Here's another of my columns for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. This time the theme of the issue was Georges - they've already done Davids. I wish I'd thought of including George Eliot.
Georges on my Mind
The future George I and his wife Sophia Dorothea fought all the time. He once pulled out her hair and throttled her until she lost consciousness – her life was saved by attendants who intervened. When George inherited the British throne, he had already forbidden his 11-year-old son, the future George II, to see his mother or even mention her name. When he came to England from Hanover, the younger George revenged himself by scheming with his father’s enemies at Westminster.
George II and his wife both hated their son Frederick, Prince of Wales, and he obliged them by dying before they did. It used to be believed that his death was caused by a cricket ball, but sadly the story has been discredited.
It was Frederick’s son who inherited the throne, as George III. The theory that his madness was due to porphyria is as out of fashion as Fredrick’s cricket injury, but whatever the cause of it, he was still clear-headed enough to see through his son. George IV enjoyed a dissolute life but not his father’s approval, and left no legitimate children.
Thanks goodness none of this enmity has come down to our present-day Royal Family.
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The uncle of Boy George used to be the priest at our local Catholic church, Our Lady of Victories. I heard that from a taxi driver who had it from two nuns, so it must be true.
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There’s a photograph of boys from a Liverpool primary school on the beach during a 1951 holiday on Isle of Man that surfaces regularly on social media. Two are instantly recognisable: John Lennon has pushed his way to the front of the crowd, and next to him a smiling Jimmy Tarbuck has adopted a boxer’s stance. Perhaps because he is younger, the boy on the other side of Lennon is not so easily recognised, but he is Peter Sissons. A friend of Paul McCartney’s at secondary school, he grew up to be an eminent television reporter and newsreader.
Sissons recalled a meeting with a third Beatle, George Harrison, in the days when he was reading ITV’s News at Ten:
I got a phone call on the news desk and the receptionist said “George Harrison is here to see you”. I went down to reception and there was George with most of the Hare Krishna people from Oxford Street. The place was full of these men in saffron robes and in the middle was George in a rather way-out sort of hippie suit. He said to me, “Peter, I’ve got a terrific story for the news, it’ll be the lead story, you’ve got to put it on the news tonight.”
I said: “Terrific, what is it?”
He said: “Peace.”
I said: “Hang on, where?” He said: “Just peace, it’s a great thing, you’ve got to put it on the news.”
I explained there had to be a bit more to it than that to make the lead on News at Ten. We parted on very good terms and off they went banging their tambourines.
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George can be a surname too: there’s Bobby George, Charlie George and probably George George too. But the most famous such George was once Henry George.
After he died while fighting the New York Mayoral election of 1897, says a contemporary report:
Thousands upon thousands of people waited in the streets from early morning to obtain places in the seemingly endless line that drifted past the candidate whose strange and premature 'election' had thrown the politicians into confusion. Sobbing women lifted their children to look upon the face of the 'martyr'. Tears became contagious, and rough men sobbed without shame.
Another reckoned New York had seen no comparable demonstration of popular feeling at the death of a public man since Abraham Lincoln had lain in state at City Hall.
Henry George achieved this extraordinary fame, not as a politician. but as an economic theorist. People argue over whether he or Karl Marx have sold more books, but there’s no doubt that George sold millions. Reading groups of working people were founded to discuss his ideas.
At the heart of those ideas were the beliefs that land was the ultimate source of all wealth and that, as the song goes, God gave the land to the people. It followed that the proceeds of rents on land and the minerals beneath it should be taken in tax by the state. This, he argued, would remove the monopoly power that allowed landlords to exploit wage earners and make possible the abolition of other taxes.
Henry George’s ideas still have their advocates, but his most tangible legacy is a board game. A follower of George’s, Elizabeth Magie, and her friends invented The Landlord’s Game. When she patented it in 1904, she said it was designed to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences".
The Landlord’s Game evolved into Monopoly, a celebration of rapacious landlordism that has done more to lay bare the tensions underlying family life than anything since the early work of Salvador Minuchin.
It happens that I reached the finals of the British Monopoly Championships in 1977. They were held on top of the nuclear pile at Oldbury-on-Severn power station – the Electricity Company, you see. It may have been only a promotional event for Waddington’s, but I managed to wangle the time off school.
I won two games on the first day to become one of the last twelve players. In the semi-final, I built hotels on Mayfair and Park Lane – they’re not the best sites to develop, but the dice fall how they will. My anticipation grew as my main rival moved round the board towards them. Suddenly, he had drawn a ‘Go to Jail’ card and, safe from my West End rents for three turns, he went on to win the game.
You have to hand it to Henry George and Elizabeth Magie: they had foreseen the Britain of the 1980s.