As the Countess de la Torre, Theresa Reviss was up before the Victorian beaks on several occasions for keeping too many animals in her London apartments. Typically,
THE COUNTESS DE LA TORRE AND HER CATS - St James's Gazette, 18 August 1884
The Countess De La Torre, of 38, Pembroke-square, was summoned at Kensington Saturday for disobeying a prohibitory order of the justices do away with number of cats and dogs which she kept in her dwelling-house. In defence the Countess said that seven of her cats had been destroyed and she bad given seven away. She had three cats still, and stray ones came to the house. By direction of the chairman, two officers of the vestry proceeded to the house of the Countess to ascertain the number of the cats and dogs. They found thirteen cats and seven dogs, and the smell in the house was most offensive. The chairman made an order for the Countess to pay 10 shillings a day from the 2nd August, on which day the decision of the justices was confirmed, to the present time. An order was also granted giving permission to enter the house and abolish the nuisance.
If only there had been a 19th century Facebook!
Reviss, allegedly the illegitimate daughter of an actress also named Theresa, had been brought up by the Bullers, an old East India Company family. Charles Buller, a radical Whig politician, who died unmarried in 1848, settled money on her with the "testamentary injunction" to be good. It seems she was anything but. Thackeray, who knew the family, is said to have based the character of Becky Sharp, the anti-heroine of Vanity Fair, on her.
Sunday, 6 August 2017
Saturday, 5 August 2017
Bercow on TMS
House of Commons Speaker John Bercow was the tea-time guest of BBC cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew on Test Match Special today. Aggers had clearly not done much research, or he would surely have quizzed Bercow about his fanatical love of tennis. What I found as surprising was that Bercow professed to no knowledge of cricket.
What Aggers concentrated on was PMQs. I would like to have asked the Speaker why he does not remove persistent chunterers from the chamber. Perhaps they are among his supporters.
What Aggers concentrated on was PMQs. I would like to have asked the Speaker why he does not remove persistent chunterers from the chamber. Perhaps they are among his supporters.
Friday, 4 August 2017
Taggart
I have been catching up on the earliest episodes of STV's police procedural, thanks to the Drama channel. Last night's (or rather, this early morning's!) drama had a parliamentary by-election as background, so I naturally made a point of watching it. Writer Glenn Chandler used the episode to deploy a wide range of reasons why returning to capital punishment would be a bad idea (the first murder victims were a policeman's widow standing as a candidate on that platform, and her agent). It was clear on what side of the argument Chandler stands, though he surely should have given the candidate some stronger arguments, without weakening the overall case against. It was significant that the university-educated DS Jardine was overtly opposed to hanging, while the rough, tough, DCI Taggart was non-committal.
Taggart broke new ground for UK TV in several ways. The DCI was authentically working-class, as was Mark McManus, the man who played him. Jim Taggart was quite prepared to play away from home (though we were not shown an instance of his achieving his end!) while maintaining a prickly relationship with his disabled wife. The series anticipated Midsomer Murders with the gruesomeness of some of its homicides.
Sadly, the series lost three of the leads over no more than seven years: Mark McManus himself in 1994, Iain Anders (Superintendent "Biscuit" McVitie) in 1997 and Robert Robertson (pathologist Dr Andrews) in 2001.
It also ran through the roster of Scottish screen acting talent, including Sean Connery's cousin and niece, having to import a few people from south of the border to fill in. Many appeared more than once in different rôles; the best example is Alex Norton who played a ne'er-do-well in an early episode only to return as DCI Burke in 2002. There were some notable early appearances, like Siobhan Redmond as an investigative reporter and Alan Cumming playing a young (heterosexual) lover.
There were progressive moves later on. The series had already featured strong women on the other side of the law and even among the victims, but season 6 saw the introduction of Blythe Duff as Jackie Reid, initially as a WPC but eventually a key member of the detective team. What could have been a first came in 1995 with an "out" homosexual DC.
It seems that no Taggarts were made after 2010 because ITV decided not to network the show any more. In any case, it did seem to have lost its way, differing only from a dozen other cop shows in its setting. I would like to have seen STV revive the hard edge of the early shows, perhaps reversing the contrast between the tough senior officer and the middle-class detective sergeant by introducing a young DC with a chip on his shoulder, having grown up during successive periods of austerity, counteracting a comfortable university-educated senior staff. I proffer it as a free suggestion to Glenn Chandler if he ever wants to pitch another Taggart to ITV bosses.
Taggart broke new ground for UK TV in several ways. The DCI was authentically working-class, as was Mark McManus, the man who played him. Jim Taggart was quite prepared to play away from home (though we were not shown an instance of his achieving his end!) while maintaining a prickly relationship with his disabled wife. The series anticipated Midsomer Murders with the gruesomeness of some of its homicides.
Sadly, the series lost three of the leads over no more than seven years: Mark McManus himself in 1994, Iain Anders (Superintendent "Biscuit" McVitie) in 1997 and Robert Robertson (pathologist Dr Andrews) in 2001.
It also ran through the roster of Scottish screen acting talent, including Sean Connery's cousin and niece, having to import a few people from south of the border to fill in. Many appeared more than once in different rôles; the best example is Alex Norton who played a ne'er-do-well in an early episode only to return as DCI Burke in 2002. There were some notable early appearances, like Siobhan Redmond as an investigative reporter and Alan Cumming playing a young (heterosexual) lover.
There were progressive moves later on. The series had already featured strong women on the other side of the law and even among the victims, but season 6 saw the introduction of Blythe Duff as Jackie Reid, initially as a WPC but eventually a key member of the detective team. What could have been a first came in 1995 with an "out" homosexual DC.
It seems that no Taggarts were made after 2010 because ITV decided not to network the show any more. In any case, it did seem to have lost its way, differing only from a dozen other cop shows in its setting. I would like to have seen STV revive the hard edge of the early shows, perhaps reversing the contrast between the tough senior officer and the middle-class detective sergeant by introducing a young DC with a chip on his shoulder, having grown up during successive periods of austerity, counteracting a comfortable university-educated senior staff. I proffer it as a free suggestion to Glenn Chandler if he ever wants to pitch another Taggart to ITV bosses.
Thursday, 3 August 2017
Shenley Fields
I have been following a lead from the inquiry into the Jersey child abuse business and come across pages on a Birmingham history web site. It seems from reading these that there was a fairly abrupt change from pre-war years and a decade or so after the war, about which people cared for in the Shenley Fields Home as children have warm feelings, to a darker period which seems to coincide with links with Haut de la Garenne on Jersey. I am interested to know more, and Cathy Fox probably even more so. If you do not want to comment publicly via the link below, you can find my email address fairly easily.
Trump's USA is anti-Christian
It was established some time ago that conservatives in government on both sides of the Atlantic were indifferent to the sufferings of Christians in other countries. Now comes news, courtesy of France24, that the US authorities want to deport a US resident of long-standing, a Christian Iraqi, back to a country where he will clearly be attacked and possibly killed because of his religion. So the Trump régime is not just unchristian, it is antichristian.
When our prime minister, a vicar's daughter, returns from her continental walking holiday, will she remonstrate with the President? If that fails, will she offer asylum to this man and other Iraqi Christians?
When our prime minister, a vicar's daughter, returns from her continental walking holiday, will she remonstrate with the President? If that fails, will she offer asylum to this man and other Iraqi Christians?
US checks and balances working
There are things wrong with electoral systems in the US, like being wedded to first-past-the-post ballots which most progressive nations have dropped and being dominated by big money. However, the checks and balances built in to the system by the founding fathers, who recognised that both dictatorship by one man and rule of the mob were detrimental to the common weal, have served the nation well and continue to do so. There was an example earlier this week when President Trump was compelled to sign a renewal of sanctions against Russia among others.
President Donald Trump signed a sweeping sanctions bill Wednesday that is intended to punish Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential election. [...] The new law limits Trump’s autonomy with respect to Russia policy in a provision that requires congressional approval for any revisions. Bipartisan support in Congress ensured a veto-proof majority, effectively forcing Trump to abandon his conciliatory approach toward Russia by signing the legislation. The law, which also levies sanctions against North Korea and Iran, targets Russia’s energy sector by granting Congress the authority to sanction individual investors in Russia’s oil export pipelines. This measure has drawn significant criticism from European investors in a pipeline project, known as Nord Stream 2, that would transport Russian oil to Germany. The legislation also brings new sanctions against Russia’s defense and intelligence sectors in an effort to obstruct weapons exports.
Imagine the danger to Europe if the US president had complete executive power unchecked, and was happy to let his partner in crime eat his way westward. This is the sort of power which Erdogan in Turkey and Maduro in Venezuela seek - dictatorship with a servile, nominally-elected parliament rubber-stamping their oppressive measures.
President Donald Trump signed a sweeping sanctions bill Wednesday that is intended to punish Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential election. [...] The new law limits Trump’s autonomy with respect to Russia policy in a provision that requires congressional approval for any revisions. Bipartisan support in Congress ensured a veto-proof majority, effectively forcing Trump to abandon his conciliatory approach toward Russia by signing the legislation. The law, which also levies sanctions against North Korea and Iran, targets Russia’s energy sector by granting Congress the authority to sanction individual investors in Russia’s oil export pipelines. This measure has drawn significant criticism from European investors in a pipeline project, known as Nord Stream 2, that would transport Russian oil to Germany. The legislation also brings new sanctions against Russia’s defense and intelligence sectors in an effort to obstruct weapons exports.
Imagine the danger to Europe if the US president had complete executive power unchecked, and was happy to let his partner in crime eat his way westward. This is the sort of power which Erdogan in Turkey and Maduro in Venezuela seek - dictatorship with a servile, nominally-elected parliament rubber-stamping their oppressive measures.
Wednesday, 2 August 2017
Macron's displaced persons solution has merit
It seems logical - and humane, considering the number of migrants who have lost their lives or those of their relatives in the Mediterranean - to deal with the movement of people from Africa to Europe nearer the source. Sorting out the genuine refugees from economic migrants in Libya or next-door in Egypt would not only be more efficient but also cut out some of the exploitation.
So when President Macron came up with something along the same lines, I was surprised at the hostility it engendered.
He later slightly amended the proposal.
However, while giving an official speech later the same day, Macron said there was no question of "hotspots" in Libya. France will instead have OFPRA (Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons) "missions … on African soil, in safe countries"
Of course, what we really need is a joint EU approach. France, Italy, Greece and even Hungary should not have to struggle alone.
So when President Macron came up with something along the same lines, I was surprised at the hostility it engendered.
"The idea is to create hotspots in Libya to avoid people taking crazy risks when they are not all eligible for asylum. We'll go to them," he said during a visit to a refugee shelter in central France on Thursday, adding the plan would be put in place "this summer".
Libya is the main launchpad for African migrants trying to reach Europe in rickety boats operated by smugglers that frequently sink.
He later slightly amended the proposal.
However, while giving an official speech later the same day, Macron said there was no question of "hotspots" in Libya. France will instead have OFPRA (Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons) "missions … on African soil, in safe countries"
Of course, what we really need is a joint EU approach. France, Italy, Greece and even Hungary should not have to struggle alone.
Tuesday, 1 August 2017
Would this heroine be successful today?
Thanks to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, I now know about Esther (Tess) Simpson, born as Esther Sinovitch on 31 July 1903. She became a sought-after secretary-cum-translator-cum-interpreter after the 1914-18 war, but took a drop in pay in order to work for what became the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning. Simpson, a Quaker, had been appalled by Hitler's wholesale dismissal of Jewish lecturers and professors from German universities. She had asked Leo Szilard if she could be of use to the Academic Assistance Council recently founded in London by William Beveridge, Maynard Keynes, Gilbert Murray, Ernest Rutherford, and others, to help these persecuted scholars.
Tess Simpson was to persevere in that endeavour for the next sixty years. When challenged, late in life, about the council's exclusive focus on intellectuals, she replied: 'What was happening [in Germany] ... was anti-human and I wanted to do something to mitigate against that ... Each [refugee organization] could only do so much but of course I felt terrible about the plight of others' (The Times, 1 July 1992).
At first almost all the refugees were Jews. But after the Nuremberg laws of 1935 German academics could be expelled if they had just one Jewish grandparent or a Jewish wife. Between 1933 and 1940 Tess Simpson became a one-woman reception centre for nearly 2600 refugee intellectuals. They arrived in Britain rejected, nearly destitute, and traumatized by the humiliation and hatred meted out to them by Nazis, and found themselves in a country still suffering massive unemployment, whose popular newspapers were as hostile to Britain's being 'flooded' by foreign asylum seekers as at any other time, before or since. Tess Simpson was almost always the first person to meet each new arrival and she greeted him or her with warm sympathy, high intelligence, and immense practicality, setting them 'on the stairway to survival and success' (Hampstead and Highgate Express, November 1996). Many of these desperate people were eventually to become among the most eminent thinkers in their fields in the world, but they all started in Britain as Tess Simpson's 'children' for whom she found a new life, often locating work for them in small colleges in the United States or in university colleges in the British Commonwealth, if not at first in Britain.
After the fall of Norway in 1940, the British government, headed by Churchill, panicked about these and other 'enemy aliens' in Britain and decided to intern them all. To her horror Tess Simpson learned that over 500 of 'her' refugee scholars, many of them now doing work of national importance and of course anti-Nazis to a man, were about to be arrested, sent to camps surrounded by barbed wire, and possibly even deported. She made vain protests to the Home Office and had to spend the next year accumulating the most meticulous documentation attesting to the integrity of every single individual case in order to give Professor Archibald Vivian Hill, MP for Cambridge University and vice-president of the executive committee of the society, and Eleanor Rathbone, MP for the Northern Universities, the evidence they required before they could succeed in their joint effort, helped by Bishop George Bell of Chichester, to have all these interned intellectuals released. 'Do you know the story of Bruce and the spider? I am that spider', she later remarked (Cooper, Refugee Scholars, 134).
The public denigration of refugees was probably more flagrant in Tess Simpson's day than now, but fortunately the Establishment was - eventually - ready to yield to rational arguments rather than pander to ignorant prejudice.
Tess Simpson was to persevere in that endeavour for the next sixty years. When challenged, late in life, about the council's exclusive focus on intellectuals, she replied: 'What was happening [in Germany] ... was anti-human and I wanted to do something to mitigate against that ... Each [refugee organization] could only do so much but of course I felt terrible about the plight of others' (The Times, 1 July 1992).
At first almost all the refugees were Jews. But after the Nuremberg laws of 1935 German academics could be expelled if they had just one Jewish grandparent or a Jewish wife. Between 1933 and 1940 Tess Simpson became a one-woman reception centre for nearly 2600 refugee intellectuals. They arrived in Britain rejected, nearly destitute, and traumatized by the humiliation and hatred meted out to them by Nazis, and found themselves in a country still suffering massive unemployment, whose popular newspapers were as hostile to Britain's being 'flooded' by foreign asylum seekers as at any other time, before or since. Tess Simpson was almost always the first person to meet each new arrival and she greeted him or her with warm sympathy, high intelligence, and immense practicality, setting them 'on the stairway to survival and success' (Hampstead and Highgate Express, November 1996). Many of these desperate people were eventually to become among the most eminent thinkers in their fields in the world, but they all started in Britain as Tess Simpson's 'children' for whom she found a new life, often locating work for them in small colleges in the United States or in university colleges in the British Commonwealth, if not at first in Britain.
After the fall of Norway in 1940, the British government, headed by Churchill, panicked about these and other 'enemy aliens' in Britain and decided to intern them all. To her horror Tess Simpson learned that over 500 of 'her' refugee scholars, many of them now doing work of national importance and of course anti-Nazis to a man, were about to be arrested, sent to camps surrounded by barbed wire, and possibly even deported. She made vain protests to the Home Office and had to spend the next year accumulating the most meticulous documentation attesting to the integrity of every single individual case in order to give Professor Archibald Vivian Hill, MP for Cambridge University and vice-president of the executive committee of the society, and Eleanor Rathbone, MP for the Northern Universities, the evidence they required before they could succeed in their joint effort, helped by Bishop George Bell of Chichester, to have all these interned intellectuals released. 'Do you know the story of Bruce and the spider? I am that spider', she later remarked (Cooper, Refugee Scholars, 134).
The public denigration of refugees was probably more flagrant in Tess Simpson's day than now, but fortunately the Establishment was - eventually - ready to yield to rational arguments rather than pander to ignorant prejudice.
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