© Christopher Seddon 2008
Monday, 25 August 2008
Canals of Birmingham
The Second City boasts a large network of canals, now extensively regenerated. These photographs were taken on a foggy morning in November 2005.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Sunday, 24 August 2008
Art Deco car park, Bloomsbury
Now used by an advertising agency, this fine Art Deco building was once a car park - proof that such structures don't have to be entirely devoid of architectural merit, as invariably seems to have been the case in recent decades.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Saturday, 16 August 2008
The Blue Max (1966)
The Blue Max (1966) is a motion picture following the career of German fighter pilot Leutenant Bruno Stachel during the closing stages of World War I. The screenplay was by David Pursall, Jack Seddon and Gerald Hanley, based on a novel of the same name by Jack Hunter. It was directed by John Guillermin and starred George Peppard, James Mason, Ursula Andress, Jeremy Kemp, Karl Michael Voger, Anton Diffring and Darren Nesbitt. Music was by Jerry Goldsmith.
In the spring of 1918, the war is going very badly for Germany. Bruno Stachel (Peppard), after two years service on the Western Front, leaves the fighting in the trenches to become a fighter pilot with the Imperial German Army Air Service. The son of a hotelier, Stachel is greeted cordially by his new CO, Hauptmann Otto Heidemann (Vogler) and his adjutant Holbach (Diffring), but faces appalling snobbery from his aristocratic squadron-mates on account of his humble background. He determines to prove himself where it matters – in the air (and, later on, in the bedroom) and resolves to win the coveted Pour le Merite - the eponymous Blue Max – “the only medal worth having – people respect it”. The Blue Max is awarded to fighter pilots for downing twenty enemy aircraft (in actuality the number required was gradually increased during the course of the war from eight to thirty). One of the squadron’s pilots, Willi von Klugermann (Kemp) only needs another two kills.
On his first sortie, Stachel shoots down a British SE5, but the “kill” is unconfirmed because nobody saw the aircraft go down. He spends hours searching the countryside in the pouring rain for the wreckage, to the annoyance of his fellow flyers, who think he is more concerned about his unconfirmed kill than he is about his wingman Fabian (Nesbitt), who failed to return. Willi, however, has gained the two remaining kills he needs for his Blue Max.
On his next sortie, accompanied by Willi, Stachel attacks a British two-man reconnaissance plane, putting the observer out of action. Rather than shoot down a helpless enemy, he signals the pilot to surrender and fly to his base. The pilot complies, but while approaching the airfield the observer, who has only been stunned, revives and – unaware of the situation – reaches for his gun, giving Stachel no choice but to shoot the aircraft down. Both the crew are killed.
Back on the ground, Stachel is accused of cold-bloodedly shooting the plane down over the airfield to ensure that the kill is witnessed. After the fuss he kicked up over the unconfirmed kill, Heidemann refuses to believe that Stachel simply acted in self-defence. Only Willi supports Stachel’s version of events. But when the two British airmen are buried with full military honours, Stachel further annoys his fellow officers by branding them as hypocrites.
However things begin to look up for Stachel when Willi’s uncle, General Count von Klugermann (Mason), accompanied by his much younger and somewhat over-sexed wife Kaeti (Andress), visits the base to see his nephew awarded the Blue Max. Von Klugermann is intrigued by the incident with the reconnaissance plane and feels Stachel might be exploited for propaganda purposes – a “working class hero” who will appeal to the masses.
Von Klugermann isn’t the only one to take an interest in Stachel. His wife the Countess –who is having an affair with Willi - mistakenly enters Stachel’s room en route to Willi’s bedroom. Both appear to have their interest piqued!
Back in action, Stachel goes to the aid of the Baron von Richthofen and shoots down a British aircraft that has got on the tail of the legendary fighter ace, but he gets shot down himself in the process. He escapes with only minor injuries and a grateful von Richthofen offers him a place in his squadron. Stachel is flattered by the offer, but declines.
While recovering from his injuries, Stachel is ordered to Berlin by Count von Klugermann as part of the latter’s propaganda project - a photo-shoot in a hospital ward alongside Heidemann’s wife, who works as a nurse at the hospital. While in Berlin, Stachel is invited to dinner by the Countess. The inevitable happens. Willi is none too happy!
Returning to duty, Stachel joins Willi on a mission to escort a reconnaissance aircraft. They are attacked by British aircraft, but early in the engagement Stachel’s guns jam. However Willi puts the enemy planes to flight, shooting down three of them. On the way back to base, Willi challenges Stachel, flying under the centre span of a bridge. Stachel outdoes him by flying under one of the narrower side spans. Willi successfully follows suit, but then clips the top of a near-by tower. He crashes and is killed.
Back at base, Stachel reports Willi’s death, but is furious when Heidemann assumes that two confirmed kills are Willi’s and not his. He falsely claims the kills for himself, but becomes trapped by his lie when Holbach points out that he only fired 40 rounds before his guns jammed. Heidemann refuses to confirm the kills, but von Klugermann overrules him.
Stachel, resuming his liaison with the Countess, is overcome with guilt and rather unwisely confesses to “stealing” Willi’s kills.
With Germany now on the brink of defeat, the squadron is ordered to cover the army’s retreat and strafe British forces on the ground, with explicit instructions to avoid air combat. But Stachel disobeys and engages a group of British aircraft. The squadron follows him into action. They bring down seven aircraft, but suffer heavy losses in the process. Three of the kills are Stachels, giving him twenty-two – enough for the Blue Max even without Willi’s kills.
Heidemann has Stachel arrested and intends to have him court-martialed for disobeying orders. Both are ordered to Berlin, but once again von Klugermann overrules Heidemann and informs him that Stachel is to be presented with the Blue Max by Kronprinz Wilhelm, after which he is to test fly a new experimental monoplane. Heidemann resigns his command in disgust.
The Countess, meanwhile, wants Stachel to flee Germany with her to Switzerland. But Stachel refuses to be one of her “lapdogs” and she storms out in a rage. She then informs von Klugermann’s superior, the Field Marshal, about the two false kills. Hell hath no fury...
The next day, Stachel is invested with the Blue Max, but during the ceremony von Klugermann receives a telephone call from the Field Marshal, who is insisting on an enquiry into the two false kills. Von Klugermann berates his wife, whose anger is going to result in the whole German officer corps being brought into disrepute.
But then Heidemann, who has taken the new monoplane up for a preliminary flight, returns and reports that the aircraft is a death trap and that its load-bearing struts are far too weak. Seeing a way out, von Klugermann telephones Stachel and orders him take the monoplane up himself and show the crowd some fancy flying.
Surrounded by a cheering crowd, with the Blue Max around his neck, Stachel makes his way to the monoplane and takes to the air. Heidemann is utterly horrified when he sees the plane take off and realises that von Klugermann is deliberately sending Stachel to his death. Stachel proceeds to put the aircraft through its paces, but it breaks up, plummets to the ground and explodes. At the moment of impact, von Klugermann stamps and signs Stachel's personnel file. He orders it to be sent to the Field Marshal as the personnel file of a German officer and a hero.
The story is presented as a clash between the honourable values of Otto Heidemann versus those of the ruthless Stachel and the cynical scheming Count von Klugermann. The Prussian aristocracy had traditional notions of chivalry which – no matter how commendable – had little or no place in the brutal reality of Twentieth Century warfare. Unfortunately there was in actuality a far more ruthless “working class hero” than Bruno Stachel serving as a corporal on the Western Front during World War I – Adolf Hitler.
Notes:
The Blue Max was filmed in County Wicklow with the consequence that the memorable flying scenes are set against the verdant Irish countryside rather than the sea of mud that was the Western Front by 1918. Another blooper is that the Irish Dail can clearly be seen in one of the “Berlin” scenes, which were filmed in Dublin.
It should however be remembered that people were less obsessed with absolute authenticity in the 1950s and 1960s: for example in The Battle of the River Plate, the panzerschiff Admiral Graff Spee is “played” by the heavy cruiser USS Salem. The inconvenient extra pair of main gun turrets was explained away as “camouflage”. The story certainly didn’t suffer as a result and is far better remembered for its sympathetic portrayal of the Graf Spee’s skipper, Hans Langsdorff, played by Peter Finch.
Modern CGI can achieve a degree of realism way beyond anything that could be achieved back then. Or can it? The flying scenes in the Blue Max used real aeroplanes flown by real pilots, including Peppard, who obtained a PPL especially for the purpose, though for the bridge scene he was rather wisely substituted for a stunt pilot!
Jack Seddon [my father] and his long-standing business partner David Pursall both served as airmen in World War II; my father flew with the RAF and David with the Royal Fleet Air Arm.
Beginning in the 1950s, David and my father formed a prolific screenwriting partnership which endured for almost three decades.
Much of their oeuvre was comedy but probably their best-known film other than the Blue Max was also a war movie: The Longest Day (1962) - an all-star dramatization of the Allied invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944. This was notable for its use of subtitles in scenes involving French and Germans and for being made in black and white at a time when nearly all motion pictures were being made in colour. Both were at the insistence of producer Darryl F. Zanuck, who wanted to give the film a “newsreel” quality. The Longest Day was thus one of the earliest examples of both subtitles and b/w being used for dramatic effect.
The film was based on a book by the Irish-American author Cornelius Ryan, who also wrote a screenplay for the movie version. The screenplay was substantially revised by Romain Gary, James Jones, David Pursall and my father. But Ryan allegedly insisted that he alone be credited for the screenplay and although all five were credited in early cinematic releases of the Longest Day, later copies credited only Ryan. This did not come to light until the 1990s, over thirty years after the film’s appearance, by which time my father was the only one of the five still living. He got into a lengthy wrangle with the US screenwriters guild, but the matter was still unresolved at the time of his death in 2001. Happily a compromise now appears to have been reached, with Cornelius Ryan credited as writer of the original screenplay and the other four including my father with “additional work”. It should be pointed out that Halliwell’s Film Guide has always attributed the screenplay to all five writers.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
In the spring of 1918, the war is going very badly for Germany. Bruno Stachel (Peppard), after two years service on the Western Front, leaves the fighting in the trenches to become a fighter pilot with the Imperial German Army Air Service. The son of a hotelier, Stachel is greeted cordially by his new CO, Hauptmann Otto Heidemann (Vogler) and his adjutant Holbach (Diffring), but faces appalling snobbery from his aristocratic squadron-mates on account of his humble background. He determines to prove himself where it matters – in the air (and, later on, in the bedroom) and resolves to win the coveted Pour le Merite - the eponymous Blue Max – “the only medal worth having – people respect it”. The Blue Max is awarded to fighter pilots for downing twenty enemy aircraft (in actuality the number required was gradually increased during the course of the war from eight to thirty). One of the squadron’s pilots, Willi von Klugermann (Kemp) only needs another two kills.
On his first sortie, Stachel shoots down a British SE5, but the “kill” is unconfirmed because nobody saw the aircraft go down. He spends hours searching the countryside in the pouring rain for the wreckage, to the annoyance of his fellow flyers, who think he is more concerned about his unconfirmed kill than he is about his wingman Fabian (Nesbitt), who failed to return. Willi, however, has gained the two remaining kills he needs for his Blue Max.
On his next sortie, accompanied by Willi, Stachel attacks a British two-man reconnaissance plane, putting the observer out of action. Rather than shoot down a helpless enemy, he signals the pilot to surrender and fly to his base. The pilot complies, but while approaching the airfield the observer, who has only been stunned, revives and – unaware of the situation – reaches for his gun, giving Stachel no choice but to shoot the aircraft down. Both the crew are killed.
Back on the ground, Stachel is accused of cold-bloodedly shooting the plane down over the airfield to ensure that the kill is witnessed. After the fuss he kicked up over the unconfirmed kill, Heidemann refuses to believe that Stachel simply acted in self-defence. Only Willi supports Stachel’s version of events. But when the two British airmen are buried with full military honours, Stachel further annoys his fellow officers by branding them as hypocrites.
However things begin to look up for Stachel when Willi’s uncle, General Count von Klugermann (Mason), accompanied by his much younger and somewhat over-sexed wife Kaeti (Andress), visits the base to see his nephew awarded the Blue Max. Von Klugermann is intrigued by the incident with the reconnaissance plane and feels Stachel might be exploited for propaganda purposes – a “working class hero” who will appeal to the masses.
Von Klugermann isn’t the only one to take an interest in Stachel. His wife the Countess –who is having an affair with Willi - mistakenly enters Stachel’s room en route to Willi’s bedroom. Both appear to have their interest piqued!
Back in action, Stachel goes to the aid of the Baron von Richthofen and shoots down a British aircraft that has got on the tail of the legendary fighter ace, but he gets shot down himself in the process. He escapes with only minor injuries and a grateful von Richthofen offers him a place in his squadron. Stachel is flattered by the offer, but declines.
While recovering from his injuries, Stachel is ordered to Berlin by Count von Klugermann as part of the latter’s propaganda project - a photo-shoot in a hospital ward alongside Heidemann’s wife, who works as a nurse at the hospital. While in Berlin, Stachel is invited to dinner by the Countess. The inevitable happens. Willi is none too happy!
Returning to duty, Stachel joins Willi on a mission to escort a reconnaissance aircraft. They are attacked by British aircraft, but early in the engagement Stachel’s guns jam. However Willi puts the enemy planes to flight, shooting down three of them. On the way back to base, Willi challenges Stachel, flying under the centre span of a bridge. Stachel outdoes him by flying under one of the narrower side spans. Willi successfully follows suit, but then clips the top of a near-by tower. He crashes and is killed.
Back at base, Stachel reports Willi’s death, but is furious when Heidemann assumes that two confirmed kills are Willi’s and not his. He falsely claims the kills for himself, but becomes trapped by his lie when Holbach points out that he only fired 40 rounds before his guns jammed. Heidemann refuses to confirm the kills, but von Klugermann overrules him.
Stachel, resuming his liaison with the Countess, is overcome with guilt and rather unwisely confesses to “stealing” Willi’s kills.
With Germany now on the brink of defeat, the squadron is ordered to cover the army’s retreat and strafe British forces on the ground, with explicit instructions to avoid air combat. But Stachel disobeys and engages a group of British aircraft. The squadron follows him into action. They bring down seven aircraft, but suffer heavy losses in the process. Three of the kills are Stachels, giving him twenty-two – enough for the Blue Max even without Willi’s kills.
Heidemann has Stachel arrested and intends to have him court-martialed for disobeying orders. Both are ordered to Berlin, but once again von Klugermann overrules Heidemann and informs him that Stachel is to be presented with the Blue Max by Kronprinz Wilhelm, after which he is to test fly a new experimental monoplane. Heidemann resigns his command in disgust.
The Countess, meanwhile, wants Stachel to flee Germany with her to Switzerland. But Stachel refuses to be one of her “lapdogs” and she storms out in a rage. She then informs von Klugermann’s superior, the Field Marshal, about the two false kills. Hell hath no fury...
The next day, Stachel is invested with the Blue Max, but during the ceremony von Klugermann receives a telephone call from the Field Marshal, who is insisting on an enquiry into the two false kills. Von Klugermann berates his wife, whose anger is going to result in the whole German officer corps being brought into disrepute.
But then Heidemann, who has taken the new monoplane up for a preliminary flight, returns and reports that the aircraft is a death trap and that its load-bearing struts are far too weak. Seeing a way out, von Klugermann telephones Stachel and orders him take the monoplane up himself and show the crowd some fancy flying.
Surrounded by a cheering crowd, with the Blue Max around his neck, Stachel makes his way to the monoplane and takes to the air. Heidemann is utterly horrified when he sees the plane take off and realises that von Klugermann is deliberately sending Stachel to his death. Stachel proceeds to put the aircraft through its paces, but it breaks up, plummets to the ground and explodes. At the moment of impact, von Klugermann stamps and signs Stachel's personnel file. He orders it to be sent to the Field Marshal as the personnel file of a German officer and a hero.
The story is presented as a clash between the honourable values of Otto Heidemann versus those of the ruthless Stachel and the cynical scheming Count von Klugermann. The Prussian aristocracy had traditional notions of chivalry which – no matter how commendable – had little or no place in the brutal reality of Twentieth Century warfare. Unfortunately there was in actuality a far more ruthless “working class hero” than Bruno Stachel serving as a corporal on the Western Front during World War I – Adolf Hitler.
Notes:
The Blue Max was filmed in County Wicklow with the consequence that the memorable flying scenes are set against the verdant Irish countryside rather than the sea of mud that was the Western Front by 1918. Another blooper is that the Irish Dail can clearly be seen in one of the “Berlin” scenes, which were filmed in Dublin.
It should however be remembered that people were less obsessed with absolute authenticity in the 1950s and 1960s: for example in The Battle of the River Plate, the panzerschiff Admiral Graff Spee is “played” by the heavy cruiser USS Salem. The inconvenient extra pair of main gun turrets was explained away as “camouflage”. The story certainly didn’t suffer as a result and is far better remembered for its sympathetic portrayal of the Graf Spee’s skipper, Hans Langsdorff, played by Peter Finch.
Modern CGI can achieve a degree of realism way beyond anything that could be achieved back then. Or can it? The flying scenes in the Blue Max used real aeroplanes flown by real pilots, including Peppard, who obtained a PPL especially for the purpose, though for the bridge scene he was rather wisely substituted for a stunt pilot!
Jack Seddon [my father] and his long-standing business partner David Pursall both served as airmen in World War II; my father flew with the RAF and David with the Royal Fleet Air Arm.
Beginning in the 1950s, David and my father formed a prolific screenwriting partnership which endured for almost three decades.
Much of their oeuvre was comedy but probably their best-known film other than the Blue Max was also a war movie: The Longest Day (1962) - an all-star dramatization of the Allied invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944. This was notable for its use of subtitles in scenes involving French and Germans and for being made in black and white at a time when nearly all motion pictures were being made in colour. Both were at the insistence of producer Darryl F. Zanuck, who wanted to give the film a “newsreel” quality. The Longest Day was thus one of the earliest examples of both subtitles and b/w being used for dramatic effect.
The film was based on a book by the Irish-American author Cornelius Ryan, who also wrote a screenplay for the movie version. The screenplay was substantially revised by Romain Gary, James Jones, David Pursall and my father. But Ryan allegedly insisted that he alone be credited for the screenplay and although all five were credited in early cinematic releases of the Longest Day, later copies credited only Ryan. This did not come to light until the 1990s, over thirty years after the film’s appearance, by which time my father was the only one of the five still living. He got into a lengthy wrangle with the US screenwriters guild, but the matter was still unresolved at the time of his death in 2001. Happily a compromise now appears to have been reached, with Cornelius Ryan credited as writer of the original screenplay and the other four including my father with “additional work”. It should be pointed out that Halliwell’s Film Guide has always attributed the screenplay to all five writers.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Sunday, 3 August 2008
St Mary and St Joseph RC Church, Poplar E14
Constructed between 1951 and 1954, the St Mary and St Joseph Roman Catholic Church was part of the postwar Lansbury Estate development in Poplar. The original church was bombed during the war, and the site compulsorarily purchased by the LCC for the first phase of the Lansbury project. In return, the LCC provided a site for a new church. The building was designed by Adrian Gilbert Scott. Though less well known than his brother Giles, Adrian was a notable architect in his own right who specialised in work for the Catholic Church.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
© Christopher Seddon 2008
William Booth Memorial Training College, Camberwell
Towering over the local landscape, the Salvation Army's William Booth Memorial Training College in Camberwell, London SE5 can be seen for miles around. Completed in 1932, it was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in his trademark monumental style, although it suffered from budget cuts during its construction and is considerably pared back from its original proposed Gothic grandieur.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Cave Art, by Dr Jean Clottes
The jet-set image of the contemporary art scene has now become so powerful that there is a real need to look beyond it and realise that art is not just about money and glamour.
Art is a fundamental part of the human condition. The capacity for art arises from what anthropologists refer to as symbolic thought: the representation of the real world through symbols such as words, drawings and objects. Just how and when these and other modern behavioural attributes arose is still hotly debated, but the oldest work of art so far discovered is a haematite stone decorated with abstract designs, found in the Blombos Cave near Capetown and believed to be 75,000 years old.
Though not the oldest prehistoric art, that of Upper Palaeolithic Europe is undoubtedly the best known. The earliest-known cave paintings, those at Chauvet Cave in southern France, are 32,000 years old. From that time up until the end of the last Ice Age roughly 11,000 years ago, Cro-Magnon cave artists consistently achieved a standard best summed up by Picasso who, on visiting the Lascaux Caves in the Dordogne, is said to have remarked “We have invented nothing”. Not without good reason have these caves, now thought to have been painted 18-19,000 years ago, been described as “The Sistine Chapel of prehistory”.
Born in the French Pyrenees in 1933, Dr. Jean Clottes is one of France’s most eminent prehistorians. Although now formally retired he remains active in the field. In the 1990s he played a leading role in the study of the newly-discovered Chauvet Cave and also the 27,000 year old Cosquer cave near Marseille.
Clottes is however best known for his controversial but highly-plausible theory that prehistoric cave art was associated with shamanic practices, whereby shamans can move between the living and spirit worlds with the aid of spirit helpers and act as mediators between the living and spirit worlds, obtaining supernatural assistance in such matters as healing, hunting and weather.
According to Clottes Cro-Magnon people regarded caves as access points to the spirit world. While the cave art would have reflected mythologies that would almost certainly have shown regional and temporal variation, Clottes’ view is that the overall belief system persisted with little change for over twenty millennia, ending only when the Ice Age finally drew to a close.
CAVE ART is an accessible and well-organised introduction to prehistoric art, featuring over 300 items. Clottes describes his book as “a kind of museum, a collection of prehistoric imagery” and admits that in common with all museums, it cannot exhibit everything. Accordingly the focus is on the cave art of Ice Age Europe, with less emphasis on figurines, engraved bones and other portable works of art. Some will feel that these, and post-Ice Age cave art from other parts of the world, might have been better covered, but Clottes admits that his “museum” is personal.
In keeping with the book’s concept, explanatory texts take second place to the “exhibits” themselves. They are styled after the texts one might find in an actual museum, with each work accompanied by a caption header providing key facts followed by a brief but generally very informative text, often including Clottes’ personal views and interpretations.
This book will be welcomed by anybody with an interest in either art or prehistory, or indeed anybody who wants to know more about the people of Ice Age Europe, whose society endured five times longer than the whole of our recorded history.
(A slightly different version of this book review appeared in Art World Magazine www.artworldmagazine.com Issue 6 August/September 2008 and is my first published work as a professional writer.)
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Art is a fundamental part of the human condition. The capacity for art arises from what anthropologists refer to as symbolic thought: the representation of the real world through symbols such as words, drawings and objects. Just how and when these and other modern behavioural attributes arose is still hotly debated, but the oldest work of art so far discovered is a haematite stone decorated with abstract designs, found in the Blombos Cave near Capetown and believed to be 75,000 years old.
Though not the oldest prehistoric art, that of Upper Palaeolithic Europe is undoubtedly the best known. The earliest-known cave paintings, those at Chauvet Cave in southern France, are 32,000 years old. From that time up until the end of the last Ice Age roughly 11,000 years ago, Cro-Magnon cave artists consistently achieved a standard best summed up by Picasso who, on visiting the Lascaux Caves in the Dordogne, is said to have remarked “We have invented nothing”. Not without good reason have these caves, now thought to have been painted 18-19,000 years ago, been described as “The Sistine Chapel of prehistory”.
Born in the French Pyrenees in 1933, Dr. Jean Clottes is one of France’s most eminent prehistorians. Although now formally retired he remains active in the field. In the 1990s he played a leading role in the study of the newly-discovered Chauvet Cave and also the 27,000 year old Cosquer cave near Marseille.
Clottes is however best known for his controversial but highly-plausible theory that prehistoric cave art was associated with shamanic practices, whereby shamans can move between the living and spirit worlds with the aid of spirit helpers and act as mediators between the living and spirit worlds, obtaining supernatural assistance in such matters as healing, hunting and weather.
According to Clottes Cro-Magnon people regarded caves as access points to the spirit world. While the cave art would have reflected mythologies that would almost certainly have shown regional and temporal variation, Clottes’ view is that the overall belief system persisted with little change for over twenty millennia, ending only when the Ice Age finally drew to a close.
CAVE ART is an accessible and well-organised introduction to prehistoric art, featuring over 300 items. Clottes describes his book as “a kind of museum, a collection of prehistoric imagery” and admits that in common with all museums, it cannot exhibit everything. Accordingly the focus is on the cave art of Ice Age Europe, with less emphasis on figurines, engraved bones and other portable works of art. Some will feel that these, and post-Ice Age cave art from other parts of the world, might have been better covered, but Clottes admits that his “museum” is personal.
In keeping with the book’s concept, explanatory texts take second place to the “exhibits” themselves. They are styled after the texts one might find in an actual museum, with each work accompanied by a caption header providing key facts followed by a brief but generally very informative text, often including Clottes’ personal views and interpretations.
This book will be welcomed by anybody with an interest in either art or prehistory, or indeed anybody who wants to know more about the people of Ice Age Europe, whose society endured five times longer than the whole of our recorded history.
(A slightly different version of this book review appeared in Art World Magazine www.artworldmagazine.com Issue 6 August/September 2008 and is my first published work as a professional writer.)
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Thursday, 31 July 2008
Demolition of the Guinness Brewery, Acton
The demolition of the Guinness Brewery at Acton in 2006 left me with mixed feelings. The loss of any building designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was certainly a matter for regret; on the other hand the brewery's product was distinctly inferior to that brewed in Dublin. Hitherto, "Irish" Guinness was rarity in pubs, but it is now the only type available.
As they say, every cloud has a silver lining.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
As they say, every cloud has a silver lining.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Hoover Building, Perivale
Constructed between 1932 and 1938, the Hoover Building and its accompanying canteen block are among the finest examples of Art Deco architecture in Britain or indeed anywhere in the world. The site remained in use until the 1980s, whenn Hoover began to gradually relocate their operations to Cambuslang, near Glasgow. The building fell gradually into disrepair but happily avoided the fate of the nearby Firestone Building and was granted Grade II* Listed status. In 1989 the site was aquired by Tesco and was converted to a supermarket, which opened in 1992. The often-maligned high street giant worked closely with English Heritage during the project, to very good effect.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Monday, 28 July 2008
Stanley Dock, Liverpool
Barely a mile away from the museums, restaurants and shops of Albert Dock, its near-twin, Stanley Dock remains totally unreconstrcted, presenting a scene of what Buzz Aldrin might have described as "magnificent desolation".
© Christopher Seddon 2008
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Mersey Tunnel Ventilation Stations, Birkenhead
Standing 150 foot tall, this imposing structure is the Woodside Ventilation Station in Birkenhead, one of six such installations serving the Queensway Mersey Tunnel. These buildings are the work of Herbert James Rowse. This building and the similar structures in nearby Taylor Street and Sidney Street do show some similarities to the work of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, most notably Bankside Power Station, London (now the Tate Modern). However, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was not involved with the Mersey Tunnel project.
Another view, from the end of Morpeth Street.
Recalling sunrise over the Heel Stone at Stonhenge, or the Monolith from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a view of the tower and the sun.
The view across the Mersey. Note the Anglican Cathedral - which was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.
The fine brickwork lends the tower a monumental presence that transcends its utilitarian purpose.
The towers at Sidney Street and Taylor Street, though similar, are not identical. Sidney Street has two squat towers rather than a single large one, though they are connected to a single ventilation shaft.
Taylor Street more closely resembles Woodside, but it is somewhat smaller.
Presumably these differences arose from site constraints.
I am most grateful to architect Reg Towner RIBA of Towner Associates for his recent input. Mr Towner has posted some very fine pictures of the Mersey Tunnel and its attendant infrastructure on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/townerassociates/sets/
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Another view, from the end of Morpeth Street.
Recalling sunrise over the Heel Stone at Stonhenge, or the Monolith from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a view of the tower and the sun.
The view across the Mersey. Note the Anglican Cathedral - which was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.
The fine brickwork lends the tower a monumental presence that transcends its utilitarian purpose.
The towers at Sidney Street and Taylor Street, though similar, are not identical. Sidney Street has two squat towers rather than a single large one, though they are connected to a single ventilation shaft.
Taylor Street more closely resembles Woodside, but it is somewhat smaller.
Presumably these differences arose from site constraints.
I am most grateful to architect Reg Towner RIBA of Towner Associates for his recent input. Mr Towner has posted some very fine pictures of the Mersey Tunnel and its attendant infrastructure on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/townerassociates/sets/
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Foggy day in Waterlow Park
Waterlow Park in Highgate is the setting for these pictures, taken just before Christmas 2007. After taking these shots, I headed into Central London, seeking pix for a "Foggy Day in London Town" post. But south of Euston Road, the sun was shining!
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Monday, 21 July 2008
66 Frognal
Although not one of London's better-known Modernist buildings, 66 Frognal in Hampstead is nevertheless an outstanding example of the style.
It was built in 1938 and designed by British architect Colin Lucas (1906-1988), who was a partner in the practice of Connell, Ward and Lucas. New Zealanders Connell and Ward had earlier collaborated on the acclaimed High and Over complex in Amersham before Lucas joined them in 1933.
The practice went out of existence when the war broke out the following year. After the war Colin Lucas joined the London County Council, working in the architecture division until 1977, when he retired.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Sunday, 29 June 2008
ET - please phone!
In the last decade and a half, astronomy has finally realised one of its long-term goals, that of identifying planets in other star systems, and indeed the number of extra-solar planets now known far exceeds the roll-call in our own solar system. Although many of these planets are “hot Jupiters” – gas giants in close orbit around their primaries – advances in observational techniques have now located potentially-Earthlike worlds such as Gliese 581 d, a large terrestrial (rocky) planet orbiting near the outer edge of the habitable zone of Gliese 581, a red dwarf located approximately twenty light years from Earth.
If – as astronomers have long believed – Earthlike planets are fairly common in the universe, what of life and by extension, what of what are colloquially known as aliens, or more accurately as Extra Terrestrial Intelligences (ETIs)? This is a topic that has attracted so much attention from flying saucer enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists that mainstream academics tend to shun it, but there is one question that refuses to go away:
“Where are they?”
This is the question asked in 1950 by the Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, and it is a very good question. Assuming we make it through the next few centuries, there is on the face of it no reason why humans shouldn’t visit Gliese 581 d or the many other Earthlike planets that will doubtless have been discovered by then. But if that is the case, why have ETIs living on these planets not visited us? If intelligent life is common, by the law of averages some of these alien civilizations must be more technologically advanced than us and already capable of crossing interstellar space.
So why are they not here? Here, in ascending order of probability, are some possibilities:
i. They visited us in antiquity, using their advanced technology to build the Pyramids, Stonehenge etc.
ii. They are here now, but there is an X-Files or Dark Skies-style government conspiracy afoot to keep the public from finding out.
iii. We have been placed out of bounds under a Star Trek-style Prime Directive, prohibiting interference in our natural development as a civilisation.
iv. Aliens are aware of us, but after monitoring our radio broadcasts, they are keeping well clear.
v. We are alone and there are no ETIs, at least in our galaxy and its surrounds.
vi. Any technological civilisation will invariably wipe itself out before interstellar travel can develop.
vii. Even with the most advanced technology, interstellar travel is extremely difficult and rarely undertaken.
We can safely dismiss possibility one: the construction of these ancient monuments was a stupendous feat, but well within the range of the Neolithic and Bronze Age technologies of Homo sapiens without any assistance from ET. And while one cannot categorically rule out the second and third possibilities, my personal feeling is that both are extremely unlikely! Possibility four is slightly more believable: Bush, Blair and Mugabe are three excellent reasons for giving humanity a wide berth, and of course that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Far more plausible is the idea that Man is alone, but my feeling is that this, too, is unlikely. Over the last few centuries, Science has demoted the Earth from the very centre of Creation to a small planet circling a medium-sized star, far from the centre of a perfectly ordinary galaxy; a planet now known to have at least one analogue in Gliese 581 d only a few light-years away. If intelligent life could emerge in such an undistinguished place, it seems perfectly reasonable to suppose it has also done so elsewhere. Indeed it seems inconceivable that it has not done so.
The sixth and gloomiest possibility is bound to have its supporters. There are of course many ways in which our present civilization could wipe itself out. At the moment, the hot (pun intended) favourite is global warming, but there are other strong contenders. Even though the threat of global thermonuclear war has now receded, the possibility of a regional nuclear exchange such as one involving India and Pakistan is a very real possibility and would have consequences ranging far beyond the Indian subcontinent. Those other Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Pestilence and Famine cannot be discounted either, as fears over pandemic bird flu and the alarming recent jump in world food prices show.
However, even if global civilization does collapse, it is difficult to believe that there would be no survivors, and that the descendents of these could not eventually rebuild civilization, albeit after the passage of many centuries. Even if global warming had completely altered climatic conditions, Homo sapiens is a highly adaptable species and there is no reason to suppose the survivors could not adjust to the new conditions. There is evidence to suppose that modern humans have already survived one such “bottleneck”, occurring 73,000 years ago after the explosion of the Toba super-volcano caused a “volcanic winter” during which temperatures plummeted across the globe, and conditions for life must have become extremely harsh.
Even if mankind were to become extinct here on Earth, does this imply the same must inevitably happen whenever and wherever intelligent life arises?
One possibility that suggests it might is the so-called Doomsday Argument, proposed by astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1983, which uses purely statistical methods to predict the likely lifespan of the human race. The basic premise is that if the total number of humans that will ever exist is N, then we are most likely to find ourselves at a point in time where roughly ½ N humans have already been born. However, given that the world population is now increasing at a very rapid rate, it will only be a few centuries before the remaining ½ N have also been born, and mankind’s day will be done.
This argument can be generalized to state that once an intelligent species develops the technology to rapidly increase its numbers, its days are numbered. In the case of our own species – and almost certainly any alien species - the crucial technology was agriculture, which permitted food to be produced rather than obtained from the wild, and thus permitted far larger populations to be sustained than was possible with hunter gathering. Complex societies soon followed: chiefdoms, then city-states and then empires, all with ever-increasing populations. Eventually mechanization of agricultural methods coupled with advances in medical science led to the rapid population increases of the last century.
If Carter is correct, then the doomsday clock for mankind began ticking as the last Ice Age ended, 11,000 years ago, and the same fate would befall any alien species, once it discovered agriculture.
But is Carter correct? Personally I am highly sceptical of any argument not backed up by hard science, however hard it may be to refute on purely logical or mathematical grounds. Philosophy, for example, is full of such arguments which can be used to prove the existence of souls, God, etc. Plato’s Theory of Forms is a wonderfully elegant theory, but few would argue that it relates to the universe we live in.
There is also the problem that the argument makes no attempt to define what is meant by a “human”. Does this include the Neanderthals, Homo erectus, etc, or just Homo sapiens? If the argument simply applies to just one species, then even if it is correct a small population of surviving humans might, through what is known as the “founder effect”, become a biologically-distinct type, i.e. evolve into a new human species. (In biology, this is thought to be one way by which new species evolve.) Thus although Homo sapiens would be extinct, humans in the broader sense would not.
(This idea of a new human species arising from a small founding population isn’t new and featured in Olaf Stapledon’s classic 1930 work Last and First Men, in which the Second Men arose from a small group of survivors of the First Men (us) who were aboard a polar research vessel at the North Pole and escaped the effects of a nuclear chain reaction that wiped out everybody else.)
My personal view is that regardless of the long-term future of mankind, the notion that no species survives long enough to achieve interstellar travel must be rejected.
We turn, therefore, to the last of the possibilities listed above. Could interstellar travel be impossible or, at any rate be so difficult as to be rarely undertaken? What is known as the "technological ceiling" of the Universe defines the fundamental limits of what even the most advanced technology can accomplish. The best-known example of such a limit is Einstein’s prohibition on any object or signal exceeding the speed of light.
It may, though, one day be possible to build a vehicle capable of approaching light speed. Even so, an interstellar voyage to even the nearer stars would be a monumental undertaking. Such a spacecraft could travel from London to New York in one-fiftieth of a second, but would require over four years to reach Proxima Centauri. Or put it another way, the distance from Earth to Proxima is roughly six-and-a-half billion times the distance from London to New York. And that’s only the nearest star.
However, one consequence of the Theory of Relativity is that time would slow down for the crew of a spacecraft travelling at close to light-speed, and from their point of view a voyage to Proxima Centauri would take less than four years – possibly much less, maybe even days. In Star Trek, the warp drive would frequently be too badly damaged even for Scotty to repair, and the USS Enterprise would be forced to head back to the nearest starbase on impulse power only. Nevertheless it could still reach near-light speed in a matter of seconds and (though the point was never made in the show) take advantage to time dilation to reach its destination with comparative ease.
Unfortnately, it might not be as simple as that. It could be that our Universe has a low "technological ceiling". On this picture, our scientists could very likely understand the underlying principles behind the technology of a civilisation tens or even hundreds of millions years older than our own. Arthur C. Clarke’s well-known Third Law stating that “any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” might turn out to be wrong.
The spacecraft featured in Clarke’s later novels couldn’t travel faster than light, but they did have some fairly exotic forms of propulsion which might in fact turn out to be impossible. Another highly speculative (and underappreciated) technology is the “inertial damper” that prevents Kirk and co being turned into strawberry jam by the enormous accelerations the Enterprise uses when getting up to speed.
Faced with these difficulties, even an ETI equivalent of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan might be forced to curb his ambitions, and there never will be a Galactic Empire or a United Federation of Planets.
But this doesn’t entirely answer the question. Even if interstellar travel will always be extremely difficult, why has the long-running SETI program failed to pick up evidence of alien radio transmissions? The explanation for this is, I suspect, very simple. Even here on Earth, the idea of broadcasting in the strict sense of the world will soon be a thing of the past. Much television is now delivered through tight-beam satellite transmission or via cable; radio broadcasting will eventually be replaced by what is oxymoronically referred to as “internet radio”; and much communication goes via short-ranged cellular networks. None of this could be detected from space.
In other words, a SETI type program could only be successful in two situations. The first would be to listen into a civilisation during the brief interval – probably not much more than a century – between radio and broadband. This would require the incredible coincidence of a civilisation being at almost exactly the same stage of technological development (allowing for the time for its transmissions to reach Earth) as ourselves, a possibility which we can safely dismiss. The second situation would require ETIs to deliberately target Earth with a transmission.
It’s not so much a case of ET phoning home, it’s more a case of waiting for him to phone us.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
If – as astronomers have long believed – Earthlike planets are fairly common in the universe, what of life and by extension, what of what are colloquially known as aliens, or more accurately as Extra Terrestrial Intelligences (ETIs)? This is a topic that has attracted so much attention from flying saucer enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists that mainstream academics tend to shun it, but there is one question that refuses to go away:
“Where are they?”
This is the question asked in 1950 by the Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, and it is a very good question. Assuming we make it through the next few centuries, there is on the face of it no reason why humans shouldn’t visit Gliese 581 d or the many other Earthlike planets that will doubtless have been discovered by then. But if that is the case, why have ETIs living on these planets not visited us? If intelligent life is common, by the law of averages some of these alien civilizations must be more technologically advanced than us and already capable of crossing interstellar space.
So why are they not here? Here, in ascending order of probability, are some possibilities:
i. They visited us in antiquity, using their advanced technology to build the Pyramids, Stonehenge etc.
ii. They are here now, but there is an X-Files or Dark Skies-style government conspiracy afoot to keep the public from finding out.
iii. We have been placed out of bounds under a Star Trek-style Prime Directive, prohibiting interference in our natural development as a civilisation.
iv. Aliens are aware of us, but after monitoring our radio broadcasts, they are keeping well clear.
v. We are alone and there are no ETIs, at least in our galaxy and its surrounds.
vi. Any technological civilisation will invariably wipe itself out before interstellar travel can develop.
vii. Even with the most advanced technology, interstellar travel is extremely difficult and rarely undertaken.
We can safely dismiss possibility one: the construction of these ancient monuments was a stupendous feat, but well within the range of the Neolithic and Bronze Age technologies of Homo sapiens without any assistance from ET. And while one cannot categorically rule out the second and third possibilities, my personal feeling is that both are extremely unlikely! Possibility four is slightly more believable: Bush, Blair and Mugabe are three excellent reasons for giving humanity a wide berth, and of course that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Far more plausible is the idea that Man is alone, but my feeling is that this, too, is unlikely. Over the last few centuries, Science has demoted the Earth from the very centre of Creation to a small planet circling a medium-sized star, far from the centre of a perfectly ordinary galaxy; a planet now known to have at least one analogue in Gliese 581 d only a few light-years away. If intelligent life could emerge in such an undistinguished place, it seems perfectly reasonable to suppose it has also done so elsewhere. Indeed it seems inconceivable that it has not done so.
The sixth and gloomiest possibility is bound to have its supporters. There are of course many ways in which our present civilization could wipe itself out. At the moment, the hot (pun intended) favourite is global warming, but there are other strong contenders. Even though the threat of global thermonuclear war has now receded, the possibility of a regional nuclear exchange such as one involving India and Pakistan is a very real possibility and would have consequences ranging far beyond the Indian subcontinent. Those other Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Pestilence and Famine cannot be discounted either, as fears over pandemic bird flu and the alarming recent jump in world food prices show.
However, even if global civilization does collapse, it is difficult to believe that there would be no survivors, and that the descendents of these could not eventually rebuild civilization, albeit after the passage of many centuries. Even if global warming had completely altered climatic conditions, Homo sapiens is a highly adaptable species and there is no reason to suppose the survivors could not adjust to the new conditions. There is evidence to suppose that modern humans have already survived one such “bottleneck”, occurring 73,000 years ago after the explosion of the Toba super-volcano caused a “volcanic winter” during which temperatures plummeted across the globe, and conditions for life must have become extremely harsh.
Even if mankind were to become extinct here on Earth, does this imply the same must inevitably happen whenever and wherever intelligent life arises?
One possibility that suggests it might is the so-called Doomsday Argument, proposed by astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1983, which uses purely statistical methods to predict the likely lifespan of the human race. The basic premise is that if the total number of humans that will ever exist is N, then we are most likely to find ourselves at a point in time where roughly ½ N humans have already been born. However, given that the world population is now increasing at a very rapid rate, it will only be a few centuries before the remaining ½ N have also been born, and mankind’s day will be done.
This argument can be generalized to state that once an intelligent species develops the technology to rapidly increase its numbers, its days are numbered. In the case of our own species – and almost certainly any alien species - the crucial technology was agriculture, which permitted food to be produced rather than obtained from the wild, and thus permitted far larger populations to be sustained than was possible with hunter gathering. Complex societies soon followed: chiefdoms, then city-states and then empires, all with ever-increasing populations. Eventually mechanization of agricultural methods coupled with advances in medical science led to the rapid population increases of the last century.
If Carter is correct, then the doomsday clock for mankind began ticking as the last Ice Age ended, 11,000 years ago, and the same fate would befall any alien species, once it discovered agriculture.
But is Carter correct? Personally I am highly sceptical of any argument not backed up by hard science, however hard it may be to refute on purely logical or mathematical grounds. Philosophy, for example, is full of such arguments which can be used to prove the existence of souls, God, etc. Plato’s Theory of Forms is a wonderfully elegant theory, but few would argue that it relates to the universe we live in.
There is also the problem that the argument makes no attempt to define what is meant by a “human”. Does this include the Neanderthals, Homo erectus, etc, or just Homo sapiens? If the argument simply applies to just one species, then even if it is correct a small population of surviving humans might, through what is known as the “founder effect”, become a biologically-distinct type, i.e. evolve into a new human species. (In biology, this is thought to be one way by which new species evolve.) Thus although Homo sapiens would be extinct, humans in the broader sense would not.
(This idea of a new human species arising from a small founding population isn’t new and featured in Olaf Stapledon’s classic 1930 work Last and First Men, in which the Second Men arose from a small group of survivors of the First Men (us) who were aboard a polar research vessel at the North Pole and escaped the effects of a nuclear chain reaction that wiped out everybody else.)
My personal view is that regardless of the long-term future of mankind, the notion that no species survives long enough to achieve interstellar travel must be rejected.
We turn, therefore, to the last of the possibilities listed above. Could interstellar travel be impossible or, at any rate be so difficult as to be rarely undertaken? What is known as the "technological ceiling" of the Universe defines the fundamental limits of what even the most advanced technology can accomplish. The best-known example of such a limit is Einstein’s prohibition on any object or signal exceeding the speed of light.
It may, though, one day be possible to build a vehicle capable of approaching light speed. Even so, an interstellar voyage to even the nearer stars would be a monumental undertaking. Such a spacecraft could travel from London to New York in one-fiftieth of a second, but would require over four years to reach Proxima Centauri. Or put it another way, the distance from Earth to Proxima is roughly six-and-a-half billion times the distance from London to New York. And that’s only the nearest star.
However, one consequence of the Theory of Relativity is that time would slow down for the crew of a spacecraft travelling at close to light-speed, and from their point of view a voyage to Proxima Centauri would take less than four years – possibly much less, maybe even days. In Star Trek, the warp drive would frequently be too badly damaged even for Scotty to repair, and the USS Enterprise would be forced to head back to the nearest starbase on impulse power only. Nevertheless it could still reach near-light speed in a matter of seconds and (though the point was never made in the show) take advantage to time dilation to reach its destination with comparative ease.
Unfortnately, it might not be as simple as that. It could be that our Universe has a low "technological ceiling". On this picture, our scientists could very likely understand the underlying principles behind the technology of a civilisation tens or even hundreds of millions years older than our own. Arthur C. Clarke’s well-known Third Law stating that “any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” might turn out to be wrong.
The spacecraft featured in Clarke’s later novels couldn’t travel faster than light, but they did have some fairly exotic forms of propulsion which might in fact turn out to be impossible. Another highly speculative (and underappreciated) technology is the “inertial damper” that prevents Kirk and co being turned into strawberry jam by the enormous accelerations the Enterprise uses when getting up to speed.
Faced with these difficulties, even an ETI equivalent of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan might be forced to curb his ambitions, and there never will be a Galactic Empire or a United Federation of Planets.
But this doesn’t entirely answer the question. Even if interstellar travel will always be extremely difficult, why has the long-running SETI program failed to pick up evidence of alien radio transmissions? The explanation for this is, I suspect, very simple. Even here on Earth, the idea of broadcasting in the strict sense of the world will soon be a thing of the past. Much television is now delivered through tight-beam satellite transmission or via cable; radio broadcasting will eventually be replaced by what is oxymoronically referred to as “internet radio”; and much communication goes via short-ranged cellular networks. None of this could be detected from space.
In other words, a SETI type program could only be successful in two situations. The first would be to listen into a civilisation during the brief interval – probably not much more than a century – between radio and broadband. This would require the incredible coincidence of a civilisation being at almost exactly the same stage of technological development (allowing for the time for its transmissions to reach Earth) as ourselves, a possibility which we can safely dismiss. The second situation would require ETIs to deliberately target Earth with a transmission.
It’s not so much a case of ET phoning home, it’s more a case of waiting for him to phone us.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Sunday, 15 June 2008
Vlad and Joe's local
The Crown Tavern in Clerkenwell, formerly the Crown and Anchor, is popular with after-work drinkers for its wide range of beers and is generally very busy in the evening. The pub's popularity goes back a long way, and it rumoured that Lenin met Stalin for a few beers there while the two future Communist leaders were in London, shortly before the abortive 1905 revolution in Russia.
While working on the socialist periodical Iskra ("the Spark"), which was for a time published in Clerkenwell, Lenin stayed at 16 Percy Square, about a mile away.
The original building has since been demolished, but an English Heritage blue plaque marks the spot. Shouldn't it have been a red plaque in this instance?
© Christopher Seddon 2008
While working on the socialist periodical Iskra ("the Spark"), which was for a time published in Clerkenwell, Lenin stayed at 16 Percy Square, about a mile away.
The original building has since been demolished, but an English Heritage blue plaque marks the spot. Shouldn't it have been a red plaque in this instance?
© Christopher Seddon 2008
7/5: The sinking of the Lusitania
The dramatic obverse design of this medal portrays the last moments of the liner RMS Lusitania, which was sunk by the German submarine U-20 on 7 May 1915 with heavy loss of life. The medal is a British copy, struck in iron, of a medal produced by the Munich-based metalworker and medallist Karl Goetz, who intended to satirize what he saw as the greed of the Cunard Line in continuing to operate the ship in a warzone whilst allowing her to be used to transport contraband military materiel from the then-neutral US to aid the British war effort.
The obverse inscription reads:
Keine Bannware!
Der Grossdampfer
Lusitania
Durch Ein Deutscher
Tauchboot Versenkt
5 May 1915.
This translates as: “No Contraband! The large steamer Lusitania sunk by a German submarine/5 May 1915". The copy erroneously uses the British spelling of “May”. The medal inaccurately portrays the ship going down by the stern.
The reverse of the medal portrays a skeleton handing out tickets for the ill-fated voyage with the inscription “Geschaft uber alles” (Business before everything).
Crucially, Goetz got the date of the sinking wrong, leading to the belief among the British and Americans that the attack on the Lusitania was premeditated and the medals had been produced in advance of the sinking to glorify the destruction of the great liner – neither in fact being the case. Goetz corrected the error in later editions of the medal but the damage was done. Selfridges of London were commissioned to produce copies of Goetz’s medal in large numbers, to whip up anti-German sentiment.
It was hardly necessary. With 1,198 dead, including all but a handful of the 139 Americans aboard, there was universal outrage on both sides of the Atlantic, probably only matched 86 years later by the events of 9/11. Had U-20’s 32-year-old skipper Walther Schweiger – seen in much the same light as Osama bin Laden would later be - survived the war he would undoubtedly have been put on trial by the Allies, but he was killed in 1917.
But was Schweiger really a war criminal, or was the Lusitania – as Goetz and later apologists for the sinking imply – a legitimate target? Frankly, in the light of subsequent events, the point is moot. Was Guernica a legitimate target? Or Coventry, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Mi Lai or KAL Flight 007? During the last century, advances in technology made it ever easier to kill large number of people, and civilian casualties – hardly something new in the history of warfare – increased accordingly. The sinking of the Lusitania was simply the first instance in which a warring state had used weapons of mass destruction against the citizens of its enemies. As with 11 September 2001, 7 May 1915 merely saw Homo sapiens’ penchant for killing one another enter a new phase.
It is probably more meaningful to look at the sinking itself, and when one does, the parallels with later events – 9/11 in particular – become apparent.
When launched in 1906, the Lusitania and her sister ship Mauretania were the largest and fastest ships afloat. Cunard took the bold step of using the newly-invented Parsons Turbine in place of the reciprocating engines that were then generally used in large ships, which gave them a service speed of 26 knots. White Star’s Olympic and Titanic, launched five years later, were substantially larger, but nowhere near as fast.
To help meet the enormous cost of construction, Cunard lobbied successfully for a government subsidy. In return, the ships were built to Admiralty specifications, so that they could be armed and function as naval auxiliaries in time of war. In fact there is no way liners could ever hope to fight warships on equal terms, and although armed merchantmen did fight enemy warships with great courage – most notably the Rawalpindi and the Jervis Bay during WW II – the final outcome of such battles was always inevitable. However even by the outbreak of the Great War it was recognised that high-value units such as the Lusitania and the Mauretania would be of more use assigned to other duties, most notably carrying troops, and indeed the latter did serve in this capacity during the war.
The Lusitania, however, remained in passenger service, and on 1 May 1915 she sailed from New York, having arrived there from Liverpool on 24 April. Just days earlier, on 22 April, the German Embassy in Washington had issued a chilling warning:
NOTICE!
TRAVELLERS intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and that travellers sailing in the war zone on the ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.
IMPERIAL GERMAN EMBASSY,
Washington, D.C. April 22, 1915
By a strange twist of fate, the notice appeared side by side in the New York Times with an advertisement for the Lusitania’s eastbound crossing. This did lead, understandably, to concern among Lusitania’s crew and intending passengers. The liner’s experienced skipper, William Turner, 58, tried to calm fears by explaining that his ship was fast enough to keep out of trouble. The reality was the ship was operating with only 19 of her 25 boilers in use, the remainder being shut down to save coal, which reduced her speed to 21 knots; the more experienced hands from her pre-war crew had joined the Navy and been replaced with less capable men; and boat-drills on the voyage were poorly attended and casually carried out.
As with the recent terrorist attacks on the United States, Madrid and London, the chances to avoid what would probably now be referred to as 7/5 were missed.
As the ship entered what the Germans had designated a warzone, Turner failed to carry out Admiralty-designated zigzag manoeuvres and ignored two submarine warnings, apparently more preoccupied with reaching Liverpool on the right tide. The Admiralty in turn failed to send out a destroyer escort that might have deterred a U-Boat attack. Precautions were not entirely absent: lifeboats were swung out and extra lookouts posted. The ship’s watertight doors were closed. Unlike those in the Titanic, these went up the full height of the hull, but while the Lusitania would probably survived a collision of the type that sank the Titanic, they were to afford no protection against what lay ahead.
Early in the afternoon on 7 May, the Lusitania was off the Irish coast, close to the Old Head of Kinsale. She had encountered fog and was steaming at a reduced speed of 18 knots when at 14:10 she crossed the bow of U-20. Kapitan-Leutnant Walter Schweiger, barely able to believe his luck, gave the order to attack. One story states that the boat’s quartermaster, Charles Voegele, refused to give to order to fire on the liner and was subsequently court-martialled and jailed for three years. If true, this lenient sentence must have reflected the ambiguity felt in Germany over the sinking. The normal penalty for refusing to obey a direct order in a combat situation would have been death.
The Lusitania was struck by a single torpedo on her starboard side, just forward the bridge. Almost immediately, the huge liner suffered a second, larger explosion. Water poured in, and she immediately began to list 15 degrees to starboard. An SOS was sent out and Captain Turner gave the order to abandon ship. But the list made it very difficult to launch the lifeboats and only six of 48 boats were successfully launched from the stricken liner. As the ship began to go down by the bow, panic broke out on board. Captain Turner tried to make for the Irish coast, in the hope of beaching the ship, but power to the rudder was out.
The oft-repeated horror-story of passengers drowning, trapped between floors in the lift in the First Class accommodation, is almost certainly apocryphal. In common with all lifts of that time, the one aboard Lusitania required an operator to work it, and both the ship’s lift-operators survived the sinking. This did not prevent a recent drama documentary about the disaster featuring the brave but hopeless attempts of an American woman to open the door of a lift with a hatpin, though this might have also been inspired by the actual escape of a group of people from a lift in the doomed World Trade Center.
The Lusitania sank in 20 minutes. It took some hours for help to arrive from the Irish coast, during which survivors clung to wreckage, including – it is said – a chicken coop. Many survived the sinking itself, only to perish in the chilly waters before they could be rescued. Like Captain Smith of the Titanic, Turner stayed with his ship until the end, but unlike the former, he was among the survivors.
The cause of the second explosion, which doomed the great liner, is argued to this day. Some claim U-20 actually fired two torpedoes, but the Imperial German Navy authorities doctored Schweiger’s log to try and mitigate the storm of international protest; others attribute the explosion to the alleged munitions aboard; oceanographer and explorer Dr. Bob Ballard blames coal-dust in the Lusitania’s bunkers, almost empty towards the end of the voyage; another theory (which seems the likeliest) is that a boiler-room explosion did the damage. Schweiger’s log in fact considers all three possibilities.
After the Titanic, the sinking of the Lusitania is generally accepted as the most famous maritime disaster of all time, but what makes it all the more shocking is that while the former was an accident, the latter was an act of war. However it is viewed, the fact remains that an unarmed passenger liner was deliberately targeted, resulting in the deaths of almost twelve hundred innocent civilians.
The final word on the Lusitania must go to the late Frank Braynard, from his 1985 work Fifty Famous Ocean Liners:
”...[the war’s] long range impact on history has yet to be properly understood. The part the Lusitania was to play had nothing to do with her qualities as a great ship. She was the victim of the war, as were the millions who were slaughtered in that asinine display of mankind’s stupidity”.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
The obverse inscription reads:
Keine Bannware!
Der Grossdampfer
Lusitania
Durch Ein Deutscher
Tauchboot Versenkt
5 May 1915.
This translates as: “No Contraband! The large steamer Lusitania sunk by a German submarine/5 May 1915". The copy erroneously uses the British spelling of “May”. The medal inaccurately portrays the ship going down by the stern.
The reverse of the medal portrays a skeleton handing out tickets for the ill-fated voyage with the inscription “Geschaft uber alles” (Business before everything).
Crucially, Goetz got the date of the sinking wrong, leading to the belief among the British and Americans that the attack on the Lusitania was premeditated and the medals had been produced in advance of the sinking to glorify the destruction of the great liner – neither in fact being the case. Goetz corrected the error in later editions of the medal but the damage was done. Selfridges of London were commissioned to produce copies of Goetz’s medal in large numbers, to whip up anti-German sentiment.
It was hardly necessary. With 1,198 dead, including all but a handful of the 139 Americans aboard, there was universal outrage on both sides of the Atlantic, probably only matched 86 years later by the events of 9/11. Had U-20’s 32-year-old skipper Walther Schweiger – seen in much the same light as Osama bin Laden would later be - survived the war he would undoubtedly have been put on trial by the Allies, but he was killed in 1917.
But was Schweiger really a war criminal, or was the Lusitania – as Goetz and later apologists for the sinking imply – a legitimate target? Frankly, in the light of subsequent events, the point is moot. Was Guernica a legitimate target? Or Coventry, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Mi Lai or KAL Flight 007? During the last century, advances in technology made it ever easier to kill large number of people, and civilian casualties – hardly something new in the history of warfare – increased accordingly. The sinking of the Lusitania was simply the first instance in which a warring state had used weapons of mass destruction against the citizens of its enemies. As with 11 September 2001, 7 May 1915 merely saw Homo sapiens’ penchant for killing one another enter a new phase.
It is probably more meaningful to look at the sinking itself, and when one does, the parallels with later events – 9/11 in particular – become apparent.
When launched in 1906, the Lusitania and her sister ship Mauretania were the largest and fastest ships afloat. Cunard took the bold step of using the newly-invented Parsons Turbine in place of the reciprocating engines that were then generally used in large ships, which gave them a service speed of 26 knots. White Star’s Olympic and Titanic, launched five years later, were substantially larger, but nowhere near as fast.
To help meet the enormous cost of construction, Cunard lobbied successfully for a government subsidy. In return, the ships were built to Admiralty specifications, so that they could be armed and function as naval auxiliaries in time of war. In fact there is no way liners could ever hope to fight warships on equal terms, and although armed merchantmen did fight enemy warships with great courage – most notably the Rawalpindi and the Jervis Bay during WW II – the final outcome of such battles was always inevitable. However even by the outbreak of the Great War it was recognised that high-value units such as the Lusitania and the Mauretania would be of more use assigned to other duties, most notably carrying troops, and indeed the latter did serve in this capacity during the war.
The Lusitania, however, remained in passenger service, and on 1 May 1915 she sailed from New York, having arrived there from Liverpool on 24 April. Just days earlier, on 22 April, the German Embassy in Washington had issued a chilling warning:
NOTICE!
TRAVELLERS intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and that travellers sailing in the war zone on the ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.
IMPERIAL GERMAN EMBASSY,
Washington, D.C. April 22, 1915
By a strange twist of fate, the notice appeared side by side in the New York Times with an advertisement for the Lusitania’s eastbound crossing. This did lead, understandably, to concern among Lusitania’s crew and intending passengers. The liner’s experienced skipper, William Turner, 58, tried to calm fears by explaining that his ship was fast enough to keep out of trouble. The reality was the ship was operating with only 19 of her 25 boilers in use, the remainder being shut down to save coal, which reduced her speed to 21 knots; the more experienced hands from her pre-war crew had joined the Navy and been replaced with less capable men; and boat-drills on the voyage were poorly attended and casually carried out.
As with the recent terrorist attacks on the United States, Madrid and London, the chances to avoid what would probably now be referred to as 7/5 were missed.
As the ship entered what the Germans had designated a warzone, Turner failed to carry out Admiralty-designated zigzag manoeuvres and ignored two submarine warnings, apparently more preoccupied with reaching Liverpool on the right tide. The Admiralty in turn failed to send out a destroyer escort that might have deterred a U-Boat attack. Precautions were not entirely absent: lifeboats were swung out and extra lookouts posted. The ship’s watertight doors were closed. Unlike those in the Titanic, these went up the full height of the hull, but while the Lusitania would probably survived a collision of the type that sank the Titanic, they were to afford no protection against what lay ahead.
Early in the afternoon on 7 May, the Lusitania was off the Irish coast, close to the Old Head of Kinsale. She had encountered fog and was steaming at a reduced speed of 18 knots when at 14:10 she crossed the bow of U-20. Kapitan-Leutnant Walter Schweiger, barely able to believe his luck, gave the order to attack. One story states that the boat’s quartermaster, Charles Voegele, refused to give to order to fire on the liner and was subsequently court-martialled and jailed for three years. If true, this lenient sentence must have reflected the ambiguity felt in Germany over the sinking. The normal penalty for refusing to obey a direct order in a combat situation would have been death.
The Lusitania was struck by a single torpedo on her starboard side, just forward the bridge. Almost immediately, the huge liner suffered a second, larger explosion. Water poured in, and she immediately began to list 15 degrees to starboard. An SOS was sent out and Captain Turner gave the order to abandon ship. But the list made it very difficult to launch the lifeboats and only six of 48 boats were successfully launched from the stricken liner. As the ship began to go down by the bow, panic broke out on board. Captain Turner tried to make for the Irish coast, in the hope of beaching the ship, but power to the rudder was out.
The oft-repeated horror-story of passengers drowning, trapped between floors in the lift in the First Class accommodation, is almost certainly apocryphal. In common with all lifts of that time, the one aboard Lusitania required an operator to work it, and both the ship’s lift-operators survived the sinking. This did not prevent a recent drama documentary about the disaster featuring the brave but hopeless attempts of an American woman to open the door of a lift with a hatpin, though this might have also been inspired by the actual escape of a group of people from a lift in the doomed World Trade Center.
The Lusitania sank in 20 minutes. It took some hours for help to arrive from the Irish coast, during which survivors clung to wreckage, including – it is said – a chicken coop. Many survived the sinking itself, only to perish in the chilly waters before they could be rescued. Like Captain Smith of the Titanic, Turner stayed with his ship until the end, but unlike the former, he was among the survivors.
The cause of the second explosion, which doomed the great liner, is argued to this day. Some claim U-20 actually fired two torpedoes, but the Imperial German Navy authorities doctored Schweiger’s log to try and mitigate the storm of international protest; others attribute the explosion to the alleged munitions aboard; oceanographer and explorer Dr. Bob Ballard blames coal-dust in the Lusitania’s bunkers, almost empty towards the end of the voyage; another theory (which seems the likeliest) is that a boiler-room explosion did the damage. Schweiger’s log in fact considers all three possibilities.
After the Titanic, the sinking of the Lusitania is generally accepted as the most famous maritime disaster of all time, but what makes it all the more shocking is that while the former was an accident, the latter was an act of war. However it is viewed, the fact remains that an unarmed passenger liner was deliberately targeted, resulting in the deaths of almost twelve hundred innocent civilians.
The final word on the Lusitania must go to the late Frank Braynard, from his 1985 work Fifty Famous Ocean Liners:
”...[the war’s] long range impact on history has yet to be properly understood. The part the Lusitania was to play had nothing to do with her qualities as a great ship. She was the victim of the war, as were the millions who were slaughtered in that asinine display of mankind’s stupidity”.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Monday, 9 June 2008
Intervention/Decoration Art Exhibition, Frome
Foreground is a contemporary arts group based in Frome, Somerset who have recently commissioned works by seven noted and emerging artists for Intervention/Decoration, an exhibition held in this attractive former weaving town.
A newly-renovated weaving shed is the setting for this fabric by Berlin-based artist Eva Berendes, whose first solo UK exhibition took place last autumn at the Ancient & Modern art gallery in London.
The work exploits the shed’s space, beams and skylights to provide a viewing experience that constantly varies and can never exactly repeat, as it interacts with the light and shadows from above, in turn casting its own shadows onto the floor below.
The division of the viewing space into two symbolises the gulf between the lives of wealthy textile merchants and the ordinary people upon whose labours they depended.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
A newly-renovated weaving shed is the setting for this fabric by Berlin-based artist Eva Berendes, whose first solo UK exhibition took place last autumn at the Ancient & Modern art gallery in London.
The work exploits the shed’s space, beams and skylights to provide a viewing experience that constantly varies and can never exactly repeat, as it interacts with the light and shadows from above, in turn casting its own shadows onto the floor below.
The division of the viewing space into two symbolises the gulf between the lives of wealthy textile merchants and the ordinary people upon whose labours they depended.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
Park Street and Wills Memorial Building, Bristol
Popular with shoppers, drinkers and clubbers alike, Park Street is unusual in running up a steep incline. The street was developed during the second half of the 18th Century but is now dominated by the massive Wills Memorial Building at its summit. Completed in 1925 and part of the University of Bristol complex, it is named for Henry Overton Wills III, first chancellor of the university and father of tobacco magnates George Albert and Henry Herbert Wills, whose donations funded its construction.
© Christopher Seddon 2008
© Christopher Seddon 2008
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