Tag Archives: UK

London 1956

Posted on by

More of my father’s slides, mostly unseen for at least 50 years. In May 1956, my family went to London for a short visit. The note on this slide says, “Mama, Jay, Jim in corner of Buckingham Palace grounds c̄ bearded character” (he used a bit of medical shorthand). Jay told me that the “bearded character” said he was Father Christmas.

LondonMay56.1 Next, “Mama, Jay, Jim in square in front of Westminster Abbey.” Looks like a pleasant spring day with a little bit of a chill in the air.

LondonMay56.5At first glance, it looks like the woman in this picture — the one who’s not my mother — saw a man with a camera, and posed in an instant. But her feet are positioned in mid-step, so I think she happened to be looking straight into the camera. Anyway, the caption is: “Jay, Jim, Mama + some Englishwoman, Picadilly [sic] Street.”

LondonMay56.4This one: “Mama, Jim, Jay + little English girl, Green Park.”

LondonMay56.6Jay was four, Jim a few months older than a year, and it looks like the girl was somewhere between those ages.

Sir Issac & His Toblerone

Posted on by

I might be misremembering, but when I saw an episode of Yes, Minister on a Virgin Air flight out of Stansted in ’94, I think that one of the characters handed another a pound note for some reason. That got a chuckle from someone British seated nearby, who observed that the one-pound note was long gone. As it would have been by then, by about 10 years, replaced by a pound coin in 1984 (the US dollar note, while an icon, is also increasingly an outlier).
pound noteI must have acquired this note in the UK in 1983. It’s crisp and unused. This particular one was part of Series D, first issued in 1978 and finally withdrawn in 1988. I understand, however, that if I take it to the Bank of England, I’ll receive a pound coin in exchange.

Sir Isaac Newton graces the back. According to one source — a book called Religion, Science, and Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Westfall (2002) — the portrait was based on two paintings by Sir Godfrey Kneller, and on the table beside Newton is a telescope and a triangluar prism (taken by jokers to be a Toblerone bar).

pound noteHe’s holding a copy of the first edition of the Principia, open to the pages that contain a diagram of a Keplerian ellipse. I know that Newton built on Kepler’s work to compute the acceleration of bodies, but what the diagram describes exactly is beyond me. So is the knowledge required to assess this line in Religion, Science, and Worldview: “The large diagram that occupies the left half of the note is also from Proposition XI, but evidently from the Cajori edition of the Motte translation of the Pemberton third Latin edition.”

The book further asserts that the original issue in 1978 had a mistake in one of the diagram’s lines, corrected in 1981. That means I have a note made after 1981. There’s more discussion about the Sun in the diagram not being at one of the foci of the ellipse, but mistakenly at the center. Even a fan of currency minutiae like me can’t be bothered to care.

The Yeomen of the Guard

Posted on by

The Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Co. drew a solid crowd for the matinee of The Yeomen of the Guard on Sunday afternoon. Not a full house, but a decent turnout, including a small busload of seniors from somewhere or other. But unlike at some events, I wasn’t one of the younger members of the crowd. There was a good mix of ages.

Yeomen of the Guard 2015Mandel Hall was the venue. A handsome place on the University of Chicago campus — I’d like to see it in this light — and almost as old as Yeomen, since it was originally designed in 1903 by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge. Not the Savoy, but what is?

Though done at a college, the show wasn’t collegiate. The highly accomplished company goes back to 1960, and, according to the program notes, “has a policy of alternating the signature operas with the obscure, taking into consideration anniversary years and programming by other local companies.” This was its seventh production of Yeomen, with HMS Pinafore, The Mikado, and The Gondoliers also done that many times over the years. (At the other end of the spectrum, Utopia, Limited and The Grand Duke have been done once each in 55 years.)

Good fun, as G&S should be, but also not quite as much levity as you’d expect in a romantic romp of switched identities, instant attractions, and lines like this: “These allusions to my professional duties are in doubtful taste. I didn’t become a head-jailer because I like head-jailing. I didn’t become an assistant-tormentor because I like assistant-tormenting. We can’t all be sorcerers, you know.”

Spoken by Wilfred, the head jailer and assistant tormentor of the Tower, portrayed by Brad Jungwirth, a bald slab of a baritone, whose voice and character I enjoyed the most. The rest of the cast turned in fine performances as well, in as much as I’m qualified to judge, as did the University of Chicago Chamber Orchestra.

Maybe there should be more romantic comedies in which love doesn’t quite conquer all, as in Yeomen. After all, it ends with three couples paired up, two of which involve less-than-enthusiastic participants, and one of which leaves a sympathetic character (the merryman Jack Point) as the odd man out, much to his anguish. Then again, I guess a movie that ended that way wouldn’t test very well among focus groups.

Time for A Time for Gifts

Posted on by

Bitter cold today, and it’s only going to get bitterer. Maybe minus 15 F. by Wednesday, after another round of snow. At times like that, icy little puffs push through the cracks in your house to remind you that the chilly world is indifferent to your fate, you who came from subtropical climes but were headstrong about migrating toward the pole.

My reading material at the turn of the year is A Time for Gifts (1977), in which Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died in 2011 at 96, recounts part of his walk as a very young man from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the winter of 1933-34. A remarkable story, well told, and reminds just about everyone else (such as me) that their travels are pallid indeed compared with his.

It features a lot of interesting detail: “I pestered Fritz Spengel, the son of my hosts, with questions about student life: songs, drinking ritual, and above all, duelling, which wasn’t duelling at all of course, but ritual scarification. Those dashing scars were school ties that could never be taken off, the emblem and seal of a ten-years’ cult of the humanities. With a sabre from the wall, Fritz demonstrated the stance and the grip and described how the participants were gauntleted, gorgeted and goggled until every exposed vein and artery, and every inch of irreplaceable tissue, were upholstered from harm… and the blades clashed by numbers until the razor-sharp tips sliced gashes deep enough, tended with rubbed-in salt, to last a lifetime.”

And musings: “The Thirty Years War, the worst of them all, was becoming an obsession with me: a lurid, ruinous, doomed conflict of briefs and dynasties, helpless and hopeless, with principals shifting the whole time, and a constant shuffle and re-deal of the main actors. For, apart from the events – the defenestrations and pitched battles and historic sieges, the slaughter and famine and plague – astrological portents and the rumour of cannibalism and witchcraft flitted about in the shadows. The polyglot captains of the ruffian multi-lingual hosts hold our gaze willy-nilly with their grave eyes and their Velasquez moustaches and populate half the picture galleries in Europe…”

Hard Day’s New Year’s Eve

Posted on by

Snow today, after a rain-ice mix yesterday that made slush. December ’14 was remarkable in that not a bit of snow fell here in northern Illinois, none that stuck anyway. That suited me, though mostly it was cold, especially as the month ended. Everyone who was out after midnight on New Year’s braved temps around 15 degrees F., with some wind.

I stood outside for a short spell to capture the sounds of the early ’15, just after midnight. It’s faint, but if the volume’s all the way up, you can hear the steady pops of technically illegal fireworks. Not sure what the loud pop is at about 10 seconds.

 

Before midnight I watched A Hard Day’s Night. Fun movie. Somehow or other I’d never seen it before, except for the famed opening, in which a mass of screaming girls chase the lads through a train station.

One amusing line — which must be understood less and less as time goes by — involved “Paul’s grandfather.” (Wilfrid Brambell played Paul’s grandfather, sometimes stealing the show. I thought he looked familiar. Turns out he played the father in Steptoe and Son.)

At one point, Paul’s grandfather sneaks off and runs up a tab at a posh club. The Beatles and their manager show up to collect the old man, and the club manager says, “There’s the matter of the bill.”

The Beatles’ manager looks at it and says, “180 pounds?”

“180 guineas!” answers the club manager.

Christmases ’14

Posted on by

Merry Christmas to all. And a fine New Year, since I’ll post again around January 4 ’15.

It’s also the centennial of the Christmas Truce. Can’t forget that.

A worthwhile dramatization from the movie Joyeux Noel (2005). A bit of documentary about the incident is here.

Windsor Castle ’94

Posted on by

Twenty years ago we visited Windsor Castle and the nearby grounds of Eton. Wish I could say that I remembered more about it, but memory fails. Maybe I’d seen too many palaces and other monumental edifices in the weeks and months before.

That December was relatively warm, which might help account for the greenness of the lawn.Windsor94.2

But it wasn’t so warm that we didn’t need coats.Windsor94.1 The ducks and geese in the Thames. Windsor94.3

I do remember looking into one of the rooms of the castle that had been completely blackened by the fire in 1992 (renovations wouldn’t be finished until later in the decade). But I don’t remember whether we were looking across a roped off area from the inside, or looking in through a window from the outside. Or maybe it was both. The fire had clearly done a lot of damage.

Things You See in Mount Carroll

Posted on by

Somewhere or other at some time, I read that Mount Carroll, Illinois, had enough things to see to recommend a short visit (how’s that for source amnesia?). Wherever I got it, I can pass along that recommendation. It’s a small place, with only about 1,800 people, but it has a sizable concentration of historic structures. We took a look at a few of them on the afternoon of June 20.

That includes a fine courthouse, the Greek Revival part of which dates back to before the Civil War. Elsewhere on the courthouse grounds are a few monuments – but not quite as many as some courthouses I’ve seen – including a tall one dedicated to Union veterans. Turns out that Lorado Taft sculpted the cavalryman at the top of the monument, which is formally called the Carroll County Civil War Soldiers And Sailors Monument.

Mount Carroll, June 20, 2014

Writing in the short-lived blog Larado Taft: The Prairie State Sculptor, Carl Volkmann says, “Lorado Taft was a member of a team of artists who was commissioned to create the Carroll County Civil War Soldiers And Sailors Monument. George H. Mitchell designed the monument, and Josiah Schamel constructed the foundation. John C. Hall designed the annex that was added later when county officials determined that there were many names missing from the original honor roll list.

Mount Carroll, June 20, 2014“The monument consists of a fifty-foot vertical shaft with a Lorado Taft-sculpted soldier holding a flag at the top. Lewis H. Sprecher of Lanark posed for the statue and made several trips to Taft’s Chicago studio to model for it. Two additional statues are attached to the base of the monument, one an infantryman and the other a cavalryman.”

Not far from the town square is a genuine, honest-to-God Carnegie Library that is, in fact, still a library. We went in for a look around. It seemed like a nice facility for a town the size of Mount Carroll. We were the only ones in the library except the librarian – it was about 30 minutes ahead of closing time on a Friday afternoon – and I spoke briefly to her, telling her that I wanted to show my daughters what a Carnegie Library was. I also wanted to come in because they aren’t exactly common sites.

Later, I checked, and my feeling wasn’t quite right. At least according to this Wiki list, some 60-odd Carnegies are still functioning libraries in Illinois alone, out of more than 100 originally built. Seems like most of them are in small towns away from metro Chicago, so unless you frequent that kind of small town, you won’t see them much.

Just before we left town, we came across something that’s presumably not always near the courthouse in Mount Carroll: this unusual car.

Mount Carroll, June 20, 2014Unusual for American roads, that is. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Morris Minor in this country. It’s so unusual that besides it being a Morris, I didn’t know anything else about it.

Naturally, I had to look it up. Through the marvel of Google images, I was able to pin it down to a Morris Minor 1000 Traveller. In its pages on Morris Minor history, Charles Ware’s Morris Minor Centre Ltd. in Brislington, Bristol, says “there is only one other car on British roads today which is as familiar as the Morris Minor, and that’s the Mini. That both were designed by the same man is no coincidence, and indeed Sir Alec Issigonis is one of the very few car designers whose name is recognised by the man or woman in the street and not just by enthusiasts or fellow engineers. [This might be true in the UK, but I have no way to judge that.]

“The products of Sir Alec’s genius have had a profound and highly beneficial influence on the British motor industry, so it is hardly surprising that it is his first car, the Morris Minor of 1948, which has become the subject of this proposal for a long-life car.” Morris Minor 1000 Traveller, Mount Carroll, Illinois, June 2014

More about Sir Alec here. I’m not sure I’d want to own a Morris Minor myself, but it’s a distinctive design. Good to see one loose on the roads of North America. I’m glad there are enthusiasts in this country. Any fool with money can buy a snazzy new sports car or a Lexis or the like, but it takes some imagination to invest in a Morris Minor.

Canterbury, 1994

Posted on by

I took lousy notes during our four weeks in London in December 1994, so I can’t remember exactly when it was we took a day trip to Canterbury. It wasn’t December 1, because that day I saw a revival of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie somewhere in the West End, and after the show the lead actress made an appeal for donations to fund AIDS research, since it was World AIDS Day.

We went to Canterbury sometime early in the month, and we had a pleasant walk around the town and a long look at the cathedral, which is off in the distance in this picture — one of the few I took there.

I think the closer ruins are what’s left of St. Augustine’s Abbey, which Henry VIII put on the road to ruin. The grass looks strangely green for December, but I remember that December in southern England wasn’t very cold at all, to the wonder of people who lived there year-round.

Better pictures of the cathedral and the ruins and other places nearby can be found at the fine Saints and Stones web site.

Life on Mars

Posted on by

I saw a car in a parking lot the other day with a license plate frame that said MANCHESTER UNITED. Not something you see too much here in the heart of darkest North America, but maybe an expat Englishman drives that car. Or, in the Internet age, a local enthusiast who’s become a long-distance supporter.

Which makes me wonder: are there (say) Packer fans in the UK? Probably a few.

Speaking of Manchester, I managed to watch the first episode of the British Life on Mars not long ago, which adeptly combines cop show and SF. A modern-day (2006, anyway) Manchester policeman finds himself transported to an earlier time (1973, as it happens). Or does he? When I have time, I’ll make my way through the entire series, which is only 16 episodes.