Hodge and his Masters and The Choirmaster's Burial

Looking again at Gillian Avery's Victorian People, I find she quotes one of this blog's heroes:

Richard Jefferies in Hodge and his Masters spoke of some of the changes that had come about with an energetic new vicar. His predecessor had been a man of whom it was said, "he was a very good sort of man: he never interfered with anybody or anything," 

The new vicar introduced a choir, doing away with the old motley collection of village instrumentalists. He brought colours into the hangings and decoration of the church, and put flowers and candlesticks on the altar. He held early morning celebrations of communion, he left the church open all day for private prayer. He reminded the people of Lent and Easter, festivals and saints' days, and emphasised the importance of the communion service. He saw to it that the district was visited, that no cottage was left neglected. 

All this was an immense change from the days when gentry dozed peacefully in high boxes-in pews while the preacher in black gown and white bands thumped the red velvet cushion in his pulpit during the lengthy course of his forty-minute sermon, which with the Litany and the Psalms formed the main part of Sunday worship.

I'm left wondering how much of an influence Jefferies was on Thomas Hardy, because here we are very much in the world of Hardy's poem The Choirmaster's Burial - an earnest, reforming new clergyman sweeps away the old ways.

You can read the poem on Hello Poetry and listen Benjamin Britten's setting of it below.

Jago Hazzard celebrates the gothic history of St Pancras

Jago Hazzard posted this, his thousandth video, a couple of weeks ago. And he found a fitting subject for it.

Iain Sinclair once referred to "the bat-chewed pinnacles" of St Pancras, which struck me as exactly right. Old St Pancras church and its churchyard are well worth visiting if you have time to kill at the station. The Beatles went there on their Mad Day Out.

Jago is right to sound a little sceptical about the myth of the Hardy Tree though.

Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies on steam threshing machines

Having blogged about the explosion that killed four men at Stonton Wyville, and then about the dangers posed by the boilers that powered steam threshing machines, I thought I would see how two masters of 19th-century rural literature wrote about these machines.

Here's Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d'Urbevilles:

Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to serve—a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining—the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.

A little way off there was another indistinct figure; this one black, with a sustained hiss that spoke of strength very much in reserve. The long chimney running up beside an ash-tree, and the warmth which radiated from the spot, explained without the necessity of much daylight that here was the engine which was to act as the primum mobile of this little world. By the engine stood a dark, motionless being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of trance, with a heap of coals by his side: it was the engine-man. The isolation of his manner and colour lent him the appearance of a creature from Tophet, who had strayed into the pellucid smokelessness of this region of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he had nothing in common, to amaze and to discompose its aborigines.

What he looked he felt. He was in the agricultural world, but not of it. He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served vegetation, weather, frost, and sun. He travelled with his engine from farm to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam threshing-machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex. He spoke in a strange northern accent; his thoughts being turned inwards upon himself, his eye on his iron charge, hardly perceiving the scenes around him, and caring for them not at all: holding only strictly necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some ancient doom compelled him to wander here against his will in the service of his Plutonic master. The long strap which ran from the driving-wheel of his engine to the red thresher under the rick was the sole tie-line between agriculture and him.

And here's Richard Jefferies in his essay The Countryside: Sussex:

To-day the sparrows are just as busy as ever of old, chatter, chirp around the old barn, while the threshing machine hums, and every now and then lowers its voice in a long-drawn descending groan of seemingly deep agony. 

Up it rises again as the sheaves are cast in—hum, hum, hum; the note rises and resounds and fills the yard up to the roof of the barn and the highest tops of the ricks as a flood fills a pool, and overflowing, rushes abroad over the fields, past the red hop-oast, past the copse of yellowing larches, onwards to the hills. An inarticulate music—a chant telling of the sunlit hours that have gone and the shadows that floated under the clouds over the beautiful wheat. No more shall the tall stems wave in the wind or listen to the bees seeking the clover-fields. The lark that sang above the green corn, the partridge that sheltered among the yellow stalks, the list of living things delighting in it—all have departed. The joyous life of the wheat is ended—not in vain, for now the grain becomes the life of man, and in that object yet more glorified. 

Outwards the chant extending, reaches the hollows of the valley, rolling over the shortened stubble, where the plough already begins the first verse of a new time. A pleasant sound to listen to, the hum of the threshing, the beating of the engine, the rustle of the straw, the shuffle shuffle of the machine, the voices of the men, the occupation and bustle in the autumn afternoon! 

I listened to it sitting in the hop-oast, whose tower, like a castle turret, overlooks and domineers the yard. In the loft the resounding hum whirled around, beating and rebounding from the walls, and forcing its way out again through the narrow window. The edge, as it were, of a sunbeam lit up the rude chamber crossed with unhewn beams and roofed above with unconcealed tiles, whose fastening pegs were visible. A great heap of golden scales lay in one corner, the hops fresh from the drying. 

Up to his waist in a pocket let through the floor a huge giant of a man trod the hops down in the sack, turning round and round, and now his wide shoulders and now his red cheeks succeeded. The music twirled him about as a leaf by the wind. Without the rich blue autumn sky; within the fragrant odour of hops, the hum of the threshing circling round like the buzz of an immense bee. As the hum of insects high in the atmosphere of midsummer suits and fits to the roses and the full green meads, so the hum of the threshing suits to the yellowing leaf and drowsy air of autumn. The iteration of hum and monotone soothes, and means so much more in its inarticulation than the adjusted chords and tune of written music. 

Laughing, the children romped round the ricks; they love the threshing and flock to it, they watch the fly-wheel rotating, they look in at the furnace door when the engine-driver stokes his fire, they gaze wonderingly at the gauge, and long to turn the brass taps; then with a shout they rush to chase the unhappy mice dislodged from the corn.

This last paragraph is typical of Jefferies' ability to surprise you with an unexpected observation. And I note that he has accepted the steam threshing machine into the agricultural world, whereas to Hardy they remain something entirely alien.

The Making of Gone to Earth 1

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger film of Mary Webb's novel Gone to Earth was released in 1950. The Stiperstones shot in Technicolor makes just about the ultimate Shropshire Hills porn.

This behind-the-scenes footage comes from Michael Powell's own collection. We see the starts Jennifer Jones and David Farrar and Powell himself, as well as many locals in and out of period costume.

Malcolm Saville fans should have a look at 3:00, where we see Gypsies. This is what Reuben, Miranda and their van would have looked like.

What strikes me most here is how cumbersome the film equipment looks. It's why you have to assume that every scene in a wartime documentary has been staged - there was little chance of reacting quickly as events unfolded.

The really good news is that this is the first of four of these films from the making of Gone to Earth (or "Tess of the Stiperstones" as I saw someone call it on social media - the story shares Hardy's triangle of innocent peasant girl, wicked squire and sexless man).

I did post these once before. It was 12 years ago, but who's counting?

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Hoping it might be so

Lord Bonkers has made this observation about when Christmas begins before, but as that was in 1990 - before any of you were born - I think he can be forgiven for repeating himself.

As for the rest, I refer the hon. Gentleman to Thomas Hardy's poem The Oxen.

Christmas Eve

To St Asquith’s for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. I’m sure I speak for many when I say I do not regard Christmas as having properly begun until I hear the tremulous voice of a choirboy singing the opening verse of ‘Lloyd George Knew My Father’. 

Late in the evening, a fellow in the Bonkers’ Arms announces “Now they are all on their knees,” referring to some legend that the oxen kneel in their stalls at midnight on this very day to welcome the Christ child. The Smithson & Greaves Northern Bitter has been flowing freely, and it does sound Rather Far Fetched, so bets are placed against. 

To ensure fair play, I join a party heading for Home Farm to see what the aforementioned beasts are up to. And – would you believe it? – they are kneeling. I have strong suspicions that the oxen were in on this from the start and will receive a share of the winnings, but say nothing, hoping it might be so. 

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• Two Well-Behaved Orphans with their faces stained green

The Joy of Six 1203

"Who's going to campaign for him in October? Who's going to stuff leaflets, who's going to give old ladies a lift to the polling station, who's going to stand in rainy high streets saying "vote Tory"? Not a single Conservative councillor, who will either have lost their seats five months previous or have scraped through by pretending not to have anything to do with That Lot In Westminster." Fleet Street Fox argues that Sunak has no choice but to go to the country in May.

David Gilbert says a Russian disinformation campaign is deploying everything from high-ranking lawmakers and government officials to lifestyle influencers, bloggers, and powerful state-run media outlets to stoke divisions in the United States around the Texas border crisis.

John Lewis-Stempel hails William Cobbett as the grandfathers of self-sufficiency: "Self-sufficiency, autarchy, backyard farming — call it what you like — is a venerable British tradition. Once upon a time governments even sponsored self-sufficiency via Smallholdings Acts authorising acquisition of land for those wanting to grow their own."

"One young reader wrote to him of Tess, 'I wonder at your complete understanding of a woman’s soul.' Hardy’s discontented wife Emma wondered at it too. She observed, 'He understands only the women he invents - the others not at all.'" Norma Clarke reviews Paula Byrne's new book on Thomas Hardy and women.

You think we're hard on our politicians now? In 1672, reports Vlad Moca-Grama, the Dutch ate their prime minister's liver.

The Smell of Water on a remarkable survival: "York Minster ... possesses a remarkable treasure, a carved stone in a quiet corner of the crypt, a remnant from the lost Romanesque church that once existed on the site. The carving depicts the descent of souls into hell via a cauldron, it also has the best name for a stone ever, it’s called The Doomstone."

Happy St Pancras Day

Embed from Getty Images

With 12 May being both the Feast of St Pancras and Steve Winwood's birthday, it's a public holiday here on Liberal England.

A couple of recent posts.

In March I discovered that the story of the Hardy Tree in Old St Pancras churchyard - its beside the line just before the station - is a recent invention.

And the most popular post here this week has been the one where I revealed that Steve Winwood's grandson was to be a page at the Coronation.

Thomas Hardy had nothing to do with The Hardy Tree and its legend dates from the late 20th century

When The Hardy Tree in Old St Pancras churchyard came down last December, I dutifully repeated its accepted history:

When the Midland Railway built its line from Bedford to St Pancras, part of the churchyard of Old St Pancras Church was sacrificed to make way for it.

The man in charge of clearing the burials in the path of the line was a young Thomas Hardy. It's no wonder his novels turned out like they did.

Hardy had some of the redundant gravestones piles around the base of an ash tree in the remaining portion of the churchyard, and its roots later spread amongst them. It is this tree that has fallen.

But the current issue of Fortean Times suggests that Hardy had nothing to do with the tree and that this story dates from the late 20th century.

In support of its scepticism, the magazine cites an article on The London Dead:

There is no evidence that Hardy had anything to do with the tree named after him but even so I had, like most people, assumed that the gravestones had been arranged around the tree in the first place. 

It was with something of a jolt therefore that I came across a photograph of "St. Pancras churchyard and it’s disturbed gravestones" in 'Wonderful London' a book edited by St. John Adcock and published in 1926. 

The caption to the photo mentions the Midland railway Company obtaining an Act in 1863 allowing them to build a viaduct over the churchyard and says "the rockery made of tombstones is a result of the headstones being removed and 'dumped'". 

The photograph shows the familiar circular arrangement of headstones but with one significant difference; there is no tree! 

In 1926 the Hardy tree did not exist. The tree, presumably self-seeded, has grown since the late 1920’s and is less than one hundred years old.

The article goes on to quote an account by Hardy of his work at Old St Pancras that makes it clear he was not in charge of the exhumations but merely dropped by in the evenings to keep an eye on progress.

So where does the legend of Hardy and his tree come from?

The London Dead says:

In ‘Lights Out for the Territory’ Iain Sinclair tells us that he was working on a long London poem provisionally entitled RedEye and gives an extract from the abandoned work (‘May 16, 1973: at St Pancras Old Church. Drawn against the repetitive boredom of the pavements to investigate the building - its slight eminence....’) which goes onto to mention Hardy and his supervision of the exhumations and "his ever-recurrent interest in churchyards".  

Later he describes the photographer Marc Atkin’s fascination with the Hardy tree "with its cluster of surrounding headstones - like a school of grey fins circling the massive trunk, feeding on the secretions of the dead." 

This was in 1997 which is as close as I can get at this stage to the naming of the Hardy tree - sometime between 1978 and 1997.

It isn't just Sinclair and Atkin who had a deep interest in Old St Pancras in those years: Aidan Dun published a visionary poem about this corner of London, Vale Royal, in 1995. Like Sinclair's early books, it was published by Mike Goldmark in Uppingham.

And in 2007 I quoted a post on BLDG Blog:

I think it's from Dun – but I don't actually know; I just associate this with him - maybe I made it up? - that I heard a legend claiming that St. Pancras Old Church, stranded on its small hill behind the train stations next to the old London Hospital for Tropical Diseases, is actually the secret burial place of Christ.

The church, obviously, was built much later, as a means of marking the site - at the same time keeping silent its little secret.

I suspect The London Dead is right, and the legend of The Hardy Tree originated somewhere in this neo-Blakean, psychogeographic, Sinclairian school of literature. And the idea that his experiences at Old St Pancras had a profound on Hardy and thus his novels does seem to date from 1997 and Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory.

Sad news from Old St Pancras: The Hardy Tree has fallen

[Later. It turns out that the Hardy Tree is a myth. See this post for details.]

The Camden New Journal reports:

The landmark Hardy Tree has fallen.

The tree in St Pancras Gardens was famous for the gravestones that piled up at its roots by architect’s assistant Thomas Hardy, better known as the author of novels like Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Camden Council had warned in the summer that the tree had been weakened by a heavy storm and would almost certainly fall at some stage. It had been fenced off for some time.

In a statement in July, a Town Hall spokesperson said: “We are looking at ways to commemorate this tree, and its story, when it does eventually fall. The council recognises the importance of the veteran Hardy Tree, both for our local communities and nationally, which is why we’ve taken measures over the last eight years to manage this stage of its lifecycle, keeping it safe for visitors.”

When the Midland Railway built it's line from Bedford to St Pancras, part of the churchyard of Old St Pancras Church was sacrificed to make way for it.

The man in charge of clearing the burials in the path of the line was a young Thomas Hardy. It's no wonder his novels turned out like they did.

Hardy had some of the redundant gravestones piles around the base of an ash tree in the remaining portion of the churchyard, and its roots later spread amongst them. It is this tree that has fallen.

You can see the tree as it is today in Richard Osland's picture from Twitter, while my photo above shows it as it used to be.

The Hardy Tree in St Pancras Gardens (Thomas Hardy shifted the gravestones around the roots when not writing Tess of the D) has fallen down. 📸@SimonLamrock pic.twitter.com/MIDZyysZRF

— Richard Osley (@RichardOsley) December 27, 2022

The Joy of Six 1086

"The idea of the 'illegal' asylum seeker is a falsehood that has been actively peddled by the Home Office and the Home Secretary in recent years. When people talk about asylum seekers coming to the UK 'illegally', what they really mean is asylum seekers arriving via informal and unofficial routes, such as crossing the Channel via small boat. However, asylum seekers are legally allowed to come to the UK even when making an 'illegal entry'." Amelia Susserott explodes the myth of the illegal asylum seeker.

Peter Hain says British politicians have failed Northern Ireland: "What a colossal, devastating failure by British politicians over Northern Ireland. The current impasse - with the Northern Irish Assembly still suspended and another set of elections now required, the second since May - is the product of terrible neglect by the British government starting in 2010, accelerated and deepened by Brexit, which has shattered the delicate power-sharing balance required for functioning Northern Irish institutions."

A growing number of children with mental health problems are being treated on adult psychiatric wards as services struggle to cope with a surge in demand, reports Shanti Das.

James West is critical of the way the media covers climate change: "This is one area where many people with no qualifications in science, with largely arts and humanities training and who have no authority in science, feel able to express opinions on climate science and expect to be taken seriously."

"Watching that scene we, the excited children of black Jamaican migrants in Luton, let out a collective 'Yes!'. Sidney Poitier was one cool dude on and off screen - and we loved, absolutely loved Virgil Tibbs, the actor who played him and all he stood for." Colin Grant surveys the career of Sidney Poitier.

Robert Edgar traces the roots of folk horror back to Thomas Hardy.

White supremacist sentenced to read Pride and Prejudice and other literary classics

Thanks to a nomination from a reader, the Leicester Mercury wins today's Headline of the Day Award.

And the story beneath it is worth reading too:

A young Nazi sympathizer who downloaded bomb-making instructions has been sentenced to read classic novels including Pride and Prejudice instead.

Judge Timothy Spencer QC told Ben John, 21, he could stay out of prison as long as he steered clear of white-supremacy literature and and read books and plays by Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens.

The former De Montfort University student will have to return to court every four months to be tested on his reading by the judge after avoiding jail "by the skin of his teeth".

You wonder if a young Muslim facing similar charges would have got off with a reading list of postcolonial literature, but I'm all for keeping young people out of prison if at all possible.

The idea that encountering great art makes you a better person is deeply unfashionable, though it lies at the heart of Alexei Sayle's novel Overtaken. But anything is better than reading Nazi literature.

For myself, I have never made it past the first few pages of Pride and Prejudice, but I did enjoy Northanger Abbey.

Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Richard Jefferies

Over on Instagram, where I hang out with my fellow kids, the Richard Jefferies Society tells us:

Exactly 140 years ago, in February 1880, Richard Jefferies had dinner with Thomas Hardy and Henry James. 

He was described by Hardy’s wife, Florence, as "a modest young man then getting into notice as a writer, having a year or so earlier published his first successful book, entitled The Gamekeeper at Home".

Because he died young and without achieving popular fame, it is easy to see Jefferies as a fragile spirit who spent his days communing with nature.

But we should remember that he was an ambitious writer who worked hard to get himself known.

Thorpe Langton this afternoon: In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’

I

Only a man harrowing clods

In a slow silent walk

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

Half asleep as they stalk. 

II

Only thin smoke without flame

From the heaps of couch-grass;

Yet this will go onward the same

Though Dynasties pass. 

III

Yonder a maid and her wight

Come whispering by:

War’s annals will cloud into night

Ere their story die.

The Clegg catastrophe

View image | gettyimages.com

The Guardian has just posted a long article under this title by Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt on its website.

Though the site no longer has that useful button that told you an article's publication history, I assume it will be in tomorrow's paper.

Here is a flavour of it:

Oakeshott regarded the forthcoming electoral drubbing as the last chance to remove Clegg, whom he had long seen as a political disaster for the party. “It felt like the scene in Far from the Madding Crowd when the sheep charge over the hill together,” Oakeshott recalled. “I thought ‘Oh my God, this is it’. In the face of all available evidence – in council elections, byelections and opinion polls – there was collective self-delusion, and the party was going to press ahead to disaster.”

And:

The party, desperate for votes, then fell into a trap set by the National Union of Students. In November 2009, the NUS persuaded 400 Liberal Democrat candidates, including Clegg, to sign a pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative. To make matters worse, Clegg agreed to be filmed doing so.

And:

Confident that his LBC training had made him an adept media performer, Clegg agreed to take part in two TV debates against Nigel Farage during the campaign. They were not generally perceived to be among Clegg’s most dazzling performances. Ed Davey, the Lib Dem energy and climate change secretary at the time of the debates, was unimpressed. “The disaster over the Farage debate was there was a Liberal Democrat leader who was representing the establishment,” he said.

I suppose we should be grateful that someone thinks our decline and fall worth documenting in such detail. Now for the fightback.