Sir Winston Churchill - Funeral (I Vow To Thee, My Country)

"I Vow to Thee, My Country is a British patriotic song created in 1921 when a poem by Sir Cecil Spring-Rice was set to music by Gustav Holst."--Wikipedia

"I Vow to Thee" is one of those stirring traditional pieces that seems to summon up the natural rolling hills and fields of the English landscape by just listening to it.

Here it is combined with footage of the funeral of Great Britain's most famous statesman of the 20th Century.

When I was about six, my father bought me what was called a book "for young adults" on Churchill's life shortly after the old fellow had died. It emphasized Churchill's larger than life persona and the enourmous span of his career as a politician, writer, soldier, historian and wartime leader. I was of course taken by the theatricality of his coming to office at a dark moment in British and democratic history. I went back to this book from time to time and one might say it was the starting point of my interest and affection for the British nations.

There have so many versions of his life played out in books and film and television mini-series that one might be forgiven for not stepping back a bit and marvelling how one man, however flawed, made such a difference to the world at a crucial time and could later write so well about the times of his life and his nation.


Although I likely would never have voted for the guy, I have always felt a certain fondness for the resolution and durabiity of this man. So call this a chance to share one of my favorite hymms and recall London and the United Kingdom at a very different time of official pagentry.

David Bowie - Absolute Beginners

With thanks to the Rev Kook and others, I refer you to the comments below for a clip from the title song and some scenes from the movie which features this and other jazz and pop songs.

Trip to London and Environs--May 1985

This was not far from my hotel at Kensington Close. I'm pretty sure this was the first picture I took that first morning after jet lag wore off.

These pictures are some "surviving" prints from a trip I took to England in 1985. I say surviving because when I got home two of the rolls of film I took were destroyed by some machine foul-up at the local One-Hour Photo labratory I was used to going to back home.

Consequently the pictures I had of places like Regent's Park, my bus trip out to Hampton Court and a later rail trip to Winchester to see the cathedral there came out just a brownish mess! Oh, to have had a diigital camera twenty six years back.

These are some shots from the first two rolls I had. All in all it was a great trip and my wife and I plan to go to see more of England and other parts of the Isles together one of these days.

It was a very nice visit, although it could have rained more! :-)

A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Charles Dickens

A TALE OF TWO CITIES is a book that reminds me how powerful a story can affect a reader, especially a younger one for the rest of his life. It was a favorite book of my father as he was growing up. I first read it at fifteen, and at my most recent return to it I was impressed by how quickly I was absorbed into a book I was already familiar with from earlier times.


For a Dickens novel , this story is not all that complex. An old doctor named Manette is freed from the Bastille after seventeen years; his daughter Lucie, brought up in England, goes to fetch him with the help of Mr. Lorry, a banker at Tellson's who has looked out for her since she her father was thrust unjustly into the Bastille and forgotten.

A man whom they meet on the return voyage across the Channel (Charles Darnay) is a French aristocrat who has turned his back on the cruelty and feudal barbarism of his family to make a life in a foreign land.

Later, the man Darnay finds himself on trail for his life, mistakenly thought to be a spy for the French in 1780's London, when both nations were at war with each other over the issue of the American Revolution. An identical-looking man in the courtroom that day, the lawyer Sidney Carton happens to be there helping his associate. The fact that Darnay and Carton both look alike convinces the jury that one witness must be lying. Darnay is spared from a gruesome death.

Dickens will come again to that plot device in good time. But the scene will not be in England but in the chaos of Paris in the time of The Terror, where the unforgettable figures of Madame Defarge and her husband lead a pack of blood-thirsty revolutionaries to a measure of vengence beyond anything close to justice.

Darnay is descended from an aristocratic French family whose hobbies include running-down a small child with an over-sized coach, then tossing the poor father a gold coin for the inconvenience. He is not like his uncle, the Monseigneur, although he will have to likely have to pay for the crimes of his elders.


Darnay is a enlightened man, a good egg and Dr. Manette welcomes him as the groom for his beloved daughter Lucie. Carton is a heavy drinker and a reprobate--he is in love with Lucie, too, but he knows he's no good for her. All this plays into Dickens theme of redemption and sacrifice. Darnay goes to France in a suicidal mission to get an old servant out of prison and away from the harsh justice of the Jacobins. This inspires Carton, who rises above his past to use blackmail and his considerable personal resources to redeem himself beyond all measure, all in the hope of a better world in the future.

That the individual human heart can bring a person to change his course and that a better world can be made from this, writ large, is a great theme of Dickens. Look at "A Christmas Carol" where Ebenezer Scrooge gets a makeover of his conscience in one horrific night, and turns into a decent and generous man. .

Paris and London are the settings for the book . Both cities have their share of injustices. But Paris is depicted as having a more hungry and brutalized populace. In London much of the lower classes are in dire straits but are not planning more than the breaking the laws (such as Jerry Cruncher, the Tellson Bank odd job man and part-time grave robber) or robbing a stagecoach or two. In the end its the servant -class people of people, including Miss Pross, Lucie's lifelong maid, who are as much appalled by the violence they see while in Paris during the September Massacres of September 1792 and on through the Great Terror as any of the middle-class folk they serve.


Critics have chided Dickens for some points in this book, for not balancing the violence of the old regime with that of the Great Terror for instance. But the Terror is the stuff of great drama and to expect a great novelist to also be a great historian is really asking too much.


In George Orwell's 1941 Essay on Dickens, he comments on this book with a particular emphasis. Here is one part:

"The one thing that everyone who has read A TALE OF TWO CITIES remembers is the Reign of Terror. The whole book is dominated by the guillotine--
tumbrils thundering to and fro, bloody knives, heads bouncing into the
basket, and sinister old women knitting as they watch. Actually these
scenes only occupy a few chapters, but they are written with terrible
intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow going. But A TALE OF
TWO CITIES is not a companion volume to THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. Dickens sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and that many of the people who were executed deserved what they got. If, he
says, you behave as the French aristocracy had behaved, vengeance will
follow. He repeats this over and over again. We are constantly being
reminded that while 'my lord' is lolling in bed, with four liveried
footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving outside,
somewhere in the forest a tree is growing which will presently be sawn
into planks for the platform of the guillotine, etc., etc., etc. The
inevitability of the Terror, given its causes, is insisted upon... in the
clearest terms..."

But Orwell also analyzed (keenly I think) that Dickens was not really a political writer, as some would have him be, but rather one whose attitudes were to show his countrymen and women how bad things could get if reform wasn't followed through upon. Then the politicians themselves (well ,some of them, like John Russell, the Parliamentary reformer that Dickens dedicated the book to in 1859) would see the way to head off the tide of red blood running through the streets of some future London.


Whatever can be said for Charles Dickens, he knew how to make you want to read more. His whole style was perfect for the way novels were introduced to the public in those days, with passages in serial form in magazines. Each couple of weeks there was a new couple of chapters in his magazine
"All the Way Around".

In "The Inimitable" Dickens' case, thousands of eager people shelled out hard coin to read about the latest triumphs, setbacks, wicked deeds and tragic ends of his characters. He was as popular in North America as his own nation.


Reading the book again, it was clear to me why my father--not a keen novel reader later in life, but a man who preferred non-fiction books--had always remembered this work with such fondness. It's a novel of great suspense and memorable characters first and foremost and, secondly, one that shows the power of an individual or a small group of people to rise above personal concerns for those they love.

Film of the London Blitz in colour unseen for 70 years

I always am keen to see film footage from the past that has been left unacccounted on a shelf or a vault. This is from a report last year about actual color footage taken during the Blitz on London in 1940-41. This is not the newly developed computer-generated colorization process imposed on monochrome film, but the real thing!

The advantage of color film I think brings a sense of heightened reality to any documenatry-style footage. These short intervals of amateur cinema remind us that these events happened among people very much like ourselves, tested them beyond anything most of us who are younger could imagine and brings the words and images of wartime to a deeper level of consciousness.

The people shown in this film footage were a small part of the first military loss dealt to the Third Reich. It is, therefore, a critical record I believe of preserving freedom in the Western World.

Made in Dagenham (2010)--Women "Stirring Up a Fuss"

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Comedy

This comedy-drama charts the struggle of one Rita O'Grady (Sally Hawkins) a working-class wife and mother who leads 157 women workers at a Ford Motor plant in Dagenham, England, out on strike when their jobs sewing upholstery on car seats is threatened by the Ford with being declassified as "unskilled labor". The personal difficulties the women face: from their husbands, from the unsympathetic union leadership and, of course, the company brass are all woven together well.

The film is based on a real event and employs television news footage of the time that documents how far working class men, professional board-room types and even supposedly socialist and liberal politicians in general were from accepting the concept of "equal pay for equal work" between the sexes --and how far it still has to go.

The film has an excellent cast and a good feel for the period. Bob Hoskins is especially good in a sympathetic role as a shop steward whose mother had to support her family when he was a kid and there was absolutely no pay equality in the workplace. Rita gets some encourgement from him but in the end its her own voice and personal mettle that comes to the fore when the all-male union bosses try to put the issue on a back burner.

Miranda Richardson appears as Barbara Castle, a powerful Labour Party official of the time who has her own "old boys network" to deal with, headed by the out-of-touch Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who thinks the women can be put off with pie-in-the-sky promises.

I hope a good deal of this film is actually factual, because it really does show how courage and convictions can change things for the better, even if its only a small initial victory .

One oddity for me is seeing so many people working at a car plant taking bicycles to work. Either that's "veddy British", or Ford was a lousy company to work for there at the time.

ORSON WELLES as Shakespeare's FALSTAFF, Dean Martin Show 1968

A wonderful and rare moment in a variety television show. Orson Welles reciting the "sheeri-sack" speech from Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part Two" from Act Four of the great Elizabethan history play.

As a young writer/director, Welles redacted five of Shakespeare's plays--two featuring the mischief-making reprobate Sir John Falstaff--into a late 1930's Broadway production called "Five Kings".

After playing all of Shakespeare's great tragic characters--save "Hamlet"--either on stage, screen or television in between, he played the "fat knight" himself in his own favorite film "Chimes at Midnight" (1964). Here he is four years later on his friend Dean Martin's program, recreating a brief bit of his original theatrical genius for millions of viewers.

The English Resistance: The Underground War Against the Normans

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	History
Author:	Peter Rex

For years, what I had read about the Norman Invasion of England was summarized by the events of the Battle of Hastings in late 1066, when King Harold Godwinson and his "Saxon" forces were defeated by William the Conquerer. King Edward (the Confessor) had left no surviving heirs and the Witan council had named Harold king. His elevation to regal status was short lived.


There were three major battles that year, and all had been bloody tests for the English forces: first, the northern earls (at Fulford Gate) and for King Harold (at Stamford Bridge and Hastings) . This is from a review of this same book by Carla Neyland, and sets the stage for the rebellion to come after William of Normandy came to power in London:

"'The English Resistance' begins with a survey of the three battles of 1066. Gate Fulford was fought just south of York on 20 September, when Tostig Godwinsson and Harald Hardrada defeated Earl Edwin of Mercia and Earl Morcar of Northumbria.

"Stamford Bridge was fought east of York five days later, when Harold Godwinsson defeated and killed Tostig and Haradrada after a forced march from the south of England. Hastings was fought on 14 October on the south coast, when William of Normandy defeated and killed Harold Godwinsson (after Harold and his army had marched all the way back from Stamford Bridge)."


Harold's ships and levies of soldiers were all too taxed from a bloody battle against the Vikings in the north of the kingdom to get back to Hastings with any measure of rest and preperation. The Norman Duke knew all about Harold's troubles with the Norwegians and William was poised to strike across the Channel when he found the time just right.

Harold and his men could only march hundreds of miles-- again--- and still had reinforcements coming up when the Battle of Hastings was all over.

It was the end of the story, at least as far as popular history goes. One assumed after the victory at Hastings, William the Conquerer (or the Bastard) moved on quickly to quell most of Britain and that was that.

Peter Rex's book shows that was not all that.

For the next five to six years, and sporadically for decades after, the English (with Welsh, Scottish and Danish support) refused to accept the Normanization of their islands and their lands. While rebellion around London and the southern regions of the kingdom ended around 1067, the remaining Earls of the Saxon dynasty and the various groups of 'silvatici' (forest dwellers) was just getting started.

There were vast parts of England (Cornwall, Northumbria, many parts between thee Humber River and the Wash, et al) that hadn't seen any Normans yet and hadn't got "the memo" it seems that the fight was over and their lands were forfeit to William's fighting chums. In Wales, for example, Eadric "the Wild" gathered forces to give the Normans a warm welcome when they moved westward.

Norman progress in the north toward Yorkshire was not all that smooth---newly-minted nobles were set upon and killed by the locals. York itself was attacked as soon as the Normans got their castle up in 1068 and the combined English-Danish forces drove the surviving invaders and their quislings back down to safer turf. William himself, dealing with problems in his own territory back at Normandy, had to rush back to lay siege to towns like Chester.

Only William's own leadership saved the day for the Normans in this new realm, filled with angry "outlaws" who hoped for a new Saxon king in the shape of Edgar the Atheling ( a young man gathering what forces he could in Scotland as a guest of King Malcom) or even in the hopes of a restored "Danelaw" king who could drive the Normans back to the Channel and restore the less onerous burden of Norse foreign rule.


A video on early Norman attempts to isolate and destroy resistance:



Rex's book focuses a great deal on one man in particular, Hereward the Exile or Hereward the Outlaw. He was one of the leaders of those forest dwellers and a military strategist who ranked up with William the Bastard or Harald Hardara of Norway, only without the loyal forces these monarchs enjoyed. Hereward (also called "The Wake" by a later generations) made inroads up and down the northern coast of England and at the then island of Ely near the deep marshes of the Fens. Needing to keep his restless Danish allies sated, Hereward sacked treasure from the abbeys that the Normans solely needed to finance their campaigns against rebels on both sides of the Channel. William responded in more than kind. It was, in Rex's phrase, William the Bastards' "government by punitive expedition."

It was all of course a bloody and brutal affair, but there is little evidence William expected anything else. To combat the forces of the resistance, The Bastard lead men up and down the north in a "harrying" operation that left farms burning and innocents slaughtered. The major battled at Stafford took on tactics that would be, in Rex's view from the surviving documents, precursors of German occupation atrocities 900 years later in places like occupied France.


Eventually, lacking loyal support from the Danes, who may never seriously considered taking on the Normans in a major battle, and after the Norman invasion of Scotland in 1072 sent Edgar Atheling to Flanders and safety and made Malcom a more passive neighbor, the English resistance dwindled. But Peter Rex and other historians he cites make a strong case that it took almost a decade for William to consolidate his 'total victory' at Hastings.

The last part of the book recounts the blending of English and Norman Noble families over the next few decades into a group with a increasingly independent identity from Normandy. As for Hereward the Outlaw, he apparently escaped from his last big stand at Ely as the Normans built a causeway and forced their way across. Hereward also escaped from any reliable historical account as to how he spent his last years. That he was the prototypical horse-mounted knight--likely trained at Flanders while in a previous exile imposed by the Confessor--is very likely. That he might have also served as a precursor to the legends of Robin Hood have also been proposed. Its his whereabouts with his bands after escaping Ely that makes for the intriguing speculations and where history and legend cross over into the great theme of resistance to foreign powers that characterizes English history just after 1066 and for centuries to come.

And now a word on 11th Century Norman taxation schemes, read by actor Chris Bailey . It looks a lot like what a Public Service Announcement from Bill The Bastard's New Order would "encourage" the public to prepare for :