemed to be hoping for had yet to arrive but she was enjoying herself nonetheless. She wrote home in May: I have been ‘special nurse’ to two patients, one a little girl with diphtheria and malaria, and an old man with erysipelas.  Both legs have got it all the way up, and he has lead lotion lint bound round them 3 times a day. My work is: first wash and fix up the little girl, then have breakfast at 6.30 and go down to another hospital and get the table for dressing ready, sterilize all the instruments, undo the bandages and prepare for the doctor or sister who does the dressings; stand and hand them lint gauzes, forceps etc. … and interpret orders to the Austrian prisoner orderlies.  Then sterilize and clear up again and get tea for doctors or nurses.  Take temperatures, wash up tea things, feed patients, and have dinner.  After dinner look for lice, wash feet and do heads with paraffin, give feeds, take temperatures, do especially bad cases again.  Come back and fix up kid for the night; and, after supper (a secret) help Austrian prisoners clean and wash up. Margery’s solicitude for the Austrians was no secret to the Berry’s. This is from their memoir, A Red Cross Unit in Serbia: Some of the prisoners were possibly…a little spoiled by sympathetic members of the Unit, but probably this did little harm either to the spoiled or the spoilers. Perhaps one of the worst offenders in this respect was one of our V.A.D.'s, whom we will call Doña Quixota, because that is a name which certainly fits her well. She was tall and comely, indeed beautiful, though not exactly of the buxom type which fulfils the Serbian ideal… On the voyage out she had passed her time feeding miserable animals and attending to the seasick and infirm. She was always looking for and helping the sick and suffering, always standing up for the oppressed. If she sometimes imagined the suffering or mistook the oppressor for the oppressed, "Que voulez-vous?" she was a feminine Don Quixote! She was splendidly genuine, and before the final release of the Unit she was reduced to the depths of destitution in regard to shoes and clothes, as she had given away most of her belongings. She would have driven a charity organisation committee to distraction, and she made heads of units and keepers of stores feel stony-hearted misers when they withstood the white heat of her generosity. Doña Quixota pitied the poor prisoners and tried to alleviate their sad lot by doing part of their work herself ! She thought Julius overworked — Julius, the ever-growing rotundity of whose form made him resemble an incipient alderman — and she would squeeze time from her multitudinous duties to wash dishes or peel potatoes for him. One day she was seen vigorously sweeping a garden path while Johann of the auburn hair reclined at ease on the grass by the  side, enjoying his off-duty hour. I thought of Gilbert and Sullivan's line "the prisoner's lot is not a happy one" and wished for a camera! But the proceeding was too much even for the easy-going Johann, and he spoilt the picture by springing up and taking the broom out of the hands of Doña Quixota. From a letter to her mother, July 1915 The men wear cotton shirts and trousers — shirts worn outside with bright striped belts bound round tight.  They have thick sort of zouave waistcoats sometimes of a good blue and braided with black but more often of brown with black.  Sometimes the shirts have colored stitching and buttons.  The women wear yellow or green handkerchiefs on heads two corners tied at back of head as per sketch.  The same thick stuff is used for the little coats which are sometimes made of leather (lined with wool and decorated with beads and patches of bright coloured leather) even in the hot weather.   Their skirts are of thick stuff dark — with large check or stripe pattern or the prettiest on plain with a deep border pattern of flowers worked into the stuff.  They all wear thick stockings which have flower patterns on the foot and the top which just shows above the strappings of the opanchie shoes.  These are leather sandals with a piece over the toe and up the sides formed of straps worked like crochet to allow you to thread the long strap that binds them to the leg thro’ wherever convenient.  The women’s skirts are very full and made in long strip and tied round.  They very often go barefoot.  The women walk splendidly and carry water in earthenware bottles on either end of a curved stick over one shoulder.  Or they walk along making thread.  In one left hand a spatula as big as this paper with a handle like a mirror round which is roughly wound the wool from sheep or goats they have killed at home.  In right hand a long bobbin which they spin round as they walk making the rough wool with wool thread. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com (https://simonbarber.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

9. 

   5 Jul 2024

   A Passage to Serbia

   April 1915. Margery was at sea again, this time aboard the SS Saidieh, a commandeered Egyptian mail packet heaving ⁠from the Irish Sea into the Atlantic stalked by a German submarine⁠. The Rector’s mad daughter, as a parishioner would remember her, was off to nurse in the Balkans, surplus no more. She owed the adventure to her brother Clement and the scarlet fever he brought home from the trenches. She caught it nursing him, which landed her in the Ipswich Fever Hospital.  There she spent a month of quarantine making herself useful in the wards and gaining enough experience to qualify as a VAD — Voluntary Aid Detachment — orderly. Austria-Hungary had invaded Serbia the previous August, nominally to avenge the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Though the Serbs prevailed at first, surprising everyone, by winter the country was on its knees. Typhus, passed from rats to lice and fleas to humans was proving a good deal deadlier than shot and shell.  Mabel Grouitch, American wife of the Serbian foreign minister, came to London to plead for help. Among the many who answered her call were James and Frances Berry of the Royal Free Hospital, he a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, she a physician and anesthetist. They had fallen in love with Serbia on a bicycling holiday in 1904. The War Office was sending just a trickle of lightly wounded to the Royal Free and had no use for women doctors. The Berrys decided that if their skills were not wanted for repairing Britons mangled on the Western Front, they would equip and lead a mobile surgical hospital to assist a hard-pressed ally in the East. Applications poured in. Margery’s was accepted. “The VAD is ubiquitous,” Frances Berry would write. “Not only does economy favor her use and scarcity of trained nurses make her a necessity, but such desirable qualities as adaptability, enthusiasm, experience of the world and of travel, and especially a knowledge of foreign languages, are perhaps more generally found among VAD’s than trained nurses, and sometimes largely compensate for absence of complete training. All our VAD’s spoke French or German or both; one had nursed in the Boer War, one had run a native hospital in West Africa and one had experience camping in Canada.” Margery had perhaps neglected to mention her other experience. The Berry unit was one of seven represented aboard the Saidieh on its voyage to the Greek port of Salonika, now Thessaloniki, where its passengers — doctors, surgeons, radiographers, nurses, orderlies, cooks and drivers, most of them women — would entrain for points north. Leading another unit was Mabel St Clair Stobart. Margery could not have missed her. For one thing, Stobart was a devotee of Swedish Drill, a sort of Nordic yoga. Weather and waves permitting, she would be out on the afterdeck before breakfast, leading her second husband (the first had died on one of her previous adventures) and anyone else she could dragoon, in the stretches and bends devised by fencing instructor Pehr Henrik Ling a century earlier and back in vogue. Mabel St. Clair Stobart Stobart had written a book on golf, run a store in the Transvaal, lassoed cattle in British Columbia (not far from the Princess Patricia Ranch), and founded the Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps which she led to the front in the Balkan War of 1912. Early in the present conflict she was taken prisoner by the Germans in Brussels and narrowly avoided being shot as a spy. A suffragist, she took the view that men being what they were, humankind was doomed to endless bloodshed unless women had real power.  This they would only win by proving themselves every bit as tough preserving life as men were prodigal in taking it, and by dressing appropriately. There were girls on board in hobble skirts and low cut blouses, she wrote, dismissing such attire as “the indecorums of the Society puppet”. These wanton creatures were letting the side down. They should be in uniform, looking the part as well as playing it. It pleased Stobart no end that a group of Rhodes scholars from America — men — had volunteered to join her unit as orderlies, then begged off. They said they needed their parent’s consent before exposing themselves to typhus.  “Our women, on the other hand, braved their relatives, knowing that a woman’s worst foes, where her work is concerned, are often those of her own household.” In a letter to her parents she would post when the ship put in at Gibraltar, Margery said she was “eternally grateful you did not oppose my going.” “Everyone is kicking⁠ about the boat,” she reported. “Heaps of people are ill.” Not Margery. “I haven’t missed a meal yet”. Her arm had been sore from the typhus shot she’d received before boarding, but only briefly. “I hope you didn’t waste any sympathy.” Her only other news was that the stewards were “Gold Coast n……s” and “I’ve discovered a Serbian who is interpreter for the Khaki people⁠ [military] and he has given me a lesson.” SS Saidieh For a fuller account, Robert and Adeline would have to wait until January the following year when William Coulson stopped by at the rectory. Coulson had been on the voyage as a driver with the Stobart unit. Margery had dazzled him. “She’s a clinker,” he said, “One in a thousand. There’s no back door about her. She’d stand up to any man”. She apparently spent much of the voyage below decks with the food supply. “She was more with the livestock than with the people. It was a Greek crew. She was on to the them for not slaughtering the sheep in the proper style and with blunt knives. She said, “Get out if you can’t do it properly!” She held the animals’ heads while they were being killed and helped in the skinning. She went to the captain and made him shift the ducks’ quarters and fed them herself. To get to the hold, she would slide down a crazy ladder with few (rungs) in the rolling ship and land on a truss of hay roaring with laughter.” Margery had spared her parents unsettling details. The Saidieh was full of ammunition, Coulson told them. “We were pursued by a submarine but zigzagged and they caught the following boat instead. Margery and I were to stand by at the same lifeboat.” Mabel Stobart would recall: “We all settled down comfortably to sea sickness and submarines. The rough weather provided us with the former but saved us from the latter. Submarines were supposed to be waiting for us off the Scilly Isles, and at first we were afraid that the Saidieh would be sunk; but later we were afraid she wouldn’t.” Two months later she was. UB-6 commanded by Erich Haeker sank her in the Thames estuary on June 1. She was back about her normal duties, carrying cottonseed and onions from Alexandria to Hull. If you’d like to receive further installments in your inbox… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com (https://simonbarber.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

10. 

    28 Jun 2024

    A Surplus Woman

    On February 26, 1914, The Land of Promise, a play by Somerset Maugham, opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London’s West End. It starred Irene Vanbrugh as a spinster who seeks happiness on the Manitoba prairie after the woman for whom she worked as a paid companion dies and leaves her penniless. The subject was topical. Ella C. Sykes, author of Through Persia on a Side-Saddle, was out with a new book, A Home Help in Canada. She had gone undercover to see what genteel Englishwomen could expect if they chose to seek work and husbands in the land of lumberjacks and Mounties. The Royal Society of Arts invited Sykes to give a talk on her findings. “At the present time,” she said, “it is a matter of common knowledge that in the United Kingdom the women greatly outnumber the men. The reason for this is that the sons go forth to serve the Empire in such callings as the Army and Navy, the Indian Civil Service, and, more than all, in the great Overseas Dominions, while the girls, as a rule, stay behind. Some two or three years ago this state of things was discussed in the newspapers under the heading of “What shall be do with our unmarried daughters?” Many answers were given to this question, but perhaps the only letter that bore practical fruit was that written by the Hon. Mrs. N(orman) Grosvenor, entitled The Million and a Half⁠.” Caroline Grosvenor painted, wrote romantic novels and advocated ardently for the Empire, then at its apogee, in whose building she felt women of the right sort should play a bigger role, especially since they were in such oversupply at home. According to the 1911 Census,  Britain possessed 1 328 625 “excess females”, not quite a million and half but near enough. Addressing Cheltenham Ladies College in July 1910, Grosvenor declared: “If Canada is to remain British and not be amalgamated with the United States, if South Africa is not to be merely a Dutch colony under the protection of our flag, if Australia and New Zealand are to be strong enough to resist invasion, British women must go and make British homes.” In that spirit Grosvenor founded the Colonial Intelligence League, recruiting as its president Queen Victoria’s third daughter, Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. Joining her royal highness on the letterhead were such imperial eminences as Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India and Lord Milner, who had lately overseen the pacification of the Boers in South Africa.  The League’s mission: “1. The maintenance of an Intelligence Office which shall estimate the demand for Women’s Work in the Colonies, and bring it into relation with the supply in this country. 2. The establishment in the Colonies of expert Agents who shall investigate local openings and report on them. 3. The establishment in each Colony of Settlements for Women.” The first settlement, Grosvenor decided, should be in the Okanagan Valley, “The Italy of Canada”, as a correspondent rhapsodized in the Acton Gazette, “where at this moment of writing, the rounded snow peaks of the Rocky “foot-hills” far above lie like gleaming silver in the sunshine, and ripe peaches strew the autumn leaf-covered ground at my feet. Snow and ripe peaches, and in October!” Captivated by the scenery, the Earl of Aberdeen had acquired 13 000 acres in the valley in 1890 but having failed to turn a profit was now selling them off. Grosvenor had the League acquire a small parcel. The Duke and Duchess of Connaught consented to the plot being called the Princess Patricia Ranch after their daughter, and helped with its purchase. Grosvenor also sought assistance from the Guinnesses, specifically Rupert Guinness MP, the son and heir of Rev. Robert Barber’s patron, Lord Iveagh, and his wife Gwendolen. Rupert and Gwendolen had toured Canada and believed its fertile but empty vastness could use a larger stock of suitably trained British emigrants. It cannot have been coincidence that Robert’s daughter was among the first chosen to help get the “settlement” up and running. Not only did she have the right connections and physical qualities, she had attended Studley Horticultural and Agricultural College. Studley was founded in 1903 by Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick, to provide training for “surplus women in the lighter branches of agriculture”. Greville was heiress to an immense fortune and ex-mistress of the Prince of Wales. A mother of several, including at least one in wedlock, she is said to have been the inspiration for the song “Daisy, Daisy” in which the lyricist dreams of riding with her on a bicycle made for two. She converted to socialism (but kept her castles) when she found her well-meaning efforts to fulfill the obligations of noblesse cruelly mocked for their condescension. As patron of St John’s, Thaxted, she provided a living for its famous “Red Vicar”, Conrad Noel. Whatever led Margery to Studley, the animals and the people were both a good fit. Contemporaries included Adela Pankhurst, youngest of the suffragette sisters, who was getting ready to emigrate to Australia. On the animal front, Margery distinguished herself as a “dompteuse”, famously taming a bull that had run amok, or so brother Clement would later report. The Empress of Ireland deposited her in Quebec on July 18, 1913.  By early August she was on the farm, taking orders from Mary Snelus, a surgeon’s daughter the League had hired as superintendent. Snelus had been matron at the British Women’s Emigration Association’s Stoke Prior Colonial Training College. Now 45, she was living in a tent on the property pending completion of the Arts and Crafts house the League had commissioned from O.B. Hatchard, chief architect to the colonial government in Sudan. Margery’s billet was the loft of the recently completed stables which she shared with her sole — at that point — coworker, the first of two Miss Stantons. The second would join them shortly. Soon after Margery’s arrival, the peripatetic Ella Sykes, now a member of the League’s executive committee, stopped by to see how things were getting on. “Miss S(tanton) and Miss B(arber),” she reported were “splendid girls. They take their work seriously and the settlement will be a success if we can keep up their standard.” Snelus described their daily routine in a note to the committee dated September 3: “The girls get up at six o’clock. During the very hot weather, they rose at 5 a.m. and worked later in the evening, taking two hours off in the afternoon. Miss S. brings in the horse, attends to her wants, cleans her stall, etc., then brushes out the rig house (our living room) and tidies generally. Miss B. milks the cow at 6.30, feeds the fowls, and so on. I rise at 6.30, light the fire, make the breakfast for 7.30…Then the girls go to the garden, irrigate or cultivate, thin root crops, or mow alfalfa or corn, till 12 o’clock, when I call them for dinner, before which there are animals to attend to again. After dinner more gardening, or business such as going with the rig for sawdust or for foodstuffs and so on. At 5 milking, feeding, wood to collect and chop, etc. Supper about 6.15, washing-up. And to bed early, as I can assure you we are all very tired.” The idyll did not last. Another committee member, Lady Sybil Grey, a noted marksman and equestrian who would be wounded as a Red Cross nurse in Russia in 1916, visited in October. Margery and the Stantons were making a good impression in the neighborhood, she said, but Snelus was getting crosswise with the locals Grosvenor had recruited to guide the project and protect it from the neighborhood’s patriarchal skeptics, of which there were many. Not everyone was entranced with the League or its scheme. “The Lack of Intelligence League”, The Victoria Colonist had called it in an editorial questioning whether “young English girls” should be “picking berries”, work, the writer sniffed, more appropriately reserved for “the yellow man”. There was muttering that the ladies had been seen in trousers. Grosvenor and her committee responded with two directives: skirts were to be worn at all times and the orders of the superintendent were to be obeyed. The latter command seems to have been aimed at Margery.  According to minutes of the committee’s meeting of April 2, 1914,  Grosvenor “reported letters in which Miss Snelus states that she could no longer cope with Miss Barber and asked permission to dismiss her. The chairman had conferred with Mrs Barber who agreed to her daughter being dismissed but begged that this might not be made public in Vernon…Mrs Grosvenor and Mrs Barber had written to Miss Snelus agreeing that Miss Barber might take home help work in the neighborhood if a suitable opening could be found, or otherwise she should go to her (Guinness) relations in Vancouver.”⁠ Her father mentioned none of this in the Margery Book, recording simply that she moved to a nearby farm, Midmar, as “home help” for its owners, the Middletons.  If she sent her parents a letter with her side of the story, it did not make it into the journal. A letter that did make it read:  “I am just as happy as I can possibly be, I keep the house clean, do washing up and washing cloths. “Ma” cooks and I do heaps of outside work. It’s just lovely. I’ve had all the cows to myself in the evening during hay-time, ten to milk, and I feed the calves, pick and pack fruit and take to Vernon. Have a lovely little horse to ride. “Ma” has given me a beautiful riding skirt (cowgirl’s), shirt, hat and gloves to match. I get up at 3.30 but we alter the clocks and call it 5.30 so it isn’t so very early.” The reverend added that his daughter would often ride into Vernon after milking the cows — a journey of “seven miles” — to take communion “in her hobnail boots”, hitching her horse to a rail outside the church. The Middletons gave her time to play. “A trip to the Rockies with the Stantons!” she wrote in August. “We camped there in a tent for a week and I did a climb with a guide, a real good rock climb but quite different from the Moine (Mt. Blanc range) — jagged, crumbling stuff that gave way in your hands, the tops like knife edges right along, just foot room and then sheer down on either side. He said Mount White was a “nice little rock climb” and the hardest I could get him to suggest. Went nine miles the night before, slept at hotel, did it next morning and walked back to our camp in the evening. I enjoyed it very much. I have become an avid fisherman…The only blow is being away here with the war on.” By early autumn she was on a ship back to England. Robert wrote: “She suddenly turned up at home (St. Mary’s, Stoke, Ipswich) one Sunday night, very hungry, with a few pence in her pocket, having crossed the Atlantic in steerage. Here she had a strange experience — a tussle with a man who was beating his wife. Margery was passing with a pitcher of water with which she was scrubbing or cleaning up (such exercise being an antidote for sea sickness) when she saw this man thus engaged. She threw the water over him. He turned upon her. They formed a ring and there was a stand-up fight in which Margery was victorious.” Marjorie Cook, whose parents attended St. Mary’s, would write in 1965 that she “quite clearly” remembered the return of the Rector’s “mad daughter”. “She caused a stir in the parish because she was reputed to speak German fluently and also had actually lived in Germany!  This in a time when the owners of dachsund dogs were immediately suspected of being spies you can imagine put her and her poor parents quite beyond the pale.” Next: A Passage to Serbia To keep it coming… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com (https://simonbarber.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

11. 

    19 Jun 2024

    The blood in her veins

    On July 11, 1913, Margery Barber boarded the Empress of Ireland bound for Quebec from Liverpool. The passenger manifest listed Canada as her “country of intended future permanent residence”. The socialite wife of her uncle Benjamin had remarked that “when an unmarried young woman gets to 25, I’ve often noticed she begins to call old maids bachelor girls.” Margery was 25 and had shown no sign of wanting to settle down and breed. At last, with the help of family connections, an alternative had presented itself, one that looked like a decent fit. If her parents’ prayers were answered, Margery would soon be making herself useful and finding happiness, perhaps even a husband, in the colonies. “She had a noble, arresting and charming face and could have married anyone she chose,” her cousin Audrey thought. She was tall, lean and formidable whether chasing hares with a pack of beagles, marching up an Alp or wielding a hockey stick. “People were afraid of her,” Audrey said. “She was very strong and powerful.” As a child she was a handful.  Today she would likely have been diagnosed with ADHD and put on Ritalin.  Getting her ready for church could require the concerted efforts of a governess, a housemaid and the one aunt who had what it took to tame her.  Though obviously clever — she had an aptitude for languages, becoming fluent in German at finishing school in Weisbaden — she had been hard to educate. Teachers, she would confess, were “my enemy”.  Authority tested her patience. The feeling was often mutual.  Margery was a rebel, her cause whatever underdog crossed her path. She would bring home strays, human and canine, no matter how ragged or reeking. There were scenes, mostly with Mith, which is what she called her loving but often exasperated mother, Adeline. Adeline Guinness and the Reverend Robert Barber exchanged vows on July 30, 1884, at St Saviour’s Church, Pimlico, up the street from 87 St. George’s Square, the London address to which Adeline’s father, Richard Seymour Guinness, had moved his three daughters and six sons (with a seventh in the offing) from Dublin ten years earlier. The couple received 154 gifts. Richard, who was busy growing the family bank, Guinness Mahon, beyond its Irish base, and who at his death in 1915 would leave an estate valued at £454 219 14s. 3d. — $75 million in today’s money — gave a piano. Sir Samuel and Lady Ferguson (he a politician and poet rated by Yeats among Ireland’s literary giants, she a Guinness aunt), contributed a “large salver”.  Lord Ardilaun from the brewing side of the Guinness tribe was good for a necklace. From below stairs at 87 St Georges Square came a lamp. Rev. Robert was the eldest surviving child of Rev. Richard, vicar of Riseley, who in turn was the first child of Rev. William, vicar of Duffield and Muggington. Of Robert’s six younger siblings, two of the three boys, Henry and Edward, were also ordained. The third, Frederick, joined the Oxford Mission to Calcutta as a lay brother. Henry,  the aforementioned Audrey’s father, had a prison ministry. Edward served as Anglican chaplain in Biarritz and Cairo, played soccer for several forbears of today’s professional sides, and was a hit at parties for his comic turns, but also, it was said, a kleptomaniac prone to trousering his hosts’ bibelots. Frederick landed a job with Hoare, Miller and Co., a prominent engineering firm, which sent him to India where the Barber genes kicked in. In Calcutta he moved between the very high and the very low. In 1891, the Viceroy invited him to a ball to meet the future Tsar Nicholas II. His work with the poor destroyed his health. Rev. Robert and Adeline in 1884 Robert was a keen gardener. His sweet peas, cauliflower, cabbage and rhubarb won prizes at the Chippenham and Snailwell Horticultural Society annual fete. He collected butterflies and moths, liked to sketch and could give a serviceable lecture on astronomy if need arose. Audrey remembered him as “an austere scholar who used to knock loudly on people’s bedroom doors to get them up for church.” His writings included a children’s guide to the catechism, a history of Chippenham from pre-Roman times and a life of Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmunds, a 12th century divine, composed in the meter of Longfellow’s Hiawatha. In his preface to the 800-line poem, Robert thanked Lord Iveagh, another Guinness beer baron and one of the richest men in England, for his “generous patronage”. He also kept a scrapbook of his daughter’s adventures beginning with her departure for Canada. In it, he transcribed Margery’s letters home, adding commentary of his own and pasting in newspaper clips and other items for context. The three volumes he filled before his death in 1928 were known in the family as the Margery Book. They, and Margery’s letters to her mother and siblings after 1928, are the primary source for this story. Adeline remained in the background. That was the way with Guinness women of her generation.  Their male siblings went from the best schools into the family racket, acquired titles and stately homes, and worried about their daughters getting hitched to gold-diggers. Adeline’s niece Lucy fell in love with a starving Hungarian artist at finishing school in Munich. They were kept apart for seven years. Only when he began receiving commissions from European royalty was he finally permitted into the clan. Men of the cloth, on the other hand, got a pass. If Guinness girls couldn’t land rich boys, reverends were an acceptable alternative. And, to be fair, there was more to the dynasty than the pursuit of wealth and status. It had a missionary wing — the Grattan Guinnesses — along with a strong tradition of philanthropy and deep ties to the Anglican Church of Ireland. There is no reason to suppose Adeline felt she might have done better when she married Robert even if her ambitions for him may have been a little more expansive than his own. She might pass through the eye of the needle more easily than her brothers, but she did not want for comfort. The Barbers could afford a butler, a cook, a lady’s maid, a housemaid and a kitchen maid, according to the 1911 census. Uncles, aunts and cousins offered Margery and her brothers, Arthur and Clement, broad avenues to God, the establishment and mammon.  “I remember Uncle Bob with delight when we watched the procession from the Ritz when ‘Mr. Guelph’ as he called him was crowned, or buried, I forget which,” Margery would write. Uncle Bob was Robert Darley Guinness, Adeline’s eldest brother, High Sheriff of Warwickshire, proprietor of Wootton Hall and squire of Wootton Wawen. Mr. Guelph was Queen Victoria’s eldest son Bertie, Edward VII. The Ritz was the Ritz. Uncle Gerald’s stately pile was Dorton House, a Jacobean gem surrounded by Rothschilds in the Vale of Aylesbury. Uncle Eustace’s seat was Green Norton Hall near Towcester. Uncle Richard entertained Rudolf Valentino and Artur Rubinstein at his place on Great Portman Square. Uncle Benjamin’s addresses included Washington Square in New York and Carlton House Terrace in London. He sat on the boards of the New York Trust Company, Lackawanna Steel Company, Kansas City Southern Railway, Seaboard Air Lines, Duquesne Light Company and the United Railroads of San Francisco. At outbreak of World War I,  he saved the German bank Henry Schroder and Co., of which he was then senior partner, from seizure by the British government.  On the morning of August 4, 1914, he hurried Baron Bruno Schroder, the bank’s chairman, down to Whitehall. Within half an hour, the appropriate strings pulled, Schroder, who owed his title to the Kaiser, emerged as a British subject. Margery and her brothers, Clement and Arthur When Queen Victoria died, Clement, the youngest of the Barber siblings, was a chorister at St. George’s, Windsor, the Chapel Royal. He sang at Mr Guelph's coronation. It earned him a medal for which he would be ragged as a young subaltern in the Royal Fusiliers. “What did you get that medal for, Barber?” “Singing in the choir, sir!” He had come home from Canada in time for the war after his own stab at emigration. Guinness relations had offered him a position in Vancouver where they were investing in vast tracts of land while lubricating the locals with their stout. He found playing the piano in lumber camp bordellos more congenial than getting rich as a member of the family firm, and came home, his boat crossing paths with Margery’s. Invalided out of the army in 1915, he was hired to run a cotton gin in Egypt where he stayed for the next 37 years, racking up three marriages (the first of which produced my father but ended when he was caught in bed with his sister-in-law) and a second medal, designating him an officer of the Order of the British Empire for “services to the cotton buying commissions in Egypt”. Arthur Vavasour, the eldest, went through the doors that were opened for him and became a banker in London. His youth had passed before the Somme could claim it.  He married and divorced a general’s daughter who gave him Lavender Jane and Jasmine. Their mother was lady-in-waiting to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor when they were tidied away to the Bahamas for the duration of World War II. Jasmine stayed on to midwife the babies of Nassau’s poor. By that time, Artie, as his sister called him, had run off with the daughter of Stalin’s family doctor. Ekaterina Georgievna Speransky wrote crime novels under the nom de plume Kay Lynn and absconded with the family silver, or so it was said, when Arthur died in 1957. By then he was an object of pity and reproach with a reputation for having been not entirely trustworthy with other people’s money, including his sister’s. Which brings us back to Margery. She was heading to Vernon in the Okanagan Valley, a garden spot some 200 miles east of Vancouver where an organization calling itself the Colonial Intelligence League for Educated Women had acquired 15 acres for “a farm settlement…to enable women of outdoor tastes and training to gain experience of local conditions.” If you’d like the next installment delivered to your mail box… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com (https://simonbarber.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

12. 

    17 Jun 2024

    Among the Khirghiz

    Margarita Robertovna, as she is known locally, is writing to her mother, who knows her as Margery. She is squeezing as many words as she can onto a sheet of coarse grey paper, the squared kind for doing sums. First the date. November 14, 1931. Then, carefully printed, her address. Урал Каз Край Рыбак Союз, Цалкарский Промысел, Анкотуиского Район. Copied correctly, this will direct her mother’s reply forty unpaved miles across the steppe from Uralsk in the northwest corner of what has lately become the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.  Her own letter is bound for 6a, The Leas, Folkestone, Kent, a clifftop row house with an occasional view of France. “Dearest Mith,” Margery writes. “Here we are in our new home. Robert and I are delighted with it.“ Robert is her five-year-old.  She calls him Robert to family and friends from her former life. Here the boy goes by other names. She thought of calling him Karl Marx but settled on Kompro, short for Communist Proletariat. Komok is the diminutive she uses. To his playmates he is Kolya.  Robert he inherits from Margery’s late father, an Anglican vicar. He is a good-looking boy. His mother worries he is small for his age. His arrival in the world had not been easy. They have their new home to themselves. It consists, Margery writes, of “a large room with a window and a door at one end and 2 windows at the other. The door leads onto a good porch with a nice food cupboard and place for our hen and cock, and the porch and window look onto the courtyard of the Promisel or Fish Farm; the other two windows look out onto the steppe with a Khirghiz village. They live very scattered so that only 3 houses are visible.” The Khirghiz (Margery’s spelling) are nomads. Or were. They have pastured their herds across the vastness of Central Asia for centuries. Now they are being “sedentarized” under Stalin’s First Five Year Plan. Moscow has decided they must pack up their yurts, settle down and surrender their livestock. This is contributing to a famine across the Kazakh Autonomous SSR that will leave one and a half million dead over the next two years. “Our side walls are inside walls,” Margery continues. “On one side is the head man’s rooms and on the other the “salters” — these are Russian — and the baker, an old man without any family, also Russian. All the rest of the personnel and workers are Khirghiz. Needless to say, I am trying to learn to talk to those as they know no Russian! The head man has a nice wife with 4 children, the eldest boy older than Robert. The latter is as happy as possible, playing with the little Khirghiz as well and learning Khirghiz fast.” Margery turns to the subject of food. In Uralsk, to which they moved in 1926, she and Pyotr, the boy’s father (Peter to Mith and hereafter), wrestled calories from the soil, a few chickens and, until it was socialized, a cow. The steppe is merciless even if you know what you’re doing. The little family has been fortunate that a bit of Margery’s money still reaches them from England via Quakers in Moscow. She has money because her mother is a Guinness of the brewing and banking Guinnesses. “We have as much fish as we can eat — fresh, salted and kippered. I saw the kippers being smoked today. They reminded me of the pictures of Dante’s Inferno.” The fish come from Lake Chalkar, a brackish, egg-shaped puddle left, some say, when an ancient ocean retreated south into the Caspian. The name comes from a Kazakh word for big.  The lake is seven miles long and five miles across. At this point Margery thinks it is 50 miles by 50, an easy mistake. The steppe here is as flat and empty as the ocean. From its treeless shore, Chalkar could be as broad as the Pacific if you knew no better. Big or small,  it “teems with fish” — carp, bream, pike and, most prized, chekhon, an oily cousin of mackerel. “The fishermen — various kolkhoz groups or parties — come and fish, sell their fish to us and are entitled to buy all sorts of goods ad lib for their fish money. So we have a nice shop.” A kolkhoz is a collective farm.  “Us” is the Ural Kazakh Fisherman’s Union which does the salting and kippering and runs the store. There is no refrigeration. That would call for electricity. Peter is keeping the books. He would rather be studying accountancy in Moscow but they didn’t accept his application.  Still, for the first time in their six years together he and Margery will be well supplied as winter sets in. Or so she wants to reassure her mother. “Peter bought a good warm overcoat with his first 1/2 months wages and 400 lbs. of potatoes, and tea and sugar, tobacco, paraffin, soap, onions — 26 lbs. — and tomorrow will receive wages to buy boots, more potatoes and materials so I shall be busy on my machine.” She draws a diagram of the room, labelling its contents. Her pedal-powered sewing machine sits between the windows at the back. She makes and mends with whatever she can find. To the right is the bed she shares with Peter. Onions and flour are stored at the head. At the foot is the stove. Built of mud and stone it takes up nearly half the wall they share with the salters. On top sit a Primus, a samovar and a copper. Between the stove and the door are buckets and a bowl for hands after visits to the communal pit latrine. “Fuel is free, as much as you want — sheaves of rushes from the banks of the lake. I burn 2 sheaves in the early morning, putting my saucepans to one side on bricks and tripods and stuff the rushes in beside them. The copper boils while you burn them and you have hot water for washing. I then take out the breakfast saucepan and put it in the hay box and close up the stove after putting in pies or something to bake.” Against the left-hand wall is a kitchen table.  On it is a cloth stitched together from colored handkerchiefs. These were sent by Mith. Anything more elaborate than a hanky or a pillow case is subject to taxes Margery and Peter cannot afford, or may disappear en route. Then come the table Margery is using as a desk, and a bookshelf. It holds well-thumbed medical and veterinary handbooks, Bukharin’s ABC of Communism, and copies of Wife and Home,  a decidedly bourgeois monthly for young English mothers to which Mith has subscribed her daughter and which, remarkably, arrives like clockwork even when nothing else does. After the bookshelf, there’s Robert’s bed, across from his parents’. Above it hang pictures of Lenin and Stalin alongside Peter’s guitar and mandolin. Also on the walls — whitewashed brick — are a clock, two more Lenins and a medley of mezzotints: a Canaletto of Venice, Hobbema’s Apollo, Courbould’s The Fisherman’s Departure and the Fisherman’s Return, and scenes of Jane Austen-era country life by William Wade: The Compassionate Children, The Citizen’s Retreat and The Farmer’s Door.  Here Wade’s farmer would have been classified as a kulak or rich peasant and, had he been allowed to live a while, worked to death in a labor camp; the horses whose noses the compassionate children are stroking would have been “socialized” by the kolkhoz. Over the sewing machine is a mirror.  In it, Margery sees a woman of aristocratic bearing and vestigial beauty. At 44, she has weathered surprisingly well given the vicissitudes to which she has subjected herself. Had she lived the life to which she was born, she would still have the teeth she has lost as a complication of tuberculosis and other assaults on her immune system. “So you see,” she tells her mother, “it is quite a dear little room.” It is time to finish. The nearest mail box is seven miles off. Peter is going on his bicycle. He  likes an excuse to be out of the house. “Must send this by him. Will write again later. Love from Marg. And kisses.” Curiosity tickled? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com (https://simonbarber.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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