Friday, March 01, 2024

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus — Happy St. David’s Day — to all who have reason to celebrate!

Sunset over Cardigan Bay, seen from Aberystwyth sea-front, 8th October, 2023.  “Machlud tawel, halen yn yr awel” (“Silent sunset, sea salt in the air”), wrote local schoolboy Gwenno Haf Thomas, aged fourteen, in 2012; his words were set down in lettering on the Promenade.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Will-ful Destruction: consultation to close this Friday

Just a reminder that the consultation on proposals by the Ministry of Justice to destroy the paper originals of English and Welsh wills after 25 years, and to rely thereafter on digital copies, is due to close this Friday, 23rd February.  The consultation is available here and I have put down some thoughts here.

If you do not have time to answer the consultation but would like to object to the plans, a petition has also been set up.  So far it has garnered well over 13,000 signatures.  I (and I think the entire archival profession, and all our descendants!) would be grateful for every voice raised in protest!

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

For Ruth Gipps’ birthday...

… (born on this day in 1921 at Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex), the second movement of her piano concerto.  Charles Peebles conducts the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra; the soloist is Murray McLachlan.

I thoroughly enjoyed a performance of her horn concerto at the Cadogan Hall earlier this month (Alexi Watkins the soloist, with the Kensington Symphony Orchestra under Russell Keable).  I have now been able to attend live performances of her horn and clarinet concertos, and her fourth and fifth symphonies: the sign of a real and sustained revival in her fortunes.

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Rondel for Ash Wednesday

Posted again for another year, according to tradition... 

All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast;
Fear not these desert days of Lent. 
All grunged-up souls, all people pent 
In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast 
Your senseless sin aside at last: 
Believe the Gospel and repent. 
All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast;
Fear not these desert days of Lent.
The thirst and hunger will not last, 
For by God’s Son, who underwent 
The Cross, we know that we are meant 
For Heaven’s home when pain is past — 
All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast.
Stow cum Quy Fen, Cambridgeshire, 2nd December 2011.

Monday, February 12, 2024

Elizabeth Jennings: a Catholic poet for our times

A talk given on Saturday, 3rd February 2024, to meeting of Deo Gratias, a circle of Catholic young adults interested in expressions of the Christian faith in culture.  We meet on alternate Saturdays at the Rosary Shrine, Haverstock Hill, London.  After the discussion we visit the church for a time of Adoration, then repair to the pub.

Elizabeth Jennings in the 1940s. 
Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence 3.0 from https://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk/image_viewer5039.html?img=portrait_7&gal=portraits 

We all know the cliché about studying poetry at school.  You spend all your time learning ‘the classics’ by heart — or ‘by rote’ as some more pejoratively call it — a compulsory exercise in memory which  drains all the life out of poetry, so that, by the age of sixteen, you are effectively inoculated against taking any joy whatsoever in it ever again.  That is the cliché — but I think for many in our generation the experience was something like the opposite extreme.  It was as if our GCSE English Literature examiners had fled in terror from daffodils and nightingales, and agreed that their chief priority in selecting poems for the syllabus was that they could never be learned by heart, even if anybody wanted to.

Accordingly, the examiners favoured free-verse poems on gritty, contemporary themes in a punchy, combative style: what a friend of mine calls ‘switchblades and asphalt’ poetry.  For example:

Today I am going to kill something.  Anything. 
I have had enough of being ignored and today 
I am going to play God.  It is an ordinary day, 
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets. 

   — Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Education for Leisure’ 

Or the one about stealing a snowman for no reason, and kicking it to pieces:  

Part of the thrill was knowing 
that children would cry in the morning.  Life’s tough.  
   […] 
Then I was standing 
alone among lumps of snow, sick of the world. 
Boredom.  Mostly I’m so bored I could eat myself. 

   — Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Stealing’ 

The idea, of course, was to try to make a point: that poetry could be ‘relevant’ (that crucial word) to the young people of early twenty-first-century Britain — that it could be as tough and unsentimental and ‘real’, so to speak, as an inner-city housing-estate.  But the poems never transcended the hard realities they were portraying.  There was no real meditation on the suffering or boredom of those lives; no engagement of heart and mind together; no introduction to that interplay of beauty and truth — the balance between form and sense — the marriage of music and meaning, that we recognise in the best and most valuable poetry. 

So I finished my GCSEs aged sixteen rather grumpy with English Literature examiners in general.  How different, then, to open a new anthology at the start of my A-level course and encounter a passage like this: 

                     […] Man’s a believer 
Until corrupted.  This huge trusted power 
Is spirit.  He moves in the muscle of the world, 
In continual creation.  He burns the tides, he shines 
From the matchless skies.  He is the day’s surrender. 
                    […]
This spirit, this power, this holder together of space  
Is about, is aware, is working in your breathing.  
But most he is the need that shows in hunger  
And in the tears shed in the lonely fastness.  

And in sorrow after anger. 

         — ‘A Chorus’ (Moments of Grace, 1979; Collected Poems, p. 440.) 

Notice how, even though the poem alludes to hardship and sorrow — to ‘cities with their factory darkness’, say, or by the way in which the lines ‘hopes fulfilled or forgotten’ and ‘promises kept’ (as opposed to just ‘hopes and promises’) acknowledge, implicitly, the possibility of hopes being dashed, or promises broken – the poem itself transcends these sorrows and hardships, and helps us to see them in the perspective of a greater reality, rather than just languishing in them. 

This was my introduction to Elizabeth Jennings, and it is still one of my favourite poems. I have school examiners to thank for it! One of the many things I love about it is the wonderfully controlled diminuendo that extends over its course.  It doesn’t go where you initially expect.  It begins in a blaze of glory, with these dazzling panoramic views of Creation, but gradually softens, growing steadily more meditative and introspective.  And the last line, ‘And in sorrow after anger’, even feels like a whispered afterthought — almost a confession.  It is a poem that seems to travel from the pulpit to the pew, from the choir-loft to the confessional. In this it is rather like the Te Deum (which begins ‘We praise Thee, O God; we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord; All the earth doth worship thee, the Father everlasting’, but whose last line is the far more intimate ‘O Lord, in thee have I trusted; let me never be confounded’.)   

So who is, as she has been called, ‘England’s best Catholic poet since Gerard Manley Hopkins’?  Who is Elizabeth Jennings? 

Elizabeth Jennings as a child
Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence 3.0 from https://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk/image_viewerc424.html?img=portrait_5&gal=portraits

Elizabeth Jennings was born in Boston in Lincolnshire, in dead-level Fen country, in 1926, and spent an idyllic early childhood there. ‘Six years of a flat land,’ she was to remember, ‘The sea […] Was more luminous even / Than the blazing tulips in formidable ranks’ – but in 1931 her father was appointed County Medical Officer for Oxfordshire, so to Oxford she, with her parents and older sister Aileen, accordingly moved. The city was to be her home for the rest of her life.  In suburban North Oxford the Jennings family were neighbours and fellow parishioners of the Tolkiens, and Priscilla, the Professor’s daughter, was to become a lifelong friend.  Jennings’ love of poetry began at school – they read G. K. Chesterton’s Lepanto (‘Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard […] Don John of Austria / Is riding to the sea […]’).  ‘That was one of the key experiences of my life.  It hit me’, she recalled years later. 

In 1944 she went up to St. Anne’s College, Oxford, to study English Literature.  Here she fell in with several up-and-coming writers and novelists: Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Thom Gunn.  She was popular and apparently had many admirers.  Kingsley Amis wrote that ‘she seemed on her bicycle and in her T-shirt very advanced for those days’, though she herself remembered being ‘agonisingly shy’.   It was at this time that she found early success in poetry and was published for the first time.   

Here is the beginning of an early poem, ‘Warning’: 

Child do not tell your images, we kill them 
With argument and I would wish you deaf 
Rather than hear the mad cries of our logic 
Aiming at beauty, wounding it with grief. 
Be silent now and do not tell your magic. 

     – from an early poem, ‘Warning’ (Collected Poems, p. 6) 

She was briefly engaged to be married to a fellow student, but this was broken off.  After graduating she ‘did eight years’ hard labour’, as she put it, in Oxford City Library, before joining the publishers Chatto and Windus as a reader.  All the time she was writing poetry.  Her first full-length collection, ‘Growing Points’, came out 1955.  In 1957 she won the Somerset Maugham Award, the prize being three months in a foreign city of the winner’s choosing.  Jennings chose Rome, and her time there was one of the happiest periods of her life.  Her memories of Rome return time and time again in her poetry. 

However, the 1960s were more difficult, bringing with them a several recurring periods of mental illness.  It is not altogether clear what brought this on: possibly overwork, possibly heartbreak, but either way, she suffered a serious mental breakdown and spent three years in and out of hospital.  Her distress was severe enough that she made several suicide attempts, and she also suffered from alcoholism.  Yet she never stopped writing poetry, even if many were later to be suppressed. 

The story of Jennings’ later life is, looked at in one way – and perhaps the wrong way – a sad one.  She never attained the literary stardom of Larkin and Amis.  Nor did she ever marry or have children, and although she claimed not to regret it, I am not entirely convinced of this. She said, for example, ‘I wouldn’t have been a good proposition for marriage.  I jump out of bed to write poems.  I don’t like housework.  I think I like being independent.  I am a romantic and I don’t think romance lasts.  I can’t bear things ending.’  There’s a tinge of unwilling resignation about the last two remarks, I think.  Still, perhaps she knew her own mind. In any case, having spent a number of years sharing quarters with a Czech refugee, in later years she lived alone in Oxford and gained a reputation more as an eccentric than as a poet.  She used to take her papers in plastic carrier bags to a café, where she would sit and write and observe. Very few people knew who she really was.  She collected trinkets, dolls’ houses and china ornaments, and attracted curiosity by never dressing up for formal occasions, even to receive the CBE in 1993 – her appearance in a duffel-coat resulted in the press rather cruelly calling her ‘bag-lady of the sonnets’.  But again, all the time she was writing poetry, right up until her death in 2001 at the age of seventy-five.

I should say a little about her faith.  Unlike many of our prominent Catholic poets like St. John Henry Newman, Chesterton and Hopkins, Jennings was a cradle Catholic, rather than a convert.  As a small child she and her sister used to play Mass, with a toy oven for a tabernacle, and a wooden train as a thurible.  As she grew up, though, she became less happy.  She found she had questions to which nobody would give her adequate answers.  There was also one particularly horrible incident in Confession where a priest seems to have told her, ‘All you think about is your ugly little self’ and, unbelievably, even though he had given her absolution, told her not to receive Communion with the other children on Sunday.  This, she said, ‘did a great deal of damage’, though not to the extent that she lost her faith.  In an unpublished poem, ‘Abuse of a Sacrament’, she wrote, ‘I have known priests who tore the soul apart […]  O yes, I’ve known the dreadful penance move / All hope away.  For this Christ knew the place / Of agony.’ 

The damage was only really repaired years later in Rome, where, she said, ‘I really found happiness’.  She climbed the Holy Steps on her knees, even though a priest told her they were not authentic. ‘They have been hallowed by centuries of penitence’, she said. Her happiness is clearly mainly because, perhaps for the first time since childhood, she had recognised her faith as a source more of joy than of torment.  And I think this is how it remained, giving her strength in the years of illness and suffering that followed. 

All her life, as far as I know, she was a faithful and regular Mass-goer.  In fact, it is nice that we are discussing her at St. Dominic’s Priory, as she was friends with many Dominican religious, dedicated poems to many of them, and, certainly late in her life, regularly attended Mass at Blackfriars in Oxford.  (Last October I was chatting to a lady here at St. Dominic’s who was from Oxford and had been a parishioner at Blackfriars for long enough to remember Jennings as a small figure huddled in the front pew – though only found out after her death who she was). 

Assessment 

It is easy to underestimate Elizabeth Jennings.  She tends to be thought not to have lived up to the potential of her poetic career.  The American poet Dana Gioia acknowledges that she ‘had the peculiar fate of being in the right place at the right time in the wrong way’, in that she had the brilliant good fortune to coincide with the Oxford literary scene at a time when there was a reaction in poetry against the obscurity and deliberate ‘difficulty’ of Modernism, and a return to a more unadorned style (in something called ‘The Movement’, an unhelpfully vague name) — but, ultimately, her fellow poets at Oxford were cut from a different cloth to her.  As well as being unornamented, the Movement poetry was deliberately unsentimental (even anti-sentimental), not just unpretentious but often curmudgeonly, pessimistic and ironic.  Elizabeth Jennings’ style is more romantic, closer to nineteenth-century poets like Christina Rosetti and Emily Dickinson (though by ‘romantic’ I don’t mean ‘sentimental’).  She was the only woman, and the only Catholic, associated with that movement.  She also committed the cardinal literary sin of being too prolific – but more on that in a moment. 

I actually think that some of the things that have led people to overlook her are precisely what make her worth reading and befriending today, and which make her in many ways a poet for our times. 

Firstly, there is the directness and simplicity of her poetic voice.  In contrast to many of her contemporaries, there is no irony in Jennings’ verse, no sarcasm, and though there can be anger or regret there is seldom outright bitterness.  It is honest verse, sometimes painfully honest, but this honesty brings a clarity, a trustworthiness, which is refreshing in an era of switchblades and asphalt.  Jennings takes ordinary, personal themes — friendship, childhood, bereavement — and very simply tells the truth about them.  Here is the beginning of a well-known poem of hers, ‘Friendship’: 

Such love I cannot analyse; 
It does not rest in lips or eyes, 
Neither in kisses nor caress. 
Partly, I know, it’s gentleness 

And understanding in one word 
Or in brief letters. […]

        – from ‘Friendship’ (Relationships, 1972) 

There is also a great humility to her.  It appears, for instance, in another favourite of mine, a poem called ‘Losing and Finding’ about a six-year-old child who had come to her house to look for her after getting lost and whom she had taken to a playground while waiting for the parents to turn up (which seems to have taken an entire afternoon!  The Seventies were different times).  It ends, 

And it was you who rescued me, you know. 
Among the swings, the meadow and the river, 
You took me out of time, rubbed off on me 
What it feels like to care without restriction, 
To trust and never think of a betrayal. 

        – ‘Losing and Finding’ (Growing Points, 1975; Collected Poems, p. 340) 

A similar example of her humility and self-effacement is a poem she wrote about a visit to a school to meet some A-level students who were studying her work: the poem is all about them and their hopes and worries, not her; they clearly made as strong an impression on her as she might have expected to on them. 

Yet this simplicity and humility is not sentimentalism or naivety.  Her observations, whether interior or exterior, are always acute and perspicacious.  She will say what needs to be said, will confront and dwell on evil if necessary – though always with the searching light of faith.  

For example, here is a poem from a late collection (Times and Seasons, 1992) about the changed, post-Sixties attitudes to romantic love.  Note that it is a sonnet, a form with a long association with love-poetry: 

You take the whole of love.  We lived by touch
And doubt and by the purposes of chance
And yet I think our slow ways carried much
That you have missed — the guess, the wish, the glance. 

        – ‘The Way They Live Now’ (Times and Seasons, 1992; Collected Poems, p. 669) 

I find it very interesting that Jennings was actually asked to read out this poem on Radio 4 when she was interviewed on Desert Island Discs in 1993.  The presenter Sue Lawley called it ‘splendid’. I am not sure that this would happen on today’s BBC.   

So you see the very Christian combination of truth and love that permeates Jennings’ verse.  I think of her as a sort of ‘poetry Auntie’, someone with whom I could happily have spent an evening chatting, but who would certainly have spoken her mind frankly if she needed to. 

And of course Jennings’ faith illuminates the whole of her verse, as well as her life and art.   She was unashamed in taking sacred themes, in writing about feasts and seasons, the sacraments, the saints, the city of Rome.  She returned again and again to Catholic subjects.  There are three poems on Lazarus, for instance; she wrote sequences on the Seven Deadly Sins, the Easter Triduum, and the different kinds of love.  ‘My Roman Catholic religion and my poems are the most important things in my life,’ she said. 

Her faith informed not only her art but her whole attitude to her art, her whole understanding of poetry itself.  I mentioned her prolific output.  From a literary point of view, over-production is often looked down upon, as it suggests a lack of self-criticism, even a lack of self-discipline.  Writing less is taken to imply higher quality.  And look how thick her Collected Poems are!  But reading through these poems – and there are a lot of them – I came to realise that this is not just a literary testament, but a spiritual one.  Not all of her verses are great poems, but literary greatness is not primarily what she was striving for.  

The editor of her Collected Poems, Emma Mason, has pointed out that Jennings recognises poetry as a kind of incarnation.  Ours is, after all, a religion of the Word — Jesus Christ is the Word as well as the Son of God — and so His incarnation elevates not only our human flesh but our human language.  So, in reading these poems, we come to realise that many of them are doing something else at the same time.  As well as poems they are thoughts, or gestures, or feelings that have been incarnated, that have ‘taken flesh’ in the form of printed type or speech.  They are personal reminiscences, memories, jottings, postcards, tributes, farewells, even apologies, meditations — and in one way or another they are almost always prayers.  For her, poetry is always a kind of prayer, and perhaps any prayer is also a kind of poem.  For those of us who love poetry (and who see the Mass, for instance, as a kind of poem) this is a pleasing blurring of boundaries.

Certainly this is how I think much of her work is best understood: as prayer-poems, so to speak.  She sheepishly acknowledged that she wrote fast and revised little – sheepishly but unrepentantly, because for her, writing too much was only like praying too much — and we would hardly try to improve the quality of our prayer by praying less.  So really, this book is a spiritual journal, a legacy of a life of prayer as much as of poetry – which is why she can say, with complete humility, ‘It is, I think, in my own poetry / I meet my God.  He’s a familiar there.’  (from ‘A Way to a Creed’, A Dream of Spring, 1980). 

Here is another of my favourite poems of hers, ‘At a Mass’, in which she meditates on the interplay between art and faith – on how, true as it is that beauty can and should lead us to God, our appreciation of beauty can get in the way, even in church.  To those of us who are deeply sensitive to the beauty of the Mass, it offers food for thought: 

        […] 
I struggle now with my own ideas of love  
And wonder if art and religion mean dividing.  

Each has his way and mine perhaps is to
Suffer the critical sense that cannot rest.  
If the air is cool, the colours right, the spoken  
Words dramatic enough, then I am pleased.  
But why must I ask a sense of style in the broken  
Bread and bring God down to my limited view?  […] 

– ‘At a Mass’ (Song for a Birth or Death, 1961).  Collected Poems p. 96. 

Another interesting poem to read in this light is To a Friend with a Religious Vocation, which reveals her own sense of a poetic vocation, but also that it takes second place to a formal religious vocation – rightly, as she acknowledges, but not without pain: 

Thinking of your vocation, I am filled
With thoughts of my own lack of one. I see 
Within myself no wish to breed or build 

Or take the three vows ringed by poverty. 
And yet I have a sense,  

Vague and inchoate, with no symmetry, 
Of purpose. 
    […] 
You know what you must do, 
So that mere breathing is a way to bless. 
Dark nights, perhaps, but no grey days for you. 

— from ‘To a Friend with a Religious Vocation’ (Song for a Birth or Death, 1961; Collected Poems p. 105). 

(‘Breed or build’ is a quotation from Hopkins’ poem about writer’s block, frustrated vocations and a sense of purposelessness: ‘birds build – but not I build; no, but strain, /  Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.’) 

So: simplicity, truth-telling, and faith: these are the main gifts that I think Jennings gives us. 

Conclusion 

When asked how she would like to be remembered, Jennings said simply, ‘As someone who wrote good poems’. I think we might add, ‘someone who wrote good prayers’.  Perhaps this is why it is such a surprise to me, though certainly a welcome one, that she is still on A-level syllabuses. She is, I think, a poet for our times: she only died in 2001, so was more than familiar with the encroachment of secularism and the hidden sorrows of modern life – and certainly with the challenges of sticking to one’s faith even in a cultural headwind, or at professional cost.  I feel that if she were here now she would understand us, sympathise with us – and then go home and write a poem about us. 

In an age of switchblades and asphalt, and of sarcasm and irony, and of joylessness and hopelessness, her poetic voice is like a simple candle which, like the Christian faith itself, is easily dismissed by the world, but unobtrusively sheds consoling and truthgul light for us.  In this way, she can help us to recover simpler, straightforward, unironic speech, and simpler, more straightforward faith. 

To finish, here is one last poem: a late one (from 1998), and I think a very beautiful one, called ‘A Full Moon’. 

            […]     But look again 
That Host-like moon shines where 
All can see him.  Christ took on all pain 
Beyond time’s arbiter. 
            […]
That moon in silence can 
Elevate us till we long to know 
The Trinity’s whole plan. 
Nature was fashioned for this purpose.  See 
A moon reminds us of God’s ministry. 

– ‘A Full Moon’ (Praises, 1998; Collected Poems, p. 760) 

Elizabeth Jennings, c. 1990
Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence 3.0 from https://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk/image_viewer3300.html?img=portrait_2&gal=portraits



 ---

Further reading & listening: 

Elizabeth Jennings, Collected Poems, ed. Emma Mason (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012).  ISBN 9781847770684.   

Elizabeth Jennings, New Selected Poems, ed. Rebecca Watts (Manchester: Carcanet, 2019).  ISBN 9781784108663.   

Hear Jennings reading her own poems on the Poetry Archive website: https://poetryarchive.org/poet/elizabeth-jennings/.

Jennings’ interview on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, 8th January 1993: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0093x99

Dana Gioia, ‘Clarify Me, Please, God of the Galaxies: In Praise of the Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings’, in First Things (May 2018).  Available online at:  https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/05/clarify-me-please-god-of-the-galaxies

The Elizabeth Jennings Project at De Montfort University, web bibliography and resource.  https://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk/home.html

Excerpts from poems are reproduced under the ‘fair dealing’ copyright exception for quotation.  Images are reproduced under Creative Commons Licence 3.0 from the Elizabeth Jennings Project at De Montfort University (https://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk), in accordance with their copyright notice.

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Digital Disinheritance? A response to proposals to digitise, then destroy, the nation’s wills

This blog was never intended to become a hot-bed of political activism, but for the second time in a year I find myself calling on sympathetic readers for action against a proposed act of destruction — not of railway ticket offices this time, but of the national archive of wills.

The Ministry of Justice has recently announced proposals to reform the procedures, and indeed the law, governing the archival storage of wills in England and Wales.  The main intention is to reduce the costs of this storage, which have been estimated at £4.5 million annually.  However, the current plan — to dispose of the originals once a digitisation programme has been completed — has caused many archivists and researchers considerable alarm.

The current procedure is as follows.  Every will notarised since 1858 is, by law, retained permanently in paper form (at present at a repository in Birmingham).  Since 2021 it has also been procedure to make digital copies of new wills as they are accessioned (i.e. incorporated into the archive), which enables speedier delivery should they need to be seen in court or by members of the public.  But that digital version is still understood as a surrogate for the original paper document, not as the document itself.

The new proposals (set out in detail here) would bring about a drastic change to this arrangement.  Firstly, a massive digitisation project would be undertaken, making digital copies of every document in the collection: some ten million wills.  Then — and here the trouble starts  the originals, or at least those more than twenty-five years old, would be destroyed, excepting only those deemed to belong to ‘notable individuals’ or to be otherwise of ‘significant historical interest’.  The twenty-five-year cut-off point would thereafter become a standard, rolling retention period, after which hard copies would be destroyed.  The fundamental character of the archive would be transformed: the digital image, not the paper original, would be regarded as the master copy of any given will.  Ultimately, it would become the sole copy.

“What is the problem with this?” one might reasonably ask.  After all, our whole lives are being digitised as it is.  If digital files would be easier to access and, according to the consultation documents, cheaper to store, why not ‘move with the times’ , as the Minister for Justice Mike Freer puts it, and make the switch from paper to digital records?

One way to answer this is to consider the two imperatives that hover like a pair of angels over the shoulders of every archivist: Preservation and Access.  Our twofold task is both the permanent preservation of records and the provision of access to them when required.  Although the two principles sometimes contradict each other — handling causes damage, and damage can prevent handling — both principles are vital, including to each other: each is meaningless without the other.  It seems little use to preserve documents if nobody will ever be permitted to read them, nor is it any good providing access to them if they have been allowed to decay into illegibility.

This means that, for archivists, ‘moving with the times’ requires careful thought.  Simply discarding old practices in favour of the new will never do: we have to work out how the arrangements we make will serve the Twin Angels in the long term.  This does not make us Luddites — part of any archivist’ s job is to respond nimbly to the challenges of record-keeping in an age of break-neck technological change — rather, we need to make intelligent and imaginative assessments of what is likeliest to prove worthwhile in the long term.  Archivists understand that technology, like anything else, should be assessed by its merits, rather than by its novelty.

So, to return to the question of the wills, it is not the digitisation itself that is the problem.  No archivist would object to a properly-organised programme of this kind.  Anything that makes the records more easily accessible is, in principle, to be welcomed.  (Indeed, the use of digital surrogates also tends to help to preserve the originals by reducing the risk of damage from handling.)  The problems arise with the decision to dispose of the paper record, and to rely on the digital image alone as the permanent record.

Digital information is generally very easy to access, but its preservation in the long term is a much more uncertain affair.  Anyone who has wondered how to retrieve information from an old floppy disc will have an idea of the sort of problems that can arise, as will anyone who reads this article once the consultation has ended and the hyperlinks have expired.  Digital preservation as a field is, in spite of the extensive work of organisations such as the Digital Preservation Coalition, still relatively new, and in any case, these experts and organisations make it very clear that digital preservation is even more complex, demands demands even more expertise, requires even greater vigilance and maintenance, and is generally even more intensive than care for traditional paper archives.  In the right conditions, paper records can last for centuries, as these very wills prove, but no digital file has yet had the chance to be preserved for longer than about three or four decades: it is a bold claim to declare that any given digital file can be relied upon as a ‘permanent’ record.  

As it is, we have found by experience that there are innumerable threats to digital records — more, in fact, than to paper records.  They are vulnerable to obsolescence of hardware and software, to the physical deterioration of complex and finely-tuned equipment, to accidental deletion, to corruption, to tampering and to cyber-crime.  (Only last October a cyber-attack on the British Library put its systems, including its main catalogue and digital repository, out of action for three months; recovery from is expected to take until June 2025 and entail significant costs).  It is by no means certain — or, at the very least, the consultation documentation provides no hard evidence — that the cost of protecting the data from these threats will necessarily be lower than the cost of retaining the paper records.  And the stakes are incredibly high.  The ultimate cost, of course, would be the total loss of all the records, a scenario which most archivists would agree is likelier in the case of a digital archive than a physical one.  

My view, in summary, is that although the digitisation project is certainly a constructive and beneficial idea, the resulting digital files should never be regarded as the master copies, as it is far harder to ensure the preservation of digital files than of paper records, and the risk of corruption or total loss is far higher.  Above all, the originals should under no circumstances be destroyed.  Other methods of reducing costs, such as more efficient, shared, or more centralised storage, ought to be pursued instead.

In so far as the new proposals improve access to the wills, they are entirely to be welcomed.  But in so far as they pose a risk to their preservation, they should be revised or rejected.  Anything that threatens the principle of preservation also threatens the principle of access: records cannot very well be accessed if they corrupted, damaged or destroyed.  For this reason, while welcoming the idea of a digitisation project, I believe very strongly that the originals must be preserved permanently, so as to pass on to future generations an irreplaceable legacy.

---

The Government has said that it ‘welcomes views from court users, the legal and archivist professions, all other probate practitioners and historians, as well as the judiciary and anyone else with an interest in this topic.’   If any readers feel inclined to respond to the consultation, I would urge you to do so by writing to:

Will Storage Consultation,
Ministry of Justice,
Civil Justice and Law Division,
Postpoint 5.25,
102, Petty France,
London – SW1H 9AJ.

— or emailing civil_justice_poli@justice.gov.uk — by the deadline of 23rd February 2024.

Here are my answers to the consultation’s ten questions:

Question 1: Should the current law providing for the inspection of wills be preserved?

From the point of view of an archivist, I have no reason to object to the law as it currently stands.

Question 2: Are there any reforms you would suggest to the current law enabling wills to be inspected?

No, I have no particular suggestions to make in this regard.

Question 3: Are there any reasons why the High Court should store original paper will documents on a permanent basis, as opposed to just retaining a digitised copy of that material?

Yes, in my view (as a qualified archivist) there are several significant reasons why the original paper records should be preserved, instead of being entirely substituted by a digital copy.  These reasons arise mainly from the difficulties and complexity in preserving the integrity and authenticity of digital records in the long term.

I have no objection to the proposed digitisation programme; indeed, I would regard a properly-organised project of this kind as an entirely beneficial development.  Anything that makes archival records more easily accessible is, in principle, to be welcomed.  It is the idea of destroying the originals that is the problem.  The consultation document gives almost no consideration to the question of digital preservation, i.e. of how the permanent preservation of the digital copies of the original wills can be ensured.  The considerable work of experts in this field — notably of the Digital Preservation Coalition (https://www.dpconline.org/) — indicates that in spite of significant advancements, digital preservation is extremely complex, demands technological as well as archival expertise, depends upon a particularly high level of vigilance and maintenance, and is overall even more intensive than care for traditional paper archives.   It is therefore generally acknowledged in the archival profession that the long-term storage of digital files is more difficult, and carries more uncertainty and risks, than that of analogue files.  

There are several reasons for this.  Firstly, a digital file in its inert state is not ‘humanly readable’: it cannot be deciphered without technological assistance.  Even if it can be read, it must also invariably be decoded, a process which depends on a particular combination of hardware and software.  The present rapid evolution of both of these categories is well known, as are the consequences of the resulting obsolescence: it is now very difficult to find a machine capable of reading the once-ubiquitous floppy disc, for instance.  Unlike a paper document, a digital document must effectively be rewritten every time it is opened, and in order for this to remain possible over the long term, both hardware and software must be kept continually up to date and digital files migrated from old to new storage.  This is a process which requires vigilance, expertise, expense and an unblemished success rate.  Where paper records are concerned, neglect may run the risk of degradation and destruction, but with digital files, it will inevitably result in total loss..

Another main area of concern concerns security and authenticity.  Firstly, it is simultaneously easier to tamper with digital records than with paper files, and harder to prove their authenticity — an issue which, where wills are concerned, has particular pertinence.  Secondly, there is the question of cyber-crime, a considerable and growing threat.  At the time of writing, the British Library continues to suffer the effects of a serious cyber-attack, a security breach which put the majority of its collections out of public reach for three months, and recovery from which is expected to take at least eighteen months.  It is not hard to imagine the severity of the consequences, let alone the financial cost, of any such attack on a digital repository of wills.  

Question 4: Do you agree that after a certain time original paper documents (from 1858 onwards) may be destroyed (other than for famous individuals)? Are there any alternatives, involving the public or private sector, you can suggest to their being destroyed?

I disagree very strongly with this proposal.  Under no circumstances should the originals be destroyed.

The costs of the retention of physical copies are appreciable, but in my view they can be justified by the longevity assured by the physicality of those copies.  The costs of digital preservation — which are not assessed in the consultation document — will scarcely be less; indeed, they are likely to be higher.  To rely on digital versions as the permanent copies would ultimately prove a false economy.

The existing costs could be alleviated by letting out unused capacity to other government departments or third parties, provided that appropriate measures are taken to isolate personal data in the wills; alternatively, a broader centralisation of record storage, perhaps involving collaboration with other institutions and organisations, might be explored.  The National Archives’ ‘DeepStore’ facility in former salt-mines at (or underneath) Winsford in Cheshire has emerged as one solution to the problems of storing large volumes of historic records.  More generally, the National Archives and Archives and Records Association are also excellent sources of professional advice. 

Question 5: Do you agree that there is equivalence between paper and digital copies of wills so that the ECA 2000 can be used?

From an archival rather than a legal point of view, any document whose integrity and authenticity can be proven may be regarded as an authoritative record, regardless of its format.  However, in the case of digital files, proving authenticity is far more complex than with paper.  Since it is easier to tamper with digital files than with analogue records, and since such tampering is harder to detect, digital files require additional safeguards such as encryption or checksums.  The Digital Preservation Coalition is able to offer extensive advice in this field.

Question 6: Are there any other matters directly related to the retention of digital or paper wills that are not covered by the proposed exercise of the powers in the ECA 2000 that you consider are necessary?

Not to my knowledge or within my particular area of expertise.

Question 7: If the Government pursues preserving permanently only a digital copy of a will document, should it seek to reform the primary legislation by introducing a Bill or do so under the ECA 2000?

Not to my knowledge or within my particular area of expertise.

Question 8: If the Government moves to digital only copies of original will documents, what do you think the retention period for the original paper wills should be? Please give reasons and state what you believe the minimum retention period should be and whether you consider the Government’s suggestion of 25 years to be reasonable.

Since I do not believe that the original wills should be destroyed at all, I do not think there should be a limited retention period of this kind for these documents.  I might make the point that no digital document has yet had the chance to be preserved for longer than about thirty years, so even twenty-five years seems to me an extremely ambitious figure.

Question 9: Do you agree with the principle that wills of famous people should be preserved in the original paper form for historic interest?

I agree that the instinct to preserve wills ‘in the original paper form for historic interest’ is sound, and understand the reluctance to dispose of the wills of prominent figures.  It is worth interrogating the reasons why this element of the plan has been included.  To make a provocative point, though constructively intended, if the digital copies are thought to be sufficient, why is any need felt to preserve even the physical wills of well-known people?  Is it because we do, in fact, sense the relatively high risk of loss?  If so, are we really confident that the digital records will last in perpetuity, or is there actually something important, something reassuringly and reliably durable and tangible, about the hard copy?  

I think this element of the proposals reflects a deeper instinct to preserve all the wills physically, an instinct which I think is sound and should be followed.

Question 10: Do you have any initial suggestions on the criteria which should be adopted for identifying famous/historic figures whose original paper will document should be preserved permanently?

Only that any adequate criteria would be so complex, and no doubt controversial, as to be scarcely justifiable.  As far as historical research is concerned, the past is full of figures who died obscure and penniless but later came to be regarded as significant; there are just as many who enjoyed great fame when living but are now forgotten.  In any case, to some researchers it may be the wills of ordinary people which come to be of greatest interest. 

Fundamentally, however, I believe that it is of paramount importance that the original wills should be preserved in their entirety, regardless of the existence of any digital copies.  I would urge all involved with these plans to reconsider the proposal to destroy them, and to maintain the current policy of permanent preservation.

Update 16th February, 2024: The Archives and Records Association, the professional body for archivists and records managers in the United Kingdom and Ireland, has just issued its own response to these proposals.

Sunday, December 24, 2023

Fear Not


And so we come once again to the fireside of the year, where the strange and lovely truth of Christmas draws us to homely things.  As the years go by, and I find myself less and less at home in the time and place given to me, I cross the threshold of this feast with ever greater relief.

It is not easy to live in, this age of deceptive appearances.  Behind the superficial glass and the liquid crystal screens our sorrows are undiminished.  The Britain in which, for the first time in fifteen centuries, a minority of people now profess to be Christians, is no happier for its loss of faith.  The old ways we tore to pieces are giving way not to the promised utopia, but to a new, sullen, disenchanted, resentful existence.   Not only are things going wrong, but we struggle to agree about what has gone wrong, let alone how to make things better.  Identity politics have captured many formerly trusted institutions and done great damage to their reputations, as well as confusing or upsetting many well-meaning people.  And our response to the general economic strain is not, in general, an effort to build up solidarity and courage, or to provide an alternative to rapaciousness and greed, but renewed howling against our forebears and the foundations of our society.  That old, gentle Britain to which we owe so much, and for which I still stand, has become our scapegoat.

This is now a Britain in which many shared things are no longer well-made or looked after; in which even those trying to do well seem unable to overcome the shoulder-shrugging culture around them.  Wherever we go, any expectations of high standards seem to be frustrated.  Thoroughfares and public spaces are tatty and uncared for; lifts and escalators are broken or vandalised.  Or things will not be as they first appear.  The Internet, for instance is full of false promises: websites will co-operate for a moment before the sentence you were reading disappears behind a salvo of pop-ups about cookie settings or newsletter subscriptions.  A special offer will turn out to entail endless and spurious terms and conditions.  Sorry, all our operatives are busy at the moment.  Sorry, this desk is unstaffed.  Sorry, this machine is out of order.

It is a Britain in which language itself is often used insincerely, too often more for the purposes of manipulation than anything else.  Euphemisms and weasel words and empty slogans are so prevalent that it is a constant effort to pare speech of them, to speak or write plainly and truthfully.  We often feel patronised and tricked and taken advantage of.

It is a Britain in which people of good will increasingly bear the brunt of the selfishness of those of ill-will; in which those in positions of responsibility are often unable to exercise their offices with principle and clarity; in which those who shout loudest tend to get their way.  Only amongst a few is there even a sense of embarrassment at our irreverence, our arrogance, our squandering of our inheritance.  It is a Britain which, I now see, is indeed mortal.

It is an old and noble nation forgetting her honour, and learning anew the barbarism that the old faith once kept at bay.  There are grave misdeeds and calculatedly barbaric violence at home and abroad, an ebbing away of civility and common decency, and the unabated undermining of marriage and the family and of the Christian vision of the dignity of the human person.

But amidst all this, even as the darkness presses in, another voice, another kind of language.  And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields... Words which, strange as they are to the ear, are not evasive, do not deceive; which have that unmistakable ring of truth:

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.  

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

They are words which contradict all the smirking arrogance and squalid tragedies of our time, but not as we would have supposed or dared to have hoped.  Something different is going on: something strange and also sweet... Something so strange and sweet as the call of our true and longed-for home.

The darkness presses in on us, often as intensely as it pressed in on the Roman province of Judaea and on Bethlehem; pressed right down on the stable-roof and sought entry.  But from within that stable it was repelled and defied, as it is repelled and defied tonight, and for ever, by light — by the one Light which, as we have often been told, the darkness cannot overpower.  And our liberation is both more cosmic and more intimate than instant deliverance from hard times or a faithless epoch could ever have been: we are freed from the very enemies that blight us most: sin and the grave.

This year is the 110th anniversary of one of my favourite Christmas poems: Noel: Christmas Eve 1913, by Robert Bridges.  Gerald Finzi set it to music in his Christmas cantata In Terra Pax (see above) though for the third stanza he substituted the verses quoted above, from the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel.

Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913
Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. 

A frosty Christmas Eve
when the stars were shining
Fared I forth alone
where westward falls the hill,
And from many a village
in the water’d valley
Distant music reach’d me
peals of bells a-ringing:
The constellated sounds
ran sprinking on earth’s floor
As the dark vault above
with stars was spangled o’er.

Then sped my thoughts to keep
that first Christmas of all
When the shepherds watching
by their folds ere the dawn
Heard music in the fields
and marvelling could not tell
Whether it were angels
or the bright stars singing.

Now blessed be the tow’rs
that crown England so fair
That stand up strong in prayer
unto God for our souls:
Blessed be their founders
(said I) an’ our country folk
Who are ringing for Christ
in the belfries to-night
With arms lifted to clutch
the rattling ropes that race
Into the dark above
and the mad romping din.

But to me heard afar
it was starry music
Angels’ song, comforting
as the comfort of Christ
When he spake tenderly
to his sorrowful flock:
The old words came to me
by the riches of time
Mellow’d and transfigured
as I stood on the hill
Heark’ning in the aspect
of th’ eternal silence.

Wishing all readers a very merry and restful Christmas.

Monday, November 20, 2023

Ticket Offices Saved

 

Wadhurst station in the Sussex Weald, 27th November 2021.

At long last, some good news for the railways — the proposals to close virtually every railway ticket office in England have now been completely scrapped.  A quarter of a million responses were made to the consultation: a huge public outcry, and a justified one.

One of the railway’s greatest strengths is, or ought to be, its ability to look after passengers and to give them confidence in travelling.  This is something the roads, in the grip as they are of Darwinian principles, cannot do.  The steady withdrawal of personnel from platforms and trains and bureaux undermines this great advantage, to say nothing of discriminating against those who are unable to use the grinning machines installed their place.

As my friend Maolsheachlann says, “People power works!  Let’s not forget it!”

Sunday, November 12, 2023

In Memoriam

The Remembrance side-chapel at King’s College, Cambridge, 11th November, 2023.  In the main chapel, as this photograph was taken, the organist was softly rehearsing the accompaniment to the movement ‘Reconciliation’ from Vaughan Williams’ cantata Dona Nobis Pacem.

These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness.  Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks.  All this is ended.

Rupert Brooke (1887–1915)

Wednesday, November 01, 2023

Fanfare for Allhallowstide

Fresco of the Communion of Saints at the Padua Baptistery (painted by Giusto de' Menabuoi, 1375–1376)
© José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / CC BY-SA 4.0
Reposted according to tradition...

    
 How shall we pilgrims keep the law of love?
  How shall we follow where our Lord has led?
  The saints know how: they point the way ahead;
  They watch the road to Heaven from above.

  The saints were young and old, were great and small;
  However they were called, one truth they knew:
  Whatever works of woe the world may do,
  The Lord shall never let His faithful fall.

  So we on earth, we must be saints as well,
  We wayward wayfarers whom they invite
  To blaze with love, to set the world alight,
  To join them in the joy in which they dwell.

  As we must one day die, they also died,
  But live now as we hope we too shall live.
  To all our friends in Heaven let us give
  Our joyful greetings at Allhallowstide!

Monday, October 30, 2023

‘Such was thy ruin, music-making elm…’

Earlier this year, for the anniversary of John Clare’s birthday (13th July 1793), his sonnet Summer Shower was read out on Radio 3’s Breakfast programme:

Black grows the southern sky betokening rain,
And humming hive-bees homeward hurry by;
They feel the change — so let us shun the grain,
And take the broad road while our feet are dry.
Ay, there some dropples moistened on my face,
And pattered on my hat — ’tis coming nigh!
Let’s look about, and find a sheltering place.
The little things around, like you and I,
Are hurrying through the grass to shun the shower.
Here stoops an ash-tree — hark! the wind gets high,
But never mind; this ivy, for an hour,
Rain as it may, will keep us dryly here:
That little wren knows well his sheltering bower,
Nor leaves his dry house though we come so near.

So unmistakeably Clare — the detail, the directness, the demonstrativeness.  No pretention, no clever devices, only the immediacy of his journalistic jottings.  ‘This ivy’, ‘that little wren’ — we are there under the ash-tree with him.

This prompted me to return to his poems, after too long an absence.  Reading them over the past few months I have been struck once again by his sheer alertness to his surroundings, to every detail of his ‘home turf’, and also by his self-awareness: he sees not only what he goes looking for, but himself as he looks, pulling his hat over his eyes or crawling on his hands and knees through the undergrowth, a creature like any of the others.
‘I often pulled my hat over my eyes to watch the rising of the lark, or to see the hawk hang in the summer sky and the kite take its circles round the wood.  I often lingered a minute on the woodland stile to hear the woodpigeons clapping their wings among the dark oaks.  I hunted curious flowers in rapture and muttered thoughts in their praise. I loved the pasture with its rushes and thistles and sheep-tracks.  I adored the wild, marshy fen with its solitary heronshaw sweeing along in its melancholy sky. I wandered the heath in raptures among the rabbit burrows and golden-blossomed firze.  I dropt down on a thymy mole-hill or mossy eminence to survey the summer landscape… I marked the various colours in flat, spreading fields, checkered into closes of different-tinctured grain like the colours of a map; the copper-tinted clover in blossom; the sun-tanned green of the ripening hay; the lighter charlock and the sunset imitation of the scarlet headaches; the blue corn-bottles crowding their splendid colours in large sheets over the land and troubling the cornfields with destroying beauty; the different greens of the woodland trees, the dark oak, the paler ash, the mellow lime, the white poplars peeping above the rest like leafy steeples, the grey willow shining in the sun, as if the morning mist still lingered on its cool green... I observed all this with the same rapture as l have done since.  But I knew nothing of poetry.  It was felt and not uttered.’
— from Clare’s Autobiography
But I was also struck again by the grief, and indeed by the anger in his verse.  He had good reason for both.  He of all poets, he of all nature-lovers, had the misfortune to live at the time of the Enclosures Act, and as a young man was himself employed actually to drive in the fence-posts that closed him off forever from the heaths and woodlands of his childhood.  Of course these landscapes were often subsequently physically destroyed, so that Clare was an exile in his own parish.  This experience almost certainly contributed to the mental distress of his later life.

What do I mean by the bitterness and anger?  One poem in particular struck me, ‘The Fallen Elm’, from The Midsummer Cushion (1824).  It begins in a typical Clareian minor key: an unvarnished portrait of country life, with its mingled discomforts and consolations.  But then comes a line which tightens the whole pitch of the poem: ‘Old favourite tree, thou’st seen times changes lower / But change till now did never injure thee.’  There follows a remarkable outburst at the injustice of those who have felled the elm in the name of false freedom, whom he repeatedly calls ‘hypocrites’: Self interest saw thee stand in freedom's ways / So thy old shadow must a tyrant be.'  The tree has to go not because of what it is but because of how it is seen; seen to be in the way of the all-conquering Self.  'With axe at root he felled thee to the ground / And barked of freedom.  O I hate the sound!', and we cannot tell whether it is the sound of the blows of the axe that he hates, or the barked slogans of freedom.  Perhaps precisely because of his eye for detail and love of the particular, Clare had no patience for vague, abstract notions like 'freedom' which, in liberating those who wished to destroy the elm at the expense of those whom it protected, destroyed the irreplaceable intricacies of his world.

Then comes the coda with the unbearable, tear -startling line, ‘Such was thy ruin, music-making elm’.  I think we all know this feeling, of rage and grief and powerlessness in seeing some old, benevolent, protective heirloom hacked to pieces in the name of progress, or freedom so-called, or some other shallow abstraction often merely a euphemism for naked self-interest.
Old elm that murmured in our chimney top
The sweetest anthem autumn ever made
And into mellow whispering calms would drop
When showers fell on thy many-coloured shade
And when dark tempests mimic thunder made
While darkness came as it would strangle light
With the black tempest of a winter night
That rocked thee like a cradle to thy root,
How did I love to hear the winds upbraid
Thy strength without – while all within was mute.
It seasoned comfort to our hearts’ desire,
We felt thy kind protection like a friend
And pitched our chairs up closer to the fire,
Enjoying comforts that was never penned.
Old favourite tree, thou’st seen times changes lower,
But change till now did never injure thee,
For time beheld thee as his sacred dower
And nature claimed thee her domestic tree;
Storms came and shook thee many a weary hour,
Yet steadfast to thy home thy roots hath been;
Summers of thirst parched round thy homely bower
Till earth grew iron — still thy leaves was green.
The childern sought thee in thy summer shade
And made their play house rings of sticks and stone;
The mavis sang and felt himself alone
While in they leaves his early nest was made
And I did feel his happiness mine own,
Nought heeding that our friendship was betrayed —
Friend not inanimate—though stocks and stones
There are and many formed of flesh and bones
Thou owned a language by which hearts are stirred
Deeper than by  a feeling clothed in words,
And speakest now what’s known of every tongue
Language of pity and the force of wrong.
What cant assumes, what hypocrites may dare
Speaks home to truth and shows it what they are.
I see a picture that thy fate displays
And learn a lesson from thy destiny:
Self interest saw thee stand in freedom’s ways
So thy old shadow must a tyrant be
Thou’st heard the knave abusing those in power
Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free;
Thou’st sheltered hypocrites in many an hour
That when in power would never shelter thee;
Thou’st heard the knave supply his canting powers
With wrong’s illusions when he wanted friends
That bawled for shelter when he lived in showers
And when clouds vanished made thy shade amends —
With axe at root he felled thee to the ground
And barked of freedom.  O I hate the sound!
Time hears its visions speak and age sublime
Had made thee a disciple unto time.
It grows the cant term of enslaving tools
To wrong another by the name of right;
It grows the licence of o’erbearing fools
To cheat plain honesty by force of might.
Thus came enclosure — ruin was its guide
But freedom’s clapping hands enjoyed the sight
Though comfort’s cottage soon was thrust aside
And workhouse prisons raised upon the site.
E’en nature’s dwelling far away from men —
The common heath — became the spoilers’ prey:
The rabbit had not where to make his den
And labour’s only cow was drove away
No matter — wrong was right and right was wrong
And freedom’s brawl was sanction to the song.
 — Such was thy ruin, music-making elm:
The rights of freedom was to injure thine.
As thou wert served, so would they overwhelm
In freedom’s name the little that is mine.
And there are knaves that brawl for better laws
And cant of tyranny in stronger powers
Who glut their vile unsatiated maws,
And freedom’s birthright from the weak devours.
This is a poem altogether worthy of its place in the canon of fallen-tree poems — I think in particular of Hopkins’ ‘Binsey Poplars’ and Vernon Watkins’ ‘Tall Trees in a Town’ — and in late September the same anger burned in me as I read of the sawing down of the eponymous tree of Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall — apparently out of pure spite, and without the grace even to pretend some justification of of ‘freedom’ or practicality or self-interest.  Such wanton destruction, such malice that is so hard to forgive: it is no surprise that such deeds roused even gentle men like Clare to righteous anger.

John Constable, ‘Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree’, c. 1821.  (Victoria & Albert Museum)

Poems from John Clare (ed. Jonathan Bate), Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2004).

Friday, September 08, 2023

A year since the loss of Queen Elizabeth

What is there to say, on the first anniversary of the death of our beloved Queen Elizabeth?  I miss her, as I knew I would, and know I always will.  Her wisdom, her smile, her words of encouragement: we are having to carry on without them.

The grief was very deep — the void in the stomach, the taste of iron on the tongue — but so too was the consolation of all that followed: the lying-in-state, the funeral procession, the final Committal at Windsor; their dignity and beauty.  They were days out of time, in which we were reminded of a different way of doing things — the Queen’s way — the only false note being the decision to bring her coffin to London by air, rather than by rail.  But in any case I shall never forget the wordless television pictures of the mourners filing past her coffin in Westminster Hall — mourners whose numbers I had the privilege to join.  That collective four-day farewell was also a pact of remembrance: we who recognised in that witness, in that pilgrimage, a vindication of the Queen’s faith and virtue, stepped out of Westminster Hall with a greater determination to live our ordinary lives more as Elizabeth lived her extraordinary one.

But we remain loyal to and continue to pray for our Sovereign King Charles, who in his benevolent melancholic way is exercising wisdom of his own.  His Majesty has written today,

In marking the first anniversary of Her late Majesty’s death and my Accession, we recall with great affection her long life, devoted service and all she meant to so many of us.

I am deeply grateful, too, for the love and support that has been shown to my wife and myself during this year as we do our utmost to be of service to you all.

Charles R.

The reception of H. M. the late Queen’s coffin at Westminster Hall.  James ODonnells arrangement of the 139th Psalm is sung by the choirs of Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal.  ‘O Lord, thou hast searched me out, and known me: thou knowest my down-sitting, and mine up-rising...

Thursday, August 31, 2023

Ticket office closures: deadline imminent

Ely station, where the staff pride themselves on making their own announcements for the trains, rather than relying on an automated system.  20th May, 2014.

A reminder that tomorrow, September 1st, is the deadline for submissions to the consultation on the proposed closure of virtually every ticket office in England.  If any readers feel even a tenth as strongly as I do that this should not happen, I urge you to fill in the consultation here: https://www.transportfocus.org.uk/ticket-office-consultation/.

I wrote about my own objections in this post, but they are put far more eloquently by my Irish friend Maolsheachlann, who comments:

I have delayed reading this post until now because the subject upsets me so much. There's always an assumption, or at least a hope, in the back of my mind that there will be SOME end to the dehumanization of daily life. Then something like this happens, or is threatened to happen, and makes me think “no worst, there is none”.

The fact that there is a terrible outcry gives me SOME hope, but it also makes me wonder are the powers that be just behaving strategically, Propose something much worse than they have in mind, and people will feel gratified when it’s modified.

A similar situation occurred in Ireland recently when Allied Irish Banks announced they would be withdrawing cash services from many of their branches. They stepped back from this after a public outcry, but are they always just softening us up?

For once, I strongly agree with the Guardian. Indeed, this is a subject on which right and left can unite.

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/aib-climbs-down-over-plans-to-remove-cash-services-from-70-branches-due-to-public-unease/41859301.html

I use the various apps to navigate public transport here, and although it’s better to have them than not, I find them extremely stressful and confusing, especially under pressure. A human face with expertise is so much more welcome.

This is happening everywhere. Cinemas are closing box offices and selling tickets at the popcorn stand. Post offices are shutting down. Banks are shunting everybody to the website. In my own university, the library is getting more and more queries for the whole campus because we are one of the few human points of contact.

I hope to God they reconsider and scrap this plan completely. 

He adds,

Once, when I was riding the train through England, I got off at the wrong station for my connecting journey. I remember feeling very panicked and upset, because I didn’t have much money and I couldn’t afford to buy another ticket. The station master was a big fat man with a red face and a gentle voice. He reassured me and printed me off a ticket for another train.

It was actually a lovely moment. The station was very quiet, it was just me and the station master. It was a warm summer’s day. If all I’d been left with was a smartphone, I would have been clean out of luck. And we all know that these other staff supposedly patrolling the station floor are only a bait; they will be gone very soon, if they materialize at all, and the process will be fully automated.