Hooptedoodle #114 - The End of Another Year - Tony Brooks

Well, you may find this hard to believe, but it seems that yet again I have failed to make the New Year honours list. I had sort of hoped that maybe the letter on the official headed notepaper had just been delayed in the Christmas mail, but the lists are out and – I just have to accept it – I’m not mentioned.

You’d have thought just a measly CBE or something wouldn’t have been too much trouble or expense – they don’t have to go daft – I am humble enough to accept crumbs from the royal table with good grace. In case you are wondering just why I might merit some kind of recognition from a grateful nation, I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing that up – I can only respond that I seem to be at least as deserving as many who are on the list. Not that I spent much time reading it, you understand.

There’s a lady who has been a very famous actress for a great many years – you know the one – she was in that TV series we all used to watch years ago – what was it called, again? – that other fellow that died recently was in it, too – what was his name? And then she was in lots of other things – she was always on TV, in our living rooms – she was like one of our family, and we all loved her. Anyway, they’ve made her a Grand Dame, or a Wicked Stepmother or something. So now, in addition to being wealthy and famous she is elevated to the peerage.

I think that’s wonderful. There’s also some chap that has been a big wig in the finance industry for a long time who is now Sir Big Wig – he looks like another deserving case – a knighthood is probably one of the very few things he couldn’t afford to buy. Well – now I come to think of it, perhaps he could. Maybe that’s where I’m going wrong.

I did spend enough time with the list to note that there are also a few people on there who have been rewarded for their work for charity, or their contribution to scientific advance and stuff like that, but I wasn’t very interested in them – I’d never heard of them – no-one ever mentions them at the hairdresser’s – and I rather regard them as faceless do-gooders. The papers don’t bother much with them either, which just goes to prove something or other. It would be churlish to begrudge them even their lower-profile honours – I mean, good for them – but it does add weight to my argument that there seem to be enough places available (I’m sure that’s not the right word) for them to have squeezed me in.

Not to worry. Rise above it. I shall enjoy my continuing anonymity, and the distinction of being one of the last people in the UK who are not famous.

Moving on, I have to observe that this is a strange time of year – we appear to be obsessed with looking back over the year and producing lists of things. TV is stuffed with this – The Top 50 Most Pointless List Shows of 2013, and similar. I guess we must like this kind of thing, though it has been suggested that it is just a very cheap way of re-running old clips into a botched-up show and giving Harry Hill or Jimmy Carr something to do. Switching on the TV last night, the Contesse and I were shocked to see a news announcement of the death of Mel Smith, the comedian and writer (I’m not sure if he was an MBE or anything) – our shock being heightened by the fact that he also died during the Summer, so it was yet another re-run. That’s one problem with re-runs – if you don’t watch them from the start, and don’t pay attention, it can become very confusing – you can get hold of the wrong end of all sorts of sticks, and this is a very easy time of year to get confused.

Given that every meaningless statistic in the world is now at copywriters’ fingertips, and everything that was ever filmed (including out-takes) is stored away somewhere, it must be possible to create a TV show of some sort at hardly any cost at all. A major contribution to helping with the Economic Depression, or depression of any sort – at peak viewing hours, the whole family can sit on the sofa, break out the catering sized bags of Doritos and watch yet another show which cost hardly anything to produce. Ideal – we will also get to sit through the advertising breaks (mostly ads for low-quality sofas and for Doritos, in fact, just as a lifestyle check), and if the story line or the information content is not demanding that’s OK; it matters less if Maureen misses most of it, checking her texts, or if we get distracted by a parallel discussion of some other show that we failed to understand previously – you know, the one with that bloke in – what’s his name?

On this general theme of recorded statistics and old pictures, one of my Christmas presents was a book called Poetry in Motion, the autobiography of one Charles Antony Standish Brooks, better known as Tony, who was a great hero of mine when I was a small boy. He was, of course, a remarkably successful racing driver back in the bad old days when motor racing was mostly a ghastly pastime for young men who found the end of WW2 had made things too boring. I loved the sport, even if it was too frequently a public cremation ritual, and still have a great interest in the earlier years of Formula One – I have a hefty collection of books and old films.

Brooks was a bit different. He was exceptionally gifted, but even back in the 1950s it was obvious that he was not one of the usual hellraisers and wild men of the sport. He was noted as quiet, a bit studious and retiring, and, as far as I know, does not appear in any photos drinking beer with Mike Hawthorn. He was a qualified dentist, a devout Catholic (I now learn), and avoided the wilder excesses. When he got married he retired at once from all forms of motor racing, opened a motor dealership which became very successful and raised a large family. Now 81, he is still going strong.

To put some dimensions on his career, he raced at the top level for only a few years – he was in F1 from 1955 until his retiral at the end of 1961, and he won Grands Prix for Vanwall and Ferrari. If he had had a slightly more pushy personality, and been prepared to take some extra risks, he would certainly have been a deserving World Champion for Ferrari in 1959. But he didn’t. That is why he is ultimately less famous than Sir Stirling Moss (that knighthood thing again), for example, though of course Moss never won a Championship either.

So - always a rather shadowy figure, and one who disappeared without trace after retiral, though I have met him a couple of times at Aintree and Goodwood in recent years. That is “have met” in the sense of “got him to sign my copy of some book or other” – he was always in notably better shape at these events than his contemporaries, Moss and Salvadori – remarkably sprightly, almost boyish for a man in his 70s.

Proper racing car - Brooks in a Ferrari, winning the 1959 French GP

Before I got the new book I was surprised by a couple of the customer reviews – there were complaints that it appeared to be mostly a collection of detailed accounts of very similar races – many of them minor club events – which quickly became boring. I dismissed these with a shake of the head – this is a racing driver’s autobiography, which kind of sets the context, you would think, and the man is from a different age – there are no tales of wild parties – this is not Eddie Irvine.

Well, I’ve been reading it. You know what? It is rather boring. The book is written, without any ghostwriters, by an 81 year old man, of deeply honest and slightly curmudgeonly nature, a man who apologises for including contemporary press quotes which show him in a favourable light. It is constructed mostly from his own very detailed records of his racing career, so the reader is going to get more detail on weather conditions, lap times and mechanical problems during testing than they may be comfortable with.

Me, I love it, but I can see how some chapters might be seen by the less nerdy as a collation of The 12 Most Boring Sports Car Races of 1953. Super photos throughout, and I can satisfy the Inner Nerd by identifying as many other cars and drivers of the day as possible. Pass the Doritos, Maureen, I’m going to be busy for a while.

I wish you all - whoever and wherever you are - a very happy and peaceful New Year.

Hooptedoodle #106 – Charles Folkard (1878-1963)

I’m sorting out my office/den. Since there are now two desktop computers in here, it follows that there are also two desks and, since the books and CDs keep arriving from somewhere or other, a serious outbreak of re-organising is now under way.

A new bookcase is on order, and I managed to bring myself to throw out an old, though working, hi-fi system (ouch!), and shifted a few things around, and suddenly there is space for everything. Two notes, in passing:

(1) I have realised that lying-down A4 box files – such as one might keep soldiers in – fit beautifully, two abreast, in an 80cm-wide IKEA Billy bookcase. Good. Excellent, in fact.

(2) My hi-fi was a decent collection of kit for its day, but its day was long ago, and its main attribute was that it was BIG. Enormous, matt black, separate components – mostly full of dust now – I believe that the unnecessary size was intentional. In those days, big stereo kit was impressive. Maybe small has become the new big, I don’t know, but among those units was the first CD player I ever bought. I was late on the scene with CDs – I’d already collected a mountain of vinyl LPs, the cassettes were starting to pile up, and I didn’t wish to commit to yet another technology switch until it looked as though it might last. The thing that settled the matter, I remember, was that John Scofield brought out a new album called Flat Out, and the title track was only on the CD, for goodness sake. I was so annoyed I just bought the CD – that’ll teach them, I thought – and then, of course, I had to buy a player to go with it. I bought a Kenwood unit – this was back in 1985. All these years later, after I have spent an amount I would rather not think about on optical media, and after a steady stream of broken and worn-out CD players has moved on to the landfill site, that 1985 Kenwood was still going perfectly when I ditched it on Sunday.

Anyway, it’s gone now. No doubt someone will rescue it from the town dump – I hope so.

I’ve been looking at how my books may be arranged once the new bookcase arrives, and I kept getting distracted, finding books I forgot I had, or hadn’t seen for a while. One such is The Land of Nursery Rhyme, which doesn’t sound very promising, but I retrieved it from my mum’s house recently, and the handwritten dedication in the front tells me that my Auntie Monica gave it to me on my first birthday.

As these things go, it is pretty much what you’d expect – the rhymes are nothing extraordinary, complete with the political insensitivity which you would expect, but it is charmingly illustrated throughout by Charles Folkard. Wow – stop right there. I opened the book and was transfixed – some of these illustrations are hard-wired in as some of the earliest recollections I must have. I can remember every picture in that book, though until recently I hadn’t seen it since infancy. The standard forms of elves and medieval kings in my imagination mostly come right out of Folkard - that's quite a legacy when your imagination is as off-beat as mine.

The end-papers show a simple little map which I used to gaze at for hours when I was little. I loved the river running past the villages and into the sea, the windmill on the hill, the whole idea that places fitted together into some kind of a whole. Never mind that the map was of The Land of Nursery Rhyme – it was the concept. I have always loved maps – I used to draw maps of imagined countries when I was 10 – maybe that book got me started. I love to see places from the air – as a toddler I imagined what it would be like to fly like a bird and see the world laid out beneath me. Right through life, I’ve always had a strange fondness for the idea of villages snuggled into valleys in rounded hills – when the radio tells me that it is raining all over Scotland tonight, I have a vision of little communities sheltering in a landscape very much like the work of Mr Folkard, bless him.

Anyway, it’s an image which once intrigued me, and which is still there somewhere in the wiring.

Montrose – History of a Different Feather

Hurrah!
James Graham, first Marquess of Montrose

Someone mentioned to me recently that he occasionally finds himself half-way up the stairs, unable to remember where he was going or why. At the time, we laughingly agreed that it was probably a gradual reduction in his ability to multitask rather than full-blown dementia.

Whatever, it rings a not-entirely-comfortable bell with me. Two contexts in which this happens a lot to me these days are

(1) online – trying to remember what it was I set out to do when I’m suddenly surprised to find myself reading a Wikipedia entry for Oswald Mosley (for example)

(2) my reading habits – trying to remember just why this particular book I have in my hand has managed to leapfrog the current reading pile

Over the last couple of days, I have read – and greatly enjoyed – CV Wedgwood’s Montrose, which certainly is a surprise to me, and I am trying to reconstruct just how this happened.

It’s at least partly Old John’s fault. He very kindly sent me some 20mm highlanders a while ago – nice little figures, but not entirely relevant to what I’m working on at  the moment. He said something to the effect that, one day, maybe I might like to extend my interest in the ECW as far as the campaigns of the Marquess of Montrose. I filed that away, alongside similar comments I’d heard from someone else.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a bit of a stock-take on the ECW lead mountain. I’ve pretty much completed what I originally sketched out as my “Phase One” ECW armies – I’ve even gone so far as to add some units of town militia and some firelocks, and there’s some siege artillery starting to collect, so a bit of an extension to the original plan is probably overdue. The ECW spares boxes now contain more Tumbling Dice figures than I thought I had (has anyone else noticed how accumulation of TD figures generates a parallel collection of human heads?), and I have enough to make up some more pike-&-shot units of foot, at least two of which are Covenanters.

Interesting. I hadn’t really thought about Covenanters just yet, though I have always known I would get there. My forthcoming early efforts in the ECW are to be based around Lancashire, Cheshire and North Wales in the 1642-45 period, and I have developed (or dreamed up) OOBs for this region at these dates. Covenanters – hmmm – what relevance have Covenanters in Lancashire? I am aware that these chaps were at the Siege of York, and provided a good whack of the troops opposed to Newcastle and at Marston Moor. It is maybe less well known that the Parliamentarian garrison of Liverpool in June 1644 included some 400 to 500 men of Sir John Meldrum’s regiment, who were Scottish, or that Sir William Brereton tried (unsuccessfully) in February 1645 to get some of the Scottish foot seconded from Yorkshire to help with his attempt to capture Chester. Also, of course, given even as tenuous a link as that, my own fake history of the war in Lancashire can easily be fudged to include any number of the fellows.

So, belatedly, I dug Start Reid’s Osprey title on Scottish ECW soldiers out of the bookcase, and I had a squint at the very useful army generation lists in the back of the Forlorn Hope rules, and Old John’s words echoed from somewhere, and Montrose was mentioned, and suddenly I decided I had better find out more about this, so I also dug out CV Wedgwood’s book on the ill-fated hero (that’s Montrose, not Old John) and got started.

A great read. Classic, story-telling, popular history, free of densely interwoven references. It isn’t a very big book, it has some nice pictures, it may even (whisper it) have quite large print, but I romped through it, and I learned a lot about Montrose – though I have to say I knew hardly anything about him before.

Booo!
Archibald Campbell, first Marquess of Argyll
He even has a black hat, for goodness sake...

This is kind of ironic, since I frequently sound off here about my enthusiasm for old-fashioned historical writing, but I did get a bit worried about the fact that the reading was so pain-free. I checked – a couple of times – to see if it was a book for children. Having spent a fair amount of time lately reading (and enjoying) Esdaile, and Rothenburg and suchlike, I was reminded that Ms Wedgwood is a breath of fresh air, but somehow this book was strangely unconvincing. I didn’t expect to find anything as dull (or useful) as OOBs, but I was surprised how partial this biography is. Montrose is a hero – he’s handsome, gifted, brave, noble and tragic all at once. His soldiers are always outnumbered, yet (for a while at least) claim crushing victories against all the odds. His opponents are mean-minded, ugly, cowardly and cruel, and generally perform like a nasty version of the Keystone Cops. I am not used to history being quite so clear cut, to be honest…

OK – what I have to do next is capitalize on my new enthusiasm and find some rather more detailed (I came close to writing “factual”) work on Montrose. It would be remarkably silly – even by my standards – if I finished up building up little armies for Montrose’s campaigns just so that I can utilize Old John’s highlanders, but stranger things have happened. It would also be silly if I did it just because Veronica Wedgwood had a bit of a thing about James Graham. I need to have a look at some rather more dense writing on the period, and think what to do next.

One big attraction is that the forces involved are small (if I only knew what they were…), so it would not be a very big digression, as these things go.

Hmmm. But why Oswald Mosley?

Danube Trip – Not a Lot of Help

As part of my preparation for my impending trip to the Danube (which starts tonight), I felt I should take advantage of the momentum and enthusiasm and revisit one of my past failures. A failure, what is more, that has nagged me like a mild toothache for years, so this is a good opportunity to sort a few things out at once.

Yet again, it has not gone well.

Around 1990, my late cousin, who was certainly one of the best-read fellows I ever knew, bought me a copy of Claudio Magris’ Danube, which, in its original Italian version, has won more literary prizes than you would believe. My cousin was a lovely, amusing man, but just occasionally he would send me an “improving” book to try to make some inroads into my vast number of years of monastic devotion to ignorance. He introduced me to Primo Levi, and a few other writers whom I have grown to love, but Magris, I fear, has been a step too far.

Now then. Claudio Magris, as you will (of course) know, is a celebrated scholar, essayist and occasional journalist who – among so many honours – is professor of modern German literature at the University of Trieste.

Claudio Magris

Danubio is a work which has received such lofty acclaim that each of my 3 or 4 failed attempts to get through it has been a humbling, not to say humiliating experience. The idea and the structure is that the reader is taken on a ramble down the Danube, from its source (and there is an interesting debate about exactly where that is) to wherever it finishes up (and I have never read anything like that far, though the Black Sea seems a decent guess). On the way, the Professor enriches the journey with snippets of history, local culture, legends and oodles of literary references. Sounds good, but each of my failed attempts has ground to a halt in the same way – bemused by the pointlessness of continually nodding, stupidly, at references that neither I, nor anyone else, is likely to make anything of.

Naturally, if Jan Baltazar Magin disagreed with the writings of Michael Bencsik back in the 18^th Century on some minor aspect of Slavophilism, there is no reason why Prof Magris should not mention it, but how much is enough? My paperback edition runs to some 400-odd pages, and I reckon there are about 10 to 12 such references per page. By any standards, that is heavy going. Who is this book aimed at? What is the reader supposed to do with all this stuff? Take notes? Agree? Check the references? Be impressed? Be convinced? Weep?

I suspect that Magris wrote the book for himself – and God bless him, he is entitled to do just that. The book is very fine – it may even be perfect, I am obviously not qualified to judge. I suspect that any readers who are not actually part of a tiny, closed circle of specialists in the field of Central European literature are purely incidental, and that the circle itself was expected to do exactly what they did – applaud and award prizes.

What is infuriating is the sycophantic noise that surrounds it. If there is anything more wretched than people who make a living out of criticizing literature then I cannot think of it offhand. Well, maybe my own failure to understand some literature runs it pretty close.

I take a random example from the gushy tributes at the start of the book.

Magris writes beautifully (and is beautifully translated by Patrick Creagh); he seems to have read everything. His reading has not made him clever, but wise. On almost every page there are passages that make the heart lift.

John Banville

There you go, you see. He seems to have read everything. Books like this are deliberately intimidating. They are consciously aimed above criticism, because the sort of people who perform literary criticism will be terrified to admit  that they didn’t have a bloody clue what he was on about. All those references – does Banville (for example) have the slightest idea about whether they are genuine, or relevant, or even accurately transcribed and interpreted? Of course he doesn’t. He just wishes, like all the other pseuds who have contributed eulogies, that he himself could have written something so obviously, exquisitely, chokingly learned.

I don’t hold these views lightly. I find inverted snobbery in any form extremely distasteful. There is nothing smart about being dumb. So I have kept going back to Danube, with growing pessimism, in the hope that it would grow on me – and it is, indisputably, finely written, and it contains much that is enjoyable and enlightening. However, I always come back to this problem with the sheer number and density of  references. It is irritating. It gets in the way. I get annoyed. Why has academic writing evolved in this form? I don’t believe that the great pioneers of modern thought behaved in this way, why do modern academics have to hide behind other people’s work in this strange manner?

Not to worry. In a moment of thinking that surely it couldn’t just be me, I looked at the Amazon customer reviews for Danube – no higher plane of intellectual activity exists, as we know. As expected, there were a number of very positive offerings from people who must have had as little idea as I do. In there, however, was the following, which I reproduce in full entirely because I thought it was somehow a blessed relief – something that needed saying.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars

Utterly pretentious 9 Jan 2010

By Hoopdriver

Format:Paperback

The snobbery and name dropping in this book beggars belief. I actually thought it was a send-up at first but as the pages dragged (and I do mean dragged) by it became horribly clear that the cold intellectual snob who wrote this thing is every bit as arrogant and donnish as he appears. I've truly never seen or read anything like it. It is convoluted, full of itself, and lacks any coherent narrative form but seems to wander from one idle whimsy to another, thick with the names of obscure figures in European academe, with the smug and donnish author keeping one eye on the mirror all the while. Its biggest failing is its complete lack of heart or soul or passion for his topic - one of the grandest and most beautiful rivers in Europe. It is not a travel book, or a history; it is purely an exercise in cold remorseless intellectualism, with no regard for either the reader or the river. And yes, I know, I've seen the other five-star reviewers and read their pooh-pooh-ing of those of us garlic-and-onions Philistines who do not appreciate the erudite wit and wisdom of this writer. To them I can say only that a true genius is one who can communicate his (or her!) passions and ideas, speak to every level, and generate enthusiasm in their listeners or readers. This fails abysmally. If one wants to read a brilliant - and erudite - book about the Danube one needs go no further than Patrick Leigh Fermor's travelogue of his journey along the Danube in 1933. And when you read him and compare those truly brilliant and warm and readable books with this bit of pretentious drivel, you will se the difference within a very few pages, and not give this thing a second glance.

Yes, it’s harsh, and I don’t agree with a lot of what it says, but it is, at last, a small riposte on behalf of what appears to me to be commonsense. I shall, needless to say, take my copy of Danube with me on my trip. You never know, God may suddenly lay his hand on me and render me able to understand it. Apart from that, some complete stranger may see me reading it on the plane, and be impressed.

Now you’re talking.

Summer Prize Competition 2013

I’ve been meaning to do something about this for a while, but kept getting distracted. Now the fact that the Summer is starting to look a bit tired here has prompted me to get on with it.

I’ve given up on my previous “place the photo” system – it was fun, but mostly just for me.

Here’s a simpler idea. The overgrown ECW mortar from my previous post looks as if it could do with a name. I know they liked to name their artillery pieces in those days – give them personalities. So let’s go with that.

Here’s what to do – please send me a comment, or email to the address in my Blogger profile, setting out what you think the gunners might have called their mortar, why you think it’s a good name (any personal stories explaining associations are likely to give extra credits), how you think history should record the reason it was given this name and anything else you think might be relevant – or of interest, even if not relevant. Gratuitous profanity (beyond a realistic measure of historically-authentic colour) will lose you marks.

I thank you.

I’ll score any responses entirely subjectively and unfairly, bringing to bear the full weight of my customary, unreasoning prejudice. The sender of the entry which pleases me most will win a prize, plus – of course – a little measure of immortality in the lasting name of the mortar.

Oh yes – the prize. I happen to have an extra, unread copy of Stephen Bull’s most excellent A General Plague of Madness – The Civil Wars in Lancashire 1640-1660 – paperback, 500pp, with maps and illustrations. Highly recommended if, like me, you are interested in the “backwater” areas of the ECW.

Entries will be accepted up until 10^th September, or September 10^th if you prefer your dates the wrong way round. If there’s anything else I’ve forgotten to stipulate, please just make it up.

More on Scans of Old Books

The ghost in the machine

I was taken to task by a few people yesterday for implying that anyone could be dissatisfied with the Google Books and Gutenberg work to digitise old books. Surely, it was argued, we can hardly complain - it is wonderful that someone should take it upon themselves to provide such a resource.

I wouldn't argue with that. My only gripe is that it would be nice if the quality of the job was always up to the worthiness of the intention. I imagine the scanning work being carried out by underpaid but overqualified inmates of a big library somewhere. Whoever does it, then God bless them, but a bit of inspection and quality control after the event would offer so much extra value. The picture at the top of this post is an excerpt from Google Books' pdf version of Les Allemands sous les Aigles Francaises - Tome 1 - Le Regiment de Francfort by Lt Colonel Sauzey. It is good that the anonymous backroom staff should occasionally get a bit of visibility, and also good to note that Google obviously encourage the practice of safe librarianism.

In addition, I wish to make some quick - and largely uneducated - observations about the products of a company or companies known variously as Nabu, Biblio and other things, whose mission in life is to make rare old books available in print once more, by exactly this same scanning process. Some of these books are print-on-demand products. I would describe them as approximate facsimiles. I have nothing at all to say about the copyright implications, nor on the apparent furore arising from the public thus having access to works which otherwise exist only in American libraries or private collections. I think I have two specimens of Nabu's output. They are alarmingly slipshod, and the books are not especially cheap.

Strange that the translator of Foy's work knew HTML?

For example, I have the 2-volume English translation of Maximilien Foy's (that's me!) History of the War in the Peninsula, under Napoleon. It has misprints on the covers, no less. One volume failed to get a title on the spine, the front cover of the other is illustrated here - you will note that the main title includes the expression "&NBSP", which is, of course, the HTML code signifying a "non-breaking space" to an Internet browser type program. Classy, eh? A real attention to quality - a real pride in the mission - old books reproduced with care and love for the benefit of future generations.

These books also have a surprising number of missing pages - presumably the operator sneezed, or ended his shift, at these points. Fortunately I have a complete pdf-file version of the same books, so have been able to fill the gaps in my own copies by including printouts of the required pages. Something seems not quite right, though, and I am not comforted by Nabu's published policy statement, part of which says:

This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc that were either part of the original artefact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Cobblers. Are there any grown-ups at home?

I thank Nabu for their good wishes, and note that they are also committed to saving on production costs by not bothering over much with normally accepted ideas on quality assurance.

Not recommended.